Doug: Consider what seems to be brewing in the Tea Party movement. It’s just a straw in the wind, of no real significance itself, but a foreshadowing of something ominous. All the false hope this Tea Party movement is creating impresses me as similar to what was going on in France in the late 1780s…

L: I think I can guess, but why do you say that? As much as you dislike the government, isn’t it a good thing that so many people are finally fed up with it and at long last are showing signs of willingness to throw the bums out?

Doug: Well, you know I don’t like making predictions, so I’m not prepared to say that it’s a terrible thing, but it’s at least a double-edged sword. Of course it’s nice to see that there are people out there who are unhappy with the status quo, with the so-called two-party system, and with the Republican party in particular. But the process of “throwing the bums out” has gone on since Day One, and it’s accomplished absolutely nothing. The system itself has degraded hugely. And more than ever before, government draws the absolute worst type of people and totally corrupts those who might be decent. That’s because government is so overwhelmingly powerful today.

L: Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. But why the Republicans in particular? Isn’t the stupid party as bad as the evil party?

Doug: As you know, I’ve always distinguished them this way: the Democrats definitely don’t believe in economic freedom, but they say they believe in social freedom, while the Republicans definitely don’t believe in social freedom, but they say they believe in economic freedom. Neither believes in both – that would make them libertarians.

L: [Chuckles] So, it’s what they lie about that really distinguishes them. Or, more to the point, it’s not what they believe, or say they believe, that drives them, but what they don’t believe. Not what they value, but what they fear. It’s not love but hate that is the guiding principle of American politics.

Doug: Exactly. Like most of what we see in politics, it’s completely perverse. The only good thing about the Democratic party is that they’re at least consistent: they are collectivists and statists through and through. They are collectivists in what they say, and they are collectivists in what they do. That gives them the appearance of being more honest than the Republicans.

L: They may be crypto-communists draped in red, white, and blue, but at least they’re consistent?

Doug: Yes, but not the Republicans. They say they value freedom and the individual, but their actions give lie to those claims, and they give freedom a bad name. It makes you reluctant to use words like “free market,” when you have the likes of the hostile and mildly demented McCain, and the bent and clinically stupid Bush claiming those principles for what they do.

L: Makes me mad. It adds insult to injury that Ronald Reagan got elected on essentially libertarian rhetoric – smaller government, lower taxes, getting the state off the little guy’s back, etc., and the signed appropriations bills that saw government grow by huge, then-unprecedented amounts. Many people today think the Reagan years prove that less government is a bad idea!

Doug: Remember what the Reagan team used to say, “If not us, who? And if not now, when?” As it turned out, it wasn’t them and it wasn’t then. The worst enemies of individual liberty are knaves that claim they’re for it but utterly betray it. And incompetents and ineffectual fools who say they’re trying to save freedom by increasing the size of the state.

L: Alas for Bartleby the scrivener. Okay, so back to the Tea Party, a sort of rebellion on the right, could this not push the center of debate in the right direction? A little?

Doug: It might, just as buying a $1 lottery ticket might make someone a zillionaire. The French Revolution also probably seemed like a good idea at the time, if only because it wanted to overthrow a totally corrupt ancien régime.

The problem with the Tea Party movement is that it has no underlying philosophical basis. Without that sound foundation, it’s either going to fail or transform into something really ugly. On average, Tea Party members know something is wrong. They’re disgruntled, and they want change. Not the Obama type of change – but what? You just don’t know which direction they may go, and there are some very disturbing directions they could end up taking.

L: Such as?

Doug: They tend to be thoughtless and reflexive. They conflate some muddled feelings of “tradition” with an actual belief system. They operate on a stimulus-response basis. They’re religious in exactly the same way as fundamentalist Muslims. And they’re hypernationalistic.

“My country, right or wrong.” “Support our troops.” That sounds good, until you realize they’re just a bunch of heavily armed kids who are blindly doing what they’re told in some fly-blown place they can’t even find on a map. The Germans supported their troops when they invaded Poland. “Us” against “them.” Wave the flag. That sort of thing. It’s like a gigantic replay of the Milgram experiment. It’s just another dramatization of collectivism and jingoism.

L: The one that really gets me, and not just from Americans but from people all around the world, is: “My country, right or wrong!” That means you’re willing to support what you know is wrong. It’s pathological.

Doug: And a complete abnegation of individual responsibility. It’s almost a Pavlovian stimulus-response type of reaction, more appropriate to chimpanzees around a watering hole than rational humans who can think things out for themselves.

The very strong, atavistic, religious streak to Tea Party types is a related danger. Glenn Beck is one of their standard-bearers. He’s always admonishing people to do things because God wants them to. That’s potentially very problematical – which god? Yahweh? Allah? Probably not Thor or Baal – but maybe it’s Jesus. What would Jesus do if he were in the CIA in Afghanistan? What does Glenn Beck think the Holy Ghost would advise? So many people claim to know what their gods want everyone to do, and if a god commands you to do something, I suppose you have no choice in the matter. But they can’t all be right.

L: Unless you happen to be Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Then you have a phone on your desk that gives you a direct line to God. Like the Bat Phone in Commissioner Gordon’s office. It lights up when God calls. Beep, beep, beep…

Doug: Or like that other guy… was it Oral Roberts who said he’d had a vision of an 800-foot-tall Jesus who said that if someone didn’t give him $8 million, he was going to die? There’s very little difference in the mindset of the average Christian and the average Muslim. Each side sees the other as dangerous, fanatical, and misguided – and they can both be right about that. Things haven’t changed much since the days of the Crusades.

L: I remember hearing about Roberts – but there were so many TV-preacher scandals. And to heap insult upon injury, Jesus himself reserved some of his harshest words for hypocrites. To engage in the hypocrisy of preying on your own flock, in his name, is about as low as you can go.

Doug: I should make clear here that I’m not trying to make fun of religion, per se. I understand that when people are looking for some type of spiritual reality, they are hoping to find something that makes their lives more meaningful than a dog’s, or a chimpanzee’s… and that’s laudable. But parroting some demagogue’s aberrant thoughts or blindly following words written in a book don’t impress me as paths to enlightenment.

I’m not trying to invalidate any person’s beliefs. I’m simply trying to get them to take individual responsibility and not fall into group-think.

L: Like Mark Twain or Robert Heinlein, it’s not religion itself I’ve got a problem with but the big churches, which are human organizations run by fallible human beings, that I often have a lot of problems with.

Doug: Yes. I’m well known for being an atheist, but I’m actually quite sympathetic to looking for spiritual truth; there’s no conflict whatsoever there. I’m all for it – I just haven’t found any proof for any religion that I can accept, and I don’t accept things just because “it’s been written,” nor because everybody else does. I don’t want to delude myself. Just because something may sound comforting doesn’t mean it’s true.

But that’s all a digression. The point is that it’s not just religion but a willingness to use the state to impose religious values on society that I’m afraid is a big element in the Tea Party movement. It can be fine for people to have personal values derived from their religions, but these people are coming together to look for political solutions to every real and imagined problem facing America today.

The fact that they are looking for political solutions to these problems is, itself, a formula for disaster. If they are successful, they will pass laws. And maybe, accidentally, some of those laws might do some good—

L: [laughs]

Doug: —but most of them are going to be just like the laws being passed now: arbitrary, ill-informed, misguided, symptomatic of group-think, and ultimately destructive. They are simply legal manifestations of the psychological aberrations of the politicians who enact them.

L: Weakening the separation of church and state.

Doug: Exactly. If you view religion as the quest for a spiritual reality, I have no problem with it. But, very unfortunately, whether in Christendom or the world of Islam, in reality it amounts to thought control and enforced morality. There’s a real strain of “old time religion” in the Tea Party movement. I don’t think the men who signed the Declaration of Independence would approve.

And that’s not all; there’s also a bit of a class problem brewing in the Tea Party pot. To use an admittedly broad and somewhat nebulous short-hand, we can say there’s still a visible lower, middle, and upper class in America today.

The problem with the lower class is that their emotional level varies between desperation and apathy. Both are destructive forces, really bad. It’s why most members of the lower classes are cemented there.

And the upper class, their problem is a poisonous mix of arrogance, greed, and delusions of superiority.

I’m a fan of the middle class, made as it is of people who want to work hard, create and run businesses, move up in life, and so forth. When a country doesn’t have a middle class, it’s in trouble. So, it’s a good thing.

But, entirely apart from the fact the U.S. is rapidly losing its middle class – which is another huge problem – the American middle class today has a dark underbelly, and that is a deep and driving fear. For one thing, fear of losing what they have; that’s a fear that’s going to grow like a cancer as the Greater Depression gets worse. For another, fear of outsiders – Mexicans and Muslims, for example. They fear anything that may challenge or change their culture. Fear is the lowest common denominator of the middle class.

The Tea Party is a middle-class movement that channels this fear into the political arena – and politics always caters to the lowest common denominator. Fear is very dangerous, it can have all kinds of very nasty results. Fear causes people to act irrationally.

L: And fear is most dangerous when combined with its ugly twin, ignorance.

Doug: The result is self-serving myopia, of which there is plenty in the Tea Party movement. They want to cut spending – but not for their Social Security benefits. They want less government – but they want the government to protect or “create” jobs. They want to close the borders – forgetting that we’re all immigrants. They want a “strong national defense” – but they forget that fear has turned the U.S. into a paranoid “national security” state.

The bottom line is that the Tea Party is just a hodgepodge of discontent and grumbling. Tinged with some inchoate rage around the edges. It stands for nothing. It’s simply a reaction.

L: No bright side?

Doug: Well, it has caused a reaction in the Republican Party, where most of these people came from, which is starting to realize that they could be hurt badly by this division…

L: They could be outflanked on the right.

Doug: Exactly. So they’ve come up with a new “Pledge to America,” which echoes that ridiculous “Contract with America” that the Republicans came up with in 1994.

L: We sued to call that the “Contract on America.”

Doug: I’ve read it, and it’s the most stupid political blather that you could ever imagine. The 1994 Contract was basically meaningless and unenforceable verbiage. It centered on making technical changes in the way Congress was run. Its net result was zero. Its lasting effect is that things are much worse today and destructive policies much more ingrained.

L: I just googled the new one, and here are the actual pledges:

• We pledge to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers and honor the original intent of those precepts that have been consistently ignored – particularly the Tenth Amendment, which grants that all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

• We pledge to advance policies that promote greater liberty, wider opportunity, a robust defense, and national economic prosperity.

• We pledge to honor families, traditional marriage, life, and the private and faith-based organizations that form the core of our American values.

• We pledge to make government more transparent in its actions, careful in its stewardship, and honest in its dealings.

• We pledge to uphold the purpose and promise of a better America, knowing that to whom much is given, much is expected and that the blessings of our liberty buoy the hopes of mankind.

“To whom much is given, much is expected” – sounds like the communist dictum of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Doug: It may be worth deconstructing both the “Contract” and the “Pledge” in another conversation. But while the Pledge pushes a few gratifying hot buttons, it’s essentially wishful thinking. And outright lies. It’s as I’ve been saying, a mixture of religion, fear, and atavism.

The first one about the Constitution (which is a flawed document but defines a much better government than the one America suffers under today) sounds like a step in the right direction. But remember, these are Republicans – a bunch of unprincipled, shameless liars motivated only to feather their own nests. You can’t believe anything they say. At least you can believe the Democrats: they overtly promise to collectivize the U.S., and you can trust them to work hard in that direction.

L: Even Reagan, the great orator who might actually have believed some of what he said, couldn’t get the GOP to deliver on their promises. What chance do these Tea Partiers have of forcing the Republicans to do what they say they will do – if that can even be defined meaningfully?

Doug: Slim and none, and Slim’s out of town.

L: So, in sum, it’s a good thing that people are finally getting pissed off enough to rise up, at least a little, but being against something bad doesn’t make you for something good.

Doug: It’s as laughable as the fascists being against the communists. And this isn’t the first time. Remember the Constitution Party? I think it still exists, but it’s been an abject failure, because, I think, all they really had was a name that sounded good. They had no principles and didn’t even understand the original Constitution has been interpreted out of existence. The Libertarian Party, too, I have to say, seems to have lost its internal gyroscope. They want to be big and successful now, hooking up with mainstream names like Bob Barr. It’s basically a bunch of losers and wannabes.

L: So much for “the party of principle.”

Doug: This is inherent in politics. Unfortunately, there are no political solutions to political problems.

L: Rent seeking pretty much precludes that. But let’s back up a minute. You said earlier, somewhat tongue in cheek, that a successful Tea Party might accidentally enact some laws with positive consequences. I would guess, for example, that a lot of them are hard-money advocates. If they could actually gain the upper hand or become the swing-vote that forces the Republicans to accept some of their demands, they might get the dollar put back on the gold standard. That’d be a big step in the right direction, wouldn’t it?

Doug: That’s possible, but the only way we can make progress, at this point, is not by passing more laws – even ones you and I might think are marginally good ideas – but by repealing the laws that have already been passed. That would allow the free market to correct the economic distortions all these years of government meddling have created, as it should.

The problem, fundamentally, is that people keep on looking to the government to solve their problems. So they come up with a new party or a new movement, and they propose new laws. This is not just the wrong approach, but the exact opposite of the right approach. The only way to get back on the right track is to undo the expansion of government and interference in the economy we’ve seen over the last 100-plus years. Repeal the laws, abolish the agencies. Get rid of it all, and free to the market to administer its harsh but effective treatments.

Instead, these people just want new and different laws. The prognosis is not good.

L: But… that never happens. Well, George Washington could have been king, and I’ll always respect the fact that he declined, and the government still got larger. Leviathan never willingly relinquishes power.

Doug: No, it doesn’t. It’s exactly analogous to a cancer. That’s why I keep saying that things will get worse than even I think they will. If we have a conversation on this subject a year from now, I expect we’ll be in the midst of real crisis and chaos such as few Americans can even imagine today.

L: Heavy stuff again, Doug. If America is beyond the point of no return, as you say, the whole world economy is in it up to its neck as well. And the investment implications…

Doug: As I’ve said before: liquidate, consolidate, speculate, and create.

L: And diversify your political risk.

Doug: Definitely. It’s well past time to prepare for the day when you’ll need to get out of Dodge, fast.

L: Well… thanks for another sobering assessment.

Doug: You’re welcome. It may not be pleasant to face the facts sometimes, but they are still facts; you either face them or face the consequences of ignoring them.

Doug Casey and Louis James
Whiskey & Gunpowder

November 1, 2010

Doug Casey on the Tea Party Movement was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

It’s no surprise that politicians hear only what they want to hear, but the Democrats take a new world indoor record for tone-deafness into the election. As the year opened with real unemployment at double-digit levels, all the President and the Democrat establishment could think about was passing Obamacare. They may be proud that they stayed on message, never mind that for most people a health care plan starts with a job and some savings.

With polls suggesting Republicans are set to re-take the House, it looks like the Democrats have a glass jaw to go along with that tin ear. And while scattered tea party victories gave the Republican establishment the thrashing it so richly deserved, the bad news is that none of it matters to our financial prospects. At least that’s the message from the gold market.

Who can disagree? Unless you think that Republicans will want to go into the next election cycle having taken on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlements, there is not much hope that they will do anything meaningful about fiscal policy. Announced on September 23, the Republican Pledge to America promised to save “at least $100 billion in the first year alone.” $100 billion a year? They can’t be serious. By the end of September, just a week later, the federal debt had already grown by another $100 billion.Of course Republicans will tinker with the hated Obamacare just enough to deliver up some form of Boehner-care. Sorry, but the chance to earn lobbyist affection and future campaign contributions trumps any thoughts about simply facing up to federal insolvency and getting government out of health care.

Some real money could be saved rolling back the American empire. Congressman Ron Paul and others calculate total war and foreign spending at about $1 trillion a year. In this context, a return of the Republicans reminds us of Talleyrand’s comment on the Bourbon dynasty that returned to the throne of France after the abdication of Napoleon: They “had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Republicans seemed to have learned nothing and forgotten everything. Betraying a hubris not seen since Bush set off to “rid the world of evil,” the pledge from November’s likely winners includes “bringing certainty to an uncertain world.” Republicans do take their military Keynesianism seriously. Just months ago Republican congressmen came together to support President Obama’s surge in Afghanistan with a $59 billion emergency spending bill. Now they are campaigning about a “robust defense,” one category of spending that even the new members from the tea parties aren’t inclined to resist.

On the monetary front, Federal Reserve officials, having forgotten at least the French Revolution and probably the 1970’s as well, are counting on inflation to kick start economic growth. Money printing is the Fed’s old time religion, but at least they are going to the trouble of bottling it under new names: liquidity operations, deficit accommodating, and quantitative easing.When chairman Bernanke said something euphemistic last week about “additional purchases,” gold shot up again, joined by silver and oil. And the dollar moved decisively lower. It’s now down 12 percent since June, resuming its long-term slide. Markets are said to be pretty good at discounting future events. Haven’t they heard that the fiscal conservatives will re-take Washington?

It is clear that the rest of the world is similarly unimpressed by Fed euphemisms or the dollar’s prospects, no matter who wins. Like the picnic ramada at the park where people take cover for a while when it begins to rain, investors take cover with the dollar briefly during a crisis. They did so in the 2008 mortgage meltdown and again during the Euro debt crisis. But like a ramada, nobody wants to live there. Or wait out a really bad storm.

Where does one weather a currency crisis? Take a look around. Reuters reported this week on a Swiss private banker who handles clients with at least $50 million to invest that they are buying gold, sometimes by the ton, and moving it out of the financial system. According to the Financial Times, JPMorgan, having recently built a vault in Singapore, has reopened an underground gold vault in New York, while Deutsche Bank and Barclays may be opening new vaults in London. India illustrates the trend: investment demand in India has grown to 92.5 tons in the first six months of this year, compared to 25.4 tons a year earlier; this time last year India’s central bank lightened its dollar reserves substantially, taking down 200 tons of gold in one move. They aren’t alone. Central banks around the world, long net sellers of gold reserves, have become buyers, among them China and Russia. Gold keeps making new all-time highs. And it doesn’t seem to care about the Republican’s prospects this fall.

Regards,
Charles Goyette
TheDollarMeltdown.com
Whiskey & Gunpowder

October 18, 2010

Gold Cares Nothing About U.S. Elections was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

When President Bush took office, the government was running a budget surplus and was on its way to paying off the national debt. Tax cuts, war in Iraq, the biggest new health program since the 1960s, a Wall Street bailout and a raft of spending increases wiped away the surpluses, creating a $400 billion deficit by Bush’s last year in office.

Yet Republicans, adopting a Who, me? approach, have managed to convince an increasingly angry populist uprising that it was Democrats who got us here.

President Obama’s policies certainly deserve scrutiny. The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl figures Obama’s stimulus program, proposed health legislation, and other initiatives would add trillions more to the public debt.

But if the Tea Party movement believes the GOP is the champion of fiscal restraint, it is ignoring the history of the last decade.

In retrospect, it is clear that the Sept. 29, 2008 House vote rejecting the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street marked a political turning point — a new grassroots politics — that culminated in last week’s stunning upset of the Democratic candidate in Massachusetts Senate race.

Republicans have brilliantly succeeded in hanging the bailout albatross around the neck of Obama. What has largely been forgotten is that a third of House Republicans and virtually all the party leadership favored the bailout and fought for a second vote that would, finally, approve the controversial $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

It was Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson who (literally) got down on his knees at the White House and begged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to try again.

Paulson was backed by Minority Leader John Boehner, who said on the House floor: “If I didn’t think we were on the brink of an economic disaster, it would be the easiest thing to say no to this.”

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, put it even more bluntly: “There are no other choices. No alternatives.”

Republican support for TARP was in tune with eight years of profligate GOP spending.

Earmarks for home-state projects exploded. War and the expansion of the American military might into Eastern Europe and the Middle East doubled the Pentagon’s budget.

Bush-era Republicans scrapped “paygo,” a budget device adopted earlier with strong Democratic support, that required new spending to be offset either by spending cuts elsewhere or with new taxes. That enabled the GOP to push through a new Medicare prescription benefit for 41 million Americans without one nickel of the costs being offset elsewhere in the budget.

By contrast, Republicans have hounded Democrats for the cost of health care legislation that would, at least on paper, be paid for with spending trims and new revenues.

(Democrats restored paygo after taking back the House and Senate in the 2006 mid-term elections, forcing a measure of fiscal restraint on themselves.)

That is all largely forgotten now. Republicans have skillfully exploited populist rage while Democrats have reaped the political whirlwind. After sweeping to power the Obama administration forgot all about the stunning Sept. 29, 2008, House vote, the first harbinger of the coming populist wave.

Instead of making reform of Wall Street his signature issue — a move that might have given him cover with independents who are now in firm control of U.S. elections — Obama turned to health care.

Democrats should not be surprised by the political turn of events. American voters have short memory spans.

Regards,
Dan Morgan

January 29, 2010

Big Government Republicans was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

If you have a house which is falling down from termites, has a leaky roof, iron plumbing, stopped up septic tank, or whatever, and you approach a home insurance company, wanting full coverage for your house, and they say “you’ve got to be kidding,” should the D.C. Gang force the insurance company to issue you a homeowners policy? If you never cut your grass, never paint, never shovel snow off your sidewalk, and your neighbors consider you a menace, would any insurance company issue you a policy? Both Dems and Repubs might want big daddy government to force them to issue it, assuming the health care thing goes into effect. Why not throw pre-existing conditions out the window for home coverage?

Currently, there are scads of auto mechanical insurance policies advertising on the TV channels. If you have a true clunker which knocks, smokes, and leaks, would you expect an insurance company to issue you a policy? If the health care proposal for no pre-existing conditions considerations, why not for cars too?

If you were an alcoholic, with dozens of DUI’s, and a host of traffic accidents charged to you, would any insurance company issue you any coverage for any price, if they had their head screwed on correctly? If no pre-existing conditions can keep a health insurance company from insuring your health, why not force insurance companies to insure your driving habits, regardless of the risks?

Insurance companies as well as all businesses are in it to make a profit, and that’s the way it should be.

If you need a loan and go to a bank, shouldn’t they check your credit rating? If you have a credit rating of 100, have defaulted on lots of loans in the past, have no savings, your credit cards have been revoked, and there are tens of thousands of dollars still owed on them, would a banker loan you a quarter if he was in his right mind? If insurance companies can’t use pre-existing conditions to deny you health coverage, why not force the banks to loan you money, regardless of your credit rating?

If the Dems and Repubs have their way, along with Obama, and you have advanced cancer, Hodgkin’s, melanoma, kidney failure, or whatever, they want insurance companies to have no choice but have to insure you. In other words, by law or bureaucracy, the D.C. Gang in both parties wants to insure the death of insurance companies.

It seems to this amateur, that if you have a serious, incurable disease, or severe health condition which either can’t be fixed, or to fix it would cost several hundred thousand dollars, an insurance company wouldn’t really be interested in covering you for a hundred bucks a month. One of my best friends is in such bad health that he has cost his medical insurance company probably a million dollars already, and he is still living with myriad health problems. Bud is probably 150 pounds overweight, has never cared for himself, smoked for decades, has very high blood pressure, and did tons of drugs, in addition to being diabetic and having had several heart attacks. He is still covered because unless he misses a payment, his insurance can’t be cancelled. Believe me, he’ll never miss a payment! His insurance company is on the hook with a certain loser, but when he took out the policy, the insurance company thought him to be a fair risk.  They were wrong, and are paying for it.

Denying pre-existing conditions as an excuse for not issuing a health policy, sounds just wonderful to the un-thinking boobs who occupy those offices on Capitol Hill. Do they ever really THINK?

Actuaries are in business to do risk assessment for insurance companies. They go over statistics, figures, probabilities, and risks. If the Demos and Repubs have their way, you can forget actuaries, because the D.C. Gang will force insurance companies out of business. The point is, once again, that both parties have destroyed America with stupidity, greed, and that ever-present ego governing us, when we need laws only to protect us from our enemies, and not ourselves. With every vote over the last 75 years, it seems as though each vote drove another nail in our collective coffins. The Tea Parties have plainly demonstrated that we have had enough of both parties, and we should throw them both out with a couple of exceptions. The Democrats are worse than the Republicans, I’ll admit, but there are far too many office holders who haven’t a grain of common sense, and I have had enough of both of them. I am no longer proud to be a registered Republican, but have not yet re-registered as an independent. Local Republicans are fine.

Regards,
Don Stott

September 11, 2009

Pre-Existing Conditions? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

It’s not because I’m a computer wizard (far from it), nor is it because I’m addicted to video games involving animated fighting of fantasy creatures. It isn’t because I’m a champion Dungeons & Dragons player, a widely published author of Lord of the Rings fan fiction, or because I drive some little electric roller skate of a car — although this one thing alone would qualify me…

It’s because every year in January, I watch the State of the Union address, instead of the NFL playoffs.

All right, so maybe I am a dork.

But since an informal personal poll in my group of like-aged friends showed that I’m one of only a few that watched the speech in real time (not including my colleagues in the publishing world, of course), that makes me a dork who’s at least somewhat in touch with the American political process…

And as troubling as it may be that a lot of American 30-somethings seemingly aren’t paying much attention to the goings-on of our political machine (clearly, they aren’t — look at how sporadically they vote), it’s nowhere near as troubling as what was in the State of the Union address itself — and what wasn’t.

Statists of the Union

Along with most of America, my feelings about George Dubya have been pretty wobbly of late. Not that they were ever as cheerleader-ish as many of my critics would claim…

However, I’ll admit there have been moments when the man’s, uhh, uncomplicated leadership has loaned a much-needed singularity of vision to certain political endeavors, in my opinion. His was the opposite of Carter’s “analysis to paralysis” style — and a refreshing change from Clinton’s finger-to-the-wind, ask-the-wife-first, what-they-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-’em method of governance.

I say “was” because Bush has clearly morphed — like most modern lame-duck American politicians — into a shapeless, spineless entity more worried about his legacy than his country. Borrowing a page from the Democrats’ playbook, Bush has tailored his rhetoric and agenda toward not principles or leadership, but appeasement and capitulation to those in power, and a more favorable depiction among those who write tomorrow’s accounts of today’s history…

Seriously, all partisanship aside (literally — I’m feeling like a man without a party these days), I want those of you reading this who actually watched the State of the Union address to ask yourselves this question:

If you somehow didn’t know that George W. Bush was a Republican president, could you have figured it out by what he said in his speech?

I’ll tell you right now that I couldn’t have, at least not by any of the yardsticks the GOP likes to claim as its own. Aside from a token bit of nebulous rhetoric about erasing the deficit and balancing the federal budget — laughable coming from the mouth of what has to be one of the biggest-spending, government-bloating presidents in history — many of Bush’s talking points sounded like some of Bill Clinton’s, and Al Gore’s, from various speeches during their tenure…

Only not as well (or even as convincingly) articulated.

That’s one of the main reasons I’m writing this rambling discourse today: Because I’m alarmed at the fact that the rhetoric of the two dominant political parties in the U.S. today seems always to inexorably blend together when there’s a balance of power between them in our government — like a pair of amoebas mating…

Actually, I’m not alarmed. That’s what they do, politicians. They test the wind, kiss each other’s butts, line each other’s pockets, and then tell us what they think we want to hear while telling each other whatever pays them the most. And we all know it. What’s worse, we’ve all grown to expect and accept it. What disgusts me about it is that they all tell the same lies, just at different times — yet ALWAYS toward the same goal: a bigger and more intrusive government.

In this respect, at least across the span of the election and reign of the current administration, the Democrats are far less deceptive than their Republican rivals. Though they try to understate it in election years, most times, the left makes little effort to conceal its desire to expand government — they see it as the cure to all our ills. The GOP, however, rides to power on the votes of millions of Americans who cling naively to the hope that it is the “smaller government” party it claims to be…

Then it legislates and spends us into the governmental equivalent of a diabetic coma too!

And in this State of the Union speech, I heard not only the same old lies in frilly, updated verse, but also a whole pack of new ones that I find so brazen and absurd I can’t stay quiet about them. Here are just a few of the low spots, for me…

The Speech As Spin

Aside from being one of the least meaty State of the Union addresses I can remember, Bush 43′s latest effort rung throughout with a kind of desperation, in my opinion — not the desperate will to persevere in policy leadership against newly empowered political adversaries, but the need to simply be a relevant part of changing policies that are well beyond his control.

Though well delivered (for him), the speech smacked more of issue ownership than initiative. In other words, the status-quo “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality that so frequently pervades two-party American politics. A few examples…

SPENDING

Dubya spoke with conviction about a return to “spending discipline” in government. But does this mean “spending cuts”? Because I didn’t hear much in the speech about what programs, entitlements, or benefits are in line to get the ax. In the address, Bush never makes the promise to actually trim any spending at all. Instead, he appears to be relying on future tax revenues computed from his own rosy economic forecasts to eliminate the federal deficit and balance the budget — without raising taxes.

Yet in the real world of an ever-older American citizenry coupled with a draining invasion of parasitic illegal immigrants (from a free benefits standpoint), his pledge to restrain the spending appetite of the federal government seems contradictory to his stated desire to “fix” Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid with nothing more than “good sense and goodwill.” Again, without raising taxes.

It takes MONEY to bail out these programs. That means other programs have to go or revenue has to increase. Simple as that. Since Bush seems unwilling to do anything but expand programs and entitlements (not to mention tax cuts), where is this money going to come from? Especially in time of war?

Let me be clear: I’m all for tax cuts. They worked to stimulate the economy in Kennedy’s era (he was a fiscal conservative, you know), during the Reagan years, and have arguably worked in the current administration. But how overheated would our economy have to get to sustain tax cuts AND new programs AND a massive benefits bailout AND an expensive war?

Is a boom of such scope even possible, never mind likely? More importantly, were it to occur, would the government REALLY be able to resist the urge to fritter away all that shiny new money squaring the books, instead of on a bunch of programs aimed at increasing your dependence on them?

Uhh, no.

IMMIGRATION

In keeping with Bush’s tone-deafness toward those who got him into office, his plans to double the size of the Border Patrol and to fund “new infrastructure and technology” run contrary to what the American people want — on both sides of the political fence (but especially on the right). A Rasmussen poll in 2005 revealed that more than 60% of Americans favored the construction of a barrier along our nation’s southern border. Surveys closer to the election pegged this number at as much as 80%. Candidates from both parties promised strong action on illegal immigration in the run-up to the 2006 midterm election, with the border fence an oft-mentioned solution…

Yet here we are, talking about the same old stuff. Increasing the Border Patrol. “Guest worker” programs. Employer accountability. These things all expand the scope and reach of government, and increase spending in all the wrong ways — yet do nothing to curb the influx and cost of illegals who come here not for work, but for the free benefits and instant citizenship status for their babies.

To be fair about it, BOTH parties want the illegal tide to continue unabated. The Republicans want it for cheap labor for businesses and the Democrats want it to expand dependency on government, which translates into votes.

But think about it: If ever there were an opportunity for Bush and the Republicans to redeem themselves in the eyes of the people, it’s with this issue.

The GOP already knows that most Americans want the fence. It’s far cheaper and more reliable than expanding the Border Patrol, and people know it. You’d think that even if Bush doesn’t want the fence in his big-business heart of hearts, he would at least aggressively push for it rhetorically to make the Democrats show their true colors by shooting it down…

But NO, he’s got to roll over into the great wishy-washy middle ground that inevitably prevails for both parties. Meanwhile, we pay out ever more in benefits to illegals, lose ever more in taxes from under-the-table wage paying, and STILL live with the most lax border security imaginable!

GAS

Here’s a gem: Bush is going to cut U.S. gasoline consumption by 20% in 10 years. Did you see Cheney’s expression in the background as the Prez unleashed this one? Was that a smirk I saw?

Yeah, this’ll happen. Our country’s population is exploding exponentially. Air travel is such a god-awful pain in the ass that people are driving more for vacations. Cities are expanding into greater and greater sprawl, so commuting distances are getting longer and longer…

Aside from this, “hybrid” gas-electric vehicles aren’t proving as fuel-efficient as they’re touted to be (look this up — it’s true). Ethanol takes more energy to produce than it saves and is a bona-fide nonstarter, as almost any of my Agora Financial comrades can tell you. Hydrogen “fuel cells” are potentially decades off — if manufacturers can work out the safety, range, and supply issues. And although rechargeable electric cars may someday indeed curb gas usage, they would increase consumption of air-polluting coal for electricity generation, not to mention present environmental challenges from this battery disposal.

Basically, this is nothing more than an attempt at issue control. The Republicans know that rank-and-file Americans (especially tomorrow’s voters) are turning greener, and are against dependence on Middle East oil — yet they’re also unwilling to tolerate ramping up domestic oil production…

So they try to rebrand themselves as being on the cutting edge of conservationist policies t A) garner future votes, B) steal some of the opposition’s core thunder, and C) be able to blame a Democrat Congress when this ridiculous proposal fails.

It’s just more of the same type of typical political rhetorical game-playing that marks the Republocrat party that’s perennially running things.

Small Gov Snubbed Forever?

I’m usually pretty good about putting a “bottom line” on these missives, but today I haven’t really got one. I just wanted to vent a bit about the mealy-mouthed, double-tongued nature of two-party American politics, as revealed by the latest State of the Union address — not that this one is so unique in the modern age. And of course, there’s a lot more I could say about the speech to buttress my points (health insurance, the war, etc.), but you already get my drift…

That all American political rhetoric is a crock of crap we’ve come to accept without outrage — and that the two parties are basically dedicated to the same insidious goal of governmental expansion. The fact that they marginally disagree about how best to do this is immaterial.

Basically, the frustrating bottom line for me is this: Not that this would even be possible, but in order for this country to once again have a true two-party parity of ideas, there’d almost have to be a viable THIRD party in the mix (are you listening, Libertarians?). In my opinion, the Republicans are too far gone to reverse course and become the smaller-government “yin” to the Democrats’ “yang.” They’ve sipped from the fountain of big government and found that it was sweet…

Now, the two parties are only truly distinct from one another at their fringes. For the most part, neither is dedicated to preserving our freedoms (perish the thought!) or protecting our citizenry — only extracting the most money out of us to sustain the greatest possible dependency on government.

And at this, they should be toasting each other to their great and continuing success.

Wishing for a State of Disunion,

Jim Amrhein,
Contributing Editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

January 30, 2007

Where’s the Party? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.