Maverick Philosopher

We are the Government?

Obama assures us that the government is us. Do you believe that nonsense?  (And it is, literally, nonsense and not merely a falsehood.)  Then you you need to inform yourself for your own good.

IRS and AP Scandals Cast a Big Chill on Free Speech  (Little Boomer allusion there, to The Big Chill, 1983)

Four Federal Agencies Targeted the Tea Party

VDH, It Can Happen Here.  Excerpt:

Living in Oceania

And now?

Suddenly in 2013, what was once sure has become suspect. All the old referents are not as they once were. The world is turned upside down, and whether the government taps, politicizes, or lies is not so important if it subsidizes the 47%. Does anyone care that five departments of government are either breaking the law or lying or both (State [Benghazi], Defense [the harassment issues], Justice [monitoring of phone lines], Treasury [corruption at the IRS], Health and Human Services ^[3] [shaking down companies to pay for PR for Obamacare])?

The National Rifle Association is now supposed to be a suspect paramilitary group, in the way the Boy Scouts are homophobes. One day we woke up and learned that by fiat women were suddenly eligible to serve in front-line combat units—no discussion, no hearings, no public debate. We had a “war on women” over whether upscale Sandra Fluke could get free birth control from the government, but snoozed through the Dr. Gosnell trial. The latter may have been the most lethal serial killer in U.S. history, if his last few years of snipping spinal cords were indicative of the his first three unmonitored decades of late-term aborting.

The Obama administration had decided to shut down as many coal plants as it can, stop most new gas and oil drilling on federal lands, and go after private companies ranging from huge aircraft manufacturers to the small guitar concerns [link added by BV]—based not on law, but on certain theories of climate change and labor equity. As in the case with the IRS, the EPA is now synonymous with politically motivated activism designed to circumvent the law. The president in his State of the Union address assured us that cap-and-trade will be back, given, he says, the atypical violent weather that hit the U.S. in his term—even as global temperatures have not risen in 15 years, and hurricanes are now occurring more rarely than during the last administration.

The government, we were also told, would not enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, and would grant de facto amnesty for large numbers of illegal aliens as the election approached. Enforcement of existing law now is a fluid idea, always up for discussion For the first time in my life, I can not even find rifle shells on the store shelves—amid rumors that the Department of Homeland Security, at a time of national acrimony over the Second Amendments, believes it is an opportune moment to stockpile gargantuan amounts of ammunition—again, a sort of force multiplier in ensuring panic buying.

Are You a Correct Citizen?

So we are in unchartered territory. The IRS has lost our trust, both for its rank partisanship and its inability to come forward and explain its crimes. Eric Holder wants us to believe that he has no idea why his office was monitoring the communications of journalists, and yet now warrants the renewed trust of the president. Susan Rice serially misled on national television about Benghazi and so will probably be promoted to national security advisor. Even the Washington Post has decided that the president was lying in his defense about Benghazi (albeit with the funny sort of childhood rating of “four Pinocchios”) after the president’s team serially blamed the violence on an internet video, while the president simultaneously claimed that he also identified the crime immediately as a terrorist hit.

On campuses, the Departments of Justice and Education have issued new race/class/gender guidelines that would effectively deny constitutionally protected free speech in universities, a sort of politically correct idea that proper thinking is preferable to free thinking.

If you oppose “comprehensive immigration reform” you become a nativist or worse—and apparently are one of the “enemies” the president wants to “punish.” The president just condemned American guns that wind up in Mexico–implying right-wingers opposed his own remedies of new gun control and neglecting to mention that his own Fast and Furious operation sold thousands of lethal weapons to Mexican drug cartels.

The end of the revolving doors, lobbyists, and non-transparency resulted in Jack Lew—recipient of a $1 million bonus from Citibank as it both lost money and gulped down federal bailout money—taking over from the tax-dodger Timothy Geithner as our new Treasury secretary to oversee the new IRS. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is now pumping corporations for money to help spread the gospel about how eager we are for the implementation of Obamacare, as the government now sort of freelances on its own—the federal equivalent of California Highway Patrol officers suddenly ubiquitous along our roadsides ticketing in a frenzy, in fear of their bankrupt state pension funds.

Now What?

What happens to a corporation that says “nope” to Sebelius? An IRS audit? Phone monitoring? Presidential denunciation as a “fat cat”? Talking points? Harry Reid taking to the floor to claim it had not paid its fair share in taxes?

Government has become a sort of malignant metasisizing tumor, growing on its own, parasitical on healthy cells, always searching for new sources of nourishment, its purpose nothing other than growing bigger and faster and more powerful—until the exhausted host collapses. We have a sunshine king and our government has become a sort of virtual Versailles palace.

I suppose that when a presidential candidate urges his supporters to get in someone’s face, and to take a gun to a knife fight, from now on you better believe him. And, finally, the strangest thing about nearing the threshold of 1984? It comes with a whimper, not a bang, with a charismatic smile and mellifluous nonsense—with politically correct, egalitarian-minded bureaucrats with glasses and iPhones instead of fist-shaking jack-booted thugs.

 

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The Government Is Us?

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The Government Is Us?

Liberals like to say that the government is us.  President Obama recently trotted out the line to quell the fears of gun owners:

You hear some of these quotes: ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government.’ ‘We can’t do background checks because the government is going to come take my guns away,’ Obama said. “Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. It’s a government of and by and for the people.

Liberals might want to think about the following.

If the government is us, and the government lies to us about Benghazi or anything else, then we must be lying to ourselves.  Right?

If the government is us, and the government uses the IRS to harass  certain groups of citizens whose political views the administration opposes, then we must be harassing ourselves.

I could continue in this vein, but you get the drift.  "The government is us" is blather.  It is on a par with Paul Krugman's silly notion that we owe the national debt to ourselves. (See Left, Right, and Debt.) 

It is true that some, but not all, of those who have power over us are elected.  But that truth cannot be expressed by the literally false, if not meaningless, 'The government is us.' Anyone who uses this sentence is mendacious or foolish.

The government is not us. It is an entity distinct from most of us, and opposed to many of us,  run by a relatively small number of us. Among the latter are some decent people but also plenty of power-hungry individuals who may have started out with good intentions but who were soon suborned by the power, perquisites, and pelf of high office, people for whom a government position is a hustle like any hustle. Government, like any entity, likes power and likes to expand its power, and can be counted on to come up with plenty of rationalizations for the maintenance and  extension of its power. It must be kept in check by us, who are not part of the government, just as big corporations need to be kept in check by government regulators.

If you value liberty you must cultivate a healthy skepticism about government.  To do so is not anti-government.  Certain scumbags of the Left love to slander us by saying that we are anti-government.  It is a lie and they know it.  They are not so stupid as not to know that to be for limited government is to be for government.

There are two extremes to avoid, the libertarian and the liberal. Libertarians often say that the government can do nothing right, and that the solution is to privatize everything including the
National Parks. Both halves of that assertion are patent nonsense. It is equal but opposite nonsense to think that Big Government will solve all our problems. Ronald Reagan had it right: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have." Or something like that.

From a logical point of view, the ‘Government is us’ nonsense appears to be a pars pro toto fallacy: one identifies a proper part (the governing) with the whole of which it is a proper part (the governed).

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There is More to Life than Politics

There is more to life than politics, but to keep it that way some engagement in it is necessary. 

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Politics is War and Conservatives Need to Learn How to Fight

Thatcherisms

Here.

Victor Davis Hanson on Generation Screwed

Here. Are the Obaminations of the current administration inadvertently building a libertarian-leaning youth movement that will unseat both the RINOs and the leftists?  One can hope.

Many young people voted for Obama because they think him 'cool.'  Well, he is one cool dude, no doubt about it, except that the criterion of cool is not germane.  Appreciation of that truth, however, tends to come after the bloom of youth has worn off.  In the meantime, opponents of nanny-statism need to front a cool candidate.  Maybe the vigorous young Rand Paul can supply the cool the youngsters crave.  But first they need to learn that they are only screwing themselves by supporting the fiscally irresponsible Dems.

Speaking of fiscal irresponsibility, I was pleased to see that the prolific Hanson  has taken aim at Krazy Krugman in Krugman's California Dreaming.  See also The Ahistorical Krugman.

'What-me-worry?' Krugman is an easy target, and I land some punches in Left, Right, and Debt and The Household Analogy.

 

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Matt J. Salmon on Same-Sex Marriage

Here:

In an interview aired over the weekend, Rep. Matt J. Salmon (R-Ariz.) told a local news station that his son’s homosexuality has not led him to change his position on gay marriage.

“I don’t support the gay marriage,” the congressman said. But Salmon emphasized that he loved and respected his son and did not consider homosexuality a choice.

“My son is by far one of the most important people in my life. I love him more than I can say,” an emotional Salmon told 3TV. “It doesn’t mean that I don’t have respect, it doesn’t mean that I don’t sympathize with some of the issues. It just means I haven’t evolved to that stage.”

This is nauseating.  First of all, parents naturally love their children,  so there is no need to gush like a liberal over how much you love your son.  Thank you for 'sharing,' congressman, but politics is about governance and problem-solving , not about squishy, bien-pensant feel-goodism. 

And then Salmon tells us that he hasn't "evolved to the stage" of accepting same-sex marriage.  In other words, he is apologizing for being a conservative Neanderthal stuck at a lower level of evolutionary development, and hinting at the possibility of his 'evolving' beyond this retarded stage. 

With all due respect, congressman, you are a joke.  Man up, take your testosterone, and learn how to ARGUE the conservative case on marriage.  That means: no Bible-thumping and no bare assertions. And no more gushing about how much you love your son. 

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Realpolitik

The weak invite attack.  That is a law of nature.  Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other.  Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism.  There is none.  Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state.  The same goes for diplomacy.  There needs be a hard fist behind the diplomat's smiling mask.  There had better be iron and the willingness to shed blood back of that persona.

Or as Herr Blut-und-Eisen himself is reported to have said, "Diplomacy unbacked by force is like music without instruments."

There is More to Life than Politics

There is more to life than politics, but to keep it that way, some engagement in it is necessary.

Obama's Abuse of Power

From an article by David Harsanyi:

The president, who has often said he will work around Congress, also justifies his executive bender by telling us that Americans are clamoring for more limits on gun ownership. So what? These rights -- in what Piers Morgan might call that "little book" -- were written down to protect the citizenry from not only executive overreach but also vagaries of public opinion. Didn't Alexander Hamilton and James Madison warn us against the dangerous "passions" of the mob? It is amazing how many times this president uses majoritarian arguments to rationalize executive overreach.

That is a very important point.  We are a republic.  Not everything is up for democratic grabs. 

And really, speaking of ginning up fear: "If there's even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try," the president said, deploying perhaps the biggest platitude in the history of nannyism. Not a single one of the items Obama intends to implement -- legislative or executive -- would have stopped Adam Lanza's killing spree or, most likely, any of the others. Using fear and a tragedy to further ideological goals was by no means invented by Obama, but few people have used it with such skill.

A platitude?  Not the right word.  What Obama is quoted as saying is an absurdity and illustrates once again what a bullshitter he is.  Many lives would be saved by banning mororcycles, skydiving, mountaineering, and so on.  But a thoughtful person does not consider merely the positive upshot of banning X but the negative consequences as well such as the infringement of liberty.  A rational person considers costs along with benefits. 

 

Welcome to Fascist Amerika

Leftists like to call conservatives fascists, but it is the fascism of the Left that is taking hold.  Two more pieces of evidence as part of a massive cumulative case:

Obama Willing to Use Executive Orders on Guns

At a news conference on Monday, exactly one month after the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Obama said a task force led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had “presented me now with a list of sensible, common-sense steps that can be taken to make sure that the kinds of violence we saw at Newtown doesn’t happen again. He added: “My starting point is not to worry about the politics. My starting point is to focus on what makes sense, what works.”

The quotation is ungrammatical ("kinds of violence . . . doesn't"), but that is the least of it.  How can any serious individual speak of making sure that events such as Newtown don't happen again?  Every reasonable person knows that there will be similar occurrences.  The astonishing attitude betrayed here is that the federal government, by merely passing laws, can eliminate evil from the world.  The risibility of this notion is compounded by the content of the laws being proposed.  Must I point out that behind this foolishness is lust for power?  The Left is totalitarian from the ground up and this is just further proof of the fact.

To say that sales of guns and ammo and accessories are brisk would be an understatement.  Expect it to become brisker still.  POTUS has just given the people another reason to arm themselves. 

This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit.  Roger Kimball reflects upon his Kafkaesque predicament after hurricane Sandy destroyed his house.

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Fiscal Irresponsibility as Politically Rational: The Fiscal Prisoners' Dilemma

Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, Regaining America's Balance. Excerpt:

There are two paths toward reducing deficits and debts of the magnitude we face: raising taxes or cutting spending. A balanced compromise would involve some amount of both, but the two political parties face strong electoral incentives to do neither. If Republicans push for reduced spending, they are criticized for taking away the benefits people rely on. If Democrats push for raising taxes, they are decried for swiping workers' hard-earned dollars. Both solutions are seen as taking money away from voters, and are thus fraught with political peril.

Consider the matrix above, in which both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have two policy choices. Republicans always promise lower taxes, so their choice is whether to cut or maintain spending levels. Democrats, in contrast, want to keep spending high, so their choice is whether to raise taxes or keep them low.

A close look at the matrix shows that it is politically rational for the Republicans to maintain today's unsustainable levels of spending when faced with either behavior from Democrats. And, campaign rhetoric aside, that is what they tend to do. Republicans have learned that whenever they actually legislate spending cuts, they are attacked by their opponents and tend to lose elections. They are not keen to do the fiscally responsible thing when the price is giving up power.

Likewise, whether Republicans cut or maintain spending, Democrats are politically better off if they allow taxes to stay low. This explains why, despite President Obama's rhetoric about raising taxes, he and other Democrats have generally refrained from actually doing so, especially at the levels needed to pay for their spending. That the expiration of the Bush tax cuts was postponed until after the 2012 election was not a coincidence.

To be sure, politicians in both parties make noises about good economic choices (from their perspectives) that balance the budget, but their actual behavior is what matters. President George W. Bush oversaw the expansion of spending on entitlements, as well as on defense, education, and other discretionary programs. President Obama serially preserved Bush's tax cuts. Politicians know what is best for the country in the long term, but they have no easy way to change their behavior now during a period of polarization in which the institutions and incentives are set up for imbalance.

This amounts to an institutional failure. For most of the nation's history, the rules of the budget game worked. Today, however, they no longer function. Politically rational behavior is now fiscally perverse. Addressing this institutional failure thus requires changing the rules of game. The only remedy to our political prisoners' dilemma, therefore, is to change those rules so that they in fact rule out structural fiscal imbalance — by imposing painful penalties on lawmakers for failing to budget responsibly.

What the Gun Debate is Fundamentally About

At bottom, the gun debate boils down to a conflict of visions, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. This is well-explained by Mchael Medved in The Liberal God Delusion.  Excerpt:

Consider the current dispute over the right response to gun violence. At its core, this argument comes down to a visceral disagreement between relying on self-defense or on government protection. Gun-rights enthusiasts insist that the best security for law-abiding citizens comes from placing formidable firearms into their hands; gun-control advocates believe we can protect the public far more effectively by taking guns away from as many Americans as possible. In other words, conservatives wantto address the threat of gun violence by giving individuals more power while liberals seek to improve the situation by concentrating more power in the hands of the government. The right preaches self-reliance while the left places its trust in the higher power of government.

The same dynamic characterizes most of today’s foreign-policy and defense debates. Right-wingers passionately proclaim the ideal of “peace through strength,” arguing that a powerful, self-confident America with dominant military resources remains the only guarantee of national security. Progressives, on the other hand, dream of multilateral consensus, comprehensive treaties, disarmament, grand peace deals, and vastly enhanced authority for the United Nations. Once again, liberals place a touching and naive faith in the ideal of a higher power—potential world government—while conservatives insist that the United States, like any nation, must ultimately rely only on itself.

For the liberal, the weapon, not the wielder, is the cynosure of his moral disapprobation, and it doesn't matter whether the weapon is a semi-automatic pistol or a nuclear device.  It is baaaaaad, as such and in itself, and so must be banned.  For the conservative, the focus is on the wielder, not the weapon, for only the wielder is a moral agent.  If Israel has nukes, that is not a problem.  But it is a big problem if a rogue state such as Iran does.  Iran does, but Israel does not, call for the destruction of other states.

The difference between my shotgun and Stanley 'Tookie' William's shotgun resides not in the shotgun but in the fact that he is or (thankfully) was a moral cretin whereas your humble correspondent, despite his manifold minor faults,  does not deserve such an appellation. 

It's the wielder, not the weapon, that counts.  Wise up, liberals.

Related post:  Farrell, 'Tookie,' Hannity and Colmes, and Bad Arguments

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On Being 26 Rather Than 62

W. K. writes,

You recently mentioned your being very happy, given what's wrong with the world, to be 62 rather than 26; I am 26. Although, sadly, I think liberalism will run until it destroys itself as a parasite that destroys its host, this metaphysical fact of evil's being self-destructive is reason enough for hope. People have always sensed that the world is falling apart, because in a sense it always has been, but even greater than the mystery of evil is the mystery of goodness. Rather than regretting my being 26 rather than 62, I remember, in my Mavphil-inspired gratitude exercises, that the cruelest regime in the history of mankind fell during my lifetime.

I have always believed that Good and Evil are not opposites on a par, but that somehow Good is more fundamental and that Evil is somehow derivative or interstitial or parasitic or privative.  The Thomist doctrine of evil as privatio boni is one way of explaining this relation, though that doctrine is open to objections.

So I agree with my correspondent that, in the end, Good triumphs.  Unfortunately, it is a long way to the end, a long march along a via dolorosa with many stations of suffering.  I don't relish making that journey.  Hence my satisfaction at the thought that my life is, most likely, three-quarters over.  As I said in that post-election post,

One can hope to be dead before it all comes apart.  Fortunately or unfortunately, I am in the habit of taking care of myself and could be facing another 25 years entangled in the mortal coil.  When barbarism descends this will be no country for old men.

I too am grateful that the Evil Empire fell during my lifetime.  But now we have an incompetent jackass in the White House, a hard-core leftist, who was given four more years by a foolish electorate for whom panem et circenses are the supreme desiderata.  Innocent of the ways of world, trapped in leftist fantasy land, he is the polar opposite of Ronald Reagan.  We are in deep trouble.

But I do not counsel despair. We live by hope, within this life and beyond it.  We shall hope on and fight on.

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Politics is War and Conservatives Need to Learn How to Fight

The Left accepts and lives by what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle: Politics is war conducted by other means.  (Von Clausewitz's famous remark was to the effect that war is politics conducted by other means.)  The party that ought to be opposing the Left, the Republicans, apparently does not believe that this is what politics is.  This puts them at a serious disadvantage.

David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability.  Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles.  But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.

You have only thirty seconds to make your point.  Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it.  Your words would go over some of their
heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life.  Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich.  Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case.  You are politically dead.

Politics is war.  Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An
Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)

Because politics is war, conservatives, if they want to win, must deploy the same tactics the lefties
deploy.  Joe SixPack does not watch C-Span or read The Weekly Standard.  He won't sit still for Newt Gingrich as this former history professor calmly articulates conservative principles.  Joe needs to be fired up and energized.  The Left understands this.  You will remember that the race-hustling poverty pimp Jesse Jackson never missed an opportunity to refer to Gingrich's "Contract with America" as "Contract ON America."  That outrageous slander was of course calculated and was effective.  Leftists know how to fight dirty, and therefore the 'high road' is the road to political nowhere in present circumstances, as the 2012 election showed.  The nice man Romney was just no match for the street fighter Obama and the slander machine behind him.

The fundamental problem, I am afraid, is that there is no longer any common ground. When people stand on common ground, they can iron out their inevitable differences in a civil manner within the context of shared assumptions.  But when there are no longer any (or many) shared assumptions,  then politics does become a form of warfare in which your opponent is no longer a fellow citizen committed to
similar values, but an enemy who must be destroyed (if not physically, at least in respect of his political power) if you and your way of life are to be preserved.

As I have said before, the bigger and more intrusive the government, the more to fight over.  If we could reduce government to its legitimate constitutionally justified functions, then we could reduce the amount of fighting.  But of course the size, scope, and reach of government is precisely one of the issues most hotly debated.

Although I incline toward the Horowitz view, I am not entirely comfortable with it.  I would like to believe that amicable solutions are available.  You will have to decide for yourself, taking into consideration the particulars of your situation.  Some of us are buying gold and 'lead.'  I suspect things are going to get hot in the years to to come, and I'm not talking about global warming.  Things are about to get very interesting indeed.

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The Crisis of American Self-Government

Harvey Mansfield interviewed. Excerpt:

Consider voting. "You can count voters and votes," Mr. Mansfield says. "And political science does that a lot, and that's very useful because votes are in fact countable. One counts for one. But if we get serious about what it means to vote, we immediately go to the notion of an informed voter. And if you get serious about that, you go all the way to voting as a wise choice. That would be a true voter. The others are all lesser voters, or even not voting at all. They're just indicating a belief, or a whim, but not making a wise choice. That's probably because they're not wise."

Exactly right.  As I say in "One Man, One Vote: A Dubious Principle":

Suppose you have two people, A and B. A is intelligent, well-informed, and serious. He does his level best to form correct opinions about the issues of the day. He is an independent thinker, and his thinking is based in broad experience of life. B, however, makes no attempt to become informed, or to think for himself. He votes as his union boss tells him to vote. Why should B's vote have the same weight as A's? Is it not self-evident that B's vote should not count as much as A's?

I think it is well-nigh self-evident.  The right to vote cannot derive simply from the fact that one exists or has interests.  Dogs and cats have interests, and so do children.  But we don't grant children the right to vote.  Why not? Presumably because they lack the maturity and good judgment necessary for casting an informed vote.  Nor do we grant felons the right to vote despite their interests.  Why should people who cannot wisely order their own lives be given any say in how society should be ordered?

Read the rest of that meaty post.  It is like a red flag before a liberal bull(shitter).

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Tribal America

One of my darker thoughts is that in the end tribal allegiances trump whatever people piously imagine unites us. For a time the great American experiment worked.  People assimilated under the aegis of e pluribus unum.  People valued liberty over material equality.  But now talk of these ideals seems quaint to a growing number.  Books like Dennis Prager's latest that celebrate them may have come too late.  We may have passed the tipping point toward the descent into tribalism.  We shall see.

 

Blut und Boden shouldn't matter but it does to leftists.  Here is an excerpt from my The Hyphenated American (link below):

 

The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive.  Suppose you come from Croatia.  Is that something to be proud of?  You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents.  It wasn't your doing.  It is an element of your facticity.  Be proud of the accomplishments  that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe.  Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.

If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.'    The Left in its perversity has it backwards.  They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind.  They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.

 

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A Case for Voluntary Segregation

This old entry, from about a year and half ago, has gained in relevance after Obama's reelection.  Here it is again re-titled and revised.

...........................

Another fit topic of rumination on this Independence Day 2011 is the question of voluntary segregation or balkanization.  Herewith, a few very preliminary remarks.

I have been inclining toward the view that voluntary segregation, in conjunction with a return to federalism,  might be a way to ease tensions and prevent conflict in a country increasingly riven by deep-going differences.  We need to face the fact that we do not agree on a large number of divisive, passion-inspiring issues.  Among these are abortion, gun rights, capital punishment, affirmative action, legal and illegal immigration, taxation, the need for fiscal responsibility in government, the legitimacy of public-sector unions, wealth redistribution, the role of the federal government in education, the purpose of government, the limits, if any, on governmental power,  and numerous others.

We need also to face the fact that we will never agree on them. These are not merely 'academic' issues since they directly affect the lives and livelihoods and liberties of people. And they are not easily resolved because they are deeply rooted in fundamental worldview differences, in a "conflict of visions,"  to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell.   When you violate a man's liberty, or mock his moral sense, or threaten to destroy his way of life, you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it. 

We ought also to realize that calls for civility and comity and social cohesion are pretty much empty.  Comity (social harmony) in whose terms?  On what common ground?  Peace is always possible if one side just gives in.  If conservatives all converted to leftism, or vice versa, then harmony would reign.  But to think such a thing will happen is just silly, as silly as the silly hope that Obama, a leftist, could 'bring us together.'  We can come together only on common ground, only under the umbrella of shared principles.  And what would these be?

There is no point in papering over very real differences.

Consider religion. Is it a value or not? Conservatives, even those who are atheistic and irreligious, tend to view religion as a value, asa good thing, as conducive to human flourishing. Liberals and leftists tend to view it as a disvalue, as something that impedes human flourishing.  Some go so far as to consider it "the greatest social evil."  The question is not whether religion, or rather some particular religion, is true. Nor is the question whether religion, or some particular religion, is rationally defensible. The question is whether the teaching and learning and practice of a religion contributes to our well-being, not just as individuals, but in our relations with others. For example, would we be better off as a society if every vestige of religion were removed from the public square? Does Bible study tend to make us better people?

The conservative will answer no and yes respectively and will feel sure that he is right.  For example, as a conservative, I find it utterly absurd that there has been any fight at all over the Mojave cross, and I have utter contempt for the ACLU shysters who brought the original law suit.  Of course, I wholeheartedly endorse the initial clause of the First Amendment, to wit, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." But it is hate-America leftist extremism on stilts to think that the presence of  that very old memorial cross on a hill  in the middle nowhere does anything to establish Christianity as the state religion.  I consider anyone who  believes that to be intellectually obtuse and morally repellent.

As for whether sincere Bible study makes us better, isn't that obvious?  Will you be so bold as to maintain that someone who has taken to heart the Ten Commandments will not have been improved thereby?  If you do maintain this, then you are precisely the sort of person contact with whom would be pointless or worse, precisely the sort of person right thinking people need to  segregate themselves from, for the sake of peace.

The leftist will give opposite answers to the two questions with equal confidence.  There is no possibility of mediation here.  That is a fact that can't be blinked while mouthing the squishy, bien-pensant,  feel-good rhetoric of 'coming together.'  Again, on what common ground?  Under the aegis of which set of shared principles?  There can be no 'coming together' with those whose views one believes are pernicious.  A man like A. C Grayling holds views that are not merely false, but pernicious.  He of course would return the 'compliment.'

If we want peace, therefore, we need to give each other space by adopting federalism and limiting government interference in our lives, and by voluntary segregation: by simply having nothing to do with people with whom there is no point in interacting given unbridgeable differences.

Unfortunately, the Left, with its characteristic totalitarian tendency, will not allow federalism.  But we still have the right of free association and voluntary segregation.  At least for the time being.

No doubt there are disadvantages to segregation/balkanization.  Exclusive association with the like-minded increases polarization and fosters extremism. See here.  The linked piece ends with the following suggestion:

Bishop cites research suggesting that, contrary to the standard goo-goo exhortations, the surer route to political comity may be less civic engagement, less passionate conviction. So let’s hear it for the indifferent and unsure, whose passivity may provide the national glue we need.

Now that is the sort of preternatural idiocy  one expects from the NYT.  Less civic engagement!  The reason there is more civic engagement and more contention is because there is more government interference!  The Tea Party movement is a prime example.  The solution is less government.  As I have said more than once, the bigger the government the more to fight over.  The solution is for government to back off, not for the citizenry to acquiesce like sheep in the curtailment of their liberties. 

You may have noticed the paradox:  Civic engagement is needed to get to the point where we don't need to  engage civically with people we find repellent. 

The 'Bread' in 'Bread and Circuses'

According to this article, if every Food Stamp recipient voted for Obama, it would account for 75% of his total. 

As you know, it is not called Food Stamps anymore.  It has been given the snappy new label, at once both a euphemism and an acronym, SNAP: Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program.  And it is actively promoted.

Liberals will call it part of the social safety net.  That metaphor suggests something to keep one from falling to one's death.  But it is also a net in the sense of a fishing net, a device that entraps and deprives of liberty.  But liberals ignore this aspect of their favorite programs.  For self-reliance and the nanny state don't go together.  Since the nanny state serves the interests of liberals,  self-reliance has to be diminished.  Part of the motivation of the liberal is to help the needy.   But another part is the lust for power which, to be retained, requires plenty of clients, plenty of dependents who can be relied upon to vote Democrat, thereby voting goodies for themselves in the short term-- and the long-term fiscal and moral solvency of the nation be damned.

Am I opposed to all social welfare programs? No. There are those who truly need help and cannot be helped by private charities.  But I am opposed to the current, utterly irresponsible expansion of the welfare state, and for two reasons.  One is economic: the expansion is unsustainable.  The other is moral: it diminishes and degrades and infantilizes people.  "The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen." (D. Prager)

Guns and Punitive Taxation

Seldom Seen Slim points us to the latest anti-gun outrage: 

The Cook County Board of Commissioners on Friday handily approved the county's 2013 budget, complete with some $40 million worth of new taxes on the sales of guns and cigarettes.

[. . .]

A previously proposed "violence tax" of a nickel per bullet sold in the county has been scrapped, though a new $25-per-tax component of the anti-violence measure remains. The gun tax will go into effect on April 1.

This is a perfect example of how leftists use the power of the state to violate law-abiding citizens.  The 'reasoning' is that since guns cause gun violence, guns sales should be subject to an additional 'violence' tax.  Of course, the premise is false, but that won't bother a  liberal whose central concern is not to talk sense or speak the truth but to feel good about himself.  And anyway, Cook County needs money, so why not invent a new tax?  Their power to tax you any way they  like justifies their taxing you any way they like.  Might makes right. 

But not only is the premise false, the reasoning is specious.  If guns can be taxed on the ground that they cause death and destruction, so can automobiles.  So why not tax car buyers?    Why single out gun buyers?  The answer, of course,  is that they couldn't get away with the latter, but they can with the former, since gun buyers are are smaller and weaker and 'politically incorrect' group.  Same reason they go after smokers with punitive taxes.

What we really need is a tax on liberals.  Every time a liberal says something stupid or contributes  to cultural pollution or undermines common sense, he must pay a stiff fine.  Think of all the revenue that would generate.

It's the Welfare State, Stupid

When one reads a piece by Robert Samuleson, one feels oneself in the presence of a clear, penetrating, and honest intellect:

By all means, let's avoid the "fiscal cliff": the $500 billion in tax increases and federal spending cuts scheduled for early 2013 that, if they occurred, might trigger a recession. But let's recognize that we still need to bring the budget into long-term balance. This can't be done only by higher taxes on the rich, which seem inevitable. Nor can it be done by deep cuts in defense and domestic "discretionary" programs (from highways to schools), which are already happening. It requires controlling the welfare state. In 2011, "payments for individuals," including health care, constituted 65 percent of federal spending, up from 21 percent in 1955. That's the welfare state.

Compare Samuelson to the  leftist ideologue, Paul Krugman:

It’s not just the fact that the deficit scolds have been wrong about everything so far. Recent events have also demonstrated clearly what was already apparent to careful observers: the deficit-scold movement was never really about the deficit. Instead, it was about using deficit fears to shred the social safety net.

From Samuelson, we learn something.  We get facts, figures, cogent arguments. From Krugman, we get an ad hominem attack.    The fiscal hawks, we are in effect told, are motivated by a dastardly desire to "shred the social safety net," not by any objective economic considerations.  Krugman impugns their motives while ignoring their arguments.

I am not opposed to the impugning of motives in all cases.  It is legitimate to do so when the other side has no arguments or has transparently worthless ones.  In earlier posts I impugned the motives of those who oppose photo ID at polling places, but only after I carefully argued for such ID procedures and refuted the flimsy 'arguments' of the oppostion.   

Go read the two articles in question and decide for yourself who is talking sense.   

Robert Reich on the New American Civil War

Robert Reich bemoans the New American Civil War as he calls it:

I know families in which close relatives are no longer speaking. A dating service says Democrats won’t even consider going out with Republicans, and vice-versa. My email and twitter feeds contain messages from strangers I wouldn’t share with my granddaughter.

What’s going on? Yes, we’re divided over issues like the size of government and whether women should have control over their bodies. But these aren’t exactly new debates. [. . .] And we’ve had bigger disagreements in the past – over the Vietnam War, civil rights, communist witch hunts – that didn’t rip us apart like this.

Part of the reason that there is a 'civil war' is because of people like Reich and their inability to fairly present the issues that divide us. 

He mentions the abortion issue.  It is not about whether women should have control over their bodies.  Of course they should. It is about whether the fetus growing inside a woman is a part of her body in a sense of 'part' that would permit her to dispose of it the way she would dispose of unwanted fat through liposuction.  Reich is not unintelligent: he is capable of understanding the issue.  But he  is intellectually dishonest:  he does not present the issue objectively and fairly.  He distorts it  like the typical leftist ideologue he is.  (See here for my refutation of the 'woman's body' argument.)

He does the very same thing with his talk of "communist witch hunts."  That phrase implies that there was no communist infiltration of the U. S. government.  But that was precisely the question. The phrase he employs is a question-begging epithet.  Why?  Well, there are no witches.  So if you call something a witch hunt then you are implying that it is a hunt for something that doesn't exist.  There is also the implication that the people conducting this search have some ulterior motive such as the desire to suppress all dissent.

The same goes for the phrase 'Red Scare' beloved of the Left.  The phrase implies that there was no threat to our gvernment posed by communists. But again that was the very question, a question that is begged by the use of the phrase 'Red Scare.'   As a matter of fact, it was not a mere scare, but a real threat. So  'Red Threat' is the proper phrase.  After all, we now know that the Rosenbergs were Soviet spies and that Alger Hiss was a communist.

My point is that Reich is not intellectually honest.  He understands the issues but he refuses to present them objectively and fairly.  He is nothing but a leftist ideologue.  And notice the tone of his piece.  It begins with a gratuitous smear against Sarah Palin.

The piece ends with Reich's playing of the race card.  So typical.

So while bemoaning the 'new American civil war,' he fuels it by his own contemptible behavior.

Why We are Headed for a Fiscal Cliff

A short video.  It explains the difference between discretionary and mandatory spending and why not even mandatory spending is covered by tax revenues.  Mandatory spending comprises the entitlements and the interest on the national debt.  A balanced budget is not possible given the way the government is currently structured.  A re-design is needed.  It must begin by a posing of the question: What is the proper role of government?

This philosophical question will  be neither seriously posed by the people in power, nor answered. And so it is is to be expected that we will go off the cliff.  I am talking about the ultimate cliff, not the one coming in early 2013 when  $500 billion in tax increases and federal spending cuts are scheduled to kick in.

So you might think that Romney's loss is of no real consequence.  It just doesn't matter who presides over the collapse.  But if you are headed for a cliff and certain death, would you rather be mounted on a nimble Obama jackass or a plodding Romney elephant?  In the long run we're dead.  But later is better than sooner.  There is more time to prepare.

And there is more time for the owl of Minerva to ascend and survey the passing scene until she too must pass away.

Take it Like a Man

Here via Andrew Klavan. 

Gentlemen Lose Against Thugs

Here.

 

Kevin Kim on the Mourning of the Morning After

Kevin Kim has been following me since late 2003 before I was a proper blogger commencing 4 May 2004 and only a mere slogger (slow blogger without the proper software: I'd upload batches of short posts to a website that I have long since taken down).

In his Conservatives Mourn, Kevin links to me, Malcolm Pollack, and Bill Keezer, and then asks:

Come on, gents-- surely you saw this coming?

Well, I didn't for a second think that there would be a landslide in favor of Romney, and I was puzzled by the cocksure pronunciamentos of Dick Morris and others who made up for their lack of crystal balls by displaying their brass balls.  But no, I didn't think the Obama win was inevitable, especially after his miserable showing in the first debate.  I thought Romney had a good chance of winning given all the objective considerations that condemn Obama, the litany of which I will not again recite.  If I was naive, it was because I foolishly underestimated the foolishness of the electorate and how it has been dumbed-down and stupefied by the flim-flam man and his empty rhetoric and outright lies and promises of all sorts of goodies that he is going to get the rich bastards to pay for.

Bill Keezer, whom I have met in the flesh a couple of times and who truly deserves (as does Pollack) the epithet 'gentleman,' speaks in his post of civil war:

If you go back through my blogs for the past few months, you will see the prediction of a coming civil war.  The differences in the red vs. the blue states is now so fundamental, that I think civil war is quite possible.  I also think the red states will win, hands down.  They still have the values that make for effective soldiering.   Imagine street gangs against disciplined, seasoned fighters.  There will be no contest, and if the red states take mercy on the blue, woe to both.  It is time for justice.  (A concern of the last couple of blog posts, which is not moot.)

God help us if Bill is right and the present war of words and votes ramps up into a shooting war. Leftists need to be careful.  If push comes to shove, and shove to shoot, the Red Staters will clean your clock.    After all, they have the guns.

How can we avoid tearing ourselves apart?  My recommendation is a return to federalism.  But of course the Left, which is totalitarian from the ground up, won't allow that.  And so we may be in for some 'excitement.'

Addenda:

1. Obama wins, gun stocks soar.

2. Ed Feser joins the mourning and adds some recrimination in his meaty post, Chief Justice Ockham.  Be sure to follow the internal "Razor Boy" link.

3. Malcolm Pollack points us to a couple posts of his more substantial than the one linked to above. Here and here. 

Bread, Circuses, and Decline

This from an English reader commenting on my owl of Minerva post:

America's fondness for bread and circuses is by no means singular and all may be well for a while, as Theodore Dalrymple observed, at least as long as the bread holds out. Yet the twilight quickly becomes darkness and after the owl of Minerva takes off, what then? Some sort of apocalypse seems overdue - but I rather feebly hope not in my lifetime.

Philosophers, for the time being, have their consolations; but when the multitude howls for 'bread' and at the same time burns down the bakeries, for how long will gentlemen and scholars be permitted the peace and quiet in which to enjoy their books, music, and speculations? 

I'm glad that I'm on my way out rather than on my way in because the decline of American civilization will affect the whole world.

Best Wishes from one depressed. . . .

A genuine apocalypse, that is, a revelation ab extra of a Meaning hitherto hidden and inaccessible to us, might be a good thing.  Nur ein Gott kann uns retten, said Martin Heidegger in his Spiegel interview near the end of his life.  But I fear all we will get is a descent into brutality and chaos.  There is, I agree, consolation for the old: I am very happy to be 62 rather than 26.  One can hope to be dead before it all comes apart.  Fortunately or unfortunately, I am in the habit of taking care of myself and could be facing another 25 years entangled in the mortal coil.  When barbarism descends this will be no country for old men. 

In the earlier entry I wasn't reflecting on the possibility of the utter collapse of the U.S. but on the more likely possibility of decline to the level of a European welfare state whose citizens come increasingly to resemble Nietzsche's Last Men.

I fully agree that Minervic flights and the consolations of philosophy cannot be enjoyed when the barbarians are at the gates of one's stoa.  The owl of Minerva is a tough old bird, but no phoenix capable of  rising from its ashes.

I myself have argued more than once in these pages that conservatives, especially those of them given to contemplative pursuits,  need to make their peace with activism in order to secure and defend the spaces of their quietism.  

Libertarians are the Ralph Naders of the Conservative Side

I just heard Dennis Prager say that on his radio show.  Exactly right.  The point is to do good, not feel good about yourself by making some meaningless, ineffectual, narcissistic, self-congratulatory, adolescent 'statement.'  It is a futile gesture to 'stand on principle' and 'vote your conscience' when the candidate representing your principles is unelectable.  Politics is not about theoretical purity but about practical efficacy.

I would add to Prager's thought that, even if libertarian ideas were better than conservative ideas -- and they are not inasmuch as what is good in libertarianism is already included in conservatism -- it would remain foolish to vote for libertarians.  It would be a case of letting the better and the best become the enemy of the good.  If you vote for the unelectable candidate with better ideas  over the electable candidate with good ideas, then you have done something manifestly foolish.

There is another side to this argument, however.  The following is from Andrew P. Napolitano, a man I respect:

Can one morally vote for the lesser of two evils? In a word, no. A basic  principle of Judeo-Christian teaching and of the natural law to which the  country was married by the Declaration of Independence is that one may not  knowingly do evil that good may come of it. So, what should a libertarian  do?

If you recognize as I do that the Bush and Obama years have been horrendous  for personal freedom, for the soundness of money and for fidelity to the  Constitution, you can vote for former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. He is on the  ballot in 48 states. He is a principled libertarian on civil liberties, on  money, on war and on fidelity to the Constitution. But he is not going to be  elected.

So, is a vote for Johnson or no vote at all wasted? I reject the idea that a  principled vote is wasted. Your vote is yours, and so long as your vote is  consistent with your conscience, it is impossible to waste your vote.

On the other hand, even a small step toward the free market and away from the  Obama years of central economic planning would be at least a small improvement  for every American’s freedom. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single  step. That is Romney’s best argument. I suspect it will carry the day next  Tuesday.

I am afraid the good judge does not understand the phrase 'lesser of two evils' in this context.  It does not imply that the candidates are evil, but that, while both are imperfect, the one is better than the other.  Both Romney and Obama are highly imperfect.  In an ideal world, the choice would not be between them. (Indeed, in an ideal world there would be no need for government at all, and no need to choose any candidates for any offices.)  But one candidate (Romney) is less imperfect than the other.  In this sense, Romney is the lesser of two evils, i.e., the least imperfect of two imperfect candidates. 

But this sense is consistent with the principle that one many not knowingly do evil that good come of it.

Napolitano claims that it is impossible to waste one's vote as long as one votes one's conscience.  But this ignores the point I have repeatedly made, namely, that voting and politics generally is a practical business: it is about accomplishing something concrete in the world as it actually is.  It is about doing good, not feeling good about yourself.  Once that is understood, it is crystal clear that to vote for an unelectable candidate is to waste one's vote.

This is especially obvious when Republicans lose to Democrats because Libertarians voted for unelectable Libertarians instead of electable Republicans.  There were a couple of cases like that in yesterday's election.  Such Libertarians not only wasted their votes, they positively made things worse.

The Owl of Minerva Spreads its Wings at Dusk

Obama won, conservatism lost, and a tipping point has been reached in America's decline. Our descent into twilight and beyond is probably now irreversible.  The economy is bad, the opposition fought hard and well, and the incompetent leftist won anyway.  Why? The Left promises panem and the culture's circenses have kept the masses distracted from higher concerns and real thought.  That's the answer in a sentence.

Should any of this trouble the philosopher? Before he is a citizen, the philosopher is a "spectator of all time and existence" in a marvellous phrase that comes down to us from Plato's Republic (486a).  The rise and fall of great nations is just more grist for the philosopher's mill.  His true homeland is nothing so paltry as a particular nation, even one as exceptional as the USA, and his fate as a truth-seeker cannot be tied to its fate.  Like the heavenly Jerusalem, the heavenly Athens is not bound to a geographical location.

National decline is not just grist for the philosopher's mill, however, it is also perhaps a condition of understanding as Hegel suggests in the penultimate paragraph of the preface to  The Philosophy of Right:

When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old.  By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood.  The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.

Daughter of Jupiter, Minerva in the mythology of the Greeks is the goddess of wisdom.  And the nocturnal owl is one of its ancient symbols.  The meaning of the Hegelian trope is that understanding, insight, widsom  arise when the object to be understood has played itself out, when it has actualized and thus exhausted its potentialities, and now faces only decline.

When a shape of life has grown old, philosophy paints its grey on grey.  The allusion is to Goethe's Faust wherein Mephisto says

Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

Grey, dear friend, is all theory
And green the golden tree of life.

Philosophy is grey, a "bloodless ballet of categories" (F. H. Bradley) and its object is grey -- no longer green and full of life.  And so philosophy paints its grey concepts on the grey object, in this case America on the wane.   The object must be either dead or moribund before it can be fully understood.  Hegel in his famous saying re-animates and gives a new meaning to the Platonic "To philosophize is to learn how to die."

In these waning days of a great republic, the owl of Minerva takes flight.  What we lose in vitality we gain in wisdom.

The consolations of philosophy are many.

My Campaign Sign

Subtle, eh?  I thought of placing two such chairs side by side, the second to signify the vacuity of the benighted and mendacious Joe Biden, but then I thought that might confuse people.

Did you vote?  Of course, I don't want any of you liberal knuckleheads to vote thereby canceling out the thoughtful votes of conservatives, but I do defend your right to vote.

Is voting a civic duty?  Think of it this way.  You have benefited all your life from the rule of law and from living and flourishing in a relatively well-ordered society.  And you don't feel any obligation to do your bit to preserve and protect that order?

Does it matter whether you vote?  Well, does it matter who the sheriff of your county is, or which judges are retained? 

Vote Libertarian, Waste a Vote

Did you perchance vote for Gary Johnson for president? Then you wasted your vote on an unelectable candidate and helped Barack Obama's re-election.

The truth of a view does not depend on its popularity.  But the political implementation of a view does depend on the electability of the candidate or candidates who represent it.  If politics were merely theoretical, merely an exercise in determining how a well-ordered state should be structured, then implementation would not matter at all.  But politics is practical, not theoretical: it aims at action that implements the view deemed best.  Someone who votes for an unelectable candidate demonstrates by so doing that he does not understand the nature of politics.

Even if Johnson is electable in the sense of (i) satisfying the formal requirements for being president, and (ii) being worthy of the office, he is not electable in the specific sense here in play, namely, possessing a practical chance of winning.

When one votes for any unelectable candidate one merely squanders one's vote.  If you are a libertarian, then your views are closer to those of Romney than to those of Obama.  By voting for the unelectable Johnson, you help someone win whose views are diametrically opposed to your own instead of helping one whose views are partially consonant with your own.  Now that is stupid, is it not?  It shows a lack of practical sense.

If you won't vote for an candidate that does not perfectly represent your views, then either

A. you are a utopian who fails to understand that politics is about action, not theory, in the world as it is, as opposed to some merely imagined world; or

B. you falsely think there is no difference between the major party candidates.

The same reasoning applies to those who vote for Jill Stein.  You are wasting your vote on an unelectable candidate.  You are making a statement all right, but nobody cares and it won't matter.  But I hope you lefties do vote for her: you will be helping Obama lose.

Ten Reasons Not to Vote Democrat

The Dems are the left-wing party in the U. S. Almost all Dems nowadays are leftists or liberals -- there is no practical difference at present.  It's not 1960 any more and you geezers out there with your sentimental attachment to the 'Democrat' label need to wise up.  So any reason to oppose liberals is a reason to oppose Dems.

1. Liberals lack common sense. As witness their lunatic stand on photo ID at polling places.  I have written several posts on this topic.  Here is one.

2. Liberals play the race card every chance they get.  Evidence here, but see also my Race and Leftism categories for plenty more.

3. Liberals are anti-liberty.  As witness Obamacare's  individual mandate, to give just one example.

4. Liberals have a casual attitude toward crime.  See Britain and the Barbarians and other posts in the Crime and Punishment Category.  Liberals are opposed to  capital punishment even though this is exactly what justice demands in certain cases.  With their unhealthy love of underdogs as underdogs, liberals will champion the scum of the earth with shoddy arguments while ignoring the concerns of decent citizens.

5. Liberals smear their opponents and then issue hypocritical calls for 'civility.'  What passes for argument among liberals is the hurling of SIXHRB epithets: sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, bigoted. (acronym via Dennis Prager)  For example, if you oppose illegal immigration then you are a xenophobe; if you carefully argue against Obamacare then you a racist; if you give reasons why marriage is between a man a woman you are dismissed as a bigot.  If you oppose the slaughter of innocent human beings which is abortion you are waging war against women and interfering with their 'health' and 'reproductive rights.'   If you point out the very real threat of radical Islam, then you are dismissed as an  'Islamaphobe' with a mental illness.

6. Liberals are weak on national defense and naive about foreign policy.

7. Liberals are fiscally irresponsible.  Unlike his predecessor, Obama made no attempt to put the existing entitlements on a sound fiscal basis.  Instead, he started up a new one!

8. Liberals are anti-religion. 

9. Liberals have  no proper appreciation for the Second Amendment.

10. Liberals have no proper appreciation of the Tenth Amendment and the notion of federalism.

Addendum (6 Nov):  Tony H. writes to say that I forgot one:

11. Liberals are economic illiterates.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604575282190930932412.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

True.  Of course, I wasn't trying to give a complete list of reasons to oppose Obama and his gang.  There are a lot more reasons than ten.  How about this one:

12. Liberals are linguistic hijackers.  They routinely distort the English language for their ideological purposes.  This is actually worse than lying.  To lie successfully one must use language properly, in accordance with the going conventions.  Misuse of language  is a subversion of the rules of the communicative game.  There are examples in my Language Matters category.

One particularly egregious example is the use of 'voter suppression' to refer to common-sense demands for proper ID procedures at polling places.  This shows that the scumbags of the Left will do anything to win. 

For even more reasons, see the Constructive Curmudgeon who has worked himself into a fine, and justified, lather over Obama's abominations.  See here, for example.

Subsidiarity and the Left's Assault on Civil Society

You say you're Catholic and you are going to vote for Obama? Are you stupid?  Apart from the fact that the Dems are the abortion party, the Obama administration's attack on civil society is at odds with Catholic social teaching which rests on the principle of subsidiarity.  David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of
subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more
complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler
organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more
decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited
government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for
centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the manifest drift of the Obama administration, on the one hand,  and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme, on the other.  By the way, one of the many mistakes Rick Santorum made in his campaign was to attack all government-sponsored education.  He was right to question whether the Federal government has any legitimate role to play in education, but to question the role of state and local government in education was a foolish extremism that befits a libertarian, not a conservative.

Subsidiarity also fits well with federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Obama.  'Federalism' is another one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead.  Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "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."

Whether or not you are Catholic, if you accept the principle of subsidiarity, then you have yet another reason to oppose Obama and the Left.  The argument is this:

1. The Left encroaches upon civil society, weakening it and limiting it, and correspondingly expanding the power and the reach of the state.  (For example, the closure of Catholic Charities in Illinois because of an Obama administration adoption rule.)

2. Subsidiarity helps maintain civil society as a buffer zone and intermediate sector between the purely private (the individual and the familial) and the state.

Therefore

3. If you value the autonomy and robustness of civil society, then you ought to oppose Obama and the Left.

The truth of the second premise is self-evident.  If you wonder whether the Left does in fact encroach upon civil society, then see my post Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society.

Addendum:  This just over the transom from an old sparring partner of mine from the early days of the blogosphere, Kevin Kim:

Thank you for your recent post on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which I had never heard of despite years of dealing with Catholics.  I had a good chuckle when I read this:

"This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization."

And this from a gigantic, thoroughly hierarchized organization!

But what really burbled to the surface of my mind was the thought that, for a supposedly Catholic principle, subsidiarity sounds remarkably Protestant.  Heh.

But isn't it obvious what the Catholic response would be?  The church is in the business of mediating salvation.   What the church does cannot be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization.  Nulla salus extra ecclesiam, where the church in question is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church founded by Christ himself on St. Peter as upon a rock and presided over by the Holy Spirit.  It might also be argued that the principle of subsidiarity is a secular or temporal political principle and not one that has any bearing on soteriology.  For the same reason there is nothing Protestant about it.

What Does Abortion Have to Do with Religion?

The abortion question is almost always raised in the context of religion.  The Vice-Presidential debate provides a good recent example.  The moderator  introduced the topic with these words: “We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I  would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your  own personal views on abortion.”  Why didn't the moderator just ask the candidates to state their positions on abortion?   Why did she bring up religion?  And why the phrase "personal views"?  Are views on foreign policy and the economy also personal views?  Below the surface lies the suggestion that opposition to abortion can only rest on antecedent religious commitments of a personal nature that have no place in the public square. 

A question that never gets asked, however, is the one I raise in this post:  What does the abortion issue have to do with religion?  But I need to make the question more precise.  Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises? Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept?  The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative.  The following argument contains no religious premises.

1. Infanticide is morally wrong.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between (late-term) abortion and  infancticide.
Therefore
3. (Late-term) abortion is morally wrong.

Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion must be religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike could make use of the above argument. 

And as a matter of fact there are pro-life atheists. Nat Hentoff is one. In The Infanticide Candidate for President, he takes Barack Obama to task:

But on abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme  Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban  Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a professed humanist, Obama -- in the Illinois Senate -- also voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on several of those cases when, before the abortion was completed, an alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the doctors' orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of the child.

Return to the above argument.  Suppose someone demands to know why one should accept the first premise.  Present this argument:

4. Killing innocent human beings is morally wrong.
5. Infanticide is the killing of innocent human beings.
Therefore
1. Infanticide is morally wrong.

This second argument, like the first, invokes no specifically religious premise.  Admittedly, the general prohibition of homicide -- general in the sense that it admits of exceptions -- comes from the Ten Commandments.  But if you take that as showing that (4) is religious, then the generally accepted views that theft and lying are morally wrong would have to be adjudged religious as well.

But I don't want to digress onto the topic of the sources of our secular moral convictions, convictions that are then codified in the positive law.  My main point is that one can oppose abortion on secular grounds. A second point is that the two arguments I gave are very powerful.  If you are not convinced by them, you need to ask yourself why.

Some will reply by saying that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body.  This is The Woman's Body Argument:

1. The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
2. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
3. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

For this argument to be valid, 'part' must be used in the very same sense in both premises. Otherwise, the argument equivocates on a key term.  There are two possibilities. 'Part' can be taken in a wide sense that includes the fetus, or in a narrow sense that excludes it.

 If 'part' is taken in a wide sense, then (1) is  true. Surely there is a wide sense of 'part' according to which the fetus is part of its mother's body. But then (2) is reasonably rejected. Abortion is not relevantly like liposuction. Granted, a woman has a right to remove unwanted fat from her body via liposuction. Such fat is uncontroversially part of her body. But the fetus growing within her is not a part in the same sense: it is a separate individual life. The argument, then, is not compelling. Premise (2) is more reasonably rejected than accepted.

If, on the other hand, 'part' is taken in a narrow sense that excludes the fetus, then perhaps (2) is acceptable, but (1) is surely false: the fetus is plainly not a part of the woman's body in the narrow sense of 'part.'

I wrote "perhaps (2) is acceptable" because it is arguable that (2) is not acceptable. For a woman's body is an improper part of her body; hence if a woman has a right to do anything she wishes with her body, then she has a right to kill her body by blowing it up, say. One who has good reason to reject suicide, however, has good reason to reject (2) even when 'part' is construed narrowly. And even if we substitute 'proper part' for 'part' in the original argument, it is still not the case that a woman has a right to do whatever she wishes with any proper narrow part of her body. Arguably, she has no right to cut out her own heart, since that would lead to her death.

I am making two points about the Woman's Body Argument.  The first is that  my rejection of it does not rely on any religious premises.  The second is that the argument is unsound. 

Standing on solid, secular ground one has good reason to oppose abortion as immoral in the second and third trimesters (with some exceptions, e.g., threat to the life of the mother).  Now not everything immoral should be illegal.  But in this case the objective immorality of abortion entails that it ought to be illegal for the same reason that the objective immorality of the wanton killing of innocent adults requires that it be  illegal.

Of course it follows that you should not vote for the abortion party, a.k.a. the Dems.  And if you are a Catholic who votes Democratic then you are as foolish and confused as the benighted Joe Biden.

The Losertarian Party

Politics is a practical business: it is about the gaining and maintaining of power for the purpose of implementing programs and policies that one believes to be beneficial, and for opposing those whose policies one believes to be deleterious. As the Converse Clausewitz Principle has it, it is war conducted by other means.  For this very reason, I stay clear of it except for voting and blogging: I am by inclination and aptitude a theoretician, a "spectator of all time and existence" to borrow a marvellous phrase from the  Plato's Republic. But part of the theoretician's task is to understand the political. And if I understand it, I understand that the Libertarian Party, though it might be a nice debating society, is a waste of time practically speaking. That's why I approve of and borrow Michael Medved's moniker, 'Losertarian Party.' These adolescents will never get power, so what's the point? It's a party of computer geeks, sci-fi freaks, and adolescents of all ages, the sort that never outgrow Ayn Rand.  Open borders, legal dope, ACLU-type extremism about freedom of expression.  Out of the mainstream and rightly so.

So Ron Paul made a smart move when he joined the Republicans, and his son Rand seems more conservative than libertarian. 

As I said, politics is a practical business. It's about winning, not talking. It's not about ideological
purity or having the supposedly best ideas; it's about gaining the power to implement good ideas.  The practical politician understands that quite often  Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien, the best is the enemy of the good.  (Voltaire's maxim explained here.)

Addendum 11/1.  The 'open borders' idea is foolish in itself, but it is foolishness on stilts when note is taken of the plain fact that we have a welfare state here in the U.S., one whose expansion can perhaps be contained, but one which will always be with us until we collapse, most likely, under its weight.  Either a welfare state with strictly controlled borders, or open borders and no welfare state.  One or the other. 

Your First Time: Obama Ad Hits New Low

Here.  How low can the Dems go?  And you thought Clinton was a sleazeball for answering the question about his underwear and telling us about his old El Camino with the astroturf in back for, you know . . . .

Time to elect some adults.  Enough of clowns and buffoons.  (Did you see Biden in the VP debate?)  Give gravitas a chance.

Mark Steyn:

Both videos – the one faking Obamagasm and the one faking a Benghazi pretext – exemplify the wretched shrinkage that befalls those unable to conceive of anything except in the most self-servingly political terms. Both, in different ways, exemplify why Obama and Biden are unfit for office. One video testifies to a horrible murderous lie at the heart of a head of state's most solemn responsibility, the other to the glib shallow narcissism of a pop-culture presidency, right down to the numbing relentless peer-pressure: C'mon, all the cool kids are doing it; why be the last holdout?

If voting for Obama is like the first time you have sex, it's very difficult to lose your virginity twice. A flailing, pitiful campaign has now adopted Queen Victoria's supposed wedding advice to her daughter: "Lie back and think of England." Lie back and think of America. And then get up and get dressed. Who wants to sleep twice with a $16 trillion broke loser?

Ron Radosh on George McGovern

A  balanced assessment.  The piece concludes (emphases added):

Years later, I heard McGovern at the PEN International Writers Conference in New York City, where he spoke on a panel with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Bruno Kreisky, the former chancellor of Austria who was virulently anti-Israel. At that meeting, McGovern said that had he been elected president, the first thing he would have done to deal with the Middle East would have been to go to ask Kreisky for advice. Kreisky, with McGovern’s support at the panel, also called for recognition by the West of Communist East Germany, and rejected  any policy that would have sought to isolate the regime. It was clear then, listening to McGovern at that event, what a disaster he would have been for his country had he been elected.

McGovern, it is true, opposed the war in Vietnam before it was popular to do so, and showed rare political courage, taking a position he thought was right although it could not help his political career. He was a straight-shooter, honest, and principled, and one could reject his policies and still respect him as a person of honor who thought what he fought for was in the nation’s best interest. A war hero, he did not ever mention his war record to try and show that he had fought valiantly for America, even though Nixon was condemning him for weakness and for having no concern for America’s position in the world. He simply did not feel to raise his own war record was the right thing to do, especially since he had become anti-war.

His defeat revealed to most people that standing for national office on a platform of extreme leftism, if openly proclaimed, could lead only to political destruction. Future leftist candidates learned from the outcome in 1972 that a more stealth approach to a move to the left was the way to operate if one wanted to achieve, as Barack Obama put it in 2008, a “fundamental transformation” of the United States based on redistribution of wealth and attainment of a social-democratic model for a future America.

A good and decent man who advocated policies that were both dangerous and wrong, he passed away living into his 90th year. R.I.P.

A good part of Obama's deep mendacity is his use of the stealth approach.  He won't say plainly what he is really for, and he will say he is for things he isn't.  For example, did you notice that in the third debate he came out in favor of American exceptionalism?  He was lying, of course.

Liberty Forever?

How many Americans care about liberty?  The depressing fact that Obama may well win the election shows that vast numbers of Americans care more about panem et circenses, bread and circuses, than about liberty.

We're running on fumes.  The stamp is border-line Orwellian.

Time was, when liberty was a state.  Now it's a stamp.

Dorothy Rabinowitz

Victor Davis Hanson

 

 

 

John Fund on the Late George McGovern

Whom did you vote for in '72?  I voted for McGovern!  But of course the Dems back then weren't the extremists they are today.  John Fund remembers what was good about the man.

Obama Administration Libya Lies

Documented by VDH.  His mojo's risin' and with it his mendacity.  Yes, they played politics on Libya.

Obama's Mendacity on Full Display in Last Night's Debate

Aided and abetted by the liberal moderator, Candy Crowley.  Analysis by Newt Gingrich.  Well, at least he got his mojo back.

Obama Lied Last Night About Arizona Senate Bill 1070

Here is the video clip of Obama lying to Romney and the rest of us in their second debate.  Obama lies when he claims that on the Arizona law (S. B. 1070) law enforcement  officers can stop people whom they merely suspect of being undocumented workers. Obama has told this lie before. 

The details are in an earlier post which I now reproduce:

Debra Saunders' article begins:

President Barack Obama hailed the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision Monday that struck down most of Arizona's 2010 immigration law. In a statement released by the White House, however, the president said that he remains "concerned about the practical impact of the remaining provision of the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."

All eight voting members of the Supreme Court upheld this provision, which requires
that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration.

Please note the difference between what the president is quoted as saying and what Saunders correctly reports the S.B. 1070 provision as requiring.  The law requires "that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration." President Obama of course knows this.  So Obama lied in his statement when he said that "the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."

Obama's egregious misrepresentation has been repeated time and again by leftists over the last two years.  See my 1 June 2010 post, The Misrepresentations of Arizona S. B. 1070 Continue.  Other
of my 1070 posts are to be found in the Arizona category.

Why are leftists so mendacious?  Because in their scheme the glorious end justifies the scurrilous means.

Don't forget to read the rest of Saunders' article.

National Public Radio and Big Bird Need Your Support!

This is something I wrote 10 March 2011.  The points still hold and the piece is relevant because of Governor Romney's 'attack' on Big Bird in his first debate with President Obama.  Lefties have a hard time understanding why we mean-spirited conservatives would want to deny such a loveable critter Federal bird seed.  Maybe this will help.

..........

If you like NPR programming, as I like some of  it, write them a check!  Just don't demand that they receive taxpayer support.  At least not now.  We are in fiscal crisis, and budgetary cuts must be made.  If such inessentials as NPR, PBS, NEH and NEA cannot be defunded, where will the cuts be made?  Think about it.  If these small allocations cannot be zeroed out or placed on moratorium, how are we going to tackle entitlement reform?

So one good reason to defund NPR is that we cannot afford it.

Some think that a refusal of sponsorship amounts to censorship.  But that is stupidity pure and simple and duly refuted here.

But even if we could afford it, NPR in its present configuration should not receive Federal support.  And this for the simple reason that it is plainly a propaganda arm of the Left.  Now that should be obvious to anyone who has been following current events, including the firing of Juan Williams, the exposure and sacking of the two Schillers, etc.  If you deny the Leftward tilt of NPR in its present incarnation, then you are delusional and not worth talking to.  So let's assume that you are sane and admit the bias.  The next question is whether you think it is morally right that tax dollars be used to push points of view that most of us in this conservative land find objectionable.  I say that it it is not morally right that you take my money by force and then use it for a purpose that is not only inessential and unconnected to the necessary functions of government, but also violates my beliefs.

Perhaps, if NPR were balanced like C-SPAN, it could be tolerated in times of plenty.  But we are not in times of plenty and it is not balanced.

So that is my second reason for defunding NPR. 

Note that a reasonable liberal could accept my two reasons.  I am not arguing that government must not engage in any projects other than those that are strictly essential such as those connected to the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad).  I leave that question open for the space of this post.  I am arguing that present facts dictate that defunding NPR is something we ought to do. 

I love Garrison Keillor and his "Prarie Home Companion" and tune in whenever I can.  "Guy Noir" is one of my favorite bits.  So I hope NPR stays on the air -- on its own fiscal steam.  Hell, if they wean themselves from the  mammaries of massive Mama Obama Government I may even send them a check myself!  And the same goes for PBS. 

Obama, the Imaginary Man

Outstanding analysis by Andrew Klavan. Excerpts:

The mystery Obama—the hollow receptacle of out-sized fantasies left and right—is not a creation of his own making, political chameleon though he may well be. It emanates instead from a journalistic community that no longer in any way fulfills its designated function, that no longer even attempts the fair presentation of facts and current events aimed at helping the American electorate make up its mind according to its own lights. Rather, left-wing outlets like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and the like have now devoted themselves to fashioning an image of the world they think their audiences ought to believe in—that they may guide us toward voting as they think we should. They have fallen prey to that ideological corruption that sees lies as a kind of virtue, as a noble deception in service to a greater good.

It is the nature of the Left to conflate the world with the world as leftists want it to be.  Whereas the conservative stands on the terra firma of antecedent reality, the leftist trades in nebulous hopes and dreams, many of them impossible.  (it comes as no surprise that the late Edward Kennedy's favorite song was "Impossible Dream.")

Theirs are largely passive lies and lies of omission. The active frauds—NBC’s dishonest editing of videos to reflect a leftist worldview, ABC’s allowing Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos to masquerade as a newsman, the Los Angeles Times’ suppressing even the transcript of the video in their possession that shows candidate Barack Obama at a meeting with a PLO-supporting sheik—these are only egregious salients of the more consistent, underlying dishonesty. The real steady-state corruption is revealed in the way Obama scandals like Fast and Furious, Benghazi-gate, and the repeated breaking of federal campaign laws have been wildly underplayed, while George W. Bush’s non-scandals, like the naming of Valerie Plame and the firings of several U.S. attorneys at the start of his second term, were blown out of all proportion.

And it is revealed in Obama’s blankness, his make-believe greatness, and the suppression, ridicule, and dismissal of any evidence that he is not the man this powerful media faction once wanted so badly for him to be. No other modern president could have associated so intimately with lowlifes like Wright and Ayers and the now-imprisoned Tony Rezko and not had those associations exposed in every detail. No other president could have made the radical remarks he’s made—about wealth redistribution, religion, and the federal government’s alleged ill-treatment of blacks—and not had them headlined all over for weeks. No other could have presided over such a crippled economy and such universal failures at war and in foreign policy and escaped almost without mainstream blame.

The Delusional Left and 'Voter Suppression'

Here is a TNR piece that proves once again that lberals live on a different planet.  I call it the planet Unsinn and I sometimes speak of the 'planetary' difference between left and right.  The difference is between nonsense and sense.  The author asks why principled conservatives won't denounce 'voter suppression.'

'Voter suppression' is leftist code for 'photo ID.'  Here's the short answer:  we won't condemn it because common sense demands it.  Longer answer and arguments here.  It shows how far we've fallen that this needs to be argued at all.

I am of course against voter suppression while being all for 'voter suppression.'

I am also against voter fraud, unlike liberals.  They welcome it knowing that it can only redound to their benefit.  That is the plain motive behind their opposition to photo ID.  If voter fraud worked to the benefit of conservatives and libertarians, leftists would be screaming in protest.

POTUS Pounded

Romney scored big against Obama  last night in the first of their three debates, as most of the pundits, left and right, agree.  When Romney came out with the "trickle-down government" line, I gave him a big 'thumbs up' to the mild amusement of my wife who, bless her heart, insisted that we watch the debate instead of a 1965 rerun  of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  (I was tempted to blow off the debate, expecting nothing but the usual bullshit.) 

But Romney should have repeated the excellent line that sums up the whole leftist approach: we take your money which, by rights does not belong to you but to the collective, and we dribble back to you such benefits as we see fit.  (Karl Marx: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.")  Obama 2016 provides evidence that this is the ultimate Obama agenda.

Romney should have pounded away with the "trickle-down government" line.  Repetition is necessary to get through to Joe Sixpack.  Romney is still too gentlemanly.  Politics, however, is not gentlemanly debate but war by other means.  Leftists have understood this all along.  Conservatives are slowly learning.

So while POTUS was pounded, he did not receive the plenary pounding that he needs.  Work for the next two debates.  Romney needs to slug harder while maintaining  his smiling 'nice guy' demeanor.

Obama: Fiscally Clueless

Here.

You say the Republicans are not much better?  I don't disagree.  But think of it this way. 

A jackass and an elephant are heading for a cliff, a fall from which will be fatal.  The jackass, being a jackass, is moving faster towards disaster.  The elephant is moving slower.  You must choose to ride on one or the other.  Upon which animal would you prefer to be mounted?

Obama is an utterly clueless jackass.  With a 'Ryanized' Romney there is some hope that we can avert disaster or at least postpone it.

Obama: Foreign Policy Disaster

Here.

Obama: A Prediction Come True

On 6 November 2008, I wrote into my journal:

The Irony of the Obama Victory.  The presidency was handed to him by the financial crisis.  But his policies will exacerbate it.

I was right.  I now predict that if he is re-elected, four more years of his policies will bring us to financial ruin.  Mark my words.

The man is not only incompetent and inexperienced but unserious.   Here he is on Letterman admitting that he doesn't know what the national debt is.  He obviously doesn't understand the gravity of the situation, or his own partial responsibility for it in irresponsibly pushing another entitlement, popularly known as ObamaCare, when the problem of the long-term solvency of the existing entitlements  has not been addressed.  Instead, he blames his predecessor while manically digging the hole deeper.

The Fallacy of Redistribution

Thomas Sowell:

The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.

In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s. [Professor Sowell is referring to the forced collectivization of the Ukraine.  If you want to inform yourself of the horrors thereof, I recommend  Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Oxford UP, 1986.]

How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth -- and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.

Sowell is right of course.  People typically do not allow themselves to be jerked around.  If California is not business-friendly, business people will move to states like Texas, and the once 'Golden State' will sink deeper into the mire.  (Bill Bennett in a recent speech referred to California as the "The Lindsay Lohan of states.")  If you tax me at 100% for any amount earned above $100,000, I will arrange things so that my taxable income will be less than that amount.  It is just human nature to resist being screwed.

The current debate about redistribution on shows like the O'Reilly Factor is close to moronic.  O'Reilly talks as if Obama is for redistribution while Romney is not.  But redistribution has been with us for a long time in the form of a progressive income tax code, and that is not going away any time soon.  (And I am not even convinced that it should.)  So the issue is not redistribution versus no redistribution.  The issue is is whether we are going to have more of it, or less of it, or reduce the rate of its increase. 

Under Obama we will most assuredly have more of it, a lot more.    This will depress the economy, the national debt will increase even more, and we will be on the way to financial ruin.

Anyone who votes for the fiscally irresponsible Obama is a fool  who does not understand his own long-term best self-interest.  And anyone who thinks that it doesn't matter who is in the White House is also a fool, despite the fact that Romney is a milque-toast and a wimp.

Never forget: politics is always about the lesser of evils.  Better a milque-toast and wimpy businessman who understands how the economy works than a incompetent leftist who doesn't.