Republican Nomination Process

I attended my county Republican committee's nomination meeting yesterday and was positive about the local candidates including two state senators, Bonacic and Larkin, several state assemblyman (the county is so gerrymandered that we have about five different assembly races), and our excellent candidate for election commissioner, Tom Turco.  Of most interest to me is the 101st assembly district, where Peter Rooney of Port Ewen is going to run against the Democratic incumbent, Assemblyman Kevin Cahill. George Phillips, our congressional candidate, is to run against a badly educated left-wing extremist, Maurice Hinchey.  Phillips has always been a good candidate and has matured considerably in his presentation.  His speech last night was one of the best of the evening and he is presenting an excellent package.

The surprise of the evening was Gary Berntsen,  the candidate the GOP is backing against the fiscally illiterate Democratic incumbent Chuck Schumer. Schumer failed to study elementary economics at Harvard and so continually advocates protectionism.  It is tragic that the State of New York, which quaintly considers itself a national leader among the states, has seen its stature shrink and its economy go into a tailspin as millions have fled the state due to the policies of inept crackpots like Schumer and Hinchey.

Berntsen, a former CIA agent, is familiar with foreign affairs issues because he was a station chief in Afghanistan and in Latin America.  He speaks Farsi and Spanish and has considerable diplomatic and military experience. Hence if elected he will likely be the first American in Congress to have a clue as to what he is talking about when it comes to foreign affairs.

Berntsen said that the military is inefficient, which is not a surprise but shows an ability to think logically that is absent from many conservatives, who believe that spending equates to effectiveness and efficiency.  He pointed out that the US military in Afghanistan spends one million dollars per soldier.  That is a joke, and it is one more piece of evidence that government cannot manage a thing, including the military.

Along the same lines, I heard Carl Paladino speak on Monday night at a town meeting in Columbia County. Paladino seems like a good candidate for Governor.  We need mavericks like Paladino, a self-made multi-millionaire in the Buffalo real estate market.  He is advocating cutting the budget by 20%.  His campaign is marred by the release of racist e-mails that he had sent confidentially to a group of friends and were released to the media.  This is something like Obama's long term association with Reverend Wright.  It deserves criticism.  The first thing Paladino did was apologize for the e-mails, unlike Obama who never apologized for his association with Wright.   I do not imagine that Paladino is interested in thwarting civil rights institutions in the state, so I don't believe that this matter, although offensive, ought to be decisive.

The New York State budget can be cut by 50% without any reduction in services. The fact that it has not is evidence of the utter incompetence of government and the Democratic Party.  

Rick Lazio is the designated candidate for governor, and Carl Paladino will challenge him in a primary.  Lazio is saying the right things, but he is not specific.  The Youtube video below was taken in October 2009 when Lazio received the Suffolk County endorsement. Lazio's points include a property tax cap; reduction of state pension costs and double dipping; increased local control; reducing taxes; improvement of infrastructure; and education reform.  He is not advocating a specific cut as is Paladino.  Too often the Republicans have come to office saying the kinds of things Lazio is saying and then have turned out to be as corrupt as the Democrats.  The involvement of slime like Alfonse D'Amato in the GOP state convention proceedings is sufficient for me to be skeptical of Mr. Lazio's intent.  Until he is willing to say that he will cut state government by more than twenty percent I will be supporting Mr. Paladino. 

As far as the senatorial race, I do not see any candidates who are especially good.  Despite the Sun's endorsement of David Malpass, his asssociation with Wall Street is sufficient to keep me away from his campaign, although I would vote for him over a criminal looter like Democrat Gillibrand.

Hence, the pickings at the state level seem rather slim despite the tea party movement's anger.  There is no clearly superior candidate for senate.  The only state level candidate who seems to have made a clear commitment to smaller government is so far Carl Paladino, and I support him.

Bet or Pass?

Dear Malpass Campaign:

 

Before I consider supporting Mr. Malpass for Senate I need to know his position on the Paulson/Bush/Obama bailout and on the Federal Reserve Bank.  My initial optimism about Mr. Malpass's candidacy for Senate given the Sun's endorsement was quashed when I learned that he is a former employee of Bear Stearns.  He may as well be a former employee of Gosplan or the Socialist Party.  Calling him a "free market candidate" with a socialist background like that is something of a conundrum.  I will need to hear clearly his rejection of the Paulson bailout and of the Federal Reserve Bank before I will consider him as anything other than another George Bush-like big government Whig.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Mitchell Langbert

America a Slave Society

Gus Murphy had written a letter to our local newspaper, the Olive Press, about my prior letter and here is my response.

 

Dear Editor:

 

Gus Murphy claims that the Wicks Law and similar kinds of governmental failures are accidents and that government can work.  But Murphy does not illustrate his claim with facts.  Murphy is right that some government is essential, and he is also right that Henry David Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience that the government is best which governs not at all. When I assign that short and passionate essay to my senior seminar students  they are often surprised that the inventor of civil disobedience, an abolitionist and opponent of the Mexican War, disagreed with big government. 

 

Mr. Murphy offers foreign affairs and road building as examples of the essential services that government provides.  But both of these functions were with us long before the explosion in government spending in the past fifty years.  In 1950 government spending was 15% of the economy and today it is 45%.  But the US isn't any safer  and doesn't have better paved roads.  Berndt Leifeld and Barack Obama have gotten plenty of votes through handing out jobs, though, even if the roads are worse.

 

I agree with Murphy on his proposals to cut drug enforcement and military spending. Prohibition didn't work and neither does criminalization of drugs.  Likewise, the use of large scale, second generation warfare (see Thomas Hammes, the Sling and the Stone) has been incompetent and wasteful, much like everything else in government.

 

But I respectfully disagree with Murphy that once it starts spending government can avoid persistent failures like the Wicks Law and a long list of government boondoggles. The Wicks Law has been with us for nearly a century, yet it remains law.  There are four reasons why government does not work.  First, the brokerage of special interests arises from economic incentives that government creates.   Mancur Olson in Rise and Decline of Nations shows that lobbying and political manipulation result from a straightforward cost-benefit calculus that that favors wealthy special interests like Paul and Nancy Pelosi's Star Kist Tuna at the expense of the average American. In the 2009 Bush-Obama bailout of Wall Street even the mass media was coopted. There was hardly an opponent of the bailout permitted on any media outlet.

 

Second, in the 1920s to 1940s Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek showed the impossibility of socialist calculation. That is, the only way to efficiently allocate resources is through markets. Government interferes with markets and so makes us poorer.

 

Third, government lacks feedback about whether its tactics succeed over time.  Government budgets are for one year, so decisions that dump costs into the future are encouraged.  There is no stock price to inform decision makers whether they are failing. 

 

Fourth the complexity of government means that neither legislators nor the public can monitor it.  Few Americans are familiar with the intricacies of the tax code or pollution law.  Recently, we heard Nancy Pelosi say that the health care law should be passed so that we can find out what it says.  Pension law (the Employee Retirement Income Security Act) is a joke, yet few Americans question it. 

 

Thus, government cannot work, has not worked and never will work.  As government has expanded from 15% of the economy in 1950 to nearly half today, real wages have stagnated.  In the nineteenth century and into the 1960s real hourly wages increased two percent per year.  Since the 1960s explosion in government and the abolition of the gold standard in 1971 the real hourly wage has not grown at all.  The explosion led to the freezing of standards of living at the 1970 level.  The frauds in the banker owned "liberal" media claim that the stagnant real wages were due to Reagan, but the freezing of the real hourly wage started in the 1970s.   In turn Americans became two income families, then three income and now we see both spouses working two or three jobs just to make ends meet. In my day my dear mother could stay at home while my father worked in a factory.  Reason: there was less government. 

 

But the public and Mr. Murphy have not figured out that if you pay half your income in taxes and get little or nothing in return, you will be forced to work like a slave in order to pay for government's greedy incompetence.  Henry David Thoreau would turn in his grave if he saw how America has become a slave society.

Sincerely,

 

 

Mitchell Langbert

Malpass for Senate

Raquel Okyay made several damning accusations in her blog yesterday.  Okyay writes that the New York State GOP has nominated a loser, Bruce Blakeman, for US Senate because Alfonse D'Amato is friends with the Democratic candidate, Kirsten Gillibrand and backed Blakeman so Gillibrand could win. "Why is D'Amato standing next to Gillibrand while she announces her candidacy in the above photograph?" Okyay asks.

 Okyay notes that two good candidates, Joe Diaguardi for Senate and Steve Levy for governor, have been "kicked to the curb."  Ed Cox, the colorless state chair, claimed to back Levy, but his motive may have been to give the appearance that he is not part of New York's loser-GOP machine. Levy only won 43% of the vote in a second ballot at the convention but needed 50% to force a primary.  Cox lacked the courage and/or the integrity to  insist that Levy be able to challenge Rick Lazio in a primary. Cox either is incompetent or never backed Levy in the first place, Okyay concludes.  As well, Cox has gone along with   D'Amato's demand for Blakeman for Senate.

The New York Sun blog seems to have been resurrected (Yay!) and they are endorsing David Malpass for Senate. Blakeman edged him out in the convention, but if the state's Republican voters back Blakeman and the ineffectual and corrupt GOP insiders whom he represents then the party is not worth saving.  The Sun writes that the Republican Party "has been waiting for a long time for such a candidate as Mr. Malpass."