We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
As an urban, aspiring-elite, I want legal immigration of the type and to the extent that the American people view is in their interest. Illegal immigration is invasion, in my view, with or without weapons. I am a proud nationalist despite the fact that our humble biz has now finally gone international. After seven years, we can now afford more than beer and pizza.
If you like roller-coasters, you will love entrepreneurship. Just do it before you have a family to support or you could get stuck in a dreary life in a cubicle.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
I have even been accused of being a “public intellectual,” which sounds too much like “public nuisance” or even “public enemy” for my taste.
My point is that people who specialize in the life of ideas tend to be extremely atypical of their societies. They — we — are freaks in a statistical sense. For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals...
Those guys have devoted significant parts of their lives to trying to save me and "society" from ourselves. We are not their children, nor are they our moral and intellectual superiors. This is a deeply obnoxious and condescending mission to which the normal, healthy reaction is "Leave me the f- alone and worry about your own life, jerk. If I want your advice, I will ask for it. Which means never."
I guess these guys are looking for meaning in life, in all the wrong places. Here's an example from the insufferable Cass Sunstein who wants to save me from Coca Cola and lots of other things too.
Pardon me, but I like Coke and I like guns. You do not. So it's your loss. CS Lewis said it best:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Politics is transactional in nature; some people receive this, others that. It involves compromises, bending, accommodation. To try any one discrete act of legislation, especially in isolation from the whole, on the grounds of discrete reason-giving is to misapprehend the nature of the legislative process, which is more Hayekian than Platonic. It is not directed by philosopher-kings. It is the product of a vast array of individual accommodations that accrete into a whole that—like the “market”—becomes falsely personified as though its behavior were susceptible of rational explanation.
That is a hot, ugly mess and no partisan of liberty should want it otherwise.
Haunting this year’s presidential contest is the sense that the U.S. government no longer belongs to the people and no longer represents them. And this uneasy feeling is not misplaced. It reflects the real state of affairs...
It was my nightmare scenario come to life. Hard-working, industrious doctors, who spent years in training, often taking on debt to complete their education, having their careers and lives upended by highly educated, highly credentialed, and galactically inexperienced policy “wonks” who had little to no real idea of how their reforms would work in the real world. Obamacare essentially was a case of inexperienced legislative and executive branch staffers, lobbyists, and academics, all of whom had fancy degrees from fancy schools but little to no understanding of the health care industry they were reshaping, going ahead and reshaping it anyway.
All the Kennedy School degrees in the world provide no understanding of what it is like to practice medicine but nevertheless give elites license to tinker, reform, and experiment with the American health care system. They are experts who know nothing. Obamacare was clear evidence that the governing class treats Americans as playthings, as guinea pigs for their social engineering experiments on how to order Americans’ lives.
Donald Trump knows at least two things: how to build buildings and how not to double down when something doesn't work.
People (since I live in NYC and have so many liberal or so-called 'moderate' leaning friends) wonder why I consider Obama divisive. He is, without a doubt, among the most deliberately divisive presidents in our history. Bush was divisive, but not deliberately so. His mere existence caused Progressives to vomit (I considered him divisive because he caused me to leave the Republican Party based on his behavior, which I'm not sure was deliberate, but he certainly behaved like he had to do the things he did).
But the Obama speech at the Dallas memorial was a classic in division politics. His supporters have cheered him as a 'caring' man, someone who is 'willing to do something' - even if that something is lie. Lying seems to come easily to this man, and his supporters love it.
The memorial was no place to make a political statement. Yet he did. He made outrageous claims about "our" lack of willingness to fund schools, fund health programs, and how it's easier to buy a Glock than get a computer or a book. Yet school funding is at all time highs, with many of the worst districts among the most heavily funded on a per student basis, and health support is also at all time highs. Meanwhile, I've noticed that Barnes & Noble and Amazon are still making some decent money, while schools hand out computers to their students for use during the school year. How does he have the gall to lie so brazenly? Because he can. Nobody questions him, particularly at a memorial for slain officers.
Meanwhile, his speech was another call for gun control. Which, in the aftermath of the Bastille Day massacre, should raise some eyebrows. After all, are we likely to start asking for 'truck control' now? France did a good job of controlling guns, so I suppose that is the logical next step, is it not?
I tired of emotional appeals in politics long ago, but it seems this is all we get any more. From the bombastic and aggressive emotional outbursts of Trump to the lies and deceit of the 'caring' Left wing triumvirate of Bernie, Hillary, and Barry. We're a nation divided more over feelings and lacking the capacity or willingness to look at what we can, and have, accomplished.
Our nation has been unique in that it rarely prosecutes politicians for crimes related to the execution of official duties. There is a good reason for this, since that kind of prosecution can often be driven by political goals and outcomes (a hallmark of banana republics and third world nations). However, in this case, there is a clear dereliction of duty and, in my mind, benign neglect (the best you can say about her behavior) is the same as malicious intent. In fact, benign neglect in any corporate situation can and will get you fired.
But government is not a corporate environment. Which is why I hold politicians and government in such low regard.
The real problem I have to face here in NYC is the stupidity of her supporters who say "The FBI says she's not guilty." No, they didn't. They just didn't feel the case would derive an outcome worthy of taking it to court, but clearly pointed out that she engaged in plenty of illegal activity. Just not maliciously. I'll remember that next time I decide to not pay my taxes.
The federal government’s massive $4 trillion budget and $19 trillion official national debt (the real tab is much higher) are evidence of an out-of-control government that seeks to seep into every aspect of Americans’ lives. But even these spending and debt measures fail to account for the full reach of the government.
More difficult to tabulate are the plethora of regulations emanating from numerous federal agencies...
The anointed and/or self-anointed political/intellectual elites have been getting a come-uppance lately. That is all for the good because our moral and intellectual superiors of both political parties have not done a very good job when they gain access to power. Enjoying power, they begin to apply their talents to keeping it and expanding it. Furthermore, these elites often ignore common sense.
The problem is that the individual can not afford to fight them. Small businesses can neither afford the legal teams, the years, nor nor lobbyists to defend them. Wallach begins:
What sort of political system do we have in America? Why, republican self-government, of course. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as mediated by our hallowed constitutional institutions. Doing our thing for 227 years now.
A great many people aren’t buying that story these days. They look at our actual manner of governing and see bitterly contested symbolic elections awkwardly joined to a powerful technocratic administrative state that makes most of the important decisions. The disconnect between the ideal and the reality has brought us a legitimacy crisis that has been often touched upon in these virtual pages lately.
Leviathan is now too big to fail:
We live in a democracy full of fellow-citizens who think that “crucial functions” are very extensive indeed. One libertarian tradition is simply to flip these fellow-citizens the bird and insist that a cadre of the right kind of rulers—anti-technocratic technocrats, more or less—will somehow gain power and make our government best by governing least. That is undoubtedly an applause line in many rooms, but it is the equivalent of not playing the game at all.
To disguise the value judgments inherent in their regulatory agendas, economists and policymakers justify their proposals as hyper-rational, politically neutral responses to "market failures." To prove these proposals enhance economic efficiency and societal welfare, they produce "cost-benefit analyses." Free markets and price signals work better, they tell us, when we embrace their recommended taxes, subsidies, and mandates. Any rule that requires $1 million of equipment to reduce by 1% the risk of death for 100 people is just common sense; one requiring $1 billion of equipment to reduce by less than 1% the emission of carbon dioxide for one year is the only responsible choice.
All this may be true on classroom blackboards and in abstract computer models. But technocrats armed with sharpened pencils and boundless egos tend not to calculate reliably which market prices are "too low" or which resource re-allocations would produce benefits that exceed costs. The easy recourse to the language of market failure — the claim that somewhere some social cost is going unpaid — reflects a subjective policy preference when we do not know the cost's size or incidence, the extent to which it is unpaid, or what countervailing benefits might be lost through a correction. A cost-benefit analysis that summarizes how many "lives" a rule will "save," how many "jobs" will be "created," and how much these achievements are "worth," is little more than marketing propaganda when the terms are unhelpful abstractions and the estimates unreliable.
The naysayers did not trust the dam to hold. Rather, they were sincerely worried that the national government would expand beyond all recognition, and that, in its broadened form, it would inevitably begin to encroach upon the rights of the people. To help prevent this from happening, they sought a parchment backstop to which they might appeal in such cases as denied their natural liberties.
They already understood that power tends to attempt to amass more power. But how did they know that the masses would, someday, demand more? Wise men, indeed. Freedom from government was their lodestar.
"America doesn’t trust you anymore. That’s the truth... and that’s not one party, that’s both" raged former Senator Tom Coburn during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs this week. As Free Beacon reports, Coburn, making his first appearance before the Senate since his farewell speech when he retired in late 2014, pleaded with Congress to take action to reform government, quoting de Tocqueville, that an ever more centralized control reduces its citizenry "to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
What if most people are happy to be sheep with a government-shepherd?
This past weekend, Springsteen canceled a concert in North Carolina, on 2 days notice, to protest the passage of law requiring people to use bathrooms based on the gender of birth. PayPal, similarly, canceled plans to expand operations in Charlotte.
I understand how tightly politics has become intertwined with business. Making a statement seems to be the most important thing anyone can do, these days. So I'll make a small one of my own. I don't agree with the North Carolina law, but I don't live there. I think it is over-the-top and excessive control of society by imposing a law where common sense should suffice to reign. The passage of law doesn't make an idea 'correct' or morally justified. Even so, I'm still planning to visit my family in North Carolina, spend money there, and enjoy the state's many natural wonders. I'm not going to boycott a state because I disagree with a law. If I did that, I'd have problems living in the state I currently reside.
Paypal and Bruce both have the right to make whatever statements they choose, just as I do. I'm not sure how what they are doing impacts the law, however. In fact, they both hurt many people in an attempt to 'show solidarity' with...some group or another (I can never tell which special interest groups are getting the attention these days).
No. It is a very rare Leftists who will tell you what the proper end point is for the expansion of government power and money. The answer is always "more."
