Perils of long distance calls

I

Easier said than done

 A few things about ditching

Global warming's glorious ship of fools

Has there ever been a better story? It's like a version of Titanic where first class cheers for the iceberg

By Mark Steyn

Yes, yes, just to get the obligatory ‘of courses’ out of the way up front: of course ‘weather’ is not the same as ‘climate’; and of course the thickest iciest ice on record could well be evidence of ‘global warming’, just as 40-and-sunny and a 35-below blizzard and 12 degrees and partly cloudy with occasional showers are all apparently manifestations of ‘climate change’; and of course the global warm-mongers are entirely sincere in their belief that the massive carbon footprint of their rescue operation can be offset by the planting of wall-to-wall trees the length and breadth of Australia, Britain, America and continental Europe.

But still: you’d have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay ice not to be howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition ‘stuck in our own experiment’, as they put it. I confess I was hoping it might all drag on a bit longer and the cultists of the ecopalypse would find themselves drawing straws as to which of their number would be first on the roasting spit. On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters. Forced to wait a year to be rescued, Sir Douglas later recalled, ‘Several of my toes commenced to blacken and fester near the tips.’ Now there’s a man who’s serious about reducing his footprint.

But alas, eating one’s shipmates and watching one’s extremities drop off one by one is not a part of today’s high-end eco-doom tourism. Instead, the ice-locked warmists uploaded chipper selfies to YouTube, as well as a self-composed New Year singalong of such hearty un-self-awareness that it enraged even such party-line climate alarmists as Andrew Revkin, the plonkingly earnest enviro-blogger of the New York Times. A mere six weeks ago, pumping out the usual boosterism, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that, had Captain Scott picked his team as carefully as Professor Chris Turney, he would have survived. Sadly, we’ll never know — although I’ll bet Captain Oates would have been doing his ‘I am going out. I may be some time’ line about eight bars into that New Year number.

Unlike Scott, Amundsen and Mawson, Professor Turney took his wife and kids along for the ride. And his scientists were outnumbered by wealthy tourists paying top dollar for the privilege of cruising the end of the world. In today’s niche-market travel industry, the Antarctic is a veritable Club Dread for upscale ecopalyptics: think globally, cruise icily. The year before theAkademik Shokalskiy set sail, as part of Al Gore’s ‘Living On Thin Ice’ campaign (please, no tittering; it’s so puerile; every professor of climatology knows that the thickest ice ever is a clear sign of thin ice, because as the oceans warm, glaciers break off the Himalayas and are carried by El Ninja down the Gore Stream past the Cape of Good Horn where they merge into the melting ice sheet, named after the awareness-raising rapper Ice Sheet…

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Anyway, as part of his ‘Living On Thin Ice’ campaign, Al Gore’s own luxury Antarctic vessel boasted a line-up of celebrity cruisers unseen since the 1979 season finale of The Love Boat — among them the actor Tommy Lee Jones, the pop star Jason Mraz, the airline entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, the director of Titanic James Cameron, and the Bangladeshi minister of forests Somebody Wossname. If Voyage of the Gored had been a conventional disaster movie like The Poseidon Adventure, the Bangladeshi guy would have been the first to drown, leaving only the Nobel-winning climatologist (Miley Cyrus) and the maverick tree-ring researcher (Ben Affleck) to twerk their way through the ice to safety. Instead, and very regrettably, the SS Gore made it safely home, and it fell to Professor Turney’s ship to play the role of our generation’s Titanic. Unlike the original, this time round the chaps in the first-class staterooms were rooting for the iceberg: as the expedition’s marine ecologist Tracy Rogers told the BBC, ‘I love it when the ice wins and we don’t.’ Up to a point. Like James Cameron’s Titanic toffs, the warm-mongers stampeded for the first fossil-fuelled choppers off the ice, while the Russian crew were left to go down with the ship, or at any rate sit around playing cards in the hold for another month or two.

But unlike you flying off to visit your Auntie Mabel for a week, it’s all absolutely vital and necessary. In the interests of saving the planet, IPCC honcho Rajendra Pachauri demands the introduction of punitive aviation taxes and hotel electricity allowances to deter the masses from travelling, while he flies 300,000 miles a year on official ‘business’ and research for his recent warmographic novel in which a climate activist travels the world bedding big-breasted women who are amazed by his sustainable growth. (Seriously: ‘He removed his clothes and began to feel Sajni’s body, caressing her voluptuous breasts.’ But don’t worry; every sex scene is peer-reviewed.) No doubt his next one will boast an Antarctic scene: Is that an ice core in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

The AAE is right: the warm-mongers are indeed ‘stuck in our own experiment’. Frozen to their doomsday narrative like Jeff Daniels with his tongue stuck to the ski lift in Dumb and Dumber, the Big Climate enforcers will still not brook anyone rocking their boat. In December 2008 Al Gore predicted the ‘entire North Polar ice cap will be gone in five years’. That would be December last year. Oh, sure, it’s still here, but he got the general trend-line correct, didn’t he? Arctic sea ice, December 2008: 12.5 million square kilometres; Arctic sea ice, December 2013: 12.5 million square kilometres.

Read more at:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9112201/ship-of-fools-2/

Keynes and Copernicus

The Debasement Of Money Overthrows The Social Order And Governments

By Ralph Benko

The United States Senate moves toward the confirmation of Janet Yellen, now posited for next January 6th, as chair of the Federal Reserve System.   Let us in this moment of recess reflect on eerily similar observations by two of history’s most transformational figures:  John Maynard Keynes and Nicolas Copernicus.

One of Keynes’s most often-cited observations, from his 1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace, chapter VI, contains an indictment of policies very like those which the Federal Reserve System has been implementing for the past dozen, and more, years.  These policies in slow motion are, in the opinion of this columnist, at the root of  the very political, social, and cultural dysphoria — uneasiness or generalized dissatisfaction — predicted by Kaynes:

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become ‘profiteers,’ who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

An almost identical point was made almost four centuries before Keynes by iconic savant and polymath Nicolas Copernicus.

Copernicus commenced a study composed for the Prussian and Polish governments around 1525, On the Minting of Money, with these words:

“ALTHOUGH THERE ARE COUNTLESS MALADIES that are forever causing the decline of kingdoms, princedoms, and republics, the following four (in my judgment) are the most serious: civil discord, a high death rate, sterility of the soil, and the debasement of coinage. The first three are so obvious that everybody recognizes the damage they cause; but the fourth one, which has to do with money, is noticed by only a few very thoughtful people, since it does not operate all at once and at a single blow, but gradually overthrows governments, and in a hidden, insidious way.”

This does not imply plagiarism by Keynes.  The coincidence between Keynes’s “[To debauch the currency] engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose” and Copernicus’s “[The debasement of coinage] … is noticed by only a few very thoughtful people, since it does not operate all at once and at a single blow, but gradually overthrows governments, and in a hidden, insidious way” is, however, striking.

Keynes, like Copernicus a paradigm-shifter, was himself extraordinarily erudite.  It is not impossible the young Keynes came across Copernicus’s work (which reportedly was first actually published in 1826).   The question as to whether Copernicus’s Essay may have inspired Keynes’s observation must be left to authentic scholars such as Lord Skidelsky.

The similarity may be merely that of “great minds working alike.”  This columnist has found but one direct reference by Keynes to Copernicus.

Keynes (whose thinking was mostly, although not exclusively, opposed to the gold standard) was fascinated by one of Copernicus’s most accomplished scientific successors, Sir Isaac Newton.  Newton, also, achieved iconic status, both for his contributions to physics and, as Master of the Mint of Great Britain, as the architect of the modern classical gold standard. Newton’s gold standard was designed along Copernican principles of close correlation toward nominal and intrinsic value.  It served the world very well for almost 200 years.

Keynes was to have addressed the Royal Society of London’s gathering to celebrate the tercentenary of Newton’s birth, an event delayed by the war.  Keynes died a few months before he could present his remarks.  Maynard’s remarks, Newton, the Man, were presented by his brother Geoffrey (and thus might even be characterized as Keynes’s last words).  A brief excerpt:

Why do I call [Newton] a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood.

…

[H]e became one of the greatest and most efficient of our civil servants. He was a very successful investor of funds, surmounting the crisis of the South Sea Bubble, and died a rich man. He possessed in exceptional degree almost every kind of intellectual aptitude – lawyer, historian, theologian, not less than mathematician, physicist, astronomer.

…

As one broods over these queer collections [of Newton's alchemical writings, which Keynes collected], it seems easier to understand – with an understanding which is not, I hope, distorted in the other direction – this strange spirit, who was tempted by the Devil to believe at the time when within these walls he was solving so much, that he could reach all the secrets of God and Nature by the pure power of mind Copernicus and Faustus in one.

As for Copernicus, On the Minting of Money has been translated into English several times yet those translations remained difficult to obtain for students of the monetary arts and sciences.  It has remained mostly the property of elite historians.  Scant and intriguing references were limited to all-too-brief articles such as “Treatise On the Minting of Coin and Copernicus views on economics”by Leszek Zygner of  Nicolaus Copernicus University.

The full text of Copernicus’s fascinating and invaluable essay remained elusive, that is, until last month.

Laissez Faire Books published a meticulous and fresh English translation from the Latin, with prefatory remarks, bibliography, and invaluable critical apparatus by classicist Prof. Gerald Malsbary. (The volume was co-edited by this columnist and by his  fellow Forbes.com columnist Charles Kadlec, with a foreword by Reagan Gold Commissioner Lewis E. Lehrman, whose eponymous Institute this columnist professionally serves).

 Read the rest at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/12/23/keynes-and-copernicus-the-debasement-of-money-overthrows-the-social-order-and-governments/2/

The Age of Intolerance

The forces of “tolerance” are intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval

By Mark Steyn

Last week, following the public apology of an English comedian and the arrest of a fellow British subject both for making somewhat feeble Mandela gags, I noted that supposedly free societies were increasingly perilous places for those who make an infelicitous remark. So let’s pick up where we left off:

Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”

For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be “tolerant” — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according to taste. The forces of “tolerance” would become intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.

Second joke from the archives: Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra kept this one in the act for a quarter-century. On stage, Dino used to have a bit of business where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Sinatra would respond, “I dunno. How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Dean would say, “Be nice to him.”

But no matter how nice you are, it’s never enough. Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, in his career-detonating interview with GQ, gave a rather thoughtful vernacular exegesis of the Bible’s line on sin, while carefully insisting that he and other Christians are obligated to love all sinners and leave it to the Almighty to adjudicate the competing charms of drunkards, fornicators, and homosexuals. Nevertheless, GLAAD — “the gatekeepers of politically correct gayness” as the (gay) novelist Bret Easton Ellis sneered — saw their opportunity and seized it. By taking out TV’s leading cable star, they would teach an important lesson pour encourager les autres — that espousing conventional Christian morality, even off-air, is incompatible with American celebrity.

Some of my comrades, who really should know better, wonder why, instead of insisting Robertson be defenestrated, GLAAD wouldn’t rather “start a conversation.” But, if you don’t need to, why bother? Most Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage; they don’t oppose the right of gays to advocate it. Yet thug groups like GLAAD increasingly oppose the right of Christians even to argue their corner. It’s quicker and more effective to silence them.

As Christian bakers ordered to provide wedding cakes for gay nuptials and many others well understand, America’s much-vaunted “freedom of religion” is dwindling down to something you can exercise behind closed doors in the privacy of your own abode or at a specialist venue for those of such tastes for an hour or so on Sunday morning, but when you enter the public square you have to leave your faith back home hanging in the closet. Yet even this reductive consolation is not permitted to Robertson: GLAAD spokesgay Wilson Cruz declared that “Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe.” Robertson was quoting the New Testament, but hey, what do those guys know? In today’s America, land of the Obamacare Pajama Boy, Jesus is basically Nightshirt Boy, a fey non-judgmental dweeb who’s cool with whatever. What GLAAD is attempting would be called, were it applied to any other identity group, “cultural appropriation.”

In the broader sense, it’s totalitarian. While American gays were stuffing and mounting the duck hunter in their trophy room, the Prince of Wales was celebrating Advent with Christian refugees from the Middle East, and noting that the land in which Christ and Christianity were born is now the region boasting “the lowest concentration of Christians in the world — just four percent of the population.” It will be three, and two, and one percent soon enough, for there is a totalitarian impulse in resurgent Islam — and not just in Araby. A few miles from Buckingham Palace, Muslims in London’s East End are now sufficiently confident to go around warning local shopkeepers to cease selling alcohol. In theory, you might still enjoy the right to sell beer in Tower Hamlets or be a practicing Christian in Iraq, but in reality not so much. The asphyxiating embrace of ideological conformity was famously captured by Nikolai Krylenko, the People’s Commissar for Justice, in a speech to the Soviet Congress of Chess Players in 1932, at which he attacked the very concept of “the neutrality of chess.” It was necessary for chess to be Sovietized like everything else. “We must organize shock brigades of chess players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess,” he declared.  

Six years later, the political winds having shifted, Krylenko was executed as an enemy of the people. But his spirit lives on among the Commissars of Gay Compliance at GLAAD. It is not enough to have gay marriage for gays. Everything must be gayed. There must be Five-Year Gay Plans for American bakeries, and the Christian church, and reality TV. There must be shock brigades of gay duck-hunters honking out the party line deep in the backwoods of the proletariat. Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily gay, can only be dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate so as to communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor heterosexuality is in contemporary America.

 Read more at:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/366896/age-intolerance-mark-steyn

The Constitution’s Vanishing Act

For decades, Supreme Court justices have been rewriting key parts of our governing document.

by Richard A. Epstein

The United States Constitution is at its core a classical liberal document. But over the last hundred years, much of it has turned into a progressive text thanks in large part to Supreme Court justices who interpret it creatively, thereby skirting the laborious amendment process of Article V. Here, I address one major, if underappreciated, cause of the problem—the fine art of making its critical words and letters just disappear through the Court’s imaginative application of its power of judicial review. This constitutional disappearing act does not take sides in the longstanding debate over judicial restraint and activism. In some cases, it unduly expands judicial power; in other cases, it wrongly contracts it. The two best illustrations of how this process works are found in the Eighth Amendment and in Article 1, which sets out the federal government’s taxing power.

Cruel and Unusual Punishments

The Eighth Amendment reads in full: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” Its use of the passive voice creates an interpretive ambiguity. Does the amendment bind only the federal government or does it bind the states as well? Using the word “excessive” twice in one 16-word sentence is not a model of clarity.

But for these purposes, the most critical word is “punishments.” The letter “s” has disappeared during the arduous process of constitutional interpretation. Just Google the phrase “cruel and unusual punishment,” and 1,740,000 entries come up. Add the “s” and that number drops by 80 percent to 330,000 entries, most of which refer to punishments without the “s.”

The importance of the slip is evident from the 2012 Supreme Court decision Miller v. Alabama, which struck down a mandatory lifetime sentence for a fourteen year-old guilty of murder. In writing her opinion, Justice Elena Kagan included the “s” in quoting the clause. But during the analysis, that “s” disappears, thereby transforming the constitutional text:

The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment “guarantees individuals the right not to be subjected to excessive sanctions.” That right, we have explained, “flows from the basic ‘precept of justice that punishment for crime should be graduated and proportioned’ ” to both the offender and the offense. 

Justice Kagan faithfully references earlier cases that take her position. But the wealth of precedent does not conceal the major shift in constitutional focus. The prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments” conjures up a list of punishments that should be rejected because they are cruel, no matter what the offense. The issue of proportionality never arises.

That interpretation makes sense because this clause is lifted word for word from the English Bill of Rights of 1689, after it accuses the deposed King James II of inflicting “illegal and cruel punishments.” The clause outlaws the rack, the thumb-screw, drawing and quartering, and other fiendish activities. In no sense did it outlaw the death penalty. Nor could that reading be sensibly made of our own Constitution, whose Fifth Amendment contains references to the death penalty in connection with due process, grand jury presentments, and double jeopardy.

Yet once the “s” is dropped, it is far easier to read the clause as Justice Kagan did, demanding proportionality between the offense and the punishment. At this point, the Court can question the death penalty in many cases, including child rape. In 2008, the Court in Kennedy v. Louisiana found that the Eighth Amendment should be read in light of “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” But this line of reasoning is simply pop sociology. Historically, there has been much principled and popular opposition to the repeal of the death penalty that should not be so easily cast aside.

Even the most austere account of limited government offers no coherent theory to explain whether the death penalty should be retained or junked, and if so, for what offenses. If there were ever a legislative function, this is it. The disappearance of that “s” was not just a random event. It paved the way for the justices to create a code of criminal sentencing, whose effects are so widespread and profound that it must be regarded as a constitutional amendment, and an unwise one at that.

The Taxing Power

My second example of a disappearing constitutional provision concerns the taxing power found in Article I:

Section 8. Clause 1. The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

This clause is a big deal because it remedies one of the major defects of the Articles of Confederation, under which the federal government had to beg the individual states for the revenues needed to discharge its own collective function. But in overturning earlier practice, the Founders were nervous about lurching too far in the opposite direction, so they limited the general power of taxation to three specified objects: “payment of debts, provision of common Defence, and the general Welfare of the United States.”

So it is important to understand that the clause is not a catchall that sweeps in every objective under the sun. Federal taxes are meant to fund only a short list of public—i.e. nonexcludable—goods that only the central government can provide. The Congressional power to levy taxes is needed to prevent free-riding by individual states. The limited purposes help prevent politically corrosive cross-subsidies between states that could sink the Union.

The proper interpretation of the clause raises thorny questions about whether, for example, the United States could provide disaster relief that benefits some but not all states. President Grover Cleveland thought that the answer was an emphatic “no” in 1887 when he vetoed the Texas Seed Bill, which allocated $10,000 for Texas drought relief. Under the Constitution, he did “not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.”
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Read more at :

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/163681

Learning the Wrong Lessons From the Financial Crisis

The rule of law has many enemies. One of them is bad law.

BY JR NYQUIST

In a book titled Theory and History, Ludwig von Mises wrote,

“Because history is not a useless pastime but a study of the utmost practical importance, people have been eager to falsify historical evidence and to misrepresent the course of events.” 

In recent history, the champions of regulation and state control of the economy would endeavor to depict the financial events of 2007-2008 as a failure of regulation. At least one historian is worried that we might have “learned” the wrong lessons if we suppose any such thing.

Historian Niall Ferguson of Harvard University says that insufficient regulation may not be at the heart of the financial crisis. Ferguson calls into question Princeton economist Paul Krugman’s assertion that Reagan era deregulation of financial institutions triggered the crisis. “For one thing,” wrote Ferguson in The Great Degeneration, “it is hard to think of a major event in the US crisis — beginning with the failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — that could not equally well have happened with Glass-Steagall still in force.”

History teaches that rule of law plus economic freedom makes for prosperity, yet we are supposed to believe that restricting freedom — or eliminating vital aspects of freedom — will somehow prevent financial ills. According to Ferguson, 

“there is something especially implausible about the story that regulated financial markets were responsible for rapid growth, while deregulation caused crisis.” 

The fact that heavily regulated markets in the past have created less wealth than free markets under the rule of law must surely count for something. Furthermore, there is no progress without risk, no advances without partial setbacks. And what does the history of capitalism show if not the fact that the advances have far outweighed the setbacks. And if freedom means progress then we must accept the consequences of that progress instead of introducing regulations that will, in the end, choke off progress altogether.

Ludwig von Mises wrote: 

“To lie about historical facts and to destroy evidence has been in the opinion of hosts of statesmen, diplomats, politicians, and writers a legitimate part of the conduct of public affairs and of writing history. One of the main problems of historical research is to unmask such falsehoods.” 

Ferguson’s unmasking of falsehood reminds us that spectacular economic progress is not found in eras of complex or heavy-handed financial regulation. The sad truth is that regulation has far more to do with causing crises than deregulation. 

“The financial crisis that began in 2007 had its origins precisely in over-complex regulation,” wrote Ferguson. “A serious history of the crisis would need to have at least five chapters on its perverse consequences….”

Ferguson wrote up a brief overview of his proposed five chapters on the role of government interference in the financial crisis, which may be summarized as follows: 

(1) incentives were given to bank executives toward low risk assets;

(2) Risk was weighed on ratings given to securities; 

(3) monetary policy consisted of cutting interest rates at the abrupt fall of asset prices, but not if they rose rapidly (as in the housing bubble); 

(4) Congress passed legislation that effectively offered home loans to people who would not otherwise have qualified, inflating real estate prices with “unhedged and unidirectional bets on the US housing market”; 

(5) Chinese currency manipulation effectively and artificially provided the United States with “a vast credit line.”

Read more at:

http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/jr-nyquist/learning-wrong-lessons-from-financial-crisis 

Breaking The UniParty

So long as the Uniparty exists, mere voters will have no way of affecting what the government does

by Angelo M. Codevilla

Yet again, for the nth time, Republican Congressional leaders and their Democrat counterparts produced a Trillion dollar, multi-thousand-page spending bill that was voted immediately after being unveiled, without having been read. Republican 2012 vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan authored the latest edition along with Democratic Senator Patti Murray. Republican leader John Boehner preempted Democrats by preemptively accusing Republicans who opposed the bill of wanting to shut down the government. He topped off this feat of leadership by declaring political war on the conservatives who had given Republicans the majority that had made him Speaker of the House – a war that Republican leaders cannot sustain.

The Republican Party’s leaders have functioned as junior members of America’s single ruling party, the UniParty. Acting as the proverbial cockboat in the wake of the Democrats’ man-of-war, they have made Democratic priorities their own when the White House and the Congress were in the hands of Republicans as well as in those of Democrats, and when control has been mixed. The UniParty, the party of government, the party of Ins, continues to consist of the same people. The Outs are always the same people too: American conservatives. They don’t have a party.

Whatever differences exist within the Uniparty, between Republican John Boehner and Democrat Nancy Pelosi, between Republican Mitch McConnell and Democrat Harry Reid, get worked out behind closed doors. Those differences are narrow. The latest negotiations were over some $80 billion out of three trillion dollars in spending. The bipartisan negotiators did not let into the room any of the major issues that concern Americans. Not Obamacare, not racial preferences, not religious liberty, not endless no-win wars. The UniParty is unanimous: more of the same!

Hence, so long as the Uniparty exists, mere voters will have no way of affecting what the government does.

Breaking up the Uniparty, means breaking the Democrats’ hold on non- Democrat congressmen and senators. The only way to do that is to break the Republican leadership’s hold on other Republicans and on the Republican label. That in turn requires using the primaries to screen out UniParty people.

Doing this is more possible than ever, providing conservatives learn to hang together before they are hanged separately.
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Read more at :

http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/12/15/breaking-the-uniparty/

The Economy of the Future

Posterity cannot vote against us, but we can vote against them.

BY JR NYQUIST

In Niall Ferguson’s book, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, he quotes one of my favorite passages from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France where Burke explains that “one of the first and leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated is — that [people] should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail or commit waste on the inheritance [of posterity] by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society, hazarding to leave those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation….” Burke added that society is a partnership between the living, the dead, and the unborn. About this partnership Ferguson wrote, “In the enormous inter-generational transfers implied by current fiscal policies we see a shocking and perhaps unparalleled breach of precisely that partnership.”

Our economic future is now threatened by the government’s inability to control public spending. The developed world is going deeper and deeper into debt, sacrificing the future to the present. Already in the 1890s the Irish historian and political theorist William Edward Hartpole Lecky saw that increasing government taxation and expenditure was a trend which might eventually lead to bankruptcy on a massive scale. He believed government indebtedness was a serious and long-term threat to liberty and prosperity; for when a government borrows it is stealing from the future. Even worse, when such a theft is accomplished in the name of equality, warned Lecky, it only proves that “democratic tendencies are distinctly adverse to liberty.” Such a realization is unsettling, and we do not know how to fix what now seems broken.

If we return to Burke’s quotation, above, we today find that the partnership between the living, the dead, and the unborn has given way to the selfishness of the moment. The unborn have no vote and the U.S. Constitution never really protected posterity from the vagaries of the democratic present. Supposedly we are to feel a natural concern for the future, and this was to restrain our behavior. But our feelings for the future are clearly attenuated. Perhaps we don’t even believe that the future will come. But when it comes let us admit that the banks will be empty. Uncle Sam will be broke. Every taxpayer will be stripped bare. And why must this be? The answer is given at every election by our leading politicians. Social justice requires solutions now, regardless of the future cost; for everyone must have healthcare and every country in the Middle East must have democracy; and it’s all very expensive, of course, so we settle the bill on posterity.

Posterity cannot vote against us, but we can vote against them. If we were decent folk this would not happen. But we aren’t decent. Not any longer. Let us therefore eat up our inheritance and leave nothing for our children. Such is the logic of our system of government. Such is the logic of our governors – those great visionaries. The politics of our time is about arranging the economy in such a way that our children will pay. Who, after all, can stop us from doing this? We are determined. It is already largely accomplished. The system of the Founding Fathers, which was designed to limit the power of the government, has been subverted by a generation that wants everything for itself now.

Recent testimony before a Congressional Committee offers fascinating insight into the breakdown of limited government in America. Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) recently put a question to legal analyst and scholar Jonathan Turley: “How does the president’s unilateral modification of acts of Congress affect both the balance of power between the political branches and the liberty interests of the American people?”

Statism: Whether Fascist or Communist, It's The Deadly Opposite of Capitalism

The political spectrum–Left vs. Right–must be defined in terms of statism vs. individual liberty

By Harry Binswanger

Over the last few years, a new and immensely clarifying concept has entered public discussion: “statism.” It has been said that he who controls language controls history. The growing use of “statism” may portend a political sea change, because it pierces a major Leftist-created smokescreen: the placing of fascism on the Right.

This twisting of language and facts has reached ludicrous levels. On November 9th, The New York Times featured a page-one article whose headline blared: “Right Wing’s Surge in Europe Has the Establishment Rattled.” But it turns out that these alleged Rightists “want to strengthen not shrink government and they see the welfare state as an integral part of their national identities.” The article reveals that “The platform of France’s National Front … reads in part like a leftist manifesto.”

We need a rational way of setting up the political spectrum. We have to have some axis of measurement in terms of which we can locate the political meaning of particular ideas and policies. I have no objection to calling this spectrum “Right vs. Left.” I have every possible objection to defining the extreme Right as fascism and the extreme Left as communism.

Suppose that someone proposed a Right-Left axis for eating, saying that the extreme Right is to eat arsenic and the extreme Left is to eat cyanide. The choice would only be: which poison do you want to die from? And the “moderates” would then be those who eat a mixture of arsenic and cyanide. What would be omitted from this setup? Food.

The political equivalent of the arsenic-cyanide spectrum is the fascism-communism spectrum. What is omitted from the setup? A free society–which means: capitalism. What is the actual opposite of capitalism? Statism.

The term “statism” was tirelessly promoted by Ayn Rand. A computer search of her published works for “statism” or “statist” gives over 300 hits. She described statism as the idea that “man’s life and work belong to the state–to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation–and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own, tribal, collective good.”

Fascism and communism are two variants of statism. Both are forms of dictatorship. Neither one recognizes individual rights nor permits individual freedom. The differences are non-essential: fascism is racial statism and communism is statism of economic class.

The Forever Man

The peculiar metrics of socialist metaphysics

by Richard Fernandez

As the New Unionist pointed out after the fall of Berlin Wall, “socialism hasn’t failed — it hasn’t been tried yet”.  And when the new attempt at true socialism fails, then repeat and rinse.  Since it’s the duty of all true socialists to try and try again two things are needed. Unlimited money and unlimited time.

The first was provided in principle by the Constitutional Amendment whose 100th anniversary falls this year. “The Sixteenth Amendment (Amendment XVI) to the United States Constitution allows the Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states or basing it on the United States Census. This amendment exempted income taxes from the constitutional requirements regarding direct taxes, after income taxes on rents, dividends, and interest were ruled to be direct taxes in the court case of Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (1895). The amendment was adopted on February 3, 1913.”

Taxes in principle give true believers all the money in the world.

This leaves only the problem of time. Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of history and education at New York University, argues in aWashington Post guest op-ed that President Obama should be allowed to run for more than two terms to accomplish his important work.

In 1947, Sen. Harley Kilgore (D-W.Va.) condemned a proposed constitutional amendment that would restrict presidents to two terms. “The executive’s effectiveness will be seriously impaired,” Kilgore argued on the Senate floor, “ as no one will obey and respect him if he knows that the executive cannot run again.”

I’ve been thinking about Kilgore’s comments as I watch President Obama, whose approval rating has dipped to 37 percent in CBS News polling — the lowest ever for him — during the troubled rollout of his health-care reform. …

Or consider the reaction to the Iran nuclear deal. Regardless of his political approval ratings, Obama could expect Republican senators such as Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and John McCain (Ariz.) to attack the agreement. But if Obama could run again, would he be facing such fervent objections from Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.)?

Probably not. Democratic lawmakers would worry about provoking the wrath of a president who could be reelected. Thanks to term limits, though, they’ve got little to fear. …

Ratified by the states in 1951, the 22nd Amendment was an “undisguised slap at the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” wrote Clinton Rossiter, one of the era’s leading political scientists. It also reflected “a shocking lack of faith in the common sense and good judgment of the people,” Rossiter said. …

Barack Obama should be allowed to stand for re election just as citizens should be allowed to vote for — or against — him. Anything less diminishes our leaders and ourselves.

That solves the problem of time.

True believers live in their version of Eternity, a state in which they are simultaneously in a hurry but never in any rush. Should Obamacare fail, try and try again. Should the deals with enemies fall through, try and try again. Progress is measured by the peculiar metric of socialist metaphysics.

Economic Science and the Underworld

The individual needs freedom and the free market. The socialist alternative threatens to blot him out of the equation.

BY JR NYQUIST

While economics depends on man’s rational side, humanity nonetheless clings to the irrational. We want to have our cake and eat it. We want a free lunch, free health care, free schools, and free retirement. But nothing is free. Someone must pay. Economic science says so.

When we say economics is a science, the ordinary man thinks of physics and biology. But economics is a different kind of science. According to the Austrian school, economics is an a priori science which assumes that purposeful behavior can alleviate a “felt uneasiness.” The process by which the greatest alleviation is made possible is called capitalism, or the free market. Whatever anyone wishes to say against market freedom, there is no workable alternative.

According to Mises, writing in his book The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, 

“The emergence of economics was one of the most portentous events in the history of mankind. In paving the way for private capitalistic enterprise it transformed within a few generations all human affairs more radically than the preceding ten thousand years had done.” 

Yet more amazing still, economic science and the capitalist transformation of human life was accomplished by a very small number of authors whose books influenced a similarly small number of statesmen. As Mises explained, 

“Not only the sluggish masses but also most of the businessmen who, by their trading, made the laissez-faire principles effective failed to comprehend the essential features of their operation. Even in the heyday of liberalism only a few people had a full grasp of the functioning of the market economy.”

It was a freak of history that a handful of thinkers began to understand economic science. It was rarer still, in terms of politics, that a handful of statesmen were able to make use of that understanding. As Mises explained, 

“Western civilization adopted capitalism upon [the] recommendation … of a small elite.” 

As such, capitalism has always hung by a slender thread. For how often do we find sufficient intelligence within ruling elites? How often does genius go unrecognized? After all, every man is a genius in his own mind. Consider how the many geniuses who produce so little of worth from their swollen egos today must naturally malign anyone whose thinking stands on higher ground. In fact, the grim history of humanity suggests that a true and worthy social science (or economic science) is as unlikely as a mouse chasing a cat. For that which touches on society and institutions must necessarily fall victim to powerful interests and political passions.

Yet economic science performed its miracle. Wonders of technology and wealth now abound. Our ancestors could hardly imagine the modern world. At the same time, a dark cloud approaches. The intelligent few seem to have been overwhelmed by the many-too-many. None should be naïve enough to imagine that history is only a story of progress. If we have been paying close attention, we might remember the saying, “What goes up, must come down.”

Keynesians: Sleepy? Down a Red Bull

The case against economic stimulus

by JULIAN ADORNEY

Fiscal stimulus, beloved by Keynesians, is not only expensive but causes long-term harm to the economy by distorting business incentives. The hundreds of billions of dollars pumped into the economy go, often as not, to cronies and industries chosen by politicians, propping up politically connected businesses at the expense of more efficient ones. 

This practice is not sustainable.

A Keynesian will attempt to justify all of these costs—decisions made by elites at the expense of the consumer—and say that they’re worth it. Why? Because fiscal stimulus cures recessions. Paul Krugman, addressing the just-breaking Great Recession in late 2008, said, “Increased government spending is just what the doctor ordered.” 

But the best reason to oppose fiscal stimulus is that it does just the opposite of what Krugman claims. It doesn’t cure recessions; it exacerbates them. 

Making Recessions Worse

Libertarians haven’t explored this angle enough, because up until recently the research just hasn’t been available to support the assertion. But as I explain here, 100 years of history show that stimulus quantitatively makes recessions worse.

In that paper, I start with research done by Christina Romer, former chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and coauthor of Obama’s 2009 plan for recovery. In 1999, Romer created a measure of the severity of recessions. The idea, in simple terms, is to add up how much industrial production was lost from one peak until the economy got back to that level. Add up the shortfall for each month between those two points, and you have one number—percentage-point months (PPM) lost—that tells you how deep that recession cut. 

Since she published the paper in 1999, she did not include data for the 2000–2001 recession nor the 2008 recession. I was able to ballpark the former and I used Krugman’s own figure (which even he says is probably a little low) for the latter. 

What I found was that Keynesian thinking has made recessions less frequent, but more painful and durable.  

The Body Economic

If you imagine that the economy is like a person, then a recession would be our need for sleep. It’s natural and normal to sleep, just like recessions are a natural market self-correction. Fiscal stimulus works like downing a Red Bull every time you need to sleep. Doing so lets you stay awake a little longer. But eventually you’re going to have to sleep, and your crash will be much worse than if you had just let your body rest instead of trying to counter that instinct with a stimulant.