And with Obama, the radicals-pretending-to-be-liberals took over.
No jobs? Simple! Fire the bosses! Or at least confiscate their surplus wealth! Isn’t that called “capital”?
And so we now live in a period in which the spending of trillions of dollars for no return is excusable, the desperate situation of Social Security is ignorable, and the Obama administration refuses to build an oil pipeline from Canada, bans drilling, and piles up costly regulations to ensure no moose ever stubs its toe.
Evil fat Capitalist strangles Labor for the sake of riches: Obama’s vision of 2012 America.
If conservatives only realized what I just said and explained that to the American people they would win the next election by a landslide. Instead, people are pushing a permanent philosophy and that horrifies many historic liberals who will vote for Democrats and Obama. After all, this empowers propaganda that the Republicans want to turn the clock back a century or two. What is most needed now is not ideology but common sense.
For example, has throwing money at public schools made education better, or made it worse? How many of the spending programs justified by alleged good intentions, nice promises, and moral-sounding goals actually bettered the lot of poor and disadvantaged people, rather than created cushy jobs for decidedly non-poor and advantaged bureaucrats, inefficient unionized government employees, and recipients of grants for doing little or nothing?
Obama’s proposed solution: The masses unite to control the monster.
So let’s be non-ideological serious people. Have the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, and all of the other bureaucrats and red-tape worked or not? Was the taxpayers’ money well-spent or thrown away? Are alleged good intentions and worthy causes just covers for sophisticated corruption and theft? Patriotism was once the last refuge of scoundrels. Today, that’s been replaced by claiming to save the environment, benefit the poor and downtrodden, and impose social justice through the redistribution of wealth (i.e., gimme!).
To paraphrase Obama’s key patron, unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, you don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.
Thus, applying common sense does not mean that the bland centrist way is the best campaign theme. In confronting a terrible imbalance, strong measures are needed that include serious cutbacks in government, regulation, and spending. The oldest successful theme in the book is to run against corrupt Washington bureaucrats and special interests who are ripping off the taxpayers.
Isn’t there any potential leader who can explain this, not by watering down his program but by putting it in the context of a return to a workable system? So far, apparently not.
Yet it is vital to remember — as most American voters do subconsciously — that neither liberals nor conservatives, Democrats or Republicans are innately correct due to their membership in such categories. They are only right when the policies and ideas they propose are beneficial and workable for the country. That is how American voters should judge in 2012. If they do so there will be a new president in the White House. If they don’t it’s because you haven’t explained things very well.
Also read my article When Obama Preaches; Anti-American Dictators First Sneer At Him, Then Spit At Us
I’ve noticed the same thing. Obama’s feeble grasp of America, history, the economy and politics seems based on a combination of Hollywood movies, outdated books and the last tweet he read 3 minutes ago.
He is, as you say, fighting the battles of 1912 in a world that is beyond his comprehension. A century late, a few trillion dollars short.
“Balance” is a word that Barry Rubin uses throughout, and so these comments. I tried over many years to figure out what “balance” might mean in our own lives, and how the conception of balance has been represented. Here is the result of my efforts. http://clarespark.com/2010/11/06/moderate-men-falling-down/. I would advise that we challenge everyone who uses the term to fill in the details of what “balance” actually means in practice.
“Balance” is just midway between whatever two points you choose as references. The intellectually lazy choose the two major parties as their “balance.” But what if I choose a point midway between say… Goldwater and Reagan?
Centrism is the ideology of those too lazy to think for themselves. Instead of being wrong sometimes, it ensures you’re at least a little wrong all the time.
But you do get to feel good about yourself… and isn’t that what counts?
Thank you! I thought I was the only one thinking that for a moment.
There’s a huge swath of assumption in this blog post:
“…America’s rapid industrialization after the Civil War put the system out of balance and threatened to wreck the country’s constitutionally-mandated system. Robber barons, monopolies, exploitation of labor, and the buying and selling of legislatures were all commonplace. Only due to reforms, largely backed by Democratic presidents before most of us were born, was the balance corrected.”
His next comments regarding the civil rights acts are also out of touch with reality. Has anyone read Sowell’s “Economic Facts and Fallacies”? Just because a lot of people mistakenly believe something to be true, doesn’t make it true, unless you’re a centrist. Then it goes without saying.
“Balance” is neither a position or a mechanical process to find a middle. It is what works to maintain our rights, our principles, and our nation. It requires constant attention to determine the facts and the proper course for the country. It the best way to sail the ship of state in rough weather, with varying winds and a volatile crew. It is never something that can determined and achieved, with the course set and the wheel lashed down.
If there is no balance now, and the crew is ready to mutiny, it is because we were all below decks celebrating when the weather changed; all except for a few children who stayed on deck and tried to change course for a place called Utopia, which they’d heard about in a bedtime story.
DavJ
Well said.
That is because he is a 1912 era communist.
No. he is not fighting a 1912 war. Nor is he out of touch. He is *finishing* the war his fellow leftists started a hundred years ago, and he is succeeding beyond the wildest dreams of the Left. He is not few trillion short—we are. And the sum is 130 trillion. He and his kind made that happen actually—with malice aforethought. Not a single one of Obama’s actions have been a folly—each one has been calculated to inflict a certain damage on the Republic. He is not the one who is clueless—most of *us* are. For example, the author of this article. The guy still thinks that winning 2012 will save the Republic. Not only it won’t, it can not possibly save anything. Simply because we are the ones who have something—rights—that the left wants to take away, while the left has nothing that we want. It is 100% lopsided field, and the left takes away a little bit everytime it wins, while we merely prevent it from taking if and when we win. since we have only finitely many rights, the left will succeed with 100% certainty to take away all our rights. Sooner or later. And judging from the naivety of the rightist writers such as this one, and from the comments such as the present one, there is no way we can prevent the left from absolute victory over us.
You are wrong about one thing. The left does have something I want: the oxygen they breath.
You hit the nail on the head. I have written similar on several sites but the conservative writers continue to assume that BHO is like the rest of us. When will they open their eyes and see him for what he truly is? Cloward and Piven is his model. Sure he has tweaked it a bit, but each and everything he does is calculated to the end of America as we know it. He is our Hugo Chavez our modern Lenin. Remember what Rahm Emmauel said about taking advantage of a disaster? That disaster was the economy.
That is probably true. But, thinking further down the road, the left is following an economic model which is doomed to failure and communism will finally be destroyed by its own implosion. Count on it, if we can live long enough to see it happen.
Spot on.
One movie I don’t think President Obama would cite for instructional purpose is “It’s a Wonderful Life.” In truth, the Obama Administration seems to have adopted “Henry F. Potter” — the banker of the movie who regarded ordinary Americans as “rabble” — as role model. Potter, today, should qualify as a “one percenter.”
It is unfortunate that Republicans do not exalt George Bailey — the “Wonderful Life” businessman committed to serving the common good. It is also unfortunate that Republicans do not take to heart the counsel Chief Justice John Marshall provided in the concluding paragraph of his Gibbons v. Ogden opinion, counseling that when confronted with clever argument, people should apply their common sense to test the validity of the arguments ingeniously put forth.
Fascinating how many Democrats in Congress qualify as members of the One Percent.
I noticed, the other day, a brief online message from ABC News to the effect that Republicans failed to block action on the payroll tax. Here, of course, is a clear example of media bias –House Republicans offered what they believed was a better approach.
BUT in media land, if you do not march lockstep with the left, you are an obstructionist. How long until Republicans realize that the best defense is a strong offense? Toujours — as General Patton said — l’audace.
Great article, great point. Until you got to your conclusion. You’re leaving out the most important part of the election equation – that people are inherently honest in their evaluation and not self-serving.
Whether you are for or against Newt Gingrich, tell me a politician of late that has done a better job of explaining the history, the choice and the consequences we face in the allotted 90 second sound bite? It’s exactly why Newt, replete with all the baggage, made a huge push in the polls for a time. Mitt Romney has not been entirely ineffective either. Even the nutty Ron Paul has made legitimate points easily understood about the Fed for anyone paying attention. Not every Republican candidate has done a poor job of explaining the situation and the solution, Barry. A perusal of the candidate’s websites explains the situation and alternatives in full. I reject that notion that the situation hasn’t been explained well.
Have you ever considered maybe it is just possible that the multi-generational decay so deep, you can buy the vote?
To borrow another cliche, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink.”
You don’t have to buy the vote if you have the media and education system pushing in one way generation after generation. You lose the vote when you allow the other side to take over the information professions and push you out. The more generations nudged leftward the less you can expect young people to be able to criticize leftist doctrines, or even identify them as such, because they were not seriously taught alternatives or criticism, but were rather taught leftist analysis as if it were the only possible reality. They simply think it’s the truth and don’t seriously know alternatives. So while you still can win this or that election the country in general is constantly moving to the left.
I believe many opinions are formed in the home…be it political or any other. When the general population does not vote…does not care to vote…does not have time to vote, the children pick up on this. It amounts to moral, ethical decay.
Americans say they care…say…but in the last election we had here..17% of the state turned out to vote in what was a very important election for our state.
We see to have lost the meaning of being a fruitful member of our society.
Years ago it was a stigma to be on welfare, to be liberal, to have a child out of wedlock. Now these things are accepted..passed along..and we cannot support a society where it’s all take and no give.
The difference between liberal and conservative is words, nothing more than words..we had a situation in Washington this past week that showed me, we conservatives have extremely weak leadership that gives in and offers no explanation to us..
Panetta recently okayed the wearing of the hijab in jrotc..no one stands up and says NO..no one..words, nothing more than words are happening, and the actions, lack of actions, are overwhelming us…be it liberal or conservative
Voting percentages are VERY deceptive because registered voter totals are extremely inflated to help accomodate Democrat voter fraud through their “Get Out The Vote” programs run by unions and their front groups. Federal restrictions on purging voter registration lists and Motor Voter registrations have given the Democrats large numbers of registered voters who don’t exist, who’ve died, who’ve moved out of the district, and who are registered in multiple districts. The gold standard for voter fraud is the registered voter who doesn’t exist. With a list of those the “voter crews” can ride around in their vans all day and vote early and often.
Frankly, I don’t support doing much of anything to either encourage voting or registration; the univesal franchise was a major mistake.
For a few decades Americans have been coaxed into gradually accepting the tenets of political correctness and essentially a view that is Marxist.
Excuses for failure are now not only accepted but encouraged as Americans have been taught to think of morality in terms of one’s racial, gender and economic status rather than as present across the spectrum of American life. Indeed, conspicuous law breakers in the form of illegal aliens are most often portrayed as innocent refugees from some terrible war rather than people without the resolve, courage or brains to not emigrate, stay and solve problems or to stop over populating their own countries.
Thus you have the 99% who are people good and true and the 1%, people who are endemically depraved except for the portion that votes Democrat. Thus you have minorities, women and gays routinely portrayed as incapable of the level of bigotry and lack of insight that white men are, though ironically, European men have demonstrably created every little thing that have allowed minority groups to emerge from the shadows of their own inability and instead claim exploitation.
American has been undone through a type of casual and mass brainwashing; naturally people in the mass media are not going to express what they really think and instead will go for the easy sell to make them look like they are righteous people whether it is an actor, star athlete or politician. We seem to take it on faith that they are not liars or poseurs trying to protect their marketability or marketability of their product.
In the past we took it on faith that America was a good country and with a noble past based on noble aims and progressions. Now too many of us see America as one vast tapestry of genocide though none ever occurred, massive support of Jim Crow though those laws were far from being the result of a mandate or referendum, and basically one mass example of hatred and oppression from coast to coast.
I won’t be surprised if Obama wins: the self-loathing undercurrent that comprises large swaths of America by demonizing success and explaining away failure is the Democratic Party platform. You can’t win that type of thing since the ultimate goal is to lose, to commit cultural suicide for the benefit of the Huns.
good comment
Lots of doom and gloom in your comment, much of it justified, but do not despair – common sense can prevail: I am a living proof that people do change their mind, and I know I am not the only one.
no, no, in this case, it’s different:
You can lead a wh0re to culture, but you can’t make her think.
Pretty much sums up the liberal problem right there. OK, so it’s really just an old definition of horticulture. But I swear, it’s true. Pearls before swine, etc.
Most rational voters know that if you rob the rich to feed the poor soon there will be no rich anymore.
Most mature voters also realize that the rich did not gain their wealth by depriving them of their money, they were either working harder, had the sense to grasp an opportunity when it arose, or had a skill that was in demand.
The losers who take Obama seriously and blame their lack of success on either the rich or just other people are not the ones who will decide who will be the next President, the decision makers will be the rational, mature, and especially responsible adults who can really tell right from wrong.
There’s another point worth making in this regard: The leftist argument basically assumes that there’s a fixed amount of wealth in the world that exists without human intervention except for supposedly unequally distributing it. That may be true in nature in general, where different species and different groups compete for the same territories of pre-existing flora and fauna and don’t grow their own. But is that true for humans too? If that was the case Europe should have been considered shortchanged compared with the Middle East with all its oil and gas. But much of the wealth is created by humans and human invention.
In fact, you can create wealth and at the same time help others create wealth without anybody losing. For instance, if you create a technology that can turn arid land into a highly productive land you can profit from it in two ways – growing more food and selling the technology. If you sell the technology to another country they pay you for it, but does that mean they become poorer? Quite the opposite – it means they will be able to turn their own arid land into highly productive land and grow more food. Soon enough the profit in food will surpass the investment in buying the technology.
Human created wealth is not a fixed pre-existing amount, but depends to a great extent on human creativity, so you can’t reduce poverty by simply redistributing the wealth that exists already, because both richness and poverty will manifest themselves again based on the degree of creativity. It’s far more important to examin and nanalyse why certain individuals and cultures are more creative than others and then apply the lessons for the poorest to be able to advance.
“It’s far more important to examin and nanalyse why certain individuals and cultures are more creative than others and then apply the lessons for the poorest to be able to advance.”
The lessons are there to be had for anyone who wants them. Travel to any undeveloped part of the world and you will see right away that the people there reject those lessons. It is not that poor, undeveloped nations are unable to advance, it is that they are culturally unwilling. As my Grandfather was fond of saying; “99% of the misery in the world is self-inflicted.”
But the West has pretty much stopped advocating these lessons. When people from the Third World, or even lower class Westerners, go to study in Western universities what they’re taught is largely that the West became rich through imperialism and slavery (note that slavery still exists in Sudan and it doesn’t make it rich), and that these practices still continue in the subtler forms of cultural and economic neo-imperialism-colonialism and globalization. They ascribe Western success to Western exploitation, and the relative failure of the Third World, as well as minorities in the West, to being victimized by Western exploitation. In other words, all the problems in the world are created by the West, so in order to solve these problems Western culture must either fundamentally transform or disappear all together.
Westerners themselves don’t often advocate anymore the principles that turned the West into such a successful civilization since this might sound as if they’re saying Western culture might be somewhat better than others in some aspects, which will contradict the accepted principles of cultural relativism, multiculturalism and political correctness and lead to accusations of racism. So when these students from the Third World return to their native countries, what they’ve learned and what they teach is that if their countries are less successful it’s due to Western exploitation. If success is achieved only through exploitation of others, which is basically what the leftists teach, then success itself is a proof of criminality, and the more successful you are the more criminal you are. This is why the West in general and the USA in particular are so hated around the world. It’s not simple envy, but it’s because the West itself pleads guilty and claims to be the cause of their misery. Only relatively few in the West itself, let alone elsewhere, dare articulate alternative explanations for the gaps. This is not only fatal for the West, but also unhelpful to others because it denies them the lessons that can lead to success. But in leftist concepts learning from the West constitues Western cultural neo-colonialism, so one should advocate against it. In the end they offer no realistic solutions because if the West is destroyed today the world won’t become a better place because of it.
And as for who will decide the next election, I wish I could share your optimism, but for now it doesn’t seem like it’s already decided.
It’s being decided right now…
By getting Cain out of the race… ( it would’ve been a blowout )
And causing kooks like Ron Paul to rise to the top… ( Obama’s crew is funding him, too. Compared to the money in his war chest such fratricide ‘investment’ is money VERY well spent.
ALL of the remaining Republicans are very weak with HUGE BAGGAGE that is sure to sink them in November.
Obama ALWAYS picks who he’ going to run against — normally no one or an empty suit.
( Hillary defeated herself. )
Paul might prove to be a long-term disaster for the GOP. For now the media isn’t making as much of a noise as it should about his old newsletter and various other expressions, but if he’ll be the Republican candidate you’ll have the first black American president running against a guy whose newsletter claimed there were gangs of 12-14 years old black girls roaming the streets of New York injecting white women with HIV. The left has been slandering the Republicans for decades as being racist, antisemitic and crazy. Ron Paul as the Republican leader is exactly what the Democrats need as the smoking gun – more like a smoking nuclear crater really – that supposedly proves it for all eternity. You can’t give them a greater gift.
Republican empty suits? Only Ron Paul should be excluded from consideration. All of the other candidates are vastly superior compared to Barack Obama! We should not be repeating left-wing propaganda. Demeaning the ultimate GOP presidential candidate will be their number one tactic. This may be the central theme: “Obama may not be fantastic—but the GOP candidate is crazy, a real right-wing loon.”
“Vastly superior to Obama” is damning the candidates with faint praise. I have pets that would make a better president. Better manners, more restraint, better capacity for long-term planning.
“Yet the governmental machine just kept going beyond the point of reasonable balance”
Yes, it does, Barry. Because when you ask a statist, “how much government is enough?” you never get an answer. It’s never enough. They always want more. And to secure more, they want to make sure that government dependents (their voters) outnumber producers. This is the road to serfdom.
But where does the balance come from, Barry? Does it drop down, like “the gentle dew from heaven”? In the USA, there is a legal balancing mechanism called the Constitution, which it has been the object of statists since Wilson’s time to turn into a dead letter (which ironically enough, they like to call “a living document”). This is why the conservative movement, esp. the derided Tea Party, uses the Constitution as its core document, calling for a return to constitutional restraints on government power.
You’re taking a historical view and no doubt, however the fight comes out, the Republicans will once again manage only a small rollback, assuming their usual roll as custodians of the welfare state. But you’re wrong when you say conservatives don’t take balance into account. They may talk small government but they know it will take all they have just to return the Federal Government to the size it was in 2007. And they know very well how we got where we are now. Have you ever read Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny?
Exactly right. Levin has an open invitation to any leftist callers to define what is ‘enough’ government. Of course no one can answer because without strict adherence to a written constitution there is no limit.
I grew up under the shadow of the Jewish Holocaust or the Shoah, it had a powerful effect on me.
There is an old Israeli joke: Those in the Pot don’t know who is stirring it.
This is true for Jewish community leaders, and the Israeli left and right, America’s Left and right, most of the rest of the world.
When cultures are pressured from outside moving people to the far right and left without them knowing or understanding it.
Some stay in their political party for one reason, because their parents, grandparents where in it “tradition”. A powerful factor in people lives.
Most of us don’t really understand why we are who we are and what made like this. Our view of ourselves is frequently controlled by outside factors, which control the way we think.
Once you know this you get huge control over your life and how you think.
In a way it is a choice of Freedom over slavery.
The trouble is, everyone loves big government (unless you are a libertarian). Nothing is every wasted, because somewhere, someone is getting something. Sure, they would have been better off if they had kept their tax money to begin with, but they don’t see it that way.
For instance, there was an article on a video gaming website attacking Coburn for including a grant to a video game museum on his waste of money list. It gathered several dozen comments, all of which pretty much shared the outrage.
Republicans are no better. They love money to going to their corporations/special interests. Just like Obama (who is not a radical, but a machine politician from Chicago and thus just a crook) who shovels money left and right to bankers, energy companies, etc, who happened to be aligned with the Democrats.
Obamacare is the perfect example. It was what Hilary campaigned on, what Romney implemented, and what Newt thought up and endorsed. Yet supposedly it’s so left wing, even though it’s a Republican idea meant to give a ton of money to private companies?
A campaign is no time for a philosophical discussion. It’s a time to convince the public of the clear differences between yourself and the opposition.
Obama has already written the most effective GOP commercials for the 2012 campaign. Here is one example of many: “The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra”.
It’s one thing to claim Obama is an economic illiterate. It’s quite another to prove it using his own words.
Who among the Republican candidates does NOT promise to bring the size of government back into balance? Can anyone name a bureaucracy in our pre-2009 government that Romney would actually try to eliminate? http://www.crisismagazine.com/2011/absolutely-profligate-mitt-romneys-spending-cuts-would-expand-the-federal-budget
“If they do so there will be a new president in the White House. If they don’t it’s because you haven’t explained things very well.”
Ron Paul is still doing well in Iowa and plans to cut $1,000 billion in spending in the first year by throwing the Depts of Energy, Education, Homeland Security and others under the bus via defunding them.
If you DON’T vote for Ron Paul, you will GET “business as usual” until the country is bankrupt. Considering we spend 40% MORE than we earn that time is not far off, look at Europe for instance.
Ceteris Paribus – Romney is the WHITE OBAMA, a Romney presidency would be IDENTICAL to a second Obama term, more “gorge the beast” spending until our creditors cry enough, close their wallets and DEMAND their money back. The country would collapse 10 minutes later into Argentina 2001 then the Weimer Republic by next morning as the rest of the world abandons the US dollar.
If you do vote for Paul, you also get a nuclear armed, aggressive Iran and the complete abandonment of Israel.
After Obama’s foreign policy we need a leader that _won’t_ snub our remaining allies as a matter of principle.
Rom Paul is a kook who should never and (fortunately) will never be President.
Agree 100% Ron Paul is the only solution. I used to be against his foreign policy but the more I’ve seen of our interventions overseas the more I’m with him. And he is far from a “kook”; to think he is pretty ridiculous
That is not what Mitt Romney says he will do. He has changed his mind on a few issues, as have I, but he has not lied about what he plans to do. So, what makes the strident Ron Paul more trustworthy? What will happen when Ron Paul becomes President and discovers Congress won’t let him dissolve the Federal Reserve? Will he have flip flopped on his constituents?
Rubin: “A lot of conservatives seem to think that to explain where the country is going wrong and fix it they have to prove that Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt were completely wrong….[conservative] people are pushing a permanent philosophy and that horrifies many historic liberals who will vote for Democrats and Obama.”
Judging by the comments so far both here and on other blogs like RedState,
Rubin’s point doesn’t seem to be getting the recognition it deserves.
It’s common among ideological activists to treat history as a morality play, in which their side has always been 100% right about everything throughout history, and those with differing opinions have always been 100% wrong about everything.
I have repeatedly pointed out to my fellow conservatives that in this election, we are running against Obama, not Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson. And we are certainly NOT running against Theodore Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln either. There’s a difference between being a conservative and being a reactionary. At least there used to be.
It should be Obama’s policies which we need to both denounce and offer better alternatives. And that’s it. Not what Teddy Roosevelt did a hundred years ago.
The vast majority of American voters–even most *Republican* voters I believe–have made their peace with 20th century reforms *in principle*, such as Social Security and unemployment insurance. That ship has sailed.
We should certainly offer major reforms to those programs. But when GOP base activists denounce both programs and hold up the Calvin Coolidge Administration (!!!) as a role model, they are not only being irrelevant but detrimental to our election prospects. That sort of thing can scare away a lot of voters who are definitely unhappy with Obama’s policies but who still think it’s a good thing to have Social Security in their old age.
Here is an excerpt from the 1980 GOP Platform, the platform that Reagan ran on to win the Presidency:
“Social Security is one of this nation’s most vital commitments to our senior citizens. We commit the Republican Party to first save, and then strengthen, this fundamental contract between our government and its productive citizens.
“Republicans have resisted Democratic electioneering schemes to spend away the Social Security trust funds for political purposes. Now the bill has come due, and the workers of America are staggering under their new tax burdens. This must stop.
“Precisely because Social Security is a precious lifeline for millions of the elderly, orphaned, and disabled, we insist that its financing be sound and stable. We will preserve Social Security for its original purpose.”
If that stance was good enough for candidate Reagan, it’s good enough for me.
“It should be Obama’s policies which we need to both denounce and offer better alternatives. And that’s it. Not what Teddy Roosevelt did a hundred years ago.”
Of course.
But as you say, there are still plenty of people demanding that the only solution is the impossible. They demand that the last 100 years of US history be wiped clean and we start over with a Levinesue purity of conservative purpose. And without that impossible dream, like children with mashed carrots, they won’t play the game.
How could conservatives win in a landslide when there are so few (if any) running for office?
What do you expect when a candidate as obviously capable as Mitt Romney can’t pass the purity test and get more than 25% support running against the likes of the loon Ron Paul, the bloviating Freddie Mac hypocrite Gingrich and the slow witted Rick Perry? The GOP leadership is a bridge too far for most sensible people, Romney being the exception. The GOP is lucky to have Romney.
Wasn’t it balance *we want our empire too* that caused Japan to begin its imperialistic attempt to take over Asia and take on the United states?
When balance is confused with equal outcomes, equal ownership, equal power, or egalitarian paradises, then it – like other deliberately politicized words such as “tolerance” “compromise” “fairness” and “choice” becomes but a distorted word that merely serves as a disguise for good old fashiond evil wearing the cloak of goodness..
no. invalid premise. the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was not about balance. It was about Japan needed natural resources or starve – as always. Japan has always needed to trade to survive, and it was just setting up a colonial structure to ensure the flow of rubber, petroleum, etc.
You’re still not on message. Too involved, too cute.
The message must be clear — a simple story for the child-like mouth-breathing undereducated masses of the American public — simple and basic Ayn Rand — told by an orator as good as the Brit MEP Daniel Hannan, not the pussy-footing egocentric Country Club Republican candidates.
Aint’ gonna happen! So go Galt!
Basically, obama is dumb.
Excellent discussion! I agree that the first task in the 2012 election is to defeat Obama, electing a conservative in his place, and affirmed with conservative control of both houses of Congress, creating a mandate.
Our first order of priority on achieving power is to right the ship of state. To reassure the populace, we need to stabilize and reform our working institutions, including the New Deal & Great Society ones that serve genuine beneficial purposes. We pay for those reforms by eliminating, streamlining, and economizing on those programs that are lesser or non-beneficial. Failing Departments and strangling regulations on minutia are relevant examples there.
Once we have done these things we can join the discussion as a nation as to how to fully restore our constitutional order, either by further restructuring, or by Amendment to make questionable programs come within the purview of the constitutional structure. All three branches have run off the rails in this manner. (As examples, Legislative – empowering the Fed; Executive – Executive orders & nation-building abroad; Judicial – legislating from the bench.)
Because of our allowing the education and media elites to dictate a mixed cultural message, we have a younger generation who don’t even understand the meaning of our founding documents and why they were so creative, revolutionary, and successful for We the People. Thus we need leaders in the forefront, if not the Oval Office, that can explain, demonstrate verbally, and educate.
I honestly think Romney, Gingrich, or Perry, plus several Governors not running, could serve this purpose effectively, and win with a mandate. I think Romney would be the weakest of those candidates because of his history of malleable principle in office and target potential as a Wall Street insider.
Ron Paul, though correct on a number of economic issues (Austrian school), would be a disaster as a candidate (racialist newsletter, conspiracy theories, JBS, etc.) and an even bigger disaster as a president. His stated programs would be frighteningly sudden and destabilizing domestically & internationally.
When the Country Club Republicans got power which, as you say, is their first objective, they blew it big time. Cit. Bush I & II. They just wanted the masses to love them as much as the candyman Demagoguic Party.
Pussycat Countryclubbers are no match for the street fighting thuggery of the Bolshevik Dems. It’s over.
In any political debate these days, common sense says that without a free and unbiased press the society dies a slow painful death. The belief that you can’t win attacking the press is a false one. Anything advertised in the New York Times boycott, not forgetting to boycott the New York Times itself. Of course, don’t forget to write letters (not emails) to the advertisers. Emails are pretty much worthless, lacking both conviction and impact according to advertisers.
The lack of a free press is what gives BambLies all their traction. This is the equivalent of Normandy, France. You need a plan of attack to take the country back, and Odumbo to the woodshed.
Barry writes: “A proof of that fact is that few conservatives sought to roll back all the pre-1952 innovations. And the same applies to such later initiatives as civil rights along racial and gender lines…”
That’s because the Republican party always lead the Democraticans in civil rights efforts:
http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1ARAB_enUS440US448&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=record+republicans+vs+democrats+civil+rights+legislation
“Isn’t there any potential leader who can explain this, not by watering down his program but by putting it in the context of a return to a workable system? So far, apparently not”.
Yes there is, however because of Western Myopia it went right over most peoples heads, and is still not understood by most western economists and politicians;
It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.
Deng Xiaoping
The USA gets caught up in the color of the cat, instead of its purpose. It has been our Achilles heel the last 50 years.
ideology trumps common sense.
most Americans are conservative, the liberals/leftist/marxist cheat and have for decades. they would be unlikely to win in a fair election.
the ideology indoctrinated left will not see reason ..truth or anything the conservatives show them to be fact.
the left control the education system and I don’t see any attempt to fix that issue.
It’s a great insight. Don’t fight yesterday’s war, fight today’s enemy.
Couple of additional points.
First, Mr Rubin makes the point but doesn’t illustrate it sufficiently that conservatives can be as guilty as librals. Even on PJM, we have people railing against reality instead of understanding it and smartly adjusting to it. Case in point: Social Security and Medicare. They aren’t going away. Yes they have become seriously problematic (particularly Medicare), but they are both reality. Paul Ryan has the correct strategic view, which is to fix them because the country will not allow them to be disbanded. Moreover, the country will not agree to a wholesale jump to 100% free market solutions; i.e., immediate elimination of fica and 100% private accounts. It siimply isn’t going to happen. Shaking fists at the sky is useless.
Similarly, too many people on these forums can’t accept that Romney and Gingrich have won. One of them is going to be the nominee. Thinking otherwise requires magical thinking. Shaking fists at the sky is useless.
There are many more examples.
The second point is that Mr Rubin doesn’t make the obvious follow-on point that radicals have stolen the past as their means to appropriate the future. He says it but implies that it is a more-or-less normal thing that liberals would use the achievements of the Roosevelts to demand a continuation. But it isn’t more-or-less normal. It was for LBJ and possibly for Clinton, but it certainly isn’t for Barack Obama. He isn’t more-or-less normal in any regard. He and his masters are hard-core radical thugs. The Roosevelts, love em or hate em, did not intend to set up a marxists tyranny. Obama does.
I blame Glenn Beck and to some extent Mark Levin for a lot of the fanciful thinking. Beck wrongly conflates the homegrown, religiously based “progressivism” of the 19th and early 20th Centuries with the progressivism as the term was used by the Communists of the 1920s into the 1950s.
In an argument that begins with salvation by faith versus salvation by works, you get the essentially American Progressive notion of the perfectability of man and the Christian duty to actively work to bring about that perfection. This belief and the “Yankee meddling” that sprang from it was a major causal element of the Civil War. After The War, Progressives, both Democrat and Republican, as well as Populists like Bryan and Tom Watson support using the power of the state to rein in the more abusive aspects of unfettered industrial capitalism, something that didn’t exist at the Founding and was barely even foreseen by the Founders, especially those who were Jefferson and Madison adherants. This American Progressive ideology and the accompanying statism led to the anti-trust laws, the Interstate Commerce Commission, railroad and food safety laws, rights of workers to collectivise to counter the power of collectivised capital in the form of the corporation, etc. Along the way, many of these ideas were endorsed by the Left, the real left, the communists and anarchists, who by WWI had become a much more powerful force in this Country than our mythology admits. By the ’20s we had major American journalists shilling for the Soviet Union; “we have seen the future and it works.” The Comintern was making major inroads in journalism, academia, and entertainment and by the ’30s large segments of all three were left-leaning or outright communist sympathizers. The Communists adopted the term progressive to describe people who would support communist goals but who couldn’t be open Party members because of their station in life. If the Communists described someone as “a progressive person,” it meant they were a fellow traveller. When the Communists were driven to ground in the late ’40s and early ’50s, their supporters came to describe themselves as liberals, again a phrase which bore no relationship to what the totalitarian communists were really about, but it made a lot of people feel good about supporting the same things the communists did. With the fall of the Soviet Union and having nothing to rally around other than the environment we had lots of communists, some who even knew they were communists, all dressed up with no place to go and nobody to tell them what to do; the KGB had taken up industrial espionage rather than fomenting revolution amongst the Blacks and the young in America. As Rush and others destroyed the “liberal” brand, the left reached back into history and figuring nobody remmebered its past, resurrected the term Progressive. After all, who can argue with progress?
In any event, Beck et al. have done a disservice by conflating the two views of progressivism and even Comrade Obama has capitalized on it by trying to identify himself with the earlier progressivism’s icon, TR. Sorry, the sane among us aren’t buying it; TR while more of a statist than the libertarians like was a patriotic American, Comrade Obama’s progressives are anti-American communists and some of them even know it.
That makes a lot of sense, and it’s one of the reasons you don’t hear me jumping on the Roosevelts and others of that era. I’m sure you are correct that there were plenty of hard-core marxists who were already exploiting the politics of the day for their vile purposes, but I think it is wrong to view the Roosevelts through the prism of 2011. In the 1930′s, communism was still a relatively new phenomenon and although there were plenty of hints that it was evil to the core, the fact that TR and others had done what was generally considered good work would certainly have influenced people like FDR who expected that government could solve almost any problem. Just because a philosophy turns out to be falacious, doesn’t mean that every early proponents is evil to believe it.
Today, it’s a totally different situation. Idiots like Josh and Dwight who can’t see that decades of disastrous statist governments, which have slaughtered hundreds of millions of people as the highlight of their good works, is the norm for statism, not the exception…J & D are, as Art and many have pointed out, hopeless fools, beyond redemption. They seem to believe that Barack Obama, Dear Leader number 9,247 in the long chain of con artist presidente’s, is, finally, the benevolent god-man who will make the blessed theory work. How stupid can people be?
Beck seems to be a guy who does a lot of research, and then totally disregards the context of the historical era. He strikes me as the equivalent of libwits who hate Washington and Jefferson because they were racists, as defined Dec 26, 2011. Levin is simply a rigid idealogue; he’s almost always correct from my perspective, but it’s possible to be right 99% of the time and still be a fool, because someone that rigid can’t even imagine the 1% when he is wrong.
I think FDR himself was your basic liberal Yankee who believed that the state had a right and duty to “make things better.” That said, he had more than a fair share of outright communists around him and in the labor movement that strongly backed him, at least until he crossed them over illegal strikes. After that, it think it is fair to say that John L. Lewis and others hated him. Stalin made a major push to infiltrate the US Government and to influence its policy as he did to England. We never got to see our Kim Philby standing on the Kremlin balcony, but we had one or more. It is a real tragedy that Joe McCarthey was such a flawed man that the Left has been able to so demonize him that the fact that he was in the main right about communist infiltration is completely lost. There’s a reason McCartheyism ranks right up there with hypocrite and racist in the lefty lexicon of invective. And even back then, Republicans were afflicted with the “be nice” and “don’t disrupt” diseases. Eisenhower should have simply used his influence to rein in McCarthey and HUAC’s excesses and continued the “witch hunt” because there were indeed lots of witches as our little peeks into the old KGB’s files have proven.
Most liberals I talk to are stuck on their ideology & can’t back up what they believe. It appears one of the best tactics to use is to put significant doubt on what they believe first, then present them with the time tested truths of what works. Libs do not stay on topic often so it is a good opening to ask them what are the 2 or 3 most important foundational beliefs. Finally it is time to respectfully “turn the tables” on them. Some will cower & end the conversation. Many will be more angry. If possible, keep the dialog going.
Re Mark Levin — can’t understand his rage against OWS (Levin is not the only so-called conservative radio talker fulminating agaist OWS). I would prefer “poulist” to “progressive” — allowing that even “populist” will likely drawn derisive sneers from all sections of the establishment spectrum. But what is Lincoln’s concluding words at Gettysburg if not recognition that the Founding Fathers established populist government (of, by, for the people)? In this regard, please see the first half of Federalist No. 57, which provides all the (populist) ideas we need for political reform that will reawaken the founding zeitgeist.
What we have today is a political-economic-social order summed up in these words from the opening sentence in Federalist No. 57 — the “ambitious sacrifice of the many, to the aggrandizement of the few. OWS People would realize that where such ambition and aggrandizement prevails, society is divided in two parts — One Percent and 99 percent. And I should thihnk, too, that Tea Party people would realize that when society is divided into One and 99 — there ain’t no middle class.
Seems to me that the radical left never had much use for the middle class — known to the left as the loathsome bourgeosie. But how the radical left loves power and all the perks appertaining thereto. And, the way the GOP remains in a state of paralysis when confronted with the posturings of the radical left, I guess we are doomed to follow the lead of Nicaragua, which apparently now will have radical leftist Daniel Ortega president for a very long time.
Ah, but that’s just it. The US is NOT divided into 99% vs 1% – that is Obama’s class warfare Big Lie, for which he is ginning up the unions and coddling the stupid ignorant OWS kids. Did you ever try to listen to them? Pure incohate lefty nonsense, not a single political program beyond “We need more, you have more. Gimme!”
The Tea Party are the small business owners, the “bourgeoisie” who will be destroyed by Obama’s statist, big government hand-in-hand with big business crony capitalism. The only real 99% vs 1% division is in Obama’s vision for the US: 99% proletariat vs 1% elite nomenclatura, sucking up most of the money and making all the decisions.
No it doesn’t, it requires very simple thinking- Ron Paul gets enough delegates to prevent either of them from getting a majority. Once a brokered convention is unleashed, it becomes completely unpredictable.
In any event, the dissention that a brokered convention will provoke will pretty much guarantee Comrade Obama’s re-election. The current circular firing squad only makes Comrade Obama’s re-election more likely than not.
The problem is “Messaging” and the GOP has no idea on how to present the proper “Messaging” to the American public. The Leadership in the GOP has no “Bold Leadership” they are all scared to death of Obama.
When your goal is the same as the communists utopian visions, as are social democrats (they just disagree on the means to get there), government is never too big, private property rights and freedom is never to small.
But alas..
This article almost hits the right tone. When you look at politics, everything is yin and yang. For every idea and argument there is an opposing idea and argument. One side promotes a visage and the other side opposes it. Both sides vigorously argue their positions. If one side gets the upper hand in the argument, they score votes from their position on the issue at hand. Multiply this by hundreds, if not thousands, of everyday issues and you have the make-up of the two party political system. Neither party ever represents a pure political philosophy of governance. Each represents one side of a myriad of contentious issues in the hope of getting the most arguments right by election time. It really doesn’t matter what position the party takes on a single issue, as long as the sum of its positions is more favored by the electorate. The democrats have kluged together such a hodge-podge constituency that they have to constantly contradict themselves in order to hold it together. They have the advantage of a compliant media to help them smooth over the rough edges, like the natural opposition of labor and environmentalists. The republicans have equally strange bedfellows in their fold. Because of this, every election cycle becomes a tap dance of shifting positions by the two parties. Adherence to a strict political philosophy is a one way ticket to minority status for either party. With this in mind, we should always point to the abject failures of the democrat visage wherever possible, if we want to win. Even if we lose the election battle, we will win the political war by forcing the democrats to adopt republican arguments in order to win, or more succinctly put, the democrats have messed up so much that it is our turn to win, if we will just decide to argue for what makes the most sense for all Americans.
Bingo…but you forgot to talk about Commies.
True enough. Those bastards have been trying to destroy the two party system for over 100 years now.
Is there such a thing as “common” sense in a society which worships diversity?
America has given more to every corner of the world than it has ever taken from that very same corner of the world…iPod?,iPhone? iPad? How about improved baby formula? Diapers for young and old? The list is as long as American’s excellence and ability to excell.
Why has America been so successful? one asks. Capitalism, it wins hands down every time.
Socialism, European style, is older than the Ottoman Empire and for the very same reasons the Ottoman Empire failed, so too does Socialism have the World’s only most dismal record on delivering on its promise to equitably govern a country’s scarce resources of:land, labor and capital.
A bottom up, representative form of governance, with a market driven economy, having price the only arbiter between individuals, can equitably govern scarce resources of:land, labor and capital. Period! Karl Marx had the toughest time with his “dialectal materialism.” He didn’t know what it was, and nobody today knows what this means, either. America! God Bless It!
America is exceptional. It should never have to look back. Forward to the future with our heads raised steady, strong and proud. We Americans lead…the rest follow. Why? one asks. Because Our Founding Fathers gave us three precious documents:US Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. No other Nation (of the 197-odd in the UN) can hold a candle to any one, or collectively, of these three documents.
Vote massively this 2012 election for massive fraud is all around us. God Bless America.
“Capitalism, it wins hands down every time.”
It’s even more fundamental than that. COMPETITION wins hands down every time. Capitalism is one instance of competion. Others are federalism, balance of powers, school choice, freedom to marry the person of your choice, the scientific method, freedom of religion, and many others.
You won’t find any of that in the Middle East, or communist countries. That’s why, unless the game is rigged, the US will always prevail.
Freedom – freedom to chose who to buy from, freedom to challenge established scientific though, freedom to invest with who you choose, freedom to worship without harming you neighbor, freedom to chose your kids school, freedom to run for office and freely vote for your representative.
Freedom to live your life anyway you choose as long as you don’t interfere with your neighbors.
Less power in the hands of the politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists. More power in the hands of the people.
Shut down ineffective federal departments (TSA) and give the power back to the states and the individual.
FREEDOM, not big government, made our country great.
Now that is the way to attack the enemy!
First, the “robber barons” wanted the regulations in place as a price support floor by doing away with the cut throat competition; the rail roads were tired of going bankrupt on a regular basis. Secondly, at the time the US was a creditor nation, not a debtor nation an insolvent, as is now.
Thirdly, the myth that Hover did nothing(actually doubling federal spending) an made the depressions worse only to be saved by FDR:
“This raises an obvious question: What would have happened if Hoover had done what the urban legend view of history claims he did? For a possible answer, it is worth looking back a decade at a different Great Depression.
From 1920 to 1921, the unemployment rate increased by 6.5 percentage points and prices fell by more than 10%. Seen without the benefit of hindsight, it was obviously the beginning of a depression. Comparing the increase in unemployment and decrease in prices from 1920 to 1921 to the almost identical figures for 1930 to 1931, it was going to be a Great Depression.
President Harding acted as President Hoover is supposed to have acted. By 1923, federal expenditure had been reduced to about half its 1920 level. The table shows the result. The unemployment rate that peaked at 11.7% in 1921 had fallen, by 1923, to 2.4%. One year of high unemployment instead of 11 years under Hoover and then Roosevelt.
It was the Great Depression that didn’t happen.
Friedman is an economist and law professor at Santa Clara University and an author. His most recent book is “Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World.”
It’s only 90 years later, but imagine trying to reduce federal spending by half to get 2.5 percent unemployment? Surely that would qualify as full employment? Oh, and once upon in the 19th century being obese and full figured was a sign of prosperity, rather than the current emaciated healthy heroine look.
The only class of people who don’t get it are the Republican leaders. The Dems are sharks in the waters, the Repubs are the minows, one reason why they never roll back the State significantly. The other reason, they like to play with all that public money also when they can. Boehner and McCollum can’t wait.
And the most important reasons the Republicans can’t rollback government is because all of the bureaucrats in the government are democrats and they simply refuse to roll back anything. The spending goes on, even if the bureaucrats have to make the money disappear in order to get it all spent.
The ‘crats can’t spend money they don’t have and the only way for them to have money is for Congress to appropriate it. We have 535 Senators and Representatives each expected to “bring home the bacon” to his/her district and state. Someone can run with brave words about cutting the budget and may even try in their first term, but then somebody is going to run against them claiming they’re not doing enough for the district and how s/he’ll “bring home the bacon,” and they’ll get elected. We have met the enemy and he is us.
I would submit that the ‘crats are spending money they almost entirely don’t have and nobody even tries to stop them.
Then you would submit wrongly or just fundamentally don’t understand how government works, an all too common Republican/conservative condition. The government is spending money that it has in large measure through borrowing it’s true, but at the operating entity level where the ‘crats are, if they don’t have an appropriation to support it, they can’t spend it and can even be prosecuted under the Anti-deficiency Act for spending money not supported by an appropriation. It’s not the ‘crats who are making those appropriations, though they may well be asking for them, it is your Congressman/woman and mine.
Another completely ignored law. What bureaucrat has ever been prosecuted for spending money. I guess the most clever way around that inconvenience would be to fail to even produce a budget. Then the bureaucrat never breaks the law.
I don’t know if you’re stupid or just being stubbornly obtuse but it is real simple, simple enough even for “true conservatives:” NO APPROPRIATION, NO MONEY. Bureaucrats, even at the appointee level can’t spend what they don’t have. Even without a formal budget, the Congress has been giving the agencies Continuing Resolutions appropriating money for the agencies to spend. Yes, most any ‘crat is going to spend whatever s/he’s given to spend and sometimes foolish or stupid ones will overspend their appropriation; depends on who’s the President and who their friends are whether anything happens or not, they can get supplemental appropriations and ratification of over-spending, but the fact remains that the Congress must authorize spending through the appropriation process. If you don’t want the agencies to spend money, tell your CongressCritter not to give them any. And, yes, sometimes fund managers are prosecuted under the Anti-deficiency Act, but usually only if they’ve really pissed somebody off.
And who would any of those people be?
Just remember, you can’t possibly overestimate the stupidity of the average voter.
SOCIALISM
a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done
This is the message Democrtas/OWS are parroting
The EPA/NOAA have dictatorial powers
Government now owns Sallie Mae GM Chrysler FNMC Freddie
This Administration frightens the HELL out of me
That bureaucracy would be Fannie Mae and I wish someone could tell me how it got that name. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sound like cartoon characters to me.
Last week I read about what has to be one of the last sheet metal fabs closing in LA because it could not meet environmental regulations. It was the typical LA times coverage that is all about the brave lawyers standing up to the factory owners. And no reflection on the fact that everyone benefits from factories but no one wants to pay the price. Thats why I always punch ‘no’ by any ballot measure that smells of environmentalism. I just assume its more hysterical overstatement and not a valid measure.
Just keep punching, john. I am punching too. Environmentalism is the definition of a state sponsored religion that our Constitution tried to protect us from.
Politics is such a multi-faceted thing…..Term limits, for example. Why…its all the rage!!! Now, consider this…lets do term limits…then, what happens?
After 8 years, or 12 years..we throw them out! And replace them! Then, what? I will tell you…we have just doubled the number of congressional lifetime pensions we taxpayers are on the hook for. Thats what! More Congressmen? More lifetime pensions! Thats what.
No reason to invoke term limits unless you also invoke congressional pension reform….Just a thought.
Idea of ‘Limited Good’ is frequently a characteristic of peasant societies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_good
Stanley.
“The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them that will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.” C.S. Lewis.
In this section of “Mere Christianity”, Lewis compared our impulses to keys on a piano and the laws of right and wrong as the composed music. If you play one note over and over, you don’t get music. Some actions are right at times and sometimes they aren’t, and I think that’s what Barry’s trying to get at here.
I don’t agree that corporatism was ever a good thing. But that’s okay, we don’t have to always agree on every point.
This is what a well-written, well-argued article looks like!
Corporatism not a good thing?
I beg to differ.
I am a small cog in a very large Corporation. My “company” is quite frugal. We have delivered over 2 thousand consectutive quarterly dividends to share holders (like me) and had, until Obama’s inaugural,19 consectutive years of double digit growth. We have gotten back on track since the Obanination and are doing extremly well again.
We have suffered almost NO layoffs, and are now INVESTING several MILLION dollars at my plant for R/D and expansions.
Our stock price plummeted like many others in the early days of Obama, from 50+ to -21 dollars per share, but everyone everyone knew it was temporary…I didnt sell, I BORROWED money against my own house to buy MORE. It peaked around 65 per share this August, so none of my prior holdings have been harmed at all, and I have quite a handsome “new profit” I can use for a better retirement, or more college funds for my child, or whatever I chose.
I, a typical Mr. Small Potato (of asonishingly average average intellect and drive, I might add) am able to hold a mortgage in a decent neighborhood, drive a decent car, and enjoy a decent life with security and stability for my family, with no burden whatsoever being placed on the taxpayer.
Indeed, the 28% corporate tax my company pays the treasury, followed by the individual taxes of myself and ALL my coworkers, funnels quite a lot to the government at large.
The Public Teachers Union in my district does afford a SIX figure average salary to all, (yes, public teachers are in the 100k range here) and regulary strikes for 11-17 percent raises. They earning double my salary for less than half as many hours worked, and it is constant a source of frustration and anger among the “parents” that must fund the unreasonable and undeserved largess. They of course enjoy this not through any positive or profitable activity among themselves, but through corrupt political donations, followed by threats and virtual “hostage taking” of our children to meet their demands
But without my Corporation frugally managing its affairs, which includes holding us to 2-3% average pay raises (or zero, as the case may be) we would have no job at all.
True, the Public Dole is a much sweeter deal for the recipients than slugging away as a corporate drone such as I. But someone has to PAY for that.
Thankfully, my Corporation is SO well managed, it can afford to do so, AND provide many, many Average Joes like me a decent living, ALL AT THE SAME TIME.
Corporations do much, much more good to the nation, than harm.
Its a shame that cannot be said for the bloated Public Sectors that Corporations fund with the efficient stewardship of their investors money and employees labor.
Would that most of the PJM crew had as much common sense as Mr Rubin.
Well, there you go D-White. An admission by the Ping Pong Tongue as to the realization that the policies, at least since FDR, have been a failure. Ask yourself, what has been the dominant political thinking of that time period?
Mr. President is simply another facet that, of this inability to look in the mirror and see what reality is reflecting. Quite like the “Elvis Syndrome” where the USA has been supplied with “free” “legal” dope so that it may die while taking a …., all the while surrounded by feel good “friends” and “fans” who only want to feed off that motive power to achieve their own ends. A “free” ride.
Sure, Elvis in a sense, killed himself. But the “entourage” was left to writing a few books and screaming “I knew Elvis!” Nothing like losing the Golden Egg because of the inability to convince the Egg that it is falling off the wall. Funny thing, the Egg seems to know it but it keeps doping up.
Yeah, I knew California etc. too. See Ed Driscoll.
Re-read what Mr. Rubin has written carefully, D-White. There sure as hell is no Pick It Fence there.
They’re selling postcards of the hanging…
The circus is in town.
Lay off the Christmas Wacky Weed. The fact is, the principles of government and economics are timeless, just like the laws of physics (which is why my alma mater places Econ in the College of Science). I’ve had enough with the pompous center. Y’all are no less partisan than the left and the right – just more sanctimonious.
Conservatives come across in their message as for “big business” while in truth we are simply for business, for private sector activitiy and growth and innovation. Corporations are Amoral and will gravitate to whatever is in their best interest financially, whether at the government trough or by doing it the right way, through competition and by market forces.
Balance is a bromide – a word that calls forth no energy. I wouldn’t get out of bed for balance. I want something that increases my vitality – affirms my existence. “Balance” doesn’t do it. What Rubin’s saying is that there is no right or wrong way – just too much of this or that.
But the truth is, the country is demoralized. That’s because the current leaders are depriving the people of their ability to take moral action – to act for their own success to provide for their lives. Everything they do is to remove the ability of a person to act for his life’s fire. This is why it is a hideous administration and why it must be gotten rid of. The idea of balance does not touch the real issue and would fail to arouse many people to get off the couch on election day.
They were certainly wrong when they violated the Constitution, which was often, and egregiously.
The problem with the Liberal-Conservative Debate is that it is not the only variable. The other variable is Big Government-Small Government also known as Progressive-Freedom.
Teddy Roosevelt was a Conservative Progressive and Woodrow Wilson & Franklin Roosevelt were Liberal Progressives.
Reagan was a Small Government Conservative, but he was surrounded and succeeded by Big Government Conservatives (Bush Sr., Bush Jr., McCain) and Liberal Progressives (Clinton, Obama).
The Republican Establishment is dominated by Big Government Conservatives, which is the reason there is friction with the TEA Party Republicans who don’t like the spending policies of the Big Government Conservatives any more than their almost Siamese Twins, the Liberal Progressives.
Liberal Progressives and Big Government Conservatives only argue about where and how much money to spend, not the more important question about whether we should be spending money in the first place.
I wonder the difference between “subsidy, tax expenditure, costs plus contracts, loan guarantees, benefit guarantees, etc.” and “entitlement.” The former as applied to business is never quantitated and not applied when it comes to understanding national or public debt as applied to public entitlements.
I wonder if national health improved by reduction in pollution is quantifiable in dollar terms.
At one time raw materials, energy, labor and capital were cheap and industry prospered accordingly. One by one they became expensive. Now cheap labor is available worldwide and cheap capital is available. And American companies are prospering and sitting on a great deal of cash.
Cap and trade to address acid rain was generally successful, a Nixon administration program.
Regulation is a bugaboo. We have hundreds of coal burning plants in the northeast spewing ultimately toxic mercury, a law to address it, but it is presented as an added regulation burden. I guess if we don’t concern ourselves with what we do to our living space, then it isn’t a concern.
The TransCanada pipeline is routed over an aquifer that is contaminated with atrazine and fertilizer runoff, increasingly difficult for the farmlands it supports, and we are told now to worry.
I don’t have the time to reply other than to end with:
1. The economic marketplace does not always make sound judgments and decisions. The profit motive and the national good are not always perfectly aligned. We need government more and more.
2. The Republican nominees who are trying to outdo one another at declaring their conservative bonafides are just making fools of themselves. Trading on religion in government, homosexuality, homosexual marriage, birth control, abortion et al is disgraceful. Romney’s entire government career displays his progressive beliefs although he has to conceal it to remain viable. Huntsman, another sensible candidate whom I could have voted for has now sold himself out to the “conservative” cause.
3. Rubin, the author if this article, whom I read regularly, is a one issue analyst that he poorly conceals. Any candidate who is pro-Israel 100%,who sides with Israel on every issue, is his candidate.
Forty years ago, environmentalists were against pollution. Today, there is much less pollution in the USA so environmentalists are against development, period. (Can’t have the job go away, can we?) They have no lack of pseudo-scientific studies published in formerly honest scientific journals ready to “prove” whatever the cause of the day is.
The Keystone pipeline, which has had years of environmental studies, is being delayed so that Obama can collect campaign donations from both sides. There is no other reason.
Stan, items 2 and 3 can be argued back and forth, but you are dead wrong on your solution to the problem of item 1. If the marketplace is left alone, bad decisions will always be rewarded by bad outcomes for the bad decision maker. Long term hard labor for the criminals would be appropriate, however. We don’t ever need government intervention in the marketplace. Government, by its definition, is the only real monopoly where the marketplace is concerned.
Decisions by government fiat are arbitrary and usually corrupt. It’s the nature of the beast. It isn’t even only the outrageously corrupt administration we have today. They are all corrupt. In addition, 99% of the time, the bureaucracy is stupid. The decisions, if they are based on data at all, are based on yesterday’s data. More commonly, they are based on who best bribes the bureaucrats, in one way of the other. This is so plainly obvious that anybody who can’t see it is willfully blind.
When the free markey is allowed to act, the best outcomes are virtually certain, and happen much faster than governments can act. Unfortunately, the free market ruthlessly carves up the people and organizations that fail to respond to the latest requirements, and often over rewards the ones who do. It’s a miniscule price to pay in the overall scheme of things.
Statist decision making is many times worse. Not one or two times worse; orders of magnitude worse.
The evidence is abundant. Consider the improvement in ANYTHING when the world was controlled 100% by statist governments (up to 1776) and since. Wealth, health, lifespans, working conditions, leisure time, freedom, mobility, communications, comfort, entertainment…ANYTHING you can think of…are so much better after a couple of hundred years of dirty ugly nasty capitalism that even attempting to compare statism and capitalism is ridiculously absurd.
Stan is playing “the reasonable man” game. Actually, he’s a brainwashed fool.
Stan,
The economy, as we are learning, is a constant necessity. It is not secondary to the environment. The environment could be managed gradually in concert with a workable economy, if the common sense was availible to so do. But, the environmentilists have no such goal–they want no production that occurs in the environment. And, the Left has an agenda that utilizes the environment as a political tool to gain greater government growth and wealth re-distribution.
As to our needing the government more and more, why? What is the government capable of doing that does not become distorted and corrupted? When have bureaucrats ever done anything more than create huge, inefficient and costly entities that eventually destroy or pervert the private activity they were intended to regulate?
Again, we must have an economy, and it must be robust and aggressive, which seems disorderly to some people; but, it creates wealth and jobs, and lets academics develop theories for being more civilized and politically correct.
I’ll take the rough edges of a robust economy, and work out the pollution and the greed as we go. And, government needs to tend to its appointed duties.
Obama, no doubt, has great confidence in his prospects to demonize the Republican candidate to the poorly informed and hardly interested moderate voters. I think there are two possible ways this could fail to work for him. First, that Gingrich might be able to deflect the barrage and bring criticism to bear successfully on Obama (Mc Cain failed to vet Obama). Or, second, that Romney might appeal to the Moderates as an alternative to Obama in a further weakening economy.
As for expecting any significant changes in the beliefs of the average American voter, that will take a lot of time and work. Many Americans are buying into the class warfare deception and are willing to believe that Capitalism is the cause of their problems. It is more comfortable than notions of austerity, hard work, or self-reliance.
It is not clear at this point if there is a voting majority of Americans who still possess the common sense to save the nation from a long trip into Statism and Socialism. I believe that Obama thinks there is not.
The comment (paraphrased) attributed to Ayers was in fact a quote from the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranian Homesick Blues”. Perhaps it was an attempt to remind us of Ayers connection to the Weatherman Underground movement in the 60′s – maybe it was an attempt to appear cool.
There’s nothing wrong with being ‘un-cool’. If you can’t attribute a quote to the right person or don’t really know the source of a paraphrased or quoted comment, just leave it out.
And that quote from Dylan’s lyrics was commonly understood to be the basis of the name “Weathermen” taken by Ayers’ splinter group of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an organization that Ayers, his darling Bernadine, and others found far too conservative.
“Robber barons, monopolies, exploitation of labor, and the buying and selling of legislatures were all commonplace.”
Rubin might do well to read “The Myth of the Robber Barons” by Robert W. Folsom. There were a few robber barons – men like Stanford and Fulton, political entrepreneurs who became rich by convincing Congress to protect them from competition. But Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford got rich on their own by figuring out how to offer improved products and services at lower prices, enriching the entire society.
Monopolies exist in economics textbooks and where governments prohibit entrepreneurs from competing with the favored monopolists. Absent government protection, no firm has ever exercised monopoly power for more than a very brief time before competitors, not some government, broke them.
Exploitation of labor? How does one exploit another person without using coercive force (violence or the threat of it)? Government is supposed to have a monopoly on violence, not capitalists. Government is supposed to protect the liberties and rights of all individuals – including the liberty to walk away from an undesirable situation. How do you exploit someone who can simply walk away?
Buying and selling of legislatures. Duh, not supposed to happen in a Constitutional Republic.
Obviously, all these maladies the Progressives became so exited about were failures of government, not excesses of liberty, wealth, or “capitalism”. To Progressives, fixing the failings of government involves blaming someone else and increasing government power. The power to bail out your campaign contributors and cronies, for instance, while firms that supported your opponents are left to fail.
How does one strike a middle ground between failures of government resulting from abuse of power on one side and increasing government power on the other?
Progressivism boils down to the belief that Harvard men can run your business, family, and life better than you can because, well, like Theodore Roosevelt, they are Harvard men. The new aristocracy, based on attitude and education rather than the old one based on birth. Both consider themselves superior to other men.
A breath of fresh air from Mr. Rubin, who apparently wants to restore reason and pragmatism to our political system. Count me in. I would only add that this will be difficult, since the central problem of our contemporary politics is that those who purport to lead us are now in perpetual ‘campaign mode.’ One campaigns on ideological grounds; one governs on grounds of reason and pragmatism. Thus it is that our leaders no longer govern. Our political system is paralyzed. Interests are served, but the national interest is not among them.
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