What Do We Do Now? View 687 20110812

View 687 Friday, August 12, 2011

· The Debate

· A program for Republicans

Who Won the Debate?

I watched some of the Republican debate in Ames, Iowa last night. I used to have a girl friend who lived in Ames when I was at the University of Iowa. Actually she wasn’t my girl friend, I just wished she was, and the term ‘girl friend’ didn’t have the same meaning then as it does now, and that’s irrelevant anyway. I suppose Ames, like almost all American university and college towns, has changed enormously since the 1950’s; everything else has. In those days you were expected to have more control over your own life, and no one expected the government to provide much. Considering that all the candidates were trying to appeal to what they think is a majority of the voters, this isn’t the same world it was when I was last in Ames. The old Free Republic is pretty well dead. The notion that rights are not restrictions on the government but entitlements to benefits seems to be accepted by everyone: the debate is over how much stuff you should be able to get from the government.

There were a few hopeful signs. Mitt Romney very properly insisted that the states have powers that the Federal Government does not have, and policies proper for some states won’t necessarily work for others. When hectored by some of the other candidates about what gave Massachusetts the power to insist that residents buy health insurance, he made it clear that the Federal government does not have that power. I’d have liked it better if he pointed out that he is running for President of the United States, not for reelection as Governor, and while questions about just what sovereign powers the states may have inherited from the Crown, or derive from natural law, would be very interesting they aren’t relevant to this debate. Romney went in as leader, and came out the same. He managed to separate himself from the Country Club Republicans without angering them.

Michelle Bachman and Tim Pawlenty worked hard at knocking each other out, and both may have succeeded.

Newt Gingrich sounded and looked Presidential. I don’t think he has much chance, but I would really hope that whoever does win brings Newt into the White House as a senior advisor. Long ago the chief political advisor to the President was given the Cabinet Status of Postmaster General (which had the status of fifth in precedence, just after Attorney General). We don’t have such a Cabinet level post now, which is a pity. Newt looked good and made sense, and his advice is always worth taking seriously. He would be a great asset to any President, and I hope that whoever wins realizes that.

Ron Paul was Ron Paul, a man who makes a great deal of sense and ought always to be taken seriously particularly in economic matters. We need him in Congress.

The others sort of blended together.

The winner of the debate in my judgment was Newt, and the high point was when he said that on his first day in office he would dismantle Obamacare by Executive Order. He also proposed the obvious, repeal of Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank, which ought to be done by the House the day after they come back from vacation. No, the repeals won’t get through the Senate, but the debate should be interesting: neither of those laws does anything useful, both are thousands of pages of regulations and empower thousands of faceless (and sometimes all too recognizable!) bureaucrats. Gingrich was the only one of the candidates who seemed to understand that the regulations from Washington are far more stifling, and thus far greater a cause of economic stagnation, than government spending and for that matter taxes. We have had economic booms in times of higher taxes; taxes impede and even stifle, but not to the extent that regulations do. The German Economic Miracle came about from liberation from stifling regulations, not from Marshal Plan spending (the actual amount of capital injected was quite small compared to the capital destroyed by the war and the early Morgenthau Plan implementations) but from relief from regulation. The United States is unlikely to have economic recovery until we eliminate regulatory impediments to economic growth. Newt knows this. The other candidates don’t seem to.

Another winner of the debate was Texas Governor Rick Perry, who wasn’t in Iowa at all. When he announces tomorrow he will be either number one or number two (Romney being the other), with anyone else a distant third. I don’t know what Governor Perry thinks of Newt Gingrich, but I hope he has a favorable opinion. Anyone seriously interested in governing would do well to pay attention to Newt.

A Program

Getting the economy going again is important; the Democrats aren’t going to do it. The “stimulus” with its “shovel ready” jobs didn’t do it – indeed, the President was amused to tell us that the shovels weren’t as ready as he had thought. A near trillion dollar oops. The problem was that funneling the money to cronies didn’t do anything to rebuild the national infrastructure, which continues to deteriorate. A new stimulus won’t help that. The infrastructure can be rebuilt by state and local governments, and will have to, but to do that will require state and local government reforms: all levels of government are broke, and will stay that way until the economy improves. Getting the feds out of that act will stimulate the states to compete for jobs and capital – as Texas is already doing, extracting a lot of jobs and capital from Silicon Valley to Austin and other high tech regions in Texas. Competition among the states will reduce regulatory strangulation, but only if the feds stop throttling the economy.

There is a way to get started on this. Now.

I do hope that all the candidates will adopt this program:

Double the exemption numbers for small businesses: that is, whatever regulations you are exempt from by dint of having 10 or fewer employees, you will now be exempt if you have 20 or fewer; similarly for larger numbers. The regulations will still apply, but the exemption numbers are doubled.

Suspend Sarbanes-Oxley until it can entirely be rewritten. This glob of financial regulations was enacted in reaction to Enron. It doesn’t do what it was intended to do. There are said to be some good effects from it: let those be debated and reenacted. The stifling effects are obvious. The good points are a bit more obscure. It needs work, and until that time, it ought to be put out of the way.

Suspend Dodd-Frank until it can entirely be rewritten. This is another enormous act that was poorly thought out, and has had wide ranging effects that were not intended. The whole notion of financial regulations needs rethinking.

Repeal ObamaCare. If we need a new national health care plan, work on that; but this one isn’t going to work.

The Republicans can pass these measures in the House. They won’t be accepted in the Senate but the debates will be enlightening, and this will have a salutary effect on the Presidential election. ObamaCare was passed by a lame duck session with a reconciliation conference, without any proper debate. We have seen enough of Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank to know they are stifling: let them be defended in public debate.

The message will be that the Republicans stand for freedom, the Democrats for more government control. It is time to have the American people choose. Either we go down the road to Empire or we turn again toward a Free Republic. Rome had centuries of Imperial Glory after Augustus converted the Republic to Empire and Claudius set up the Imperial bureaucracy using freedmen. Competent Empire is a viable system of government; competent empires have lasted longer than most Republics. The United States at 235 years or so is a bit young compared to the Roman Republic which was around 400 years old at its collapse, and much younger than the Venetian Republic when Napoleon ended it. Britain became what amounts to an aristocratic republic in 1688. France in 1789. Britain and France seem destined to be absorbed in the bureaucracy of the European Union. We will see.

But the alternatives are stark here. Either we go back toward renewing the Republic or we slide further and further into rule by bureaucracy; and the remedy to that is generally empire. Turn to someone who can control the rapacious officials. One of our main complaints against King George III (really against the Parliament of Westminster) is that the king had erected needless Offices and sent among us swarms of Officers to harass the people and eat out their substance. Would we had only the customs and Stamp Act officers now!

I sure did like what Newt had to say about the Deficit Dance Supercommittee. “Scrap it now, recognize it was a dumb idea, go back to legislative process.” He sure sounded Presidential. I sure wish we still had a cabinet position for someone like him, though.

And it was good to see candidates take the Tenth Amendment seriously. Now if Newt can make friends with whoever wins…

Towing Icebergs,

Money quote: ". Towing an iceberg from somewhere around Newfoundland to the northwest coast of Africa would only take around five months and could still retain more than 60 percent of the iceberg’s mass. The downside: it would cost about $10 million."

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-08/computer-models-show-shelved-iceberg-towing-scheme-could-actually-work

Rod McFadden

I wrote about this concept in A Step Farther Out. As well as in some of my early short stories. It’s certainly one way to get fresh water. And I like it.

Infomation upon the causes of the "English Spring" – From someone who was there –

Dear Sir: I have just read your thoughts upon the "English Spring" and did have to reply, because if the Egyptian version was at least centred around a noble motive, then the English Spring is mostly motivated by a burning desire for a 40" plasma screen TV.

There is little likelihood of this going any further for several reasons.

One thing to remember about the (Completely unreported) ethnic aspect of the riots in the UK is that here, as everywhere else, it is Ramadan. All of the Muslims are too tired to cause trouble, they are indoors, eating and then sleeping in the six hours of darkness that August at high latitude gives them, presumably furious that they are missing out due to the religious convictions that they have all loudly insisted to their parents that they have recently acquired. The city of Bradford, with it’s huge Asian population, and indeed parts of West London such as Hounslow, have not seen any real trouble. The looting is heavily ethnically centred around blacks and lower class whites. This could have been far worse than it was.

What motivates them? : Although you have already written about Danegeld…Here it is more than looting, it is literally true. An aspect of the events that make them unique to the UK is the "Education Maintenance Allowance." This was an initiative introduced by Gordon Brown in order to induce the lower end of the intellectual demographic into staying in education.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Maintenance_Allowance

(Notice how if you are poor, you get more money.)

However, it strikes me that if you are paying 16-19 year olds to study, you obviously will attract people who are not very interested in study but will happily sit in classrooms talking and playing with their mobile telephones, as it is somewhere to go during the day. The people who do want to study and the effect that that has upon them are matters naturally ignored, and the children of the political classes all send their children to private institutions anyway, and so are unlikely to have their education affected.

If I were genuinely cynical, the EMA (Labour) and the rise in tuition fees (Coalition) are going to combine to make access to Oxbridge by the socially connected even easier, but in this country more than almost any other, we can frankly attribute it to incompetence. MPs abuse their expenses and don’t feel that it is wrong, and Police officers accepting money from journalists for information do not think that they are being bribed, either.

When the EMA was withdrawn by the coalition, this was a cause of protests, but it is a memorable acronym and so it lingers on as a mark of how society has let "us" down. It has been cited upon UK news programming as a thing that the young people questioned still hold as a grievance/ excuse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xJlmZitdG1o#at=37

A thing to notice with this piece is how the reporter openly prompts the intervees into being angry with bankers and financiers, rather than mention that the Murdoch press and media, of which Sky News is an arm, had their own part in encouraging to the culture of insolence and opportunistic looting that lower class Britain now clearly possesses. An example of their irresponsibility is the fashion in which coverage of the initial trouble in Tottenham (Prompted by a completely defensible shooting) was covered live on TV all Friday evening and over the weekend, giving an entire country knowledge of the events. Also, the acts of cancelling all police leave, requesting special/volunteer police officers report for duty, and the act of transporting in additional officers to London from outer regions were each loudly announced by the media, meaning people knew that their particular areas were now underpatrolled and so ripe for local action. Hence, the secondary acts in Birmingham and Manchester, where organised criminal gangs co-ordinated the looting, over the weekend itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=KxJkbYpVG4c

(……Gloucester, now twinned with Mos Eisley, as a wretched hive of scum and villany.)

Presumably the media are just incompetent rather than malicious as well. The one thing that is agreed upon by the everyone, is that the government should do more for everyone.

…But it will all quieten down, partly because it has been raining at night. It is a very English form of riot control, and a very English form of insurrection: This was not the L.A. riots, he’s not a N*gger with attitude, he’s a N*gger who has ALREADY sent you a CV! ….That’s why he is entitled to cross London in a van, to get one of your televisions!

Hope that this of interest. Thank you for you website.

Yours faithfully,

Andrew S. Mooney, Huddersfield, United Kingdom.

Thanks. I am not quite as convinced as you are that the Arab Spring continues to be motivated by a burning desire for freedom, but I have conflicting information on the events in Cairo. Tunisia may have been a special case. And what began the events in Cairo may not be what ends them. We all read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, and most of us know something of the Terror and what a relief it was when the Revolution ended. I wish the Arabs well. But in any event I completely agree that the situation is quite different in Britain and in the Middle East, and the endings will be different; but what those endings will be is not so clear. Thank you for the information. The england of today is not the England I know much about.

I have sat on this biit of trivia for a week trying to figure out why anyone wrote or published it. In Los Angeles our subway does not go to the airport, it goes just close enough to it that taxi drivers, who have waited for an hour or more to get airport passengers, do not want to take anyone to the subway station, but far enough away that you would have to be mad to attempt to walk it, especially with family and luggage. The subway system works if your goal is Union Station, but it is as if Los Angeles city planners never realized that people often want to get to and from the airport. I can recall taking a train from Heathrow to Piccadilly Circus, but I do not know how to take a train to LAX. I suppose Taki has his reasons for publishing this, but I don’t know what they are.

http://takimag.com/article/angelenos_ask_dude_wheres_my_subway/print#axzz1U7Cjgpc3