Poor Bloody Corporations

You can see what the Dems are up to.  Haul Apple CEO Time Scott up on Capitol Hill.  Get shocked, shocked that Apple has avoided billions in taxes.



Then Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) calls for tax increases on corporations.  Says he: "We need additional revenue from corporations whose contributions to the treasury have gone down."  I guess he's looking at this chart.

It shows that corporate income taxes have been going down as a percent of GDP over the long term.  But what of it? Is it because corporate incomes taxes have gone down as a percent of GDP or because corporate profits have gone down as a percent of GDP?



And anyway, corporate income tax rates are higher in the US than almost anywhere else.



So does it matter?



Put it this way.  If you are a government dependent, then of course you want to suck the economy for whatever you need for your next check.



But if you are a young person looking to get a job or pursue a career then the only thing that you care about -- or should care about if you have a clue about the economy -- is robust and increasing corporate profits.



And you certainly don't want corporate profits going to the government where they won't create new jobs.



Hey, maybe the extra tax money will go for a couple dozen new $177,000 a year Lois Lerners at the IRS to help implement Obamacare.  What's not to like!



And anyway, the idea that the corporate income tax is a problem misses the point.  Corporations are the government's main tax collector.  They collect the myriad taxes on labor that the laboring working stiff or stiffette never sees.  There's the 7.6 percent employer share of the FICA tax.  There's unemployment tax.  There's workers comp.  That's all paid by corporations -- out of money that ought to be going to workers.  You see, the ruling class decided decades ago that working stiffs couldn't really handle their own money.  So it would be safer for the government to look after it and put it in a Trust Fund (you know, just like the rich!) until the worker needed it.



Meanwhile the ruling class could use the money to buy votes.



Obviously our liberal friends are focusing on the corporate income tax because its an easy way to gin up outrage.  I recently had an email exchange with a chap that had all the talking points to hand.  The unspoken assumption was that we need the money for programs for people.  So the money has to come from somewhere.



No it doesn't.  In my view we need to break the spell at its source.  Government is force, so it stands to reason that everything the government does is done under the color of compulsion.  Whaddya mean that people can't be trusted to save for their own retirement?  Whaddya mean that seniors are helpless fools that can't pay for their own health care?  Whaddya mean that parents are so dumb that they can't be trusted to educate their own children?



That's what I contest.  Because once you have conceded that people are dumb or something then you have conceded the main point.  You have conceded that average people must be forced to do the right thing; the only question is how much force is necessary.



Government, on my view is the agent for defense against enemies foreign and domestic.  For that you need force.



Are we really saying that corporations are the enemy?  And rich people too?  Of course some people get rich because of government.  There are senators that have become multimillionaires without ever working in the private sector.  There are corporations that get rich from government contracts.  There are corporations that get rich from government subsidies.  Think green energy.



But then there is Apple.  Apple got rich on the vision of Steve Jobs to create the real life Dick Tracy watch, a tiny appliance that you can use as a audio or video link with anyone in the world.



Apple needs to pay more taxes?  So that it has less money to invent cool new appliances?



And let us not forget that cell-phones are perhaps even more beneficial in the Third World than in the good old USA.  Think of sardine fishermen off the west coast of India talking on their cell-phones with the sardine buyers in each nearby port to find the best price for their catch.



Please.  No. More. Taxes.  Because all government is a waste.  All of it.

All Wars Must End. Then What?

What are we to make of the president's End of the War speech at the National Defense University last week.  It's the one in which he said:

But this war, like all wars, must end.  That’s what history advises.  That’s what our democracy demands.

He is talking about the AUMF, the Congressional Authorization to Use Military Force that is now "nearly 12 years old."  He wants a national conversation:

 I intend to engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorism without keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.

Is this a practical step, a final end to the failed Bush doctrine, or a grievous betrayal of the young men that fought and died in the war on terror, a progressive muddle that misunderstands the issue of militant Islam?



The answer, of course, is All of the Above.



On balance, I think this is a good thing.  Not because President Obama is doing the right thing, not at all.  I rate President Obama as a man that usually fails to think out of the box of his postmodern identity liberalism.  That is a failing that is costing and will cost America a bundle.  The one thing we need today in America is leadership that can think outside of the liberal conventional wisdom.



Surely, though, after twelve years since 9/11, it is time to step back and think seriously about what we are doing in the Middle East, in the war on terror, in the cultural conflicts of conservatism vs. the welfare state, secularism vs. religion, Christianity vs. Islam.



When you do that it is not that hard to decide what to do.



At the tactical level we need to make things difficult for individual terrorists and work on making them appear shameful and monstrous.  And please, there must be a way to make our airplanes safe other than the dead hand of the bureaucracy at the Transportation Security Administration.



At the strategic level we want to make life difficult for Iran and bolster the strategic situation of Israel.  It doesn't hurt that Israel now has petroleum wells out in the Mediterranean and that the fracking revolution is going to marginalize Mideast oil.



But it is at the grand strategic or cultural vision level that we have the real problem.  It is not because of Islam.  It is because of the problem of liberalism.  Instead of building a society of independent sociable individuals that freely and generously work and save and give, we have been busily building, for the last century, a balkanized culture defined by the old marks of identity -- sex, race, and tribe -- with a powerful addiction to government "free stuff."



Why is that?  It's simple.  That is the way you increase the power of the liberal ruling class.  Divide and conquer, it is called.  Liberals want to segregate the population into separate identity ghettos and rile up each identity group with hate.  That's the way that government thrives.  When everyone is a helpless victim, surrounded by malevolent forces like The Man or The Great Satan, then they need government to protect them from everything.



The great virtue of the feckless Obama years, the years the locust ate, is that at the end of it we will be forced to get serious -- about not just the problem of Islam but the greater question of the putrid problems in our own culture.  For that we can thank our First Black President.



All we know is that it ain't gonna be easy.  But then nothing worthwhile ever was easy.

Critical Theory: Not Just a Punching Bag

Conservatives like to use the Frankfurt School (of neo-Marxists) and their "critical theory" as punching bags.  Not to mention as the source of all our problems.

Yes, it's true that all the cruel and unjust ideological repression against conservatives through the application of what we call "political correctness" seems to issue from the ideas of the Frankfurt chappies like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and second-stringer Herbert Marcuse.

But in my view it is better for conservatives to study and understand the ideas of the Frankfurt School than to stigmatize and reject them as, for instance, the excellent Bill Whittle does here.

That's because if conservatives want to win the culture war we need to be able to understand and transcend the ideas of the left.  We need to grasp the kernels of truth in their critiques of bourgeois society, and then go on to show how they completely miss the point.

Let's take Max Horkheimer's definition of critical theory as an example.  He wrote that a theory is

critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

Now, of course, lefties use critical theory in the limited scope that assumes that it is traditionally marginalized groups that need to be liberated and bourgeois culture that they need to be liberated from.

But what about liberals?  Think of the awful liberal bubble of The New York Times and NPR.  Think how they enslave liberal minds.  Think of a glorious future in which liberals could free themselves from their ideological devotion to "good" government and comprehensive and mandatory universal administrative programs designed and implemented by "large-minded" people.

Why not use critical theory to liberate liberals from the ideas that enslave them?  Who else could do the job but conservatives?  Actually, Jonah Goldberg already did it with his Liberal Fascism.

The Frankfurt School originated after World War I when German intellectuals realized that Marxism as defined by Marx and implemented by the Bolsheviks was a mess.  So they went to work to understand where Marx had gone wrong and to try to rescue their millennial Marxian hopes from despair.

By the time that Horkheimer and Adorno wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment in the US during World War II they had despaired of the Enlightenment project.  Because they saw that fascism was already encoded in the notion of enlightenment and reason.  What man wants from nature is to dominate it and other men, they wrote.

When Herbert Marcuse came up with One-dimensional Man in the 1960s his grand contribution amounted to a lame notion that, now that the working class had made its peace with capitalism, narcotically immunized by big media and and advertising and consumer goods, the would-be revolutionaries would have to look elsewhere for the cannon fodder for their revolution.

But real thinkers like Jürgen Habermas began on a solution to the problem of enlightenment and its identification with domination.  He revived the idea that we are not just mechanical wind-up toys, cogs in a rational machine, but communicators.  So his Theory of Communicative Action proposes that the systems world of Enlightenment and instrumental reason should be balanced by a life-world of communication and negotiation.  In German, the "Action" in his book's title is "Handeln."  It means not just action but exchange, negotiation.  It also had a use in German as a pejorative when applied to Jews as hagglers and peddlers.

Now, of course, the silly lefty liberals in our US universities have made a complete dog's breakfast of "critical theory."  They have fashioned it into a club with which to beat conservatives and stigmatize us as racists, sexists, anti-choice fascists and homophobes.  Not to mention that their Gramscian "march through the institutions" turned the academy into a sterile monoculture.

Be of good cheer.  All is not lost.  We can see, finally, as we get into the scandal zone of the Obama administration that critical theory is leading liberals off the cliff.  It's encouraged them to think that they, the lame critical theorists, are the good guys, and the defenders of freedom and tradition are pond scum.

The thing is that critical theory and postmodernism can be applied to anything.  Used judiciously, they can be used to do a penetrating critique of any cultural tradition and expose its assumptions and hypocrisies.

Like Obama and the Obamanauts.

So I say: forget about trashing the Frankfurt School and critical theory.  Read up on it.  Then apply its tools against fin de siècle liberalism.  Because everything that liberals say about the patriarchy or dead white males or capitalism applies in spades against the monstrous self-serving ruling-class ideology we call liberalism or progressivism or multiculturalism or whatever.

And this is just the moment to do it, as the Obama years-the-locust-ate collapse in a welter of scandals that all issue from the self-inflicted wounds of liberalism and its foolish attempt to keep the Marxist dream alive.

Let's face it: the original Marxism did nothing but harm to the working class.  Finally, through a maelstrom of purges and death camps the working class emerged and made a separate peace with capitalism.  So what did the Marxists propose as an encore?  To apply the same ideas to what Herbert Marcuse called "a new substratum of outcasts and outsiders."  It's the same thing.  Trust in us, the noble overclass, and we will protect you, the minority and the marginalized, from the evil white man and his cunning plan to oppress and exploit you.  And by the way, whaddya think of this free stuff?

Already, back in the land of Israel, Esau found out that it is not a good idea to exchange your birthright for a mess of pottage.  It didn't do the working class much good to exchange their benefit clubs and friendly societies for the administrative benefits and "free stuff" of the welfare state.  It isn't doing much good for today's "women and minorities."  Because, relying on government, they are always "hardest hit" when something goes wrong.  That's because when you get your stuff from government you let your ties of family and solidarity weaken and shrivel.  When you need them, when all of a sudden government isn't there like liberals promised, your social ties aren't strong enough to take the strain.

As the Obama administration spirals into scandal and failure conservatives have a once in a generation opportunity to lead America back to the ideas that made it great: freedom and civil society.

It would really help if, in between teaching the American people about truth, justice, and the American Way, we could eat the liberals' lunch, and apply critical theory to the hypocrisies of their rotting pile of multiculturalist diversity.

Tri-gate: Pay for Play

I know we are all supposed to be outraged at Lois Lane, er, Lerner's neat little trick of taking the Fifth right after her self-justificatory statement.



Yeah, what would Clark Kent down at the Daily Planet say about that?



But let's be practical.  Lois Lerner is merely telling Congress a simple fact.  Hey, pal, you want information, you gonna pay for it.  Immunity for Information.  Pay for play.  That's the First Commandment in the Beltway.



Immunity for Information.  That's how things go in the Obamian Culture of Intimidation.



Look.  We conservatives finally get to come up for air and have a good laugh.  Because liberals did this to themselves.  They believe in the chimera of Good Government.  Ethical activists and credentialed experts think up beneficial legislation and then the administrative state executes on it.



Settled science alert:  Hayek told us half a century ago that the Good Government/Expert/Administrative state model was bound to fail, because the man in Whitehall (he was still in Britland at the time) could never know more than a million consumers.



On top of that liberals believe in a kind of salvific politics.  Only elect the right man, the young and vigorous JFK, the charismatic policy wonk Bill Clinton, the intellectual Barack Obama, and the oceans will start to recede.



(Do these people not understand how religious this sort of thing sounds?)



But government is force.  Politics is division.  Administration is domination.  If you don't limit all three you lose society.  It turns into an internment camp.  Liberals think that because they are virtuous and well intentioned and intellectual that they can design a beneficent society administered by large-minded people like them.



But the philosophy of limited government says that anyone, no matter how virtuous and large-minded, is corrupted by power.  It says that the more government you have, the more force you have.  The more politics you have the more society will be divided.  And the more that you systemize things into administrative bureaucracies the more domination you have.



Well, now, five years after liberals went into a multiple political orgasm over the OMG! First! Black! President! we are starting to see the wages of folly.  That wonderful intellectual president has been presiding over an IRS that has specifically targeted grass-roots political organizations for delay and harassment.  The wonderful politician who was going to move beyond red and blue has tapped the telephones of AP journalists.  Not just right-wing nut-cases at FoxNews, but good liberal AP journalists!  And the most transparent administration in history is tangled in a web of lies and obfuscations over the murder of a US Ambassador.



Look liberals.  Politicians are merely professional specialists in winning elections.  That is all.  Activists are activists, narrow, driven people with an agenda.  Experts are thinking about their next grant.  And bureaucrats are thinking about keeping their noses clean for the next few years until they collect their pensions.  That is what you believe in.



There is such a thing as society; it's just not the same thing as the state.  Society evokes the idea that humans are social animals; we cooperate and work and play together because that's who we are.  But government is force; politics is division.  The more government you have, the less freedom you have. the more politics you have, the less unity you have.  With more government and more politics, the less society you have, because you have reduced society to an internment camp of force and division, mediated by systematic bureaucratic domination.



I don't think liberals really understand what is coming.  They are safe in the soothing NYT-NPR bubble.  But people are hurting.  They are hurting as they get stripped of their health insurance by Obamacare, as they are stripped of a future by the sluggish economy.



Think of the next three years as Oklahoma in the tornado season.  There are black clouds all around, but nobody knows when a line of thunderstorms will touch down into a twister.  And nobody can know whose house it will rip apart and whose life it will tear in pieces.



Conservatives and Republicans are notorious for being stupid about politics and messaging and tactics.  But when something big is in the air the minutiae of tactics usually don't matter as much as the professionals would like to believe.  What matters instead is what the Soviets used to call the "correlation of forces" or the "contradictions" of the existing order.



All we can know for sure is that the lives of millions of Americans are going to be ripped to shreds in the next few years as the tornado of bankrupt government touches down on the ordinary American heartland.



And all the while the job-for-life IRS myrmidons that dutifully ragged on mom-and-pop Tea Parties will be taking the Fifth and bargaining about Immunity for Information.

Richard Wagner: Most Hated Composer

Today's the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner.  He's #3 in Charles Murray's list of classical composers compiled in Human Accomplisment.  But he's probably #1 on the list of most-hated composers.



That would partly be due to his anti-semitism.  And partly due to the fact that he wrecked the good old opera formula of recitative followed by beautiful songs.



But really, he upended music as a whole.  The best way to understand this is to listen to a movie (while you watch it).  It was Wagner that invented that kind of music, setting the tone of the movie, telling you in the feeling in sound of what is going on visually and what you should feel about it.



Wagner always lived the spirit of the age.  He was a Romantic, then a lefty revolutionary, then a Schopenhauerian pessimist.  And he did his best to bring all that out in his music.



This sort of thing infuriated the purists.  He took the Nordic myths about power struggles between the gods and turned it into a drama about power, duty, and love.  He took the Arthurian Tristan and made it all about sex.  He took Eschenbach's Parzival and made him into a post-aristocratic post-Christian upper-class ascetic.



That points up the main thing to know about Wagner.  He requires total surrender.  Think the opera is too slow? Too long? Too chromatic?  Too improbable?  Too bad.



My own relationship with Wagner began in the 1970s.  My wife had asked me to get tickets to the Flying Dutchman and Mr. Skinflint didn't do it.  But I got an LP of the Dutchman from the library and was blown over.   Not by the singing, but by the Prelude, which is an astonishing impressionistic piece that evokes wind and storm.  The story is about Senta's sacrifice of love.  All heroines in Wagner sacrifice themselves for love.



Wouldn't you know, by the time I actually got season tickets to the opera, Director Glynn Ross in Seattle was mobilizing for a full Ring cycle for the centenary Ring year of 1976.  So I got to go to Der Ring des Nibelungen, the whole thing.



People ask: how can you sit through four nights of opera, and long operas at that.  The answer, of course, is that going to the Ring is a ritual, and rituals are supposed to be boring; they are supposed to force you to get rid of your monkey mind and surrender to the experience.  It is, if you like, a form of meditation.



At the end of the Ring, after the end of Götterdämmerung, you know you have experienced one of the great aesthetic experiences known to man.  That is why the Ring is so popular, even though Wagner's music is so challenging.



What about the bad parts, the anti-semitism?  Wagner was undoubtedly a minor monster.  He aligned his life completely with the various spirits of the age.  And one of them was anti-semitism. When the Jews were released from their ghettos in Germany in the 19th century they exploded into the economy and the culture with a power that frightened lots of people.  Kinda like the way that liberals are terrified of conservatives and Christians.  Where do these people come from?



But like it or not, Richard Wagner was a musical genius, and after Wagner music will never be the same.

Putting a Name on Obama Politics

It's lucky that liberals never have to look at themselves in a mirror, and never have to listen to their hate speech.



Because what liberals do is an utter betrayal of what they say they believe.



They say that everything they do is for the little people.  But they don't have a problem siccing the IRS on the little people of the Tea Party.  They say that dissent is the highest form of patriotism, but don't you dare dissent against liberalism, in the university or in the public square.  Not if you know what is good for you.



Liberals justify their gun-control politics with the mantra "if it saves one life."  But the brave media was hiding behind the ink barrel when abortionist Kermit Gosnell was on trial for snipping the spinal cords of live babies.



That is why I have developed the mantra "government is force; politics is division; system is domination."



Because it is all too easy -- for anyone, liberal or conservative -- to justify bigger government when you assume that there's nobody here but us chickens, and we care.  That's phoney baloney.  Because when you have the power of government you have the power of force, the power to peer into peoples' lives, to count them, to tax them, to send in OSHA or the ATF.



And when you have the power of government, sooner or later you are going to use it, as the Obamis did, to help win the next election.  And you do it not just by buying votes but by siccing enforcement officers on your opponents.  Get that?  "Enforcement?" As in force.  Golly, could it be that government is force?



It's natural in the to-and-fro of politics to think of your team as the good guys and the other team as the bad guys.  You can see this very human instinct at work in every sports stadium.



But our liberal friends have built a whole secular religion on the notion that they are the forces of good. They know that God -- or in the liberal case, justice -- is on their side.



That's why God created the First Amendment and the separation of Church and State.  The idea is that the moralists and the good guys don't get to tell the government enforcement officers what to do.



Liberal orthodoxy collapses the separation between their secular church and the government.  Their politics and their religion are one and the same.  It means nothing to them to accuse their opponents of the worst evils they can think of: racism, sexism, anti-choice fascism, homophobia.  Liberals diligently teach college students to hate racists and homophobes, starting with freshman orientation.



So it's just one small step to ordering IRS agents to harass Tea Party applicants with requests for their Facebook posts and their reading lists.



Reading lists!  Just imagine what would have happened if the Bush administration had asked for the reading lists of the Soros funded non-profits.



As I've written, it's one thing for the little darlings of the ruling class to run around harassing the evil racists, sexists, and homophobes when they are learning their trade in college.  It is another thing when they are doing it as government officials.



When private persons are harassing racists and sexists and homophobes they are just nasty little Alinskyite thugs.  But when government officials do it they are nasty little petty tyrants.  And there is a word for what they are doing as they tyrannize over their political opponents.



The word is Injustice.

Obama's War on Women

One of the underappreciated facts about the Tea Party movement is that women have been in the vanguard.  And they started organizing in the fall of 2008.



We're supposed to believe that all women are Democrats.  But Keli Carender (@LiberTBelle), who started the Tea Party here in the Seattle area, is a graduate of Oxford, a teacher and sometime actor.



Doesn't fit the profile.



And of course many of the Tea Party groups that the IRS was targeting in the run-up to the 2012 election were moms that didn't like what they saw coming out of Washington, DC.



Now we have the case of True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht, profiled on NRO today.  From Houston, Texas, this wife of a small manufacturer got involved also in the fall of 2008.  When she did some election monitoring she decided to do something about it and founded True the Vote.



I have found that election shenanigans seems to touch a sensitive nerve with women.



True the Vote got the attention of the Feds, and even Democratic legislators, and since then they have been regular visitors at the Engelbrecht business: IRS, OSHA, even the ATF!



As we crank up into the current scandal season, there is one thing in the back of my mind.  What was it that triggered these women off in the fall of 2008?



The easy thing would be that they are all racists.  Didn't like the powerful black man getting elected to the White House.



Trouble is: many of these women don't fit the profile.  They are educated, articulate.



So what did set them off?  Was it the Alinsky tactics?  But back in 2008 you had to be really paying attention to get that.  Was it the left-wing agenda?  But Obama kept that under wraps back then.



Well.  Now that we have three, four scandals going full bore, we may get to find out.  I think I'll go to the Seattle Tea Party rally at the IRS tomorrow, just to take a gander.



Because I always think that what women are thinking and feeling is the only thing that matters.



The hand that rocks the cradle.