Now Brazil Runs Out of Other Peoples' Money

My man Kevin D. Williamson is writing about America's Big Problem. No, it's not Trump, it's the Budget. As Kevin is a focused guy, he always asks visiting politicians about this at National Review's coffee and conversation meetings.

I have put the question more or less identically to many of them: “Given that almost all of our spending is on popular programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, national defense) or effectively non-negotiable spending (interest on the debt), how would you balance the budget?..."

Of course, the visiting pols always answer with fudge, or, as Kevin puts it "hogwash." Nevertheless, he writes, "somebody is going to have to answer that question, someday."

No they won't. The question will be answered, instead, by national debt default. As in Brazil, which is facing a financial crisis as its debt spirals out of control and the government sits there frozen in place. Here is The Telegraph's resident financial Cassandra, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. He quotes a former state secretary of planning.

"There is a loss of confidence in the ability of the government to manage its debts. We face the risk of default," he said. Three quarters of the budget is effectively untouchable, locked in by a web of welfare payments and regional transfers..."

 In Kevin-speak, talking about the US, we could say that:

About than [sic] 80 percent of federal spending is on Social Security, medical benefits, the military, and interest on the debt.

But politicians dare not speak about cutting any of that. Not until the nation "goes Greek" or, in this case, Brazil. At that point, it's like the popular song "Comes love, nothing can be done."

Nothing can be done about the entitlements when things are great; nothing can be done about the entitlements when the economy is spinning out of control. Nothing can be done in the wreckage of the economy after hyperinflation and sovereign debt default, except that the entitlements, whatever they were, are now unaccountably worth a lot less. It must be love. But, since "nothing can be done" it is just too bad.

It's easy to say that there has to be a better way, but the fact is that there has never been a better way. That is why I have developed my General Theory of Government.

A government is an armed minority occupying some territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its regime supporters.

Notice that there is nothing here about cutting rewards to regime supporters. I wonder why.

In the old days the supporters were marcher lords and the central government had to keep those obstreperous lords semi-happy or they would march from the border marches to the capital city and know the reason why. Think Henry IV Part One and Harry Percy, son of the marcher Earl of Northumberland.

But these days the regime supporters are you and me, the voters that elect politicians like Barack Obama to give us Hope and Change or Donald Trump to Make America Great Again. And what we want is loot. We want our Social Security, our Medicare, our veterans benefits, our free education, our affordable housing, and so on. And woe betide the politician that dares even to mention the word "cut."

My little contribution to this is my website usgovernmentspending.com. Its Breakdown page shows pretty well exactly what Kevin shows. The only difference is that I show the next big thing, after Social Security, health benefits and defense and welfare. Education. Most of education is taxed and spent at the local level. Free, dontcha know.

But the worst of it is that, even after a nation goes Greek, or Argentina, or Venezuela, or now Brazil, people still don't get it. They still want their free stuff as regime supporters. Or else.

That's why I call it my General Theory of Government.

Trump Hauls White Working Class into the GOP Boat

For years, conservatives have been bemoaning the GOP's inability to expand the party. But now that Donald Trump has done it, we conservatives are complaining, because Trump has done it the wrong way.

Of course, the idea was that the GOP would expand by appealing to Hispanics, not the white working class. But who's keeping score?

In the cold light of day, after Trump clearly won the SEC primary over Ted Cruz, whose strategy centered on winning those southern states, we can say this.

What is so shameful about a more restrictive immigration policy that limits low-wage competition from low-skilled immigrants? The fact is that, for over a generation, liberals have used the immigration issue to import boatloads of potential Democratic voters, and named and shamed anyone that objected as a racist and a bigot. Moreover they have eroded the rule of law with their sanctuary cities and their virtual retreat from enforcing the law on illegals by burdening police with onerous reporting requirements.

Donald Trump has smashed the liberal immigration racket to smithereens.

The reason I say that Government is Injustice is that anyone wielding political power should think about how their power politics looks to the other side. There is actually no need to think about it. The other side always experiences the deployment of political power as injustice. Of course they do; government is force, taking money from some people and giving it to others, because we can.

The white working class has been on the receiving end of government for quite some time now, and like most people, they don't like it up them. For some time now, Republicans have wanted the white working class to join the Republican Party, but nobody had a clue how to do it. So Republicans and conservatives defaulted to the position that the white working class should just vote Republican if they knew what was good for them.

Yeah, we have seen how well that has sold over the years, President Romney.

Last night, Donald Trump was at his Mar-A-Lago resort trumpeting the idea that he was expanding the Republican Party. And "I'm a unifier."

That, of course, is the $64,000 question. Does Trump end up destroying the Republican Party or does he end up pulling every remaining working-class white out of the Democratic Party into the GOP column. And what about blacks and Hispanics? Conventional wisdom says that immigration politics is a third rail to Hispanics. But blacks are not at all happy with immigration, and Hispanics are said to turn anti-immigration once their family has all immigrated to the US.

Is Trump kryptonite to Republicans? Or is he a unifier that expands the party? George Neumayr of The American Spectator did an experiment, wearing a Trump hat around Manhattan earlier this winter. He kept running into people that had never voted Republican in their lives, but now...

“I like your hat,” said a bellhop to me at a boutique luxury hotel a block or so off Times Square. I had taken the hat off inside the hotel but placed it next to me on a seat. The bellhop, who described himself as “half Italian, half Hispanic,” made a point of walking over and complimenting me on my Trump hat. “I have never voted Republican in my life,” the bellhop said to me. “But I am going to vote for Trump.”

Yesterday I heard a Trump supporter tell Rush Limbaugh that Trump has actually done something, while all the other candidates have done nothing in their lives but talk. He had a point.

The story of the Republican Party since 1960 has been the story of Ronald Reagan, who said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the party left him. Again and again, it wasn't that the Republican Party went out and corralled a new bunch of voters. Instead the voters found them, after being cast out of the Democratic Party into the political wilderness.

If we mark the debut of All in the Family in winter 1971 as the date that the white working class was cast out of the Democratic Party, branded as racist, sexist, bigoted Archie Bunkers, every one, then the white working class has been wandering in the wilderness for about 40 years, just like the Israelites. Nobody is saying that Trump is a Moses, but he has clearly found some tablets up in them thar hills.

And really, would it harm the Republican Party to adapt itself to the political needs of the white working class? A little less immigration, a little less racial spoils, a more moderate reform of entitlements than hardcore libertarian conservatives like me would like? Is that so hard to swallow?

And really, what better time to test all this out than against the hopeless Hillary Clinton, the politician without a clue?

The Racist KKK and the Racist BLM

Presidential candidate Donald Trump got into trouble over the weekend by not reciting the proper liturgical text about apparent support by the Ku Klux Klan. Apparently every media personality in America knows how to pose the question when the KKK uses the political moment to get some publicity by endorsing some Republican.

You are supposed to say that you utterly reject the endorsement of the KKK and everything it stands for. Anything less is a scandal.

(But I wonder if Donald Trump is crazy like a fox and understands that he gets the attention of disaffected whites by equivocating on the KKK).

OK, so what about Black Lives Matter? Where's the ritual requirement to disavow this racist hate group and everything it stands for? From where I stand, the KKK and the BLM are eerily alike.

The Ku Klux Klan was part of an infrastructure of quasi-military groups opposing federal power in the post Civil War South. Its job was to intimidate uppity blacks and any whites that supported the federal government and its reconstruction policies. Its job, in the immortal words of left-wing activist Melissa Click, was to apply "muscle."

Black Lives Matter is part of an infrastructure of left-wing activist groups that push left-wing narratives and works to intimidate anyone that opposes left wing ideas.

The difference between the KKK and BLM in 2016 is that the KKK has absolutely no support from the ruling class whereas BLM obviously does.

So which group should we worry about? The group of what the Brits call "no-hopers" marinating in their cultural decay? Or the group of regime-supported shock troops, funded in part by billionaires like George Soros?

Personally, I think there's a Dirty Harry "Make My Day" aspect to left-wing activism. Ordinary middle-class people just hate it, and run away from it as fast as they can. Because the whole point of left-wing activism is that you will be made to care, about climate change, about race, about rape, about gender bending. And the whole point of the middle class is that its people don't want to be made to care about anything.

But in the Obama era liberals have kinda run wild on the activist front, just like they did in the Sixties. Back in the Sixties liberals woke up one morning and found that Richard Nixon had been elected president, and Nixon went on to energize the Silent Majority that hated the left-wing activist cuture.

It was only after the evil Nixon had been followed by the amiable dunce Reagan that liberals decided it was time to bury the activism thing and pretend to be New Democrats and crime fighters and moderates, every one. That's how Bill Clinton ran for president and had his Sister Souljah moment.

But Barack Obama is a true movement liberal, and he has not felt the need to keep his lefty crazies under a wrap. In consequence the lefty crazies have run riot across the fruited plain. Now we have Donald Trump, the unguided missile, who makes a point of trashing liberal activism narratives, to rapturous applause. Who could have seen that coming?

To my mind, the left movement of communism, socialism, fascism, and its spawn, that makes a fetish of political power, is the most poisonous human cultural meme since, oh, Islam.

But what do I know.

Here's an idea. How about we start demanding of Democratic politicians that they disavow the racist hate program of racist hate group Black Lives Matter?

Liberal Race Politics and the Movies

Ratings were down on the #OscarsSoWhite 88th Acadamy Awards show last night. So what else is new? What in the world could turn Americans away from the Oscars more than yet another liberal race row?

And really, what in the world is the point of having a racial purity test on the Oscars, making sure that there are regular black award winners? Oh, I see. Social justice. My bad.

Actually, to step back a bit, Hollywood is not really just white, it is Jewish. And the perfectly good reason for that is that Jews invented it. As in Louis B. Mayer. Samuel Goldwyn. They made Hollywood because, back in the the 1920s and 1930s, movies was a new thing, and open to talent. Unlike Harvard and Yale with their Jewish quotas.

Another thing about the Oscars is that secular liberal smart Jewish kids are not that interested in a movie like Straigh Outa Compton about gangs and hip-hop artists. But they are taken by movies like Spotlight about Catholic priests abusing young boys. Now why would secular liberal Jews be drawn to a movie about priests abusing young boys rather than musical gangbangers in LA? Go figure.

Of course, the question of racial stereotypes in movies is a big thing, because movies are all about current cultural moral stories. In the old days the moral stories were about class and white ethnicity. In High Society we were taught about the moral vacuity of the WASP elite and their casual divorces. Louis Armstrong and his band play some music, and are treated by Bing Crosby as almost equals, but the blacks don't engage with the action.

But in a modern movie, like The Martian, modern liberal race and gender politics is all over the place. The commander of the Ares III spaceship is an upscale woman. The pilot of the Ares is a Martinez. And the orbital mechanics expert appplying his equations to a bank of supercomputers is a hip-hoppy in-your-face Magic Negro. But the hero is a white guy, played by Matt Damon as a quirky, inventive, scrappy individualist. Meanwhile the head of JPL is an East Asian and the representatives of the Chinese space agency are inscrutable Orientals. Between Matt Damon and the Latino pilot there is guy insult talk. But the orbital mechanics guy is sacred, so sacred that he gets to butt into the NASA head's office. Of course. Meanwhile the girl commander is racked with guilt about leaving Matt Damon on Mars. Of course.

There is a wealth of possibility in the new multicultural metro city, where educated young people from all across the planet get to mix it up in business and tech and the creative arts. It would have been really cool if TV and the movies had been allowed to present this world without the intervention of the political commissars. But that would be too much to hope for.

In reality, the #OscarsSoWhite mess is liberals' own fault. Their race politics was great fun when it was deployed against Archie Bunker and any Republican politician that got his words mixed up. If liberals had any wisdom they would have known that eventually the black racists they had encouraged and wafted aloft would turn on them. Now elite liberals are getting a taste of what they have inflicted on ordinary Joe Schmoes for the last half century. It would be fun if it weren't so sad.

But meanwhile, race wars at the Oscars doesn't seem to be very good for business. Now that is a real problem.

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.