Tag: politics

The irrelevant Republicans

Apparently we’ve reached the point where Republicans aren’t even pretending to slow down the rapid increase of central government expansion:

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the last-minute fiscal cliff deal reached by congressional leaders and President Barack Obama cuts only $15 billion in spending while increasing tax revenues by $620 billion—a 41:1 ratio of tax increases to spending cuts.

Needless to say, this will not fix anything.  And the distance with which the can is kicked down the road keeps getting shorter and shorter.

Shout them down again

It’s time to begin cranking up the volume and sending the anti-gun politicians scurrying back under their rocks again:

In January, Senator Feinstein will introduce a bill to stop the sale,
transfer, importation and manufacturing of military-style assault
weapons and high-capacity ammunition feeding devises.

  • Bans the sale, transfer, importation, or manufacturing of:
    • 120 specifically-named firearms
    • Certain other semiautomatic rifles, handguns, shotguns that can
      accept a detachable magazine and have one military characteristic
    • Semiautomatic rifles and handguns with a fixed magazine that can accept more than 10 rounds

We all knew it was coming.  You know the drill.  If there is even the slightest squishiness on the part of your elected official, squeeze him until he squeals like an NRA piggy.

Why they’re desperate

If setting up and suiciding a drugged-up patsy to take the fall for shooting up a suburban school of sweet, innocent, white elementary schoolchildren isn’t enough to move the dial in favor of gun control, then what on Earth will?

The public’s attitudes toward gun control have shown only modest change in the wake of last week’s deadly shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Currently, 49% say it is more important to control gun ownership, while 42% say it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns….  However, support for gun control remains lower than before Obama took office.  In April 2008, 58% said it was more important to control gun ownership; just 37% prioritized protecting gun rights.

The increased hysterics we’re seeing from the media is their horror at the dawning realization that a very large and statistically significant number of Americans will never, ever give up their guns, not even if Washington arranges to have a kindergarten shot up every single day.  It unsettles them deeply to recognize that the mere fact of Obama holding office scares more people than elementary school massacres.

WND column

Standing Firm for Freedom

It was not a surprise that the response of the New York Times to the Connecticut public-school shootings was to run, not one, not two, not three, but four editorials calling for yet another push for gun control. The mainstream media have been waiting literally years for something like this to happen, and they are not about to let such a crisis go to waste.

Top 40 political quotes for 2012

I would take exception to most of the quotes on this list compiled by the Right Wing News.  I think you could find a number of better ones in the comments on this blog alone.  Any time Herman Cain makes the top 10, you have to question the quality.  But a few of them are worth noting:

17) As government becomes bigger, it becomes more lawless. — George Will

13) As my father-in-law once said, when they talk about taxes it’s
always for teachers, firemen, and police — but when they spend your
taxes, it always seems to go to some guy in a leather chair downtown you
never heard of. — Glenn Reynolds

4) The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the
people who react to the whistle always assume it’s intended for somebody
else. The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the
whistle, you’re the dog. — James Taranto 

Expect more Californication

I have no problem with California and New York City jacking up their tax rates to the Moon… so long as they keep their residents there:

Gerald Prante, an economics professor at Lynchburg College in Virginia, and Austin John, a Lynchburg economics student, calculated marginal tax rates — the highest rates on the highest levels of income — for all 50 states. They combined state, federal and, where applicable, local income taxes, plus payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare and included the deductibility of some taxes.

Proposition 30 added three percentage points to the marginal state income tax rate for California’s highest-income taxpayers, bringing it to 13.3 percent. That action raised California over other high-tax jurisdictions to a marginal rate of 51.9 percent, slightly higher than New York City’s level. Hawaii was the only other place with a calculated rate above 50 percent.

The problem, of course, is that higher taxes cause left-leaning voters who support them to flee those high-tax jurisdictions, who then Californicate their new places of residence.  And so the disease spreads.  Given that border walls present their own evils and are not presently possible without secession, I think the problem is best resolved by not permitting anyone with less than 18 years residence to vote on state and local affairs.  The mechanism is already there in the age-related voting laws, just make them dependent upon 18 years of residence rather than age.

One would hope that after 18 years, either some sense would have been inculcated into them, or more likely, they would have moved on again.

Another conservative purge

How many times can Republicans purge those to their right from their ranks and still be meaningfully considered to represent the American political right?

Boehner, Majority
Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)
have worked assiduously to keep conservative groups on the outside in
line as they try to strike a massive deal to keep taxes low on all
Americans and avoid spending cuts to the Pentagon and other domestic
programs. The traditional right — The Wall Street Journal editorial page,
National Review, Fox News and business-friendly analysts on CNBC — have
been lockstep in line with Boehner, the result of careful outreach by
leadership staff. But now, top House leaders suddenly find themselves under fire from entities with enormous sway in GOP politics.

The fact that the WSJ, NR, and Fox are pro-business doesn’t mean they are traditional right.  Not anymore.  Mussolini and Hitler were pro-business too.  The irony is that the right was told that they had to dutifully line up behind Mitt Romney because he was, as a moderate, more electable than the anti-bank, anti-war, Ron Paul.  Then, when Romney went down in flames just like McCain, Bush, Dole, Ford and every other elite-selected moderate before, what passes for Republican “leadership” in the House is trying to keep moving left.

If you are a conservative who is still a Republican, I have a very simple question to ask you: why?  It is becoming increasingly obvious that both conservatives and America would have been better off if the John Birch Society purged William F. Buckley rather than the other way around.

The Laffer Curve at work

An Instapundit reader illustrates both the perils of blindly raising income tax rates and the financial pointlessness of many married women working:

After the election, my wife and I are going partial Galt. We’re in
California, so our state income tax went up in addition to what’s sure
to come out of Washington.

My wife quit her job last week. I increased my participation in a
tax deferment plan offered by my employer to bring my taxable income as
close to $250K as possible. We’ll be cutting back a little, but the
government is going to getting a whole lot less.

My wife’s entire salary barely covered our tax bill – she was 100%
slave to the government, while I was a 10% slave. Now she is 100% free,
and I’ll be a ~35% slave As a couple, 17.5% of our time is slaving on
the government plantation from an astounding 55% previously.

My wife is deliriously happy, our children are delighted to have mom
home, the dog gets more walks, and I find not spending money rapturously
satisfying. 

Statist theoreticians and bureaucrats never seem to understand that humans always modify their behavior in response to prospective stimuli.  And when they finally do, after failing to achieve the results expected, they usually make the mistake of attempting to forcibly limit human options, thereby falling into exactly the same trap.  And the smarter and more productive the individual, the more his contributions are required, the more likely it is that he will figure out a way to refuse to participate.

Here is a trivially easy prediction.  California will collect less tax revenue than estimated in 2013 despite its newly raised rates that theoretically will cause it to collect more.  Moreover, it will probably collect less than it did in 2012, and its budget deficit will rise.

The art of the reframe

Heartist discusses the political reframe:

“A commenter at Larry Auster’s accurately imagines what a typical anti-white leftoid (in this case, John Podhoretz) would say to a realist schooled in the facts of intransigent human nature and the evolved preference for tribalism: 

“But humanity does not consist of universal individuals. It consists of various cultures, ethnicities, and races all of which have particular identities, characteristics, ability levels, values, and agendas which are different from those of the host society. As a result, the mass presence of those different groups in the host society, far from advancing right-liberal equal freedom, empowers their unassimilable identities, characteristics, ability levels, values, and agendas, and thus changes the host country from a right-liberal society into a multicultural, left-liberal, racial-socialist society whose ruling principle is equality of outcome for all groups.”
 
To which Podhoretz pere et fils would surely reply, “Why do you hate freedom?”

How does a weak-willed, supplicating, betaboy “””conservative””” like, oh, say, Jim Geraghty, respond to this all-too-realistic, imagined Podhoretz coercive frame? Probably something like this: “I don’t hate freedom! Really, I don’t! Look, some of my best friends are freedom lovers. And I promise never again to use the word slut, no matter how applicable it is. Be kind to me?”

Lame. Podhoretz owns the frame, and Geraghty is just playing within its bounds.”

While I agree with the need for a reframe in this sort of situation, the problem with Heartiste’s recommended riposte is that while it avoids acquiescence to the  theoretical frame, it fails to destroy it and permits the hypothetical Podhoretz to claim the high ground.  Yes, it is true that the question concerning Podoretz’s overt intimacy with Capra aegagrus hircus is as intellectually fair as Podhoretz’s question concerning his interlocutor’s imaginary hatred for freedom.  But it sounds less reasonable and will cause said interlocutor to come off looking weak and reactionary by comparison.

A better tactic is a refined version of agree and amplify.  In this case, Podhoretz’s interlocutor would do well to simply respond to him: “For the same reason you do.”  This immediately turns the frame around and forces him onto the defensive, and has the benefit of being absolutely true.  While Podhoretz and his fellow neoconservatives may favor freedom in the form of permitting mass invasion from the Third World, they oppose it in a vast panoply of more important forms.  The right-liberal is far more opposed to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of exchange, and seeks to control the population in a much more coercive manner than the traditionalist right that seeks to protect Constitutional America and the only group with any significant collective regard for it, the descendants of its Christian European colonists.

In the same way that tax revenues are not maximized by maximizing tax rates, as per the Laffer curve, freedom of action and opportunity is not maximized by maximizing legal freedom for everyone on the planet.  Podhoretz, for example, would not be more free if Hamas were legally permitted to set up Jew-baking ovens in New York City, just as Americans would not be more free if 50 million Mexicans were legally permitted to enter the country and begin voting for the sort of policies they are accustomed to voting for when choosing between the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and the Party of the Democratic Revolution, both of which are members of the Socialist International.

Since freedom is not easily mathematically quantified, it is not as simple to construct a Liberty curve as a Laffer curve, but the logic is the same.

This is just an example; the point is that reframe is best done in the direct context of the attempted frame.  Due to psychological projection, in most cases, those who attempt to frame an attack in an unfair and intellectually dubious manner will reliably choose to attack you on their own point of vulnerability.  By way of example, note how yesterday the Neo-Keynesian SK repeatedly insisted that I was a) ignorant, b) didn’t understand anything, and c) needed to read a certain book while simultaneously a) getting most of his basic facts wrong, b) failing to grasp the difference between debt/GDP and federal debt/GDP and trying to discredit the data I’d provided by citing the very source I’d quoted, and, c) believing that I was some sort of monetarist inflationista because he knew nothing about RGD.

The menace of hope

The NYT smells Republican blood in the water and goes for the kill:

 Funny how quickly some principles collapse when given the right kind of shove. One day, the Republican Party is rock-ribbed restrictionist, dedicated to the proposition that unauthorized immigrants are an invading army of job stealers, welfare moochers and criminals whose only acceptable destiny is to be caught and deported — the border fence forever, “amnesty” never. The next day: never mind. The party suddenly discovers the merits of a working immigration system. Senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who once bravely supported bipartisan reform but slunk away late in the last Bush administration, are scratching at the door again, as if the last five years never happened.

All it took was an election in which millions of Latino voters — many of them the wives and husbands, sons, daughters, grandchildren, cousins, co-workers and friends of those despised “illegals” — overwhelmingly chose President Obama over the man who promised to be deporter in chief. They rejected Mitt Romney by 3 to 1, according to exit polls. Asian-Americans did, too. Republicans looked at a changing America, saw a future of decline and irrelevance for the party, and concluded that immigrants weren’t so bad after all.

One more amnesty and we’ll establish the permanent left-liberal majority!  You can almost feel them desperately trying to conceal their glee.  What is remarkable is that they can’t seem to understand that the current travails of Illinois and California are what happens when left-liberals get what they want.  It’s like letting a five year old kid child drive.  There’s going to be a crash, it’s going to be bloody, and everyone is going to blame those who weren’t behind the wheel.

This is much more A Phantom Menace than A New Hope.