California Dreamin’

More from Armed and Dangerous:

If it is impossible for something to continue indefinitely, it will eventually stop.

The politics of the modern redistributionist state is founded on the assumption that politicians can buy votes by promising voters ever more munificent entitlements - from federal deposit insurance against bank failures to government-subsidized medical care - with the money for these things always somehow being painlessly extracted from somebody else.


Once voters have agreed to forget that every single dollar of tax revenue is extracted from the productive economy by threat of force (including corporate taxes, which are then passed along as higher prices), there is no incentive for any politically favored interest group to do anything but eat subsidies as fast as it can, before all those less deserving other interest groups get a snout in. The demand for entitlements, income transfers, and subsidies will, accordingly, rise without limit. And why not, when “somebody else” is paying?

For this con game to continue working on the suckers voters who buy it, there always has to be a “somebody else” from which more money can be painlessly extracted. It’s “the rich” or “corporations” or (when governments borrow money against future tax revenues) ourselves in the future.

But what happens when there is no “somebody else” left? California’s voters posed that question today when they rejected six referenda designed to raise taxes or borrowing, all of it allegedly intended to pull the state out of a $21-billion-dollar hole. Exit polling made the voters’ reasoning clear; they don’t believe that allowing taxes to rise will produce anything but ever larger deficits as politicians recklessly overspend on behalf of those politically favored interest groups. The state of California is now facing imminent bankruptcy.

The U.S. as a whole will almost certainly face the same problem before the end of Barack Obama’s administration in 2012. Social Security obligations were due to exceed collections in 2013; even before Obama quadrupled the federal deficit this meant a giant blazing meteorite was already hurtling straight at the heart of the Feds’ dinosaurian finances. And the second-order effects of Obama’s socialism-lite economic policy are pushing tax revenues rapidly downwards as investors cut back economic activity in order to avoid being skinned (that is, skinned worse than they already are - the top 1% of earners already pay 39% of all income taxes).

The underlying problem is that in any democratic system, the political demand for redistribution of wealth rises faster that the economy’s ability to generate wealth to be redistributed. Even if none of the money ever stuck to our political class’s fingers on its way through, the structural trend would be to ever-increasing deficits; moral outrage about corruption, while justified, is a distraction from the real problem, which is redistributionism itself.

But. If it is impossible for something to continue indefinitely, it will eventually stop.

Soon - very soon, in historical time - it will become clear that democratic redistributionism cannot deliver on its promises. All such systems, not just California’s and the U.S’s, are running headlong towards a terminal state of moral, political, demographic, and financial bankruptcy.

Then, the question will become: what happens afterwards? And it is a serious one, because the crisis could resolve either through the end of democracy or the end of redistributionism. On one path, we learn that we must live within our means and reject the delusion that redistribution can solve more problems than it causes; down the other path lies Peronism on steroids.

I am not in doubt which of those I will choose. If I am given any choice…

Some Iron Laws of Political Economics

From Armed and Dangerous:

There is no form of market failure, however egregious, which is not eventually made worse by the political interventions intended to fix it.

Political demand for income transfers, entitlements and subsidies always rises faster than the economy can generate increased wealth to supply them from.

Although some taxes genuinely begin by being levied for the benefit of the taxed, all taxes end up being levied for the benefit of the political class.

The equilibrium state of a regulatory agency is to have been captured by the entities it is supposed to regulate.

The probability that the actual effects of a political agency or program will bear any relationship to the intentions under which it was designed falls exponentially with the amount of time since it was founded.

The only important class distinction in any advanced democracy is between those who are net producers of tax revenues and those who are net consumers of them.

Corruption is not the exceptional condition of politics, it is the normal one.

Quote Of The Day

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that Nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
- John Stuart Mill

Why We Value Freedom

Thoughts from Gagdad Bob (emphasis added):

Liberty is not a built in -- much less universal -- value, and I think you can see how this is a major part of understanding the motivations -- or shall we say, the deep structure -- of leftism. Classical liberals wonder why leftists don't value freedom, but they shouldn't.

Rather, the question is why we do value it, because it is an obvious aberration in the human race. Most humans value security over liberty, predictability over change, conformity over individuality, and authority over self-rule. So when we see that leftists hate freedom and progress but love authority and comformity, we shouldn't be the least bit surprised, for it is true of most rank-and-foul humans. Political correctness, statism, micromanagement of our lives -- these are all the natural consequences of a dread of liberty.

To finish up with Prager's thought, he noted that it was God who wanted humans to have freedom, not humans. For the vast majority of human beings, liberty is not a particularly important value, much less the most important one. They would just as soon barter it away for security, as they have done in western Europe.

Once you understand this, then much about the left begins to make sense. In Europe, we can see how the welfare state puts in place a system of incentives that creates a new kind of enfeebled man, but that's not exactly correct. In reality, it simply reveals man for what he is -- a lazy, frightened, selfish, superstitious, instinct-loving and lowdown rascal. Leftism aims low and always reaches its target.

Only liberty unleashes the possibility of man and reveals what man can be, as an alternative to the unimpressive specter of what he is. Leftist man is like a human being, only worse.

Much of this is laid out quite succinctly by Robert Sirico in the latest edition of the Hillsdale College Imprimis. Sirico points out that leftism wasn't always the anti-progressive, anti-human movement it has become. Rather, it began with relatively good intentions, especially if we bear in mind that the means of creating wealth were not at all well understood at the time (in the same way that physicians weren't trying to harm patients by applying leeches to every problem). As such, the early socialists naively thought that socialism could achieve what capitalism could not:

"The core of the old socialist hope was a mass prosperity that would free all people from the burden of laboring for others and place them in a position to pursue higher ends, such as art and philosophy, in a conflict-free society."

But there was the problem of human temporo-centrism alluded to above: "The Marxist prediction of a revolution that would bring about this good society rested on the assumption that the condition of the working classes would grow ever worse under capitalism. But by the early twentieth century it was clear that this assumption was completely wrong. Indeed, the reverse was occurring: As wealth grew through capitalist means, the standard of living of all was improving."

That should have been the end of socialism, but it wasn't. And that is precisely when it transitioned from something that could at least be defended on rational or humanitarian grounds to a substitute religion. And again, it is specifically not a new religion, but a resurrection of mankind's default religion. Leftism is actually the abstract articulation of the "economic psychology" of Stone Age man. There is nothing new about it, which is why we see so much "born again paganism" associated with it -- the cult of the body, the exaltation of the senses, barbaric art forms, the vapid mystagogy of the "new age," the Obamessiah, etc.

What was truly new and progressive was all of the dynamic change wrought by the unfettered free market:

"Historians now realize that even in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, workers were becoming better off. Prices were falling, incomes rising, health and sanitation improving, diets becoming more varied, and working conditions constantly improving. The new wealth generated by capitalism dramatically lengthened life spans and decreased child mortality rates. The new jobs being created in industry paid more than most people could make in agriculture. Housing conditions improved. The new heroes of society came from the middle class as business owners and industrialists displaced the nobility and gentry in the cultural hierarchy."

In light of everything that had gone before, this was truly a miracle. But one of the less flattering characteristics of human beings is that there is no gift so miraculous, no grace so bountiful, that they cannot take it for granted. As such, another trait of the leftist -- as we all know -- is the conspicuous absence of gratitude, for gratitude is another spiritual value that doesn't come naturally to human beings. In one sense it must be cultivated, but in another sense it is a spiritual reward, since it frees one from the painful constitutional envy that motivates the leftist -- the ouch they can't stop scratching. Even when they have run out of other people's money.

Put it this way: from a world-historical standpoint, the "glass" of wealth is exponentially larger than it was 50 or 100 or 1000 years ago, and it is growing all the time. But no matter how big it gets, the leftist is condemned to seeing it as half full and obsessing over the fact that someone else has more. Thus,

"In the midst of all this change, many people seemed only to observe an increase in the number of the poor. In a paradoxical way, this too was a sign of social progress, since so many of these unfortunate people might have been dead in past ages. But the deaths of the past were unseen and forgotten, whereas current poverty was omnipresent. Meanwhile, as economic development expanded in the nineteenth century, there was a dramatic growth of a middle class that now had access to consumer goods once available only to kings -- not to mention plenty of new goods being created by the engine of capitalism."

Needless to day -- at least for a classical liberal -- "The poor didn’t get poorer because the rich were getting richer (a familiar socialist refrain even today) as the socialists had predicted. Instead, the underlying reality was that capitalism had created the first societies in history in which living standards were rising in all sectors of society. In a sense, free market capitalism was coming closest to realizing what Marx himself had imagined: 'the all round development of individuals' in which 'the productive forces will also have increased' and 'the springs of social wealth will flow more freely.'"

And Now A Word From Pravda

American capitalism gone with a whimper by Stanislav Mishin:

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

Speaks For Itself

Quote Of The Day

"In a just world, announcing you watch Keith Olbermann would gain the same reaction as saying you attend KKK meetings."
- Frank J.

Quote Of The Day

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-George Orwell

"What's In Your Wallet?"

WTF?!?!?!?!

I read about this on Drudge the other morning and thought I had hallucinated it. I read the article a second time and sure enough, that's what it said. Because the news article didn't provide a link to verify the story I went to the source to find it and, lo and behold, he actually did say it.

"But the long-term deficit and debt that we have accumulated is unsustainable. We can't keep on just borrowing from China, or borrowing from other countries -- (applause) -- because part of it is, we have to pay for -- we have to pay interest on that debt. And that means that we're mortgaging our children's future with more and more debt, but what's also true is that at some point they're just going to get tired of buying our debt. And when that happens, we will really have to raise interest rates to be able to borrow, and that will raise interest rates for everybody -- on your auto loan, on your mortgage, on -- so it will have a dampening effect on the economy."

"A dampening effect"? Ladies and Gentlemen, it is now official; Barack Obama, the President of the United States of America, completely understands the negative impact the policies he has implemented during his first 100 days in office will have on our country.

And yet we march on.

Either this man is the greatest demagogue to ever occupy the White House or I have completely lost my fucking mind.

Quote Of The Day

"There's no rhyme or reason to it. There's a general breakdown in almost every formerly functioning economic and social process I can think of. The intellectual and economic version of delirium tremens rules the day. Bizarre things, with even bizarrer explanations offered for them will happen every damn day for quite a while. And by "explanations," I mean unreasoning blame -- a headwind which does not shift but comes from all points on the compass.

It's the seventies again, baby. You wished it on yourself, but now we're all going to get it, good and hard. Been there, done that, got the straightjacket. Trust me, you're not going to like it."
- Sippican Cottage

Currahee!

Spend a few minutes and watch this tale of heroism. And check your cynicism at the door.

P.S. Note to CBS - get with the program guys. Putting an auto start on an embedded clip that activates every time the page is loaded or refreshed is as annoying as it is stupid.

Like Tears In The Rain

I love Blade Runner.

I Wonder How This Worked Out For Him?

I Knew It Would Eventually Come To This

Treasury Department Issues Emergency Recall Of All US Dollars

Don't Worry, Be Happy

Thanks, But No Thanks

Andy McCarthy passes on a chance to sing "Kumbaya" with Eric Holder:

May 1, 2009

By email (to the Counterterrorism Division) and by regular mail:

The Honorable Eric H. Holder, Jr.
Attorney General of the United States
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Dear Attorney General Holder:

This letter is respectfully submitted to inform you that I must decline the invitation to participate in the May 4 roundtable meeting the President’s Task Force on Detention Policy is convening with current and former prosecutors involved in international terrorism cases. An invitation was extended to me by trial lawyers from the Counterterrorism Section, who are members of the Task Force, which you are leading.

The invitation email (of April 14) indicates that the meeting is part of an ongoing effort to identify lawful policies on the detention and disposition of alien enemy combatants—or what the Department now calls “individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations.” I admire the lawyers of the Counterterrorism Division, and I do not question their good faith. Nevertheless, it is quite clear—most recently, from your provocative remarks on Wednesday in Germany—that the Obama administration has already settled on a policy of releasing trained jihadists (including releasing some of them into the United States). Whatever the good intentions of the organizers, the meeting will obviously be used by the administration to claim that its policy was arrived at in consultation with current and former government officials experienced in terrorism cases and national security issues. I deeply disagree with this policy, which I believe is a violation of federal law and a betrayal of the president’s first obligation to protect the American people. Under the circumstances, I think the better course is to register my dissent, rather than be used as a prop.

Moreover, in light of public statements by both you and the President, it is dismayingly clear that, under your leadership, the Justice Department takes the position that a lawyer who in good faith offers legal advice to government policy makers—like the government lawyers who offered good faith advice on interrogation policy—may be subject to investigation and prosecution for the content of that advice, in addition to empty but professionally damaging accusations of ethical misconduct. Given that stance, any prudent lawyer would have to hesitate before offering advice to the government.

Beyond that, as elucidated in my writing (including my proposal for a new national security court, which I understand the Task Force has perused), I believe alien enemy combatants should be detained at Guantanamo Bay (or a facility like it) until the conclusion of hostilities. This national defense measure is deeply rooted in the venerable laws of war and was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in the 2004 Hamdi case. Yet, as recently as Wednesday, you asserted that, in your considered judgment, such notions violate America’s “commitment to the rule of law.” Indeed, you elaborated, “Nothing symbolizes our [adminstration’s] new course more than our decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay…. President Obama believes, and I strongly agree, that Guantanamo has come to represent a time and an approach that we want to put behind us: a disregard for our centuries-long respect for the rule of law[.]” (Emphasis added.)

Given your policy of conducting ruinous criminal and ethics investigations of lawyers over the advice they offer the government, and your specific position that the wartime detention I would endorse is tantamount to a violation of law, it makes little sense for me to attend the Task Force meeting. After all, my choice would be to remain silent or risk jeopardizing myself.
For what it may be worth, I will say this much. For eight years, we have had a robust debate in the United States about how to handle alien terrorists captured during a defensive war authorized by Congress after nearly 3000 of our fellow Americans were annihilated. Essentially, there have been two camps. One calls for prosecution in the civilian criminal justice system, the strategy used throughout the 1990s. The other calls for a military justice approach of combatant detention and war-crimes prosecutions by military commission. Because each theory has its downsides, many commentators, myself included, have proposed a third way: a hybrid system, designed for the realities of modern international terrorism—a new system that would address the needs to protect our classified defense secrets and to assure Americans, as well as our allies, that we are detaining the right people.

There are differences in these various proposals. But their proponents, and adherents to both the military and civilian justice approaches, have all agreed on at least one thing: Foreign terrorists trained to execute mass-murder attacks cannot simply be released while the war ensues and Americans are still being targeted. We have already released too many jihadists who, as night follows day, have resumed plotting to kill Americans. Indeed, according to recent reports, a released Guantanamo detainee is now leading Taliban combat operations in Afghanistan, where President Obama has just sent additional American forces.
The Obama campaign smeared Guantanamo Bay as a human rights blight. Consistent with that hyperbolic rhetoric, the President began his administration by promising to close the detention camp within a year. The President did this even though he and you (a) agree Gitmo is a top-flight prison facility, (b) acknowledge that our nation is still at war, and (c) concede that many Gitmo detainees are extremely dangerous terrorists who cannot be tried under civilian court rules. Patently, the commitment to close Guantanamo Bay within a year was made without a plan for what to do with these detainees who cannot be tried. Consequently, the Detention Policy Task Force is not an effort to arrive at the best policy. It is an effort to justify a bad policy that has already been adopted: to wit, the Obama administration policy to release trained terrorists outright if that’s what it takes to close Gitmo by January.

Obviously, I am powerless to stop the administration from releasing top al Qaeda operatives who planned mass-murder attacks against American cities—like Binyam Mohammed (the accomplice of “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla) whom the administration recently transferred to Britain, where he is now at liberty and living on public assistance. I am similarly powerless to stop the administration from admitting into the United States such alien jihadists as the 17 remaining Uighur detainees. According to National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, the Uighurs will apparently live freely, on American taxpayer assistance, despite the facts that they are affiliated with a terrorist organization and have received terrorist paramilitary training. Under federal immigration law (the 2005 REAL ID Act), those facts render them excludable from the United States. The Uighurs’ impending release is thus a remarkable development given the Obama administration’s propensity to deride its predecessor’s purported insensitivity to the rule of law.

I am, in addition, powerless to stop the President, as he takes these reckless steps, from touting his Detention Policy Task Force as a demonstration of his national security seriousness. But I can decline to participate in the charade.

Finally, let me repeat that I respect and admire the dedication of Justice Department lawyers, whom I have tirelessly defended since I retired in 2003 as a chief assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. It was a unique honor to serve for nearly twenty years as a federal prosecutor, under administrations of both parties. It was as proud a day as I have ever had when the trial team I led was awarded the Attorney General’s Exceptional Service Award in 1996, after we secured the convictions of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and his underlings for waging a terrorist war against the United States. I particularly appreciated receiving the award from Attorney General Reno—as I recounted in Willful Blindness, my book about the case, without her steadfastness against opposition from short-sighted government officials who wanted to release him, the “blind sheikh” would never have been indicted, much less convicted and so deservedly sentenced to life-imprisonment. In any event, I’ve always believed defending our nation is a duty of citizenship, not ideology. Thus, my conservative political views aside, I’ve made myself available to liberal and conservative groups, to Democrats and Republicans, who’ve thought tapping my experience would be beneficial. It pains me to decline your invitation, but the attendant circumstances leave no other option.

Very truly yours,

/S/

Andrew C. McCarthy

cc: Sylvia T. Kaser and John DePue
National Security Division, Counterterrorism Section

Clown Nose Off, Clown Nose On

Wading through these videos will take some time but consider it a teachable moment.

Jon Stewart would have been exposed as a fool and a knave to his audience by now were it not for the fact that they are more historically illiterate than he is. Let this then be a lesson about why it is dangerous to get your "news" from the "pseudo-news comedian" who in the process of crossing the lines between news and nonsense irreparably blurs them. In what appears to be a serious conversation about torture Cliff May and Stewart bring up the atomic bombings during World War II around the 5:50 mark. Stewart then professes that he thinks President Harry Truman was a war criminal.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 2
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

A few days later after presumably digesting the fact that he called President Harry Truman a war criminal and perhaps a couple of e-mails calling on him to do so, Stewart does the honorable thing and apologizes on air for his comments.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Harry Truman Was Not a War Criminal
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

And now the historical facts behind the decision to drop the atomic bombs courtesy of Bill Whittle. If Jon Stewart had a working knowledge of these facts he could have saved himself a great deal of trouble and would not have misinformed his audience.

But I doubt he would have been as hip and cool.