Tag: politics

Women and the civilizational cycle

The materially deleterious effect of women working on a society is illustrated in a paper entitled “Women Prefer Larger Governments: Growth, Structural Transformation and Government Size”

The increase in income per capita is accompanied, in virtually all
countries, by two changes in the structure of the economy, namely an
increase in the share of government spending in GDP and an increase in
female labour force participation. This paper suggests that these two
changes are causally related. We develop a growth model where the
structure of the economy is endogenous so that participation in market
activities and government size are causally related.

Economic growth and
rising incomes are accompanied by a greater incentive for women to
engage in labour market activities as the opportunity cost of staying at
home increases. We hypothesize that government spending decreases the
cost of performing household chores such as, but not limited to, child
rearing and child care so that couples decide to engage further in the
labour market and chose a higher tax rate to finance more government
spending.

Using a wide cross-section of data for developed and
developing countries, we show that higher participation by women in the
labour market are indeed positively associated with larger governments.
Furthermore, we investigate the causal link between the two variables
using as instrumental variables a unique and novel dataset on the
relative price of home appliances across OECD countries and over time.
We find strong evidence of a causal link between participation in the
labour market and government size: a 10 percent rise in participation in
the labour market leads to a 7 to 8 percent rise in government size.
This effect is robust to the country sample, time period, and a set of
controls in the spirit of Rodrik (1998).

This is also an implicit argument against female suffrage. However, the researchers’ hypothesis is incorrect, as government spending observably does not decrease the cost of child rearing and child care; one reason European families have so few children is that the cost of raising children is exorbitant despite the greater amount of spending by European governments. Free day care and year-long maternity leave doesn’t make up for the fact that food and gasoline cost considerably more than in the USA.

Voting is not freedom. The conflation of voting with freedom is one of the key deceptions upon which feminism rests. And like all ideologies based upon deception, the more powerful feminism becomes, the more likely it is that the polity in which it has become influential will collapse on the basis of the weight of its contradictions.

11 Tenets of Progressivism

What is it with lefties and their love for manifestos? Elizabeth Warren outlines what she defines as the core tenets of progressivism:

– “We believe that Wall Street needs stronger rules and tougher enforcement, and we’re willing to fight for it.”
– “We believe in science, and that means that we have a responsibility to protect this Earth.”
– “We believe that the Internet shouldn’t be rigged to benefit big corporations, and that means real net neutrality.”
– “We believe that no one should work full-time and still live in poverty, and that means raising the minimum wage.”
–
“We believe that fast-food workers deserve a livable wage, and that
means that when they take to the picket line, we are proud to fight
alongside them.”
– “We believe that students are entitled to get an education without being crushed by debt.”
–
“We believe that after a lifetime of work, people are entitled to
retire with dignity, and that means protecting Social Security,
Medicare, and pensions.”
– “We believe—I can’t believe I have to say this in 2014—we believe in equal pay for equal work.”
– “We believe that equal means equal, and that’s true in marriage, it’s true in the workplace, it’s true in all of America.”
– “We believe that immigration has made this country strong and vibrant, and that means reform.”
– “And we believe that corporations are not people, that women have a right to their bodies.

  1. And yet, they’re not willing to end Wall Street’s monopoly. One observes that by this definition, President Goldman Sachs is no progressive.
  2. That’s nice and all, but science does not mean we have a responsibility to protect this Earth anymore than it means that we have a reponsibility to make the hajj.
  3. Can’t argue with that. It seems I’m a progressive!
  4. Actually, I’m fine with this. Raising the minimum wage is a de facto anti-immigration measure. Two for four!
  5. Isn’t this covered in (4)?
  6. So she’ll be permitting defaults on college loan debt and getting the government out of the college loan business? I’m all for that, but I’m guessing that’s not quite what she had in mind.
  7. Good luck with that. Do the math.
  8. Great. So am I. Get rid of maternity leave and “sick” days and require equal work and equal hours for equal pay. Deal?
  9. So, progressives are against pro-female family courts? I am skeptical.
  10. Progressives are pro-vibrancy. That’s hardly news. And here we see the intrinsic incoherence of progressivism. You can’t have more immigrants and a higher minimum wage. See: Adam Smith.
  11. Good luck with that. Corporations are juridical people, as per the Supreme Court. And women obviously don’t have any right to their bodies or they could sell title in them or shoot up heroin while naked in public having sex for money.

A more straightforward version: Progressives favor corporate regulation, environmentalism, free Internet, minimum wages, unions, public education, subsidizing old people, women in the workforce, gays, immigration, and abortion.

UPDATE: As is his wont, John C. Wright not only translates the ProgSprache into plain American, but sums it up in a beautifully brutal manner.

To sum up, translating all this from bafflegab and craptalk to English, it means three things (1) the Left are parochial, and only regard the issues of the current news cycle as being principles (2) the Left hates civilization and all its institutions (3) the Left hates the Catholic Church, and will destroy itself attempting to destroy her.

Regarding this last point, allow me to say on behalf of the one, true, catholic and apostolic Church that better men than you, leftwing nutbag, far better men, such as the potent and remorseless Imperators of Rome tried that.

We are here. They are gone. Soon — as we count time — you will be gone.

When beauty isn’t enough

When 17-year-old Axelle Despiegelaere went to support her native Belgium at
the World Cup she wasn’t expecting it to lead to a job offer. But a
long-distance photo of her went viral on Twitter, where she was labelled the “most
beautiful” fan in Brazil, and L’Oreal came knocking with a modelling
contract. The competition is not even over and the company has already shot a video
where Axelle is doused in its products, uploaded it to YouTube and received
over two million hits. Such is the speed at which marketing now works. But the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long: Axelle’s fledgling modelling career is already finished, after images of her posing
next to dead animals on the African savannah with a rifle and a smile as big
as she wore at the football. 


Apparently it’s not enough to be young and beautiful. To be employed as a professional model, a girl must also possess politically correct opinions concerning big-game hunting. We’ve seen this in the publishing world. We’ve seen this in technology. Now we’re seeing it in modeling, of all places.

Remember this the next time you’re congratulating yourself on your open-mindedness, and patting yourself on the back for the way you hired that [insert repulsive left-wing opinion or identity here] individual despite the fact that you completely disagree with him. Because not only will you not be the beneficiary of the same treatment if your positions are reversed, you are helping to ensure that your side is going to lose.

Wars do not require two sides. You can lose a war even more easily by refusing to fight in the first place. One hopes that some rifle manufacturer or hunting magazine will be smart enough to see the opportunity in hiring a very pretty young spokesmodel who knows how to put lead on target.

A 2010
report from Microsoft said that social media checks were already as
important in the job selection process as a CV or interview. Some 70 per
cent of HR managers at the top 100 companies in the UK, US, Germany and
France said that they had rejected candidates because of their online
behaviour.  

Most people, when reading this, think that this means pictures of guys doing keg stands or girls posting naked selfies. Such things are included, of course, but so are one’s political identifications, such as expressing support for a political candidate during the electoral season. Don’t think that they aren’t.

On libertarianism

Increasingly of late, people have been attempting to claim I am not a libertarian on the basis of my failure to adhere to one or another common libertarian shibboleths. Consider my purported heresies:

  1. I oppose open borders.
  2. I oppose free trade.
  3. I oppose female suffrage.
  4. I oppose “equal rights”.
  5. I oppose desegregation.
  6. I oppose the incoherently named “gay marriage”.
  7. I have observed, and stated, that sexual anarchy is incompatible with traditional Western civilization.
  8. I have observed, and stated, that female education is both dyscivic and dysgenic.
  9. I support the right of free association.

These positions are obviously anti-libertine, but are they truly anti-libertarian? I don’t see that the case can be made if one considers the actual definition of libertarianism rather than various dogmatic policies that have somehow come to pass for the philosophy itself. From Wikipedia:

Libertarianism (Latin: liber, free) is a classification of political philosophies that uphold liberty as their principal objective. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and freedom of choice, emphasizing political freedom, voluntary association and the primacy of individual judgment. While libertarians share a skepticism of authority, they diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing political and economic systems. Various schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power, often calling to restrict or even to wholly dissolve pervasive social institutions. Rather than embodying a singular, rigid systematic theory or ideology, libertarianism has been applied as an umbrella term to a wide range of sometimes discordant political ideas through modern history.

All of my supposedly anti-libertarian positions are based on the idea of maximizing liberty in a society based on Western civilization. So, far from being anti-libertarian, I would argue that my National Libertarianism is more in keeping with the true concept of libertarianism than all the various dogmas that are libertarian in theory, but in practice have material consequences that are observably anti-human liberty.

The end may not justify the means, but the end is the only correct means of judging any social policy. Intentions and hypotheses and flights of fancy are all equally irrelevant. In the end, one can only look at the policy and decide: does this advance or detract from human liberty in this particular polity.

The new battle cry

Repatriation. Some of you may recall that I have predicted this for some time now:

Lynes’s growing group of protestors in Murrieta has been organizing and plans to continue their protests until something is done. Their message is support Border Patrol, stop illegal immigration, enforce existing U.S. laws at the border, and repatriate those here in the U.S. illegally to their home countries.

They’re focused on illegals now. But, just as we’ve seen in the larger immigration debate, the shift from illegal immigrants to all immigrants will take place soon. It’s already happened in most European countries. Because it’s not about the legality of the entry, it’s about who is where.

This is a literal invasion of the country. And given the growing indications that the Executive Branch helped it take place, it is without question an impeachable offense.

It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up

The IRS-Lerner scandal looks like it has the potential to be a lot bigger than Watergate ever was:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.

The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”

Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.

But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

It would certainly be unexpected if it turned out to be IRS shenanigans that took down the Obama administration. At this point, even the cowardly House Republicans and the RINOs in the Senate have to be seriously discussing a special prosecutor and a possible impeachment. Especially in light of the amnesty-related debacle on the southern border.

Republican sellout bites the dust

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s political career was just ended over his traitorous love of immigration:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated Tuesday by a little-known economics professor in Virginia’s Republican primary, a stunning upset and major victory for the tea party. Cantor is the second-most powerful member of the U.S. House and was seen by some as a possible successor to the House speaker. His loss to Dave Brat, a political novice with little money marks a huge victory for the tea party movement, which supported Cantor just a few years ago.

Perhaps the idiot Republicans will rethink their decision to serve as Obama’s vanguard on the invasion amnesty. Opposing immigration, opposing amnesty, and opposing the ongoing foreign invasion is the winning issue in American politics, just as it is in European politics. As more immigrants migrate, the more blacks and whites of every ideological stripe will turn against immigration and the politicians who support it.

It’s not about legal or illegal, it’s about the numbers.

Desperately avoiding default

One thing you have to understand about every federal debt-related action: it’s not for the benefit of the borrowers, but for the benefit of the banks. We saw this in 2009 with “mortgage reform” and it will be the same with “student loan reform”:

President Barack Obama is prepping new executive steps to help Americans struggling to pay off their student debt, and throwing his support behind Senate Democratic legislation with a similar goal but potentially a much more profound impact.

Obama on Monday will announce he’s expanding his “Pay As You Earn” program that lets borrowers pay no more than 10 percent of their monthly income in loan payments, the White House said. Currently, the program is only available to those who started borrowing after October 2007 and kept borrowing after October 2011. Obama plans to start allowing those who borrowed earlier to participate, potentially extending the benefit to millions more borrowers.

 The problem Obama is addressing is that although it is impossible for graduates (and non-graduates) to formally default on their student loans, they will effectively default on them when they simply don’t have the money to make their payments.

This is simply reducing the payments in order to keep them on the hook longer and thereby prevent the loans from being correctly recognized as bad loans that have to be written off. As Karl Denninger correctly ascertains, the ultimate goal is to keep the
young borrowers on the hook, but force taxpayers to pay off their
loans. It about the banks not the borrowers. It’s ALWAYS about the banks.

The challenge of cause-and-effect

This plaintive protest, in a nutshell, explains why there can never be any significant mixing of various population sub-groups that will be successful over time. Not without the rule of a militarized aristocracy at a bare minimum, and a strictly limited voting franchise at best.

“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchen Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8,500 this year.

“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.”

Now, this is a woman who cannot grasp the connection between her votes for “anything that will make this city better” and the consequent increase in her property tax bill. How can one reasonably argue that she should be permitted to vote? She is literally non compos mentis with regards to basic politics.

And she is high-functioning in comparison to millions of other voters! If nothing else, she has managed to provide for herself and pay her mortgage for 23 years. That puts her ahead of tens of millions of people.

The worst thing is the probable consequences of her selling her house. She’ll move somewhere less expensive, and then promptly resume voting for the very things that forced her to move there. Because she does not understand cause and effect.

“Retire, you selfish old bitch!”

The New York Times leads the campaign for Justice Ginsberg to step down while Obama is still president:

The “best way for her to advance all the things she has spent her life working for is to ensure that a Democratic president picks her successor,” wrote Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine. Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor and a former clerk to Justice Marshall, has argued that both she and Justice Breyer should retire. Former Justice Stevens, for his part, has said, “It’s an appropriate thing to think about your successor.” (Indeed, Chief Justice Warren deliberately resigned before the 1968 election, in an effort to prevent Nixon from naming his successor.)

On the other side of the issue, Dahlia Lithwick of Slate has written, “I have seen not a lick of evidence that Ginsburg is failing,” adding that the justice’s successor is not likely to be as liberal as she is, given today’s political climate.

This much seems clear: The decision is Justice Ginsburg’s, and people close to the court do not expect her to retire this year. No doubt, being a Supreme Court justice is more enjoyable and consequential than being a retired justice. Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired in 2006, has since regretted stepping down as early as she did.

At the same time, there is no denying that any justice who stays on the court into old age is taking a chance. Justice Ginsburg will do damage to the causes about which she cares most if she follows the path of previous liberal justices who allowed a Republican to replace them. Similarly, Justice Scalia or Justice Kennedy will hurt conservatism if either passes up a chance to resign under a Republican president in coming years — and doesn’t get another such chance.

Just think about what liberals would give to have had a Democratic president replace Justice Marshall. And think about how many major cases — on voting rights, campaign donations, the death penalty and other issues — might have turned out differently.

The most interesting aspect of this editorial is that it tends to indicate the NYT’s belief that the next president will not be Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat. Personally, I’d love to see Obama appoint one more Supreme Court justice just to see how badly he’d screw it up. He’d likely appoint a corrupt black lawyer from Chicago, or, more likely, one of Goldman Sachs’s corporate attorneys, because Valerie Jarret wouldn’t accept the pay cut.