Dissecting Leftism

Sunday, September 01, 2024

Kamala: $5 Trillion in New Taxes

Kamala Harris’ economic plan is taking shape, starting with $5 trillion in new taxes—because Washington clearly does not have enough money to spend

In the past fortnight alone, Harris has promised to hike taxes on small businesses to 39.6% and hike taxes on capital gains and dividends to a top rate of 44.6%—the highest in history, even beating the communist-adjacent Jimmy Carter.

Since taxing half your life savings doesn’t come close to keeping Washington fed, she also wants to hike the corporate rate by a third to 28%. That would take us from one of the best places in the world to do business to one of the worst. We’d be worse than China, Canada, Britain, Russia, even the European Union.

A company would literally make money moving to Canada. And for so-called strategic sectors, our tax rate would be double the rate in China.

Note that workers are the ones who actually pay corporate income tax. A Tax Foundation study found that they pay around 70% of them in the form of lower wages. The rest is paid by shareholders in lower retirement returns and customers in higher prices. Yes, the same high prices she’s blaming on “price gouging.”

The fun doesn’t stop there.

Harris is also calling for a second death tax, something called “step-up basis” that would treat death as a taxable event. So, not only would the family business or farm have to pay estate taxes when it’s passed on, it would be taxed as if all the assets were sold, with up to 44.6% going to the government on top of the death tax.

Finally, the big one: Harris’ handlers are pushing for something we’ve never taxed in this country: unrealized gains. As in a bureaucrat pretends you sold all your stock and the family farm when you didn’t and sends you a bill anyway.

Like all new taxes, this one is being sold as only hitting the rich, but in reality, it will hit family businesses and farms. Moreover, I mentioned in a recent video how the income tax itself started by only hitting the top 1% at a top rate of 7%—and yet here we are today, with more tax returns than people in this country and a top rate of—if Harris gets her way—44.6%.

Incidentally, Americans overwhelmingly oppose taxes on unrealized gains by a factor of 3 to 1. Seventy-six percent of independents oppose it.

It’s also worth noting Europeans have tried this kind of wealth tax over and over, and every time, it’s failed. The actual rich just move their money and hire better tax lawyers, while small business gets wiped out. Norway, for example, expected to collect $150 million per year from its wealth tax, but instead $54 billion fled the country, taking $600 million of taxes with it.

So, what’s next?

Barely a month into Harris’ presidential candidacy, she’s already far to the left of even President Joe Biden. And keep in mind, this is before the election, when they try not to sound crazy.

We can only imagine what’s coming after the election.

Like drinking radiator coolant, government spending always tastes sweet in the beginning. The stimulus checks, the trillion dollars for green energy, and this week’s war are all painless blips on a debt chart.

Then comes the payback: First, the inflation; then, the taxes that amount to wholesale confiscation of your retirement, of a financial future for the young—all while gutting what’s left of the productive economy.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/28/kamala-trillion-new-taxes/

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CNN’s Softball Interview of Kamala Harris

Vice President Kamala Harris’ very first interview of her campaign aired on CNN Thursday night.

We waited a month and a half for this and Harris’ much anticipated debut ended up containing barely more substance than the policy section of her website. (Don’t search too long for that section; it doesn’t exist.)

The interview began with a glowing montage resembling a movie trailer, settled in with a few tough questions, and ended with a whole lot of meaningless fluff. There were a few word salads mixed in for flavor.

CNN anchor Dana Bash did press Harris on a handful of her long list of flip flops.

She asked Harris why she changed her policy on fracking. In 2019, Harris said that she was in favor of banning fracking. Here she is saying so.

Now she says she no longer backs the ban on fracking. What changed?

Harris couldn’t articulate a particular reason. She said that climate change is real and that the current administration is doing a good job of hitting climate goals, so she won’t do it.

“What I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking,” she said.

The vice president was also asked about the record illegal border crossings since she and President Joe Biden ascended to the White House. Bash noted that she was tasked with solving the “root causes” of illegal immigration from Central America.

This is when Harris was the border czar, a phrase the media has desperately attempted to erase from history.

Harris answered that what she did to address the root causes of illegal immigration has “resulted in a number of benefits, including historic investments by American businesses in that region. The number of immigrants coming from that region has actually reduced since we’ve began that work.”

She then said it was actually former President Donald Trump who was against border security and that she and Biden were all for the Senate border bill that failed to pass in February.

That bill would have done little to stop the flow of illegal immigration and was largely stuffed with funding for the war in Ukraine to boot.

Bash later followed up with a softball question—asked in the form of a wink, wink answer—about how voters should respond to her shifting sands policy positions.

“How should voters look at some of the changes you’ve made that you explained some of here in your policy?” Bash asked before giving Harris multiple-choice options to respond with. “Because you’ve had more experience now and you have learned more about the information? Is it running for president in a Democratic primary? And should they feel comfortable and confident that what you say now is going to be your policy moving forward?”

Harris fumbled her response anyway with a meandering non-answer but insisted that her values have stayed the same. Take a listen.

Ah, so we’re supposed to believe that while Harris’ policy positions have largely changed in just a few years, her principles remain timeless. But are those values left-wing, moderate, populist, or what? She didn’t explain.

Those were the high points of the interview. There’s little else to say about the policy substance. I suggest you read my colleague Virginia Allen’s fact check of the handful of substantial questions Harris was asked.

Harris notably brought her dad, I mean her running mate Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., along with her. He didn’t do much and just kind of sat there like a chaperone.

Walz was asked a question about his alleged stolen valor and why he made false statements about being a war veteran.

“You said that you carried weapons in war, but you have never deployed actually in a war zone. A campaign official said that you misspoke. Did you?” Bash asked.

The Minnesota governor didn’t really answer. Walz just said that he’s proud of his service, and that he has poor grammar.

After that there really isn’t much to tell in this edited, 27-minute performance.

Harris was asked about the day Biden dropped out of the race which gave her the chance to tell a whimsical story about puzzles and making bacon when she got the phone call. Walz and Harris were questioned about what enchanted them about the DNC. And Harris was given a moment to talk about a picture of her niece watching her accept the nomination.

These are clearly the issues voters care about.

What we learned from this is that the Harris campaign clearly intends to test the outer limits of how much the media and this regime can simply manufacture a presidency.

Harris’ performance Thursday night wasn’t awful. It was just flat and shallow. She gave cookie cutter, not particularly clarifying. answers to serious questions about governing philosophy.

And it’s hard to say that the American people learned much at all other than that Harris held some policies, then she didn’t, she thinks Biden is a great and wonderful president, but she’s new and fresh.

The question Harris was never really asked and generally didn’t answer was this: Why should she be the president? What does she think she will bring to the White House that would make her an effective commander-in-chief? Why should we think she will be anything more than a lifeless caretaker president like her predecessor?

Harris may be more lucid than Biden at this point, but mere lucidity shouldn’t be the only qualification to be president.

The closest Harris got to answering this question of why she should be president is when she said in her talk about her niece, “I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans.”

That’s not a bad answer for someone running to be class president, but doesn’t really explain to the American people why a candidate who simply got dropped into this race at the last second should become the leader of the free world.

CNN asked a handful of tough questions, but failed to follow up, and left the American people without answers about what Harris actually stands for.

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UK: Here’s an opinion poll you might have missed.

A few days ago, YouGov asked British people whether they would support or oppose increasing deportations of illegal migrants. The results speak for themselves.

More than two-thirds of the country, 67%, would support increasing deportations, rising to 92% among Conservatives and 96% among Reformers.

It’s a reminder of how ordinary people are thinking and feeling, and how the ‘pro-immigration position’ is routinely only represented by 15-20%.

Why am I showing you this?

Because this issue also lies at the heart of something else in British politics that is about to heat up dramatically: the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party, a party that at the general election last month was very nearly destroyed.

Put simply, if there’s one issue more than any other that will determine whether the Conservative Party comes off life support and recovers then it is immigration.

This was the primary reason why millions of disillusioned conservatives abandoned the party for Nigel Farage and Reform’s tougher measures, and has since become the most important issue for ALL people in the country, eclipsing the economy.

And make no mistake: this is also the most important leadership election in the modern history of the Conservative Party.

Why? Because if they get this right they could, perhaps, fend off Nigel Farage and Reform. But if they get this wrong then they will continue their death spiral.

If the Tories elect somebody who is credible and competent on immigration then they might at least stand a chance of survival; but if they elect somebody who is weak and deferential to the status-quo then they will essentially be creating the biggest opening for Nigel Farage that the leader of Reform has ever had.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/where-conservative-party-leadership?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=858965&post_id=148295144&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=3vtk7t&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Thursday, August 29, 2024

Time for Never Trumpers to Drop their Conservative Charade

Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee, is the most liberal nominee for president in history.

She has ardently supported Medicare for All, also known as a complete federal government takeover of health care, even though she has tried to walk it back in this election cycle. Philosophically, self-proclaimed conservatives have argued vehemently against this policy and the experience of Covid should have given the practical reasons to back the rhetoric.

She is on record as opposing hydraulic fracturing and the Biden-Harris energy policy is one that makes the country more dependent upon electricity generation while ending the most reliable sources to generate electricity. With the key Electoral College state Pennsylvania being a major economic beneficiary of fracking Harris now claims to be against banning the process. GOP “leaders” claim to oppose the Green New Deal destruction of fossil fuels generation, and pretend to understand that reliance on unreliable sources of energy puts our nation at risk.

She has proposed price controls on food as a solution to inflation. You can’t find a single conservative leader in America who believes that the government can do a better job of pricing commodities than the market, and that food price controls don’t mean food shortages. Not even the Washington Post thinks this emphasis on price “gouging” is a good idea.

Kamala Harris is an abortion extremist who as the California Attorney General raided the home of an independent journalist who uncovered an elaborate business venture by Planned Parenthood to market and sell baby body parts from aborted children. Kamala Harris did not prosecute Planned Parenthood, but the journalist who uncovered and videotaped the sickening practice of selling off body parts as if aborted children were human parts manufacturers.

On taxes, she has embraced taxing unrealized capital gains. An example of an unrealized capital gain would be to impose a tax on a homeowner on any appreciation of the value of their home even though that money is only a paper gain and not in their bank account.

Also, the Tax Foundation found that Harris’ pledge to end the Trump tax cuts will mean a tax increase for most Americans. In fact, the bottom half of taxpayers would have their average tax rate raised to 4 percent from the current 3.4 percent. Married couples with two children making a joint income of $85,000 a year would see their taxes go up by $1,661 a year, the equivalent of almost 2 percent of their entire pre-tax salary for the year.

And of course, the Biden border Czarina Harris has seen 10 million illegals encountered at the border since she was given stewardship of the border crisis by President Biden. Note that this does not include the estimated 2 million illegals who got away after being observed by the Border Patrol. It is so bad that Harris is trying to deny any part in the Biden border fiasco, but not even Google can make the news clips of her appointment go away.

It is really hard to find a screwball, California idea that Harris hasn’t supported, including banning gasoline powered cars, which the Biden-Harris administration would put out of business by 2037, two years after California banned them.

All of this does not even include the Biden-Harris weaponization of the Justice Department and intelligence agencies against their political opponents, the on-going censorship and manipulation of social media platforms to promote the left’s political agenda, or her adamant opposition to the Second Amendment. In fact, it is hard to find a part of the Constitution that Harris actually supports.

Given the above, any person who endorses Kamala Harris for president can no longer call themselves a conservative in any way, shape or form. They are not. They are massive government enablers unable to get over the fact that Donald Trump defeated them in a primary election in 2016 and again in the primary of 2024.

The question that the Liz Cheneys of the world need to answer is whether they were lying when they claimed to be pro-life, support free markets, lower taxes, less federal government control, gun rights, energy independence and the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution.

Even those with the worst cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome should be able to look at the policies of Kamala Harris and reject them outright. Those with the worst cases have the option of voting third party – maybe the pot party (err, the Libertarian Party) is high enough to earn your vote. But endorsing Kamala Harris is admitting that everything you said was important no longer matters, and that you support the likely final stage of the fundamental transformation of America because … Donald Trump.

I can no longer take those seriously who have embraced the New Age Harris who rejects constitutional governance in her musings about being unburdened by the past

The very soul of America is at stake, and there is no room in the fight to preserve the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and the ideal that all are created equal endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights for those who would sacrifice our fundamental liberties because they don’t like mean tweets. Now, more than ever, in the words of Ronald Reagan, this is our time for choosing.

The author is president of Americans for Limited Government.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/08/time-for-never-trumpers-to-drop-their-conservative-charade/

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JD Vance tells Kamala Harris to 'go to hell' after her campaign takes aim at Trump over Arlington incident

ERIE, Pa. — Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) told Vice President Kamala Harris she “can go to hell” Wednesday if she wanted to criticize former President Donald Trump for attending a ceremony honoring the fallen 13 servicemembers who died during the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Vance’s swipe came after the Trump campaign reportedly got into an altercation with a cemetery official at Arlington National Cemetery, who tried to stop them from filming and photographing in Section 60, the burial site for military personnel killed while fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In an interview with CNN, a spokesperson for Harris, Michael Tyler, called the incident “pretty sad” and “not surprising.”

The VP pick was asked to comment on the incident at a campaign event in Erie, Pa. when he became visibly frustrated and sniped that the Democratic presidential nominee “can go to hell” if her team wanted to use it as an opportunity to attack Trump.

He then hit back at Harris for not firing anyone responsible for the withdrawal that happened under her watch.

“The other thing that our veterans care more about is that three years ago, 13 brave innocent Americans died. And they died because Kamala Harris refused to do her job and there hasn’t been a single investigation or a single firing,” he said.

“Kamala Harris is disgraceful. We want to talk about a story out of those 13 brave innocent Americans who lost their lives? It’s that Kamala Harris is so asleep at the wheel that she won’t even do an investigation into what happened. And she wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up?”

She “can go to hell” he scoffed.

Vance also insisted that the incident was exaggerated by the media.

“The altercation at Arlington cemetery is the media creating a story where I really don’t think that there is one,” he said, saying the Gold Star families wanted Trump there and that the incident was not an “insult” to the memories of the fallen servicemembers.

The Ohio senator said that an Arlington National Cemetery staff member “had a little disagreement with somebody” but that the media ran with it to create a “national news story.”

On Tuesday, NPR reported that two Trump campaign staff members “verbally abused and pushed” aside a cemetery official who tried to prevent staffers from filming and photographing while the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony.

A spokesperson for the Arlington National Cemetery told The Post that there was an “incident,” that a “report has been filed” and that “federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign.”

The Trump team has insisted that the individual who confronted the campaign about photography was “suffering from a mental health episode” and that there was “no physical altercation as described,” communications director Steven Cheung said.

One Gold Star family member who was at the cemetery with Trump backed up the campaign’s version of events, and claimed the cemetery staff was “lying.”

“We are the ones that invited Trump. He didn’t invite himself,” Darin Hoover, the father of Marine Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover, told The Post in a phone interview on Wednesday.

“We invited him because we knew that he had our backs, he supports us. He cares about us.

“While I was there, I didn’t witness any, any physical altercation or anything like that. And quite frankly, the Arlington staff is lying. I mean, it’s just, it’s a flat-out lie,” Hoover fired back.

“We wanted the pictures to memorialize, you know, what President Trump had said and done and … that moment where he’s paying his respects to our children,” Hoover continued.

The Gold Star family member also said Trump’s support is “a far cry more than what the current administration has done” — which is “absolutely nothing.”

“The current administration wants to sweep it under the rug and make sure it stays buried,” Hoover said.

Attendees at the Erie rally, meanwhile, told The Post that Vance’s military experience and him being a Marine veteran is a positive for the Republican ticket.

Gene Seip, 69, a business owner born and raised in Erie, said that “one of the demographics he’s drawing is military people.”

Chris Knight, 68, is the head cook at a school in Corry, Pa. She brought a hard copy of Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” with her and said that she’s a fan of the senator, not just Trump.

Vance is “adding to the veterans,” she said, noting that her son was in the military and that “it’s important that we keep our kids here and only send them away if they have to go.”

https://nypost.com/2024/08/28/us-news/jd-vance-tells-kamala-harris-to-go-to-hell-after-her-campaign-takes-aim-at-trump-over-arlington-incident/

Wednesday, August 28, 2024

Campaign lays bare debate over what it means to be a ‘real American’

JD Vance introduced himself to the nation as a son of poor Kentucky coal country with family roots going back generations. Kamala Harris introduced herself as the child of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, one of them “a brown woman with an accent” who arrived with dreams of becoming the scientist who cured breast cancer.

These details, laid out at the two parties’ national conventions, weren’t just intended to fill in the biographies of the faintly known Republican nominee for vice president and Democratic nominee for president. Rather, they were part of the two parties’ explanations for why they would take the nation in radically different policy directions.

The two presidential campaigns, at the conventions and in other messages, have offered far different visions of what it is to be American, part of a battle over which agenda serves the nation best. To Vance, the “source of American greatness” is the bonds built over generations of people connected to their “homeland,” which he said must be defended against imported foreign labour, imported energy and trade deals that shipped jobs overseas. To Harris and her allies, the American story is often about people overcoming racial and economic hurdles, whose aspirations deserve targeted aid from the government.

Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, has prominently taken up the debate over American identity by portraying Harris herself and her policies as outside the mainstream.

Deriding her economic plan as a form of Soviet-style governance, he has continually dubbed her “Comrade Kamala” and recently posted an image online casting the Democratic convention as a communist rally, with Harris as its leader. He has contended that she took on her Black identity only recently, suggesting she is deceitful in presenting herself to the public.

Kamala in 1995, with friend

“He’s trying to ‘other’ Harris” – make her seem alien in her identity and values, said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who opposes Trump. She said Harris had responded in the convention by “leaning into what it means to be an American, how American she is, how she’s a unique American story. And that’s how you overcome, I think, his attempts to ‘other’ her.”

Trump has also proposed the largest mass deportation program ever of people in the U.S. illegally, describing them as a threat to safety and the American way of life.

Vance, meanwhile, used the GOP convention to tell the story of a family rooted to the land for generations, using it to argue in part for protecting the nation’s native-born citizens and their values.

Vance talked about the cemetery in Eastern Kentucky, near his family’s ancestral home in one of the nation’s poorest counties, where he expected to be buried one day next to people born at the time of the Civil War. He put the shared history of the people there at the centre of his vision of America.

“America is not just an idea,” Vance told the Republican convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” While accepting immigrants is part of the American tradition, he said, “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.”

Harris’s convention speech, by contrast, leaned into the idea that her story of a first-generation, bi-racial child advancing to high office embodies America’s promise of offering opportunity to all.

Harris has proposed a sweeping package of tax cuts for parents, aid to first-time home buyers and access to capital for small-business owners that she suggested would help people who had few chances for advancement. “Opportunity is not available to everyone,” she said she learned as a child. “That’s why we will create what I call an opportunity economy, an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.” The two party conventions also offered a more direct engagement in the battle to define American identity. When Hulk Hogan, the retired WrestleMania star, took the stage shortly before Trump accepted the GOP nomination, he wore a shirt that said “Real American.” He then explained what the term meant to him.

“I found out I was in a room full of real Americans,” he said, referring to the convention hall and the loyalty of GOP delegates to Trump. “When Donald J. Trump becomes the president of the United States, all the real Americans are going to be nicknamed Trumpites, because all the Trumpites are going to be running wild for four years,” he said.

Democrats left it to Barack Obama to give the reply. “Donald Trump wants us to think that this country is hopelessly divided between us and them, between real Americans who of course support him and the outsiders who don’t,” the former president told his party’s convention. He urged the audience to reject that idea.

Democrats also responded by trying to paint Trump as the candidate who is outside the mainstream, given his efforts to denigrate Harris and her policies. Michelle Obama, among others, presented Harris’s life story as an example of America’s promise, rather than foreign to it. “It’s the story of the vast majority of Americans trying to build a better life,” the former first lady said.

She added: “No one has a monopoly on what it means to be American.” The convention also put Harris’s great-nieces on stage to explain the correct way to say the candidate’s first name (it is COMM-a-lah) – an implicit rebuke to Trump, who often mispronounces the name and has said “I couldn’t care less” about doing so.

Michelle Obama went further and tried to flip the script on claims by some Trump allies – and amplified by Trump himself – that Harris is a “DEI candidate,” a claim rooted in the belief that minority groups unfairly use racial preferences to advance. She implied that it was Trump who had received special preferences based on his birth that aren’t available to others.

“We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth,” she said.

Vance concluded his speech by saying his family represents “generations of people who have fought for this country, who have built this country, who have made things in this country,” and whose commitment to the country is more concrete than an abstraction or idea. He said that “America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first,” whatever the colour of their skin.

Vance is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, Usha Chilukuri Vance, while Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, immigrated from Slovenia.

The night after Vance spoke, Trump expanded on the details of putting those interests first, promising “massive tax cuts for workers” and new tariffs on imports, among other measures. “We will not let countries come in, take our jobs, and plunder our nation,” Trump said.

His vision of improving America centred in large part on protecting its territorial integrity. He said he would secure the border and deport undocumented immigrants, who he said made the nation more dangerous and who squeezed Black, Latino and union workers out of their jobs. Previously, Trump had accused Biden of allowing migrants into the country to “sign them up to get them to vote in the next election.” “At the heart of the Republican platform is our pledge to end this border nightmare, and fully restore the sacred and sovereign borders of the United States of America,” he said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/campaign-lays-bare-debate-over-what-it-means-to-be-a-real-american/news-story/d3e35b7efac2f9b81cde17aadb0bb228

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Kamala Harris Never Mentioned Inflation In Her Acceptance Speech, And At This Rate, She Never Will

By Robert Romano

Upon accepting the Democratic Party presidential nomination for 2024 on Aug. 22 in President Joe Biden’s stead, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a short speech wherein she never mentioned inflation by name even though it is by far the top issue in the campaign alongside the economy among voters, according to recent polls.

She dared not.

In the most recent Economist-YouGov poll taken Aug. 17 to Aug. 20, inflation and prices still remained the top concern among voters, at 26 percent and the economy and jobs at 10 percent. Immigration is at 13 percent, health care at 9 percent, climate change at 8 percent and abortion at 8 percent.

Among those who said inflation and prices were the top issue in the campaign, Trump leads them by almost 35 points, 61.15 percent to 26.5 percent.

Elsewhere, 47 percent of voters say they are worse off financially than they were a year ago. Among those voters, they break for Trump by more than 44 points, 66.8 percent to 22.5 percent.

Whereas, among those who said they were financially the same as a year ago, 37 percent, they favor Harris by 35 points, 60.8 percent to 25.7 percent. Among those who said they were better off, 15 percent, they favor Harris by more than 68 points, 79.7 percent to 11.5 percent.

That largely breaks down along party lines, with 64 percent of Republicans saying they are worse off and 29 percent of Democrats. Among independents, critically, 44 percent say they are worse off, 37 percent say about the same and 11 percent say better off. 8 percent are unsure.

Critically, 23 percent of Harris supporters say they are worse off. That could create an opening for Trump, since he is talking about the inflation and prices issue. Especially, since by every measure, personal incomes have definitely not kept up with consumer inflation even when government transfer payments are included, only increasing 18.2 percent since Feb. 2021 whereas prices are still up 18.9 percent, according to data respectively collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A good question might be what Harris can say to those who say they are the same or better off but still favor Trump, 22 percent and 4 percent, respectively, without disaffecting those of her own supporters who say they are worse off. To get there, she would need to acknowledge the weak economy.

So far, the way Democrats appear to have chosen to solve this dilemma is simply by not addressing it. But that might only go so far if economic anxiety increases as the election gets closer.

Suffice to say, if the election comes down to better off or worse off, clearly more Americans say they are worse off than better off, and could give Trump a slight edge, especially if he can persuade some of those saying they are no better off or are better off, to ask for their support to help those out who are not doing too well by taking measures to reduce costs and increase production.

And then there is all the spending that has taken place since 2021, including $1.9 trillion on the American Rescue Plan for more helicopter money and another $891 billion of green subsidies in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.

On April 29 at the Economic Opportunity Tour in Atlanta, Ga. Harris stated, unironically, “we are in the process of putting a lot of money in the streets of America…” Trump can ask, does that help inflation?

Trump’s advantage appears to be that he can embrace the economic reality, whereas the polls might suggest Harris might be better off — at least for now — ignoring the plight of Americans suffering through the Biden-Harris economy. For the convention, the betting appeared to be that she can skip past it, banking on enough loyal Democrats and enough independents to get her across the finish line.

It’s a gamble, but Harris won’t think incomes not keeping up with inflation matters until the polls tell her campaign it does, but by then, it might already be too late. Stay tuned

https://dailytorch.com/2024/08/kamala-harris-never-mentioned-inflation-in-her-acceptance-speech-and-at-this-rate-she-never-will/

Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard endorses Donald Trump

I always thought she was too realistic to be a Donk

Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard has given Donald Trump a ringing endorsement for his White House bid, blasting her erstwhile political foe Kamala Harris in a speech in Detroit, days after party scion Robert F Kennedy Jr similarly backed the former president.

Ms Gabbard, who served as a Democrat congresswoman from Hawaii for eight years to 2021, praised Mr Trump, 78, for his foreign policy as president, including his courage to “meet with adversaries, dictators, allies and partners in the pursuit of peace”.

Speaking at a National Guard conference alongside Mr Trump, who is seeking to regain political momentum as Vice-President Ms Harris inches ahead in the polls, Ms Gabbard urged Americans to “stand together to reject this anti-freedom culture of political retaliation and abuse of power”, referring to Democrats’ alleged weaponisation of the courts to prosecute the former president.

“We can’t allow our country to be destroyed by politicians who will put their own power ahead of the interests of the American people, our freedom and our future,” she said in a speech to mark the three-year anniversary of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which 13 American service members were killed in a bomb blast at Kabul airport. “Kamala Harris has done this over the last 3½ years; she won’t hesitate to continue that if she is elected.”

Ms Gabbard, who along with Ms Harris unsuccessfully sought the Democrat nomination for president in 2020, has become a regular fixture on conservative media since she left the party in 2022, slamming it then as an “elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness”.

“I am proud to stand here before you today, whether Democrats or Republican or independent, if you love our country as I do, if you cherish peace and freedom as we do, I invite you to join me in doing all we can to save our country and elect Trump and send him back to the White House,” she told the audience to rounds of applause.

Ms Gabbard, who was considered an outside chance to become Mr Trump’s vice-presidential running mate before he chose Senator JD Vance, has become an outspoken critic of the Biden administration’s foreign policy, citing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine she argues are in part provoked and sustained by the US.

“This admin has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts and brought us closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before … I am confident (Mr Trump’s) first task will be to walk us back from the brink of war,” she said in her remarks.

Mr Trump has enlisted Ms Gabbard, 43, to help him prepare ahead of his scheduled first and possibly only debate with Ms Harris, planned to take place September 10. “He knows the issues. He is very homed in on her record in reminding voters … ‘what have you done for the last 3½ years?’ ” she told Fox last week when asked how Mr Trump’s preparation was going.

In an exchange that went viral in 2019, Ms Gabbard tore into Ms Harris during a Democrat primary debate, arguably derailing the then California senator’s first presidential bid, who like her later dropped out of the race without winning a single delegate. “She put over 1500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” Ms Gabbard said.

Ms Gabbard’s endorsement came as Mr Trump ramps up his campaign appearances including in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this week. Ms Harris and her running mate Tim Walz will launch a bus tour of South Georgia later this week, seeking to extend a political honeymoon during which the 59-year-old has secured a polling lead over Mr Trump since she replaced Joe Biden as Democrat presidential candidate.

With the two major parties’ nominating conventions finished, Ms Harris, who has yet to agree to a press conference or interview since becoming the nominee last month, is leading in the polls by 47 per cent to 43 per cent, according to the latest average by FiveThirtyEight.

Mr Kennedy, a member of America’s storied political clan, suspended his long-shot presidential bid as on Friday and endorsed Mr Trump, injecting new uncertainty into the White House race. The 70-year-old failed to get on the ballot in even half of the 50 US states and his independent candidacy featured a number of twists – including his claim to be suffering from a parasitic brain worm.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/us-politics/former-democrat-tulsi-gabbard-endorses-donald-trump/news-story/0ceaf5adc105f593a6740d78c79f0ad0

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Trump would veto national abortion ban says Vance

Smart move

Donald Trump would veto a national abortion ban, his running-mate, JD Vance, said as their White House campaign tried to regain the initiative after the Democratic convention.

Vance also sought to turn the focus of the election back on to higher food and housing prices as Trump’s pollsters warned of a bounce in the polls for Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president.

Democrats made clear at their convention in Chicago that reproductive rights were a cornerstone of their appeal to voters in November’s election after conservative judges on the US Supreme Court, including three appointed by Trump, overturned the federal right of access.

Vance, 40, told NBC’s Meet The Press that Trump, who has spoken of his pride in enabling the abortion ruling, “wants to end this culture war over this particular topic”.

“If California wants to have a different abortion policy from Ohio, then Ohio has to respect California, and California has to respect Ohio,” Vance said.

“Donald Trump’s view is that we want the individual states and their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities to make these decisions because we don’t want to have a non-stop federal conflict over this issue. The federal government ought to be focused on getting food prices down, getting housing prices down – issues, of course, where Kamala Harris has been a total disaster.”

Abortion is banned in 14 of the country’s 50 states, with some exceptions to save the life of the woman or in cases of rape or incest, with bans at various early stages of pregnancy up to 18 weeks in eight more states.

Pressed on whether Trump would veto a bill for a federal abortion ban across America, Vance said: “If you’re not supporting it as the president of the US, you fundamentally have to veto it.”

Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, told NBC: “American women are not stupid and we are not going to trust the future of our daughters and granddaughters to two men who have openly bragged about blocking access to abortion for women all across this country.”

The Harris campaign said it had raised dollars 540 million in donations following President Biden’s withdrawal on July 21, a huge sum that dwarfed Trump’s fundraising efforts in July of dollars 138.7 million.

Trump will try to get back on the front foot with speeches in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this week while Harris and her running-mate, Tim Walz, will kick off their own tour in Georgia on Wednesday.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/trump-would-veto-national-abortion-ban-says-vance/news-story/f5817c604c72fd94578c625db4006c1e

Monday, August 26, 2024

To get ahead of the curve, the Fed should follow the quantity theory of money

I would have thought that it was bleeding obvious that monetary expansion would be followed by price inflation but I accept that they are talking below about the short to medium term whereas the effects of monetary expansion on prices certainly can take some time to emerge

The tide has suddenly turned on the economics consensus among everyone from Keynesian professors to Wall Street commentators. Their expectations for a soft landing have fallen to earth.

The immediate trigger for the shift and the selloff in equity markets was a run of adverse data last week. It began on Wednesday, with higher claims for unemployment insurance, followed on Thursday by weak purchasing-manager indexes for manufacturing and services. Then on Friday came disappointing nonfarm payroll data and a higher than expected unemployment figure.

To explain why the consensus changed so fast, the economic chattering classes and press have latched onto the Sahm rule. That tool, created by economist Claudia Sahm, correlates an increase in unemployment with the onset of recessions. According to Ms. Sahm’s research, if the unemployment rate climbs by half a percentage point or more relative to its low during the previous 12 months, we will be in the early months of a recession.

This index has identified all recessions since 1953, but Ms. Sahm rightly emphasizes that the rule is only an empirical regularity, not a theory. Since January the unemployment rate has risen from 3.7% to 4.3%, fulfilling the Sahm criterion of a 0.5-point rise. The 3.7% low qualified, as it represents a low that has occurred within the past 12 months. This suggests the economy may already be in a recession.

The Federal Reserve was having none of it last week. On Wednesday, the Federal Open Market Committee held the federal-funds rate steady at 5.25% to 5.5%. Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues are data dependent. Until the data give them confidence that inflation will stay low, or until their full employment objective is threatened, they won’t cut rates. Since we know that changes in monetary policy act with a long lag in affecting inflation or unemployment, a data-dependent Fed will always be behind the curve.

To get ahead of it, the central bank should be basing its decisions on the quantity theory of money, a model that allows for reliable predictions about the course of the economy and inflation over the coming two years. The only people who successfully predicted inflation almost two years ahead of its peak—both in terms of timing and magnitude—were monetary economists.

For more than a year, monetarists have been warning that the economy would likely enter recession this year. That is because the Fed has over-constricted money growth between 2022 and 2024. The stock of money is now lower than it was in July 2022. Since the Fed was established in 1913, such contractions have only occurred on four occasions: in 1920-22, 1929-33, 1937-38 and 1948-49. The second episode resulted in the Great Depression, and recessions followed the other three.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/monetarists-warned-of-a-recession-the-fed-central-bank-quantity-theory-of-money-0b591977

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Trumpenomics: The implications of a second Trump term

David Pearl

As we know, Trump has a powerful – and seemingly debilitating – psychological effect on the great majority of commentators. Very few seem capable of detached, balanced and nuanced analysis.

Many of my fellow economists, the vast majority of whom are politically to the left of centre, have fallen over themselves to denounce Trump’s economics. In June, sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, issued an open letter arguing that Joe Biden’s economic agenda (which no doubt will be replicated by Kamala Harris, if elected) was ‘vastly superior’ to Donald Trump’s.

A second Donald Trump presidency, they asserted, risked ‘reigniting’ inflation given his commitment to raise tariffs and cut taxes, conveniently ignoring the alarming surge in inflation on Biden’s watch. Bizarrely, the laureates suggested that Biden has lowered ‘long-run inflationary pressures’ by subsidising wind and solar energy, which as we know is a proven strategy for raising, rather than cutting, power prices.

Australian economists have been no better, predicting variously that Trump will destroy the international trading system, take control of the Federal Reserve and even, according to one, refuse to leave office once his term is up. (The idea of Trump assuming direct responsibility for monetary policy – and therefore interest rates and inflation – is ridiculous. He may be a lot of things, but he is not stupid).

While the outlines of Trump’s likely agenda are well known, his plans for trade and illegal immigration have received almost all the attention.

Economists have seized on his intention to impose an across-the-board 10-per-cent tariff on US imports, and tariffs of up to 60 per cent on goods from China. While this is understandable, they have typically ignored the bigger policy picture.

Trump is a committed tax reformer, and will want to extend his 2017 personal income tax cuts due to expire in 2025 (these narrowed deductions and lowered rates across most brackets, with the top rate set at 37 per cent). He is likely to call for a further reduction in the corporate tax rate.

And if elected, Trump will comprehensively deregulate the US energy sector, including: removing regulatory restrictions on oil production, natural gas, nuclear power and clean coal; scrapping car emission and electric vehicle mandates; and, once again, pulling the US out of the Paris climate change accord.

How should we characterise Trump’s economic philosophy? His critics have usually described it as populist and protectionist. Sympathisers have characterised it as nationalist-conservative, suggesting Trump favours a big and intrusive government, but dedicated to right-wing instead of progressive causes. In truth, none of these labels fits the bill, or at least not entirely.

While I agree that Trump is no classical free trader, his support for lower taxes and energy deregulation is firmly in the Reagan tradition. True, Reagan deregulated the US finance sector, not energy (although, he famously removed the solar panels his Democrat predecessor Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House roof), but there are parallels between these agendas.

In the 1980s, the economic costs of financial regulations (many dating back to the Depression era) became crushing for the US and other Western economies, raising the cost of capital, misallocating resources on a vast scale and limiting growth. Today, it is the extensive network of energy regulations, designed to force cheap and reliable fossil fuels out of the market, which is doing the most economic harm.

The positive supply-side impacts of Trump’s energy deregulation plans, if realised, are likely to dwarf any negative effect of his tariff agenda. (Remember that for large economies like the US, the costs of protection, while not trivial, are far lower than they are for smaller economies like Australia.)

Fiscal policy provides another parallel between Trump and Reagan. Reagan cut taxes but did not touch entitlement programs, securing the support of millions of working class Democrats.

Trump plans to do the same thing. Before we reach for the smelling salts, we should keep in mind that the US’s international creditors, with China at the forefront, have been only too happy – through their continued purchases of US government bonds – to finance its budget deficits.

Should Australians fear or be optimistic about a second Trump presidency? Leaving aside the simplistic view of his haters, it will be a mixed bag.

While Trump is a protectionist, Kamala Harris is as well (judging by the record of the Biden administration). So there will be broad continuity here. And let’s not panic about Trump’s sabre-rattling on China trade, which in my view is more about positioning him for a bilateral deal than anything else, a two-step strategy he followed during his first term. Back then, of course, Trump exempted Australia from higher steel and aluminium tariffs. Given the weakness of its economy, I have no doubt China will be ready to negotiate.

If trade, under either Trump or Harris, presents some risks, the big policy shift will come in the area of energy. Trump’s plans in this area, if realised, will undermine, perhaps fatally, the global – in truth largely Western – emissions reduction crusade. By delegitimising wind-and-solar ideology, it may free Australia to pursue more rational energy and climate change policies.

This all said, it would be foolish to over-analyse what a second Trump presidency might bring. After all, the Covid pandemic, which arguably cost him the 2020 election, came out of the blue. And with the election still months away and recent polls tightening, Trump is no certainty to take office.

It is intellectually lazy, and an insult to the millions of Americans who will vote for him, to dismiss Trump as a fool or would-be dictator. He is neither.

But nor is he a political messiah. He is flesh and blood, a singular politician to be sure, but a politician nevertheless. His plans on tax and energy, if realised, will deliver enormous gains to the US economy and set a positive policy example for Australia.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/trumpenomics/

Sunday, August 25, 2024

Kamala Harris’s political strategy: vibes in a vacuum

Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention continued the convention’s vibe. It focused mainly on the usual autobiographical sentimentality. My mother… our neighbourhood… and all the heart tuggung emotion of every American political speech. Whose upbringing is not worthy of a sentimental treatment? It’ a good thing that Australia doesn’t have that stylistic obsession.

There were almost no specifics in the Harris speech, but it certainly, and perhaps unexpectedly, reached the right register of love of country and high aspiration.

It wallowed in abstract nouns and mainly got specific when it denounced Donald Trump.

Nonetheless Harris’s speech had a few unexpected wrinkles. First of all, like the whole convention, it was overtly patriotic.

The Republicans have effectively pushed Democrats into a much more explicit embrace of America, its history and ideals, a more muted critique of the ills of American history and society.

There were American flags everywhere. The crowd broke into chants of “USA! USA! USA!”.

That’s cute and quite smart by Democrats, stealing a characteristically Republican chant.

Also, she showcased the new Democrat way of dealing with Trump, to present him in part as a bit of a joke.

“Donald Trump is in many ways an unserious man,” Harris said.

“But the consequences of putting him back in the White House are extremely serious.”

That’s a cleverer combination than Democrats have had in the past. The whole convention focused a lot on the alleged dangers of Trump, but in a less hysterical tone.

Indeed, one of the features of the convention was a series of anti-Trump Republican speakers. Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinziger was especially effective.

The best part of Harris’s speech were a few strong paragraphs on foreign policy. Unexpectedly perhaps, she strongly backed Israel and its right to defend itself but also reasonably labelled what’s happened in Gaza as devastating.

She also said she’d always provide for a powerful US military, “the strongest and most lethal force in the world”, which runs against her quite recent advocacy for cutting defence spending.

She pledged support for Ukraine and criticised Trump for endangering NATO. That was orthodox presidential stuff but she’s never done it before.

Harris hardly mentioned Biden and tried to recapture some of the campaign magic of Barack Obama.

She still offered almost nothing specific on the US economy.

It was still almost entirely about the vibe. A few sentences of substance were welcome but all the more stark because they were so lonely.

Harris thinks she’s going to become president in November. The candidate who couldn’t win a single vote when she ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, who five minutes ago had a lower approval rating than the departing Joe Biden, whose manifest lack of experience and competence was one reason Biden selected her as an unthreatening deputy, thinks she will sweep the board and, to mix the metaphors, surf into the White House on a wave of joy and love and happiness and IVF and abortion.

At least, that’s the message from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

It was a brilliantly produced and nearly flawlessly executed affair, a Hollywood winner, all the more effective because it shifted towards the new fashions in the genre.

All the stars performed. Barack Obama, certainly the most effective political speaker of his generation, and Michelle Obama, licensed to be the angry Democrat. Bill Clinton, fading a little but still with lots of magic. Hillary Clinton, not quite right as ever. And the newly discovered governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, presenting as the folksy goodie nice guy dad, football coach, high school teacher, aw shucks, just the sweetest guy in the room. Biden, like a garrulous grandpa, on the first night talking and talking and talking endlessly, endlessly, endlessly with his old anecdotes and political war stories, until way after midnight, way after not only his bedtime but everybody else’s as well, then sent away from the party, never to be seen again.

And the biggest star of all – Oprah Winfrey! She’s still got it. She was Barack Obama’s most important endorsement in 2008. Some studies say she got him a million votes. She didn’t campaign for Hillary, and look what happened. But now she’s back in the ring for Kamala. “Choose common sense over nonsense,” Winfrey says.

And Kamala herself, intermittently present, still yet to give an unscripted interview since Biden, more than a month ago, announced he would not run again, the most perfectly curated candidate since Robert Redford in The Candidate, offering the most inviting blank canvas for every hope to be written on since Chauncey Gardiner in Being There.

Bill Clinton suggested Harris, who worked in a fast food restaurant as a youngster, would eclipse his record as the president who spent the most time at McDonald’s. Surely this other record, the first new frontrunner candidate for the presidency to go longer than a month after announcing her candidacy without giving a single unscripted interview, is the more significant record.

Former President Bill Clinton devoted a great portion of his speech at the Democratic National Convention to mocking Donald Trump, from his self obsession, his age, even his obsession with Hannibal Lecter.

The Democratic National Convention, while mostly civil in tone and joyous in the way the laughter track on an old 1960s sitcom is joyous, also demonstrated the new hollowness, the intellectual bankruptcy, the sheer echoing emptiness of modern presidential politics, which has become a kind of universal celebrity dancing-with-the-stars performance. There was almost no mention of policy of any kind, barely a line about foreign policy, certainly nothing so otiose as defence policy, until a couple of sentences in Harris’s own convention speech. Similarly, there was nothing about cyber security, budget deficits or any of that boring old yesterday’s stuff, the looking at the past kind of old politics.

Instead, everything was about the vibe, a perfectly conceived series of empty, and often quite dishonest, emotional high points.

There was less Hollywood than in previous Democrat conventions. The politicians still wanted a bit of entertainment glamour, but mostly they mined their own backstories for ersatz glamour. Pete Buttigieg, the Transport Secretary, an impressive performer in anyone’s books, nonetheless said absolutely nothing about transport and spoke instead almost exclusively about his gay marriage.

The first night was all about feminist women celebrating the wonderful identity politics of Harris’s candidacy. To be clear, any background can furnish a good presidential candidate. Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice would have been superb Republican candidates. But do you really vote for someone because of their ethnicity or sex?

Michelle Obama put the biggest stress on black identity politics.

“For years,” she said, “Donald Trump did everything he could to make people fear us. Who is going to tell him the job he is seeking might be one of those black jobs?”

Her reference was to Trump saying that illegal immigrants were taking black and Hispanic jobs. This was a clumsy, even ugly, formulation by Trump, for sure. But his meaning was harmless. Illegal immigrants were taking jobs that African-Americans and Hispanics traditionally occupied in very large numbers. But Michelle Obama labelling the presidency “a black job”, is that really an example of “when they go low, we go high”?

Similarly, there was the first night’s highlight, Hillary Clinton – we put some cracks in that glass ceiling but on the other side of those cracks is Kamala Harris being inaugurated as president!

The Democrats dialled back identity politics a bit, but it’s still central to their pitch.

As well as dialling down identity politics and Hollywood, the Democrats, in a measured and limited way, dialled up God and patriotism.

Everybody seemed to finish their speech with God bless America, which for some years had gone right out of fashion among Democrats. Lots of folks talked about the help of God and going to church. There were several one-line denunciations of anti-Semitism, and only a few of them were accompanied by the formerly obligatory simultaneous denunciation of Islamophobia.

One or two speakers said they wanted the war in Gaza to end as soon as possible, an idea so wonderfully generic that anybody from any party in America could sign up to it.

You could just about see the team of Democrat script writers calibrating everything. There was even just the right amount of anti-Israel demonstrators outside the convention. The presence of left-wing demonstrators helps reassure middle America that the Democrats are not themselves left-wing extremists, but the fact the number of demonstrators is not too big means they won’t generate any real energy against the Democratic ticket on the left.

This was nothing like 1968, when the US commitment to the Vietnam war ripped Democrats apart and there were passionate debates on the convention floor. Nothing happens now at conventions that is not perfectly scripted. As a result conventions are much less meaningful as democratic exercises. The political parties like it like that. No political professional wants an outbreak of real democracy. The DNC was every bit as contrived and artificial as the Republican National Convention a few weeks earlier. Both parties create a kind of fantasy America in which the other side is a mortal threat to democracy and only their party can come to the rescue.

Image is everything. Memes are bankable currency. Democrat congressional leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered a speech that seemed staccato and a bit demented until you realised it was a rap performance designed to go viral, or at least to be a little contagious.

Speaker after speaker labelled Trump, his running mate, JD Vance, and Republicans generally as “weird”, but this too was carefully calibrated. Mostly each speaker, even the big beast former presidents Obama and Clinton, used the word only once, lest the mere repetition of the word weird should start to look weird itself.

Of course, “weird” is a pretty mild insult. Trump himself has been so brutishly and coarsely insulting, indeed childishly insulting, about anyone he doesn’t like at any given moment, and has himself so often said things that are completely untrue, that he has no claims to sympathy over having his honour or reputation trashed.

Nonetheless, it’s important to see when the Democrats are telling the truth, and when they’re telling lies. The Democrat convention trafficked in untruth at three levels.

First, it offered no policies, while claiming to be providing a choice between good government and weirdness. But American politics is now entirely dominated by the dynamics of celebrity. Policy is the last thing anyone talks about.

Second, it pretended the Biden-Harris record simply didn’t exist, or that Harris had no part in its many manifold failures.

Before the convention, Harris outlined some bare scraps of an economic policy. Inflation was too high, she proclaimed, and she would tackle it. Inflation was high, in her view, because of corporate greed and “price gouging”.

In fact, inflation has risen because of the massive increase in government spending that Biden, with Harris as his Vice-President, has driven. Not only that, prices paid by producers have risen as quickly as prices paid by consumers, which means price gouging is the least of all the problems.

The few concrete policies Harris has proposed, such as government-imposed price caps and government-imposed rent increase caps, would be disastrous and have support from virtually no serious economist. Similarly, Harris has said she’ll tackle illegal immigration. Yet the crisis on the Mexican border was entirely created by Biden and Harris.

Third, and perhaps most seriously, the Democrat convention consistently lied about Trump and the Republicans. I don’t mean here shades of grey or exaggerations but just plain outright lies. Almost every third speech, it seemed, mentioned the threat of Republicans not only to absolute legal abortion from conception to birth but also to IVF fertility treatments.

I found this intriguing because I wasn’t aware of any Republican proposal to restrict IVF. It turns out there is no such proposal. Some anti-abortion activists are opposed to IVF because it involves creating and disposing of embryos. No Republican politician is remotely opposed to IVF, certainly not Trump or Vance. There was a court case in Alabama that threw some doubt on IVF’s legality and the state Republicans immediately rushed to make sure it remained legal. Trump and Vance support it, as do more or less all Republicans.

The lie that Republicans plan to ban IVF is so brazen that when you hear it consistently over several days your first reaction is to assume there must be some serious proposal among Republicans to at least restrict IVF. In fact there is none.

Senate Democrats introduced a declaratory bill mandating a national right to IVF, and a similar bill on contraception. Republicans all said they supported IVF but leave the matter to the states, none of which inhibits IVF. So this pure stunt is then used as a justification for a wholly fraudulent claim that Republicans actively plan to outlaw IVF. No wonder so many Americans hate politics.

More here:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/kamala-harriss-political-strategy-vibes-in-a-vacuum/news-story/f32c7261e652f1db4ac9838e6f063e21

Thursday, August 22, 2024

Have I "radicalised"?

Matt Goodwin describes well below the way a half-mad Leftist elite have taken control of the national discourse in Britain -- to a point where policies and procedures very harmful to the average Briton have been put in place.

A major omisssion from what Matt says below, however, is that he fails to take account of the fact that it is only one half of the elite that is Leftist. At election time, at least half of people in elite occupations vote conservative. As ever, it is minorities and the poor who are the support-base of the Left, not the elite as a whole.

So the deeper question about elite influence is how the LEFTIST elite have gained so much power in the media, in the educational system and to some extent in big business?

An answer is complacency. The destructive Leftist policies all have justifications as being kind and caring. And those who are in a position to see the full picture tend to think that the polices sound good so may well spring from real good intentions and should therefore not be opposed. So we badly need writers such as Matt to alert us to how much damage is being done by the ideas of the Leftist elite

“What happened to you, Matt? When did you change your views? When did you become right-wing? When did you become … radical?”

These are questions I’m asked a lot, usually by disgruntled members of the elite class —an assortment of left-wing academics, journalists, and think-tankers I worked with more than a decade ago.

And while this is deliberate, a concerted strategy to try and discredit anybody who challenges the elite consensus, these questions do need answering for two reasons.

First, because I feel an enormous sense of responsibility and obligation to be as truthful as possible to you, my readers and supporters.

And, second, because as one of my favourite writers, Andrew Sullivan, once wrote, this dynamic should really be the other way round.

It’s not me who has radicalised. It’s the elite class.

Today, we are simply living through the greatest radicalisation of the ruling class in Western democracies since at least the 1960s, if not for more than a century.

What do I mean by this?

Well, let’s start with my own views.

I’ve certainly made no secret of the fact that, over the last fifteen years or so, I’ve become more critical of things like mass, uncontrolled immigration.

Why? Because research shows it creates low-trust societies that are more divided, polarised, segregated, less supportive of welfare, and more violent.

I was recently in Sweden, for example, where I did not meet anybody on the left or right who felt their country’s experiment with mass immigration has been a success.

Let me say that again.

I was in Sweden —notoriously liberal, tolerant Sweden— and I could not find a single soul who thought that mass immigration had made their country a nice place to live.

I’ve also become more critical not of multi-ethnic societies per se but rather the state policy of multiculturalism, which encourages different ethnic and religious groups to live separate ‘parallel lives’, rather than integrate into a wider, shared community.

And I’m not alone in this.

More than a decade ago, leaders from across the spectrum —David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Tony Blair— could all say much the same, and in public.

What else do I think?

I reject anti-Muslim prejudice much like I reject anti-Semitism and racism.

But I do have strong and growing concerns about the capacity and willingness of Islam to integrate into West nations, to respect our rule of law, the rights of women and same-sex couples, and to root out violent Islamism among its ranks.

My critics on the left, who have spent much of the last decade inflating terms like “Islamophobia”, will say this is irrational.

But I would say it’s entirely rational after watching violent Islamists blow up 52 of their fellow citizens on London’s Tube and buses, murder British children at a pop concert, execute British soldier Lee Rigby, police officer Keith Palmer, and Member of Parliament Sir David Amess, attempt to blow up a women’s hospital in Liverpool, and stab and murder dozens of other innocents, like pensioner Terence Carney.

Not to mention my confusion about why so few prominent British Muslims, Imams, and others, for years, failed to call out the industrial-scale rape of young white girls at the hands of Pakistani Muslim gangs in dozens of English cities, and when a few brave souls did call this out much of the left said nothing or dismissed them as ‘racist’.

I also believe passionately in free speech but now worry it’s being undermined by a creeping groupthink, political correctness, and cancel culture —a point The Economist, among many others, has also made in recent years.

I think we’re too soft on criminals and would like to see tougher sentencing, especially for repeat offenders who make the lives of their fellow residents and communities miserable and intolerable because we no longer put them where they belong: prison.

I believe that the family, shaped by my own experience of having been raised by divorced parents, is the most important unit in society, that children who are raised by two parents routinely do better in life than those who are not.

I believe that the nation-state is an incredibly powerful source of belonging, pride, and status for most people, that Western nations got more things right than wrong in their history, and that public institutions, especially schools and universities, should ensure this remarkable cultural inheritance is passed down to our children.

And when it comes to economics, I think capitalism is the most successful economic system we’ve managed to create but also think that global corporations, big business and crony capitalists routinely look for ways to exploit workers.

Like many other members of my generation, Gen-X, I came of age during the 1990s and the 2000s, watching globalisation disproportionately damage the working-class in Western economies and then lived through the Global Financial Crash, with few of those responsible for ruining economies and people’s lives facing any consequences.

These views are not extreme. Nor are they particularly radical.

They basically put me where the average voter is. Across the West, all these views are shared by millions, and usually majorities, of ordinary people.

But now look at the elite class.

Look at the university graduates from the elite institutions, who work in financially secure if not well-paid professional jobs, who live in one of the big cities, the affluent commuter suburbs, and the university towns, whose parents also belong to this class, whose marriages and social networks are likewise filled with people from this class, who share the same backgrounds, values, and political loyalties, and who all lean strongly to the political and cultural left.

They’ve radicalised.

Over the last fifteen years, they’ve swung even more sharply to the left, leaving a large number of people scratching their heads, asking themselves the same question.

What the hell happened to the ruling class, to the people who dominate the most important and influential institutions in my country, who claim to speak on my behalf?

Writing on his deathbed in the early 1990s, the academic Christopher Lasch once said that the revolt that was about to commence in the West would not see the masses revolting against elites but elites revolting against the masses.

And he was right; this is exactly what is now happening around us.

Increasingly, our societies are being radically reshaped around the values, beliefs, tastes, and priorities of a radicalising minority elite, rather than the wider majority.

Just look at where the elite class is today compared to where it was, say, ten or fifteen years ago, and compared to where many ordinary people, like me, still are today.

While large majorities of people in the West, like me, think mass, uncontrolled immigration is unsustainable and damaging Western economies, culture, and ways of life, today’s elite class, as we saw in its reaction to things like Europe’s refugee crisis, Brexit, Trump, and the recent immigration protests in the UK, has now radicalised to such an extent that it views any criticism of this policy, any criticism at all, as tantamount to ‘racism’ and ‘hate’.

Whereas only a few years ago, the likes of Cameron, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Blair could talk openly about the failure of state multiculturalism, triggering a useful debate, today’s elite class, including even Conservatives, could not even handle the likes of Suella Braverman making the very same point without having a complete nervous breakdown and catastrophising about the possible return of fascism.

Similarly, whereas in the aftermath of the terrorist atrocities on 9/11 and 7/7 we could just about have a reasonable debate about how best to integrate newcomers, prevent Islamist terror, and encourage ‘community cohesion’, however flawed those ideas were, today, after things like the murder of children at an Ariana Grande pop concert and the murder of Sir David Amess, the elite class has a total meltdown and insists that we either hold hands and sing ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ or have a completely irrelevant debate about ‘online safety’ and how to ‘be nice’ on social media.

Compare and contrast, too, the reaction to urban disturbances in England’s northern towns, in 2001, with the reaction to the immigration protests this year. Whereas only twenty years ago, the elite class was capable of talking openly about the underlying cause, the fact minority (mainly Muslim) communities were living ‘parallel lives’, and that our model of multiculturalism was very clearly failing, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent it is incapable to talking about the cause at all.

So far, weeks on from the rioting and protests, for example, the elite class has still said nothing at all about the root cause of the immigration protests, preferring instead to view them simply and narrowly through the prism of criminality while deriding much of the rest of the country as ‘far-right thugs’ and desperately searching for new ways to curtail free speech and shut down any debate. Today’s elite class, in other words, has radicalised to such an extent it is now completely incapable of even leading a national debate that might give voice to views which challenge the elite consensus.

While many people in the West, meanwhile, like me, used to think that a level of net migration of 150,000 a year was too high —a view, by the way, shared by much of the elite class as recently as fifteen years ago— today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that whether on the right or left it now has no problem at all with pushing this number to an eye-watering 700,000 a year while continuously breaking manifesto promises to lower the overall number. The elite class, in short, has morphed from accepting it made mistakes on this issue to now just lying to the British people.

In the 2000s, New Labour politicians could talk openly and honestly about the urgent need to regain control of the borders and swiftly remove illegal migrants from the country; but today, in sharp contrast, the elite class is falling over itself to grant amnesty to nearly 100,000 illegal migrants while branding anybody who talks about ‘stopping the boats’ as ‘far-right’ and blaming them for the outbreak of rioting.

I mean, seriously, am I supposed to be the person who has radicalised here?

While many people in the West, like me, think free speech should be protected and promoted, today’s elite class, as we see through the spread of a chilling cancel culture, an oppressive political correctness, and online mobbings of anybody who dissents on social media, is routinely willing to sacrifice free speech on the altar of ‘social justice’ and protecting minorities from what it calls ‘emotional harm’. Routinely, major surveys now find that the left-leaning elites who dominate universities and other public institutions are the most willing of all to say they’d compromise on free speech and free expression if it means greater protection for minority groups, which helps to explain why they are so eager to shut down voices like mine.

While many people in the West, like me, still think Western liberal societies should be organised around individual rights, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that it actively subordinates individual rights behind people’s fixed group identities. The only thing that really matters to today’s elite class, which is now falling over itself to impose ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ policies on pretty much every institution and government department, is not our individual achievements and character but merely what fixed identity group we belong to. Do we belong to one of the morally superior ‘oppressed’ racial, sexual, or gender minority groups? Or do we belong to the morally inferior ‘oppressor’ majority group, which should be treated with suspicion, if not contempt? Everything, increasingly, flows from these questions.

Even worse, while many people, like me, believe that a child’s early years should be about joy, play, and a politically neutral education, today’s elite class now appears absolutely determined to sexualise and racialise our children, exposing them to radical ideologies that have no serious basis in science and then complaining about the rise of ‘culture wars’ when mums and dads ask entirely legitimate questions about why their child is being taught there are 72 genders, divided into separate ‘racial affinity’ groups in class, or to hate their country, its history, and culture.

While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the critical importance of debating in good faith and ensuring there is a diverse range of opinions in the institutions and national debate, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent it can no longer tolerate any dissent at all, which again you see in the authoritarian reaction to people like me. Consistently, the elite class has launched an assault on contrarian thinkers, demanded that alternative television channels like GB News, and social media platforms like Twitter/X be shut down, failed to stop unorthodox gender critical and conservative scholars from being kicked out of universities, and is now increasingly using ‘hate laws’, ‘non-hate crime incidents’ and opposition to ‘legal but harmful’ views to essentially shut down alternative perspectives it does not like.

What happened to me, you ask? No. What the hell happened to you.

Support Matt's Work

While many people in the West, like me, think we should treat people from different racial, ethnic, and religious groups equally before the law, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that, as we’ve seen in its reaction to the immigration protests, the marches after the hideous attacks on Israel on October 7th attack, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the ongoing failure to address ‘Muslim grooming gangs’, it’s now more than happy to treat minorities more favourably than the majority, or simply remain silent when some people from minority backgrounds flagrantly violate our children, laws, and ways of life.

While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the superiority of Western civilisation and Enlightenment values, and on balance think the West got more right than wrong in its history, today’s elite class, which is supposed to value nuance, evidence, and reason, has now become utterly obsessed with feeding its own sense of moral righteousness and narcissism by trying to convince us that everything from our history to science, from cricket to the countryside, are mere manifestations of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘structural racism’. Increasingly, they hate who we are to try and win more social status, esteem, and prestige for themselves, from other elites.

While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the critical importance of a politically independent and ideologically diverse media that prioritises truth, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that once respected legacy media like the BBC, the New York Times, and Financial Times, have morphed into platforms for hyper-political activists who prioritise ideological dogma over truth and reason.

And in the universities, too, I spent much of the last decade watching things like the Grievance Studies Affair and the shocking harassment and sacking of scholars who challenge the consensus, like Kathleen Stock and Roland Fryer, all of which made it obvious that the academy is now openly corrupt, highly politicised, and much more interested in prioritising left-wing dogma over evidence and reason —shocking cases, by the way, about which my critics said … absolutely nothing at all.

While many people in the West, like me, think we should be led by the kind of evidence and logic that underpinned the UK’s Cass Review into what was happening to children in hospitals, which pointed out there was insufficient evidence to be pushing children onto things like ‘puberty blockers’, the elite class today has become so radical that it’s no longer interested in evidence that challenges its worldview at all. Routinely, as we still see in healthcare and education, the so-called ‘expert class’ still put emotional blackmail, superstition, and dogma before empirical evidence, even when it involves the medical treatment (read: mutilation) of our children.

While many people in the West, like me, certainly think voters can be misled but ultimately see them as rational beings capable of making up their own minds, today’s elite class now trace any political outcome it doesn’t like, whether at elections or referendums, to “misinformation”, all while trying to tell us with a straight face that boys can become girls and girls can become boys, or that things like Brexit and Trump were caused by Russia. Who is spreading “misinformation” here?

And while many people in the West, like me, think that people voting for things we don’t like is a bit annoying but perfectly acceptable in a democracy, today’s elite class, as we’ve seen in its reaction to things like Brexit, Trump, Boris Johnson, and fourteen years of pro-immigration liberal Tory government, has radicalised to such a degree that it now genuinely appears to believe it is living amid a fascist uprising, that the West is on the cusp of morphing into something that resembles the Third Reich.

In some other galaxy, where the elite class is just a fringe group of oddball people who have no influence over society, these views might not matter. But because the elite class dominate the most important and influential institutions, it’s used its immense social and cultural power to impose this narrow, illiberal and radical worldview on the rest of us —on ‘meaning making’ institutions like schools, universities, government departments, healthcare systems, legacy media, and creative and cultural industries.

This is deeply problematic because while the elite class likes to think of itself as representing the beating heart of the nation, the blunt reality, as major surveys show, is that most of its views are only held by a maximum of 10-15% of people in the West.

This is why, today, a much larger number of people are looking at the radicalisation of the elite class with a combination of bemusement, shock, and, increasingly, horror, wondering what the hell happened to the people who are ruling over them, claiming to speak on their behalf.

While my critics certainly don’t like it, the blunt reality is that many of these ordinary people are much closer to my views than the radicalising views of the elite class, and yet writers like me who challenge if not oppose the elite consensus are now framed as radical outliers. But as Andrew Sullivan said, this is the wrong way round. It is the elite class that is now the radical outlier.

The real story here, the story my critics routinely ignore or get wrong, is actually not about me at all. It is about the radicalisation of the elite class, a minority radical elite that is imposing its values on the rest of society while simultaneously expecting ordinary people not to notice and certainly not dare say anything about it.

Mass uncontrolled immigration. Broken borders. Segregation. The rise of violent Islamism. A stifling political correctness. Woke ideology. The dismissal of biology, empirical evidence, and scientific fact. The closing down of free speech and the public square. The repudiation of our history, culture, and ways of life. And the general hatred and class prejudice that’s now hurled at millions of ordinary people when they happen to vote for, or say, the wrong thing.

When did I radicalise, you say?

You must be joking. When the hell did YOU radicalise.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/have-i-radicalised

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Wednesday, August 21, 2024

NOTE

I underwent two lots of minor surgery today so I am not feeling up to blogging. Hope to be back on deck tomorrow

BACKGROUND

Home (Index page)

A simple definiton: Conservatism is all about preserving traditions and resisting sudden change

Deep down: The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

Leftists use the rest of us as a tool to make themselves feel better

The extreme Right are actually the extreme Left

"Social justice" is inherently tyrannical

Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party. And now a "Deplorable"

When it comes to political incorrectness, I hit the trifecta. I talk about race, IQ and social class. I have an academic background in all three subjects but that wins me no forgiveness

Access past and present backups for all my current blogs

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

My annual picture page

Subject index to my academic journal articles

Consolidated list of links to all my writings

The sidebar entries here had become very extensive. I have therefore divided them into two. The first half is below and the second half is here -- including some comments on Jews

References to "Leftists" below are to preachers of Leftism, not the ordinary Leftist voter

As a good academic, I define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not.

So an essential feature of Leftism is that they think they have the right to tell other people what to do. They see things in the world that are not ideal and conclude therefore that they have the right to change those things by force. Conservative explanations of why things are not ideal -- and never can be -- fall on deaf ears

That Left and Right are so hostile to one-another is most unfortunate. Broadly, the world needs Leftists to highlight problems and conservatives to solve them. But the Left get angry with conservatives when conservatives point out that there are no good solutions to some problems

Conservatism is as much a respect for reality as a respect for tradition. But tradition summarizes a lot of reality. So conservative thinking must change as reality changes. There is no unchanging body of doctrine in conservatism. Conservatism is an attitude, a realistic attitude. Leftists, by contrast, believe whatever suits them, reality regardless

Giorgia dal Italia -- my favourite politician

What the Left routinely forgets: As Henry Hazlitt pointed out: “The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.”

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities,” -- Voltaire.

Social justice is injustice. What is just about taking money off people who have earned it and giving it to people who have not earned it? You can call it many things but justice it is not

But it is the aim of all Leftist governments to take money off people who have earned it and give it to people who have not earned it

Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, 'social justice.’ - Thomas Sowell

At the most basic (psychological) level, conservatives are the contented people and Leftists are the discontented people. Conservatives don't think the world is perfect but they can happily live with it. And both those attitudes are largely dispositional, inborn -- which is why they so rarely change

Revolution is the ultimate desideratum for Leftists

Patriotism is a happy thing. No wonder Leftists have difficulties with it

Leftists' manifest desire is to destroy their country from the inside with division and hatred

The Left Doesn't Like Christmas because Christmas is just too happy for them

Former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo switched from Democrat to the Republican Party, saying, “A conservative is a liberal who was mugged the night before.”

Who is this Leftist? Take his description of his political program: A "declaration of war against the order of things which exist, against the state of things which exist, in a word, against the structure of the world which presently exists". You could hardly get a more change-oriented or revolutionary programme than that. So whose programme was it? Marx? Lenin? Stalin? Trotsky? Mao? No. It was how Hitler described his programme towards the end of "Mein Kampf". And the Left pretend that Hitler was some sort of conservative! Perhaps it not labouring the point also to ask who it was that described his movement as having a 'revolutionary creative will' which had 'no fixed aim, _ no permanency, only eternal change'. It could very easily have been Trotsky or Mao but it was in fact Hitler (O'Sullivan, 1983. p. 138). Clearly, Nazism was nothing more nor less than a racist form of Leftism (rather extreme Leftism at that) and to label it as "Rightist" or anything else is to deny reality.

A rarely acknowledged aim of Leftist policy in a democracy is to deliver dismay and disruption into the lives other people -- whom they regard as "complacent" -- and they are good at achieving that.

As usual, however, it is actually they who are complacent, with a conviction of the rightness and virtue of their own beliefs that merges into arrogance. They regard anyone who disagrees with them with contempt.

Leftists are wolves in sheep's clothing

Liberals are people who don't believe in liberty

Leftist principles are as solid as foam rubber. When they say that there is no such thing as right and wrong they really mean it.

Leftists FEAR the future

There is no dealing with the Left. Their word is no good. You cannot make a deal with someone who thinks lying and stealing are mere tactics, which the Marxists actually brag about

Montesquieu knew Leftists well: "There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice."

Because they claim to have all the answers to society's ills, Communists often seem "cool" to young people

German has a word that describes most Leftists well: "Scheinheilig" - A person who appears to be very kind, soft natured, and filled with pure goodness but behind the facade, has a vile nature. He is seemingly holy but is an unscrupulous person on the inside.

The new faith is very oppressive: Leftist orthodoxy is the new dominant religion of the Western world and it is every bit as bigoted and oppressive as Christianity was at its worst

There are two varieties of authoritarian Leftism. Fascists are soft Leftists, preaching one big happy family -- "Better together" in other words. Communists are hard Leftists, preaching class war.

Equality: The nonsensical and incoherent claim that underlies so much Leftist discourse is "all men are equal". And that is the envier's gospel. It makes not a scrap of sense and shows no contact with reality but it is something that enviers resort to as a way of soothing their envious feelings. They deny the very differences that give them so much heartburn. "Denial" was long ago identified by Freud as a maladaptive psychological defence mechanism and "All men are equal" is a prize example of that. Whatever one thinks of his theories, Freud was undoubtedly an acute observer of people and very few psychologists today would doubt the maladaptive nature of denial as described by Freud.

Socialism is the most evil malady ever to afflict the human brain. The death toll in WWII alone tells you that

“Hanlon’s razor”: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

American conservatives have to struggle to hold their country together against Leftist attempts to destroy it. Maduro's Venezuela is a graphic example of how extremely destructive socialism in government can be

The standard response from Marxist apologists for Stalin and other Communist dictators is to say you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. To which Orwell retorted, ‘Where’s the omelette?’

You do still occasionally see some mention of the old idea that Leftist parties represent the worker. In the case of the U.S. Democrats that is long gone. Now they want to REFORM the worker. No wonder most working class Americans these days vote Republican. Democrats are the party of the minorities and the smug

"The tendency of liberals is to create bodies of men and women — of all classes — detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion — mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined." —T.S. Eliot

We live in a country where the people own the Government and not in a country where the Government owns the people -- Churchill

"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others" -- Cicero. See here

The Left have a lot in common with tortoises. They have a thick mental shell that protects them from the reality of the world about them

Definition of a Socialist: Someone who wants everything you have...except your job.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

One cheer for Jon Burge

Leftist writers usually seem quite reasonable and persuasive at first glance. The problem is not what they say but what they don't say. Leftist beliefs are so counterfactual ("all men are equal", "all men are brothers" etc.) that to be a Leftist you have to have a talent for blotting out from your mind facts that don't suit you. And that is what you see in Leftist writing: A very selective view of reality. Facts that disrupt a Leftist story are simply ignored. Leftist writing is cherrypicking on a grand scale

So if ever you read something written by a Leftist that sounds totally reasonable, you have an urgent need to find out what other people say on that topic. The Leftist will almost certainly have told only half the story

Leftists commonly have the Cyclops syndrome: to see with only one eye, in only one dimension and only half of reality.

We conservatives have the facts on our side, which is why Leftists never want to debate us and do their best to shut us up. It's very revealing the way they go to great lengths to suppress conservative speech at universities. Universities should be where the best and brightest Leftists are to be found but even they cannot stand the intellectual challenge that conservatism poses for them. It is clearly a great threat to them. If what we say were ridiculous or wrong, they would grab every opportunity to let us know it

A conservative does not hanker after the new; He hankers after the good. Leftists hanker after the untested

Just one thing is sufficient to tell all and sundry what an unamerican lamebrain Obama is. He pronounced an army corps as an army "corpse" Link here. Can you imagine any previous American president doing that? Many were men with significant personal experience in the armed forces in their youth.

'Gay Pride' parades: You know you live in a great country when "oppressed" people have big, colorful parades.

A favorite Leftist saying sums up the whole of Leftism: "To make an omelette, you've got to break eggs". They want to change some state of affairs and don't care who or what they destroy or damage in the process. They think their alleged good intentions are sufficient to absolve them from all blame for even the most evil deeds

In practical politics, the art of Leftism is to sound good while proposing something destructive

Leftists are the "we know best" people, meaning that they are intrinsically arrogant. Matthew chapter 6 would not be for them. And arrogance leads directly into authoritarianism

Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?

And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr Obama

That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His clever short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"

Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out

Insight: "A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him." —Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Leftists think of themselves as the new nobility

Many people in literary and academic circles today who once supported Stalin and his heirs are generally held blameless and may even still be admired whereas anybody who gave the slightest hint of support for the similarly brutal Hitler regime is an utter polecat and pariah. Why? Because Hitler's enemies were "only" the Jews whereas Stalin's enemies were those the modern day Left still hates -- people who are doing well for themselves materially. Modern day Leftists understand and excuse Stalin and his supporters because Stalin's hates are their hates.

"Those who see hate everywhere think they're looking thru a window when actually they're looking at a mirror"

Hatred has long been a central pillar of leftist ideologies, premised as they are on trampling individual rights for the sake of a collectivist plan. Karl Marx boasted that he was “the greatest hater of the so-called positive.” In 1923, V.I. Lenin chillingly declared to the Soviet Commissars of Education, “We must teach our children to hate. Hatred is the basis of communism.” In his tract “Left-Wing Communism,” Lenin went so far as to assert that hatred was “the basis of every socialist and Communist movement.”

Karl Marx in his own words

If you understand that Leftism is hate, everything falls into place.

The strongest way of influencing people is to convince them that you will do them some good. Leftists and con-men misuse that

Leftists believe only what they want to believe. So presenting evidence contradicting their beliefs simply enrages them. They do not learn from it

Psychological defence mechanisms such as projection play a large part in Leftist thinking and discourse. So their frantic search for evil in the words and deeds of others is easily understandable. The evil is in themselves.

Leftists who think that they can conjure up paradise out of their own limited brains are simply fools -- arrogant and dangerous fools. They essentially know nothing. Conservatives learn from the thousands of years of human brains that have preceded us -- including the Bible, the ancient Greeks and much else. The death of Socrates is, for instance, an amazing prefiguration of the intolerant 21st century. Ask any conservative stranded in academe about his freedom of speech

Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Leftists don't understand that -- which is a major factor behind their simplistic thinking. They just never see the trade-offs. But implementing any Leftist idea will hit us all with the trade-offs

Chesteron's fence -- good conservative thinking

"The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley"[go oft astray] is a well known line from a famous poem by the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns. But the next line is even wiser: "And leave us nought but grief and pain for promised joy". Burns was a Leftist of sorts so he knew how often their theories fail badly.

Mostly, luck happens when opportunity meets preparation.

Most Leftist claims are simply propaganda. Those who utter such claims must know that they are not telling the whole story. Hitler described his Marxist adversaries as "lying with a virtuosity that would bend iron beams". At the risk of ad hominem shrieks, I think that image is too good to remain disused.

Conservatives adapt to the world they live in. Leftists want to change the world to suit themselves

ABOUT

Many people hunger and thirst after righteousness. Some find it in the hatreds of the Left. Others find it in the love of Christ. I don't hunger and thirst after righteousness at all. I hunger and thirst after truth. How old-fashioned can you get?

The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"

UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.

I imagine that few of my readers will understand it, but I am an unabashed monarchist. And, as someone who was born and bred in a monarchy and who still lives there (i.e. Australia), that gives me no conflicts at all. In theory, one's respect for the monarchy does not depend on who wears the crown but the impeccable behaviour of the present Queen does of course help perpetuate that respect.

I imagine that most Americans might find this rather mad -- but I believe that a constitutional Monarchy is the best form of government presently available. Can a libertarian be a Monarchist? I think so -- and prominent British libertarian Sean Gabb seems to think so too! Long live the Queen! (And note that Australia ranks well above the USA on the Index of Economic freedom. Heh!)

The Australian flag with the Union Jack quartered in it

Throughout Europe there is an association between monarchism and conservatism. It is a little sad that American conservatives do not have access to that satisfaction. So even though Australia is much more distant from Europe (geographically) than the USA is, Australia is in some ways more of an outpost of Europe than America is! Mind you: Australia is not very atypical of its region. Australia lies just South of Asia -- and both Japan and Thailand have greatly respected monarchies. And the demise of the Cambodian monarchy was disastrous for Cambodia

Throughout the world today, possession of a U.S. or U.K. passport is greatly valued. I once shared that view. Developments in recent years have however made me profoundly grateful that I am a 5th generation Australian. My Australian passport is a door into a much less oppressive and much less messed-up place than either the USA or Britain

Following the Sotomayor precedent, I would hope that a wise older white man such as myself with the richness of that experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than someone who hasn’t lived that life.

"Remind me never to get this guy mad at me" -- Instapundit

It seems to be a common view that you cannot talk informatively about a country unless you have been there. I completely reject that view but it is nonetheless likely that some Leftist dimbulb will at some stage aver that any comments I make about politics and events in the USA should not be heeded because I am an Australian who has lived almost all his life in Australia. I am reluctant to pander to such ignorance in the era of the "global village" but for the sake of the argument I might mention that I have visited the USA 3 times -- spending enough time in Los Angeles and NYC to get to know a fair bit about those places at least. I did however get outside those places enough to realize that they are NOT America.

"Intellectual" = Leftist dreamer. I have more publications in the academic journals than almost all "public intellectuals" but I am never called an intellectual and nor would I want to be. Call me a scholar or an academic, however, and I will accept either as a just and earned appellation

Some personal background

My full name is Dr. John Joseph RAY. I am a former university teacher aged 80 at the time of writing in 2024. I was born of Australian pioneer stock in 1943 at Innisfail in the State of Queensland in Australia. I trace my ancestry wholly to the British Isles. After an early education at Innisfail State Rural School and Cairns State High School, I taught myself for matriculation. I took my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. I then moved to Sydney (in New South Wales, Australia) and took my M.A. in psychology from the University of Sydney in 1969 and my Ph.D. from the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1974. I first tutored in psychology at Macquarie University and then taught sociology at the University of NSW. My doctorate is in psychology but I taught mainly sociology in my 14 years as a university teacher. In High Schools I taught economics. I have taught in both traditional and "progressive" (low discipline) High Schools. Fuller biographical notes here

I completed the work for my Ph.D. at the end of 1970 but the degree was not awarded until 1974 -- due to some academic nastiness from Seymour Martin Lipset and Fred Emery. A conservative or libertarian who makes it through the academic maze has to be at least twice as good as the average conformist Leftist. Fortunately, I am a born academic.

Despite my great sympathy and respect for Christianity, I am the most complete atheist you could find. I don't even believe that the word "God" is meaningful. I am not at all original in that view, of course. Such views are particularly associated with the noted German philosopher Rudolf Carnap. Unlike Carnap, however, none of my wives have committed suicide

In my teenage years, however, I was fortunate to be immersed (literally) in a very fundamentalist Christian religion. And the heavy Bible study I did at that time left me with lessons for life that have stood me in good stead ever since

Very occasionally in my writings I make reference to the greats of analytical philosophy such as Carnap and Wittgenstein. As philosophy is a heavily Leftist discipline however, I have long awaited an attack from some philosopher accusing me of making coat-trailing references not backed by any real philosophical erudition. I suppose it is encouraging that no such attacks have eventuated but I thought that I should perhaps forestall them anyway -- by pointing out that in my younger days I did complete three full-year courses in analytical philosophy (at 3 different universities!) and that I have had papers on mainstream analytical philosophy topics published in academic journals

IQ and ideology: Most academics are Left-leaning. Why? Because very bright people who have balls go into business, while very bright people with no balls go into academe. I did both with considerable success, which makes me a considerable rarity. Although I am a born academic, I have always been good with money too. My share portfolio even survived the GFC in good shape. The academics hate it that bright people with balls make more money than them.

I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak. Some might conclude that I must therefore be a very confused sort of atheist but I can assure everyone that I do not feel the least bit confused. The New Testament is a lighthouse that has illumined the thinking of all sorts of men and women and I am deeply grateful that it has shone on me.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age. Conservatism is in touch with reality. Leftism is not.

I imagine that the RD are still sending mailouts to my 1950s address

Most teenagers have sporting and movie posters on their bedroom walls. At age 14 I had a map of Taiwan on my wall.

A small personal note: I have always been very self-confident. I inherited it from my mother, along with my skeptical nature. So I don't need to feed my self-esteem by claiming that I am wiser than others -- which is what Leftists do.

As with conservatives generally, it bothers me not a bit to admit to large gaps in my knowledge and understanding. For instance, I don't know if the slight global warming of the 20th century will resume in the 21st, though I suspect not. And I don't know what a "healthy" diet is, if there is one. Constantly-changing official advice on the matter suggests that nobody knows

As well as being an academic, I am an army man and I am pleased and proud to say that I have worn my country's uniform. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.

It would be very easy for me to say that I am too much of an individual for the army but I did in fact join the army and enjoy it greatly, as most men do. In my observation, ALL army men are individuals. It is just that they accept discipline in order to be militarily efficient -- which is the whole point of the exercise. But that's too complex for simplistic Leftist thinking, of course

A real army story here

It's amusing that my army service gives me honour among conservatives but contempt from Leftists. I don't weep at all about the latter. I am still in touch with some of the fine people I served with over 50 years ago. The army is like that

This is just a bit of romanticism but I do have permanently located by the head of my bed a genuine century-old British army cavalry sword. It is still a real weapon. I was not in the cavalry but I see that sword as a symbol of many things. I want it to be beside my bed when I die

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and there is JUST ONE saying of Hitler's that I rather like. It may not even be original to him but it is found in chapter 2 of Mein Kampf (published in 1925): "Widerstaende sind nicht da, dass man vor ihnen kapituliert, sondern dass man sie bricht". The equivalent English saying is "Difficulties exist to be overcome" and that traces back at least to the 1920s -- with attributions to Montessori and others. Hitler's metaphor is however one of smashing barriers rather than of politely hopping over them and I am myself certainly more outspoken than polite. Hitler's colloquial Southern German is notoriously difficult to translate but I think I can manage a reasonable translation of that saying: "Resistance is there not for us to capitulate to but for us to break". I am quite sure that I don't have anything like that degree of determination in my own life but it seems to me to be a good attitude in general anyway

And something that was perceptive comes from the same chapter. Hitler said that the doctrines of the interwar Social Democrats (mainstream leftists) of Vienna were "comprised of egotism and hate". Not much has changed

I have used many sites to post my writings over the years and many have gone bad on me for various reasons. So if you click on a link here to my other writings you may get a "page not found" response if the link was put up some time before the present. All is not lost, however. All my writings have been reposted elsewhere. If you do strike a failed link, just take the filename (the last part of the link) and add it to the address of any of my current home pages and -- Voila! -- you should find the article concerned.

COMMENTS: I have gradually added comments facilities to all my blogs. The comments I get are interesting. They are mostly from Leftists and most consist either of abuse or mere assertions. Reasoned arguments backed up by references to supporting evidence are almost unheard of from Leftists. Needless to say, I just delete such useless comments.

You can email me here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR" -- and that preference has NOTHING to do with an American soap opera that featured a character who was referred to in that way

SIDEBAR EXTENSION HERE

DETAILS OF REGULARLY UPDATED BLOGS BY JOHN RAY:

"Tongue Tied"
"Dissecting Leftism"
"Australian Politics"
"Education Watch International"
"Political Correctness Watch"
"Greenie Watch"
Western Heart

BLOGS OCCASIONALLY UPDATED:

"Marx & Engels in their own words"
"A scripture blog"
"Recipes"
"Some memoirs"
To be continued ....
Coral reef compendium.
Queensland Police
Australian Police News
Paralipomena (3)
Of Interest
Dagmar Schellenberger
My alternative Wikipedia

BLOGS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED

"Food & Health Skeptic"
"Eye on Britain"
"Immigration Watch International".
"Leftists as Elitists"
Socialized Medicine
OF INTEREST (2)
QANTAS -- A dying octopus
BRIAN LEITER (Ladderman)
Obama Watch
Obama Watch (2)
Dissecting Leftism -- Large font site
Michael Darby
Paralipomena (2)
AGL -- A bumbling monster
Telstra/Bigpond follies
Optus bungling
Vodafrauds (vodafone)
Bank of Queensland blues

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Some more useful links

Alt archives for "Dissecting Leftism" here or here
Longer Academic Papers
Johnray links
Academic home page
Academic Backup Page
General Backup
General Backup 2
Dagmar Schellenberger
My alternative Wikipedia

Selected reading

MONOGRAPH ON LEFTISM

CONSERVATISM AS HERESY

A COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF NAZISM

Rightism defined
Leftist Churches
Leftist Racism
Fascism is Leftist
Hitler a socialist
Leftism is authoritarian
James on Leftism
Irbe on Leftism
Beltt on Leftism
Lakoff
Van Hiel
Sidanius
Kruglanski
Pyszczynski et al.

Cautionary blogs about big Australian organizations:

TELSTRA
OPTUS
VODAFONE
AGL
Bank of Queensland
Queensland Police
Australian police news
QANTAS, a dying octopus

INTERESTING BLOGS by others
(My frequent reads are starred)

10 o'clock scholar
Agitator*
AMCGLTD
American Thinker
ASTUTE BLOGGERS
Baby Troll
Bad Eagle
Belmont Club*
Betsy's Page
Bill Keezer
Blackfive
Bleeding Brain
BLOGGER NEWS
Blowhards
Bob McCarty
Booker Rising
Brian Leiter scrutinized
Brothers Judd*
Brussels Journal
Bullied and Badgered, Pressured and Purged
Bureaucrash
Candle in dark
Catallarchy*
Classical Values
Clayton Cramer*
Climate audit
Climate science
Colby Cosh
Cold Fury
Common-sense & Wonder*
Community Pride Childcare
(Clearwater, Florida)
Confront the Left
Conservative Grapevine
Conservative Oasis
Conservative Political Forum
Conservatives Anonymous
Critical Mass
Cronaca*
Daily Caller
Danegerus
Dead Cat Bounce
Dean's World
Dhimmi Watch
Discover the networks
Discriminations
Dodge Blog
Dr Helen
Dr Sanity
Drunkablog
Ed Driscoll
Dyspepsia
Eddy Rants
Electric Venom
Endiana
Enter Stage Right
Eugene Undergound
Evangelical Ecologist
Fighting in the Shade
Find the best gun
Fourth Rail
Free Patriot
Gates of Vienna
Gay and Right
Gene Expression*
Ghost of Flea
Global warming & Climate
Gold Dog
Grumpy Old Sod
Hack Wilson
Hall of Record
Heretical Ideas
Hitler's Leftism
Hugh Hewitt
Hummers & Cigarettes
IMAO
Icecap
Inductivist
Instapunk
Intellectual Conservative
Interested Participant
Jihad Watch
Jim Kalb
Junk Food science
Junk Science
Just One Minute
KBJ
Knowledge is Power
Ladybird Deed
La Shawn
Laudator
Libertyphile
Lone Wacko
Lubos Motl
Luskin
MA firearm safety
Main Street Radical
Mangan
Margaret Thatcher Foundation
Maverick Philosopher
Medicine World
Michelle Malkin
Moderate Voice
Moorewatch
National Center
National Scene
Neo Con Blogger
Never Yet Melted
New Zeal
Northeastern Intelligence Network
Not PC
On the Right Side
Orator
Overlawyered
Parable Man
ParaPundit*
Pedestrian Infidel
Poli Pundit
Prof Bainbridge
Promethean Antagonist
Qando
Qohel
Random Observations
Rand Simberg
Random Jottings
Red State
Rhodey
Rhymes with Right
Right Nation
Right Thinking
Right Wing news
Roadkill
Ron Hebron
Rottweiler
Schansberg
SCSU Scholars*
Sharp Blades
Sharp Knife
Should Know
Shrinkwrapped
Silent Running
Smallest Minority
Squander 2
Steve Sailer
Stop the ACLU
Stuart Buck
Talking Head
Tim Worstall
Truth and consequences
Two-Four Net
Urban Conservative
Urgent Agenda
Vdare blog
View from Right
Viking Pundit
Vodka Pundit
Watt's up with that
Western Standard
Bill Whittle
What If
WICKED THOUGHTS*
Wiki Law
Winds of Change
Wizbang
World of Reason
World Terrorism news

Education Blogs

Early Childhood Education
Education Bug
Eduwonk
Joanne Jacobs*
Marc Miyake*

Economics Blogs

Adam Smith
Arnold Kling
Chicago Boyz
Cafe Hayek
Econopundit
Environmental Economics
Jane Galt
S. Karlson
D. Luskin
Marginal Revolution
Mises Inst.

Australian Blogs

A E Brain
Brookes News
Catallaxy
Fortress Australia
Kev Gillett
Hissink File
ICJS*
Oz Conservative
Slattery
Tim Blair
WESTERN HEART*
Cyclone's Sketchblog

England

Anglo Austrian
Burning our Money
Campaign Against Political Correctness
England Project
Norm Geras
House of Dumb
IQ & PC
Limbic Nutrition
Majority Rights*
NHS Doctor
Policeman
Samizdata
Sean Gabb
Sterling Times
Englishman's Castle

Scotland

Freedom & Whisky
A Place to Stand

ISRAEL

IsraPundit
Steven Plaut
Think Israel

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here