Liberals Do Too Believe in Borders

I was at a good liberal friend for dinner last night. They didn't have a "We Believe" yardsign out in front but they did have the No Borders yardsign: "No matter where you are from, we're glad you're our neighbor."

And during the meal my liberal host opined as how he was opposed to borders.

Of course I was very nice and didn't contradict mine host in his own house. But I got to thinking on the way home.

Wait a minute! Liberals do too believe in borders. They believe that no conservatism should take place inside the borders of a university. They believe that no conservatives should get tenure within the borders of their university. They believe that no Christianity should take place within the borders of a government child-custodial facility. And they believe that no federal immigration enforcement should take place within the borders of a liberal city.

And the liberals also believe in a strong border police. You might almost call it a wall. What do you think all those anti-fa and Black Block protesters are all about? They Shall Not Pass, those nasty stinky deplorable racist, sexist, homophobes. And the liberal KKK will make sure of it. Yes. really, those peaceful protesters are nothing more that the liberal militia, just like the racist militia in the Jim Crow south.

Hey, how about those right-wing militias that the FBIs have to kick in the butt to get them to do anything but grouse around at their local gun range? The left-wing militias are out and about every day marchin' and protestin'. And they are up to the task of intimidating the lifer admininstrators in the university, the ones that actually need intimidating. There is the Berkeley Militia; there is the Middlebury Militia. And you will note that the folks on the barricades are usually little rich kids. Just like the rich kids in Les Mis back in Paris in the good old 19th century.

So the only question is: which borders matter to the ordinary person in Manchester, England, or San Bernardino, or Paris or Nice. Does the average person want to protect the world from corruption by racist, sexist homophobes, or does the average person want to be protected from low-wage competition from immigrants and terrorism from woke Muslims?

You tell me. I've got to go downstairs and finish loading the FY18 budget up on usgovernmentspending.com.

When Will The Ruling Class Cry "Uncle" On Islam

Our beloved Mark Steyn today satirizes the establishment instructions after the Manchester bombing by invoking the naughty "Carry On" movies. Keep Calm and Carry On, the WWII posters used to say, and the Carry On movies made a joke of it for about twenty years.

And that is what the establishment proposes after the Manchester killings.

That's because, I suppose, the ruling class thinks that while it is OK to angry-up blacks and feminists and gays and ordinary liberal college graduates against the Deplorables and the irredeemables, there is one thing that is not allowed! Not to be endured! And that is for the ordinary white middle class and the remainder-of-the-day white working class to get angried-up.

Because that would be fascism.

What is going on here?

It is simple. After World War II the wise and the evolved elite decided "never again." They would create a politics that would never descend into extreme nationalism and fascism.

The obvious solution was that the lesser lights would be excluded from national and international politics. Only the educated and the evolved need apply. This would prevent the outbreak of aggressive nationalism and populist leaders like Mussolini and Hitler.

But, as I have said before, this completely misunderstands the rise of Mussolini and Hitler.

That is because, as I say, Trump is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.

As in the Great Depression.

Here is my analysis of how we got to fascism in the 1930s. First of all, there was World War I. This was a gigantic mistake of the powers-that-be who hadn't really thought through that there was no point in Germany defeating France and France defeating Germany. For what? Money-losing colonies in Africa?

After World War I the Allies decided to make Germany pay. Fine, but that unbalanced the international financial system and led to loans to the Germans so they could pay their reparations. And then Winston Churchill and others felt that the UK had a moral obligation to return sterling to the pre-war parity against gold. That led to deflation.

Then we had the fairly new US Federal Reserve System stumbling and bumbling around: first it was expansionary, then in the bubble of 1928 it turned contractionary and let the whole financial system collapse after the Crash of 1929. Because bureaucratic stupidity.

When you have the governing class idiots stumbling and bumbling like that, you tend to get populist leaders that offer extravagant promises to get out of the mess that the ruling-class stumblers and bumblers have created. Sorry about that. It has something to do with rats trapped in a maze.

Today the problem we are facing across the West is that the ruling class decided it would be a good and noble idea to allow immigration of non-white peoples into the predominantly white European first world.

In part, I suspect, this impulse was a judgement that eventually the whole world would get mixed together, and partly a conceit that the educated and evolved had a duty to help and educate the marginalized peoples of the world. And in part, I suspect, the impulse was a response to the empty wombs of educated first-world women. If first-world women weren't having babies, then we would need to import women that would have babies and provide the workers to pay the taxes to fund the west's bankrupt pension and health-care entitlements.

Anyway, it is obvious that the judgments of the ruling class have been wrong, in various and numerous ways.

And it is obvious that we are going to have a smash-up sooner or later in which the average voters look for a new ruling class that will attend to their needs rather than tell them to keep calm and carry on.

Notice how the needs of the average voter conflict with the politics of the left. The left, since 1840ish, has been a political movement dedicated  to representing those people that are presently outside the system. First it was the workers, that in 1840 did not have the vote. Then it was women, then minorities. Now it is illegal immigrants and Muslims.

The reason that the left keeps finding a new group outside the system to represent is that it justifies the left's primary approach to society, which is that political force is the only option. There must be some issue, must be some group that requires educated young men and women to issue manifestos and non-negotiable demands and Occupy Wall Street and demand a resort to force and a new administrative government program.

My judgment is that this political philosophy is dead wrong. It is wrong because in the modern age it is seldom necessary to use force to solve social problems. The whole logic of the market system (which is not a system but an emergent phenomenon) is that anything is possible at a price. Even if you are excluded, and outside the system, you can still participate; it is just that you will suffer a certain amount of disadvantage. This might be if you are a Muslim that wants to pray five times a day in a workplace where nobody else does that. Or it might be if you were a conservative Christian working in a liberal media conglomerate. In either case, the Muslim or the Christian are going to have  to keep a buttoned lip.

We could have solved all issues these decades ago, but for the pride and idiocy of our ruling class, and the longer we wait to do something about it, the more gruesome the solution will be.

No, THIS is the Fundamental Error of the Left

Here is a piece, about the Left's stupid "net-neutrality" movement. The idea is to regulate the wild and crazy competitive internet business as though it were a monopoly radio business. It begins with the usual accusation about crazy lefties:

Leftism is a bereft ideology.  It is a certain set of ideas and government policies - all of which are horrendous when put into actual practice.  It pretends human nature isn’t human nature. And tries to reshape it - and the humans it imbues - with the fires and on the anvils of government.

But I think this is a misunderstanding of the left's position and world view.

Let us start with net neutrality. The left believes that unless strong and consistent government force is applied against corporations and businesses the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

This is encapsulated in the view of a young acquaintance that "capitalism keeps people down."

To say that this "pretends human nature isn't human nature" misses the point. That's because down through the ages the whole point of government was to keep the raiders out and the people down. Every tribe or dukedom occupied some patch of land, and defended it against raiders. The result of this was that the tribe depended on its rulers to protect it from raiders, and that meant that the rulers had to have a free hand. And a firm hand. You couldn't have any rebels in the tribe, because that would prevent the tribe from defending its patch of land from the rest of humanity.

In other words, in the old days the government had to keep the people down.

But now things are different. That's because everything is tradable. In the old days only luxuries and vital metals like tin, that was needed for bronze weapons, were traded. Food was grown and eaten right there on the patch of land. Thomas Sowell has shown that, in those old days, the price of grain would double from just one day's transportation by horse and cart. Right now, as I sit in a friend's house in West Vancouver, there are at least 12 grain ships sitting in the outer harbor waiting to go in and load grain from the giant grain elevators and transport it to the world. I wonder what the grain transporters charge to transport grain half way around the world: 10 percent markup? 20 percent? But you can see the point. You can trade grain across the world because the folks in India and China can afford to buy the grain after transportation half way across the world.

This is what the left doesn't get. You can trade everything, all across the world, and you now need force, not to keep the raiders out of the patch of land, but to keep pirates from attacking ships in transit.

In the old days men were needed to grow food and to defend the patch of land against raiders. Now men are needed to produce goods for sale on the market and to serve the consumers.

This has been an astonishing revolution, and it has only really kicked in during the last two centuries.

So it is not surprising that a reactionary movement erupted in the first years of the Great Enrichment on the belief that this new revolution was just a flash in the pan and that, sooner or later, and probably sooner, we would revert to the old regime of "immiseration." That how the world always used to world, in the Malthusian limit of food that could be grown right here on the patch of land, and any "surplus population" periodically starved in periodic famines.

I am reading right now Andrew Roberts' biography of Lord Salisbury, Salisbury, Victorian Titan. It covers three famines in the mid-19th century that were regarded in British politics as scandals. The first was the Irish famine of the 1840s. The other two were famines in Bengal. In all three the British government was criticized for not doing enough, and Lord Salisbury, then a young politician, felt deeply the obligation to relieve the famines.

But the point is that it was only in the 19th century that there was anything that anyone could do about a famine. First of all you need timely information about an impending famine, and it certainly helps to have a world-wide telegraph system for that. Secondly you need a transportation system that can rush grain from areas of surplus to areas of deficit. I don't know what date to establish as the first day when a government could do this on any scale other than local, but I'd say you need railways and steamships and telegraph before you can do anything significant.

Leftism is certainly bereft. But it is merely applying the age-old remedy for human problems. And that remedy, outside the immediate family or tribe, is force.

In the old days you sought shelter and safety from a tribal leader or local lord, and he dispensed justice and favors as the mood took him. Now you seek shelter and prosperity by finding a way to serve your fellow humans, across the globe, by performing some service that the market shows, by the price system, is valued by other humans.

Simply put: in the old days the ruler ruled. Today, the price system rules.

This is an incredibly advanced notion, that replaces the realities of the ten-thousand years of the agricultural age. It is hardly surprising that most people cannot yet grasp it.

Removing Trump Per 25th Amendment

I guess I was asleep at the switch, because I've only just woken up to the latest wizard wheeze of the ruling class; it is to remove Donald Trump per the 25th Amendment as "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office."

See, the idea, from Section 4, is that:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments... transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Pretty cute, huh?

The idea, from a long tweet series from Ross Douthat, is that removing Trump per the 25th Amendment has to do with the "central *use* of an elite - their ability to respond swiftly to a situation the public as a whole can't reckon with."

Oh yeah. Except I can't think of a case where the elite did usefullly "respond swiftly," and there are other cases where I'd say the elite did respond swiftly when it wasn't necessary.

In general, I would say that an elite is absolutely useless in doing the things it is supposed to do. I'd say that is to stop the people from doing something they might regret.

But the elite never does that. Instead it manipulates the people in order to increase its money, power, and the love of beautiful women. The whole point of the mega-administrative state is that it has been useful for the elite to acquire political power, by enticing the support of the people by offering them free stuff. Then it gets us into stupid wars that cost a ton of money and the lives of young American men. And then, per Margaret Thatcher, it runs out of other peoples' money.

So now the elite is saying that Donald Trump is somehow "unable to discharge" his duties? You mean that he gets pissed off when leakers and bureaucrats embarrass him with memos to the file? Golly! That's really bad! So that's why we need an elite. To punish populist presidents when they get mad having to deal with the permanent government.

One could ask: why aren't more presidents getting pissed off with the high-born leakers in the bureaucracy?

You know the answer to that. If you are Barack Obama, you don't have to bother, because the permanent bureaucracy is on your side, just waiting for a hint to go on a rampage to double and redouble the regulations of the regulatory state. If you are, say, George W. Bush you know that it is useless to even try to fight the permanent bureaucracy, 'cos they will probably eat you for breakfast one day.

Maybe it is time we had a president that lacks the trained-poodle blandness of a seasoned Republican. Maybe we elected Donald Trump to get into a knock-down drag-out fight with the permanent government before it is too late.

Because I will tell you what I think. I think that the good thing about the Trump administration thus far is that he has flushed the permanent state out of the bushes -- and on stupid penny-ante issues.

Who cares if the Trumpsters dallied with the Russians? It's the job of a candidate's people to make contact with foreign powers.

Who cares if the president asked James Comey to take it easy on Gen. Flynn -- although it looks like Flynn was a naughty boy taking money from the Turks. But hey, the Clintons take money from foreigners! They all do it!

My point is that if the Deep State was more serious, instead of a bunch of rich kids with sinecures, it would hold its fire for something really big and then swoop down with devastating effect. Right now, the Deep State is just teaching President Trump how to deal with it.

But aside from that, what exactly has President Trump done that is so horrible? He has a mild reform of Obamacare in the works. He is proposing a tax cut. He has cut back a bunch of stupid regulations. He has flooded the airwaves with his tweets.

But look at the good side, from the viewpoint of the elite. He is having difficulty with his wall and his immigration policies because of pushback from the Deep State. What is not to like?

Here's my beef. The "elite" ought to know that government handout programs are a really bad idea because you can never cut them. So a wise elite would always combine to prevent that. The "elite" ought to know that the science of regulatory government has been settled for a hundred years, ever since Ludwig von Mises pointed out that socialism couldn't work because it couldn't compute prices.

I could go on.

So what's the point of an elite that can't pull the people back from common mistakes? What's the point of an elite that makes really big mistakes?

I'd say that in President Trump the elite got the president it deserves. Trump is the result of decades of elite conceit that didn't bother to consider the needs of the ordinary man-in-the-street. The elite hasn't even begun to get serious about getting its own house in order before running over to Trump's house to complain about the dust and disorder there.

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?