Trump Honors Armed Services on Independence Day

In all the arguments about President Trump's speech at the Lincoln Memorial on Independence Day, July 4, 2019, one thing seems to have been missed out.

What did he actually talk about?

I'm glad you asked, Senator.

First, he welcomed the distinguished guests.

Then he talked about the Declaration of Independence, and how Gen. Washington had it read to the troops in New York City facing the Brit invasion fleet.

Then, he mentioned the Constitution.

Then he celebrated explorers, the patriots that ended slavery, fought for civil rights, and expanded liberty; the inventors, the astronauts, culture and the arts, not to mention

the musical, the motion picture, the Western, the World Series, the Super Bowl, the skyscraper, the suspension bridge, the assembly line, and the mighty American automobile.

Then he called out living patriots in the audience by name that had made great contributions to America.

Then he mentioned service members that had died for our country, and their Gold Star families present at the speech.

Then he thanked Clarence Henderson, who in 1960 sat down at the segregated "Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina."

Then he mentioned the

heroes who defined our national character — from George Washington, John Adams, and Betsy Ross, to Douglass — you know, Fredrick Douglass — (applause) — the great Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Amelia Earhart, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Jackie Robinson, and, of course, John Glenn.  

Then, for the second half of the speech, the president honored the armed services of the United States in turn, starting with the Coast Guard, then the Air Force, then the Navy, and finally the Army. At the end of each tribute, there was a flyby of military planes.

At the end of the speech he told us that America was the bestest nation ever and that it would live for ever and ever.

We will always be the people who defeated a tyrant, crossed a continent, harnessed science, took to the skies, and soared into the heavens because we will never forget that we are Americans and the future belongs to us.  (Applause.)

The future belongs to the brave, the strong, the proud, and the free.  We are one people, chasing one dream, and one magnificent destiny.  We all share the same heroes, the same home, the same heart, and we are all made by the same Almighty God.  (Applause.)

And from the banks of the Chesapeake to the cliffs of California, from the humming shores of the Great Lakes to the sand dunes of the Carolinas, from the fields of the Heartland to the everglades of Florida, the spirit of American independence will never fade, never fail, but will reign forever and ever and ever.  (Applause.)

What, so to speak, is not to like?

Or, to put it another way. What is the point of a president who does not extol the United States of America and the American people to the heavens? 

Independence and Slavery and 3/5 of a Betsy

Yes indeed. It is a shocking thing to recall on this Independence Day that not a few of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave-owners. And that slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of apportionment of the House of Representatives.

And that therefore it is shocking for Nike to sell shoes with the Betsy-Ross-designed flag of the United States of America.

Hey lefties! How about utterly deploring the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union because all 170.6 million subjects of Union were slaves. Cat got your tongues?

Because as everyone knows, from my Great Reaction maxims, that socialism is neo-slavery. And ignorance is no excuse.

The truth is that the United States was formed in a remarkable time, the crazy hazy years of the transition in Europe from feudalism to something else.

From what to what? From Agriculture to Industry, certainly. From serfdom to freedom, or village communism to wage slavery? From subsistence to prosperity. From the rule of kings to the rule of the people? Or from feudal lords to industrial lords? From the administrative state of the absolute monarchs to the administrative state of the educated class? You tell me.

The fact is that everything is a muddle, always was, and always will. Our Founders lived in a time when would-be rulers were trying to think how government should be organized if it were not to be ruled by a dynasty of hereditary kings. They were also living in a time when, of all things, evangelical Christians were raising the question of slavery and its injustice.

So the fact that they had not solved all these problems by 5:00pm on July 4, 1776, is not a scandal. It is just life.

Here in North America, 250 years ago, a bunch of hotheads were outraged at the taxes that the Brits had raised to pay for the French-Indian War of the 1750s. They also were annoyed by special privileges accorded the ruling-class appointed East India Company.

In other words, then as now, there were a number of activists doing activism and outraged at the injustice they saw around them.

Hey! Me Too!

I am outraged at the injustice of the Social Security system that sequesters the savings of ordinary workers through the FICA tax so that, maybe, the savings can be paid back in their retirement years. But that meanwhile they don't have money that could be starting a business, or an IRA account at Fidelity. And the unemployment tax, that sequesters the savings of the workers as a tax against the possibility that they might be unemployed. Yeah, well. Most unemployment is due to the government's mismanagement of the economy. So how about politicians, economists, and bureaucrats get to pay for unemployment.

I am outraged at the incompetence of the government school system, K-12, and the daylight robbery of the university system that condemns our young people to years of indentured servitude through the student loan system. I demand a system where parents -- yeah, poor parents too -- get to direct the education of their children.

I am outraged at the collapse of the black family, through the cunning of lefties everywhere that have made black women into their electoral serfs, married to the government's welfare services system.

I am outraged by the cultural suicide of the sexual revolution that has reduced the war between the sexes to a war of all against all, as the manosphere battles the fem-o-sphere.

I am outraged by all the injustice I see around me and I demand justice!

Some people are demoralized by the cultural hegemony of the left, and I am too, on many days.

But then I remember that most lefties are idiots, that have never read a book, and never had a thought about anything in their lives but just parrot what they saw on MSNBC or read in The New York Times.

And I remember that power, political power is a very blunt and clumsy instrument, and that the people attracted to political power as a means of salvation are unusually blunt instruments. And that the secret ingredient of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is to let nobodies create new products and services and ideas and try not to get in the way too much.

And I remember that the old certainties that, in the words of the fictional Gerald O'Hara, "land is the only thing that lasts," is probably no longer true, that the defense and/or plundering of land and its food no longer really matters very much.

And I remember that our lefty friends are engaged upon a Great Reaction, a movement of monumental existential folly, reinventing slavery as socialism, feudalism as the welfare state, monarchical absolutism as administrative absolutism, the politics of plunder for the old wars of plunder. And so on.

And then I don't feel so bad.

What Do You Think Parades are For, Lefties?

I first realized that liberals were all in a twist about Trump's Fourth of July tank parade yesterday when my yoga teacher expressed his disappointment at the beginning of class and all the liberal ladies moaned their agreement.

Actually, I understand the liberal ladies. If you are a woman then invasion and conquest are merely inconveniences. Sure, you may get raped and sold into slavery, but you are a woman, and every regime needs child-bearing women. Never mind tanks: what about health care?

For men, of course, invasion and conquest is a matter of life and death, because successful conquerors have a nasty habit of killing all the defeated men, just to be on the safe side.

And the point of government, any government, is to defend and protect its people against enemies, foreign and domestic. Period, full stop.

So, the point of having a national holiday to celebrate the glorious Day on which Independence was declared is to rehearse the whole point of a government: we are going to protect you, so you can put your trust in us. And, apropos, we have the guns and the tanks to make it stick. Plus, we honor the young men that put their lives in harms way so that the rest of us won't get killed and the womenfolk won't get raped and/or sold into slavery.

The whole point of parades is precisely to make the point that we got the power. Did you know that the first St. Patrick's Day parade was held in New York City in 1762, by Irish soldiers in the British army?

Yeah, those Irish soldiers would not have been allowed to have a St. Patrick's Day parade in Ireland at the time, and certainly not in England. So those Irish soldiers were establishing that, in the colonies, they had the power. Yay!

That's the point about all these civic marches. Columbus Day?

For many, the holiday is a way of both honoring Columbus’ achievements and celebrating Italian-American heritage.

That, sports fans, is the point of having Gay Pride marches and Martin Luther King Day. It is to make the point that "we" got the power, to make our ethnic day a holiday, and to "march" to show the world that nobody can't mess with us.

Next up will be an LGBTQ national holiday. Because nothing says that you have arrived better than a national holiday to go along with your march.

But obviously the flip-side of having a march and a holiday for your patron saint is denying the validity of the other guy's patron saint and national holiday. That's the point of all those lefty activists demanding that Columbus Day be replaced by Indigenous Peoples Day (Google "columbus day in" and see what the autocompletion comes up with), and that Confederate statues be removed. And the liberal ladies at yoga moaning about Trump's tanks. It isn't enough to have your holiday. You only show real cultural hegemony when you can deny the "deplorables" their holiday.

Reading post-NRO Jonah Goldberg today and he's moaning about the pure accident of Trump's election, that he was running against Hillary and that the Democrats' leftward turn was a reaction to Hillary (I don't think so):

[I]t sure looks like Hillary Clinton's candidacy was an inflection point, because it galvanized not only the GOP's turn toward nationalism but the Democrats' turn toward socialism.

No, Jonah. What galvanized the GOP turn to Trumpian nationalism was the fact that guys like you didn't protect us as political leaders ought to do, as in protect the people from enemies foreign and domestic. The Democrat's left turn is just the progressive left returning to normal after the end of Bill Clinton, who was the guy that got the Democrats out of the ditch in the 1990s by pretending to be a New Democrat and getting the rest of the party to pretend with him. What happened then was that after his reelection, Barack Obama turned the spigot on "full left" and let all the lefty activists run riot in his administration. Of course, the Dems lost about 1,000 legislative seats nationwide during the Obama years. I wonder why, Jonah. Hillary? You think?

Let nobody doubt that parades are important. If you have your own parade it tells the world that you count and that politicians better not take you for granted. That is why President Trump is proposing a Fourth of July parade with tanks and a special speech by Trump at the Lincoln Memorial. And why if you Google "trump fourth of july" you will see pages and pages of liberal tut-tutting.

If you have the power to have your parade, then you count. If the ruling class can put a stop to your parade it means you are close to exiting history. Sorry pal.

When Was Peak US?

Now that our little kiddies are being carefully taught at the local library about the fabulousness of Drag Queen Story Hour, maybe it is time to take seriously the notion that America is past its peak.

Every civilization or empire or nation goes through the cycle of birth, growth, decay and death. It's nature's plan, I dare say.

So let's think about the Peak of the great civilizations and whatsits of the world.

Ancient Greece. Was Peak Greece at the Battle of Marathon when the heroes blocked the pass? Or the death of Socrates, showing that then and now, free speech is a movable feast.

Ancient Rome.Was Peak Rome the destruction of Carthage -- Carthago delenda est -- or maybe the reign of the first emperor, Caesar Augustus? Obviously things were going downhill by the time of Caligula and his horse.

I think that Peak France was probably the reign of Louis XIV. Seems to me that it was all downhill after that, culminating in the folly and failure of Napoleon.

What about Peak Britain? I'd say it was the Battle of Waterloo. Yes, the glories of the Empire still lay ahead, but the supreme effort was to defeat Britain's ancient enemy. The proof is that the French have never recovered from that defeat.

Then there is Germany. I'd say that Peak Germany occurred the day before Bismarck was fired by Mr. Genius, Kaiser Bill, in 1890. Germany had already produced Kant, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Freuds and Jungs and Einsteins were already alive.

Then there is Russia. I'd say that Peak Russia occurred in May 1945 when the Red Army had conquered the whole of eastern Europe. But then the Soviets had their hats handed to them in the Cold War. Sorry about that, lefties.

Now the US. Unless things change real soon, it is pretty obvious that Peak US was the end of the Cold War in 1989, which proved the point of Chinese strategist Sun Tzu that the best way to defeat an enemy is to have them give up without a shot being fired. OK, so there were quite a few shots fired in the Cold War, but the US proved the Germans wrong by winning without a "decisive battle," thus proving the armchair western strategist intellectuals wrong.

Now we come to China. Obviously there was a Peak China back in the day. Maybe the day they sent out their fleet in 1421 to explore and impress the world. But we are interested in modern China. Will it wax and grow and dominate the world as the US did in 1945-89? Or is its Commie leadership leading it to disaster as almost all Commie leaders have done over the last century?

And then there is Peak India. The thing about India is that it doesn't seem that exercised about being Numero Uno in the world. It's been invaded time and again, but who cares? The Brits stumbled and bumbled around in India for 250 years, and ended up teaching the Indians how to unite into a nation, at least for five minutes. But India might make a bigger peak than China, because the Indian political class is less interested in being Numero Uno than the Commies in Beijing. So they might make India the world's City on a Hill without even really trying. My thing about succeeding in the modern world is that you have to forget about Peak Anything being about political power.

See, I think that the lesson of the last 200 years, the Great Enrichment, is that wealth, power, and the love of beautiful women comes from "intangible capital," the stuff between human ears that has created the wonders of the economy and the culture that have been bequeathed to us.

But I could be wrong.

Government and Politics: Force and Division

If, as I have, you have reduced your understanding of life to two maxims, that government is force, and politics is division, it rather colors your experience of, say, the Democratic Debates for 2020.

Because when everyone on stage holds their hand up to pledge free health care for illegal immigrants, they are saying that average Americans -- or at least income taxpayers and property taxpayers -- should be forced to pay for other peoples' health care. Really? Is the problem of health care for illegal immigrants so vexed a question that force is the only option?

And when Kamala Harris lays a haymaker on Joe Biden on the race question, suggesting that she was a poor helpless little black girl being bused to school in lefty Berkeley, CA, you can see that the whole point of politics is to divide people and stir up enmity.

And that is why I have created this idea of leftism being a Great Reaction to the modern era.

See, the astonishing thing about the modern era is that it proposes, gently, tentatively, that maybe we don't need as much force and division as we thought.

In day-to-day economic production of the necessaries and the not-so necessaries of life we have stepped partially away from the age-old notion of subordination. Instead of the workers being confined and subordinated to a feudal warrior lord, we have found that workers can wive and thrive perfectly well as free labor.

But there is a cost, and that is that, when the market moves on and makes your skills obsolete, or at least less well paid than in days of yore, then you have to get on your bike and update your skills and find a new job. And that is hard.

But notice what happens with government in the economy. You get Bernie Sanders saying that government must take over the whole of health care, period, full stop. Really Bernie? You mean that health care could not operate the same as retail, where you can get bare-bones from Walmart, and cheap too. Or you can buy at an upscale department store attended by numerous assistants and buy only the very best. I wonder what Walmart health care would look like? Hey, I know. Why don't we try? We could always call the whole thing off if it turns out that cheapie health care is no bargain at all.

In the day-to-day relations between people we have found that trust need not be limited to people of our own blood, or "race," or language. We have found that the question of trust is simple. You trust people that demonstrate trustworthy behavior and you interact and exchange with them. But people that don't act trustworthy? Those guys you try to keep away from.

But with politics we rely on politicians to tell us who to trust and who to beware. I wonder whether this is a good idea. For instance, if I were to encounter Kamala Harris in real life I would be very reluctant to trust her. A woman that got her start in politics as the mistress of a headline politician? I don't think so. A woman -- the daughter of two PhDs -- that uses the race card to humiliate an old white guy that obviously can't hit back? Not quite out of the top drawer, old chap.

It's my belief that we are living in an unprecedented era, where all the old assumptions are being transformed. And people are asking whether the transformations are really as good as advertised. For instance, my Greek friend tells me about life in Greece 70 years ago when the men in the villages did about two months work a year -- harvesting grain for the animals, and olives for cash -- and spent the rest of the year drinking and playing cards. What a life! Today we all work for wages, and we mortgage ourselves up to the eyebrows to live in a city with a decent school system, and we are taxed at about 35 percent of income. We are, indeed, under enormous pressure to conform and be useful, to our employers, to our governments, to our spouses. In fact we labor night and day. Is that really "freedom?"

Now, the point about government is that government is force. But what is force for? Answer: to meet an existential peril, such as criminals despoiling people, and invaders threatening to conquer us. But suppose that our leaders kinda fake the existential threat? Of the streets being full of criminals? Of aggressive foreign empires that want to bury us? You can see there is a real temptation to overdo the existential threats, because only then can the government leaders get more power.

And again, politics as division. You can see that with no division, no "hate" for the other guy, there is very little for a politician to go on. You can see how this works with our present generation of political activists that are determined that racism, sexism, and homophobia are monstrous perils, even when civil rights is the law of the land and gays get to marry. Really? Things are that bad?

But imagine a world with a lot less government, in which people are a lot less energized to do everything by force? What kind of a world would it be? It's hard to imagine, because in the normal politics of today we are constantly assailed with a huge list of existential perils that require resort to force. What would we do, how would we live, if there weren't a whole list of frightful perils terrifying us and needing our immediate attention?

And what would life be like without the constant moral battle for hearts and minds, the constant battle of good vs. evil, that has to be conducted on our agenda, and death to the other agendas!

As I say, we are living in an unprecedented age, where the need for force and division is battling with a counterargument that maybe we don't need to be fighting each other all the time.

And there is no telling how it will all turn out.

Because, if we humans weren't battling and fighting all the time, what would become of us?

Hey Financial CEOs! You Gotta Problem!

I am in the process of winding down my Chase Amazon Visa Card account. Because Chase decided to bow to the lefty activists that want to deplatform right-wing groups and even cut them off from the financial system. Because hate.

And of course, the easiest thing to do for the financial giants like J.P. Morgan Chase is to appease the lefty activists and beat up on some marginal right-wing group that nobody ever heard of before.

Now the lefties want MasterCard to do the same, demanding that it "put hate groups out of business."

So we can see where this is going. If one lefty activist group can "advocate" for Chase to put some haters out of business and another lefty activist group can "advocate" for MasterCard to put other hate groups out of business, pretty soon everyone to the right of Kamala Harris will have their financial accounts canceled and serve them right, eh, CEOs?

So I reckon that you chaps need to get together and form a committee to deal with this lefty movement. Because the particular right-wing groups are not the point. The point is that if you are a lefty activist the whole point of your existence, your hope for a spot in lefty paradise when the arc of history has finally bent towards justice, is to find some issue, any issue, upon which to advocate and then get out there and advocate.

Really, I don't know why you financial chaps are truckling to the lefty activists. They are not your friends! But ordinary Americans like me are your friends, if only you had the wit to see it. We understand that you financial chaps are caught in a political net, that, ever since the Dutch invented central banking -- hey, look it up -- the financial system has been plugged into government, its government debt, and its ability to be the "lender of last resort" in a financial panic.

So you guys have got used to bending to the political winds. It's inevitable given that modern governments all sit astride the financial system and exploit it to the max.

But sooner or later you are going to have to formulate a strategy to deal with the lefty groups that want you to annihilate the "haters." As I say, it's not really about the haters; it's about the activists' need to have an issue to advocate on and issue non-negotiable demands, and fill the Twitter-waves with frightful threats.

So here is my plan. It's really pretty simple. When any lefty activist group agitates for some "hate group" to be closed out of the financial system I suggest that you chaps get right in there and close the accounts of the lefty activist group.

After all, anyone that accuses someone else of being a "hater" is almost certain to be a "hater" themselves. Better to be safe.

You can make a simple point to justify your action. You can say that "anyone that wants to cut someone off from participating in the financial system is the kind of person that we, at Main Street Bank, do not want to do business with."

Otherwise the lefty groups will see that they are onto a good thing, and, guess what, they will escalate their demands.

Why, I wouldn't be surprised if next week they decide that the eevil Koch Brothers need to be cut off from the financial system.

The Problem of Non-Profits and Risk

For some time I have been worrited about non-profits. It goes like this.

A proper actor in the market economy is owned by someone. For a mom-and-pop business it is the owner/manager. For a corporation it is the stockholders. For the government it is the bondholders and the people.

But what about a non-profit? Answer: nobody. OK, there's a Director, or some such. But he is just the manager.

This is important because in all economic transactions someone has to pick up the risk of everything going wrong. Or, more prosaically, someone has to pick up the losses, if there are any.

But a non-profit doesn't have anyone that picks up the profits or the losses. Except the institution itself.

So, imagine a non-profit institution that goes broke, like a university once the current education bubble has popped. Who picks up the losses?

The answer is pretty simple: it is the holders of the debt.

But wait! Debt is supposed to be covered by collateral. That is how debt works: you pledge collateral to guarantee that the debt will be repaid. The problem in, e.g., a financial panic, is that it turns out that the collateralized debt isn't fully collateralized, and as a consequence all the financial actors "lose confidence" in certain distressed financial institutions, and if the "lender of last resort" doesn't step in the whole economy goes down the toilet.

But obviously, someone must be responsible for the losses at any institution, whether a profit-seeking corporation, a non-profit foundation, or a government. In the corporation the stockholders are responsible for losses; in government the taxpayers and bondholders and bank-balances of ordinary citizens are responsible. And that is to say nothing of the holders of hyper-inflated cash. But what about the non-profit? Nobody. Unless you count the banks that loaned it money. But remember, the loans are supposed to be collateralized.

The other day I found out how it works. Non-profits have endowments. If they have a surplus, it goes into the endowment. If they happen to own a building and sell it for a big profit, the profit goes into the endowment. And if the non-profit has losses, the losses come out of the endowment.

Do you see that this is a Very Bad Thing? In a profit-seeking capitalist corporation the capital is the value of the stock: the present value of all future revenue from the corporation, as currently valued by the players in the market. It is not a pile of cash, or bonds or stocks in some other enterprise. The "savings" of the corporation is the very value of the corporation to the rest of the world.

But a non-profit just has a pile of cash. How much?

As of fiscal year 2015, there was some $547 billion tied up in university endowments in the United States. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton alone accounted for $86 billion of that figure.

The universities of the United States have over half a trillion dollars in endowments. And is that endowment contributing to the university? Is is the very sinew of the university? No. It is just a pile of just-in-case cash: money in a mattress. And it is sterile capital.

If I had my druthers I would make all non-profit institutions illegal. I would say that all institutions must be owned by someone, or some group, and that someone and that group should fully understand that they have signed up for the risk proposition connected with the institution.

And I would certainly forbid governments to engage in business.

Here's an idea. We could pass a law to mandate that all college administrators and tenured professors should own the equity in the university they serve. That way they would not just be interested in getting their share of the loot, as at present, but in the long-term welfare of the university.

You would know what a good idea this was by the absolute outcry from all university professors and administrators if this idea were ever proposed in the halls of Congress.

But sooner or later we are going to have to confront this issue: that in any organization, someone has to own the losses.