Category Archives: Political Economy

Obama Rejects Socialism Sobriquet

Barack Obama, Communism, Democrats, Fascism, Political Economy, Republicans, Socialism

The truth is that Republicans, who keep pelting BO with the socialism sobriquet, have advanced the same interventionist principles, but because Republicans, pols and pundits, do not know how to define socialism, they get away with claiming their party’s Third-Way interventionism is qualitatively different to that of the Dem’s.

However, the species of socialism advanced by both parties exists on a continuum; it differs quantitatively only.

MSNBC:

President Barack Obama launched a vigorous defense of his economic agenda Wednesday, rejecting critics who call his policies “socialism” and insisting he aims to boost U.S. competitiveness abroad.

His aim He proclaim has “less to do with big government or small government than it does smart government.”

From “GOP Sticks With Karl (Marx)”:

“Strictly speaking, socialism implies state ownership of the means of economic production. But … ‘state-directed sharing of the wealth’ is also part of the socialist scheme. A scheme both Republicans and Democrats have overseen energetically and with matching commitment.

The American economic system is a mixture of free-market capitalism and socialism, with dollops of fascism added for good measure. ‘Fascism,’ wrote the Tannehills in The Market for Liberty, is a system in which the government leaves nominal ownership of the means of production in the hands of private individuals but exercises control by means of regulatory legislation and reaps most of the profit by means of heavy taxation.’ …

A great deal of this boils down to deceptive semantics—and a society that has accepted the attendant, underlying, socialistic precepts.”

Updated: Tax Credits = Social Engineering (Tax Talk)

Barack Obama, Democrats, Economy, Political Economy, Taxation

H. L. Mencken called elections “a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” As he ramps-up for an election season, BO proves once again that he has perfected the art of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The president’s next gambit is “tax credits” for the middle class.

These are “subsidies disguised as tax cuts. In other words, they are spending in the form of direct transfers from the treasury to individuals, except that they are administered by the tax authorities rather than the agencies usually responsible for welfare.”

Social engineering is what tax credits are, as they target certain constituencies to the determinant of other, less politically powerful ones. Basically, “taxpayers can receive a raft of tax credits if they engage in various government-specified activities.”

You need very few brains to err on the side of growth and usher in, “lower tax rates for everybody.”

Update (Jan. 26): The familiar demand that I abandon a discussion on tax policy because I stand for abolishing the 16th, “The Number of The Beast,” is a position I’ve denounced again and again. This is what goes for libertarianism in many quarters; you sit on the fence, make nothing but tinny, tedious, purely theoretical arguments, and congratulate yourself on retaining your political purity. To repeat, this is nothing but sloth. It’s also boring, foolish and uppity without being superior.

Yes, taxation is immoral and naturally illicit. And yes, tax policy needs to be debated among the handful of intellectually curious, clever, engaged individuals, and yes, the fact that one wishes to see a return to natural justice does not preclude a pragmatic support for, say, a flat, low tax. Let the poor set the rate.

Update III: Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values (Senegal Does It Right)

America, Celebrity, Christianity, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Media, Morality, Political Economy, The West, UN

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column: “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values”:

“… in all its self-serving displays, humanitarianism is, overwhelmingly, a Western affair; a Judeo-Christian thing. It’s as simple as all that. Liberals like Angelina Jolie will trace Western generosity to the founding of the United Nations, to the League of Nations, or to some other supra-national structure.

I suspect that what is at play in Haiti, and in countless locales around the undeveloped world, began with the revolutionary, universal, elaborate moral and legal injunctions encoded first in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus – and, thereafter, throughout the Hebrew Bible – to protect and do justice by the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widow and the stranger. The people of Israel were enjoined to practice what Christians later perfected.

That stuff stuck.

A different set of beliefs animates Haitian society, and helps explain its helplessness and hopelessness. ‘Haiti is not a Catholic country, Haiti is a Voodoo country,’ Erol Josue told National Public Radio. Josue is a Voodoo priest in a country whose former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, officially recognized Voodoo as a state religion.” …

The complete column is “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Jan. 22): Martin’s comment hereunder reminded me what I clean forgot: the Obamas’ very public giving. I’m also grateful to Martin for bringing to our attention the DIRECT injunction in the New Testament against showy charity. Martin quotes the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.” How has this country forgotten something as foundational as that?

Self-righteousness has replaced righteousness and self-aggrandizement has supplanted simple goodness.

Update II (Jan. 23): CHILD SLAVERY still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone. In the West this would be considered perverse in the extreme; in Haiti owning a Restavek is a status symbol. CNN has done stories on Restavec children, but has never connected the dots, as the favorite phrase goes. The angle is, invariably one of, “Look how good I am [Dr. Gupta here]; I’m crying.” Coupled with, “This happens in the US too.

No it doesn’t. When a slave is discovered, usually in the home of immigrants who imported their bad habit, American society shames and punishes the offenders.

Update III (Jan. 24): SENEGAL DOES IT RIGHT. Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has offered Haitian refugees a “parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,’ he said.”

Wade “insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area – not in the country’s parched deserts.”

Wade’s got the right idea, or at least the righteous one. He is offering Haitians a most generous chance at self-sufficiency; at working the land.

“Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, holds that the most praiseworthy and effective means of fulfilling the commandment of Tzedakah [charity] is through offering an impoverished person a business partnership, a business loan or a job. … the Prime Minister and [former Finance Minister] of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently understood this well. Speaking on the benefits of workfare reform in Israel, Netanyahu was once quoted in the press as saying that it is not enough to be a Thatcherite, a Jew should go even further and become a Maimonidite. [Excerpted from the monograph titled Judaism, Markets, and Capitalism: Separating Myth from Reality, by Corinne and Robert Sauer of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, with which I am affiliated.]

[SNIP]

Will Haitians be tempted by a chance at an honest living when hand-outs abound?

Is Ben Having A ‘Meltdown’?

Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Political Economy

Or is Mr. Bernanke reading Meltdown? “The Federal Reserve Chairman’s views on asset bubbles,” writes The WSJ, are slowly changing.”

“Earlier this decade, when Mr. Bernanke was a Fed governor, he and other central bank officials said financial bubbles weren’t something the Fed could identify or pre-empt effectively. Its focus was on keeping inflation and unemployment low. [And how well that has been achieved.] Its bubble strategy was to mop up after a bubble burst with lower interest rates to prevent damage to the broader economy.”

In a speech on Sunday at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting, BB repeated the shibboleth about the need for “better regulation” as the first line of defense against future crises. But he also conceded to the need “to ‘remain open’ to using the blunt tool of higher interest rates to avert or pop future asset bubbles … particularly if other approaches aren’t working.”

Why is raising interest rates considered a “blunt tool,” keeping them artificially low is not?