EBTers Sack Walmart

Obamacare isn't the only government program having computer problems. Recently the EBT program went down.

EBT's the electronic replacement for Food Stamps. It's a debit card that gets refilled every month so that welfare recipients can use them to buy food.

When EBT went down most merchants stopped accepting EBT payments. But two Walmart stores in Louisiana decided to honor EBT purchases anyway.

So what do you think the good EBT folks did when Walmart kindly let them continue shopping on the honor system? Did they thank Walmart for letting them shop even though nobody could verify whether they had a balance on their EBT cards?

No they didn't. What they did was to buy up the stores and loot them, buying not just food but clothing and electronics.

It's a dramatic illustration, as if we needed one, of the difference between government and business, a difference that I dramatize in my American Manifesto.

Government is force. A government is an armed minority occupying some territory and funding itself by requisitioning or taxing the local inhabitants. Who need it? The argument is that you need an agency of force to prevent the robbers and pirates from running rampant. Yet governments maintain themselves by paying their supporters from funds extorted from ordinary people. This may be in wages and pensions paid to modern government employees, or in a license to loot, like crony capitalists, liberal grant recipients, Social Security Disability Insurance, and EBTers.

So wherever you find it, government is an armed minority doling out loot to its supporters, even though it says that its whole reason for being is to defend against the looters.

But business is different. Business is not about force and loot, because business does not start with the problem of how to maintain the apparatus of force, but how to find or make something, some product or service, that people are willing to pay for.

So right away business starts not with Ego's needs, but with Alter's needs, to use the lingo of modern Marxists. It means that business must spend every waking hour thinking about what other people want not what I want.

Suppose you have discovered a product that other people want. Then you have a new problem. How do you get the customers to come back and buy again? The answer is simple. You must build a relationship with your customers; you must treat your customers well, and get them tolike you and feel that they are treated well. There is a word for this sort of thing. It is called Trust. There is even a book about it, by Francis Fukuyama.

So when the EBT system goes down, Walmart thinks of its EBTers as valued and trusted customers. Unfortunately, Walmart is wrong.

EBTers and the other supporters of the welfare state are not trusted "others." They are like the soldiers of a warrior chieftain. They are like the warriors in the Iliad. They only know looting and pillage. They range the world looking for things to steal and loot, just like Sherman's "bummers" or the Russian soldiers that, reportedly, raped every single German woman east of the Elbe on their way from Moscow to Berlin in World War II.

The modern global underclass is just like the licentious soldiery of old. They are not connected into the market economy by a web of service and reciprocal obligation, by long-term relationships of trust. On the contrary, they are looters and pillagers, and they owe loyalty only to the political chieftain of the moment, the one that offers them the best opportunity for ripping off free stuff.

The sooner we stop it the better.

Be of Good Cheer

OK.  So the House Republicans lost the shutdown war.  So what, as they say in corporate-speak, are the "lessons learned?"



Lesson One: Obama had to have a win, and he got it.  But we shall see whether it turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory or not.  Because Obama won on the issue to keep his Obamacare lead balloon fully inflated even as its website was collapsing and Americans all over the country were waking up to a doubling of their health insurance premiums.  Golly.  Another victory or two like that and the president will destroy the Democratic Party.



Lesson Two: Republicans needed to show their base that they had some fight in them.  Yes, it was a pathetic Keystone Kops routine, but at least they fought.



Lesson Three: Republicans needed to know which leaders were prepared to get up on the parapet and yell defiance at the Ruling Class.  That was what Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-TX) "meaningless" non-filibuster was all about.



Lesson Four: These Obama crises are really good for usgovernmentspending.com.  Yesterday the site got just under 20,000 visitors.  Back in early September is was more like 4,000 visitors per day.  Yay Obama!



Remember back in the innocent days of 2000 when Al Gore ran for president and his website was full of stuff about "fighting for the people against the powerful?"  Back then I thought this sort of faux populism rather funny, but I'm not laughing now.  Right now I am feeling a deep hunger for a leader who will fight for the People of the Responsible Self against the ruling class of liberals, experts, special interests and crony capitalists and their supporters, the EBT folks that looted Walmart.



Why is this?  It is because the liberals are finding themselves behind the 8-ball and they are cheating in order to stay in the game.  Back in November 2008 after liberals won the election with the First Black President they never thought they'd be sitting where they are today, defending an unpopular law with parliamentary tricks and executive illegalities.  Liberals think that, with their pro-science world view and their Keynesianism and their education and their policy-analyst expertise that they know how to operate the levers of political and economic power to fix society and fix the economy.  They never thought that in 2013 they would be running the printing press flat out (making money for the 1%).  They never thought that the economy would be struggling to make 2% GDP growth.  They never thought they would have to observe a code of omerta on the embarrassing fact of high unemployment.



Because liberals own the mainstream media and the culture and the universities and all, they have a safety net and can attempt death-defying political high-wire acts that Republicans and conservatives just cannot attempt.  But eventually gravity wins out.  Eventually even the most partisan of liberals and the most oblivious of low-information voters begin to feel in their gut that something is wrong.  That "eventually" is probably occurring right about now.



Think about it.  For ten years liberal leaders have been teaching their followers that conservatives, from President Bush on down, are stupid.  And when they are not stupid they are racists, sexists, homophobes.  What was needed was for an intelligent government that knew what it was doing and that relied on science not on religion for its inspiration.  Well who is stupid now?  Who is stumbling and bumbling now?  Who is failing to bring Americans together now?  Who has produced the worst government program failure ever?



Of course the liberal partisans are never going to admit that their guy is a bust.  But they will start to lose faith in the project.  They will start to cast around looking for better leaders.  They will start drifting away from the reassuring NPR news.  The lo-fos will start picking up on anti-Obama cracks from the TV comics.



And then there is 2016.  African Americans will be staring in the face the truth that we conservatives already knew.  Put not thy faith in princes, even First Black Princes.  African American voters will be wondering what their enthusiastic support for President Obama has delivered for them.  They will not be excited about an old white woman like Hillary Clinton, even if she will be America's first woman president!  Yeah.  They will stay home.



But in 2016 the conservative base and the independent conservatives that sat out 2008 and 2012 will be loaded for bear.  All they will need is a presidential candidate that can ignite their smoldering rage.  If they want a nice guy they can have Marco Rubio.  If they want a tough guy they can have Ted Cruz.  Both men come from big states, so that's all right.



Yeah.  It's tough to take a loss, especially against a guy like Barack Obama.  But Obamacare will still be there messing up peoples' healthcare next week, and next year.



And Obamacare is an issue that goes straight to the hearts of women: their healthcare.  Here's a fearless prediction.  Look to the gender gap snapping shut in 2014 and 2016.

What is Wrong With Republicans?

Here we are, less than a day before debt default -- or more exactly -- pay-as-you-go, and the House Republicans collapsed in a heap on the floor.



Is this a disaster, or what?



Who knows?  But J.T.Young writes that it's a lot easier for the presidential party to impose party discipline.  And right now President Obama desperately needs party discipline to show some backbone to his troops after the chaos of the Syria debacle and the Obamacare rollout.

Democrat divisions have been becoming more pronounced. Prior to the debt limit and shutdown, which strengthened Obama’s control over his Congressional allies, recent concerns have arisen over Obamacare and its implementation, continuing revelations over NSA surveillance, the recent Summers-Yellen debate over heading the Fed, and over his stance on Syria.



If Congressional Democrats should really break with Obama in appreciable numbers, his presidency would start to disintegrate as well and Democrat fissures become even more numerous and apparent.

Yeah.  That's the real problem.  Unless President Obama spends a lot of energy maintaining discipline in the ranks his people will start looking forward to the time without Obama.  When that happens, and it is a question of when and not if, the Obama ship will go on the rocks -- while everyone complains about Obamacare 24-7.  Why even a chap from Daily Kos is all wigged out about his steep increases in health insurance premiums.  And now that "Tirge Caps" is getting hammered he has this to say about the president's signature achievement: "This appears, in my experience, to not be a reform for the people."



Listen.  All I'm worried about is that I'm in Boston and scheduled to take the train to Connecticut on D-Day, October 17.  What happens if the president pulls some new shutdown shenanigan Thursday?



But let us ease up from this misery and delight in the Hot People of the Responsible Self.  I am thinking of the hot mom that posed with her three young children on Facebook.  To the haters and nay-sayers that objected to her photo she had this to say.

I won’t go into details that I struggled with my genetics, had an eating disorder, work full time owning two businesses, have no nanny, am not naturally skinny and do not work as a personal trainer,” she wrote, in part. “What I WILL say is this. What you interpret is not MY fault. It’s yours. The first step in owning your life, your body and your destiny is to OWN the thoughts that come out of your own head.

Couldn't have said it better myself.  We humans are social animals, so everything we do is socially conditoned.  But back in the Axial Age the idea got about that each individual ought to be individually responsible for their one life to God.



If you are a conservative and Republican things are pretty discouraging right now.  But with people like Maria Kang in America you have to feel that we are destined to get out of the current Obama Slough of Despond pretty soon.



We'll do this not because of fate, but because of the individual determination of each Person of the Responsible Self.



And because President Obama is driving the Democratic Party off the cliff.



It may look like the president is beating up Republicans up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, but I suspect that he is subjecting his party to unnecessary and damaging battles that are a waste of political capital.



Only time will tell.

It Ain't Over Till It's Over

The usual voices are condemning the Republicans for their usual vices over the government shutdown.  The mainstream media is all upset about Republican extremism, and the conservative mainstream is all upset about the Republican stupidity or, alternatively, cowardice.



And there's the third voice attacking Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for imagining that he could stop Obamacare with one filibuster.

I suggest that before moving that discussion forward we acknowledge and bewail the barren naïveté of those Republicans — are you listening, Sen. Cruz ?— who thought all they had to do to make Obamacare go away was fold their arms and clamp their jaws.

No, no, no, William Murchison.  Ted Cruz did not imagine that he could stick his finger in the Obamacare dyke.  He was just establishing his bona fides as a fighter for conservative principle.  He was merely running for president in 2016.



The result of the shutdown thus far, according to the Rasmussen Poll, is that the president's popularity has upticked a couple percent, from 45-48% to 47-50%.  Why?  You can see the reason in the plot of the Strongly Approve / Strongly Disapprove numbers.  Strongly Approve has gone from about 23% to 28% in the last couple of weeks.  Strongly Disapprove hasn't moved, although it is showing signs of increasing from the 39% area.



So the net result so far has been to gin up the president's support among his supporters which is, presumably, the president's strategy for the 2014 midterms.



But my overall feeling is that the president's constant attempt to demonize and corner the Republican opposition is just bad politics -- quite apart from it's being bad statesmanship.



If you ask me there is a reason why presidents usually work with the other side and avoid unnecessary partisanship.  It's because they know it's not good politics to humiliate the opposition and then rub salt in their wounds.  That's a really good way to get the opposition burning with a desire for revenge.



President Obama seems really to believe in the Saul Alinsky school of politics, in which you rile up your marginalized supporters to take it to the Man; you embarrass City Hall or the employers to make them follow their own rules, to personalize and demonize.



But the Alinsky Rules assume that you, the community organizer, are the outsider, and that you, because you are the outsider, don't have to follow the rules because you don't have the power.



That's not what's going on here.  President Obama is the Man: he's the president.  The mainstream media is the ruling class.  They are the ones that must follow the rules because if they don't then it makes no sense for the conservatives, as the insurgents, to abide by the rules either.



The Rules, liberals, are there for the government and the ruling class to follow.  When the government follows the rules then people afraid of injustice, afraid of being on somebody's "list" can rest easy in their beds.  Unjust as this administration may be, the insurgents can say to themselves, at least the government follows the law.



But President Obama and the liberals don't seem to think that they have any obligation to follow the law, or be seen to follow the law.  The president seems to think that he can do whatever he can get away with: Obamacare waivers for powerful special interests, delay in employer mandate, IRS obstruction of Tea Party groups.



Put it this way.  If a Republican president were doing what the Obamis are doing the mainstream media would be hysterical.  There would be daily above-the-fold front page coverage in The New York Times.  The left-wing activists would be staging daily rent-a-mob protests.  We would all know about the new imperial presidency that was worse than Richard Nixon and scandals that were worse than Watergate.



At this point, we do not know how angry the voters are about the Obama strategy of division and name-calling.  That's because Republicans aren't allowed to indulge in hysteria.  And because the mainstream media doesn't know any Republicans and doesn't know what is going on in their minds.



We will only know the answer to this in November 2014.



But my guess is that a deep and powerful outrage is building in the breasts of the conservative independents.  The point is that all government, any government, excites rage in the breasts of everyone but its unthinking supporters.  There's no mystery about this.  Government is force; government is injustice.  And government makes people angry when the force and the injustice is done to them.  That's why we get "throw the bums out" elections; that's why sixth-year midterms are usually a disaster for the president's party.



So go right ahead Mr. President with your division and demonization.  In the opinion of this humble writer you are digging a grave for Democratic hopes in the next two election cycles that will be used as a cautionary tale for up-and-coming political operatives for the next fifty years.

Yellen in the Night

Oh dear.  Our new rule-of-the-experts nominee for Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board admits she didn't have a clue about the Crash of 2008.  Here's the quote from Janet Yellen:

“For my own part,” Ms. Yellen said, “I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.”

Now I think that it is reasonable to suppose that the average ruling-class bear couldn't have known that we had a once-in-a-generation financial crisis in 2008.



But the folks in charge of the nation's money supply should have known that cheap credit in the aftermath of the tech crash of 2000 and that huge subsidies for home mortgages and government policy to shovel mortgages to people that couldn't make the payments was going to end in tears.



The problem is that for the Keynesian liberals a little bit of cheap credit is worth it.  It's worth it to give the economy a bit of stimulus.  It's worth it to help create jobs.  And all the other self-indulgent stuff that the ruling class spews out.



But for you and I all this mucking around with the credit system is poison, for us and for our lives.  Right now it means that ordinary people can't get a decent rate of interest on their savings.  At other times it means inflation raising the price of groceries.  And inflation eating away at the value of your savings.



And all because the cheap credit philosophy of the Keynesians means that they are always trying to get out of a jam.



Now we have Janet Yellen, the president's nominee to run the nation's monetary policy.  And she admits that she didn't really have a clue about what was going on in the 2000s in the run-up to the Crash of 2008.



So what does it mean three years down the road when the current quantitative easing results in a nasty inflation?  What mumbo-jumbo will she be muttering when things start to go wrong?



Actually, we know what the liberals will be saying then.  They will be blaming the banks and they will be proposing credit controls to stop the reckless speculation that is the inevitable consequence of their foolish policy.



It will be a case of Yellen in the dark.

War and Force and Division and Government

In the old days human society was simple.  There was the community, within which differences were settled by hierarchy. If you were a high status person you got your way; if you were a low status person you gave way.

Outside the community things were also simple.  All other groups were enemies, actual or potential, because all other groups were competing for land, and land is life.

So in the old days every community was at peace within the community and at war without the community.

But in our world things are more complicated because every community has a government.

Government is force, meaning that government doesn't do anything by consensual agreement.  It does everything by law or by rule.  Not to do things by rule or by law is to commit an injustice because special favors and special allowances for certain favored people amounts to an injustice to all the others.

But who wants to sit there as a judge evaluating rules and violations?  People want action.  And so government gets involved in peoples' quarrels.  Who wouldn't want the government on their side when they have a disagreement with their neighbors, and want to force their neighbor to curb their barking dog or cut down a rotten tree?

So here we have the government with its apparatus of force with nothing to do unless someone has a quarrel.  If there's a quarrel that the participants can't resolve then you have a war on your hands, and you need a war to justify using force.

Thus it is that the men and women that direct government have a special interest in ginning up quarrels and dividing the people.

You can't justify the use of force unless there is a war to fight.  And you don't have a war unless there's a quarrel.  And you don't have a quarrel unless you have a disagreement that two parties won't resolve on their own.

Thus it is that politicians are in the business of division.  They need to divide people to gin up a quarrel.  And with a quarrel they have a chance to gin up a war.  And with a war they have the justification to use force.

And force is what government is all about.

But the whole point of human society is to maximize friendly cooperation and to structure society so that almost all transactions between people can be conducted in a spirit of amity and give and take.  It means that people work with the other rather than work to divide from the other; they work to help the other rather than work to defeat the other.

But it makes sense that the more government the less give and take, the more government the less people are thinking about how to help other people rather than dominate other people.

So the great question in all political affairs should be: How do we reduce government?  Because by reducing government we reduce the zone of force and division, and increase the zone of cooperation and agreement.

Why Did Liberals Have to Blame Right for JFK Death?

We all know the story of the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963.  A lefty ex-Marine who'd been to Moscow and to Cuba did it.



But liberals have ever since wanted to believe that it was right-wing hate that did it.  George Will rehearses the story for us.



James Reston wrote that Kennedy was "a victim of a 'streak of violence in the American character,' noting especially 'the violence of the extremists on the right.'"  A New York Times editorial spoke of "the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down" JFK.  Really?  From a lefty that went to Moscow?



What were they smoking?  And, of course, as the assassinations continued with Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, liberals intensified their indictment of America.  Gun violence was the problem, they have insisted ever since.



Now we see the same paranoia from liberals.  It's directed at the Tea Party, the most sober and friendly of political movements.  But liberals call Tea Partiers "extremists."  It's directed at the government shutdown.  Liberals call the Republicans "arsonists."



I don't think there is anything special here.  We are just seeing the natural behavior of a quasi-religious movement.  Liberals don't experience politics as politics, but as saving religion.  So any setbacks they experience are not the vicissitudes of life, but the power of Satan.



Right now liberals are in a perilous situation.  The economy is barely recovering from the Crash of 2008 and liberals don't know why, because it ought to have responded to their wise Keynesian medicine.  Obamacare is debuting to catcalls; this is utterly demoralizing given that universal health care is a natural evolution of every civilized society.  Republicans, the hated party of racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes, gives every indication of obstreperous disrespect.  Something weird and chthonic is taking place, and liberals are feeling the strain.  Liberals are starting to panic.



Rewinding back to the Sixties, the self-delusion that began with the "climate of hate" response to the Kennedy assassination ended up in the stagflation and powerlessness of the Carter years.  The remedy was the Reagan revolution of 1980.



It's beginning to look as if the delusion of 2000, that liberals were robbed of the election of Al Gore, that continued through the mad partisan destruction of George W. Bush and into the delusive worship of Barack Obama, is set to end in a massive liberal crackup in 2014-2016.



And it all issues from the central liberal delusion, that you can build a good society on the government of experts and activists, that administration and system can improve on the natural sociability of human individuals.



Our liberal friends make a big deal about the importance of science, at least when it comes to evolution and climate.  But when it comes to economics and government they are the worst deniers of all.  Government, we know from economics and public choice theory, is a very blunt instrument and is just not up to the job of running a modern society.



Once you promote government from the job of defending against enemies foreign and domestic you are heading for trouble.  That's because government is force, and force always means a war, and force applied to your fellow citizens leads to injustice.



Liberals have no clue about the depth and breadth of the injustice they have sponsored in this nation with their endless wars on poverty and wars on behalf of the marginalized.



But injustice is injustice.  Sooner or later it finds its voice and builds up to a head of rebellion.



And liberals, in their delusions about right-wing hate, will be the last to know.