Progress to the precipice

It only looks like you’re going onward and upward until you go over the cliff’s edge:

Who has driven America to this precipice? Certainly part of the blame belongs to the politicians, primarily Democrats, who created and enlarged these entitlements without imposing taxes anywhere near sufficient to sustain them, and otherwise seriously mismanaged the programs’ finances. On a deeper level, however, the blame belongs to the late-19th- and early-20th-century Progressive movement. Despite recent claims that the Progressives had little impact upon the development of liberalism in the New Deal and beyond, including in the realm of social insurance, the Progressives were in fact the founding fathers of social insurance in America. Far from making a break with Progressivism, accordingly, the enactment of these programs during the New Deal and Great Society represents the clear policy fruit of the philosophical revolution as to the end of government, and the fundamental conception of morality underlying it, that the Progressives fought so vigorously to effect.

Of course, persuading many Americans that Progressivism initiated a struggle over the soul of America is a hard sell. For decades, liberal scholars and politicians have attributed the 20th-century growth of government to changes in the mere material circumstances of American life. The Progressive era’s progressive reforms, we have been told, were the necessary and inevitable response to problems created by the closing of the frontier, the rise of huge corporations and a transition to large-scale factory production, population shifts out of the countryside and into the city, large waves of immigration, etc. The New Deal, in turn, was simply a response to the economic hardships caused by the Great Depression. By attributing these periods’ reforms to America’s changing material circumstances, the orthodox view implies that there was no change of philosophical or moral import likewise under way. More to the point, it implies that the Progressives’ reforms were guided by the principles of the American Founding.

And yet this is demonstrably false.

How I love those two words. “Demonstrably false”. That, all ye of the Dread Ilk, is the hallmark of a writer who knows what she is talking about and is calling her shot. It’s a very good article showing how Progressivism is intrinsically hostile to natural and individual rights and has replaced them with government-granted, situational privileges. And she even shows how it is ultimately self-limiting given the inexorable requirements of increasing debt involved.

The Three Billion Images of Eve

They downloaded all the porn? It would appear so, seeing that The Artist Now Known As Prince Again has declared that “The internet is completely over“. I suppose this moment was always inevitable. Isaac Asimov even wrote a story about what would happen when the picture of the last woman on Earth to display her naked talents was finally posted on the Internet. Or something like that, anyhow.

Around the world, without any fuss, the servers were going offline.

You’re crude, Mr. Krugman

And ignorant. And most importantly, demonstrably and provably wrong.

I’m Gonna Haul Out The Next Guy Who Calls Me “Crude” And Punch Him In The Kisser….

All through this debate, a recurring theme among anti-Keynesians has been that Keynesians like me or Brad are ignorant primitives who don’t know anything about modern macro. It’s really hard to see where that comes from, since I’ve done plenty of intertemporal optimizing in my time

Bring it on, Internet tough guy. Tell you what. I won’t even duck. And then, in the immortal words of one River Tam, my turn.

Oh, and as for why people think you are an ignorant primitive, this display certainly belongs on the list.

You’re not part of the solution

If you want to know why there is no hope for America, it is because “conservatives” like Roger Simon have successfully managed to put themselves forward as the Right when in fact they are, and have always been, nothing more than the right side of the Left:

When I was young, early twenties, I felt tremendous guilt about what happened to black people in this country, even though my family arrived here fifty years after the freeing of the slaves and were themselves escaping the pogroms of Europe. Those feelings — and a sense of what was right, of course — propelled me into the civil rights movement and I am very proud to have participated. When I moved to Los Angeles and began making money in Hollywood, I still wanted to do something and started to help finance the Black Panther Breakfast Program. The Panthers did seem a bit on the tough side, but somehow I thought it was the right thing to do. Those kids in Watts were hungry, weren’t they? The “black supremacy thing” was just a “phase.”

Well, soon enough it became obvious that I was wrong. The supremacy thing was the least of it. Or a charade. The Panthers were thugs. Even worse, they were murderers and drug dealers. Worst of all, they were a horrible example to their community, a straight line ticket to oblivion.

And when I look at the videos of the New Black Panthers menacing voters in front of the polling place, I see the same thing, the same guys. Any African-American who really cared about his people would want those thugs prosecuted. He wouldn’t want them on the street as am example to the children of the community.

Mr. Simon, you are as wrong today as you were wrong then. You clearly haven’t learned anything about tribal loyalties since you were so magnanimously attempting to structurally alter the very place that offered your family a place of refuge. The easily verifiable fact is that despite your totally irrelevant opinion about what African-Americans should care about or think, no African-American wants to see a few Black Panthers prosecuted for voter intimidation any more than he wanted to see OJ found guilty of murder.

Mr. Simon’s personal history offers a very clear case against the immigration he supports. Notice that he is actually proud of having worked to increase Federal power while successfully weakening individual property rights and the Constitutional right to free association. As Hayek pointed out regarding “social justice”, “civil rights” are not and cannot be unalienable rights endowed by a Creator. They are nothing more than politically inspired, government-granted privileges. While a small amount of immigration can certainly strengthen a society, mass immigration does nothing but alter, weaken, and eventually destroy it. There is no “strength through diversity”, only “conquest through division” a fact that most of history’s great conquerors have known and utilized. You will note that the diversity and immigration advocates never cite any historical examples for the obvious reason that migration, as mass immigration is more accurately labled, has long been the death knell of the societies inundated by it.

For those who missed it before, I note that “the melting pot” is ahistorical fiction written by a hypocritical Zionist and no one who cites it as some sort of societal ideal should be taken any more seriously than a guy wearing a red Star Trek uniform and calling for the establishment of the United Federation of Planets. Moreover, the melting pot ideal is at its core nothing more than the usual utopian Marxist transnationalism: “Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man.”

Kicking the Krugster

David Brooks is ever so polite as he expresses his doubts about the Neo-Keynesians call for a Third Stimulus, but there’s no question as to whom he is putting his genteel, moderate boot:

These Demand Siders have very high I.Q.’s, but they seem to be strangers to doubt and modesty. They have total faith in their models. But all schools of economic thought have taken their lumps over the past few years. Are you really willing to risk national insolvency on the basis of a model?

Moreover, the Demand Siders write as if everybody who disagrees with them is immoral or a moron. But, in fact, many prize-festooned economists do not support another stimulus. Most European leaders and central bankers think it’s time to begin reducing debt, not increasing it — as do many economists at the international economic institutions. Are you sure your theorists are right and theirs are wrong?

The Demand Siders don’t have a good explanation for the past two years.

No, they don’t. Nor will they have one for the next ten years. They’ll have an explanation all right – the bitter-end liquidationists didn’t let us spend enough money – but it won’t be a good one or a correct one.

UPDATE – And Krugman is forced to immediately start lying in response. “Funny, I thought we had a perfectly good explanation: severe downturn in demand from the financial crisis, and a stimulus which we warned from the beginning wasn’t nearly big enough. And as I’ve been trying to point out, events have strongly confirmed a demand-side view of the world.”

Krugman hopes we’ve all forgotten that he calculated a $600 billion stimulus was needed before the Obama administration championed the $787 billion stimulus passed by Congress.

Cue Derbyshire

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the next revolution:

As grills across America fire up this weekend some Americans may want to crack open a history book instead of a cold beer. A Marist poll finds that 26 percent of Americans dont know whom the United States declared its independence from.

In fairness, there’s not much reason an immigrant from Honduras, Egypt, or Somalia should either know or care about who declared what regarding whom. And one can’t reasonably expect natural-born Americans to have time to learn anything about the Revolution of 1776 in only 12 years of public school when there is so much to learn about Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, the Mayans, and all the other important figures of history who made America what it is today.

The myth of Deist America

I suppose we can’t be surprised that atheists so often get Christian “mythology” factually incorrect when they can’t even keep their own myths straight:

The thinkers who formulated the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were deists, not theists, and were inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment movement in England and Europe.

Pure.. Unadulterated.. Poppycock. This flies completely in the face of serious scholarship on the subject by Dr. Miles Bradford (University of Dallas) in which he careflully examined the religious beliefs of 55 of the framers of the Constituional Convention and found only 3 whose religious leanings were a bit unclear.

For crying out loud, there were nearly as many MINISTERS signing the Declaration of Independence as there were deists. The lesson is to always treat atheists spouting “facts” like Jehovah’s Witnesses “quoting” the Bible. Always, always, always, ask them for their source. Most of the time, when you force them to trace it back, it will turn out to be pure fiction.

The danger of white knighting

It is always heroic to rescue a child. But to “rescue” a woman from “violence against women”? Sometimes, but by no means always. Even the police know that intervening in a domestic situation is dangerously stupid given the roughly 50/50 chance that the woman initiated the violence:

A Good Samaritan who tried to help a stranger being hit by her husband was badly beaten after the man turned on him. Matthew Leone has a broken jaw and one third of his skull has been removed because his brain is swollen after he was beaten earlier this week.

I am totally opposed to the “chivalrous” notions that “you should never hit a woman” and “violence against women is absolutely disgusting”. What does that make violence against men, peachy keen? Either violence is acceptable or it isn’t, and I firmly believe that the Dragon motto of “start nothing, finish everything” applies universally. If a woman is dumb enough to escalate conflict to a physical level with a larger, stronger, and faster opponent, then she absolutely merits any subsequent beating that she takes. People always focus on the “finish everything” half, but the more important one is “start nothing”. Now, if I am attacked, I may choose not to retaliate on the basis of my Christian principles, but that has nothing to do with the sex of the attacker. A decision to let a physical assault pass is my choice and that choice doesn’t negate my absolute self-defense right to respond to the initiation of violence with incapacitating violence.

This doesn’t mean that one should never intervene in a violent situation, but that if one is going to intervene, one must do so in precisely the same manner that one would intervene if two men were fighting. That’s precisely why the police usually handcuff both parties involved first, then attempt to sort the matter out once everyone has been incapacitated. As I have mentioned before, you should never intervene in any violent situation unless you are absolutely certain that an even greater level of violence is justified in stopping it. If one man is stabbing another, then go ahead and blow his head off. If one woman is smashing another woman’s face against the floor, then go ahead and break her wrists. But if all you’re going to do is demand the bigger party – which isn’t necessarily the guilty party – relax while you strike a moral pose at them, you shouldn’t be terribly surprised when you wind up in the hospital.

And given the fact that the woman wasn’t injured and the husband was only charged with a misdemeanor, it’s pretty obvious that the white knight’s intervention not only wasn’t necessary in this case, but actually made a bad situation worse. I tend to doubt that the woman is going to appreciate her husband being needlessly put away in prison for 3-5 years.

WND column

What Are You Celebrating?

The fourth of July is the day to celebrate American independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. But what is the significance of independence from Great Britain when America is kept in dependence by Washington, D.C., and in the case of 11* once-sovereign states, forcibly so?

*This should have been 12. I had forgotten about the forcible seizure and illegal occupation of the sovereign kingdom of Hawaii. Mea culpa.

Go Cops

This is the greatest song about the police since NWA’s epic anthem and actually serves to justify Kesha’s existence on the planet. There has never been a police state without police.