Libertarian Leanings

Staying Home

On Friday Mitt Romney announced that he would not seek the Republican presidential nomination.

“I believe that one of our next generation of Republican leaders, one who may not be as well known as I am today, one who has not yet taken their message across the country, one who is just getting started, may well emerge as being better able to defeat the Democratic nominee,” Mr. Romney said. “In fact, I expect and hope that to be the case.”

There's not the slightest doubt that putting Romney in the White House would be a vast improvement over our last dismal eight years under Obama, but as I've said before, Obama won't be a tough act to follow.  Romney would assuredly be a better president than Obama, but is that really good enough?  There is damage that must be undone, and I'm not at all confident that Romney is the man who will do it.  As Mr. Romney said, it's time to look to the next generation of Republican leaders.

Thank you, Mitt.

Obama and the Homeless

If there was anything notable about the latest Obama State of the Union, it was that once again he trotted out the same old class warfare rhetoric with calls for higher taxes on the rich.  Once again he bragged, to almost everyone's disbelief, how well his policies have worked, while throwing in the absurd line about the "shadow of crisis" having passed.  People are having a hard time buying it.  Consider this story from the LA Times about the spread of homeless camps in Los Angeles.  

Over the last two years, street encampments have jumped their historic boundaries in downtown Los Angeles, lining freeways and filling underpasses from Echo Park to South Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county agency, received 767 calls about street encampments in 2014, up 60% from the 479 in 2013.

Some residents believe the city is exporting its downtown homeless problem to their neighborhoods. But social service agencies and volunteers say it isn't that simple. They say that although downtown development and skid row cleanups are squeezing out some homeless people, many camps are filled with locals.

No matter what Obama says, you can't help but notice there are more homeless in our midst, and that Obama's policies are not helping them.  And now that folks in the LA area are voicing there concerns about the growth in homeless camps, the LA Times finds that it is also obliged to notice as well.  

Still, it's downright shocking to see a story like this from a mainstream newspaper when a Democrat sits in the White House.  Could it be that the mainstream news outlets are finally catching up with the rest of America?  Are they finally recognizing that Obama's tax-the-rich policies are really hurting the people that he likes to take credit for helping.  

It's not rocket science, says Larry Kudlow.

First, you can't create a new business or sustain an existing one without the seed corn and nourishment of capital investment.

Second, only businesses create jobs. You can't have a job without a business.

Third, jobs create all incomes, including middle-class incomes.

Fourth, incomes create family and consumer spending.

OK? This is not complicated. It's common economic sense.

University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan states this in a simpler way: Growth starts with investment and ends with consumer spending.

Alas, for some it is rocket science.  In his State of the Union, class warrior Obama proposed another hike in the capital gains tax.  It was at 15 percent when he came into office.  He pushed it to to 20 percent, and then Obamacare took it to 23.8.  Now he's proposing to push it to 28 percent.  At the same time the U.S. workforce participation rate has gone from just under 66 percent to just under 62 percent.  A surge, in the millions, of people who have given up looking for work has occurred on Obama's watch, which has translated into a surge in the number of homeless.

Sadly though, the plight of the homeless is not a popular news feature until it can be traced back to the policies of a Republican president, at which point we are inundated with stories about them.  Perhaps MSM is just warming up in anticipation of things that might come in 2016.  After all, Republicans did just take over Congress.

In any event it's a stark break with tradition for an outlet like the LA Times to notice that the poor are suffering at exactly the same time that Obama's grand Democratic policies are supposed to be helping them.  One can't help but wonder what drives Times reporter Gale Holland to such an egregious breach of good taste.

It's hard to say, but it doesn't seem to arise from any rage at the unfairness of Obama's policies.  She obviously hasn't made the connection between higher taxes and lower job growth.  Ms. Holland can't even be sure there are any more homeless this year than there were two years ago.  Maybe they're are just spreading out.

Whether homeless people are more numerous or simply more visible could be answered by the biennial tally taking place this week.

As many as 6,000 volunteers will go out Tuesday through Thursday searching for homeless people living in alleys, riverbeds, cars and RVs. For the first time, homeless people will be asked about their gender identity, domestic violence and prison histories, and years of military service — information that could better track where they came from and why.

Ms. Holland's uncertainty will most likely disappear with the next Republican administration, when greater visibility of the homeless will be reflexively reported as evidence of a more widespread and growing problem.  In the next Republican administration there will be no need for her to ponder where the homeless come from or why they are homeless.  The causes will be obvious — Republican policies that favor the rich.

The simple logic that there are more homeless because there really aren't enough jobs to be had, and there aren't enough jobs to be had because of punitive and arbitrary tax policy, seems to escape Ms. Holland along with the the rest of the mainstream press.  For them, homelessness remains a mystery whose causes can't be ascertained with a certainty for at least another two years.

Stay Home, Mitt

It would be an understatement to say that I was disappointed when Mitt Romney came up short in 2012.  2012 should have been a layup, a chip shot for Mitt Romney.  Barack Obama's combination of incompetence, arrogance, and intense partisanship has put him out in front of Jimmy Carter in the race for worst president in modern times.  But Mitt managed to blow it.

Mr. Romney’s campaign team was notable for its mediocrities, led by a strategist whose theory of the race was that voters had already rejected Mr. Obama so the challenger merely needed to seem like a safe alternative. He thus never laid out an economic narrative to counter Mr. Obama’s claim that he had saved the country from a GOP Depression and needed more time for his solutions to work.

And don’t forget the management calamity of Mr. Romney’s voter turnout operation, code-named Orca. Mr. Romney likes to say he reveres “data,” but Mr. Obama’s campaign was years ahead of Mr. Romney’s in using Big Data and social media to boost turnout. The Romney campaign was so clueless on voter mobilization that well into Election Night the candidate still thought he would win. He lost a winnable race 51%-47%, including every closely contested state save North Carolina.

There is no question that Mitt would have been a vastly better president than Barack Obama, but that's not setting the bar very high.  Obama said he intended to transform America.  He wants us to be a socialist democracy, one that elects progressive leaders on the promise that they will maintain the various federal entitlements upon which we are intended to become dependent.  We are well on our way if ObamaCare is allowed to stand. 

But a Romney presidency starting in 2016 will move America only slightly back toward the center.  Meanwhile Obama's encroachments on our freedoms, the politicization of the federal bureaucracy, including the Justice Department, the EPA, and the IRS will remain in place.  Obama put them there, the tools he uses against his enemies and the American people, hoping to establish lasting progressive majorities.  Should Romney run and win in 2016, there they'll stay, awaiting the next progressive "visionary" who will pick them up and use them to rebuild Obama's totalitarian apparatus when Romney's term is done.

Obama had to be stopped in 2012.  Romney's first step towards halting and rolling back the Obama transformation was winning that election.  He didn't do it.  He couldn't stop the transformation then, and we can't expect that he'll stop it now.  I wonder if he even knows that that is what needs to be done.

A Stunning New Insight

How about a "Marxist view of liberalism as a single-minded defense of capitalism."  Now there's a stunning new theory.  It comes to us from Edmund Fawcett's new book, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea as reviewed by Katrina Forrester.

It must be something about the start of a new year that has the left is scrambling to explain six years of horrendous policy failure.  Had these last six years not culminated in the resounding rejection of liberalism in the November midterms I'm sure there would be no such soul searching.  As it turned out, even on the left the failures can't be ignored, so liberals, or progressives, as they so like to be called, are out with the explanations.  This latest is a doozy, though.  Marxism was really all about rescuing capitalism.  Who knew!

Naturally, the basis of this new interpretation is an untruth.

For the defenders of Lockean liberalism, why liberals accommodated empire is a central puzzle: How could defenders of liberty defend colonial exploitation?  ...Fawcett dissolves the puzzle. Exploiting the riches of empire abroad was one way for states to resolve political conflict and economic turmoil at home. Much of the time, debates about empire were just an extension of the question of how to pay for liberal capitalism. 

It's not just that progressives are still talking about colonialism, long after colonial empires have ceased to exist.  There is also the deliberate misrepresentation, about the nature of wealth.  Progressives insist that economics is a zero-sum game.  They reason that somebody, somewhere, has to have gotten poorer in order for anyone, like, oh let's say Warren Buffett, to get richer.  It's a lie, really.  But it's a crucial principle, without which this wonderful new theory makes absolutely no sense.  Here's Ms. Forrester explaining Fawcett's supposed epiphany about who "pays for" capitalism.

It was in the 1930s that the question of how to rescue capitalism from itself was brought into sharpest relief. Fawcett looks to three economists who had different ideas about who would pay for the rescue: John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Irving Fisher. Each provided answers that would shape the future of economic thought and practice. Keynes’s focus on high wages was equivalent to earlier liberals’ concessions to demands for universal suffrage; his economic program was an example of liberalism’s economic compromise with democracy. Hayek’s willingness to belittle politics and look to the market for solutions harked back to an imaginary nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism and set the stage for the neoliberalism that followed. Fisher stressed the dangers of falling prices and the role of government monetary policy in preventing booms and busts. Though their recommendations were different, Fawcett emphasizes their similarities: all wanted to “limit capitalism’s disruptive instabilities” while protecting liberal principles. For Hayek (who worried least about capitalism’s disruptive potential), labor would bear the costs of saving capitalism. For Keynes and Fisher, because government paid for the rescue, in effect everyone played their part.

It's BS, of course.  It really doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that capitalism, or the fruits of it to be more precise, pays for everything else.  What Forrester and perhaps Fawcett don't get is that it isn't capitalism that needs to be paid for, it's those grubby little politicians who line their own pockets with taxpayer money by promising to fix the supposed problems of capitalism.  Here's one:  "the gap between the rich and the poor."  It's a non-existent problem really.  Nervertheless, taxing "the rich" and regulating everything else was supposed to fix it.  But six years of such disastrous progressive policy under Obama have made the rich richer (those connected to the Democrats and Obama), the poor poorer, and progressives a bit desparate.  And so the explanations come.

Or maybe sales pitch would be a better way to describe the progressive philosophy.  In actuality, progressives are the new entrepreneurs.  Their product is "fairness" which they deliver through expanded government, which at this point can fairly be described as bloated.  Under Obama progressives have realized massive profits through government delivered fairness.  Take Jonathan Gruber, one of ObamaCare's key architects.  He pulled in an estimated $4 million by helping to fashion a deliberately misleading and complex piece of federal legislation that depended upon, in his words, the “stupidity of the American voter” for passage.

The beauty of making your money through government sponsored fairness is that you're not constrained by the same rules that might apply to car dealer, or a loan officer, or anybody else who might be involved in the unpardonable sin of making a profit.  No.  Champions of "social justice" can say whatever they like.  "You can keep your doctor, period," comes to mind. 

We know how that worked out.  In spite of that there are still legions who favor centrally planned solutions like ObamaCare, who can disregard the actual fruits of it, who can pardon the lies that sold it.  And in case you're wondering why, just remember this.  There's a huge amount of money to be made in central planning.  It's a wonderful thing — for everybody except the ones in whose names the wonderful plans are made.

Progressive policies don't work very well in the real world, and after a while people get it, and they push back against it.  The 2014 midterms for instance.  When that happens progressives fight for market share with new strategies, new messages, and brilliant new insights.  Like how Marxism is really all about defending capitalism.