Fortunately, deficits don’t matter

For Paul Samuelson told us so:

President Obama‘s budget, released Monday, was conceived as a blueprint for future spending, but it also paints the bleakest picture yet of the current fiscal year, which is on track for a record federal deficit and will see the government’s overall debt surpass the size of the total U.S. economy. Mr. Obama‘s budget projects that 2011 will see the biggest one-year debt jump in history, or nearly $2 trillion, to reach $15.476 trillion by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. That would be 102.6 percent of GDP — the first time since World War II that dubious figure has been reached.

Neo-Keynesians such as Paul Krugman insist that the deficit isn’t a problem because of this line of argument, first presented by Paul Samuelson in his landmark 1948 textbook entitled “Economics”.

“There are also burdens involved in an internally held public debt like our present one, but the burdens of an internal debt are qualitatively and quantitatively different from those of an external debt. This is the first and most important lesson to be grasped, without which nobody can go far in understanding the economics of the public debt. The interest on an internal debt is paid by Americans to Americans; there is no direct loss of goods and services. When interest on the debt is paid out of taxation, there is no direct loss of disposable income; Paul receives what Peter loses, and sometimes – but only sometimes – Paul and Peter are one and the same person. . . . In the future, some of our grandchildren will be giving up goods and services to other grandchildren. That is the nub of the matter. The only way we can impose a direct burden on the future nation as a whole is by incurring an external debt or by passing along less capital equipment to posterity.

Of course, it is probably worth considering that the situation in 2011 is not exactly the same as the situation in 1948, as can be seen in the chart below.  Note the green line, in particular.

The pursuit of excellence

As I am working on what is now the third revision of the monetarist inflation video – I never should have started reading Rothbard’s History of Economic Thought before finishing it – it occurs to me that I am hardly the only individual in possession of esoteric information here. And it’s quite obvious that my video production skills are towards the low end of the spectrum.

What I’m interested in doing is making more Voxiversity-style videos available on a variety of subjects. So, if you have an idea for a series on anything from basic evolutionary biology to Calvinism or the impossibility of a Japanese naval invasion in 1941, let me know and we can discuss it via email. I’ll review each completed video before it will be added to the YouTube channel; there has to be some amount of quality control and you should probably plan for at least two rounds of criticism and refinement until you’ve got a good handle on what’s expected.

I don’t know if anyone will be interested or not. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing regardless, but if anyone has anything worthwhile to add, it would be welcome.

The perils of diversity

Steve Sailer reviews Byron Roth’s book on immigration:

Roth reviews the social science in tremendous detail (The Perils of Diversity includes 993 footnotes and a 35-page bibliography). He concludes of both the multiculturalists and the assimilationists:

“What is disturbing is that these positions are taken as self-evident by their advocates who seem uninterested in serious theoretical and empirical evidence … They certainly have not consulted the social sciences for, if they did, they would soon discover that the evidence for both the multiculturalist and the assimilationist positions is either nonexistent or contradictory.”

The problems with multiculturalism are readily apparent. So, how is that assimilation working out across the West? Not so well, on either an empirical or anecdotal level.

Joy Small, 24, was found dead in her home along with her three-year-old son Aubarr and daughter Chanarra, two, on Saturday afternoon. It is not yet known how they died, but it is thought police went to the flat after discovering the body of Miss Small’s husband, Aram Aziz, 32, in a country park the day before.

History strongly suggests that if you don’t want to live in barbarism, don’t permit barbarians to cross the borders. The fact is that civilization doesn’t tame barbarians, barbarians destroy civilization. The situation can still be resolved relatively peacefully through mass deportations, but if it isn’t – and it seems highly unlikely at the moment that it will be – then there is no question it will be resolved in a more chaotic manner with a much more uncertain outcome.

The diversiphiles can affect as much shock and horror as they like, but that’s not going to change the fact that either the civilized world will either excise the barbarian immigrants or collapse into barbarism. Since even the most enthusiastic multiculturalists and assimilationists show no desire to move to Mexico, Tunisia, or Iraq, there is no doubt that they will all eventually come to accept this reality. The only question is if enough of them will do so before it is too late.

WND column

Tea Party Traitors

Unlike many right-wing commentators, I did not endorse the tea-party movement when it erupted. Nor, like a few unusually shameless media whores, did I rush to leap in front of the parade and claim that I was leading it. I did not even think of doing either because I concluded from the start that the tea party is a useless and incoherent political mirage that is unlikely to accomplish anything of substance. It is not elections but the subsequent actions of the officials elected that matter.

Of Church and State

This is an example of why the Church needs to keep itself apart from the State. The purpose of the separation of Church and State is not to protect the State from the doctrine of the Church, but to protect the Church from the dictates of the State:

Gays and lesbians will be able to ‘marry’ in church under new laws to be unveiled this week. The historic decision by Liberal Democrat Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone will end the legal definition of marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. A gay couple will be able to refer to one of the partners as a ‘husband’, and a lesbian couple will be able to refer to one of the partners as a ‘wife’. A key part of the reform will bring an end to the ban that prevents civil partnerships being conducted in places of worship.

Now, you can certainly call a fish a gorilla if you want to. You can even pass a law declaring that all fish are henceforth to be legally considered gorillas. But it still won’t make a fish into a gorilla. At this point, it’s almost impossible to lament the decline of what was once Christendom as its actions eminently merit its forthcoming collapse.

It will be interesting to see how long the various governments attempt to deny the obvious logic that permits polygamy and bestiagamy under the same guise as homogamy before the inevitable acceptance.

The nonsense of noir

I recently read three more books in The Dresden Files, the popular noir magic series written by Jim Butcher. And while I quite enjoy them, something was bothering me throughout the books, something that I couldn’t quite identify until I had nearly reached the end of Changes. And then it struck me. The noir genre, which these days is predominantly seen in its urban fantasy form, is considered to be based on the hardboiled school of American detective literature published in the 1930s. So, we have a fantasy literature based upon the figure of the cynical, wise-cracking private investigator, who fights evil in all its various criminal forms along with the aid of his allies in the police department, who regularly risk their lives and careers on his behalf.

Read the rest at The Black Gate.

Unelectable!

Ron Paul beats the smack out of the RINOs at CPAC:

Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) won the annual straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, an early, though unscientific, indicator of conservative favor as the 2012 presidential campaign cycle kicks into gear. Paul, with a 30 percent plurality, topped numerous high-profile White House contenders. He finished seven points ahead of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who placed second. All other candidates finished with less than ten percent of the vote: former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson snagged six percent, as did Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich won five percent.

Needless to say, if Mitt “Obamacare” Romney had beaten every other potential Republican candidate this easily, all we would be hearing about was the inevitability of Captain Underoos’s nomination.

Inventing executive powers

The Obama administration exposes its fascist side:

The Obama administration’s Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy. That assertion was revealed — perhaps inadvertently — by the department in its response to a McClatchy request for a copy of a secret Justice Department memo.

It’s amazing how even the simple act of obtaining a warrant is too much work for the executive branch to bother with anymore. Can there be any doubt that they expect to eventually discover the power to try and sentence “criminals” without any any formal legal process or court oversight?

One also notes that this appears to be a rather belated discovery of this executive power, considering that international telephone calls weren’t just invented yesterday.

Ideological plague

This comment from an Althouse reader illustrates the problem of voter mobility:

My sister and brother-in-law — a couple of liberal Obama-votin’ Democrats — are currently trying to get out of Illinois as fast as they can. They literally cannot afford to live in Illinois anymore — they were having trouble making ends meet *before* the gargantuan tax hike.

Needless to say, no matter where they go, this couple will cling to their liberal Obama-voting ideology and continue to demand the very big government that they fled in Illinois. They are ideological disease carriers. The only viable solution I can imagine is permitting such refugees to move into a limited government state if they are willing to sign a consent form giving up their right to vote for as long as they were resident in their former state. Although perhaps even that is taking too big a risk since they’ll probably settle in an enclave of like-minded carriers. This should be a legally defensible approach since if one doesn’t wish to give up one’s right to vote, one doesn’t have to reside there.

Egypt and the Iraqi Crusade

It would appear to have gang seriously agley:

It’s an irony almost too bitter to bear that George W. Bush, an evangelical Christian fired by a vision of freedom with religious overtones, waged a war of liberation in Iraq that led to the uprooting of the country’s Christians. And did almost nothing to prevent it, or even remark upon it. Iraq’s Christians are the collateral damage of the country’s post-Saddam revolution….

Before the invasion, roughly 1.4 million Christians lived in Iraq. About half of them have fled, with many more sure to follow. For a community that dates back almost to the inception of Christianity, this is nothing short of a historic cataclysm.

Once more there are reports circulating that Hosni Mubarak has stepped down again and this time they are apparently correct. There are also 8 million Coptic Christians now living in Egypt. Will the world demonstrate even a tenth of the concern for them that it still shows – or at least feigns to show – for six million Jews who died more than 60 years ago?