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View 688 Saturday, August 20, 2011

The end of the evil empire.

Twenty years ago, in August, there was an attempted coup by the old line Communists of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – USSR – against the “liberal communist” General Secretary and first elected President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev. As part of that coup a battalion of guards armor was sent to the White House, the seat of government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which was occupied by Boris Yeltsin, President of the RSFSR. He had been elected in a reasonably free election getting 57% of the vote (rather than the more traditional results of an election in the USSR). Yeltsin resisted the hard line KGB-led coup against Gorbachev. The KGB leaders sent the tanks to the White House. Many citizens of Moscow turned out to defend the RSFSR President.

The tanks surrounded the White House with their guns pointed inward toward it. One tank commander, a lieutenant, was invited inside by Yeltsin supporters. An hour later he came out and told his commander “Sir, we’re on the wrong side.” The commander went in to meet President Yeltsin. An hour later he came out and gave orders. The tanks, which had faced inward threatening the building, rotated to face outward. The coup was effectively over, and with it the USSR and the Cold War. The evil empire was finished. On Christmas Day Gorbachev resigned as President of the no longer existing USSR.

In 1989 I made my only visit to the USSR as part of a group of journalists and academicians that included Richard Pipes. Roberta and I twice had breakfast with Dr. Pipes and we shared a seat on one of the tours, I think the one arranged by Armand de Borchgrave. It was a heady experience. Pipes and Possony had been friends and associates. Regan had held fast on Strategic Defense. At one point Roberta and I saw a Guards officer and his sergeant shopping in a hard currency store to buy food for his troops. It was clear that the troops were loyal to their officer; it was not clear to whom the officer felt loyal. And at the demonstrations in Pushkin Square the government sent truckloads of military cadets to the square; there was no sign of the Army garrison of Moscow.

There was rebellion in the air; two years later the USSR would be gone.

As part of the observation of the end of the Cold War, there is an appreciation of Pipes with some of his recollections. I can recommend it to your attention.

View 688 Thursday, August 18, 2011

· Why new taxes are a bad idea

· How to restore prosperity

· Quality of Life: The Apocalyptics reconsidered

The Politics of Envy

Apparently I have not made myself clear: I have not been addressing Buffet’s contention that the rich aren’t paying their fair share. That is worth discussing, and perhaps he is right and perhaps not. There is considerable history on the politics of envy, and the gap between the very rich and the middle class, and the fairness of tax structures. Many authors have written on the subject and there is a rich store of discussion; but it is mostly irrelevant to the point I have been trying to make, which is that we should not raise taxes because we do not want the government to have the money.

If the government gets more tax money, it will spend it on keeping the exponential rate of government growth up where it is now – somewhere around 7% meaning that it doubles every 11.5 years. Not one of the Deficit Deals offered to cut government; at best there were offers to reduce the exponential from 7% to something less, perhaps 5%. Historically when there are tax increases coupled with “cuts” (inevitably cuts in growth, not actual cuts) the tax increases take effect immediately; the “cuts” take place later, and usually don’t happen at all, as it is discovered that the cut is too Draconian and would unduly burden someone.

The automatic exponential growth of government has to stop. If we allow it to grow at the present rate it will double in 12 years, and by then so many will depend on government that it will be nearly impossible to reverse the trend. Democracies fall when all men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins – a trend we can see in every socialist state including the United States. We are already on that road.

What the United States needs is a reduction in the size of the Federal Government. An actual cut in the budget, that is, a budget that next year is actually smaller, say by 1%, than it was last year. If there are programs so important that they cannot be cut at all, let that be a separate legislative item to be justified on its merits, not as part of a general increase. We also need some actual cuts in the sense of dismantling programs that may or may not be desirable, but surely are not worth borrowing money to fund. Of course any such program will be portrayed as Draconian cuts to teachers, law enforcement, the poor, science, the environment, as if the nation were on the brink of Doom before the enormous expansion of government that began with Johnson’s Great Society; as if the Republic had not endured for 200 years before 1976; as if America were in desperate straits in1990 when the Cold War ended and we no longer needed to maintain an enormous Strategic Air Command, thousands of nuclear missiles on extreme ready alert, hundreds of young men and women in silos holding the keys of Armageddon. A return to the spending levels of the time when Clinton was President and Gingrich was Speaker would not mean ruin and destruction, starvation and floods of homeless.

Any such attempt will be portrayed as such, of course.

I outlined my proposal for what we ought to do now in a Republican Plan in a previous essay. This is a program for Republicans that could be trotted out now.

What else might we do?

We are in the Second Recession, or our Great Recession seems to be plunging toward a Second Depression. The situation is not yet desperate but it could get there.

Our big problem is restoring prosperity. The President will shortly propose his plan to create jobs. I don’t know what it will be but I can guess: it will be a massive stimulus program to pour billions of borrowed money into institutions like universities and schools that are already in bubble-funding land. There will also be grants and giveaways, direct presents to voters from the Obama Stash, and many appeals to raise taxes on the rich. All this will I give to you…

It hardly matters, since it will not be intended to be implemented. Its purpose will be to generate envy. See what you can have if you vote for us! And it will cost you nothing, for we will take it from those who are not paying their fair share. Never mind that what we take won’t come close to paying for what we are promising; never mind that the real purpose of any new taxes is to keep the exponential growth of government and government employees. All this would we have given to you had the Republicans not foiled us with their obstinacy. Turn them out.

The Obama Plan will be some variant on increased spending coupled with “fair share” taxes. If the stimulus strategy were going to work, one would have thought it would have worked by now: after all, the Democrats had supermajorities from January 2009 until January 2010, and in December 2010 they used that power to smash through ObamaCare. If they could pass that they could pass anything, including whatever stimulus they thought would bring about economic recovery in a year – say by August 2011.

In other words, that has been tried. You can’t lower interest rates much. If there are shovel ready jobs out there surely they have been commissioned. Nearly a trillion dollars was used to stimulate the economy, and the result has been long term unemployment and the rest. I don’t need to trot out the economic bad news.

So what might we do?

We might try economic freedom to bring about an American Economic Miracle.

Suspend most federal economic regulations: minimum wages; Americans with Disabilities Act; Various sex equality acts; environmental protection acts; all of them. If there are some that are absolutely necessary to the survival of the Republic – really long term irreparable damage to the Earth as opposed to temporary pollutions that are inconvenient or uncomfortable – they can be specifically addressed – not only the threatened damage but the actual threat that this will happen unless the Federal Government prevents it. Not just “reduce CO2” but “How much damage will suspending these carbon laws for five years cause? Be Specific.” And so forth.

The regulations are suspended until their importance is shown. By importance, it is with the understanding that we are broke. Should we borrow money to pay for this? It may be desirable, but can we afford it?

States may do as they choose here. If California wants to continue really stringent controls on motor vehicles, that’s California’s business, and if Texas wants to repeal some, that’s the business of Texans. The Federal Government suspends most regulations involving jobs and commerce, and those laws sunset if the need for them cannot be established.

My guess is that the consequent economic miracles will make it pretty clear which regulations were needed and which were not. As to the horrid economic damage we are doing, take account of what China and India and other places are doing. Look at what that costs us. Should we borrow money to cripple our economy while others are driving ahead? All that might have been fine when we were rich; but how much sense does it make when we are broke?

And Drill, Baby, Drill. Get the pipeline to Canada going. Encourage American refineries. Find oil and pump oil. Frack away.

On Quality of Life

One major argument for extensive federal regulations is that if we don’t prevent it, some action will release carcinogens into the environment; when we ask how much of what is to be released, we discover it is often trace amounts that were formerly undetectable before a recent development of new instrumentation. When we ask how much cancer is going to be caused, the numbers are generally vague, and often work out to a few hundred extra cases out of millions exposed over decades of time.

No one thinks cancer is a minor affair: but when it comes to misery, poverty for thousands now whose jobs were eliminated because their plant is to be closed because a new instrument has been invented is quite real and visible. Should such decisions automatically be made by Washington bureaucrats, or should the local people affected have a say in the matter? Who is better at determining effects on quality of life? At the moment the trend is toward trusting the experts and ignoring the locals actually affected. That may not be optimum.

If all this seems a bit vague, I suppose it is. Let it become specific; what I want is a renewal of the debate over principles.

For those interested in just what regulations do, and what relationship regulatory science has to real science, I recommend to you Edith Efrom The Apocalyptics, Cancer and the Big Lie (How environmental politics controls what we know about cancer). Published in 1984, it is still quite relevant (and of course denounced by the regulatory establishment as the work of a crazy woman.) You may be astounded by the effects of our “zero tolerance” laws on carcinogens even in 1984; most of that remains in 2011, but few notice.

Regulatory science is to science as rabbit hunters are to rabbits… And of course we continue to federally regulate the use of bunny rabbits in stage magic acts. We borrow a couple of million a year to pay for that. Are we getting our money’s worth? But in fact the stakes are a great deal higher, as toy makers and publishers of children’s books have recently found to their sorrow. Efrom’s book made a considerable stir in its day, but it was dealt with by being ignored, not refuted. It’s easier to tell the story of some victim than to look at what happened and examine probability of causal links.

Suspend regulations. Reconsider the whole principle of federal vs. state regulation, and re-justify the re-imposition of each regulation before it can become effective again. Look to cost of enforcement and the effect of the regulation on the economy. If we can’t afford it now, put it back in the hopper for reconsideration later.

And find ways to bring energy prices down.

The alternative is our continued decline: as of now there is more money owed for student loans than on credit cards; the entire middle class is now in bondage. The government has a monopoly on student loans, and you cannot be relieved of them by bankruptcy. They can garnish wages and seize pensions. That is the end of the independence of the middle class. And we continue toward exponential growth in spending. That means more money for universities. They use this to expand and grow – and charge more. They’ll help you get a loan.  A nation of bondsmen.

Salve sclave.

View 688 Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Now Obama has taken up the “shared sacrifice” arguments. All we have to do is soak the rich and our financial problems will be over. After all, Warren Buffett has said so. The President finds that refreshing. There are those who say that Buffett was not entirely accurate in his analysis. The Wall Street Journal even has an editorial on the subject. It’s worth your attention. But leaving out Buffett’s arguments, there are other considerations. Is the purpose of taxing the rich more to raise revenue or simply because we can do it, and we want more equality?

The Journals also points out that if the goal is equalization, “Obamanomics has been a raging success.” I haven’t been able to find a proper link to that article, but the title is “Millionaires Go Missing.” (There is a similar article about Maryland missing millionaires here.)

The important notion is the amounts involved. According to the journal:

2009 Tax information:

Tax Returns

$200,000 and above   3,924,000
$1 million and above      237,000
$10 million and above        8,274

Taxes Paid

$200,000 and above   $434 Billion
$1 million and above      178
$10 million and above      54

This is way down from 2007 when the numbers for the three categories were 4.6 million, 390 thousand, and 18.4 thousand respectively. In 2007 the 18,394 people who made $10 million a year paid $111 billion in taxes, about double what we got from the 8,274 who made that much in 2009. That is the point of the Journal article: if you want more money, you need more rich people. The poor don’t pay much in the way of taxes.

If Buffett wants to donate money to the government, he’s certainly free to do so: but in fact we all suspect that more good would come from his deciding where to invest his money, or on what enterprises he ought to spend it – including simply turning it over to the Gates Foundation – than would come from sending it to the government where we will cycle it through the SEIU. We all know that if the government gets money it spends it, generally on hiring more government workers. It doesn’t reduce the deficit. There are never any deals that actually reduce spending, even on Bunny Inspectors, who will duly get their raises. I note that the three senior officials who approved the scheme to sell guns to be delivered to drug cartels have been promoted despite the undesirable outcome of what they approved. Parkinson’s Laws apply to the government: it’s expenses rise to exceed income, and there will be exponential growth in departments independent of the amount of work those departments do.  This always happens, and the only way to stop it is to control spending – which seldom happens. If a government activity exists it will have strong advocates for doing it and expanding it; while there won’t be many who oppose it. Look again at Bunny Inspectors.

Giving the government more money to spend will result in the growth of government to exceed that new income. It always works that way. The only way to actually cut government is to force it to cut programs, either by reducing their cost, or by eliminating them. I didn’t see any such proposals in the Deficit Dance. Nothing about reducing regulatory activities.

Note too that any proposal to reduce regulation always gets the response that the first program to be eliminated will be the control of putting arsenic in the water, or industrial pollution running rampant by dumping sewage upstream.. When it is answered that no, we don’t think that ought to be eliminated but – the argument is cut off in mid sentence. The rest of the sentence would have been “Yes, but just because you can detect something doesn’t mean it is at a dangerous level; surely the level of enforcement can be discussed? Surely we can tolerate some levels of pollution when the result is an increase in employment? Surely we can discuss this. But it is never discussed. It is the same with the city budgets, where the first thing proposed for elimination is the police and the second the first grade.

The United States managed to survive for a very long time with a much smaller and less active federal government. It could do so again, but none of the Deficit Dance proposals I know of even considered the notion that we might actually cut the size of government, not just cut its rate of growth in half. (And cutting the rate of growth in half would have been considered an intolerable cut with accusations of balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.)

I note that Peter Thiel has invested some of his billions in the concept of “Islands of Liberty”, sovereign ocean living platforms. I explored some of that concept in early stories, and for a while I was on the board of the Ocean Living Foundation which looked into engineering factors and even cast a few experimental designs onto the waters, so to speak. Such places can exist in an orderly world. Historically the attempt to found a new Republic has been difficult because someone else will want it. In the Caribbean there were a couple of independent city states in the Golden Age of Piracy, but they were subsumed into existing Imperial schemes as colonies, and went through the usual history of West Indies colonies. Some are now independent nations, some in the British Commonwealth. Others are “Overseas Regions” of France, which is essentially the same status that Algeria had until wars – war of allegiance, war of independence, civil war – ended that.

My point being that I wish the libertarians well, but I have less confidence in the international community allowing them to exist. I can see them being “defended” by an international peace keeping force that levies taxes on them to pay for that defense – might be an interesting story to write. And of course I had some sort of scheme of my own in some of my early stories.

I wish them well. Maybe the US Navy could help…

View 688 Monday, August 15, 2011

I wonder if anyone in Washington actually takes anything seriously other than winning office and retaining power? At the Iowa debates the big trick question was, if a Deficit Dance bill had a tax increase in it, but had ten times as much in cuts, would you reject it? All the candidates raised their hands. They would reject it. And of course today the President of the United States had to say something about that in insulting tones:

“I know it’s not election season yet, but I just have to mention the debate,” where Republicans said they would not increase taxes under virtually any circumstance, Obama said at a town hall. “Think about that. That’s just not common sense.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/campaigns/obama-kicks-off-midwest-bus-tour-with-harsh-words-on-the-economy/2011/08/15/gIQAZecOHJ_story.html

The nation is drowning in debt, unemployment continues high, and the president buys $3 million worth of busses to take a political tour in which he doesn’t say what he’s going to do, but has plenty of time to say it’s not common sense to try to balance the budget with sending cuts rather than tax increases. Does anyone realize that we’re in trouble? Real trouble? Is anyone looking at the cost of the regulatory nightmares business people face? Is anyone looking at the costs of the environmental regulations vs. their effectiveness? Does anyone care that we have to borrow the money to keep the budget increasing exponentially at above 5%, that this will go on forever, and no one in the Deficit Dance seems to ask for real cuts in spending as opposed to possible reductions in increases?

I’ve said it before: if you continue to borrow money to spend on Bunny Inspectors, you won’t cut much else either. The mind set is that that government spending must increase exponentially, there can be no cuts even in the most ridiculous programs, that can be no examination of whether the programs are doing enough to justify borrowing money to fund them, and “common sense” says that we must raise taxes and increase revenues so that we can continue to increase the deficit.

Of course the Republican candidates rejected the trick question; and no one seems to be asking President Obama for specifics. If you promise ten times the cuts as revenue increases, what will you cut? If you can cut those, why not cut them now, and argue for the revenue increase after the cuts are made? So far every time there has been a deal with budget cuts in return for more taxes, the result has been more taxes and more spending, but no cuts. Why would it be different now?

It wasn’t possible in a “debate” to ask any such questions. The President does not find it in his interest to do so, because he does not want to waste a crisis.

But is anyone in Washington asking those questions?

I have a ton of mail regarding the barbarians in England. There are plenty of bizarre events in the United States. Civilizations fall when there is no one to defend them. The values of our civilization are no longer defended in our schools or our universities, and those who accept those values (and are pretty well the ones who pay the taxes) are expected to pay for all this. The liberal view of the world is that things can only go on improving; there is no need to defend a civilization’s values.

And of course all children ought to have a world class university prep education so they can be exposed to more deconstruction of the society.

Possony used to say that one sign of a coming collapse of a civilization is bizarre crimes and activities. Another is a leadership that no longer understands the necessity for common values. We have deconstructed the common values for a long time.

Commentary on the London/UK riots

I think this is probably about the best thing I’ve read on the subject. Of course it helps that the writer works at what could be called ‘ground zero’ for these riots with youths who probably were involved in the riots.

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2011/08/simon-marcus-listen-to-the-children.html

Francis Turner

From that essay:

When I first saw what went on in the streets around the Academy I couldn’t help but think of the line from Luke 23:26: “ For if men do these things when the forest is green, what will happen when it is dry”

We are a strange lot, the human race. We learn in funny ways. Once you break a taboo it is gone, once you break a boundary it is gone, if you get away with something and you enjoy it, you do it again. When kids attack teachers, (and it happens thousands of times a year) being sent to the cooling off room is pretty much a reward, a fixed term exclusion often makes no odds either. If a social worker tells a teenage mum the word ‘no’ emotionally damages a child, a message goes out. If an adult admonishes a gang of children for littering and gets a police caution a message goes out. If a father is reported to the police for smacking a child a message goes out. If an adult is arrested for grabbing a child who is stealing, or assaulting another child, a message goes out. If knife criminals receive community sentences, a message goes out. If people tell you about your rights as a child, and never about your responsibilities, a message goes out. If teenage girls are given flats for having babies a message goes out. If the police arrest you fifty times and nothing happens a message goes out.

How did it come to this? It is all about the power of ideas. The left wing sales pitch of grievance, victim, blame and excuse has done immense damage to society, as has the rights culture and the sense of entitlement many young people now have. If we look there is clear chain of causality that goes through the decades as other poisonous ideas took hold and turned society on its head: The family is outmoded, children don’t need fathers, they should be treated the same as adults, they don’t need discipline or boundaries, authority is oppression, everything is society’s fault, right and wrong are relative concepts, as is morality, ethics are contextual and no one view is worth more than another. Well-meaning this may be, but no society in the history of the world has taught its children this and survived. Edmund Burke must be turning in his grave.

We have sown the wind. Now we reap.

And I have just heard that most of the bizarre crimes are the fault of the Tea Party. Never waste a crisis.

Luke 23:26

And as they led him away, they laid hold upon one Simon, a Cyre’nian, coming out of the country, and on him they laid the cross, that he might bear it after Jesus.
27  And there followed him a great company of people, and of women, which also bewailed and lamented him.
28  But Jesus turning unto them said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.
29  For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.
30  Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.
31  For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?