From the embarrassing to the pathetic
I don’t want to beat the proverbial dead horse, but these media polarities are getting to the point of absurdity. Bush, the lazy golfer while we were at war; Obama the engaged commander-in-chief playing golf for needed relaxation more in one year than in Bush’s eight. Katrina, the emblem of federal inaction and culpable incompetence; the BP slick, either a result of private greed overwhelming noble federal auditors or proof of the Obamian competent response. Bush’s illegal war clearly alienating Muslims and thus creating terrorists daily; laughable excuses from a terrorist that Obama’s stepped-up targeted Predator assassinations “created” would-be killers such as himself. Right wingers in bed with Wall Street oligarchs greedily crafting federal policy for the exploiting class; Obama for some odd reason, no doubt in the end a noble reason, taking more money from the likes of Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum than any politician in history. The Bush-Cheney nexus shredding the Constitution with the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, Predators, and renditions; Obama the civil libertarian reluctantly forced to maintain or expand such protocols, albeit at last under a watchful liberal eye. Bush’s “lost” war in Iraq miraculously soon to be Obama’s “greatest achievement.”
What is the theory behind all this other than partisanship or cynicism? I think it involves the power of faith and the irrational, in some cases not confined to the left. (e.g., I once got a prominent conservative angry at me when I suggested Reagan embraced large deficits, signed an amnesty bill, wanted nuclear disarmament, and raised payroll taxes). Politics is a religion, never more so than in the case of Obama. And true believers always prefer the saintly explanation rather than the most logical.
An era of zero interest
I went to two banks the other day. The interest rates on interest checking, or short-term savings, or money market accounts (without tying money up for a half year or so) were all below 1%. In my lifetime of some 56 years, I cannot recall lower rates. I just refinanced last fall a loan at 4.8%. Two observations. That is quite a spread of profitability for banks; and, two, given inflation at 2-3%, it seems better to borrow than to save. For conservative, thrifty retirees, worried about the mercurial stock market in the post-2008 days and post-real estate crash age, there is essentially little income to be had from their savings. I don’t follow the inter-workings of either the Federal Reserve or the Treasury Department, but as an historian I note only that we are in a cycle in which debt trumps capital, and we are witnessing an enormous redistribution of wealth far beyond the implications of new tax policies. Interest income on savings simply has ceased to exist for millions — leading to profits for banks, and essentially cheap money (the interest rate minus inflation) for debtors. Was this an artifact of the recession or a planned act, and have we seen anything quite like it in recent memory?
Perhaps the only positive ramification of the fiscal collapse of the West is that left wing policies will perish with it. They depend on solidarity, i.e. the willingness to pay for others or to share the burden. But why would a private worker wants to pay for the pension of a public worker that has it so much better?, why would a legitimate US citizen wants to support a Mexican flag waiver, who calls him a racist?, Why would a German tax payer wants to bail out the Greek state that cheated on them. The last 50 years of public finance have been a giant Ponzi scheme, where everybody tried to the get the best deal for himself. 2010 will be the year that will bring the collapse of that system.
You should earn your own money, save for you own pension and only you can insure yourself for calamities and sickness. Not because of a political ideology, but because there is not other way left.
To play devil’s advocate:
1. “But why would a private worker wants to pay for the pension of a public worker that has it so much better?” – because more than 50% of the population, including women, receive some form of entitlement and are addicted to big government. Private workers are a minority.
2. “why would a legitimate US citizen wants to support a Mexican flag waiver, who calls him a racist?” – because the addicts to a pusher government fear competition from white males more.
3. “Why would a German tax payer wants to bail out the Greek state that cheated on them.” – Germany is committed to the EU. If Greece goes, so does Spain and Ireland and that would be too destructive. Either way, they lose.
4. “The last 50 years of public finance have been a giant Ponzi scheme, where everybody tried to the get the best deal for himself. 2010 will be the year that will bring the collapse of that system.” – see 1. and 2. above.
“Ponzi scheme…” right you are.
Another comparison; a chain letter type of scam (no, I didn’t, but co-workers boasted about the $$$ they hauled in). In the early stages many benefited, but as fascination waned others just sent money away and put their name at the bottom of the list for nothing.
Sitting here wondering what will happen when the (borrowed) money runs out and the handouts cease…
I guess what bugs me about the immigration discussion (if it can be called that) is that none of my left-leaning friends seem to be able to carry a logical conversation with regard to the issue. It’s pretty hard to have a conversation about anything worthwhile when no one can follow a basic syllogism. *sigh
And Vic, I was wondering if you read the article in the latest addition of The Atlantic regarding the Pacific series. It seems the author is rather frustrated that the ‘Greatest Generation’, and it’s motives during the Pacific campaign, has not been sufficiently tarred when it comes to war movies (i’m assuming his flavor is more Oliver Stone). However, it seems the treatment of the brutality of the Battle of Peleliu has, so far, somewhat satisfied his desire for the image of the marines to be sullied somewhat. (I think this is interesting because you dealt with this issue specifically in an interview with their own Chris Hitchens awhile back.
Cheers
When Carter was president interest on loans to buy a home was up to 22%…maybe 24%. It was hard to believe it would go so high. Those of us with 7 to 8% interest on our home loans were smug.
It was the seniors that cashed in. Old timers with cash in the bank made out great with that high interest under Carter.
Bush may get the last laugh on Obama sooner or later. I’m eager for his book in November.
I read that a third of public employees in San Francisco make 6 figures.
I’m curious to see if the Arizona experiment works and other states try it.
Ron, I remember those Carter days. I had just started my first job and opened an IRA with a 14% rate.
While interest rates on mortgages during the Carter years were often as high as 18% and CDs paid interest about as high, don’t forget that the inflation rate peaked at over 20% *. If someone could lock in those high CD rates for a long period, they made out pretty good but when you factor in inflation and taxes, they really did little more than break even.
I was in the military during the Carter (Mis)administration. Two years in a row, we were given pay raises that were 10% less than the inflation rate to “set an example” that no one else followed. Yeah, I remember Jimmy, the rat-bastard.
True, but if you bought a CD in 1983, which was the high water mark for real interest rates, you could have gotten a real yield of 12%.
Should not the message be—“We want to get far away from Mexico, learn English, learn all about the traditions of this wonderful country we are fleeing to, and embrace the American notion of the content of our character rather than skin color.”
Of course it should, but that isn’t what the illegal immigrants and their US advocates believe. The illegal immigrants want better pay, a nicer lifestyle, and a safer place to live. Those are understandable goals. But far too many believe that just because they managed to get into the USA, they should be entitled to those things while avoiding taxes. They also believe that they can and should retain the language, culture, and attitudes of the poor Mexican villages and cities from whence they came. They believe this because Mexican propaganda promotes such divisive ideas, and because too many US citizens and legal immigrants prefer the “tossed salad” model to the “melting pot” model and advocate a race or ethnicity or skin color approach to politics, employment, education, and housing.
Cesar Chavez opposed illegals because they undercut farmworkers wages. Yet the left call him their hero. I don’t you would find carrying the Mexican flag or promoting the cowardly Che.
Cesar Chavez held the conventional view during that era. The Democratic Party consensus was that illegal immigrants unfairly competed against American citizens in the workplace. What changed? These same activists later realized that the Hispanic illegals could be turned into loyal voters! It really is that simple.
Mention of Greece in passing this article. I believe VDH predicted the riots we are seeing today. Will this be California’s fate when the inevitable bust comes? How much longer can they keep putting lipstick on the pigs in Sacramento?
“…putting lipstick on the pigs in Sacramento?”
Hold it! I thought Nancy Pelosi was from San Francisco? …did I miss something?
One thing everyone seems to have missed is the “Golden Ratio” of the health of a Civilization: When 85% of the Productive Citizens are only supporting 15% of the non-productive, that civilization is at its zenith. When this ratio begins to shift towrd more Non-productive Citizens (both Rich and Poor), that civilization is in decline. When it falls to 65% of the Productive supporting 35% of the Non-productive, it vanishes from the face of the Earth, and, drops into Footnotes at the bottom of pages in dusty tomes, nobody reads.
The Public Sector needs the Private Sector to survive. Said another way, the Public Sector is a parasite living off the Private Sector host. Higher salaries and pensions (cost structure) in the Public Sector, relative to the Private Sector, cannot be sustained over the long run. The Left’s flawed world view leads to the need to create a false reality. This leads to costly mistakes. See Greece, Spain, Portugal, NY, CA, and NJ for a more detailed explanation.
At this point I just think that Western civilization has gone crazy. I applaud and value your efforts at depicting this.
And I love what you must be doing with your house. ;-)
La Raza is the John Birch Society of the American Southwest & undoubtedly evolving into the Klu Klux Klan as they advocate ruthlessly and exclusively “por la RAZA”!!!
I knew some Birchers in the 60s.
They were friends of mine.
They had good educations and factual, logical arguments against the scourge of Communism.
They were American born children of parents who escaped the post WWII massacres of the Russian takeovers of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
They were the complete reverse of the La Raza gang in every respect.
How dare you? I know. You went to American schools post 60s.
Bravo!
Obviously, you’ve mislearned the John Birch Soc. message. Unfortunately, their predictions have been accurate, and the statists in all their guises are upon US tooth and nail. Hard to besmirsch those who can say “we told you so” with absolute 20/20 vision in hindsight.
The inevitable collapse of the West will be a horrible thing to go through. Some countries will rediscover there Christian patrimony and begin anew, others will opt for tyrany. Change is coming and it wont be pretty.
Anywhere you go in Europe you know how a person votes by the paper he reads. Socialists read the leftist papers. Nothing controversial about it. When communists held 10 to 20 percent of the national vote, communist voters read the communist paper. Here, numerous “watchdog” websites each post daily a dozen examples of media bias. When will Americans stop treating media bias as news and recognize it as the status quo since time immemorial?
When Americans were building their nation into a superpower, they created a larger middle class relative to its population than any other country. Washington bureaucrats were a nuisance only to a few, fewer still paid attention to their intrigues, and cronyism, or surreptitious nationalization, was not a threat to competition within entire industries as it has become today.
Now, our political overlords have converged on a simple idea: too large of a middle class makes elections unpredictable; it is better to have a majority of dependents who take from government and a servile minority who pay. Can this “fundamental transformation,” as our historic first Islamic apostate president said it, last for long? Alas, we are a wealthy, and law abiding country.
We may be surprised, however, by a confluence of events, inimitably ironic like those brought forth by the meddling mansuetude of an ancient divinity, whence the disobedience of illegal aliens and the opportunism of terrorist enemies overwhelm the current regime’s attempt to remake our way of life.
Brilliant and spot on. This should be a guest article on PJM and crossposted everywhere. Real socialism 101.
This a communist plot,couldn’t y’all see this coming???Do you think the Berlin Wall fell because the U.S.S.R. was defeated by Regan???Right you see who’s still in power in Russia.Keep watching Russia & remember never trust a Russian :)
Agreed,,, every word. Don’cha just love it when we (conservatives) are able to sit back at some point and just laugh at the clowns? Or maybe we should be crying…
November 2010 cannot come too soon for me. However, I live in the Texas 27th Congressional district which has been firmly in the grip of Soloman Ortiz for the past 28 years. I’m an active member of the local Republican support group, but they out number us, I do not expect to see a change here in my lifetime.
La Rasa and the Mexicans misplaced national pride are two reasons why illegals from Mexico should go first and the southern border should be repaired first. Then we can work on the northern border, Canadians, Irish, Colombians, Russian illegals. It is pathetic that Congress and at least the last four administrations whine that they can’t enforce the law as they wrote it.
Congress and the White House need to get the idea that we owe the world help out of there heads.Stop exempting themselves from laws they pass, read, health care, and EEO laws. Stop giving themselves excessive benefits, read, health care and a pension after 6 years. This government wants to follow the Roman Senate’s road map to destruction.
But you do realize, don’t you, that all this border security will be pouring billions more dollars into the public sector? In a dream world, we would cut other spending and concentrate on the borders, but in the real world it will be more salaries, pensions etc.
Easy, we’ll pay for it by getting rid of all the things govt has no business doing.
Getting rid of ObamaCare would pay for enhanced border security 10 times over.
The inevitable collapse of the West and the formerly named United States of America (now named the New American World State NAWS) became evident with the selection of the Obama by the American and European Left. He was selected because of his dedication to the hard core Leftist world of the American and European Academic milieu. This world has distorted reality and turned everything upside down. This collapse had its begiinings a long time ago when American Progressive decided to change the world into what they considered the ideal society. The only problem is that their ideal world is quickly becoming hell on earth. The future is looking more and more grim; the riots now taking place in Greece will hit this country by next year; the American cities are more and more resembling third world cities where nothing works and people get by with guile and dishonest. The so called educated American cannot see where he is leading the rest of us and will be the most shocked when the little air tight world of University professors and public school teachers come tumbling down. For Christians it is interesting to read the works of St. Augustine who lived at the end of the great Roman Empire; as the Roman world was crumbling Augustine did a great service for us Christians and was able to preserve the Christian patrimony and helped it survive through the long dark night that followed the collapse. The City of God is the refuge and City of Man is as it always has been the realm of the Evil One.
Thank you
There is no reason for the racialists to change their image or message. They know they can count on fellow believers in the MSM to sanitize whatever needs to be and to vilify whoever disagrees with the liberal narrative. But the slow heaving I detect below the radar suggests the country has awakened from what has not really been a long sleep and is rolling up its sleeves. I look forward to November with what I think is a reasonable optimism.
Mention of Greece in passing this article. I believe VDH predicted the riots we are seeing today. Will this be California’s fate when the inevitable bust comes? How much longer can they keep putting lipstick on the pigs in Sacramento? nice blog
These demonstrations are being fueled by OUR applicable laws. Laws that permit the underclass/minorities to openly discriminate against the very people that made it possible to live in the United States of America.
It is sickening to witness, and has been for decades.
The Union of Sociopath/Paranoid/Psychotic Inmates of America is empowering themselves with these laws to overwhelm the management and become administrators of the Institution.
But, don’t get caught calling them any names; You’ll be labeled a criminal.
The cuckoos nest is getting as large as America, and it’s being flown over like a pile of dung.
Great article–keep them coming!
If the border were close to Cape Cod or the Hamptons there would be whole different view of illegal immigration.
If Boston is a sanctuary city, maybe a few dozen busloads of illegals would get their attention.
Exactly! Please help: http://www.969bostontalks.com/bustickettoboston.aspx
Dr. Hanson,
Are we to witness the pruning of the world’s embrace of madness, until only sanity remains? Will this take a quick world war, or centuries of dissipation?
Imagine if the Chinese travelled to Mars, wherein Martians asked for wisdom. The Chinese would say, “Why, Communism!” Then, imagine if the EU astronauts travelled to Mars, wherein Martians asked for wisdom. The Metro-Sexual Proggies would say, “Why, Socialism!” Finally, the late great descendants of the USA arrive on Mars, and the Martians ask them for wisdom. What would the Americans say? A Jeffersonian limited democratic republic? Or would they say, “Let us be perfectly clear, it’s is disingenuous, sub-intellectual, mob-hypnotizing jabberwocky gobbledygook!”
Who would blame the Martians for concluding that our planet’s theories on governance needs pruning?
We keep scratching at the surface. What seems to be happening are red herrings. We need to look beyond the apparent emergencies and recognize where all this is leading. In all of it we let our reliance on money be our guide. Wrong approach.
There is some evidence that its all conncected. Part of much wider effort to push the world towards corporate oligarchy and collectivism. For instance an interesting series of interviews by Jamie Glazov over at Frontpagemag recently discussing the KGB’s activities from Gorbachev onwards. Could it be the Cold War never really ended, and that we have been rooked?
It seems almost inconceivable, like a bad political thriller novel. But is it?
I am 43 and have degrees from good schools, and still don’t understand money. It is my current focus. I will post my results on my blog.
Here is my current heuristic, though: Imagine a dollar on one side of a table, and a teacup on the other. If you put another dollar on there, that is inflation. What is interesting about this, though, is that is what the Fed does. They “create” money, that goes to the banks, out in the world, comes back, and gets fed back to the Fed.
What I think has happened in that transaction, though, is inflation. Imagine I owned the $1; the second comes from the bank, who owns it. They now own one half of my teacup. I think inflation cedes power to banks.
This may be completely wrong, but it is my working thesis.
Note that if you add a teacup, with one dollar, you have increased your purchasing power. At first I thought this was deflation, but that would be removing the dollar (I think); rather I think this is the basic process of wealth creation. What we want is not higher wages, but greater purchasing power. We get that with Capitalism. We hear how “real wages” are stagnant, but computers get faster and cheaper every year, and we can buy more stuff for less money.
And wealth creation is related to the speed of money. The more it moves, the more it spurs innovation, and the cheaper and better and more plentiful things get. What happened in the Great Depression was that money stopped moving. There was real capital around and about, but at 91% tax rates for capital gains (or something like that; Roosevelt hated Capitalists, which is to say the only people who could have created jobs), why move? Let it sit in box somewhere. You get to keep more that way.
And Communism is simply a system which substitutes burocratically controlled barter for money. In a true barter system, you take your pig to market and want to buy some whiskey. If no one has any whiskey, you don’t sell the pig. What money allows you to do is time and space travel, where you sell now, buy later.
Communism eliminates, functionally, money. And if wealth production is a function of the speed of money, and you have no money, then no wealth is created; rather, less is created. What they have, again, is a barter economy, where Statist burocrats decide who needs what.
This is a structural problem that goes beyond the simple loss of motivation to work that attends not getting to keep the fruits of your labor.
I will add that it is useful to substitute for the word profit the word “Motivation”. If you do this, you see that if you condemn profits, you are simultaneously condemning motivation. Why produce, if there is no benefit?
These last points are obvious, of course. Yet there remains so much stupidity around us.
“This is 2010. The “Race” is a fossilized word; in a society of Asians, blacks, whites, and everything in between, even the mere scent of racialism is odious and, again, counter-productive.”
Dear Professor Hanson – I have finally found something on which I must disagree with you. The use of race both here and in other contexts is only counter-productive if it does not accomplish the intended goal. The goal here, as in so much else, is to keep our beloved race industry alive, intact and thriving. One rejects race-based politics only if one is interested in genuine societal tolerance. These people are not. They are interested in the power and money and jobs that come from the racial grievance business. And they are probably going to win. The Democrats cannot possibly resist going for broke with a blanket amnesty that will provide between ten and twenty million new Democratic voters virtually overnight.
Correction/addition: what you trade is your labor and freedom, in Communism, for food and shelter. Freedom, because the terms of the deal are not up to you, and are subject to revocation or renegotiation for any reason at any time.
It is a barter system, therefore, where you get to remain alive in exchange for the sweat of your brow, and your submission. The extent of the sweat, and the extent of the submission, will depend on the needs of the State. Your price, in other words, varies.
Long-term bonds are *not* a good investment right now. There *will* be massive inflation, soon.
Makes me almost glad I took out way too big a mortgage. Inflation will wipe out my indebtedness. Assuming, of course, I still have a job with a salary sufficient to pay back even the inflated dollars.
1. We can learn again from Greece.
Either the United States fixes its budget problem by cutting spending or we end up with something like current events in Greece.
2. The real scandal is usury. The banks can borrow from the Fed at 0% or get deposits at 2%. Credit card debt can bear interest at 30%. Now there’s a profit margin; financed by taxpayers.
This is a serious problem.
Peter Schiff is running for Senate in CT – and he’s talked extensively about Greece, and the fact that it is the canary in the coal mine. I’d like him pull a Brown in CT. The Fed and the interest rate scam – for lack of a better word, is going to cause big problems.
Communism, Marxism-Leninism, as the Chicoms historically refer to it, is not about the economy. It’s about power. State control of society is not an economic theory; it is a political theory about power. No regime needs to cause the death of tens of millions of its citizens for economic reasons. Such thuggish tactics appeal only to thug megalomaniacs in the pursuit of their acquisition of power by means of intimidation.
Socialists in our government today sidestep the socialist moniker in the mind of the general public because they have not effected the mass execution of freedom loving citizens, yet. Their mask of peaceful coexistence with their political opponents shields them from the common understanding of the central consequence of communism: death.
Frequent elections limiting mandates, separation of powers ensuring competition in the branches of government, and the 2nd Amendment protect us from the designs of a Final Solution by our historic first Islamic apostate president and his staff of post-American, baby-boomer degenerates.
well said VDH
For many in al-Qaeda, they look to words and symbols…— and they see a stumbling pony not a strong stallion. They are encouraged and emboldened — and they act.
An apt description from Dennis Miller…the United States as “Mincing Leviathan”
Are the bad guys…?
The bad guys are all the guys and girls in government charged with enforcement of federal law who pretend to see that law as discrimatory.
Who refuse, for a whole host of reasons relating to a perception of their personal political futures (“we must coddle all our potential new voters”) and phony obeisance to political correctness, to do their jobs.
(…Hillary Clinton in Las Vegas, while still a candidate, shouting at the Mexican man’s wife hiding in an adjacent room…”No woman is illegal !”)
All the guys and girls who are laboring hard, daily, and incrementally, to turn this country into a Mincing Leviathan.
Or worse, a cesspool of their extremely small minds and limited vision.
Oh! for an earlier era when popular music would produce this famous ditty:
” If you don’t like your Uncle Sammy,
Then go back to your home o’er the sea,
To the land from where you came,
Whatever be its name,
But don’t be ungrateful to me!
If you don’t like the stars in Old Glory,
If you don’t like the Red, White and Blue,
Then don’t act like the cur in the story,
Don’t bite the hand that’s feeding you!”
Not long after, even Irving Berlin wrote “Watch Out for that Bosheviki Man.”
What do we get nowadays from pop entertainment? Sean Penn, Danny Glover, et. al.
As words go, so to does conversation.
The current state of language is that to give any value to the newspeak of “progressives” is to choose one’s own loss.
There is no dialogue. The left has no interest whatsoever in hearing about anything to do with what is sustainable, viable, or responsible. The goal is to put the state in charge.
Let the chips fall. And, if this seems extreme, the events in Greece are evidence that this is what is happening. The limit of lies and insolvency is the chaos they are living in Greece, and what threatens to contaminate of member countries, and beyond.
This is pretty embarrassing:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/06/colbert-rips-anti-gay-act_n_565763.html
and yet, haven’t heard a peep on the conservative matrix.
Ah, you just missed the Dow 1,000 point drop – the tabula rasa, wiping the slate clean – where my stock, bought at 12.00 a year ago, was at 18.00 on the morning of the 6th and had a stop at 15.60. It went down, the stops kicked in, selling it, eventually landing at 6.00 where someone else bought it…
It closed at the end of May 6th at 17.21.
I made my widow’s mite, but someone else made a bundle.
When Obama speechified “Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” he was plagiarising.
I have experienced first hand the destructive, divisive tactics of racist Hispanic organizers. The good people with Hispanic surnames who have been one of the pillars of our nation since its inception should be aware of the damage that is being donem In many cases they are being cruelly used. The motive is power, not justice.