Maggie's Farm

An excerpt from Vaclav Klaus' speech to the EU parliament last week:

The present decision making system of the European Union is different from a classic parliamentary democracy, tested and proven by history. In a normal parliamentary system, part of the MPs support the government and part support the opposition. In the European parliament, this arrangement has been missing. Here, only one single alternative is being promoted and those who dare thinking about a different option are labelled as enemies of the European integration. Not so long ago, in our part of Europe we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition. It was through this experience that we learned the bitter lesson that with no opposition, there is no freedom. That is why political alternatives must exist. 

He is completely right, and the unelected EU mandarins don't want to hear it. More here at NRO. The EU has nothing to do with freedom.

While understanding that Putin is a tricksy Russian who, like all national leaders does not always say what he means and who always - correctly - has his own nation's interests at heart, we do agree with almost everything he said at his Davos opening speech on January 28. One quote:

...the state's increased role in times of crisis is a natural reaction to market setbacks. Instead of streamlining market mechanisms, some are tempted to expand state economic intervention to the greatest possible extent.

The concentration of surplus assets in the hands of the state is a negative aspect of anti-crisis measures in virtually every nation.

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state's role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.

Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state.

And one more point: anti-crisis measures should not escalate into financial populism and a refusal to implement responsible macroeconomic policies. The unjustified swelling of the budgetary deficit and the accumulation of public debts are just as destructive as adventurous stock-jobbing.

As Mark Levin noted tonight, he sounds more free-market than Obama. The notion that the State knows best is insane. Our admin's instincts now appear to be to the left of both Russia and China. Read the whole thing.

Black AG working for black President says Americans need to make "racial progress" and to deal with race better by somehow becoming more race conscious. I always thought the goal was color-blindness - to deal with individuals, not skin colors. It's not hard to do that, because there seem to be about a thousand different skin tones in the US.

I think we ought to speak - and think - less about race. It's a stupid subject.

I have a simple question.

Instead of a near-trillion dollar spending bill (which I doubt will do much for the big picture anyway, and put us and our kids in hock to the Chinese for a couple of generations), why didn't Washington simply propose a time-limited tax credit or tax reduction of the same amount, and let the people invest or spend that money into the economy as they saw fit? It would have had an immediate effect - and no different budgetary effect.

Why not? (I know - it's a naive, dumb question. Nevertheless, I think biz and individual tax cuts is the way to go.)

Today we remember the Virginian George Washington, but, since it is now called "Presidents Day," why not remember this fine Vermonter too:

"The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act of resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil."

Calvin Coolidge

Photo: Coolidge in 1930 at his home in Northampton, MA with his dogs, Tiny Tim and Rob roy.

I recently noticed somebody at Samizdata refer to the "client class," but I cannot find the link right now. It is a useful phrase. It refers to those directly or indirectly employed or supported by government (ie their neighbor).

From my perspective, we will watch this client class grow, while those who feed that class diminishes. I am not convinced that this is a good long-term plan, because most of us gave up on Santa a while ago. Last Christmas, for example. I am still waiting and hoping for my pretty pony.

Who will be productive and produce the wealth to pay these bills? The Tooth Fairy?

Our sense of entitlement to an easy life - decadence - will be death to us and to the American can-do spirit. We currently seem to have a "You Can't Do" government and a growing "Can't Do" population. Not good. Weak. Can I say "flaccid"? Not the American "Yankee Doodle, keep it up".

Who the heck do people expect to take care of them? Me? My shoulders are not broad enough to carry that load, but I do carry my own. Plus I pay my taxes (unlike many Dems, apparently. And I give generously to my charities).

Via Town Hall:

In his classic book, "The Conservative Mind," Russell Kirk established his "canons of conservatism," which on Wikipedia, Russello (2004) has abbreviated as follows:

1. A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;


2. An affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence;


3. A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions;


4. A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;


5. A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and


6. A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.

We see how quickly government intrudes into enterprise when "their" dollars are involved. Their intrusions are, naturally, political rather than rational. Note the usually calm, restrained, and reflective Jim Cramer comparing Obama to Lenin re Obama's call for "no profits."

Here's Reagan in 1961 on government control of medicine (h/t, Axis of Right):

In response to my shout-out about MacFarlane's book last weekend, our friend Tom Brewton sent this (which he had posted previously):

The simple, undeniable, and clarion fact is that our personal freedoms came about only, exclusively, and entirely because, centuries before, enough Englishmen had owned enough private property to compel the crown to recognize their rights. When individuals hold the nation’s purse strings, the rulers can’t afford to be too arbitrary.

Evolution of individual property ownership and individual liberties was a process that took place only in England, and it was the very heart of the ethos brought to America by the English colonists.

As Alan Macfarlane (The Origins of English Individualism) explains, England’s traditions of property ownership and the rights of contract, along with its supporting legal system, are historically unique in the world. Only in England did the legal right exist for individuals to own and freely dispose of property. As a consequence, according to accounts by visiting merchants and diplomats from the 15th century onwards, England had a per capita wealth and standard of living, even among the peasant farmers, vastly greater than that of any other European country. It is no accident that the 19th century industrial revolution was more extensive and more effective in England than on the Continent.

Elsewhere in Europe, property was a vague concept based, not on a legal title as in England, but on the feudal tradition of occupancy by generations of the same family. A peasant farm was “owned” by the whole family. No member of the family had any legal way to dispose of any of the property by contract. Every member of the family was entitled by tradition to live on the farm. When a family grew larger, there was less produce from the farm for each member.

The Continental peasant economy was characterized by subsistence farming. Peasant families hardly ever possessed money, but lived by bartering produce at local markets. There was almost no hired labor working for wages. The effect was social and economic stagnation with little prospect for increasing the wealth or living-standards of individuals.

In contrast, England at least as early as the 13th century, around the time that Henry II instituted the common law, had a well developed legal system of individual ownership. Church and court records of the time, both in the rural districts and in the cities, show continual sales of all or parts of farm land and other property by the legal owner, who was always an individual, not a family. Fathers could, and did, disinherit individual children; women owned and sold property in their own name, appearing by legal right to represent themselves in such transactions before the local courts.

The expected pattern in rural England, described by Henry de Bracton in the 13th century (On the Laws and Customs of England), was for sons to leave their families at an early age and hire themselves out as laborers on other farms or in the trades. They usually worked and saved their wages until they had accumulated enough to buy a small farm or business, then they married and began to raise their families. Harder-working and more capable individuals often became well-to-do by continually adding to their property holdings, but there was nothing guaranteed by law or tradition. Indeed, records over several generations in any given local jurisdiction show a constant turnover of family names in the property ownership and tax records. The grandchildren of a wealthy yeoman farmer could easily be poor, if they were not equally hard-working and prudent.

The result of this ethos was an unparalleled degree of economic and political individualism in England, and later in the British North American colonies. For an additional perspective, note the striking contrast between British North America and Latin America, where the Spanish crown originally controlled or owned all property. Latin Americans have never enjoyed the secure personal freedoms found here from the earliest days of the English colonists.

For non-English immigrants to America, especially the millions after the Civil War from historically-feudal Continental Europe, this almost universal private ownership of property was both a jarring social and legal ethos, and, at the same time, the source of their great opportunity for a better life in the New World. Their European heritage led them to identify property ownership with the hereditary landed aristocracy and therefore with repression. They had heard all their lives that liberty was to be taken with armed revolution against existing authority. With no conception of the English heritage of working and saving to accumulate private property over the long term, small numbers of them simply transferred their radical socialism to American soil.

Every day I feel more steamed about this "stimulus." This is no stimulus. Dear readers, we are in the process of getting scammed, hoodwinked, tricked - in a way that Bernie Madoff could only dream about doing in his wildest dreams. The statists are literally trying to pull a fast one over on me. It's the biggest money and power grab since Lyndon Johnson, and nobody knows all of the details, implications, or the long-term consequences - not to mention the undiscussed or unintended (or quietly-intended) consequences.

It's a trickster's delight. Are we such easy marks? I hope not. They hope most of us are uninformed morons and will defer to their superior wisdom. The House bill goes far beyond the usual pork. It changes the role of the federal government in our lives, and is intended to do so. This is no short-term stimulus for an ugly recession; this is long-term change via centralization of power and money using today's fears about the economy as a convenient excuse.

Why is it long-term? Heck, it's not just long-term; this stuff is forever. How difficult is it to "cut" a program? Well, no more difficult than trying to take a lollypop out of a kid's mouth. The socialist ratchet wrench has no reverse setting.

Yes, I am not pleased with hopey-changey thus far.

 From WSJ's Look at the Time:

That's what the stimulus bill was about—not knowing what time it is, not knowing the old pork-barrel, group-greasing ways are over, done, embarrassing. When you create a bill like that, it doesn't mean you're a pro, it doesn't mean you're a tough, no-nonsense pol. It means you're a slob.

That's how the Democratic establishment in the House looks, not like people who are responding to a crisis, or even like people who are ignoring a crisis, but people who are using a crisis. Our hopeful, compelling new president shouldn't have gone with this bill. He made news this week by going to the House to meet with Republicans. He could have made history by listening to them.

Via NRO:

To call the economic legislation now moving through Congress a stimulus bill obscures its full implications. The measure represents the most ambitious effort in decades to swell public spending on domestic priorities such as education, infrastructure, and scientific research that many Democrats consider the foundation stones of sustained prosperity.

The Democratic plan . . . provides the biggest surge in long-term public investment since President Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s. . . .

[T]he bill also emphatically expands programs targeted more at the far term than the near term — from aid to schools in low-income areas ($13 billion) to expanded college loans ($16 billion) and scientific research ($10 billion). In normal times, Congress might never enlarge so many programs at once. But, as with Reagan's tax cut, the crisis-induced demand for action may suspend the normal laws of political gravity — and allow Democrats to redirect federal priorities as boldly as Reagan did. "This is a once-in-a-25-year opportunity to [implement] a lot of our agenda," a top House Democratic aide says.

How big is the "stimulus"? Bigger than any program or war in history.

The stimulus will undo two decades of welfare reform.

Via Insty:

For the amount spent we could have given every unemployed person in the United States roughly $75,000.

We could give every person who had lost a job and is now passing through long-term unemployment of six months or longer roughly $300,000.

There has been pork barrel politics since there has been politics. The scale of this pork is beyond what had ever been imagined before — and no one can be sure it will actually do much stimulation.

Wall Street didn’t have Obama’s chutzpah. And it didn’t do nearly the damage to the nation that this bill will do. (Via Dan Riehl).

Via SDA:

The U.S. National Debt was $930 billion in 1980, or 33% of GDP. Today it is $10.7 trillion, or 76% of GDP. The National Debt has grown by 1,150% in 28 years. With the planned fiscal stimulus (taxing future generations), the National Debt will reach 100% of GDP during the Obama administration. When Argentina’s economy collapsed in 1998, their National Debt as a percentage of GDP was 65%. The Great Deniers say we are not Argentina. They say we are safe because the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency of the world. This is like jumping off a 20 story building and as you pass the 10th floor someone yells out the window asking how you are doing. You answer, “Good, so far”.

I thought he was elected to run the city, but he seems to prefer controlling what we put in our mouths. Fats, smokes, soda pop - and now salt!?!

What an idiot. There is not a darn thing wrong with salt. Furthermore, food without salt tastes like cardboard. As a lover of NYC, I have had it with this nanny Mayor. Let's go back to a normal machine sleazebag Dem who will rip you off and pad his pocket and pass money to his buddies - but won't tell you what to eat or drink or smoke. Towns like NYC are for people who want to be free to do what the heck they want, and are not terrified by death.

This Bloomberg guy is a nut. Rich, but still a control freak and a crank. Dietarily-obsessed, too, it seems, with a mild form of eating disorder which causes him to be concerned with what other people do. He's neither my doctor nor my nutritionist nor my Mom, even though he seems to imagine that he is and that I want him to be.

What will be next on his list? Meat? Alcohol? Coffee? Chocolate? Broccoli (which raises cancer risk)? Greens (whose folate raises risk of cancer recurrence)?