Reminder: They’re Republikeynesians

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

Carl Rove on “Hannity” paraphrased: The Democrats’ stimulus was all stupid spending, there was nothing stimulating about it.

The premise of this stupid refrain, repeated again and again by GOPiers, is that there is a smart, economically stimulating way for the state to spend money to stimulate the economy.

Each and every Republikeynesian heard on cable will refute not the idea that government is able to create jobs out of funds it forcibly removes from the private economy or by printing paper in the basement of the Fed. The beef the likes of the incredibly dim Dana Parino, Newt, Dick, Carl et. al., will invariably voice is: The Dems didn’t apply the stolen funds the way one ought to have; the way we would have.

“How much to hand-out; who to hand it to; which hand-out makes the best use of taxpayer money … that’s the depth of the ‘philosophical’ to-be-or-not-to-be among Republikeynsians.”—ILANA (December 5, 2008)

Just thought thought I ought to remind you that they are all rotten Republikeynesians.

UPDATED (7/31/020): Beck Bad-mouths Byrd, RIP

Democrats, Glenn Beck, Race, Racism, Republicans, States' Rights, The South, War

It looks like Glenn Beck is positioning himself as a right-wing racial policeman to rival the Sharpton and Jackson reign of terror. Today, Beck badmouthed the late Robert Byrd, one of the last principled, old-style Democrats, making sure that his listeners were aware of the old Byrd’s clan membership way back in the 1940s or 1950s.

Byrd was an old Southern gentleman after whom Republicans have always chased for his past peccadilloes. Intellectually honest souls that they are, Republicans would attack Byrd’s present policy positions by citing his distant-past indiscretions. Pretty much how Beck played it today.

Most recently, Byrd (D-W.Va.), “a stern constitutional scholar who has always stood up for the legislative branch in its role in checking the power of the White House,” warned about Obama’s executive-branch power grab.

According to Politico, “Byrd complained about Obama’s decision to create White House offices on health reform, urban affairs policy, and energy and climate change. Byrd said such positions ‘can threaten the Constitutional system of checks and balances. At the worst, White House staff have taken direction and control of programmatic areas that are the statutory responsibility of Senate-confirmed officials.'”

Last year, Sen. Byrd issued this warning regarding the procedural shenanigans the Democrats tried to deploy to pass the healthscare bill:

“I oppose using the budget reconciliation process to pass health care reform and climate change legislation…. As one of the authors of the reconciliation process, I can tell you that the ironclad parliamentary procedures it authorizes were never intended for this purpose.”

The frail senator had taken to the floor of the United States Senate on October 14, 2009, “to discuss the situation in Afghanistan and voice his concerns over the possibility of a major increase in U.S. forces into Afghanistan”:

“General McChrystal, our current military commander in Afghanistan, has requested 30,000-40,000 additional American troops to bolster the more than 65,000 American troops already there. I am not clear as to his reasons and I have many, many questions. What does General McChrystal actually aim to achieve?” “So I am compelled to ask: does it really, really take 100,000 U.S. troops to find Osama bin Laden?”

Perhaps if Republicans adopted Byrd’s skepticism of war for the sake of war, and rediscovered authentic Taft Republicanism—they might even deserve to win the next election.

Here Sen. Byrd is at his finest:

RIP Robert Byrd, you were sui generis.

As for Beck: as if the nation does not already feed on fiction, Beck, aided by one David Barton, has been busily breathing life into—and developing—a fanciful idea: America had black Founding Fathers. A racist society and its schooling have stopped this truth from percolating down to your kids. Glenn to the rescue.

UPDATE: The footage is not yet online (or I haven’t been able to find it), but Beck also singled out Byrd for opposing the Civil Rights Act, the same tack Democrats took with Rand Paul recently.

I would not have expected anything less from Byrd. As I wrote when Rand was being lynched, “It has never occurred to me that for the reasoning advanced in these posts, I could be construed as a racist. Respectable scholars advance the same arguments: Richard A. Epstein, Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England, 1995), and Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom: The Story of How Through The Centuries Private Ownership has Promoted Liberty and the Rule of Law (New York, 2000).

Beck’s litmus test for racism is as rigorous as Shaka Zulu’s sniff test for witches.

UPDATED (7/31/020): Anti-war all the way.

Life, Liberty and Property Stronger (State Rights, Not So Much)

Constitution, Federalism, GUNS, Individual Rights, Natural Law, States' Rights

As someone who doesn’t believe the Constitution gave the government the right to enforce the Bill of Rights in the states, the Supreme Court’s latest gun-rights decision presents with the usual dilemma. The SCOTUS has decided that “the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms applies to every jurisdiction in the country – throwing doubt on a Chicago law that bans handguns in the home.”

Still, and overall, the ruling will revive the eroded, immutable right to defend life, liberty and property. (The title of John Lott’s op-ed encapsulates exactly that: “Court’s Gun Decision An Important Win for Americans Who Want to Defend Themselves.”) This is a war. Progressives have left little of the original Constitutional scheme. A victory for natural rights in the rights-violating society we inhabit is a good thing. The good guys won. A toast to the patriots who fought the good fight: a besieged black man from Chicago and his lawyer.

Johnny-Come-Krugman Diagnoses Depression

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

Austrians like myself have long been calling this “recession” a depression. My WND colleague Vox Day wrote a book explaining why this economic downturn is a depression—the worst we’ve seen so far because of unprecedented levels of household and government debt. Now Paul Krugman, whose Keynesian voodoo I discussed in “Obama To G-20: Print More Money, Don’t Make It,” has, finally, diagnosed a depression.

This dangerous moron, however, believes depressions are caused by lack of spending—dips in demand must be compensated for by massive state spending, or else. That’s Keynesianism in a nut shell. Of course, be it on the macro or micro level, debt = decline + decay

HERE crazy Krug condemns the “resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy”:

“…this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.”

[SNIP]

Fans of Vox Day: write to our friend and urge him to write-up answers to the interview I sent him weeks back pursuant to reading the copy of “The Return of The Great Depression” he mailed me. Change the questions if you don’t like them, VD, respond to the Krug news; do what you like with my text, just get to it.