A Budget Cut In D.C. Doublespeak (I.E., Bowel-Speak)

Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Government, Taxation, The State

Tom DiLorenzo (he’s a friend) on D.C. bowel-speak:

In Washingtonese, if one proposes a $100 billion spending increase, and actual spending increases by “only” $90 billion, they call it a $10 billion budget cut.

And on the Washington Monument Syndrome game, via LRC.com:

The game is this: Whenever a politician is “threatened” with a minor slowdown in spending, the first thing to do is to eliminate police, firefighters, ambulance services, school buses, etc. — everything that inflicts the maximum discomfort on the victims of the government monopoly (a.k.a., taxpayers). The booboisie then wake up from their American Idol stupor for a moment to raise a fuss, and the proposals to slow down spending growth disappear. (It’s called the “Washington Monument Syndrome” because the head of the National Park Service shut down the Washington Monument in the ’60s in response to Congress’s temporary refusal to fund his complete spending wish list. Tourists from every state complained to their congressmen, and the Park Service wish list was fully funded).

Rand Paul: Political Performance Artist, Or Action Hero?

Economy, Government, libertarianism, Liberty, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Ron Paul, The State

The purist in me recoils at Sen. Rand Paul’s latest political performance art. As Glenn Beck reports, the senator from Kentucky “took the $500,000 in savings he had from running a frugal, cost-efficient office and returned it to the treasury.”

“Hey, Senator Paul, wait a minute. You know better,” I want to shout. “That money you’ve returned to Treasury in a grand gesture doesn’t belong there, it belongs to taxpayers. Why stuff stolen goods down the maw of the federal beast, into which scarce resources only ever disappear without trace, and where everything is fungible? Rand’s $500,000 could be directed into the domestic drone program. See what I’m saying? The principles absolutist in me rejects many of Rand’s gestures. On the other hand, what American doesn’t like an action hero?! I like Rand Paul’s energy.

The question: Is this Randian energy or Brownian Motion?

Rand Paul is front-and-center in media, showing what some people like to call “leadership,” a contemptible phrase, I know. The libertarian Paul is a pragmatist, whereas his father, Ron Paul, is an idealist.

So far, I’ve been critical of Rand’s compromises, but perhaps he deserves more support? After all, have I not condemned the sin of abstraction we libertarians tend to commit, writing against the libertarian “specimen that has nothing to say about policy and politics for fear of compromising precious libertarian purity”?

Suspended as he is in the arid arena of pure thought, this species of libertarian will settle for nothing other than the immediate and absolute application and acceptance of the non-aggression axiomatic ideal. And since utopia will never be upon us, he opts to live in perpetual sin: THE SIN OF ABSTRACTION.

Ambition no doubt has a lot to do with Rand Paul’s positions, but, boy, is he a doer. The question is, is he doing the right things?

Here’s Paul putting in a good performance over the sequester nonsense:

PAUL …for goodness sakes, it was [Obama’s] proposal. He proposed the sequester. It was his idea. He signed it into law, and now he’s going to tell us that, oh, it’s all our fault?
I voted against the sequester because I didn’t think it was enough. The sequester cuts the rate of growth of the spending, but the sequester doesn’t even really begin to cut spending, which we have to do or we are going to get a credit downgrade, another credit downgrade.
BLITZER: So you don’t think that the $85 billion this year, that would be the forced cuts this year, from your perspective, that’s not enough?
PAUL: It’s a pittance. I mean, it’s a slowdown in the rate of growth. There are no real cuts happening over 10 years.
Over 10 years, the budget will still grow $7 trillion to $8 trillion. He added $6 trillion to the debt in his first term. He’s on course to add another $4 trillion to $6 trillion in his second term. So, really, this is just really nibbling at the edges, and he’s saying, oh, it’s some dramatic thing where all of a sudden it’s still the rich’s fault.
Didn’t he already raise taxes on the rich? I’m having trouble even understanding what he’s talking about because he sets up this rhetoric and this sort of game of let’s go get the rich again that really is divorced from any reality. It’s his sequester we’re talking about, his bill.

Blade Runner Killing And The Media Blackout

Celebrity, Crime, Democracy, Race, Racism, South-Africa

“Blade Runner Killing And The Media Blackout” is the current column, now on WND:

“After decades of indifference from America’s infotainment industry, imagine my surprise to hear TV anchors like Megyn Kelly of Fox News allude to the killing fields of South Africa.

South Africa should be in the news every day. It isn’t. Scant few among the West’s Yellow Press care to chronicle the country’s favorite blood sport: murder. The Afrikaners, in particular—arguably that country’s founding people—are being killed off at genocidal rates with nary a murmur from the media—although the same crowd is on the scene to report on Nelson Mandela’s every wheelchair-bound move.

According to Genocide Watch, South Africa under the African National Congress is now at stage 5 of the 8 stages of Genocide. However, were it not for a little-known, heroic Internet journalist (cited in ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa’), few would know who the victims of this racial onslaught are and how they die.

Soon jurist Alan Dershowitz was chiming in about ‘how dangerous’ life in South Africa was. Dershowitz even denigrated the country’s judiciary as ‘a very politically correct judiciary,’ ‘filled with people from the ANC and supporters of the ANC’; most certainly ‘not one of the finer judiciaries in the world.’

A subject that had been submerged since 1994—the ramshackle state of post-apartheid South Africa—was suddenly being raised, if in veiled terms.

The reason for the heightened awareness among the criminally comatose is Blade Runner Oscar Pistorius’ run-in with the law. The Olympian amputee killed his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp, in what he contends was a case of mistaken identity. …”

The complete column is “Blade Runner Killing And The Media Blackout,” now on WND.

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Updated: The Oink Sector Is Always Seen (‘A Decrease In the Spending Increase’)

Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Government, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, The State, War, Welfare

“The art of economics,” wrote Henry Hazlitt, “consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” Hazlitt was encapsulating Bastiat’s What-Is-Seen-and-What-Is-Not-Seen principle.

“Flanked by emergency medical personnel,” write the editors at the WSJ, “Mr. Obama made his usual threat of Armageddon if automatic spending cuts go forward on March 1. Americans can expect more such melodrama in the coming days, so as a public service we thought we’d break down the President’s three biggest political tricks.”

Members of the “oink sector” were front and center in Obama’s show. What you didn’t see were the many private-sector suckers who work to fund the wealth consuming sponger sector, members of which were on show. What you didn’t see were the unemployed in the private sector, who are displaced because of the growth of government.

Think zero-sum, or parasite vs. host. The first (the parasite) is sucking the lifeblood of the second (the host). The larger the parasite gets, the weaker the host will grow.

UPDATED (2/22): “What a bunch of Keynesians,” writes the Fox News column “Power Play” about … the Republicans. Now that’s progress. (Fox News is usually a megaphone for the GOP.)

So here sit Republicans, teeth clenched, gripping their desks, waiting for the “devastating” cuts to explode the economy and just hoping that Obama will get some of the blame for having invented the thing. They are assuming that $85 billion less spent by the government will cause devastation in an economy of some $16 trillion.

The sequester, as everyone knows, “was …the brainchild of Team Obama.” It is nothing more than a “decrease in the increase in spending,” another good way to describe the “crippling reductions [Obama] says will result from the government spending only $15 billion more this year than last year.”