Is Trump Toast Yet?

To understand how the frenzy over the Comey Memo could provoke a 370 point decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Index on May 17, consider this by a liberal, Damon Linker, bemoaning the sickness of an America that elected "to deliver the presidency to a man of uncommon ignorance and sociopathological malevolence."

Every day Donald Trump shreds the rule of law in novel ways — by lying constantly and continuously, by bringing corruption into the highest levels of the executive branch, by expressing contempt for and defying ordinary norms of democratic governance, by refusing to hire people to staff the federal government. And every day, the president's own party makes it worse by ignoring or making excuses for the transgressions.

Oh please! Gag me with a spoon, as we used to say. You'd think the fellow was describing the Obama administration. Lying? As in "If you like your plan you can keep your plan?" Corruption? As is hiring Hillary Clinton? As in condoning the lovely Lois Lerner and her war on Tea Party groups in the months before the 2012 election? Contempt for ordinary norms of democratic governance? As in Rule by Phone and Pen and middle-of-the-night regulations? What planet are you on, Mr. Linker?

Somehow there is never a need for a special prosecutor in a Democratic administration. Why is that? Is it something in the Constitution?

But back to the important stuff. Is Trump finished? Will he be impeached next week? What we have seen this week is Democrats turning on a dime from calling for James Comey's scalp to expressing their shock, shock, that President Trump might put in a word for Gen. Flynn, a man who seems to have been grievously and unjustly treated by the Deep State's campaign to discredit President Trump.

Honestly, I don't know. But I will tell you this. I was talking to a young skull full of mush yesterday and he didn't like hearing the argument of Charles Murray that the US is turning into a society segregated by IQ, in which the top 25 percent is doing fine, the middle 40 percent only so so, and in the bottom 35 percent the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. That's just for white people. No clue about how the Murray Doctrine applies to minorities.

So I assume that the argument that liberal politics has segregated the nation by IQ is a powerful argument that pierces liberal conceit at its very heart. After all liberals think, they know, that their welfare state is an engine of equality and justice that is helping marginalized communities, only more programs are needed. It cannot be, it just cannot be that liberal politics is having the opposite effect, marginalizing the low paid, the low IQ and throwing them on the dust-heap of history right there with the white working class.

Yes, but what about Trump? Honestly, I don't know. Obviously liberals are using everything they can to angry up their base which was caught completely with sails aback last November. But there is a problem. If liberals angry up their base they might end by angrying up the Republican base. And really, is the angry-up strategy working? After eight years of angry-up politics we have the most Republican Congress and state legislatures since the 1920s.

Before we assume that Trump is finished we'd better understand why all the protests and the accusations and the marchin' and resistin' failed to deliver a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President.

Maybe it's because Democrats ended up believing their own press releases that the future belonged to an Emerging Democratic Majority of women, minorities, the educated and the youth. Maybe that's why Hillary Clinton didn't bother to contest the Rust Belt states of Michigan and Wisconsin.

What I do know is that liberals have no clue how much trouble their top-down administrative state is in. My young skull full of mush was a bit shocked when I explained that any administrative system is like an army. It is designed to implement the strategy of the guys at the top and the kids at the bottom in the firing line are just cannon fodder. As in: System is Domination.

Should Trump Take Credit for 4pct Growth?

Stop Press: The Atlanta Fed is forecasting four percent GDP growth for the second quarter.

Should President Trump take credit for that, or is this finally the economic policy of the former President Obama taking hold?

There are two obvious answers to that.

Point One: This is taking place on Trump's watch. So he takes the credit.

Point Two: After a major economic meltdown like the Crash of 2008 it takes about ten years for the economy to get back on track. That was true in the Crash of 1873, the Crash of 1929. So whatever the  government does, it takes about ten years to shake off the meltdown.

The point is that major crashes are major failures of the credit system. Millions of people lose everything they  have or at least take huge haircuts and can't do what they usually do: start businesses, buy houses, etc.

Now the theory: Per Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street, a healthy credit system requires that loans be properly collateralized and that borrowers should make their payments. If the market thinks that either is in question then you get a credit collapse, and a Lost Decade.

So right about now, the credit system should be getting back into gear, especially as housing prices have recovered. Did you know that one of the biggest ways of financing a new business is by taking a mortgage out on your house? People can't do that when their houses are under water.

Of course, I think that the way this worked out is rather cool. The Crash of 2008 was on Bush's watch, so he is to blame, even though the crash was caused by the Democrats encouraging non-creditworthy people to take out low-down-payment mortgages, and calling opponents to their policy red-lining racists. See Bagehot, above, regarding questionable borrowers and questionable collateral.

But the ten year hiatus after the crash took place on Obama's watch, so he is to blame whether or not he had anything to do with the case. Of course, he did a lot of stuff to slow the recovery, including raising welfare payments, putting a huge burden on small business with Obamacare, putting the financial system in a Dodd-Frank administrative strait-jacket, and throwing money away on crony-capitalist green energy. So there is that.

But now the ten year hiatus is over, and it is starting to look like the economy is ready to take off again. It's happening on Trump's watch so he takes the credit. But imagine if we had had a Republican president the last eight years. Imagine the fake news coming from the Democratic operatives with bylines about the cruel Republicans that didn't care about the suffering of the American people! The Republicans might have been out of power for a generation like after 1929.

But here is what I worry about. I worry that the economy will get such a boost from Trump tax cuts and the Trump Obamacare-lite and the lower energy costs of the fracking revolution, that the economy will overheat in a couple, three years, and we will have a nasty crash and recession.

But that is all in the future. Why, before then we might have Trump impeached and thrown out of office and President Pence impeached and thrown out of office and Hillary Clinton appointed president by acclamation.

So let's not worry about the future. Let's have another cup of coffee, and let's have another piece of pie. Yeah, that song came out in 1932, at the very bottom of the Great Depression.

Is Trump Crazy or Crazy Like a Fox

Suppose you were President of the United States and you had a ton of things you wanted to do. What would be the best way to achieve this?

Would you decide to bring each item up, one by one, so there could be a full and fair Discussion of the Issues? Or would you decide that a better strategy would be to ram all the issues through in the dead of night while the media artillery barrage was blasting to smithereens the Russia connection or the Comey firing or the Trump leaking of sensitive intelligence to the Russians?

Honestly, I don't know. My Man Kevin D. Williamson writes that it is one thing to run a nice little family business with your kids, but another thing to sit astride a monster bureaucracy like the federal government.

On the other hand, the whole point of a gigantic bureaucracy, of which the modern armed forces are the gold standard, is for the commander-in-chief to concentrate on grand strategy and let the lower ranks, the army group commanders, the general staffs, and so on down, concentrate on the details of strategy, operations, and tactics. And, of course, all those lower ranks are expendable, particularly the twentysomethings doing the actual fighting.

The point is that there is only enough bandwidth for one-and-a-half-issues to come before the American people at one time. That is what happens during election campaigns, and that is what happens in the day-to-day reporting of " issues." And since the mainstream media are all liberals down to the last lesbian activist, the only thing that gets discussed is the liberal "take" on the issue of the day.

On the other hand it is also true that the President of the United States is supposed to embody the calm and overwhelming power of the United States. So there is supposed to be something majestic about him, about his presentation, about his gravitas. There should not be any suggestion of feet of clay, that the whole thing could come tumbling down what with the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare and all.

However, the fact is that the Republicans' Big Problem for the last 50 years has been that they are always in the position of having to apologize. It used to be they had to apologize for being the party of big business. Now every Republican goes around in mortal fear of being branded a racist, sexist, homophobe. At some point, some Republican politician had to break out of this glass cage, and just blow through the vile high-school-girl accusations of not being cool enough.

I'd say the reason that Donald Trump got nominated and elected is because he was and is the closest thing to a politician that could blast through the Maginot Line of political correctness and tell the SJWs to put it where the sun don't shine.

Maybe the Sturm und Drang is all chaos and stupidity on the part of the president. Maybe it will bring him down and ruin his presidency. Maybe it will prevent him from getting Trumpcare and tax cuts from passage.

Maybe. But we know that the history of Republicans hiding in bunkers to avoid the incoming rounds from the Democrat partisans ably assisted by their willing partisans in the media wasn't working. Someone had to take the battle to the Democrats, and Trump is the one leading the charge.

Whether we like it or not Trump is what we got. Trumpism may end up in red ruin as soon as 2018, or it may go for eight years until the next Democrat comes in on a change election. But the Trump approach is what we asked for, and that is what we got.

The bigger question is how to get out of our cultural bunker, where anything you say that isn't the latest approved liberal line gets you kicked out of your job and send to Outer Slobbovia.

Any ideas?

No, Capitalism Doesn't "Keep People Down"

We have a twentysomething son of a friend staying with us, and very helpful it is. Because an old geezer like me isn't up to date on all the liberal memes, not as much as I ought to be.

Already I have been inspired to make a chart of Deirdre McCloskey's Great Enrichment notion, showing the US and the UK starting at about $3 income in real dollars per person per day in 1800 and reaching $120-140 per day right here in 2017. Go take a look at the links: it's really cool.

But my young friend also has the opinion that capitalism "keeps people down." OK, never mind that the charts just mentioned give that notion the lie.

It is true that capital-ists are often discovered trying to keep people down. I don't mean the meanie-jelly-beanie that won't give his workers a raise. I mean dear old Warren Buffet. The dear chap announced back in the Obama days as how chaps like him should pay more in taxes because his secretary paid more percent of income in tax than he did. Well, Warren old chap, I doubt it. But if she does the reason is that she is paying payroll taxes which are a cunning way to prevent ordinary middle-class people from building assets that can be handed down to their children -- in other words keep them down. So yeah. Warren Buffet wants to keep people down.

And let us not forget that Buffet's support of the Obama administration helped pipelines from being built in the frack-alicious Dakotas, and that helps Warren make lots of lovely money hauling crude oil around in his Burlington Northern trains. But Mr. President, Is It Safe? No, transporting crude oil in trains is a lot less safe than transporting it in pipelines. Any fool knows that. It's the science.

Then, of course, there are out-and-out crony capitalists like Elon Musk, who is making big money from renewable energy credits with his Tesla electric-car company and from NASA with his SpaceX outfit. I know: electric cars and reusable rockets are cool. Still...

Look the problem here is not that capitalists "keep people down." Of course they do, just like SJWs keep the notorious racists, sexists, and homophones down. And just like the welfare state keeps the old white working class and women and minorities down, anesthetized by welfare and healthcare entitlements and opioids. One of the basic facets of social animals is hierarchy. Hierarchy, or pecking order, is one way to avoid violence, and the war of all against all. So today's top dogs certainly have an advantage. In order to have access to money, power, and the love of beautiful women you have to fight for it, like these giraffes.

But the whole point of markets and prices is that you can only be "kept down" so long as you don't have a better idea, and only so long as crony capitalists have access to politicians to write laws to block up-and-coming businesses with licensing laws and regulation. And even politicians and the current crony capitalists are not really smart enough to keep a good man down for long, except in full-on socialist countries.

The astonishing thing about the last 200 years of the Great Enrichment is that, time after time, the ruling class and the crony capitalists were caught looking the other way, and not really understanding the threat from the latest innovation until it had got itself fully in the saddle and able to bribe politicians just like the old rich.

But what really keeps people down are government programs. That's because it is almost impossible to reform government programs. Why? Not because of capitalism, but because of the selfishness and meanness of the government's clients, who will war to the knife to keep their free stuff, their subsidies, their credits.

And why not? Who would go out into the world and endure the stress and humiliation of working for a boss or a demanding consumer when you could get it all almost for free just by bribing and threatening a politician?

No. It is not capitalism that keeps people down. It is government.

Health Care: The View from the Inside

A couple days ago I got an email from a physician, giving me the inside word on the problems of the health care system from his 40 years of experience. He'd read my American Thinker piece, "The Meaning of Kinda-sorta Obamacare Repeal and Replace." His analysis was deep and penetrating.

But who cares? Right now we have a health care system that is riddled with political corruption. I don't mean this in the sense of politicians and crony capitalists milking the system, although I am sure there is plenty of that.

No, I am talking about the bigger issue, the fact that down the years the politicians have offered free stuff to the voters, and the voters have only ever asked: "does that come with sprinkles on top?"

To keep the free stuff coming, the health care system has become horribly distorted, quite apart from the fact that it is administered and regulated by the administrative and regulatory state, which means, according to settled science, that it will be a dysfunctional mess.

And it won't get any better. That's because Rule One of government spending is that the politicians dare not cut spending, ever. President Trump proposed spending cuts of $50 billion (in a $4 trillion budget) and the media couldn't believe it. The end of Meals on Wheels! Oh no!

(I know! Why doesn't George Soros pick up Meals on Wheels. How about it George?)

Or, as my physician emailer put it:

How is this to be done when people become more devoted to free stuff than to the free market?

My line on this is that it all depends on what you are prepared to surrender to. Because you must be willing to surrender to something. That is the basic meaning of social animals and social cooperation.

On my reductive Three Peoples theory there are obviously three ways to surrender.

The People of the Subordinate Self surrender to their liege lord. He could be the village Big Man; he could be the lord of the manor; he could be the local politician. The subordinate worker or peasant surrenders to his lord in exchange for free stuff. Of course, the People of the Subordinate Self are not perfect. They are inclined to resent their lord when he doesn't deliver the free stuff as promised. Sometimes they form a head of rebellion complete with peasants with pitchforks, or they strike their employer.

The People of the Responsible Self surrender to the market. They are saying, in effect, that they agree to serve their fellow men and women by doing something useful for which people are prepared to pay. You can see that this is to aim higher than the People of the Subordinate Self, who just surrender to the local big cheese, and then wait for orders. I do not think we give this surrender option enough credit, for if you ask me it is a noble and selfless thing to abjure violence and the strong arm, and just say that you will accept the verdict of the market on your efforts to wive and thrive in this world. Of course, the People of the Responsible Self are not perfect. They are inclined to look to government for a bit of help when the market goes against them and revalues their contribution to the world downwards. Sometimes they get politicians to give them subsidies, and carve-outs.

The People of the Creative Self surrender to the verdict of history. It is not enough for them just to serve their fellow men and women by being useful. They aim higher than that. They aim to do something original and transformative: in business, in art, in literature, in religion, in politics. It is not enough just to do something useful, it must be special. Of course, the People of the Creative Self are not perfect. They are inclined to force their creations on the rest of us, whether we like it or not, in art, in politics, and the rest. And since the People of the Creative Self are now the ruling class, it means that they use government to force the rest of us to be the chorus of jolly peasants on the stage of their creative projects.

You can see the problem when you apply this theory to health care. The People of the Subordinate Self expect their liege lords to provide for them. The People of the Creative Self have all kinds of creative plans for health care from Health Maintance Organizations (Ted Kennedy's wizard wheeze) to "single payer." So it is only the People of the Responsible Self that are prepared to willingly surrender themselves to whatever the health-care market delivers.

But who cares what we think?

Hillary Clinton Epitomizes Government: A Train Wreck

I've been reading Niall Ferguson's 2004 book about American empire: Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.

Yes, he was saying that the whole thing was a mess, back in 2004 before the real mess began in Iraq and before the Surge, and before the clueless eight years of Obama stupidity.

The thing is: the message of the book is that the American empire has always been a train wreck, even back in the 19th century when the US started getting into messes in Texas, Mexico, Cuba, the Philippines.

But the rulers always have tame operatives with bylines to concoct a pretty story, a narrative, out of the chaos of events.

This pretty-story thing is not really a scandal, because the only thing that government does is war. It can be war on the Nazis, or the Russkies. Or it can be back at home, making war on greedy bankers and homophobic racists.

Now the thing about war is that it is always going wrong, and the leaders have to buck up  the spirits of their followers to keep them "down for the struggle," as we now say.

In more conventional speech, we are talking about the need to maintain morale among the troops, so they will continue to march and fight in the government's latest war. The one thing a government must avoid is for people to lose heart and start to desert from its latest project.

Thus it may be a mistake for President Trump to run a government where he doesn't seem to care whether he is giving the impression of running a 24-7 train-wreck. It may be that people really do need to be constantly reassured that things are completely under control. It may be that a government that does not lie its head off, assuring everyone that the train wreck they can see right  in front of their eyes is not really a train wreck but merely a very brief setback, is not long for this world.

Now we have a ordinary Democratic operative with a byline, Doyle McManus at the LA Times, doing a puff piece on Hillary Clinton's reemergence into public life after her defeat in November 2016's presidential election. He writes about how she has a "right" to return to public life, but maybe she shouldn't.

Hillary Clinton has more than earned her right to be a major voice in American politics. She’s smart and forceful on a raft of issues, from working-class job creation to foreign policy. But she’s not great at running a presidential campaign. She’s tried twice, in races where she began as the presumptive front-runner, and lost both times. That’s enough.

Oh please. "Smart and forceful?" "Working-class job creation?" "Foreign policy?" The fact is that Hillary has been a train wreck on policy, ever since the late lamented Hillarycare. That is why it is always best for defeated candidates to get the heck out of public life. Indeed that is why it is a good idea for former presidents to get out of public life, Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama. It is best for people to be able to forget the train wreck of your presidencies. And I don't mean that in a partisan way. Every presidency is a mess, when you look back at it. Hillary Clinton is the poster girl for government and political train-wreck.

Why is that? The reason is simple. In Colossus Niall Ferguson has a long chapter on the European Union. It is pathetic. The EU is a high-class bureaucrat's wet dream. It has committees and councils and initiatives left, right, and center, all run by high-born scions of the ruling class or retired members of the ruling class: Hillary Clintons every one. And what is the good of them? What have they ever accomplished? Nothing, except to make things worse.

Just as the foreign policy of the US for the last century or so is a miserable story of stupidity followed by foolishness, so domestic policy is the graveyard of failed programs that are still on life support because they are supported by powerful interests that can make a lot of trouble for a politician.

Let's take the travails of the working class, now replicating throughout the West, about which Doyle McManus writes that Hillary Clinton has some expertise. Really? Who knew?

Look, pal, the working class is toast, and the reason is politics. In the service of noble ideals like compassion and justice, the governments of the western world meddled in the cultural and economic turmoil of the Industrial Revolution to regulate work and pay. It put its thumb on the scale of justice to "help" the workers. It enacted social insurance programs. It validated the tribal, class-bound culture of the working class, and discouraged the working class from getting into the middle class and its culture of responsibility. And so the working class assumed that government would always be there to help it.

Golly GeeWillikins! The day came when the kind Hillary Clintons of the world left the working class by the side of the road to die of despair! Who could have seen that coming?

Look, government does not care about people like you; the ruling class only cares about how it can use you in its power politics. If it can get you to vote for it on the promise of free stuff, Yay! If it can get gays to hate straights and vote 85-15 for Democrats, Yay! If it can angry-up blacks with Black Lives Matter, Yay! If it can wean women off husbands and children and instead work for taxable wages and decline into single parenthood and start to look to government for support, Yay!

But the rulers don't care about people like you. Hillary Clinton doesn't care about you. All they care about is their court politics of who is up and who is down, and how they can use political power to strut their hour upon the stage of power.

And so the whirligig of time spins on, from one train wreck to the next. And you and I are the folks that will pay the price. Every time.

My Take on the Comey Firing

If you want fun and games about President Trump firing FBI Director James Comey, go and read Mark Steyn. When it comes to searing political wit, Mark can't be beat.

But here is my take.

When Hillary Clinton decides to get her a home-brew email server and conduct the business of the Secretary of State on it, that is a problem.

It is not so much that it is illegal. It is not so much that it is the kind of action that would put the average federal worker or member of the armed services in jail. It is not so much that the whole episode shows that there is one law for ordinary people and Republicans like Scooter Libby and another law for the Clintons.

It is not that, from my understanding, any federal worker would go to jail just for copying some stuff onto a memory stick. It is not just that Gen. Petraeus got stuck with a big fine for allowing his mistress to see classified information.

No, for me it goes beyond that. Maybe I understand because I am a computer guy and I understand how much I don't understand about computer security and hacking.

The point is that if I were in Hillary Clinton's position I would never depart from security protocols, particularly where transmission of electronic messages was concerned.

I would think, based on my knowledge of computers and governments that probably the government's security protocols were woefully inadequate and out of date. But, I would think, nothing could be more stupid than to take my official correspondence off-line onto an unsecure private server.

I mean to say that, in my view, setting up a private email server on which official secrets might be stored is so egregiously foolish that the fool that did it should never serve in an official capacity. It shows an error of judgement so big that it brings into question the capacity of that person to make a sensible decision about anything.

Now I understand that Hillary Clinton is old and sick. And I assume, from the nods and winks, that she is an alcoholic. But she is not the only person in the ruling class. Surely there is someone in the ruling class with the wit and the cojones to say: this private email server thing is so stupid that it is going to lose us the next election. Get this woman outta here.

Now we know the story of the email controversy between the lines, and the impossible position that James Comey was placed in. He knew that Clinton had monstrously violated the law, and monstrously exposed classified information. But he also knew that if he didn't go public that the whole affair would never see the light of day because the Obama Justice Department would never issue an indictment.

So when Comey went public on the server issue back in July he was probably starting on a path that he knew would lead to his political immolation. But what was he to do? Pass the information to the Justice Department and wait for nothing to happen? And then resign? When would he do that? Most likely the Obamis in the Justice Department would fiddle around until after the election, so there would not be a decision over which he could resign -- before the election.

There have been many complaints about the Clintons and their corruption down the years, and how they get away with everything, because their supporters say things like "one free grope" in the decade when sexual harassment in the workplace became a Thing. Or they prevaricate about the facts on Hillary Clinton's email server, because First Woman President, or something.

I suspect that in the end, God is not mocked. There are plenty of Americans that are disgusted with Clinton corruption, and in the end the Clinton corruption bit the Clintons and the Democrats in the backside.

That is why honesty is the best policy, for a person and for a political party.

But now we need to make a new start. We need an FBI that goes by the rules, and we need a Justice Department that upholds the law. And those are two things that manifestly did not happen in the Obama administration.

It's not surprising. The whole point about being a ruling class is that you get to make the rules. But we bourgeois, we middle class people, we People of the Responsible Self, we believe that we should hold powerful people to account. If we don't we get people like the Clintons and political parties like the Democrats, and that is not good.