The economy of mass prosperity

After proposing $1 trillion investment into infrastructure, the Trump administration is harnessing the brainpower of renowned experts to unlock the insoluble problem of how many jobs will be created for each billion dollars of spending. While stressing the obvious, the administration is missing the important point.

The purpose of capitalism is not job creation. The purpose of the capitalist economy is to create wealth. Employment and the subsequent distribution of the spoils of an economy are byproducts of capitalism.

Since its inception, capitalism has been in a perpetual state of evolution, from the Industrial Revolution that ignited an economy of mass production to the economy of mass productivity to, most recently, the economy of mass consumption. Each subsequent phase of capitalism has been associated with innovation, rise of productivity, and the immense creation of wealth.

Our current economic period was fueled by a huge expansion of credit, which temporarily has taken the economy beyond its limits. Through excessive borrowing, consumers have spent far more than they can afford, and the expansion of social programs and futile attempts to stimulate the economy via government spending have left the country with $20 trillion of debt. At this point the consumer is broke, the country is broke, and the economy of mass consumption is on a respirator and cannot be resuscitated by further spending. If not the spending, what then, is the catalyst that will take capitalism to its next phase of evolution?

A host of very significant developments over the past 20 years indicates that we are witnessing the dawn of a new phase in this evolution: the era of mass prosperity.

What distinguishes this phase from the previous ones is that enormous sums of money have been accumulated by corporations and private investment funds. American corporations have amassed trillions of dollars on their balance sheets; Apple alone has more than $200 billion in its accounts. This mass of liquidity looking for markets to invest in has set up an interesting dynamic.

Until recently, only the government could handle projects on the scale of the Hoover Dam and the interstate highway system, but now large corporations and investment funds have sufficient resources to build projects on any scale. Hence, there is no imperative for the government - federal, state or local - to finance and maintain modern infrastructure when private capital is available to do the job.

Privatization of the infrastructure will open a new, multitrillion-dollar frontier for capitalism, and its effect could be massive. It has the potential to create a long-term economic expansion that will dwarf the scale of the Pacific Railroad and National Interstate and Defense Highways acts combined.

The privatization should include selling the existing assets and creating an environment conducive for private enterprises to BOO (build, own and operate) new and existing roads, bridges, tunnels, treatment plants, airports and other facilities. Tolls will be collected to defray operating costs and retire debts. Revenue from the sale of existing assets can be used to reduce the national debt. Privatization would relieve, in large part, federal, state and local governments of the burden of funding, constructing, operating and administering the infrastructure, thereby resulting in smaller governments.

Just as in any field of endeavor, bringing competition into a sector of the economy currently monopolized by the state and local governments will spur innovation and result in greater efficiency in project development and lower tolls and taxes. Government-run projects have no incentive to keep costs down and are notoriously delayed and over budget.

Privatization of the infrastructure is a product of the spontaneous evolution of our economic system and, therefore, is a historical inevitability. Inevitability, however, sometimes requires human intervention.

We should always remember that the government's job is to enforce the law and spend people's money in a manner consistent with the perceived national interest. It cannot produce wealth, employment and the other attributes of a free society. That is the job of capitalism. Hence, we do not need to borrow our way into prosperity; we just have to let capitalism work.

SOURCE  

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State-by-State Wave of 'Blue Lives Matter' Laws Concern Activists

Activists who regularly come face-to-face with police officers are among those concerned about a new wave of so-called “Blue Lives Matter” laws that have swept through 14 state legislatures.

Alabama could become the next state to enact tough new laws that make attacking first responders a hate crime, and an African-American Democrat could lead the way.

Alabama Rep. John Rogers (D) has introduced legislation that identifies police officers as members of a protected group so that attacks against them become hate crimes.

"If you kill somebody just because they are of a certain race it's a hate crime, so if you kill a police officer because he is a police officer or a fireman, it should be hate crime also," Rogers told WBRC.

Texas was the most recent state to see lawmakers approve a Blue Lives Matter proposal. The legislature sent Gov. Greg Abbott a bill in late May that makes attacking or even threatening police officers or judges hate crimes.

The Texas legislation was a response to the 2016 ambush attack that killed six Dallas police officers and a 2015 attack on a district judge outside her home.

“At a time when law enforcement officers increasingly come under assault simply because of the job they hold, Texas must send a resolute message that the state will stand by the men and women who serve and protect our communities,” Gov. Abbott said.

Along with Texas, state legislatures in Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia have already added crimes against police, firefighters and EMTs to their list of hate crimes.

But maybe the Blue Lives Matter wave won’t have to go state-by-state. The movement could sweep across the U.S. from Congress.

U.S. Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) filed H.R. 4760 earlier this year to make attacks on police officers the same as hate crimes nationwide.

“I was looking for something that could send a very strong message that the federal government stands by police officers,” the Denver Post reported Buck said.

Sonia Bill Hernandez of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund warned of a Blue Lives Matter backlash.

She told the AP that so-called “Blue Lives Matter” laws that strengthen criminal penalties against people who attack police officers only “deepen divisions between law enforcement and communities with no tangible benefit to law enforcement.”

Jens Ohlin, a criminal law professor at Cornell University Law School in New York, told the AP the Blue Lives Matter laws all “reek of political pressure to do something symbolic as a way of expressing solidarity with police officers.”

But to a community activist like Zaki Baruti in St. Louis County, Mo., Blue Lives Matter laws are nothing but a way to cut the legs out from under the Black Lives Matter movement.

“This is another form of heightened repression of activists,” Baruti told the Associated Press. “It sends a message to protesters that we better not look at police cross-eyed.”

Other critics of Blue Lives Matter legislation contend attacking a cop is bad, killing a cop is worse, but laws making attacks on police the same as hate crimes go too far.

“We believe that being a police officer is not an innate part of a person’s identity. You’re not born a police officer,” wrote the Denver Post editorial board.

“Further, police are provided many protections already. We arm them and grant them great leeway in use of deadly force,” the Denver Post editorial continued. “We protect them with body armor and other gear. Rarely do juries or review panels charge officers who kill alleged offenders, but the justice system comes down extra hard when one of its own meets with harm.”

The heated argument over the movements apparently boiled over in Alabama.

Four men face assault charges after allegedly attacking a high school student who posted pro-police, Blue Lives Matter comments online.

Seventeen-year-old Brian Ogle was hospitalized with serious head injuries after being found bleeding on the ground after a homecoming game. His mother, Brandi Allen, told Fox News that Brian responded with a Blue Lives Matter argument when he was confronted by four former students who were wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts.

Police said the attack on Ogle, who is white, may have been racially motivated.

"Instead of us planning for his 18th birthday, we're here. Why? Because he made a statement that he backs the blue?” Allen told Fox News in the hospital as her son recovered from his injuries. “I'm still trying to understand how someone, no matter the color of their skin, can do this to another human being.”

SOURCE

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Sorry, class warriors. Unions aren't coming back

by Jeff Jacoby

HERE IS A TALE of two socioeconomic trends and one seductive myth.

Trend No. 1: There was a time when the wealthiest households in America — the top 1 percent — earned about 11 percent of the nation's income, even as the great majority of income, more than two-thirds, went to the bottom 90 percent. That was in the mid-1940s, in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II. Income inequality in the United States was relatively low, and it stayed that way for the next three decades.

Seventy years later, the distribution of income is much less equal. According to Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, the top 1 percent of US households today account for 22.5 percent of all pretax income, while the bottom 90 percent collect less than half.

Trend No. 2 occurred over the same period: As incomes in America grew less equal, membership in unions grew less common.

In the decade that followed World War II, the percentage of American workers belonging to a union rose to nearly 35 percent. That high level of union density lasted for almost three decades, but by the 1970s unions were in decline. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 10.7 percent of US wage earners today are union members — and nearly half of them work for the government. In the private economy, just 6.4 percent of employees are unionized.

In short, income inequality rose as union membership plunged.

So the way to reduce inequality is to reinvigorate labor unions? Not a chance.

One can make a plausible case that falling union density paved the way for the rich to grow richer. In a 2012 paper for the liberal Economic Policy Institute, labor economist Lawrence Mishel concluded that "deunionization can explain about a third of the entire growth of wage inequality among men and around a fifth of the growth among women from 1973 to 2007." Two International Monetary Fund economists made a similar argument in a 2015 study. "The decline in unionization in recent decades has fed the rise in incomes at the top," they wrote.

Not surprisingly, those who view income inequality as a terrible social malady seize on research like this to prescribe more union power as the remedy.

Senator Bernie Sanders hailed the IMF study as "a call to arms" — evidence not just that unions should be "revitalized and renewed" but that doing so "needs to be one of the major undertakings of our time."

From former Labor Secretary Robert Reich comes an even more impassioned exhortation. "We must strengthen labor unions!" he declares in a video for MoveOn. Reich wants new laws making it easier for organizers to form new unions. In particular, he wants all state right-to-work laws — which protect the right of employees not to join a union — overturned.

But unions didn't decline because laws are stacked against them or because employers have too much power. They declined because in the eyes of most workers they grew obsolete and irrelevant. And no amount of class-warfare drum-banging is going to bring them back.

As it happens, I belong to a private-sector union, and have been paying union dues for more than 20 years. I think private-sector workers should be perfectly free to bargain collectively — and just as free to shun unions. (Government unions, on the other hand, should be banned.)

I don't share the left's obsession with the wealth of "the billionaire class," to use a favorite Sanders expression. Like most Americans, I have more important things to worry about than whether Warren Buffet or George Soros get richer. But even if I did lie awake at night fretting over income inequality, I wouldn't count on a union revival to do anything about it.

Unions rose to power before globalization and automation had transformed economic reality. Before the internet utterly reshaped American commerce. Before the explosion of temps, part-timers, freelancers, and independent contractors who now constitute such a huge swath of the workforce. Before it became abnormal to stay with a single employer for a whole career. Before traditional workplaces — physical spaces with rank upon rank of workers — began to vanish.

In the early 1950s, manufacturing and mining accounted for one-third of all the jobs in America. Today? Barely 10 percent.

"In mining ... there are perhaps 80,000 jobs today compared to over a half million — almost all of which were unionized — in the late 1940s and early 1950s," writes Rich Yeselson for the progressive political website Talking Points Memo. "Coal provided close to 2/3rds of our energy then — making the imperious president of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, one of the most powerful people in the country."

Much the same is true of the steel industry, which now employs 70 percent fewer workers than it did in 1959. That was the year that 500,000 members of the United Steelworkers of America went on strike — the largest strike in the nation's history.

Manufacturing is still enormously important to the US economy. It accounts for a larger share of GDP than ever. But it takes far, far fewer people to do so, making unions a far, far less important player in American life than they once were.

Private-sector unionism isn't a sleeping giant waiting for a wakeup call. It's more like a once-mighty prizefighter shuffling into oblivion. In its heyday, it was a force to be reckoned with. No longer.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Doing nothing can be good conservative policy

To this day it is widely accepted in Australia that Bob Menzies was our greatest Prime Minister. He was the Prime Minister of Australia from 1939 to 1941 and again from 1949 to 1966. He is Australia's longest-serving prime minister, serving over 18 years in total. He ran Australia in the '50s and most of the '60s in what many now look back upon as a golden age. There was great embarrassment if unemployment exceeded 2% and life was generally tranquil, though Communist unions did their best to make trouble.



But when people say what a great man Bob was, a common response was:  "But what did he DO?"  And that is a hard question to answer.  Whenever people came to Bob and suggested something that the government should do,  Bob would reply:  "But if we do that, that will create another problem here".  So Bob would send the suggestions away, saying that the best thing to do was nothing.  

People are always calling on the politicians to do something so it takes great political talent to do nothing.  And doing nothing means that the size of the government stays pretty small -- unlike what mostly happens today when the government never ceases to expand.

So Bob's talent was to let the people of the nation create any change they desired, with little or no government interference.  If enough people backed the change it would happen.  If it had little backing it would not happen.  So prosperity and quality of life increased entirely through private initiatives.

Bob was however of Scottish origins and he inherited the great Scottish reverence for education.  So he saw it as a real problem that poor families could not send their children to university.  So, for once, he DID something about that. He instituted a scheme where the Federal government would send to university all children from poor families who had scored in the top third of High School grades.  The government not only paid the tuition fees but even gave the kid a living allowance.  It was called the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme and I was one of its beneficiaries.

But Bob was rare even among conservative politicians for his ability to do next to nothing. More on Menzies here

So let me mention another such rarity: "Honest" Frank Nicklin.  Would you believe a politician with the nickname "Honest"?  In WWI he was a war hero and after the war he was a banana farmer.  In 1957, he became the Premier of my home state of Queensland and ran Queensland for around 10 years in the 60s.  Frank was by all accounts a very nice man:  A pre-Reagan Reagan.  He got on well with the bureaucracy and even the unions.  So life in Queensland was very tranquil in his time.



How Frank did it can perhaps be gleaned from the words of a unionist who had just gone to see him with some request.  He was asked afterwards what had happened with his request.  He answered:  "Mr. Nicklin can say No in the nicest possible way"!

But, like Bob Menzies Frank did do something:  He spent a lot on upgrading the infrastructure -- roads and bridges etc. More on Nicklin here.

And then we come to an example that older Americans will know about: Ike.



Ike didn't like to rock boats and mainly just wanted to let people get on with their own lives.  He kept the government low-key and tried to reduce government financial deficits.  But he too did SOMETHING.  Like Frank Nicklin, he spent a lot on building up infrastructure -- a big network of high quality interstate highways.  That network is in rather bad repair these days but if all the money wasted on the global warming myth had been spent the way the three men above operated, there would be no such problem today. Has there ever before been so much money spent with nil result as has been spent on global warming?  It would take a war to equal it

But it is wrong to say that conservatives favour the status quo.  Conservative-run legislatures legislate as energetically as any  but mostly that is just to undo the damage caused by previous Leftist policies.  It is Leftist changes that they oppose, not all change.  But, as we see above, even the three champion conservative leaders did also make positive changes: carefully considered changes that generated broad consensus

Trump looks to be going down a similar road.  He is mainly unwinding Obama-era initiatives rather than launch initiatives of his own.  But he has launched one initiative: A Paid Parental Leave Entitlement.  Hopefully that will be his version of the "one thing" that deeply conservative leaders sometimes do.  Like their initiatives it will probably have broad support. Market-oriented conservatives don't like it very much but family-oriented conservatives probably will. And any welfare proposal will have the Democrats onside -- though they may feel burned that their name won't be on it.

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Washington Post Editor: Just Let White Working Class Die in Peace

They have thought it but recently a member of the media elite actually said it out loud. Washington Post columnist and editorial board member Jonathan Capehart basically told white working class Americans they are better off dying than trying to fight for their life against a swelling tide of immigration and globalization.

    “Economic dislocation and demographic changes are fueling discomfort and desperation among white working-class voters,” wrote WashPo columnist and editorial board member Jonathan Capehart, continuing:

    While [university professor and author] Justin Gest says that both Republicans and Democrats have exploited these voters, he sees a way forward.

    “The only way of addressing their plight is a form of political hospice care,” [Gest] said. “These are communities that are on the paths to death. And the question is: How can we make that as comfortable as possible?”

Professor Gest made no bones about his views of white working class citizens: they are a dying breed who are simply too dumb to understand that they need immigrants to revitalize their  communities.

    "Declining towns need immigrants to reinvigorate their markets, take on unwanted labor positions, and add youth to aging demographies. Once these communities understood the benefits immigrants bring and were consulted about the terms of their integration, they would feel more comfortable with their arrival."

Capehart and Gest are both well aware of their rabid anti-white working class prejudice:

    “It has become okay [among Democrats] to become classist against poor white people and the [white voters] see it,” said Gest.

    The party’s coalition includes environmentalists, lawyers, Latinos, hippies, and electric-car drivers, Gest said, adding “there are many people in there who like the privileged status that the Democratic Party gives to certain ethnic groups.” For the party to welcome the white working class, he added, it would be “cheapening” the privileges given to others.

In other words, the Left doesn’t want to demean itself by appealing to people who do not meet their standards of virtue signaling.

So instead of appealing to them in any meaningful way, Gest suggests political suicide:

    "For many white working class people, and this is going to be controversial, for many white working class people, not all of them but many, you have a community of people who are advanced in age, whose skill set is for a different economy, who are living in communities that are losing population, losing resources, and so in many ways, the only way of addressing their plight is a form of political hospice care. These are communities that are on the paths to death, and the question is how can we make that as comfortable as possible …"

A white working class voter offered this defense of her community:

    "Education can’t be the only answer for Americans if the U.S. labor market is also being flooded with cheap foreign workers", said a highly skilled worker contacted by Breitbart. “I know you don’t know me from a can of paint, but I had to throw in my 2 cents in your article about the WashPo editor,” said the woman, who tunes and operates computer-controlled machine tools in Cincinnati, Ohio. She continued:

    "I work in manufacturing. I have a high school diploma and a so-called associate degree from Wyotech that currently has as much worth to me as toilet paper (and it’s just as disposable). I am a [Computer Numeric Control] Machinist. I set up, tool, program, and operate CNC mills and lathes to make precision parts out of Teflon (polytetrafluoroethylene, that nonstick stuff on your frying pan) and can hold tolerances to +/- 0.0002″. So I’m wondering, since I am working in a field of a bygone economic era, how dumb do they think I really am that I need “more” education? What is more education going to do for me? So I can sit around and be a great do-nothing thinker as a white (non) working class individual? What is the threshold of intellectual satiation? How many degrees do we need to be indebted to the federal government before they deem the white working middle class smart enough to associate with people like THAT?

    I have a hard time understanding how someone like Gest or Capehart can look down their noses at someone like me because I don’t share their desire for overpriced toilet paper. Could either of them program a machine to cut an arc into a piece of material? No, but I can. Could either of them change their oil, replace their brakes, or change their front differential fluid? (I’d be surprised if they knew where the dipstick is to even check it.) No, but I can. I’m a 35-year-old, white working class woman that could outsmart them on a common sense basis and on a highly technical basis, and somehow I am the one that needs more education?

    People like that think that “working class white voters” is a descriptor of who we are as a socioeconomic group, with a dash of race and political functionality. “Working class (white) voters” are machinists, assemblers, machine operators, mechanics, nurse’s aides, waitresses, small retail store managers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, and all the jobs that they wouldn’t dare do themselves, being so much smarter than the rest of us (doubtful they know which end of a wrench to use).

    Being a “working class white voter” does not make us inferior or intellectually stunted so much that we need to be (re)educated in liberally biased schools of doublespeak and thoughtlessness. All we want to do is work a good job that does present a modest challenge, that does feel rewarding, keeps the lights on and our bellies full and after all of that, we just want to come home, drink some beers, pet the dog and enjoy the sunset in our small suburban slice of heaven. For us, that is what life is all about. We don’t care about revolutions, microaggressions, or how many physical and economic descriptors we can apply to a sub group of a sub group of a sub group. People like Gest and Capehart are more important to themselves, like Narcissus was to his reflection; eventually, they will drown in their obsession. And when they do, they’re still gonna be at the counter of a Mom and Pop shop asking some “white working class voter” with grease on his or her face “What’s wrong with my Prius?”

SOURCE

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Ted Cruz Lays Out 4 Priorities for a Blockbuster Year for Conservatives

We have “a historic opportunity,” was the message of Sen. Ted Cruz at the Road to Majority Conference.

“It is June 2017, and Hillary Clinton is not president and Neil Gorsuch is a Supreme Court justice,” said the Texas Republican Thursday.

This year “demonstrates that elections matter,” Cruz said. “It demonstrates that men and women here, men and women of faith, pastors, Americans across this country love freedom, and if we rise up and stand together, we can do remarkable things.”

“We have a majority in the House, we have a majority in the Senate, we have a Republican as president, how about we act like it?” Cruz said to the crowd.

And with this “historic opportunity” in mind, Cruz laid out the four big priorities that Republicans need to deliver on. Otherwise, he warned, the party risks 2017 being a “heartbreaking missed opportunity” rather than a “blockbuster year” with possibly the “most productive Congress in decades.”

These four priorities are the Supreme Court, repealing Obamacare, regulatory reform, and tax reform.

*    Supreme Court. Cruz commended President Donald Trump on his nomination of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and “for honoring his promise to the American people of nominating a principled constitutionalist,” calling it a “home run.”

*    Obamacare. The second priority was repealing Obamacare, which Cruz called “a train wreck collapsing right before our eyes.” It is, he said, “critical … to repeal Obamacare and it is critical that we do it well, in a way that provides real relief.”

*    Tax Reform. Rather than focusing on the “political circus … let’s focus on delivering results,” Cruz stated, advocating a “bold and simple” approach to tax reform, saying that “there is power to bold simplicity.”

*    Regulation reform. The Texas conservative called for a “pull back of the regulations that are strangling small businesses, strangling farmers and ranches, and job creators across this country.”

In closing, Cruz emphasized his appreciation for those in attendance and those who have fought so hard to make a difference in the U.S., saying, “thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“Thank you for your prayers, thank you for your passion, thank you for your time, thank you for your energy, thank you for speaking out and working to retake our nation.”

The Road to Majority Conference is hosted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Washington, D.C.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Comey confirms that I'm right - and all the Democratic commentators are wrong

Alan Dershowitz

Comey's opening testimony: Trump admin lied, defamed me

In his testimony former FBI director James Comey echoed a view that I alone have been expressing for several weeks, and that has been attacked by nearly every Democratic pundit.

Comey confirmed that under our Constitution, the president has the authority to direct the FBI to stop investigating any individual. I paraphrase, because the transcript is not yet available:  the president can, in theory, decide who to investigate, who to stop investigating, who to prosecute and who not to prosecute.  The president is the head of the unified executive branch of government, and the Justice Department and the FBI work under him and he may order them to do what he wishes.                    

As a matter of law, Comey is 100 percent correct.  As I have long argued, and as Comey confirmed in his written statement, our history shows that many presidents—from Adams to Jefferson, to Lincoln, to Roosevelt, to Kennedy, to Bush 1, and to Obama – have directed the Justice Department with regard to ongoing investigations. The history is clear, the precedents are clear, the constitutional structure is clear, and common sense is clear.

Yet virtually every Democratic pundit, in their haste to “get” President Trump, has willfully ignored these realities.  In doing so they have endangered our civil liberties and constitutional rights.

Now that even former Director Comey has acknowledged that the Constitution would permit the president to direct the Justice Department and the FBI in this matter, let us put the issue of obstruction of justice behind us once and for all and focus on the political, moral, and other non-criminal aspects of President Trump’s conduct.

Comey’s testimony was devastating with regard to President Trump’s credibility – at least as Comey sees it.  He was also critical of President Trump’s failure to observe the recent tradition of FBI independence from presidential influence.  These are issues worth discussing but they have been distorted by the insistence of Democratic pundits that Trump must have committed a crime because they disagree with what he did politically.

Director Comey’s testimony was thoughtful, coherent and balanced.  He is obviously angry with President Trump, and his anger has influenced his assessment of the president and his actions.  But even putting that aside, Comey has provided useful insights into the ongoing investigations.

I was disappointed to learn that Comey used a Columbia law professor as a go-between to provide information to the media.  He should have has the courage to do it himself.  Senators must insist that he disclose the name of his go-between so that they can subpoena his memos and perhaps subpoena the professor-friend to provide further information.

I write this short op-ed as Comey finishes his testimony. I think it is important to put to rest the notion that there was anything criminal about the president exercising his constitutional power to fire Comey and to request – “hope” – that he let go the investigation of General Flynn. Just as the president would have had the constitutional power to pardon Flynn and thus end the criminal investigation of him, he certainly had the authority to request the director of the FBI to end his investigation of Flynn.

So let’s move on and learn all the facts regarding the Russian efforts to intrude on American elections without that investigation being impeded by frivolous efforts to accuse President Trump of committing a crime by exercising his constitutional authority.

SOURCE

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House Republicans Pass Bill to Rein In Dodd-Frank

On Thursday, while seemingly everyone in Washington was fixated on former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, House Republicans were busy. A bill entitled the Financial Choice Act was passed, along party lines, which aims to significantly roll back many of the onerous banking regulations created by the Dodd-Frank Act. Referencing the need to continue the process of government deregulation, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) tweeted, “Let me put it this way: #DoddFrank is more than a thousand pages long and has more rules and regulations than any Obama-era law.”

While the Financial Choice Act does not repeal Dodd-Frank, it does go a long way in reining in its congressionally independent powers. The House Republicans' bill specifically targets the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an unelected and unaccountable board of bureaucrats. Clamping down on the CFPB’s ability to create new financial regulations without approval from Congress is a very welcome change given the fact that elected representatives, not unelected bureaucrats, should have the power and responsibility to create significant rules and regulations. The new bill also stops the CFPB from collecting consumers' information without their permission.

Democrats' justification for the passage of Dodd-Frank was to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis — a crisis for which Democrats sowed the seeds with housing regulation. As is often the case with onerous government regulations, Dodd-Frank proved to do little in the way of actually helping small businesses and small banks, instead hurting them and resulting in years of sluggish economic growth. Rep. Rod Pittenger (R-NC) states, “Local bank leaders tell me they now hire more compliance officers than loan officers, as filling out forms for bureaucrats has become more important than growing the economy.” The irony in Dodd-Frank is that its regulations, which were supposed to protect the little guy, have proven to prevent and hinder economic growth and opportunity for the little guy.

Many are predicting that the House bill is dead on arrival in the Senate, and it is certain to undergo significant changes, but there are some Democrats who have voiced support for reforming Dodd-Frank.

SOURCE

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President Trump’s Lower-Court Nominees Are As Good As His SCOTUS Pick

Whatever’s happening with James Comey’s testimony, Donald Trump’s Twitter account, or congressional inaction on Obamacare repeal, tax reform, or much of anything else, from where I stand all that is fake news designed to distract your eyes from the prize: we have more judicial nominees!

This week, in an echo of how the 21 contenders for the Supreme Court vacancy were rolled out during the presidential campaign, 11 would-be black-robers join last month’s stellar list of 10 lower-court nominees. They join the one confirmed nominee, Sixth Circuit Judge Amul Thapar, who was elevated from a Kentucky district court after having been on that list of Supreme Court potentials.

Case Western law professor Jonathan Adler, who appeared with me on a panel at Cato’s 40th anniversary celebration right before the May 8 announcement, says they’re “‘incredibly strong nominees’ who were within the judicial mainstream and should ‘have an intellectual influence on their courts.’” As they say in Congress, I wish to associate myself with that analysis—and to extend those remarks to apply to all the nominees we’ve seen thus far.

Let’s Take a Look:

In that first batch are two state justices who were on the potential Supreme Court list, Michigan’s Joan Larsen (nominated to the Sixth Circuit) and Minnesota’s David Stras (nominated to the Eighth Circuit). These are engaged and scholarly jurists—both former law professors who still teach on the side—who will make terrific circuit judges.

Eleventh Circuit nominee Kevin Newsom, a former Alabama solicitor general who hosted me when I spoke to the Birmingham Federalist Society chapter earlier this year, is a serious lawyer and public servant who will serve the nation well even if I disagree some with his interpretation of the Slaughterhouse cases.

Pacific Legal Foundation’s Damien Schiff, with whom I’ve worked on many cases, is an inspired pick for the Court of Federal Claims, an Article I court that mainly handles government-contract disputes and property-rights claims against the government. Throughout his career, Damien has shown a commitment to protecting individual rights against government overreach.

This week’s second batch brought us three more circuit court nominees, including Justice Allison Eid of the Colorado Supreme Court to fill Neil Gorsuch’s vacant Tenth Circuit seat and professor Stephanos Bibas of the University of Pennsylvania Law School for the Third Circuit. I know Eid by reputation. A former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, she’s a thoughtful and intellectual jurist much in the mold of her former boss. Bibas is one of the top criminal-law scholars in the country. I’ve worked with him professionally and had drinks personally; he’ll be outstanding but leaves a gaping hole as faculty adviser for Penn’s Federalist Society chapter.

Then there’s Stephen Schwartz, an old friend who was a few years behind me at the University of Chicago Law School and has also been nominated to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Stephen has the perfect blend of nerdiness and skepticism of federal power that the job demands.

I’ll Never Tire of This Kind of Winning
If the other eight announced June 7 are of the same caliber as these three (and the previous 10)—and we have no reason to think otherwise given that the administration’s nominations staff is the same—then this is the sort of #winning of which I won’t ever tire.

The only curiosity is the continued absence of Justice Don Willett of the Texas Supreme Court—and indeed no nominees to the Fifth Circuit at all. As Hugh Hewitt tweeted, of the 11 original SCOTUS short-listers, five were state judges. Three have now been nominated to the federal appellate courts. The two remaining are Tom Lee of Utah (which has no current vacancies) and Willett (and Texas has two vacancies). Moreover, Willett was apparently one of the five or six finalists for the seat that Gorsuch filled, and is close to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. So you’d think he’d be a shoo-in.

Now, it’s certainly possible there’ll be some grand bargain whereby two other worthies get the Fifth Circuit slots but Willett goes to the high court whenever Justice Anthony Kennedy decides to retire. But that’s pie-in-the-sky because so many other stakeholders are involved at that point. Of course, if this deal—a fabulous deal, believe me!—is ratified by the president himself, that would be bigly indeed.

In the meantime, the White House counsel’s office should just keep these black-robe orders coming. Their work, and that of the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, has allowed President Trump—regardless of what else he does with his time—to continue fulfilling what was probably his most important campaign promise: to appoint “the best” judges.

SOURCE

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Justice Department Ends Government Bankrolling of Liberal Groups in Legal Settlements

The federal government no longer will make settlement agreements with any person or organization not directly involved in a legal dispute, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Wednesday.

The move by Sessions abolished a practice that has funneled likely millions of dollars in banking settlements to outside organizations in such “third-party” payments.

Left-wing groups, including La Raza and NeighborWorks America, benefited from the practice, The Daily Signal previously reported.

In a formal statement, Sessions said: Effective immediately, [Justice] Department attorneys may not enter into any agreement on behalf of the United States in settlement of federal claims or charges, including agreements settling civil litigation, accepting plea agreements, or deferring or declining prosecution in a criminal manner, that directs or provides for a payment or loan to any non-governmental person or entity that is not a party to the dispute.

For over a decade, the Justice Department has permitted corporations found guilty of wrongdoing to pay part of their financial penalty as a donation to certain pre-approved nonprofit organizations, as The Daily Signal reported last year.

After the 2008 financial crisis, the Obama administration alleged that banks were responsible for inflating the mortgage bubble.

The Justice Department and the banks settled with the settlements running into the millions of dollars, Paul J. Larkin, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an interview.

Sometimes the Justice Department would allow donations to third parties to be counted toward the settlement value.

The practice is unlawful, said Larkin, whose work on the issue was cited by Sessions in the attorney general’s decision.

“Some of the settlements allowed a settling party to treat $1 given to a favored organization as counting for $2 toward the settlement,” Larkin said.

He added:

Federal law requires Justice Department lawyers to deposit the funds they receive from a settlement into the U.S. Treasury so that Congress, not the president or the Justice Department, can decide how those funds should be spent.

The announcement is welcome news, Steven J. Allen, vice president and chief investigative officer at the Capitol Research Center, a conservative research institution based in Washington, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Wednesday.

“It’s about time that someone did something about this,” Allen said. “It is a practice that had been going on throughout the government for decades, and we need to crack down. This is a very important first step by the attorney general.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, praised Sessions’ move.

“Today’s decision by the attorney general to end the Justice Department’s use of settlement agreements to fund politically favored organizations is a win for the victims in such disputes and for checks and balances in government,” Grassley said. “Under the Constitution, Congress holds the purse strings.”

The decision by President Donald Trump’s attorney general to end third-party settlements also benefits taxpayers, Larkin said.

“Sessions’ decision is the right one because it ends an unlawful and unethical Justice Department practice,” he said. “The department’s third-party payment practice was tantamount to the theft of money that belonged to the public.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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WaPo's Horowitz Conspiracy Piece Ignores Democrat Ties to Radical Left

David Horowitz is an open advocate of the Constitution, while George Soros lurks in the shadows to undermine it

Last Sunday, the Washington Post published a lengthy exposé supposedly chronicling how a “‘shadow’ universe of charities” teamed up with right-wing political warriors to fuel the rise of Donald Trump. We knew immediately, “This should be good.”

And just what are the nefarious aims of this dastardly assemblage of conservative villains? To “upend the Washington establishment” and its Big Government/Big Business collusion, combat the dangers of radical Islam (as opposed to the Left’s “see no evil” approach), stop illegal immigration, protect religious liberty, and generally to promote a pro-Constitution, pro-American values worldview. Oh, the horror!

The Post’s story focuses primarily on David Horowitz, a 1960s leftist radical turned right-wing political warrior (though without any more than a single mention of the words “former ‘60s radical). Raised by Communist parents in New York City, Horowitz was a "red diaper baby” who grew up marinating in left-wing, anti-American ideology. He attended liberal Columbia University, then graduate school at lefty nirvana UC-Berkeley, and became editor of Ramparts, arguably the most influential publication of the New Left.

Horowitz grew close to Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, even raising funds to buy a church that was turned into a “learning center” for children of the Black Panthers. He recruited Ramparts bookkeeper Betty Van Patter to manage the finances.

Horowitz’s journey from far-left radical to conservative warrior began when Van Patter was murdered, her badly beaten body found floating in the San Francisco Bay. Police, convinced the murder was committed by the Panthers, were unable to bring an indictment, and the feds and the mainstream press refused to look into it, so Horowitz investigated the murder on his own.

After repeated denials followed by threats of retribution if he continued, he came to the disturbing conclusion that the murder was committed by the very left-wing radicals he considered allies. As noted in a National Review piece in 2015, “The Life and Work of David Horowitz,” “His lifelong friends and associates on the Left were now a threat to his safety, since they would instinctively defend the Panther vanguard; and no one among them really cared about the murder of an innocent woman, because the murderers were their political friends.”

This realization led to further realizations, including the fact that the Communist regimes vigorously supported by the Left had engaged in the wholesale slaughter of their own innocent people. As Horowitz would later write, “A library of memoirs by aging new leftists and 'progressive’ academics recall the rebellions of the 1960s. But hardly a page in any of them has the basic honesty — or sheer decency — to say, ‘Yes, we supported these murderers and those spies, and the agents of that evil empire,’ or to say so without an alibi. I’d like to hear even one of these advocates of ‘social justice’ make this simple acknowledgement: ‘We greatly exaggerated the sins of America and underestimated its decencies and virtues, and we’re sorry.’”

These realizations led Horowitz to the conservative right, becoming more tireless in his efforts to expose, undermine and destroy radical leftism than he had been in promoting it.

And it is the unapologetic conservative activism of people like Horowitz, and his friend and Trump advisor Steve Bannon, that has the Post and progressives everywhere in a breathless tizzy.

Yet these same hysterical leftists are either completely oblivious to, or openly dismissive of, their own hypocrisy in funding and supporting radical leftism.

For example, billionaire socialist George Soros — a man who, as a 14-year-old boy living in Nazi-occupied Hungary, helped confiscate the property of imprisoned fellow Jews, and later described it as the “happiest time” of his life — has spent much of his life providing massive funding for radical progressive and socialist causes around the world. Yet the Leftmedia and their Democrat counterparts usually refer to him as a “philanthropist.”

Soros seeks the elimination of national borders in favor of a unified global government, using his vast wealth and influence to achieve those aims; funding radical left-wing organizations with benign-sounding names such as the Center for American Progress, Change America Now, the Human Rights Campaign, and the Alliance for Global Justice, the last of which gave $50,000 to the “antifa” organization that violently attacked bystanders at UC-Berkeley. Soros also funded the violent Black Lives Matter movement.

Somehow the media never seem to root out the shadowy players behind leftist violence, possibly because Soros is a powerful behind-the-scenes player, not only funding dozens of radical leftist groups, but also funding dozens of major “news” outlets.

The mainstream media was totally uninterested in the fact that through a complex, shadowy network of progressive organizations, Soros funded the campaigns of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Nor are they concerned that Obama launched his political career in the home of left-wing domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn. They yawned at the fact Obama spent decades in the pews of “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright, who spewed anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic venom each week from the pulpit.

The double-standard among the progressive Left and their media co-conspirators is as unsurprising as it is hypocritical. They slam Trump for his association with staunch conservative political activists, warning of conspiracies and dire consequences, yet actively hide the subversive, often violent actions of the Left.

Horowitz, Bannon and others like them are anything but shadowy. Unlike the political Left, which must disguise its true aims, Horowitz et al are as open and vocal as people can possibly be in their efforts to restore the Constitution and the Rule of Law in our great nation, and in their efforts to protect and defend American values.

SOURCE

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Socialism in one country






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Great Moments in Fake News 'Journalism'

What about President Donald Trump’s complaint about “fake news”? Let’s look at some examples of “Great Moments in ‘Journalism’” over the last few years.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), in an appearance on ABC’s Sunday morning political show hosted by George Stephanopoulos, called former Democratic Alabama Gov. George Wallace a “Republican.” Ellison said, “At the same time, [in Trump] we do have the worst Republican nominee since George Wallace.” Stephanopoulos either ignored or was ignorant of the fact that Wallace — who proudly proclaimed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” — was a long-standing Democrat who served four terms as governor and twice sought the Democratic nomination for president. Tellingly, Stephanopoulos did not correct Ellison. Fortunately, another guest, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), did correct the history-challenged Ellison.

MSNBC’s Luke Russert, covering the 2008 presidential election, said students at the University of Virginia will vote Obama because: “You have to remember, the smartest kids in the state go there, so it’s leaning a little bit towards Obama.” Get it? Smart people vote Democrat. Dumb people vote Republican. Russert later apologized.

CNN’s Carol Costello laughed hysterically as a frantic Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah Palin, told cops she was assaulted at a party. Listen to how a gleeful Costello introduced the audiotape of Bristol describing the attack to the police: “This is quite possibly the best minute and a half of audio we’ve ever come across — well, come across in a long time, anyway. A massive brawl in Anchorage, Alaska, reportedly involving Sarah Palin’s kids and her husband. It was sparked after someone pushed one of her daughters at a party. That’s what Bristol Palin told police in an interview after the incident. … So sit back and enjoy.” A near-hysterical Palin says: “A guy comes out of nowhere and pushes me on the ground, takes me by my feet, in my dress — in my thong, dress, in front of everybody — ‘Come on, you [expletive], come on, you [expletive], get the [expletive] out of here.’”

At the conclusion of the segment, a smirking Costello said, “You can thank me later.”

MSNBC’s Erin Burnett, now with CNN, called then-President George W. Bush a “monkey.” With videotape rolling of President Bush flanked by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to his left and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to his right, the reporter gushed, “Who could not have a man-crush on that man? I’m not talking about the monkey, either. I’m talking about the other one.” The host asked, “Who’s the monkey?” Burnett replied, “The monkey in the middle” — meaning President Bush. She, too, later apologized.

The late Tim Russert, in a 2007 interview with New York Times war correspondent John Burns, repeated an often-cited anti-Iraq War talking point — that Americans expected to be greeted as “liberators” in Iraq, but weren’t. Burns, who was in Iraq at the time of the invasion, corrected him: “The American troops were greeted as liberators. We saw it.”

Trump is clearly right to fulminate against what he calls the “fake news media.” The real question is what took Republicans so long to fight back.

SOURCE

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GORGEOUS REPORTER UNLOADS ON HILLARY



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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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"Trumpileaks" and Leftist flexibility

Leftists have no principles, ethics or morals.  How do I know that?  They tell us.  Whenever they are cornered in an argument, they will say, with a great air of superiority, "But there's no such thing as right and wrong".  And they do mean that.  We should take them at their word.  They do have aims -- destroying anything they can -- but that is all, no ethics or principles.  You can see it for yourself any time.  When they say something is wrong -- like anything that Trump does -- just reply: "But  there's no such thing as right and wrong".  It really stumps them.  Years ago I did some research into their insincere use of "right" and "wrong" which showed their inconsistency.

And there is no limit to what Leftists will appeal to. When George Bush's intervention in Iraq was being mooted -- Bush made sure to get Congressional approval for it first -- John Kerry and others even made an appeal to preserve the status quo -- the one thing Leftists most consistently oppose.  They even stressed the importance of the Peace of Westphalia -- a set of documents created in the year 1648.  You couldn't make it up! Leftists will appeal to anything that they think will be persuasive to others, regardless of what they themselves think.

And that brings us to Michael Moore and his establishment of a gossip site called "Trumpileaks".  Moore gives a classic exhibition of Leftist "flexibility".  He claims that Trump has done all sorts of illegal things but can't actually name one.  He mistakes Leftist howls for evidence of illegality.

He makes up for his lack of substance, however, by appealing to all sorts of authorities that Leftists normally abhor. He speaks warmly of the founding fathers and even quotes Mike Pence approvingly. The whole thing is too silly to reproduce but a reader has done an extensive fisking of it so I will forward the fisked version to anyone who asks for it.

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The Church of Globalism Wants Your Blood (and Money)

I am still concerned with what I have been writing about as “human sacrifice” (here and here)  but in the aftermath of the London Bridge Attack it has become apparent that there are deeper concerns and the death of innocent people is a symptom of an even graver danger.

it is, surely, “The Jihad” and the renaissance of fundamentalist Sharia law that are the proximate causes of the slaughter but it is a mistake to focus solely on the Muslim side of the equation.  It is not so much the Islamists that we should be afraid of, it is the Globalist movement in the west that has allowed, and even fostered, those squalid barbarians to grow so dangerous and impudent.

The limp, mealy-mouthed responses of Kahn and May to President Trumps tweets after London have gotten me thinking. The majority of our elected officials, and their bureaucratic minions along with our leading academics and the majority of our artists and entertainers have conspired to lull us into suppressing our spiritual, intellectual and cultural defenses and open our borders to the unfettered immigration and the terror, disease, rape and murder it brings. But the terror is just the most noticeable manifestation. There is a whole complex Globalist movement that has pervaded and polluted our body politic.

I am not one of those who believe in an organized Globalization Conspiracy. I know there are conspiracy theories out there but they seem a bit overwrought and impossibly arcane. I think, though, that once you understand Globalism and its underpinnings you will see that its worse and more pervasive than any centralized conspiracy could be.

Globalism is actually a pseudo-religion, it is the Sharia Law analog of the West. It is an extreme belief in the infallibility and inevitability of Globalization. It and all of its doctrines are unassailable and anyone who questions them are disqualified from legitimacy. There are a number of dogmas connected with Globalism Chief among them is what is now commonly called Climate Change. Other dogmas include:

    The Right to Migrate (for western countries this means unfettered immigration- legal and otherwise)

    Multiculturalism (which is more accurately described as Cultural Relativism)

    Disdain for Nationalism and Populism

    Condemnation of Income Inequality (although, ironically most of those who trumpet this the loudest are pulling down vast incomes for doing so- see Bernie Sanders, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, et al)

But you don’t need to take my word for it. An excellent, if unintentional, indictment of Globalization may be found on the Barclay Bank website. The research paper abstracted on this page is a perfect case study in the arrogant cluelessness of what might be called the Globalist Elite. The title “The Politics of Rage” sets the tone. It is cold research seen through a pro-globalist lens. It presents a chilling picture of what Globalism aims to do. Here is the list of of factors necessary to globalization that are identified as causing the rage against globalization among the middle classes:

    Sovereignty (as in the loss of national sovereignty through Trade Pacts and the EU - See Brexit)

    Representative Reform (related to Sovereignty- the loss of local representation through mandates from national governments and their commitments to supra-national bodies)

    Immigration (unfettered migration of the un-assimilate-able, terrorists, carriers of diseases and non-productive third world populations into western countries)

    Trade (free trade that costs jobs and economic dislocation in developed countries)

    Redistribution of Income (related to Trade- loss of employment and depression of wages costs the lower and middle income people in developed countries  and creates more profit for the wealthy and corporations)

    Anti-Corporatism (see Redistribution)

I finally have a complete understanding of what Barak Obama meant when he vowed to “fundamentaly transform the United States of America.”  The picture that emerges is that the middle and lower middle class in the developed countries of the world are being sacrificed, in every way possible. Their jobs and wealth are being diluted and lost to the tidal wave of “migration”. They lose their very lives to the terrorists who wash ashore with that same wave.

All the while, the corporations, government apparatchiks, media pundits, academic theorists and financial manipulators, those that I call the Global Elite, get ever fatter and more insolent. They are not the ones being run over, slashed to death and shot in the streets. They live in enclaves with high walls. They are not losing their financial security, their interests are doing very well thank you. It is no transformation. It is a betrayal.

And to what effect is all this havoc being visited on the workers, earners and entrepreneurs who make it all possible? There is no proof that refugees from failed states can adapt well enough and in large enough numbers to modern western economies to do anything more than increase the burden of entitlements in those countries. There is no proof either that there is any chance that the other “benefits” predicted for globalization will ever materialize.

The Barclay researcher blandly asserts that it would lead to faster development in undeveloped countries. Even allowing for the scabrous old allegation that the abuses of the colonial era are responsible for the economic devastation in those countries, colonialism has been over for a century and the third world is still poor.

Culture is the most important determinant of development. Israel, for example, is a country founded in a place bereft of natural resources on land that had been poverty stricken for two millennia. In sixty years, under constant hostility and attack from neighbors with overwhelming numerical advantage, it is one of the strongest economies in the world. Globalists hate Israel for the very example that she is!

No! The only benefit that is real in the globalization scenario is that which accrues to the Globalist Elite who are trying to squelch the natural resistance to it by calling our distress “rage”. They call us “bitter clingers” (Obama), “deplorables” (Clinton), “uneducated” (Mainstream Press), deniers and they belittle our very sacrifice with statistical cruelties like “London is still one of the safest cities” or “undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the general population”.

These are untrue in any sense but they are most sinister in the way they negate real suffering. It is heartless to tell the families of the little girls killed in Manchester, or of the nine year old boy killed in Boston or of Kate Steinle that they should be comforted by those cold statistics when their loved ones would be alive today if immigration were under sufficient control. This is not inchoate “rage” as Barclay and the progressives try to invalidate it. It is not we who are “the deniers”.

SOURCE

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Enforced Equality: Fair or Foul?

Economic inequality has generated much discussion in recent years—in academia, on the campaign trail, and even on the international bestsellers list. Some might say that one of the dialogue’s core ideological drivers—egalitarianism—has claimed more than its fair share of public attention. The editors of The Independent Review, however, see the trend as a welcome opportunity to improve the quality of debate about economic progress and opportunity, the rule of law, intellectual history, public opinion, and ethics. The result is the Summer 2017 issue’s fascinating, in-depth Symposium on Egalitarianism—perhaps the most important forum in the journal’s twenty-two-year history.

“Love it or loathe it, egalitarian sentiments and concerns about inequality are clearly on the rise in both politics and the academy,” writes the journal’s co-editor Robert M. Whaples in his introduction to the symposium. The fact of inequality, he counsels, requires thoughtful consideration. “Will our response to it be ugly, say by envying or injuring those who have ended up with more than we have or by belittling and mistreating those who have less? Or will we see the dignity in all people—great and small—and treat others with respect, cooperating with them to fulfill that promise by achieving the virtue, prosperity, and peace that we all desire?”

Incidentally, of the symposium’s many outstanding essays, The Independent Review’s editors singled out one as standing above the rest—“The New Egalitarianism,” by Adam Martin. In it, the Texas Tech University assistant professor shows why today’s leading theoreticians of egalitarianism “are not your father’s collectivists.” Along with their obscurantist analysis of the ways that existing practices and norms may benefit the powerful at the expense of the disadvantaged, the New Egalitarians are distinguished by their decidedly anti-egalitarian solution to the world’s social ills: to appoint themselves as society’s adjudicators and enforcers of right and wrong.

More than merely of academic interest, the New Egalitarianism is a threat to be taken seriously. For his deep erudition, penetrating insights, and stylistic accessibility, Martin will be awarded the symposium prize of $10,000. Quick—someone call the equity police!

SOURCE

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Funeral of Chris Brand

I have received the following email from Dr. Shiou-Yun Fang

The date for Chris' funeral and memorial and thanksgiving service has just been set. They will take place on the 26th of June (Monday). The funeral will start at 2:30pm, for family and friends. Then is the memorial and thanksgiving service for the public which is going to be held in St Peter's Church, Lutton Place, Edinburgh at 3:30pm. This is the church Chris and I went every Christmas Eve. It has warmly-decorated interiors and the two vicars there are well known to us. After the service, there will be a reception in the sitting room of our Brand's mansion. I started joining his life in 2000. From close friends, I have heard lots of amusing stories about many parties that he had thrown there before. I believe that Chris will like the reception being held here.

I have received the photo below from Shiou: happy times for her and Chris at a Boxing Day party. You can see how well Chris did to get a lady who was beautiful and accomplished.  In a comment on the happy photo, Shiou said poignantly: "My happiness has been changed to much pain and grief".  I feel her grief.  A quality lady -- JR



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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Seeds of fascism sprout anew in Trump’s America (?)

H.D.S. Greenway below focuses mainly on style and it is true that Trump has a forceful style. But style is not substance and what Greenway omits is that Mussolini was a Marxist and Trump is a capitalist.  Those are REAL differences and they matter.  And the ideology matters too.  Mussolini was a centralizer intent on expanding government control whereas Trump has scrapped regulations by the bagful.   The unending shrieks from the Left should tell you about  that. So the idea that Musso is a forerunner for Trump is a strange comparison indeed.  H.D.S. Greenway should look to policies, not appearances

It is however true that the seeds of Fascism are to be found in the USA.  The constant expansion of government regulation and control under Obama was very Fascist.  It was Fascism with a courteous face but Fascism nonetheless.  Even Hillary's election slogan "better together" was what the Fasces of ancient Rome symbolized and it was that Roman example which Musso adopted as the symbol and name of his party.  Fascism is indeed not far away in the USA. Trump is doing his best to roll it back

Leftists make many attempts to redefine what Italian Fascism was -- some examples below -- so let us look at Mussolini's own summary of the Fascist philosophy: "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato" (Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State).  Clear enough? How does that compare with "Drain the swamp"?

WATCHING DONALD TRUMP on TV whipping up his base of supporters at a rally in Harrisburg, Pa., I had a sudden feeling I had seen this all before. I remembered a speech I had seen on YouTube. It was a speech Mussolini had given in Milan in 1932. I watched it again, and it was all there. The chin thrust, the pouts, the hand gestures, the adoring base cheering every word. He spoke of the might of his army “second to none,” the “injustices committed against us,” and how he had “stormed the old political class.” There was even a complaint about the press that had drawn “arbitrary conclusions” to what he was saying. Mussolini’s Blackshirts, his squads of roughnecks, were used to assaulting reporters they didn’t like.

Today the Italians are an easygoing and generous people. But when Fascism took hold in the early 1920s, Italy became belligerent and bullying. Its concentration camps for the native population in Libya and its use of poison gas became genocidal. And it was quick to join the Nazis in dreams of conquest. Mussolini was telling Italians they had to begin winning again.

In his 2004 book, “The Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert O. Paxton wrote that fascism did not die with the end of World War II, that its seeds were planted “within all democratic countries, not excluding the United States.” According to Paxton, fascism was a “form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood. . . . “Fascism was an affair of the gut more than of the brain.”

Or as R.J.B. Bosworth wrote in his 2005 book “Mussolini’s Italy,” “Border fascism,” an obsession with borders and keeping the population pure, was always a “key strain in the fascist melody,” as was “allowing the nation to stand tall again.” All you needed was a charismatic leader, Mussolini, whom Paxton compared to the modern “media-era celebrity.”

Thirteen years ago Paxton wrote that all that is required for a rebirth of fascism is “polarization, deadlock, mass mobilization against internal and external enemies, and complicity by existing elites. . . . It is of course conceivable that a fascist party could be elected to power in free, competitive elections.”

SOURCE

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Governor Gasbag Abuses Taxpayers

California governor Jerry Brown has signed off on a $5.2 billion deal that will raise the tax on gasoline, raise the tax on diesel and raise user fees on motorists. Before the Memorial Day weekend, Brown ranted that those who complain about this tax hike are “freeloaders.” This doesn’t deserve a response, but taxpayers may find one helpful.

The tax hike is intended to fix California’s disastrous roads, but maintenance of roads is already part of California’s budget. Trouble is, as we noted, the California Department of Transportation developed a model for the allocation of maintenance funds but abandoned it because it would have reduced more than 100 Caltrans staff positions. Caltrans distributes funding based the previous spending patterns of the region in question, whatever the road conditions. Taxpayers might also recall that for years the state has diverted $1.5 billion in transportation infrastructure taxes to subsidize California’s General Fund bond payments.

Anybody who drives already pays substantial gas taxes every time they fill up, so in no sense are working motorists “freeloaders.” California workers already pay the highest income and sales taxes in the nation, and they are weary of government shaking them down for more. Taxpayers might note that Brown and the legislature made zero cuts to the state’s bloated bureaucracy and failed to trim wasteful spending. Brown and the legislature could have scrapped the $70 billion “bullet train” boondoggle, and $15 billion to dig tunnels under the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta. Fixing the roads and building new ones would be a better application for those funds.

As is happens, Caltrans employs more than 3,000 engineers who basically do nothing but Brown is okay with that sort of parasite, common in state government. The first recourse of California’s hereditary, recurring governor, is to punish the workers with higher taxes and fees then abuse them as “freeloaders.” As working taxpayers may recall, this is the same governor who responded “I mean, look, shit happens,” to safety lapses on the new span of the Bay Bridge, a project that came in 10 years late and $5 billion over budget.

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Leftist mob Cheers As Speaker Criticizes U.S. Bombing of ISIS

Hundreds of anti-Trump protesters gathered at the Washington Monument on Saturday in what was billed as a “March for Truth.”

According to the group’s Twitter page, the rally in Washington and other U.S. cities was a call for “urgency and transparency” on the Trump-Russia probe.

At the event, protesters carried signs accusing President Trump of colluding with the Russian government. Signs read “Investigate Trump,” “Liar, liar, Pence on fire,” and “Follow the money.”

The headline speaker at the event was Linda Sarsour, who describes herself as a Palestinian-American-Muslim, civil rights activist, and national co-chair of the Women’s March. Sarsour blamed “right-wing Zionists” for victimizing her, and she also criticized President Trump’s decision to bomb ISIS fighters in Afghanistan.

After her speech, CNSNews.com asked Sarsour why she opposed the April 13 airstrike that killed 94 ISIS fighters in Afghanistan, but no civilians. Sarsour responded that “civilians were being directly affected.”

“I’m anti-war, and I also didn’t get any confirmation about that, like, did you see a list of these ISIS fighters? I didn’t.”

Both Afghan and U.S. officials confirmed that no civilians died in the airstrike.

Asked if she was okay with the fact that the bomb killed ISIS members, Sarsour replied: “If we are actually not killing civilians, and we’re directly targeting terrorists.”

Sarsour has come under fire for some of her controversial connections and statements. In March, she was arrested for disorderly conduct at the “Day Without A Woman” protest in New York City near Trump Tower.

Sarsour also has called shari’a Law “reasonable” and “misunderstood,” tweeting what she sees as the benefits of shari’a

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Whom are you calling crazy?

By Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe

IT IS AN article of faith in polite society, where I live in a kind of internal exile, that President Trump is clinically insane.

Here are some headlines from the august New York Times: “Mental Health Professionals Warn About Trump,” “Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill?,” and so on. Before those two articles appeared in February, Sharon Begley of STAT wrote a more convincing and measured overview of head-shrinkers’ thoughts about Trump, cannily titled, “Crazy Like a Fox.”

Trump’s mental state definitely interests me. He seems deeply wounded, frantically impulsive, and obviously capable of endangering the nation and the world. But medicalizing heinous behavior — a favorite pastime of the chattering classes — is counterproductive. Not everyone who is sad is depressed. Not everyone who is excited is manic. Not every miscreant is nuts.

It’s a good idea to leave diagnoses to the diagnosticians, and we don’t have access to any of Trump’s psychiatric records, if such even exist. It should not go unnoticed that the man who literally wrote the book on the “narcissistic personality disorder” so commonly ascribed to Trump, opined, “He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill.”

Dr. Allen Frances, the chairman of the committee that created psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Volume 4, continued: “It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).”

Mental health professionals should be familiar with the “Goldwater Rule,” which strongly cautions psychiatrists against commenting on the mental state of people they have not examined. The rule harks back to 1964, when several psychiatrists dilated on the mental fitness of the Republican presidential candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater sued the publication that quoted them, and, in an unusual legal victory for a public figure, won. Savor the irony: Goldwater, a five-term US senator, was about 20 times more qualified to be president than Trump. Talk about defining deviancy down.

There have been other comical attempts at psychoanalyzing presidents. In 1931, the prominent Freudian A.A. Brill published a paper diagnosing Abraham Lincoln as a “manic schizoid personality.” He observed that Lincoln’s famous stories and jokes “are of an aggressive and [sexually masochistic] nature, treating of pain, suffering and death, and that a great many of them were so frankly sexual as to be classed as obscene.”

Simultaneously rebutting and demeaning Freud’s American disciple, analyst Jacob L. Moreno noted that the barely five-foot tall Brill sported a beard and was also named “Abe.” “Brill had waited patiently for a chance to measure up to that other Abe,” Moreno wrote.

In 1967, the retired diplomat William Bullitt published a “psychological study” of Woodrow Wilson purportedly coauthored by Freud, who had been dead for 28 years. The “authors” refered to Wilson as “Tommy” throughout, and attributed his reformist urges in part to an “under-vitalized” mother and “the ego of a boy who has no sister.”

“What a can of worms,” the New York Sun editorialized. “The tome was so weird that it horrified even Harvard’s Erik Erikson,” who called it “a disastrously bad book on Wilson.”

If and when Trump is forced to answer for his many depradations, let’s not rationalize his behavior with a bogus insanity defense.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Trump’s Food Stamp Reform Would Close the Trap of Dependency

President Donald Trump’s newly released budget contains a proposed food stamp reform, which the left has denounced as a “horror” that arbitrarily cuts food stamp benefits by 25 percent.

These claims are misleading. In reality, the president’s proposed policy is based on two principles: requiring able-bodied adult recipients to work or prepare for work in exchange for benefits, and restoring minimal fiscal responsibility to state governments for the welfare programs they operate.

The president’s budget reasserts the basic concept that welfare should not be a one-way handout. Welfare should, instead, be based on reciprocal obligations between recipients and taxpayers.

Government should definitely support those who need assistance, but should expect recipients to engage in constructive activity in exchange for that assistance.

Work Requirements

Under the Trump reform, recipients who cannot immediately find a job would be expected to engage in “work activation,” including supervised job searching, training, and community service.

This idea of a quid pro quo between welfare recipients and society has nearly universal support among the public.

Nearly 90 percent of the public agree that “able-bodied adults that receive cash, food, housing, and medical assistance should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving those government benefits.”

The outcomes were nearly identical across party lines, with 87 percent of Democrats and 94 percent of Republicans agreeing with this statement.

Establishing work requirements in welfare was the core principle of the welfare reform law enacted in the mid-1990s. That reform led to record drops in welfare dependence and child poverty. Employment among single mothers surged.

Despite the harsh impact of the Great Recession, much of the poverty reduction generated by welfare reform remains in effect to this day.

Unfortunately, though, welfare reform altered only one of more than 80 federal means-tested welfare programs. The other programs were left largely untouched. Trump’s plan is to extend the successful principle of work requirements to other programs.

Restoring State-Level Accountability

The second element of Trump’s plan is to restore a minimal share of fiscal responsibility for welfare to state governments.

As noted, the federal government operates over 80 means-tested welfare programs providing cash, food, housing, medical care, training, and targeted social services to poor and low-income persons. In addition, state governments run a handful of small separate programs.

Last year, total federal and state spending on means-tested aid was over $1.1 trillion. (This sum does not include Social Security or Medicare.)

Some 75 percent of the $1.1 trillion in spending comes from the federal government. Moreover, nearly all state spending was focused in a single program: Medicaid.

Excluding Medicaid, the federal government picks up the tab for nearly 90 percent of all means-tested welfare spending in the U.S.

The United States has a federal system of government with three separate levels of independent elected government: federal, state, and local. Under this three-tier system, the federal government already bears full fiscal responsibility for national defense, foreign affairs, Social Security, and Medicare.

It makes no sense for the federal government to also bear 90 percent of the cost of cash, food, and housing programs for low-income persons.

But for decades, state governments have increasingly shifted fiscal responsibility for anti-poverty programs to the federal level. As a result, the federal government picks up nearly all the tab for welfare programs operated by the states.

This is a recipe for inefficiency and nonaccountability.

One of the key lessons from welfare reform—now 20 years ago—is that both blue and red state governments spend their own revenues far more prudently than they spend “free money” from Washington.

Efficiency in welfare requires state governments to have some fiscal responsibility for the welfare programs they operate.

The food stamp program is 92 percent funded by Washington. Washington sends blank checks to state capitals—the more people a state enrolls in food stamps, the more money Washington hands out.

A dirty secret in American politics is that many governors, both Republican and Democrat, regard this type of “free money” poured from Washington as a benign Keynesian stimulus to their local economies. The more spending, the better.

The Trump budget recognizes that the food stamp program will become more efficient if the state governments that operate the program have “skin in the game.” Therefore, it raises the required state contribution to food stamps incrementally from 8 percent to 25 percent.

By 2027, this would cost state governments an extra $14 billion per year. Half of the so-called “cuts” in food stamp spending in the Trump budget simply represent this modest shift from federal to state funding.

The remaining savings in food stamps in the Trump budget come from assumed reduction in welfare caseloads due to the proposed work requirement.

A Proven Policy

Today, there are some 4.2 million nonelderly able-bodied adults without dependent children currently receiving food stamp benefits. Few are employed. The cost of benefits to this group is around $8.5 billion per year.

In December 2014, Maine imposed a work requirement on this category of recipients. Under the policy, no recipient had his benefits simply cut. Instead, recipients were required to undertake state-provided training or to work in community service six hours per week.

Nearly all affected recipients chose to leave the program rather than participate in training or community service. As a result, the Maine caseload of able-bodied adults without dependent children dropped 80 percent in just a few months.

A similar work requirement for able-bodied adults without dependents, imposed nationwide, would save the taxpayer $80 billion over the next decade.

Even this would be a pittance compared to the $3.6 trillion the federal government will spend on cash, food, and housing benefits over that period.

The Trump policy is the exact opposite of so-called “block grants” in welfare.

In a welfare block grant, the federal government collects tax revenue and dumps money on state governments to spend as they will.

Welfare block grants have always been failures. In fact, the Trump budget would eliminate two failed block grant programs—the Community Development Block Grant and the Community Services Block Grant.

Instead of block grants, Trump is seeking to reanimate the principles of welfare reform from the 1990s that emphasized work requirements and renewed fiscal responsibility from state governments.

Deeply Needed Reforms

Of course, the left adamantly opposed welfare reform in the 1990s. In their view, welfare should be unconditional. Recipients should be entitled to cash, free food, free housing, and medical care without any behavioral conditions.

No wonder they have proclaimed Trump’s proposal to be “devastating” and a “horror.”

Contrary to protestations from the left, the U.S. welfare state is very large and expensive. For example, federal spending on cash, food, and housing benefits for families with children is nearly three times the amount needed to raise all families above the poverty level.

But the current welfare state is very inefficient. Trump seeks to reform that system.

In Trump’s unfolding design, welfare should be synergistic. Aid should complement and reinforce self-support through work and marriage rather than penalizing and displacing those efforts.

A welfare state founded on this synergistic principle would be more efficient than the current system. It would reduce both dependence and poverty.

More importantly, it would improve the well-being of the poor who have benefited little from the fractured families, nonemployment, dependence, and social marginalization fostered by the current welfare state.

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The myth of ‘caring liberals’

Progressive politics is now about feeling good, not doing good. Comment from Britain:

It’s long been a common assumption that liberal, left-wing people are more caring than those on the right, that they are more compassionate people than conservatives. Right-wing people, by contrast, are generally assumed to be selfish, greedy and generally horrible. This consensus explains why now, if you live in a British city or large town, you will be surrounded by a multitude of signs outside houses exhorting you to vote Labour, Liberal Democrat or Green, and why you will scarcely see any ‘Vote Conservative’ signs. Everyone wants to be seen as a caring lefty, and no one wants to parade their right-wing opinions.

I have never fallen for this myth myself, that left-wing people are better or morally superior people. If anything, and if we are going to judge a person’s character by their politics, I’ve always been more inclined to believe the opposite – that people who loudly espouse caring politics tend to be more egotistical and selfish. This is because the main things that ostentatious liberals care about are themselves, their public image and their reputation as really nice people.

The ‘caring liberals’ myth was exposed once again in the aftermath of the Manchester bombing. The bien pensants were on hand to issue clamorous declarations of peace, love, hashtags and sympathy, but few from the liberal media or in the Labour Party dared to speak out unequivocally against the obvious evil afoot: Islamism, an extreme variant of a creed that now deliberately kills children.

The thing that metropolitan liberals fear most is to be accused of racism and being ‘right-wing’. They are utterly terrified of losing face this way. Hence in times of terror, they stick to pacifist platitudes and evasive, deceitful words. Far better, and far safer, to direct their anger instead against people like Katie Hopkins and other non-U vulgarians. For the liberal left, the abiding concern is always: how do I make myself look good out of this situation?

This reluctance to speak the truth after Manchester is indeed despicable, but none of us is surprised. The tactic by the liberal left has always been to change the subject of a conversation about Islamist terrorism, and to instead invoke the mythical spectre of ‘Islamophobia’. Or ‘foreign policy’. Or ‘root causes’. This egotism is all the more outrageous in that it masquerades itself as altruism and outward-looking compassion.

This behaviour is not new. It’s part of our Christian heritage, which long ago instilled in our collective mindset the notion that self-abasement and self-hatred are virtues. George Orwell wrote copiously about the liberal left’s infantile, attention-seeking self-hatred. And I remember my dad telling me about a letter he read in the Guardian in the 1960s, from a reader who would bump into West Indians and Pakistanis on purpose on the buses, just so he could say sorry to them. ‘We are all guilty’ remains the mantra of simpering, self-flagellating pietists.

‘Progressive’ politics today is about feeling good first, making yourself look good second, and doing good third. Ostensible and ostentatious liberal politics is now less about changing the world and more about you. Nietzsche’s warning about conspicuously caring types remains pertinent: ‘Where in the world have there been greater follies than with the compassionate? And what in the world has caused more suffering than the follies of the compassionate?’

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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