Category Archives: The State

UPDATE III: Bar (State) Monopolies From Extortion (Reagan PATCO Remarks)

Business, Education, Elections, Free Markets, Government, Labor, Socialism, The State, Uncategorized

By the look and sound of the striking educators on the streets of Madison, Wisconsin (here), the kids (plenty stupid in their own right), are not missing much. Chaos theory aside, the public sector was never supposed to be able to strike; that’s a later socialistic privilege they were granted (See “Regulation of unions and organizing.”) The absence of these coercive cretins in the classroom is no loss. Still, The government education cartel should not be permitted to hold taxpayers hostage. Collective bargaining in general ought to be outlawed unless workers and employers are free to associate and dissociate from one another at will. Otherwise, it’s extortion. Here, the monopolist has, in effect, the right to shake down the taxpayer, who has no recourse; cannot opt out of the abusive relationship, or protect himself from the extortionist.

THIS IS THE LAW OF RULE, NOT THE RULE OF LAW.

(To clarify: The only true monopolies are government monopolies. A company is a monopoly only when it can forcibly prohibit competitors from entering the market, a feat only ever made possible by state edict. In the free market, competition makes monopoly impossible. A large market share is not a monopoly.)

I would have no objection to unions were they voluntary, non-coercive associations that looked out for the needs of workers without trampling the rights of other non-aggressive parties.

While we’re meting justice (in theory, at least), government employees, politicians included, should not be allowed to vote. This is because they are paid from taxes garnished by force from taxpayers, and will always vote to increase their own powers and wages. They have always so voted! The other option is that they keep the vote and accept volunteer, unpaid status.

The moochers and the looters are upon us. Moochers “will claim your product by tears” and manipulation. The rioters among them will “take [your product] from you by force.” Both versions have been loosed upon us.

During the Greek wilding, I warned (as many others) that it was a minor event compared to the events that’ll unfold should we quit funding our federal behemoth’s bacchanalia. The sound and fury of the American public sector unions is going to be like Tyrannosaurus (T-Rex) tearing through Jurassic Park.

UPDATE I: Obama waded right into the affairs of Wisconsin, stating superciliously that “the new Republican governor, Scott Walker, [was] launching an ‘assault’ on unions with his emergency legislation aimed at cutting the state budget.” Obama had once before meddled in a state’s affair and was badly burned. Remember the case of the bad ass, race-baiting Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr.? BHO’s full-throated reaction in that case was in his capacity as the president of Black America (“the Cambridge police acted stupidly,” he asserted, “in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.”)

But Barack wears many hats. And today, he responded to the “oink sector” strike in Madison, Wisconsin, as a union man, a man beholden to “Organizing for America, the successor to President’s Obama’s 2008 campaign organization. It helped fill buses of protesters who flooded the state capital of Madison and ran 15 phone banks urging people to call state legislators.”

UPDATE II (Feb. 20): Larry Kudlow on a “European-style revolt”:

The Democratic/government-union days of rage in Madison, Wis., are a disgrace. Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan calls it Cairo coming to Madison. But the protesters in Egypt were pro-democracy. The government-union protesters in Madison are anti-democracy; they are trying to prevent a vote in the legislature. In fact, Democratic legislators themselves are fleeing the state so as not to vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s budget cuts.
That’s not democracy.
The teachers’ union is going on strike in Milwaukee and elsewhere. They ought to be fired. Think Ronald Reagan PATCO in 1981. Think Calvin Coolidge police strike in 1919.
The teachers’ union on strike? Wisconsin parents should go on strike against the teachers’ union. A friend e-mailed me to say that the graduation rate in Milwaukee public schools is 46 percent. The graduation rate for African-Americans in Milwaukee public schools is 34 percent. Shouldn’t somebody be protesting that?

UPDATE III (Feb, 22): PEW AND THE PUBLIC. Pew Research cautions that “it is not clear whether the public nationally will support Wisconsin Republicans’ efforts to prevent government workers from unionizing. In the Pew Research survey, which was conducted before the Wisconsin protests drew national headlines, people were asked for their reaction when they hear of a disagreement between a labor union and a state or local government: 44% say that when they hear of such a dispute they side with the unions while 38% say they side with the governments.”

This, even though “organized labor is in a much weaker position today than it was during the air traffic controllers’ strike.” Back in August of 1981, the public solidly supported Reagan’s “reaction to the PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization).” He fired the controllers, and banned the government from ever rehiring them.

WE ARE DOOMED.

Here are Reagan’s memorable remarks on the air traffic controllers’ strike. Note this president’s clear reference to the burden the oink sector imposes on its fellow citizen; notice his allusion to the government’s monopolist position. Reagan was capable of clearly articulating the principles of freedom, and, in this case, he also acted on these principles.

Fire Wisconsin’s government employees.

The CBOafs And Tax Cuts

Debt, Economy, Political Economy, Private Property, Reason, Taxation, The State

The prediction of the CBOafs (The Congressional Budget Oafs) with respect to the “cost” of tax cuts is only as good as their premise, which is faulty. That premise is that property stolen by the state from its rightful owners (taxpayers) will be used to pay down the debt and the deficit incurred by the same band of brigands.

And CBOafs will fly. (Apologies, by the way, to bandits for comparing them to government officials. As one libertarian wag once pointed out, highway robbers are fairer and more benevolent than government, because they rob you once, usually, and then leave you be.)

As the Congressional Budget Office warned today, “Last month’s bipartisan tax cut legislation will drive the government’s deficit to a record $1.5 trillion this year.” (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/01/26/federal-deficit-hit-trillion-budget-office-projects/)

In logic, a conclusion can be correct and untrue at once. The debt will go up—not because of tax cuts, but despite of them.

No matter how much these highway robbers take from the creators of wealth, the debts they incur will only go up. The lesson? Money is always safest with those who make it.

Politicians Pair Off For Their Big Night (Not Ours)

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Democrats, Ethics, Government, Politics, Republicans, Ron Paul, The State

Care about principles? Then the only time you want your representative to reach across the aisle is to grab a Democrat or an errant Republican by the throat. What about sitting together at the biggest “Stalinist extravaganza” (http://barelyablog.com/?p=33815) of the season, the State of the Union Address? “More than 60 members have signed up to sit next to one of their colleagues from a different party,” reports CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/25/brazile.congress.sit.together/index.html?hpt=T2). Reporters are giggling and cooing over who’s dating whom. I could not care less about the seating silliness. Let the statists play at symbolism. It’s a matter of time before tea partiers, bar the Pauls, slip between the sheets with their big-spending profligate pals.

Watch the formations—the twosomes and the threesomes into which the pols pair. That ought to tell you something about future alliances.

UPDATE III: State of the Union: a ‘Disgusting Spectacle’ (Derb: Defeatist or Realist?)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Democrats, English, History, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Literature, Politics, Propaganda, Reason, Republicans, Technology, The State, The Zeitgeist

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution required that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the state of Union.” Like everything in the Constitution, a modest thing has morphed into a monstrosity.

A “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’ …) sensibility,” is how National Review’s John Derbyshire describes the State of the Union speech. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derb in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” a book I discussed in “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed'” (http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=580).

John goes on to furnish the quotidian details of how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. “On the podium at last, the president offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators” (p. 45).

Then there is the display of “Lenny Skutniks” in the audience, “model citizens chosen in order to represent some quality the president will call on us to admire and emulate” (this year it’ll be the family of the little girl who was murdered by the Tucson shooter).

Derb analyzes this monarchical, contrived tradition against the backdrop of the steady inflation of the presidential office, and a trend “away from ‘prose’ to ‘poetry’; away from substantive argument to “hot air.”

The president of the USA is now “pontiff, in touch with Divinity, to be addressed like the Almighty.”

Prepare to puke. The antidote is “WE ARE DOOMED.”

UPDATE I (Jan 25.): Robert, have you even read “WE ARE DOOMED”? Derb is a paleo-libertarian and a bloody good writer at that.

UPDATE II (Jan. 26): Derb: Defeatist or Realist? Van Wijk: I did not know you were among the happy faced, cheery conservatives who eschew reality and insist that the band of fools plays on, as the Titanic goes down.

Almost all of Derb’s misery making factual survey of America, in We Are Doomed, is correct (bar his biological determinism, which is supposed to sunder free will, but is not convincing). In fact, it mirrors a lot of what I’ve said and written (why, I’m cited in the book vis-a-vis Robert Putnum). There is no getting out from under:

1) Crippling government debt

2) The layers of crap culture and cultural products (literally: did you know that the MOMA, or its British equivalent, stores bodily waste in hundreds of vials produced as art?)

3) Perverted intellectual and moral standards

4) Crops of affirmatively appointed leaders, in all fields of endeavor, which will be with us for decades, if not longer, because of (1) and (2), among other reasons.

What’s your problem with that (Derb’s) rational, reality based conclusion—an analysis effected over the years in these (my own) pixelated pages?

Isn’t it clear that freedom and mass society—unfettered democracy, mass immigration mainly of voracious tax consumers with a visceral hatred for the history and historical majority of this country, on and on—cannot coexist?

It does not mean that one doesn’t continue to fight (I do), but it’s a losing proposition. Talented, industrious, taxpayers—doing highly skilled work—will become less numerous and more burdened with the years. This shrinking tax-base will be working to keep the voracious racial Idiocracy, represented faithfully by the political and intellectual class, in the style to which they have become accustomed.

(As aside: My source in one of America’s most lauded corporations, brilliant in his performance and intellectual leadership, is forever being told to develop his sorry “emotional intelligence”—even given books about this crap—as he solves the most complex of technical and logical problems. Why? because the manly, forceful, algorithmic iteration of facts, without dissolving into tears and embracing the intellectually halt and lame and dysfunctional around you: that is BAD. Men like that are not dismissed, because few can replace them. But they are cornered and cowed. Wanna tell me that a society that disempowers and subdues talent will survive?)

Isn’t it idiotic to attack the messenger, Derb? In any case, I’m glad you don’t attack me for advancing a similar message for years.

UPDATE III: To the letter about his alleged taste in poetry, Derb has provided some references in the Comments sections below. What about Louis MacNeice? I’m a poetry primitive, but I quite liked MacNeice.