Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Marxist Gives Good Analysis of American Economy
H/t Jon Nadler of Kitco. Professor Wolff is a Marxist who gets most of what has been going on in the US economy right. He does not seem to understand the role of the Fed, monetary policy, and the banking system in creating the problems he describes. Otherwise, he hits quite a few nails on their heads.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Gingrich, Like Cagney, Is Better than Romney
Newt Gives It to the Taxpayers
The Economist was ebullient when Romney was winning. Now that Gingrich has trounced Romney in South Carolina, our financial overlords in the City of London and on Wall Street may be may be a bit less, but almost as, content. The difference between Romney and Gingrich is like the difference between Cary Grant and James Cagney. Romney, the debonair aristocrat, an opportunist beneath his manly charm, Gingrich, the thug who twirls around in a ménage à trois before mashing a grapefruit in taxpayers' faces (see Cagney's Gingrich-like performance in The Public Enemy above). These are two dogs out of the Council on Foreign Relations' kennel.
Of the four standing GOP candidates Romney is the most accomplished, having achieved impressive business success. In contrast, Gingrich's chief achievement, his appointment to speaker of the house, led to quick failure due to his incompetence. Romney is a stable and cautious friend of global financial interests while Gingrich is full of big ideas, each one more destructive than the last. In the last debate, Gingrich's proposal for a government subsidy to build a port in Charleston was an example. Gingrich seems to have planned a massive pork barrel project for each city in which a debate is held.
Romney blows with the winds; Gingrich proves that 180-year-old tax-and-spend Whig socialism is alive and well. Romney is in the centrist, globalist, and corporatist tradition of Richard Nixon; Gingrich is in the Whig tradition of Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln practically bankrupted Illinois with frivolous infrastructure projects, and, now that Illinois's credit rating has been reduced, what better expression of the GOP's big government Whig tradition than to nominate Gingrich?
Presidents don't usually win or lose because of ideas. Lyndon Baines Johnson fought Goldwater over the New Deal, but Kennedy had just been shot. Perhaps Ronald Reagan fought a campaign of ideas, but would he have won without his actor's charm? And did he really believe that government was the problem? He didn't act like it. Rather than ideas, Nixon's half-day-old whiskers are the kind of issue that America's increasingly impoverished electorate emphasizes. America was once the richest and freest country in the world, but television news has led it to its favoring candidates, like Gingrich, Romney, and Obama, who are bleeding them, diminishing their freedom, and creating a paper money aristocracy at their expense.
That said, Gingrich is better than Romney for one reason: Gingrich can't win. He can't win because his image is tarnished, he is fat, his ideas are ridiculous, and he is an imaginative sexual virtuoso. That makes him preferable to Romney, who can win.
The most important thing in this election is a strident protest vote. The greater and more explicit the vote against the Federal Reserve Bank, the greater a threat to its political security, the sooner the Ron Paul revolution will win. In the event that Paul loses the primary race (and his 13% showing was better than in '08, but discouraging), a vote for the Libertarian Party in the general election will speak more loudly than one for the GOP candidate. There is more likely to be a stronger protest vote with a Gingrich than with a Romney candidacy.
As well, a Republican Congress coupled with a Democratic presidency is unlikely to achieve much. That is the best we can hope for. If the Republicans win both branches, we will see plenty of ports and plenty of pork in Charleston and every other hurricane-prone city in the country, if not the world.
The Economist was ebullient when Romney was winning. Now that Gingrich has trounced Romney in South Carolina, our financial overlords in the City of London and on Wall Street may be may be a bit less, but almost as, content. The difference between Romney and Gingrich is like the difference between Cary Grant and James Cagney. Romney, the debonair aristocrat, an opportunist beneath his manly charm, Gingrich, the thug who twirls around in a ménage à trois before mashing a grapefruit in taxpayers' faces (see Cagney's Gingrich-like performance in The Public Enemy above). These are two dogs out of the Council on Foreign Relations' kennel.
Of the four standing GOP candidates Romney is the most accomplished, having achieved impressive business success. In contrast, Gingrich's chief achievement, his appointment to speaker of the house, led to quick failure due to his incompetence. Romney is a stable and cautious friend of global financial interests while Gingrich is full of big ideas, each one more destructive than the last. In the last debate, Gingrich's proposal for a government subsidy to build a port in Charleston was an example. Gingrich seems to have planned a massive pork barrel project for each city in which a debate is held.
Romney blows with the winds; Gingrich proves that 180-year-old tax-and-spend Whig socialism is alive and well. Romney is in the centrist, globalist, and corporatist tradition of Richard Nixon; Gingrich is in the Whig tradition of Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln practically bankrupted Illinois with frivolous infrastructure projects, and, now that Illinois's credit rating has been reduced, what better expression of the GOP's big government Whig tradition than to nominate Gingrich?
Presidents don't usually win or lose because of ideas. Lyndon Baines Johnson fought Goldwater over the New Deal, but Kennedy had just been shot. Perhaps Ronald Reagan fought a campaign of ideas, but would he have won without his actor's charm? And did he really believe that government was the problem? He didn't act like it. Rather than ideas, Nixon's half-day-old whiskers are the kind of issue that America's increasingly impoverished electorate emphasizes. America was once the richest and freest country in the world, but television news has led it to its favoring candidates, like Gingrich, Romney, and Obama, who are bleeding them, diminishing their freedom, and creating a paper money aristocracy at their expense.
That said, Gingrich is better than Romney for one reason: Gingrich can't win. He can't win because his image is tarnished, he is fat, his ideas are ridiculous, and he is an imaginative sexual virtuoso. That makes him preferable to Romney, who can win.
The most important thing in this election is a strident protest vote. The greater and more explicit the vote against the Federal Reserve Bank, the greater a threat to its political security, the sooner the Ron Paul revolution will win. In the event that Paul loses the primary race (and his 13% showing was better than in '08, but discouraging), a vote for the Libertarian Party in the general election will speak more loudly than one for the GOP candidate. There is more likely to be a stronger protest vote with a Gingrich than with a Romney candidacy.
As well, a Republican Congress coupled with a Democratic presidency is unlikely to achieve much. That is the best we can hope for. If the Republicans win both branches, we will see plenty of ports and plenty of pork in Charleston and every other hurricane-prone city in the country, if not the world.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Republican Debate a Big Government Stew with Small Government Seasoning
Tonight's Republican debate was a big government stew with small government seasoning. Ron Paul, who remains the only Republican candidate to raise the possibility of shrinking government, was the seasoning. Stew-meat-and-potato candidates Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Huntsman talked about the importance of the private sector and job creation, but they had nix to say about how to cut government. Gingrich said he favors less government; nevertheless, he offered ideas about how an ever-bigger government can spend on infrastructure. He, like rest of the beef, potatoes, and onions of the big-government Republican stew, had no specific plans to make government smaller; Gingrich and Romney merely say they like the private sector. Big government Progressives of the past like George W. Bush, George H. Bush, and Richard M. Nixon said the same kinds of things and did nix to shrink government. We can expect the same from tonight's stew meat.
Ron Paul may have been the small government seasoning, but I found him not seasoning enough. He made a number of good points, such as his mentioning that none of the other candidates had a any ideas on how to shrink government. But he erred in saying that the Fourth Amendment prohibits states from banning contraceptives. The decision that claimed this, Griswold v. Connecticut was the pivotal case of federal judicial imperialism that led to Roe v. Wade (the significance of this question escaped Mitt Romney, who seemed to not have heard of Griswold).
Paul's position is wrong if he claims to be the constitutionalist candidate. The Tenth Amendment states:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
In deciding Griswold, the Supreme Court claimed that there are penumbras to the Constitution. But that claim is a flat contradiction of the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment precludes any concept of penumbras. It says that powers need to be delegated. The claim that delegation can be through non-delegation, i.e., through penumbras or shadows, is self-contradictory. Hence, Paul advocates expansion of federal power. This is understandable when considering that many libertarians apply a state minimization approach--if something reduces government then they are for it. Griswold reduced government when defined as the sum of state and federal government, but it sledge hammered states' rights. In the long run states' rights reduce government because the states can compete. By instituting federal control, the federal government imposes ever more fascistic control.
Equally unconvincing is Paul's apparent claim that the Commerce Clause permits the federal government to require that states sell contraceptives because banning them would interfere with interstate commerce. That would imply that the federal government has the power to require that the states do anything it wants, since anything can be imported across states. A national building code, for instance, could be viewed as a matter of interstate commerce. In fact, that is precisely how the Democrats overturned judicial resistance to the National Labor Relations Act.
Paul claims to favor the Constitution, and Griswold is very much in the anti-constitutionalist, "living constitution" tradition. If the Fourth Amendment is extended to "penumbras" and then foisted on the states through another series of illegitimate decisions starting with Gitlow v. New York, then pretty much anything goes as far as reinterpreting states' rights and the Constitution out of existence.
Rather than Paul's government minimization approach, federal government minimization is closer to the Constitution. Take the First Amendment, which says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." This could not have meant that the states are forbidden from establishing a religion because all of them had established religions at the time the First Amendment was written. States have the right to establish a religion, although I don't favor their doing so.
My chief criticism of Paul, though, is that he should do more to state his case. The Republicans' debates are staged by media lackeys of the same special interests who gain most at public expense from the Federal Reserve Bank: Wall Street, big government, banks and big business. As a result, the Republican debates are exercises in pointlessness. Paul was right to point this out, and thankfully there is a Ron Paul to do so. At the point where he brought up monetary policy and the Fed there was a palpable freeze in the audience. Discussion of the Fed and monetary policy are not permissible ingredients in big government stew. For that reason, Paul needs to do more to bring the debate about the Fed to the fore. No institution has been more destructive of the nation's welfare. It takes guts to say things on national television that the debate planners don't want a candidate to mention. Paul is three quarters of the way there. But he needs to be more aggressive.The seasoning needs to be stronger.
Ron Paul may have been the small government seasoning, but I found him not seasoning enough. He made a number of good points, such as his mentioning that none of the other candidates had a any ideas on how to shrink government. But he erred in saying that the Fourth Amendment prohibits states from banning contraceptives. The decision that claimed this, Griswold v. Connecticut was the pivotal case of federal judicial imperialism that led to Roe v. Wade (the significance of this question escaped Mitt Romney, who seemed to not have heard of Griswold).
Paul's position is wrong if he claims to be the constitutionalist candidate. The Tenth Amendment states:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
In deciding Griswold, the Supreme Court claimed that there are penumbras to the Constitution. But that claim is a flat contradiction of the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment precludes any concept of penumbras. It says that powers need to be delegated. The claim that delegation can be through non-delegation, i.e., through penumbras or shadows, is self-contradictory. Hence, Paul advocates expansion of federal power. This is understandable when considering that many libertarians apply a state minimization approach--if something reduces government then they are for it. Griswold reduced government when defined as the sum of state and federal government, but it sledge hammered states' rights. In the long run states' rights reduce government because the states can compete. By instituting federal control, the federal government imposes ever more fascistic control.
Equally unconvincing is Paul's apparent claim that the Commerce Clause permits the federal government to require that states sell contraceptives because banning them would interfere with interstate commerce. That would imply that the federal government has the power to require that the states do anything it wants, since anything can be imported across states. A national building code, for instance, could be viewed as a matter of interstate commerce. In fact, that is precisely how the Democrats overturned judicial resistance to the National Labor Relations Act.
Paul claims to favor the Constitution, and Griswold is very much in the anti-constitutionalist, "living constitution" tradition. If the Fourth Amendment is extended to "penumbras" and then foisted on the states through another series of illegitimate decisions starting with Gitlow v. New York, then pretty much anything goes as far as reinterpreting states' rights and the Constitution out of existence.
Rather than Paul's government minimization approach, federal government minimization is closer to the Constitution. Take the First Amendment, which says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." This could not have meant that the states are forbidden from establishing a religion because all of them had established religions at the time the First Amendment was written. States have the right to establish a religion, although I don't favor their doing so.
My chief criticism of Paul, though, is that he should do more to state his case. The Republicans' debates are staged by media lackeys of the same special interests who gain most at public expense from the Federal Reserve Bank: Wall Street, big government, banks and big business. As a result, the Republican debates are exercises in pointlessness. Paul was right to point this out, and thankfully there is a Ron Paul to do so. At the point where he brought up monetary policy and the Fed there was a palpable freeze in the audience. Discussion of the Fed and monetary policy are not permissible ingredients in big government stew. For that reason, Paul needs to do more to bring the debate about the Fed to the fore. No institution has been more destructive of the nation's welfare. It takes guts to say things on national television that the debate planners don't want a candidate to mention. Paul is three quarters of the way there. But he needs to be more aggressive.The seasoning needs to be stronger.
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