Category Archives: Political Philosophy

The Republican Party's Campaign Of Co-optation

Conservatism, Free Markets, Media, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Republicans

Check out this new production, “I want Your Money,” touted on Fox News. It opens with Stephen Moore, of the War street Journal, pronouncing the stimulus a hoax. But Moore is a member of America’s failed philosopher kings who has consistently failed to predict anything. This same snake-oil merchant was all for Keynesian tinkering before he turned against it, and then only on purely utilitarain grounds (“it hasn’t worked”).

Moore’s book before last was titled “Bullish on Bush: How the Ownership Society Is Making America Richer.” If that’s not an indictment, nothing is. “Bush’s bailout society” is an instantiation of the principles upon which “Bush’s ownership society” was founded: credit for those who are not creditworthy.

There are some nice Reagan quips in this trailer tease, though. Nice because they are rooted in rights, not in utility (what works for the hordes):

• There’s a word for redistributing the wealth, it’s called theft.
• We could say that they spend like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors because they are spending their own money (Moore would never talk openly about ownership).

Then Moore the moron pops up with this pearl: “It is fiscal child abuse,” the allusion being to spending for posterity.

Fuck the kids; I’m sick of them. I pay for their miseducation. They’re the reason my aspirin bottle has to be pried open with the jaws of life. Fuck ’em. From what I’ve seen they deserve to be sold into slavery. The state should not enslave me and mine. I don’t need “The kids” to justify my right to live free of subjugation.

The rest of the clip is crammed with Bush bitches and Newtered dogs superimposed upon the earnest Tea Party protest.

Clearly, this message is part of the Republican Party’s campaign of co-optation.

UPDATED: Crazy Like A Fox (Bush & Laissez-Faire Capitalism)

Barack Obama, Bush, Capitalism, Conservatism, Political Philosophy, Propaganda

The following is taken from my new column, “Crazy Like A Fox,” now on WND.COM:

“From Cleveland, Ohio, Obama issued forth this week with renewed vigor. Media plaudits notwithstanding, the president’s words were either inane or simply insane.

An instance of “insane” was Obama’s professed fealty to a “lean and efficient government.” The trillion-dollar deficit man declared: “I believe government should leave people free to make the choices they think are best for themselves and their families, so long as those choices don’t hurt others.”

On the sly side was the president’s confession that he was propelled to run for president because for much of the last decade, a very specific governing philosophy had reigned about how America should work … The idea was that if we just had blind faith in the market, if we let corporations play by their own rules, if we left everyone else to fend for themselves that America would grow and America would prosper.

Evidently, Oprah’s backing and naked ambition had nothing to do with Barack Obama’s selfless ride to the nation’s rescue; it was the philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism, RIP.

Not for nothing did Ayn Rand call capitalism “the unknown ideal.” This ideal has not been practiced in the US for a very long time; it is a fable that George W. Bush was an unfettered capitalist.” …

Read the complete column, “Crazy Like A Fox,” now on WND.COM.

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

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UPDATED: Bush & Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Bush gave the economy its first stimulus, or “shot in the arm,” as he called it, in 2002. Like Obama, Bush believed with all his brutal little heart that consumption undergirds the American way of life and that any slack in consumption must be filled by government spending.

Bush gave us the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by which Bush federalized corporate law, and ensured that the SEC’s politically voracious prosecutors were able to pursue any business executive as long as a lay jury could be convinced the unfortunate chap intended to mislead or stiff shareholders. The same “capitalism” saw the detestable Decider pass an enormous prescription drug entitlement program, Medicare Part D, and “No Child Left Behind,” which further federalized education and increased the reach and size of the federal government. Let us not forget the “Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)” of 2008, which showed the way for Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009.

Danish-Style Welfare

America, Democracy, Europe, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Political Philosophy, Socialism, The State, Welfare

“The pigs to which the politicians pander outnumber—and are electorally stronger than—the productive whom they plunder. The first are feeding off the second and will not let-up. To remove or not to remove the teat of the Welfare State from its primary beneficiaries: that will be the question on the Tuesday following the first Monday, in November.” Indeed, fewer and fewer are working to feed more and more Americans. USA Today has the latest astounding figures:

“Government anti-poverty programs that have grown to meet the needs of recession victims now serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand.

More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, the federal-state program aimed principally at the poor, a survey of state data by USA TODAY shows. That’s up at least 17% since the recession began in December 2007.

“Virtually every Medicaid director in the country would say that their current enrollment is the highest on record,” says Vernon Smith of Health Management Associates, which surveys states for Kaiser Family Foundation.

The program has grown even before the new health care law adds about 16 million people, beginning in 2014. That has strained doctors. ‘Private physicians are already indicating that they’re at their limit,’ says Dan Hawkins of the National Association of Community Health Centers.

More than 40 million people get food stamps, an increase of nearly 50% during the economic downturn, according to government data through May. The program has grown steadily for three years.

Caseloads have risen as more people become eligible. The economic stimulus law signed by President Obama last year also boosted benefits.”

[SNIP]

Statism Starts With Us!

Some time ago Oprah Winfrey discovered that the welfare state of Denmark was home to the happiest people in the world. She and others (Bill O’Reilly and his “Cultural Cretins” opposed her observations for no intelligent reason) have put this happiness down to “Free health care, education and long leave for new parents … A simple life and a strong social system.”

Copenhagen is one of the world’s most environmentally conscious cities. A third of the population rides bikes, many with groceries and kids in tow. Homelessness and poverty are extremely low here. If you lose your job, the government continues to pay up to 90 percent of your salary for four years. You’re never going to be homeless on the street.

I suspect that what makes “Denmark one of the best places on earth to live, according to American talk show star Oprah Winfrey” has quite a bit to do with fellow feelings of unity. Denmark is still relatively homogeneous, with a migration rate of 2.48 migrant(s)/1,000 population.

Multiculturalism immiserates.

It is also a tiny country of only 5.5 million people. A welfare state can chug along if it is small and well-managed. A welfare sytem consisting of 310 million people is doomed.

More importantly: If a good majority in a culturally homogeneous country has agreed on such a system of welfare, it is more likely to make them happy.

Moreover, direct-democracy initiatives on crucial matters are more prevalent in Europe than in the US. I mean, if you are going to suffer the blight of democracy, at least make it a direct democracy as a representative one is on par with tyranny:

“Of the constitutional provisions for mandatory constitutional referendums, those of Denmark, Ireland and Switzerland have been put into practice. In these states, mandatory referendums are required on all constitutional ]matters], whereas in Spain and in Austria mandatory referendums required only on fundamental changes to the constitution, and in Iceland only on certain types of constitutional amendments.”

“The Danish case illustrates how the referendum has been adopted as an institution that limits the powers of parliamentary majorities. The mandatory referendum was first adopted in Denmark in 1915 to compensate the abolition of the requirement that constitutional changes should be passed in two subsequent parliaments.”

Big-Government Gerson

Bush, Conservatism, Constitution, Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

BUSH’S Bastardized Conservatism is also Michael Gerson’s. As a committed ideologue, formerly of the Bush administration, Michael Gerson is a completely consistent, dangerous statist. He imagines that the General Welfare Clause gave our overlords, and the Little Lord Fauntleroys who serve them (the female version: Dana Perino), authority to enact the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, federal civil rights law; direct what Gerson terms “economic growth,” and pursue the national greatness agenda.

To oppose “Alexander Hamilton and a number of Supreme Court rulings” that affirm such overreach is “morally irresponsible and politically disastrous,” says Gerson.

Today, Laura Ingraham referred to Gerson, affectionately, as being part of that wonderful big tent that makes the GOP so inclusive. Yet Gerson, whom BAB celebrity Myron Pauli long ago identified as the most dangerous kind of (crunchy) conservative, holds that the welfare clause, “and Congress will have the power…to provide for the general welfare”—Article I, Section 8—implies that government can pick The People’s pocketbooks for any possible project, even though the general clause is followed by a detailed enumeration of the limited powers so delegated.

Asks historian Thomas E. Woods Jr.: “What point would there be in specifically listing the federal government’s powers if the general welfare clause had already provided the government with an essentially boundless authority to enact whatever it thought would contribute to people’s well-being?” Woods evokes no less an authority than the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison: “Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars.”

You’d think Madison knew one or two things more than Michael about this document.

I once wrote that “sometimes the law of the State coincides with the natural law. More often than not, natural justice has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.” When Gerson and company (you’ll find that Rove, Perino, and the rest, currently masquerading as conservatives, are no different) reject “a consistent constitutionalism,” namely a critique of the current promiscuous applications of the 14th, the “General Welfare” clause, and so on, and embrace the concept of the Constitution as a “living, breathing” document—they rely for their case on layers of that rubble.

Having shoveled the muck of lawmaking aside, constitutionalists base their case on the natural justice and the founders’ original intent.

Gerson is the enemy of liberty. But even more so, because so deceptive, are the Ingrahams of the world. Ms. Ingraham wanted to know how Gerson could bad mouth the tea part, yet still call himself a Bush conservative. Ms. Ingraham has set up a dichotomy where there is only congruity and consistency on the part of Gerson: now that is dangerous.