Thoughts on a Week in Paris

I'm sitting at the gate at Charles de Gaulle airport waiting for the plane to take me back to Seattle. I have had a delightful week with my daughter and her husband and son. She lives just south of the Seine in the 7e Arrondissement, so we were well positioned to enjoy all the pleasures of the city of lights.

We are taught to think of Paris in terms of the Muslim terrorism, but of course you don't get a lick of that, except that there is a lot of security around. What you do notice is that the Uber drivers tend to be North African, while the taxi drivers are white.

But every moment you are reminded what a delightful place Paris is for the educated and the well-provisioned. It is amazing how many little boutique stores line the streets, and every corner has its restaurant. You wonder, how many fashionable women does it take to keep all these boutiques in business with their upscale clothing and furnishings and antiques? And how do all these little restaurants manage to make a go of it?

There are Monoprix supermarkets spreading out in the basement from a doorway onto the street, and there are plenty of McDonalds and Subways around. But the old Paris is still there, including the haute-couture brands and the fancy hotels south of the Champs Elysées. We had afternoon tea at the King George V Hotel and watched the world go by.

Paris is like every big city: it is home to the world, and if you didn't know that there were Muslims no-go areas, you'd think that Paris didn't have a care in the world. Of course, maybe it doesn't. Maybe all the Muslim fuss is just the ruling class needing a reason to tax us and spend us, and the need of Islamia to record its rage and frustration.

We went to the Louvre; it's a good idea to buy your tickets on-line before you go, because it allows you to skip the big security line and get into a shorter ticket-holders line. And then you get to sample just a little of the western colonialist loot that the curator class has accumulated and displayed. We went into the Richelieu wing and saw their huge Dutch collection, including what seemed like a roomful of Rembrandt self-portraits. There were a number of effigies of 13th century nobles, lying in magnificent carved stone on top of their mortal remains. The men were shown in their armor with a lion, for courage, at their feet, and their wives were shown with a dog, for fidelity, at their feet. They each held a pouch on their bellies, to carry their viscera. In stone, of course.

And that's to say nothing of the Egyptian, Persian, Phoenician, Carthaginian, Greek, and Roman collections. It is interesting to note that most statuary shows men in their fighting trim. But not the Egyptians, and not the toga-clad Romans. And hey, you may not be able to read hieroglyphic, but you can read the numbers off the wall, because the Egyptians have a glyph for one, for ten, for a hundred, and a thousand. One is a simple stroke, and nine is nine strokes. La Wik has the details.

No visit to Paris is complete without a visit to the Tombe de Napoléon at Les Invalides. Considering that Napoléon got the French in a bit of a pickle, it is a little surprising to see what an amazing, over-the-top memorial they have built for him. His remains sit in a huge sarcophagus in the middle of a huge rotunda, and in the wings are other French military heroes, such as Turenne and Foch. Alongside the tomb is the Musée de l'Armée, with tons of swords and muskets and uniforms from 500 years of French military campaigning.

Next to the Musée de l'Armée is the Rodin museum, but we didn't have time to visit before it was time to go to the King George V Hotel for tea. Oh well, next time.

And now it's time for the ten hour flight back to Seattle. Hey, what is ten hours compared to the 13 hour flight to Oz?

Trump Trumped at Last?

Last night at the GOP debate the 2nd placers finally laid their gloves on the GOP front-runner, Donald Trump, and gave him some rough handling. Where were you, guys, all this time? As David French writes:

Rubio and Cruz dissected Trump so thoroughly that I kept asking myself, why only now? Why didn’t they pounce earlier — before Trump gained the die-hard loyalty of between 30 and 40 percent of GOP voters? The GOP’s best candidates finally took down Trump, but it may have been too late.

Since we all know that Rubio and Cruz are seasoned politicians, with seasoned campaign operations, there must have been a good reason not to hammer away at Trump before last night. But what was it, and why? And is it all too late anyway?

Is Trump as rich as he says he is? Did he hire illegal Polish workers for real-estate construction? Was Trump University a scam? Does Trump hire H-1B workers over native Americans? We'd better get all this worked out and debated. Because otherwise we will be leaving the fish-fileting for the Clinton campaign, and boy, do they have sharp knives.

I was talking to a liberal feminist woman yesterday who asked, without really wanting an answer, about the US election. There are two sets of folks that are unhappy, I said: young people, and you can understand why. And also the white working class, and you can understand why.

That's the basic point that I have been trying to understand about government and its relation to life, the universe, and everything. Because government is force, it always ends up making the people on the receiving end of the force angry.

Young people are having a rough time right now, because the goodies have been hived off by government for the benefit of others, and they are left with a lousy job market and unpayable college loans. But I tell you kids, the answer to your prayers is not free college.

The white working class, and indeed anyone without a basic education, is having a rough time, has been ever since the unionized manufacturing game went over the top in the 1970s. It was a good time, for those that got the goodies, when private-sector union workers held good jobs at good wages. But now that's all over, and so the white working class, that thought it had a guaranteed ticket is stuck in a swamp of misery and helplessness. But I tell you, white working class, the answer to your prayers is not a wall and tariffs on imports.

Yes, but what do we do?

We conservatives and libertarians know the answer: stop the spending; stop the regulations; stop the crony capitalism; reform and dial down entitlements; reform and shake up education; stop the race politics; stop the gender politics. Because government is force, and force ends by making the world grind to a halt. The trouble is that nobody is allowed to say this. That's because the default position in politics is the patron-client relationship. The politician is the patron, and the only thing he is allowed to do is offer free stuff to the peasants.

It may be that Donald Trump is crazy like a fox, offering to make the economy great again while carefully avoiding the specifics, knowing what has to be done while cunningly hiding the knife that will scythe through the special interest carve-outs and welfare offerings. Or it may be that he doesn't have a clue.

The only way we get to find out is to let the process proceed, and hope for the best.

Nobody Knows What Trump Would Do

The common hit on Donald Trump, now the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, is that he is all bluster and no program. What, after all, are his ten point programs for immigration and health care and growth and Supreme Court nominees?

Me too. I'm a conservative libertarian and I like a candidate that spells out chapter and verse. Only there is one little problem. Politics just doesn't work that way.

All skilled politicians are the despair of people like me. They make a lifetime career out of saying things that get people enthusiastic, but avoiding things, what the media call "specifics," that might give their supporters pause. Here's an example.

Derek Hunter faults Trump on college loans. A woman asks Trump what he is going to do about college costs and he delivers a bromide.

We gotta do something with the cost of colleges. Now, what’s happening is you’re a conduit for government to give money to you to give to the college. And the colleges, their costs are going up by a factor that’s faster than anything else, practically, is going up. People are making phenomenal salaries at the top.

Trump goes on to say that he is going to "look into this" and "come up" with something. Yes, but what exactly is his ten point program to do something about this? Trump doesn't say. Therefore he is an enigma and we conservatives have no clue what we would be electing if we make him president in November.

But that's what politicians always do. They make sure to sound concerned about a constituent's problem and then utter some meaningless bromide. Of course they do. That's how politics is played.

But let's pause for a moment. Look at the quote above. In response to the question "what are your plans to make college more affordable?" he accurately spells out the problem, that students are a conduit for government to give money to the college. How cool is that?

Really, we can't ask for more than that, on education, the man we elect to be President of the United States understands the problem of high college costs. The only thing he left out is that students are left with the bill. He would be a fool to get down to specifics, because the specifics would tell us who is going to pay for any program to make college more affordable. And that would annoy both students and colleges. It's pretty obvious what needs to be done. We need to stop sloshing free money around. But don't tell the students, and don't tell the college administrators, or you won't get elected president.

Nobody knows what Trump will do. But maybe that's not a bug, but a feature. I'd say that in the US right now practically everyone except the ruling educated class is feeling that nobody cares about them. Here's Donald Trump that has found a way of rallying the non-conservative middle Americans to his banner.

Isn't that what the wise heads have been telling the GOP to do since whenever? That the GOP has to break out of the base, do outreach, and create a message that resonates not just with white conservatives but with, e.g., Hispanics?

Suppose that is exactly what Trump is doing, except that he is not doing outreach specifically to Hispanics but to the whole universe of non-college-educated Americans, white, black, and Hispanic.

Can he do that? Is he doing that? Well, latest word is that the Democrats are starting to get nervous.

Because maybe Donald Trump has found a way to appeal to nominally Democratic voters that the Democrats have owned for the last generation with their race and gender politics.

Imagine if the Democrats woke up one day and pressed the race button and nothing happened.

The President's Rhymes-with-Bucket List

Just imagine if President Bush had declared, in the spring of 2007, that in the last two years of his presidency he would be working on his rhymes-with-bucket list.

Oh, the liberal gnashing of teeth! Oh the disrespect to the country! Oh, the disaster for the Republican Party! Oh, the final proof that Bush was an idiot!

Actually, it may not be so bad. Because what the president meant was doing all the things you are not allowed to do, like go to Cuba and hob-nob with the Castro brothers. Like closing the Guantanamo Bay terrorist jail. Like nominating a liberal to the Supreme Court in your last year when tradition has it that the president doesn't do that, out of respect for his successor.

What all those things are likely to do is rile up Republican voters in November 2016. And what could be wrong with that?

The path not taken is the path taken by President Bush in 2008. Like nominating a Democratic Treasury Secretary with a nasty financial crash looming on the horizon. Like working with Nancy Pelosi in the spring of 2008 to pass a stimulus program to help ward off recession, or leaving the auto bailout half completed at the end of 2008 so that the incoming Democratic administration could put its imprint on it.

The thing is that we want a president that so loves America that he would not do anything to hurt America, even if it were politically advantageous. He wouldn't do anything to rile up the opposition. Not because it would help his party but because it would keep America from unnecessary division.

But President Obama is different. He is mean. He is petulant. He doesn't really love America. He doesn't even really love his party. So he does nasty stuff. He stiffs Sen. Chuck Schumer some extra money for anti-terror funding in New York. He doesn't attend the funeral for Justice Scalia. He resumes diplomatic relations with Cuba. He plans to visit Cuba, home of the cruel Castro brothers. And the repression increases on Cuba's democracy activists.

Now my feeling is that there's a reason why most presidents don't do this. It's not because they are good guys. It's because doing your rhymes-with-bucket list is really stupid, for getting anything done with Congress, with helping your party, with keeping the rage of the opposition down to a dull roar, with making America a better place.

For some reason, President Obama doesn't get this. Maybe it's because he's a Saul Alinsky leftist. Maybe it's because he's an Ivy League liberal. Maybe it's because he was abandoned both by his father and by his mother, and left to be raised by his "typical white people" grandparents. Maybe it's because when you are a Magic Negro being wafted aloft by liberaldom and the Democratic Party you never have to mend bridges with the rest of the world, never have to say your are sorry. Maybe it's just because President Obama is a small, unpleasant person.

But I think that the president and his rhymes-with-bucket list are worse that a crime,  they are a blunder. For him, for his party, and for the nation.

Trump's Big Advantage

Here we are down to three candidates in the Republican presidential race. And the leader is the guy that has broken all the rules.

How could this be? How could the political novice Donald Trump break all the rules and win? How could the practiced and polished politicians like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio be outgunned by a novice like Donald Trump?

The answer lies in the Breitbart dictum: politics is downstream from culture. Liberals have dominated the culture and they have remade the culture so that conservatives cannot win in politics. Conservatives are racist, sexist homophobes. But racism is defined as opposing race-conscious diversity and affirmative action. Sexism is defined as not hiring and promoting enough women. Homophobia is defined as not affirming the gay agenda with sufficient enthusiasm. In other words, liberals are racist, sexist, genderists, that accuse the other side of racism, sexism, and genderism.

It's brilliant. Liberals have confined conservatives in a cage without a door.

But Donald Trump has succeeded in breaking out of the cage cunningly designed half a century ago by Herbert Marcuse, the inventor of intolerant tolerance (or was it the other way around?). How he has done it is still a mystery to me. And I am sure it is a mystery to Cruz and Rubio and their campaigns. After all, if they knew how to do it, they would have done it first. Hey, they are in the game to win.

The key to controlling politics is to control what people are allowed to say and not allowed to say. That is what the whole universe of political correctness is about. And that is what Trump has blown apart.

But notice that the only guy that has broken out of the cage, to this very moment, is Trump. The others are still sitting around wondering what has happened to them. They are still wondering how to play the game by the new rules. If the game has changed, and if the rules have really been broken.

Yes, but, you may say. Trump is in the enviable position of being able to throw caution to the wind. He is 69 and wealthy and can afford to play a high-risk game. If he wins, he gets all the marbles. If he fails, he is still rich and powerful and married to a beautiful woman. Cruz and Rubio have their political careers to think about.

The fact is that Trump should not have been able to happen. It was supposed to be death to insult a woman journalist, as Trump has insulted Megyn Kelly. It was supposed to be death to get into an argument with the pope, but Trump has done it and survived.

OK, but Trump has connected with the white working class that has been abandoned by the Democrats for the last half century. He has said things that they have been longing to hear. Exactly, but haven't Republicans been longing to discover the magic bullet to penetrate the hearts of the Reagan Democrats since forever? How come that Trump is the first politician to do that?

How come a political novice was the first to figure it out?

Let's think ahead and wonder if Trump can win the general election. Over at Mark Steyn there is a piece on the shriveling of the map for Republicans since George Bush senior. Look at the map, he says.

In the south-west he won California. In the north-east he won four New England states. He won the home state of a young community organizer called Barack Obama.

And he won Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Since then things have gone straight downhill so that the idea of a GOP win in 2016 looks pretty improbable.

But with Donald Trump you have to say that the map has been scrambled. The ideological divide of the past three decades has been shattered. How or why is for the historians to decide. Trump has found a way to scramble ideology, break the rules of political correctness and simply appropriate the voters' general unfocused anger into support for him personally. It does no good to point to Trump as a classic confidence trickster, or to complain about his complete lack of worked-out issues. The fact is that politics is about charisma and bombast, about grand denunciations and accusations; it is not about a serious and well-argued discussion of the issues, the careful calibration of messages, and appeals to various constituencies.

Nobody knows what will happen from here on out. All we know is that Donald Trump has blown up the liberal grand strategy in which America would become defined by liberal identity, as liberal identities expanded and included more and more of the electorate, and the rest of America would cower in the shadows, afraid of the mortal accusation of racism, sexism, or homophobia.

When you blow up the world, you don't know how the pieces will fall. By the fall the liberal cultural hegemony may be back in control and everybody will be minding what they say, afraid of the political commissars as of old.

But for now, Donald Trump has broken all the rules, and lived to tell the tale. And that is all that matters.

Mend the Fed? Be Careful What You Wish For

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has accused the Fed of keeping interest rates low at the behest of President Obama. Marco Rubio waffles about Fed overreach that has led to an unhealthy “Fed-centric economy.” Ted Cruz talks about tying monetary policy to the price of gold.

But I wonder if anyone has really thought about what it would mean to reform the Federal Reserve System.

No doubt, the Fed’s zero interest rate policy is all about keeping the government’s debt interest costs down and protecting debtors from the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. But what would it mean to return to a normal interest rate policy?

No doubt the Fed has badly warped the economy, not just in the past few years, but ever since its inception in 1913.

No doubt, all things being equal, it would be best to link the dollar to gold.

But what, really, should we do? And more to the point, what do we dare to do?

We all complain about the Federal Reserve System. But do we really want to do anything about it?

Modern central banking started with the Dutch and their Amsterdam Exchange Bank. It provided the credit that enabled the Dutch to fight and win independence from Spain. Then the Dutch Prince William of Orange invaded Britain in 1688 and within a decade founded the Bank of England and used the British National Debt to conduct a Second Hundred Years War against the French, ending with victory in 1815. But the fact is that the central bank tended to roil the economy badly, since its war finance operations created inflation, and its post-war resumption tended to bankrupt debtors with withering deflation. Even without a central bank, the US Revolutionary and Civil Wars created first ruinous inflation and then bone-jarring deflation.

Our situation is the same, but different. Now the central bank is involved in goosing and/or cooling the economy on the conceit that monetary policy can help moderate the boom-and-bust cycle.

But I suspect that the real role of the central bank today is to smooth over the distortions caused by the huge presence of government operations in the modern big-government economy.

In the old days, the central bank’s credit operations helped the government commandeer the nation’s resources so that it could fight its national wars. That would result in ruinous inflation during the war and ruinous deflation after the war.

But today the central bank’s credit operations are intended to help the government commandeer the nation’s resources so that it can conduct its redistribution operations, from Social Security to mortgage subsidies. This has resulted in a century of inflation punctuated by various financial panics and banking collapses. The Crash of 2008 was caused by the Fed trying to cool the Fannie/Freddie fueled housing bubble of the 2000s. Call it the government’s clumsy right hand trying to correct the errors of its clumsy left hand. But before that was the Savings and Loan collapse, in which the government’s subsidized Savings and Loan lenders collapsed in the 1980s. It was a case of the government’s deflationary policy of the 1980s having to deal with the fallout of its inflationary policy in the 1960s and 1970s.

We are taught to believe that the Fed wisely guides the economy with the predictions of its economic models and economic data. But most likely it is just muddling through, trying to pick up the pieces of the government’s continuing failed interventions in the national economy. And every time we never see the crash coming.

So what are the chances of reforming the Fed so it doesn’t keep interest rates down to reduce the government’s interest payments. or reduce the “Fed-centered” economy, or get back to gold?

I’d say the chances are slim to none. As long as the government is seizing 35 percent of GDP to redistribute to to powerful interests, and using the credit system in all kinds of ways to favor certain interests, it is going to set up inflations and deflations, and crashes, and it will need the power of the printing press get itself out of a jam, by bailing out banks and frequently acting as lender of last resort to prevent a “sudden stop” in the credit system, and using cheap money to "stimulate" the economy.

And we will continue to build up the Chairmen of the Federal Reserve System, from William McChesney Martin to Alan Greenspan to Ben Bernanke to Janet Yellen, as wise financial soothsayers protecting the nation from fearful portents in the financial heavens.

Because the alternative of recognizing that they are all dull political hacks fumbling their way in the dark is too horrible to admit.

No, The US Budget Is Not Bankrupt

In the American Spectator today they do the usual piece about how the United States is bankrupt, that Barack Obama is doing nothing to fix the budget and that spending is going up and revenue not so much. So it says:

The U.S. is bankrupt. Not in the same sense as an individual, of course. Uncle Sam has the power to tax. But at some point even Washington might not be able to squeeze enough cash out of the American people to pay its bills.

Actually, the US is not bankrupt. That's because, unlike you and me, the US is a sovereign nation and it can renege on anything it wants. Only one thing matters to a sovereign nation: Can it sell its debt? Venezuela is bankrupt; it cannot sell its debt and so it pays its bills by printing currency and launching hyperinflation. And yet it is not bankrupt. It is still operating, and it will continue operating even after it reduces the economy to ruins.

The situation of the United States is that it has promised all kinds of entitlements and programs to the American people and the many special interests and client groups, and there isn't going to be enough money to pay for them all. Basically, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are going to eat the budget.

But really, what else is new? Every government has promised all kinds of things to all kinds of people and the fact is that a lot of people get disappointed.

So at some point the US will start to renege on its promises. It can do it clean, and cut the spending and reform the entitlements and put the special interests on a diet, or it can do it ugly, like Venezuela.

The problem is, of course, that when the cuts come, the recipients will be mad as hell and will declare that they won't take it anymore. Just like the folks in Greece. So the government will do nothing, until we get to Greece.

At no time is the US really bankrupt. The US has the power to renege on anything it wants to. So there! The only question, at any moment, is who it decides to renege on. Will it be entitlement recipients? Will it be government bureaucrats?  Will it be bondholders? Will it be holders of US dollars and dollar denominated bank accounts?

The answer is obvious. When the US gets into a bind about meeting all its obligations, it will take the easy way out. It will renege on the folks that have the least political clout. That is not bankruptcy. That is just politics.

So the US budget is not bankrupt. It is just a measure of how badly the government is lying to us.