UPDATED (6/9): What Larry Kudlow & Stephen Moore Are Hiding About Bush & Housing Bubble

Bush, Hillary Clinton, Private Property, Regulation, Republicans

George W. Bush did his share to bring about the housing bubble, and Stephen Moore, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, knows it. Moore wrote a book he’d like us to forget: “Bullish on Bush: How the Ownership Society Is Making America Richer” (2004). “Bullish” got one and a half stars on Amazon and it had almost no takers. Moore and Larry Kudlow have no business obfuscating about Number 43’s enthusiasm for giving credit to those who were not creditworthy.

Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush’s first chief economics adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Mr. Bush meet housing goals. “No one wanted to stop that bubble,” Mr. Lindsey said. “It would have conflicted with the president’s own policies.”

The two’s article, “Are the Clintons the Real Housing-Crash Villains?”, offers only a veiled allusion to the shared Clinton-Bush blame for the housing bubble:

There was plenty of blame to go around among both political parties and the horde of housing lobbyists who helped set up this real estate house of cards. It’s a sordid story. And the Fannie/Freddie chapter is still not solved. It now includes profit-sweeping from shareholders to the government, thereby ending any chance to sell the mortgage agencies back to the private sector.

But not a word about Bush II. And no mea culpa from Moore for his zeal for Bush’s phony “ownership society.”

UPDATE (6/9/016):

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The Statist Mindset Of ‘Libertarians’ Garry Johnson & William Weld

Donald Trump, Law, libertarianism, Nationhood, Rights, The State, War

Gary Johnson and his sidekick William Weld, Libertarian Party goofballs, are running for president and VP, respectively. The two fulminated to CNN’s Victor Blackwell against Donald Trump. From the libertarian perspective, though, their mindset was much more statist and deferential to state structures than Trump’s.

Weld, in particular, went over the various policies Trump was proposing, voicing objections to each that were thoroughly statist.

WELD: Some of the stuff that he’s running on I think is absolutely chaotic. I’m going to do this to Mexico. OK, that’s a violation of the North American Free Trade agreement, which is the supreme law of the land. It is a treaty. We signed it. I’ll do this to China. No questions asked. OK, that’s a violation of the World Trade Organization rules [which good libertarians despise], exposing us, the United States, to sanctions. And we would be the rogue nation. I don’t think we want to be the rogue nation. You know? Let’s let North Korea be the rogue nation, not us.

Trump can’t do what he proposes because he’ll be in violation of this or the other agreement between states, national and international, which Weld treats as holy writ.

Not to real libertarians. The idea of radical freedom is to dissolve the chains with which others have bound us. Smashing or refashioning these agreements and reclaiming national, state and individual sovereignty, as Trump proposes, is more libertarian than the queasiness these two evince at such actions.

Johnson and Weld objected to Trump’s proposals on the statist grounds that renegotiating agreements or optimizing them for Americans would violate agreements that by their nature sideline the American people.

You don’t get more un-libertarian than that. Then there’s the viva Hiroshima attitude:

How The Cult of The Kid Is Making America Not Great

China, Communism, Education, Family, Morality

“How the Cult of the Kid Is Making America Not Great” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

There were likely no kids on board EgyptAir Flight 804 that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea, on May 19. Had there been kids on board, we’d be hearing about it a LOT.

Of the 224 people on board the Russian metro jet airbus—it crashed in March—17 were children. I know this because each time TV anchors reported about the plane that went down in the Sinai desert, near El Arish (once way safer because under Israeli control); they counted the kids.

Is the death of a child more of a loss than the death of an adult? Apparently so. Adult lives matter less.

The hallmark of an infantile even immoral society is the deification of The Child. Not for nothing did the Communist slave societies place kids in control of their parents. This is how one inverts the moral order, also the aim of Communism’s leaders.

The feral kids took to killing their elders like the proverbial ducks to water. It’s all in “The Black Book of Communism: CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESSION,” published by Harvard University Press, written by the finest scholars to survive Communism. The BBOC should be compulsory reading for every Bernie Sanders supporter—for every American, once Bill O’Reilly “preps” the text for popular consumption.

Where the mini-Communists killed their Confucian-minded elders—they did so absent any remorse or angst. For kids are naturally feral and liberal. They want nothing more than more privileges, more license and lenience; fewer demands for obedience, chores and hard work. This every parent knows firsthand.

In “The Death of the Grown-Up,” author Diana West contended that “America’s arrested development is bringing down Western Civilization.” Certainly, a moral society must be a hierarchical society, one in which adults guide children until they’re capable of governing themselves.

But first, adults have to be adults. And they’re not.

Take the parent who declared, as a DRUDGE headline blared, that his “Eight-Year-Old Son’s iPad Addiction Is As Real As Alcoholism, Drug Abuse.”

The editorial so titled was published on a large website. In line with the prevailing anti-intellectual childishness, public writing has turned into public advocacy. Conjure and cultivate a malady, share it with the world, and—abracadabra!—you’re a hero. In any event, you don’t need to read this flaccid folderol to know the following:

* It’s the fault of the parent that little snot is addicted not to books or to outdoor ball games, but to gadgets.
* Who gave sonny boy the gadget? The parent did! Take the iPad away.
* Stop paying for your kids’ cell phones and assorted hand-held devices. (It costs a fortune!)

We survived without them. If the kid needs to contact crazy-in-love parent urgently, he or she can go to the principal’s office. It’ll give Kid an opportunity to practice a few civilizing skills you’ve refrained from imparting, lest manners mess with his élan: …

Read the rest. “How the Cult of the Kid Is Making America Not Great” is now on The Unz Review. “Share” and “Like” it on social media.

AND, if you’d like to feature the Unz Review’s “Paleolibertarian Perspective” on your website, please email me at ilana@ilanamercer.com.

TRUMP @ 1238 Says ‘Market Forces Are Beautiful’ & Other Lovely Things

Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Economy, Elections, Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Regulation, Republicans

Twenty eight minutes and 27 seconds into this YouTube of his press conference in Bismarck, North Dakota, Donald Trump emerged to take questions: He has reached and surpassed the 1237 delegate threshold. Behind him stand “the folks, delegates, who got him over the top.”

Trump sounded masterful—and mirthful. If only he put on this hat all the time:

* About Obama badmouthing Trump at the G-7 summit: “It’s good, although Obama used a business term, rattled, and he known nothing about business. It’s good that world leaders are “rattled” by him, Trump. As for Obama’s assessment of his, Trump’s, ignorance, basically who’s he to talk? “Obama has done a horrible job. He’s got to say something. Every time he has a news conference he talks about Trump. Obama has not done a good job; we’re divided, we have tremendous difficulties.”
* VP: We are not going to pander and get a woman or minority just for show. We’ll have women involved, as we do now, but “we’re looking for absolute competence.”
* Hillary: No I don’t want her out of the race.


I want to have her in the race. The report is devastating. She’s skirting on the edge. This is her history of bad judgement. I love watching Hillary fight. She can’t close the deal.
* Message to Suzanna Martinez. Nothing much.
* The HuffingtonPost; I don’t read it. Do they cover politics?
* Muslim ban: We’ll look at the solutions. (As of this moment, the ban, it would seem, stands.)
* I’d love to debate Bernie Sanders … for charity. The problem with debating Sanders is that he is going to lose the nomination, as the system is rigged.
* Debating process: We’re not debaters, we businessmen; we put people to work. We businessmen don’t talk, we do.
* Regulating energy: The Federal government should get out of the way. They’ve put the coalmines out of business—which is what Hillary has promised. Energy independence and exporting energy is what Trump promises. Coal can be restored, if regulations are reduced. All I can, says Trump, is free-up coal and let the market work. Market forces are a beautiful thing.
* Give the people of the US a piece of the profits from the Keystone Pipeline and other such projects.
* Lower taxes are key to economic vitality. America is over-regulated. Regulation is even more of a problem than taxes, which will go down.
* About Elizabeth Warren aka …


* On first-day duties: Trump will be “unwinding various executive orders,” not least the ones affecting the porous border on the country’s Southwest.
* Intends to make use of the Republican campaign-infrastructure machine.
* “I won’t forget Indiana.”
* Fracking and our feathered friends: Bernie will ban it; Hillary will ban it. We’re going to open it up. Solar is expensive. It has a 30-year payback. And it’s killing all the eagles in California, one of the most beautiful and treasured of our birds.
* Blessed be the Farmers.
* Accursed is the New York Times, which doesn’t need Donald’s help in discrediting itself.

So what if Trump forgot to bless the cheese-makers: