Libertarian Leanings

It's Mike's Fault

If I had to categorize the conservative philosophy at National Review, I would call it "Rote Conservatism."  It's a learned thing, passed down from founder William F. Buckley, as if scripture from the National Review archives.  It's the old "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" brand of conservatism.  It's conservatism that demands the utmost in personal strength of character, which is what National Review says is lacking in those who support Donald Trump.  To steal some words from Kevin Williamson, it's "You know: Them," those people that are keeping Trump's presidential aspirations alive long past their expiration date.

I'm stealing his words but not his context.  Mr. Williamson was somewhat defensive when he used that phrase, taking issue with something written by "estranged" conservative Michael Brendan Dougherty.  In Williamson's context "them" were the political elites, "people who live in places such as Washington, D.C., and New York City and work in fields such as politics and media."  In other words, him, not the white working class supporters of Trump.  But it's the white working class who became the target of Williamson's tirade.

Williamson offers a remarkable straw man argument, complete with a fictional villain, "Mike, an imaginary member of the white working class who is getting by on Social Security disability fraud."  Williamson borrowed Mike from Dougherty.  According to Williamson, fictional Mike's refusal to face his own failures and shortcomings is emblematic.  Mike represents a dysfunction in the white working class that powers the Fuhrer" Trump's improbable rise.  Mike just won't get off his ass and get out of the dying town of Garbutt.  Instead, Mike lays around collecting disability, shooting up on heroin, and listening to Donald Trump tell him that he's a victim of the Chinese.

"The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.  What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul."

But Mr. Williamson never gets into why Mike's dying town of Garbutt is dying.  Could tax policy be a factor?  Or maybe punitive, anti-growth business regulation?  It's funny how some towns seem to thrive while others don't.  Can we honestly say fictional Mike is to blame for the ones that don't?

And how about the rising divorce rates and the decline of the family?  Mike's fault?  Or might there have been policies that contributed.  We used to hear conservatives rail against liberal policies that would encourage the demise of the American family.  It turns out, after all these years, they were wrong?  Mike's fault?

How about welfare policies?  Can Mike really forego his Social Security disability check, fraudulent though it may be?  Can he actually afford to pull up stakes, rent a U-Haul, and head west, or south, or someplace?

Well, since Mike is a fictional character, I'm going to give him a fictional brain.  I won't make him a genius, but I will give him enough smarts to realize that for all the preaching from real world Williamson, opportunity keeps getting harder and harder to come by.  For all intents and purposes, Mike has been facing recession for eight years.  Mike may not understand why.  I can't imagine that he would.  But Trump offers Mike the hope that he can change things, end the recession, make it so that Mike can get a job.

Williamson, on the other hand, tells Mike to get a goddamned U-Haul.

The recent #NeverTrump hysteria at National Review is almost comical, except for the damage its war on Trump might do.  Williamson and the rest of National Review used to explain how progressive policies, in spite of all promises of panacea, would instead actually cause the problems now facing fictional Mike.  But now, rather than entertain the heretical thought that boorish Trump might actually reverse the trend, perhaps ending the policies that they used to oppose, Williamson wrings his hands over the bigoted, fictional Mike and how his ignorance gave rise to the insufferable Donald.

By poisoning Trump, Williamson, National Review, and a host of other "conservative" elites will most likely usher in a resurgence of progressive control.  They will elect Hillary.  With Hillary in the Oval Office we'll see our federal agencies become further weaponized against our citizens.  We'll see the systematic erosion of our liberties at the hands of a progressive Supreme Court.  And for fictional Mike?  Welfare with dignity, maybe. But not opportunity.

Thank you Mr. Williamson and National Review, but do please stop masquerading as conservatives.  There's only so much fiction we can stand from you.

Capitalism and The Socialists Who Depend Upon It

Oleg Atbashian, writer and graphic artist from the former USSR, talks about his experiences with socialism on American Thinker.  He makes an entertaining observation.  While socialists rail against the inequities of capitalism, they actually depend upon it to provide the material needs of the people under their thumbs.  In certain Marxist countries you can see that a particular stage of world economic development has been captured and locked in place.  It's as if time has been frozen at the moment socialist "enlightenment" has been achieved.

"Capitalism just keeps churning out all these new products, which our increasingly socialist government then declares "human rights" and taxes these very producers in order to provide their products to the people for free.

Some call it harmonious coexistence, but there's a catch. The more the socialist government expands its functions by guaranteeing an ever expanding number of "human rights," the more it needs to tax capitalist producers, which undercuts their ability to develop, manufacture, and market new products. Once they reach a tipping point when capitalism is no longer viable, this will also end the propagation of "human rights" in the form of new goods and services.

Socialism conserves the stage in which the society existed at the time it was overtaken. Cubans still drive American cars from the 1950s, North Koreans still dress in the fashions of the same bygone era, and in the USSR I grew up in a government-owned house that was taken from the rich and given to the needy in 1920s and remained without indoor plumbing or running water and with ancient electrical wiring until it was condemned and demolished in 1986."

Socialism is quite the rage these days, especially on college campuses, where it has become a religion.  It's a path to salvation for its advantaged and pampered followers as they preach its gospel of enforced racial and gender fairness, and income equality.  Feel the Berne.  It's been the experience of Mr. Atbashian and millions of others, though, that socialism never quite works to the benefit of the people who have to live it.  The fact is, socialism can't possibly live up to its promises.

Yet that there are a great many who think of socialists as well meaning reformers, good-hearted people, who are maybe just a little bit blinded to the the greater benefits of capitalism because of a sad preoccupation with some minor transient flaw.  Caught up in the fervor of reform, well-meaning socialists are somehow blind to the failure of their theories.  Or maybe they just can't bring themselves to admit that they might be wrong. 

I would say that this somewhat widely held view gives socialists way too much credit for altruism, more than they ever deserve.  In fact, I think it's becoming evident to more and more people that in the U.S. our socialist elites are really a capitalists at heart.  They are capitalists who sell socialist pipe dreams.  They rely on the force of government to make, break, or bend the rules to help them steal "market share" in profitable private sector industries whenever and wherever possible.  A prime example is Obama's recent hostile takeover of the health insurance industry.  

In this case the socialist idea of a "right" to health care evolved into a "right" to health insurance.  Recently we got a real world reminder of how our new right to health insurance has panned out .  A Democratic voter at a recent CNN sponsored presidential town hall asked Hillary Clinton what she could do about ObamaCare rate increases.

"Teresa O’Donnell, an office coordinator from Powell, Ohio, told Clinton that, like many Americans, her premiums have skyrocketed under Obamacare:

'I have voted for Obama, and then my health insurance skyrocketed from $409 a month to $1,090 a month for a family of four. I know Obama told us that we would be paying a little more, but doubling -- over doubling my health insurance cost has not been a little more. It has been difficult to come up with that kind of payment every month. I would like to vote Democratic, but it's cost me a lot of money, and I'm just wondering if Democrats really realize how difficult it's been on working class Americans to finance Obama care.'

In this correspondent’s experience, $1,090 for a family of four is actually low by ObamaCare’s jacked-up rates, and not representative of what many families are facing. Obama actually promised lower premiums under his scheme."

Hillary had a hard time with the answer.  In fact, she really didn't have one, not that you would expect her to.  Eventually someone will have to have an answer, because Ms. O'Donnell's experience is not an aberration.  Rates have gone up, Obama's insurance exchanges are going broke, there are still millions left uninsured, and predictions are that things will get worse.  

Now let's look one of the prime architects of ObamaCare and how he made out from it.  He is the MIT health care economist Jonathan Gruber who achieved notoriety when he was recorded saying that it took “the stupidity of the American voter” to get ObamaCare legislation passed.  That went over well, but no worries.  Here's how Mr. Gruber made out on ObamaCare, according to Deroy Murdock writing in National Review.

"So far, the health-care economist has received at least $5,886,150 in taxpayer-funded health-care-consulting fees, mainly from the federal government. This bonanza includes:

• $103,500 from the U.S. Department of State
• $392,000 from the state of Minnesota
• $392,600 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources
• $400,000 from the state of Vermont
• $400,000 from the state of Wisconsin
• $481,050 from the state of Michigan
• $1,730,000 from the U.S. Department of Justice (that medical hotbed)
• $2,050,000 from the U.S. National Institutes of Health"

Not too bad.  Well, the public sector route has proven to be the easier path for many of today's fortune seeking entrepreneurs.  For one thing, by cashing in on hostile government takeovers they never have to worry about customer satisfaction.  At least, not for actual customers.  Typically, as soon as the government takes over there is no longer a need to satisfy the people who actually have to use the services.  The only customer of importance is the government, which is most happily satisfied when it can spend money, lots and lots of money.  ObamaCare, with its costs of design, implementation, subsidies, and exchanges, fills the bill.

However, as ObamaCare has demonstrated, government takeovers can be, and often are, total disasters for the people that are forced to use them and the people who have to pay for them. And that's a feature not a bug. Failures require congressional committees to study them.  Committees hire consultants and staff, and they inevitably come up with solutions that call for more government control, perhaps through creation a new federal agency.  Or maybe they'll identify a new takeover target, perhaps a satellite to the now federalized industry, one that the committee decides is guilty of cheating the American people and is thus pushing up costs.

In all cases, in whatever solution for whatever problem, tax payer money flows and flows, and our socialist entrepreneurs get richer and richer.  And naturally they vote for the party that wants more government, the Democrats.  

But is it for the greater good as our socialist invariably claim?  Is it for the good of the country?  Is it good for anybody who doesn't happen to have the proper connections?  Not for my money, and not according to Oleg Atbashian, either.  He lived it, and he would know.  

Read his entire essay.  It's well worth the time.

War on Republicans Reaches Tragically Absurd Heights

What to make of union officials who refused to blow the whistle on government mismanagement and corruption because it would have meant speaking to a Republican about it?  It happened at the Veterans Administration, and the refusals cost some veterans their lives, according to this report in the Daily Caller.

A former federal employee union president is wracked with regret because veterans likely died at a time when she knew about gross misconduct within her Department of Veterans Affairs facility but didn’t tell congressional leaders because they were Republicans.

“If I would’ve gone to him two years ago, who knows what kind of lives could’ve been saved,” Germaine Clarno told a radio interviewer Monday, referring to the Republican leader of a VA subcommittee. Clarno, a lifelong Democrat and social worker at the Hines Veterans Affairs Hospital in Hines, Ill., was president of the union representing doctors at the hospital as the deadly wait-time scandal unfolded.

Dozens of veterans have died in recent years while waiting for appointments with doctors at multiple VA hospitals and care centers around the nation. But VA staffers systematically manipulated records to make it seem like they didn’t have long waits. The problems became so severe by 2013, that as many as 40 patients died at just the Phoenix facility.

In defense of Ms. Clarno, she did not sit on her knowledge of gross misconduct simply because Republicans happened to be in power.  She did, in fact bring it to the attention of certain Democrats, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin and Representative Tammy Duckworth.  No action was taken at that time.  It was not until Ms. Clarno brought the problems to the attention of Republican Senator Mark Kirk that an investigation was launched.

Sen. Mark Kirk was the ranking Republican on the Senate VA Appropriations subcommittee when Clarno finally talked to him in 2013, and wielding the power of the purse, he immediately launched a crusade to expose wrong-doing at Hines.

But in the previous years, Clarno went instead to Democrats who were ill-positioned to do anything, and who indeed, did nothing.

One might wonder why Durbin or Duckworth could not, themselves, have reached across the aisle in order to get life and death issues raised in the proper committees.  For others it was a matter of distaste.

Clarno’s tale of haunting regret is at least the second case of people connected with VA unions admitting they did not speak up about life-and-death issues because the idea of talking to a Republican was too distasteful.

An earlier case involved the Tomah Veterans Affairs Medical Center hospital in Wisconsin, also known as “Candy Land” because veterans were given sedatives rather than treatment for their underlying conditions.  According to postcrescent.com, a subsidiary of USA Today, Marine veteran Jason Simcakoski was prescribed a fatal mixture of drugs.

WASHINGTON — The union president at the Tomah Veterans Affairs Medical Center tried to alert congressional Democrats about the over-prescription of opiates at the facility as early as 2009 — five years before a 35-year-old Marine died there when doctors prescribed him a fatal mixture of drugs, according to memos obtained by USA TODAY.

Lin Ellinghuysen, president of the local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees that represents Tomah employees, outlined the issues in an April 2009 memo that is marked as having been "hand-delivered" to Rep. Ron Kind, then-congressman Dave Obey and then-Sen. Russ Feingold.

The text of the April 2009 memo can be found here.  And now back to the Daily Caller reporting:

The Tomah VA employees union didn’t take complaints to Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican, even though he is not only from Wisconsin, but is chairman of the Senate Oversight Committee with jurisdiction over management issues in government agencies.

“We didn’t even talk to Republicans then,” Lin Ellinghuysen, union president and past vice president, told the Wisconsin Watchdog.

But there is no remorse in Wisconsin. The union is now running ads against Johnson, faulting him for not acting on information he was never given. The public employees union is campaigning for Russ Feingold, a Democrat who preceded Johnson in office and is now running to retake the seat.

...

Ellinghuysen said the union talked with Democrats about the problems, but she didn’t follow up when they didn’t get results because she is no “courageous Wonder Woman” and “needed a paycheck.”

Ryan Honl, a lifelong Democrat who worked at Tomah, reluctantly went to Johnson’s office, and got a response the next day after being frustrated with a lack of response from Baldwin and another Democrat, Rep. Ron Kind.

Then, after Republicans did the work of proving undeniable mistreatment, the Democratic members belatedly chimed in with expressions of outrage at the mistreatment of vets — just as Durbin and Duckworth did in Illinois — Honl told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The failure of the unions to alert relevant authorities about patient abuse, coupled with political attacks against the few congressmen who actually tried to put a stop to it, astounded Honl to such an extent that he renounced his political party.

We find that the media war on Republicans has reached tragically absurd heights.  That there is a war is no secret.  Look no further than CBS News' political director John Dickerson who offered advice to Barack Obama on the occasion of his second inaugural address.  Under the heading of "Why Obama Should Seek to Destroy the Republican Party," Dickerson had this to say:

The challenge for President Obama’s speech is the challenge of his second term: how to be great when the environment stinks. Enhancing the president’s legacy requires something more than simply the clever application of predictable stratagems. Washington’s partisan rancor, the size of the problems facing government, and the limited amount of time before Obama is a lame duck all point to a single conclusion: The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat.

Advice taken.  Obama, with help from the media, has truly transformed American politics. Together they have so thoroughly poisoned the Republican brand that government officials with life and death responsibilities — union Democrats — refuse, out of some bizarre sense of distaste, to reach across party lines, even when there are serious problems involved.  It is astonishing that the Democrats' war on Republicans has reached the point where collateral damage is measured in lives lost.

The Escalating War on Cash

The following article was written by Clint Siegner, a Director at Money Metals Exchange.  It was originally published on February 22, 2016 at www.moneymetals.com.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Government bureaucrats, central bankers, and Wall Street executives all have their own reasons for hating the cash in your wallet. So, no surprise, they are working closely together to rid you of it.

The war on cash is intensifying and bullion investors are wondering what the transition to a "cashless society" might mean. We'll cover that, but let's first recap why these organizations are, once again, allied together to the detriment of your ability to transact privately.

The self-interest of bureaucrats is one factor. They don't like privacy. They dream of the day when they can access all of your spending with just a few keystrokes. The knowledge will help them more aggressively tax and regulate.

Central bankers want something a bit different. The policy du jour among these central planners is NIRP – negative interest rate policy.

Bankers in Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan have already launched NIRP. Their counterparts elsewhere, including the U.S., are planning for it.

The challenge is to create an environment where customers must either spend their savings or pay their bank interest to hold deposits. To succeed, the government must corral citizens into purely electronic money. Otherwise many will simply withdraw cash and hide it under a mattress. When you have to pay a bank to borrow your money, holding physical cash gives you a higher yield, i.e. 0% interest is a higher yield than negative 1%!

Bank executives are licking their chops at the potential for all transactions to be done electronically. They stand to rake in processing fees every time you use your card or cell phone to make purchases rather than using cash. Plus they will gather a larger deposit base as customers no longer have the option of holding paper money outside the banking system.

People need to keep these motivations firmly in mind, because politicians and bankers aren't going to be honest about why they want to eliminate cash. Wall Street wants you to focus instead on the convenience of electronic payments. And bureaucrats are busy stigmatizing cash as a tool for drug dealers, tax cheats, and terrorists.

Perhaps Americans will see through the propaganda and recognize just how dangerous a cashless society would be to their wealth and privacy. They might decide to punish banks such as JPMorgan Chase for no longer accepting cash payments on loans and insisting customers not put cash in their safe deposit boxes. They may ask their elected representatives to oppose any measure to eliminate paper bills.

However, most Americans aren't paying much attention to the issue. Congress is barely accountable, and the Federal Reserve isn't accountable at all. A restriction on cash could indeed be imminent. That's certainly the goal of the "Better Than Cash Alliance".

If citizens ultimately lose the War on Cash, here are some likely ramifications for precious metals investors.

Negative rates should drive significant demand for gold and silver. NIRP is a testament to the fact that central bankers will try literally anything to produce inflation. Such an extraordinary policy should set off alarm bells for anyone who isn't concerned about inflation, or is betting on deflation. If central bankers want inflation, they have the power to create it. As always, inflation fears will drive demand for physical bullion.

The good news is that while bureaucrats can theoretically win the War on Cash because they have complete control over the issuance of paper money, they cannot win a war on bullion. Metals don't roll off a printing press that can simply be switched off. Physical bullion is private and off-the-grid – a nightmare for regulators.

If they attempt taxes and regulation, they will fall victim to the law of unintended consequences. But that may not stop them from trying. It's happened before – most recently in India. Indian officials dramatically hiked the tariff on imported gold in 2013 They accomplished little more than angering a gold-loving population and driving an eight-fold increase in gold smuggling.

Politicians and their friends in banking aren't going to stamp out peoples' desire, or their ability, to transact privately using barter instruments such as gold and silver coins. And they aren't going to force unwilling people to stand idly by as they take shears to savers; bank accounts. The push to eliminate cash will inevitably push people into cash alternatives including physical precious metals.

Bret Stephens Laments the Loss of Conservative Purity

In a column entitled Staring at the Conservative Gutter on the Opinion Journal website, Bret Stephens catalogues Donald Trump's many departures from what he considers acceptable norms.  Unfortunately, Mr. Stephens measures Trump using the usual progressive politically correct yardstick.  In other words any disagreement with the progressive party line is racist, or sexist, or something.  Worse, Mr. Stephens indicts those who support Trump, as well.

"It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years. Nativist bigotries must not be allowed to become the animating spirit of the Republican Party. If Donald Trump becomes the candidate, he will not win the presidency, but he will help vindicate the left’s ugly indictment. It will be left to decent conservatives to pick up the pieces—and what’s left of the party."

So it's up to decent, enlightened, establishment conservatives like Mr. Stephens to "pick up the pieces," after smearing middle America as racist because we would like to stem the tide of illegal immigration.  Characterizing Trump and his supporters as "hostile to immigration" is inaccurate and dishonest. The problem is not immigration, but illegal immigration.  To ignore that distinction is to ignore legitimate concerns about possible jihadist infiltration, the impact the flood of immigrants has on the jobs market, and the intent of the Democrats to get the illegal immigrants into the voting booth as soon as possible as a means of securing and holding power.

Smearing these concerns as racist is what the Democrats reflexively do as a matter of political strategy against any who oppose them.  And in Stephens they have an ally.  I get annoyed.  Bret Stephens and others are so quick to concede racist intent on the parts of Trump and his supporters, apparently seeking to show that they, themselves, are not like those middle Americans over whom they stand in judgment.  Well, accusations of racism are all the rage these days, aren't they.

But I'd be willing to bet that most of the attraction to Trump comes from the willingness he has demonstrated to push back against politically correct progressive stereotyping.  When Hillary accused Trump of sexism, look what that got her — a renewed focus on Bill's serial abuse of women and Hillary's part in enabling it.

Trump is not my first choice.  My preference is to see Ted Cruz win the nomination, but I'll vote for Trump if he wins it. The alternative is to endorse an accelerated descent of our federal bureaucracy into scandal, incompetence, and criminality — as we have seen under Obama — in the GSA, EPA, ICE, IRS, NASA, and the VA.  They tend to become increasingly politicized in support of anyone who supports more and bigger government which is typically the Democrats.  Think job security.

I'm not sure if Trump can successfully turn accusations of racism back on the accusers as he did with Hillary's charge of sexism.  In fact I'm not even sure he'll try.  At one time I was convinced that his purpose in running was to get Hillary elected.  Records show that he's donated somewhere between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation.  Whether he intends it or not, President Hillary may be the end result of Trump's campaign for the presidency.

But in the meantime, Trump has been willing to fight on a battlefield of his choosing rather than concede some "moral high ground" to a bunch of progressive criminals and their sycophants.  He's teaching the GOP how to fight. Unfortunately, Stephens and the GOP establishment aren't getting the message, and their push back against Trump is alienating the very people the GOP needs to attract.  If the Stephens and Republican establishment are so worried about having to fix a damaged Republican brand, they should start with a good hard look in the mirror.  They could defend the Republican brand instead of conceding some validity to progressive politically correct accusations.