Stephen Colbert on Kim Jong-il

Kim Jong-il in Memoriam.

Free to Choose

I have been watching these fascinating videos featuring Milton Friedman. The videos begin with a short piece on the economy by Milton Friedman, and then end in a debate on the issues in the Chicago Library. The debates at the end are the most interesting, with Friedman responding to their questions and accusations.

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist, statistician, academic, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. He was a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Among scholars, he is best known for his theoretical and empirical research, especially consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.

Part 1: The Power of the Market

Part 2: The Tyranny of Control

Part 3: The Anatomy of a Crisis

Part 4: From the Cradle to the Grave

Part 5: Created Equal

Part 6: What’s Wrong with Our Schools

Part 7: Who Protects the Consumer

Part 8: Who Protects the Worker

Part 9: How to Cure Inflation

Part 10: How to Stay Free

Douthat on Ron Paul

Here are Ross Douthat’s comments on Ron Paul:

But consider a third possibility. There’s often a fine line between a madman and a prophet. Perhaps Paul has emerged as a teller of some important truths precisely because in many ways he’s still as far out there as ever.

The United States is living through an era of unprecedented elite failure, in which America’s public institutions are understandably distrusted and our leadership class is justifiably despised. Yet politicians of both parties are required, by the demands of partisanship, to embrace the convenient lie that our problem can be pinned exclusively on the other side’s elites — as though both liberals and conservatives hadn’t participated in the decisions that dug our current hole.

In this climate, it sometimes takes a fearless crank to expose realities that neither Republicans nor Democrats are particularly eager to acknowledge.

In both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, Paul has been the only figure willing to point out the deep continuities in American politics — the way social spending grows and overseas commitments multiply no matter which party is in power, the revolving doors that connect K Street to Congress and Wall Street to the White House, the long list of dubious policies and programs that both sides tacitly support. In both election cycles, his honest extremism has sometimes cut closer to the heart of our national predicament than the calculating partisanship of his more grounded rivals. He sometimes rants, but he rarely spins — and he’s one of the few figures on the national stage who says “a plague on both your houses!” and actually means it.

Obviously it would be better for the country if this message weren’t freighted with Paul’s noxious baggage, and entangled with his many implausible ideas. But would it be better off without his presence entirely? I’m not so sure.

Neither prophets nor madmen should be elected to the presidency. But neither can they safely be ignored.

Steyn on the GOP

Mark Steyn shares his thoughts on the GOP race.

 

Jay Nordlinger comments on GOP debate

Jay Nordlinger has some scribbles on the GOP debate in Sioux City, Iowa. Some funny, some serious. Here are the highlights:

• Ron Paul’s supporters give him a huge cheer of welcome. Virtually a roar. He makes an unlikely gladiator, doesn’t he?

• Um, President Obama will not agree to seven three-hour debates. He is not a moron.

• Holy moly, is Megyn Kelly pretty. I guess people don’t watch Fox News for nothing.

• Don’t think I’ve ever seen Megyn — Megan, Meghan — spelled that way.

• Ron Paul says that “probably anybody up here can beat Obama.” So not true.

• Paul describes his foreign policy as “pro-American.” Oh, is that what it is? Then Ronald Reagan’s, which was the antithesis of Paul’s, must have been anti-American.

• When Michele or someone else says something bad about Newt, Newt gives the moderator a look and a grin that says, “Okay, my turn in a minute . . .”

• Megyn Kelly looks like she wants to school Newt Gingrich in the Constitution — balance of powers and all that. I’m thinking, “Big mistake. Newt is not really schoolable in the Constitution.”

• People try to school Romney on his record in Massachusetts. They never really get it done. He knows better than they.

• I have known many people in sports, politics, the arts, and other fields. Not sure I’ve ever come across a worse bragger than Rick Santorum. I have a feeling he’s unaware of what he does.

• Paul on al-Qaeda: Quit provoking them! If we leave ’em alone, they’ll leave us alone.

• It is irksome enough when Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky talks this way. A candidate for the Republican nomination for president?

• He says that we have “declared war on 1.2 billion Muslims.” Who has?

• Again, Paul says what the hard and crazy Left says. That’s fine for the hard and crazy Left. Do we need this talk in the Republican primaries?

• Bachmann breaks in to say, “I’m a serious candidate. My facts are accurate.” That sounds a little pathetic — the “I’m a serious candidate.” If you have to say it, are you?

Occupy Wall Street List of Demands

If this is typical (which it may not be) of the Occupy Wall Street Demands, then Mark Steyn is right. Welcome to the Armageddon. An example:

Demand four: Free college education.

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America’s nuclear power plants.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

I hope this person is 12 or under, never got an allowance, and was never able to even handle money.

I hope this is a joke.

Mark Steyn on the Wall Street Protestors | Or Do You Ever Want to Get Your iPhone from the DMV?

He writes:

Michael Oher, offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, was online on Wednesday night when his Twitter feed started filling up with tributes to Steve Jobs. A bewildered Oher tweeted: “Can somebody help me out? Who was Steve Jobs!”

He was on his iPhone at the time.

Who was Steve Jobs? Well, he was a guy who founded a corporation and spent his life as a corporate executive manufacturing corporate products. So he wouldn’t have endeared himself to the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, even though, underneath the patchouli and lentils, most of them are abundantly accessorized with iPhones and iPads and iPods loaded with iTunes, if only for when the drum circle goes for a bathroom break.

The above is a somewhat obvious point, although the fact that it’s not obvious even to protesters with an industrial-strength lack of self-awareness is a big part of the problem. But it goes beyond that: If you don’t like to think of Jobs as a corporate exec (and a famously demanding one at that), think of him as a guy who went to work, and worked hard. There’s no appetite for that among those “occupying” Zuccotti Park. In the old days, the tribunes of the masses demanded an honest wage for honest work. Today, the tribunes of America’s leisured varsity class demand a world that puts “people before profits.” If the specifics of their “program” are somewhat contradictory, the general vibe is consistent: They wish to enjoy an advanced Western lifestyle without earning an advanced Western living. The pampered, elderly children of a fin de civilisation overdeveloped world, they appear to regard life as an unending vacation whose bill never comes due.

He concludes brilliantly:

If you’ll forgive a plug for my latest sell-out to my corporate masters, in my new book I quote H. G. Wells’s Victorian Time Traveler after encountering far in the future the soft, effete Eloi: “These people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metalwork. Somehow such things must be made.” And yet he saw “no workshops” or sign of any industry at all. “They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept going.” The Time Traveler might have felt much the same upon landing in Liberty Square in the early 21st century, except for the bit about bathing: It’s increasingly hard in America to “see how things are kept going,” but it’s pretty clear that the members of “Occupy Wall Street” have no plans to contribute to keeping things going. Like Michael Oher using his iPhone to announce his ignorance of Steve Jobs, in the autumn of the republic the beneficiaries of American innovation seem not only utterly disconnected from but actively contemptuous of the world that sustains their comforts.

Why did Steve Jobs do so much of his innovating in computers? Well, obviously, because that’s what got his juices going. But it’s also the case that, because it was a virtually non-existent industry until he came along, it’s about the one area of American life that hasn’t been regulated into sclerosis by the statist behemoth. So Apple and other companies were free to be as corporate as they wanted, and we’re the better off for it. The stunted, inarticulate spawn of America’s educrat monopoly want a world of fewer corporations and lots more government. If their “demands” for a $20 minimum wage and a trillion dollars of spending in “ecological restoration” and all the rest are ever met, there will be a massive expansion of state monopoly power. Would you like to get your iPhone from the DMV? That’s your “American Autumn”: an America that constrains the next Steve Jobs but bigs up Van Jones. Underneath the familiar props of radical chic that hasn’t been either radical or chic in half a century, the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement are a paradox too ludicrous even for the malign alumni of a desultory half-decade of Complacency Studies:

They’re anarchists for Big Government. Do it for the children, the Democrats like to say. They’re the children we did it for, and, if this is the best they can do, they’re done for.

Herman Cain Responds To A Question At a Rally

Roasted.

Bleak America, and Perhaps, a Bright Future

Related to the last post, Jimmie Bise reviews Mark Steyn’s newest book After America: Get Ready for Armageddon and Marybeth Hick’s Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left’s Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom.

He says:

The pair of books from Regnery Publishing are not, I warn you, for the faint of heart. Neither Steyn nor Hicks are out to make themselves look good for a television appearance nor are they running for office. They are not cheap hacks out to score an easy best-seller. They are skilled writers who have delved into the current cultural and political lay of the land and found hard truths. So here’s your warning. If you’re given to the sort of melancholy that drives you to black nail polish and Morrissey albums, you may not want to tackle both within a month of each other. However, if you can take the hard medicine that Steyn and Hicks serve up, tablespoon by unrelenting tablespoon, you will be better off than when you started.

I decided to write about these books together because they tackle, at a different level, the very real malady that has struck our country. While Steyn’s book diagnoses, in stark and unflinching detail, the cultural cancer that continues to eat away at the vitals of America, Hicks’ book zeroes in on how the left spreads that cancer cell by cell.

The premise of Steyn’s book is simple: what has befallen Europe over the past several decades is happening to America right now…

Hicks narrows the focus to our children and the daily relentless efforts by determined individuals on the left to turn them away from the traditional values that underpin the American identity. The fight against the cultural cancer spread by the malignant left goes on every day in schools and on playgrounds, in the movie theater and on radio stations.

The President’s Deficit Plan

Here is something you probably already know, but still worth acknowledging. From Ross Douthat:

Last week, in the wake of President Obama’s jobs speech, I wrote that the president seemed poised to campaign for re-election on an essentially centrist policy agenda: A short-term payroll tax stimulus, a plan for tax reform that would close loopholes while lowering corporate rates, and a long-term plan for deficit reduction modeled on the grand bargain that the White House and John Boehner were supposedly close to striking during the debt ceiling negotiations. The president’s goal in 2012, I suggested, would be to try to paint himself as the moderate bipartisan grownup, and dismiss the Republicans as extreme, intransigent, and hyper-ideological.

Based on the actual details of the deficit plan that the administration just released, though, I would like to retract that analysis. Between the size, scope and design of the tax increases and the skimpiness of the entitlement reforms (nothing on Social Security, minimal tinkering on Medicare), it seems that the president will be running for re-election as Nancy Pelosi instead. The White House is essentially proposing to raise taxes on the wealthy (and only the wealthy) in not one but three different ways — higher rates, fewer deductions, and the so-called Warren Buffett tax on millionaires who draw most their income from capital gains — in order to keep our entitlement system almost exactly as it is. Or, more aptly, in order keep our entitlement system almost exactly as it is for a few extra years, since nothing in the proposal is commensurate with the size of our long-term fiscal gap.

One way to look at this is that the White House exhausted itself trying to reach a compromise with Republicans and has decided that there’s no point in making any concessions whatsoever if the other side won’t give an inch. (That’s the analysis that Ezra Klein offers today.) Another way to look at this — which I find somewhat more persuasive — is that for all his brave rhetoric about shared sacrifice and grand bargains and hard choices, when it comes to make actual, specific, detailed policy proposals, President Obama has always shied away from putting his name on anything that 1) acknowledges the actual scale of our deficit problem and 2) takes on his party’s interest groups in any meaningful way. So why should we expect his election-year proposals to be any different?

In either case, it looks like we have our campaign theme for Obama 2012: “Tax the rich, and Medicare forever.” Which means that if Rick Perry wins the Republican nomination, we’ll be set up for the starkest ideological collision in a presidential election since 1964. No doubt cable news executives are salivating at the prospect.

 

The Real Taliban

Paul Miller has an article explaining how calling fellow citizens “terrorists” or “Taliban” is despicable.

Vice President Joe Biden denounced Republicans in Congress as “terrorists.” Former Democratic Congressman Martin Frost labeled them the “Tea Party Taliban.” New York Times columnist Joe Nocera accused them of wearing “suicide vests” and waging “jihad” on America.

The exploitation of such labels for political gain is despicable, insulting, and wrong.

The United States is in the midst of a shooting war with actual Taliban, who have killed 1,306 Americans since 2001, and with actual suicide jihadists, who killed 2,977 people in New York and Washington in 2001, 33 in Bali in 2002, 202 in Casablanca and 35 in Riyadh in 2003, 191 in Madrid in 2004, and 52 in London in 2005, to say nothing of the tens of thousands slain by insurgents and terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Borrowing the fervor and moral authority of war-time rhetoric to demonize political opponents is disgraceful to those serving, wounded, and killed in actual war…

The only apparent similarity between American conservatives and the Taliban is that they believe things. Incidentally, so does most of the human race. However, they believe different things, and those different beliefs lead to greatly different actions. Republican beliefs in liberty, constitutional democracy, and limited government lead them to participate in elections and, once in office, work hard for their agenda. The Taliban’s convictions lead them to kill people. Calling Republicans “jihadists” because of their fervor is as silly as saying Woodrow Wilson was a “Progressive jihadist” because of the zeal with which he sought to regulate capitalism.

Equating “strong conviction” with “terrorism” is an old postmodernist trope that doesn’t hold water for the simple reason that it is impossible to get away from all ideas and beliefs completely. Most Democrats believe things too, often with great fervor, but that does not make them terrorists. In fact, having convictions, articulating reasons for them, and trying to persuade others of them through discussion and reason are basic prerequisite for democratic decision making. Apparently the Democrats’ preferred alternative is that their opponents not believe in anything, which would be convenient for Democrats.

To my knowledge, President Franklin Roosevelt never accused Republican critics of the New Deal of being Nazis. Roosevelt could tell the difference between enemies in war and political opponents at home, and did not blur the difference just to concoct a zinger of a talking point. That is because Roosevelt was a statesman.

 

Taxing the Rich

Thomas Sowell debunks the idea that taxing the rich will bring more money to the government.

Despite the widespread notion that raising tax rates automatically means collecting more revenue for the government, history says otherwise. As far back as the 1920s, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon pointed out that the government received a very similar amount of revenue from high-income earners at low tax rates as it did at tax rates several times as high.

How was that possible? Because high tax rates drive investors into tax shelters, such as tax-exempt bonds. Today, as a result of globalization and electronic transfers of money, “the rich” are even less likely to stand still and be sheared like sheep, when they can easily send their money overseas, to places where tax rates are lower.

Money sent overseas creates jobs overseas — and American workers cannot transfer themselves overseas to get those jobs as readily as investors can send their money there.

All the overheated political rhetoric about needing to tax “millionaires and billionaires” is not about bringing in more revenue to the government. It is about bringing in more votes for politicians who stir up class warfare with rhetoric.

Planless

This debate about the debt ceiling and spending cuts has been tremendously frustrating. The liberal media says Republicans won’t compromise, while Republicans are saying they have not seen a plan from the President (or Harry Reid). Mark Steyn writes:

Obama has done his best to pretend to take them seriously. He claimed to have a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. The court eunuchs of the press corps were impressed, and went off to file pieces hailing the president as “the grown-up in the room.” There is, in fact, no plan. No plan at all. No plan whatsoever, either for a deficit reduction of $4 trillion or $4.73. As is the way in Washington, merely announcing that he had a plan absolved him of the need to have one. So the president’s staff got out the extra-wide teleprompter and wrote a really large number on it, and simply by reading out the really large number the president was deemed to have produced a serious blueprint for trillions of dollars in savings. For his next trick, he’ll walk out on to the stage of Carnegie Hall, announce that he’s going to play Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 2, and, even though there’s no cello in sight and Obama immediately climbs back in his golf cart to head for the links, music critics will hail it as one of the most moving performances they’ve ever heard.

The only “plan” Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt.

How about Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader? Has he got a plan? No. The Democrat Senate has shown no interest in producing a budget for two-and-a-half years. Unlike the president, Senator Reid can’t even be bothered pretending he’s interested in spending reductions. But he is interested in spending, and, if that’s your bag, boring things like budgets only get in the way.

The president is said to be “the adult in the room” because he is reported to be in favor of raising the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.

By the year 2036.

If that’s the best offer, there isn’t going to be a 2036, not for America. As the Europeans are beginning to grasp, eventually “political reality” collides with real reality. The message from a delusional Washington these last weeks is that it won’t be a gentle bump.

It would be worth your time to take 14 minutes to watch Senator Rubio say the same thing.

Is There a Magic Lever for the Economy?

The following seems reasonable and sensible from David Brooks:

A group of bankers thought they had the magic tool to help them master financial trends and predict the future. Sophisticated risk assessment models would enable them to rewrite the rules and make more money…Democrats argued that through gigantic deficit spending, they could bring unemployment rates down sharply and produce a “summer of recovery.” Staunch Republicans argue that taxes are central to determining economic growth. Tax cuts, they argue, have huge positive benefits and tax increases have disastrous negative effects.

These three groups — bankers, Democratic Keynesians and staunch Republicans — have one thing in common: They all believe they have identified the magic lever. They believe they can control their economic fate.

Some of us do not believe there is a magic lever. Deficit spending stimulates growth, but not by that much. Tax increases are bad, but they are not disastrous. We believe that there are a thousand factors that go into economic growth, and no single one is dispositive.

We look at the tax cuts of 2001 and do not see tremendous gains. We look at the tax increase of 1982 and do not see a ruinous disaster. We look at high deficit eras and low deficit eras and do not see an easy correlation between deficit spending and growth. On the contrary, if you look around the world there’s a slight negative correlation between government size and prosperity.

We believe that if you rest everything on a single lever (Increase deficits! Cut taxes!), you give people a permission slip to be self-indulgent. They will spend or cut to their hearts’ content and soon you’ll be facing national bankruptcy. We believe that even if you are theoretically right, your policies will be distorted by human frailties and special interests.

The people in my group (you might call us conservatives) are more likely to embrace a low and steady approach to fiscal policy. Control debt. Control entitlements. Keep tax levels reasonable and the tax code simple. Work on the economic fundamentals: human capital, productivity, labor market flexibility, open trade, saving and investment. Don’t believe you can use magic levers to manipulate growth month to month.

People in my camp form a silent majority. But we have been astonishingly passive during these budget negotiations. The tax cut brigades and the Medicare/Spending brigades are well organized. The people who believe in balance and the fundamentals sit piously on the sidelines.

The tragedy is that in Barack Obama and John Boehner we have leaders who would like to do something big. They seem to know that you need bipartisan cover if you want to really cut spending. They seem to know circumstances for deficit reduction will only get worse in the years ahead.

But they are bracketed on all sides — by the tax cut and Medicare brigades, by the wonks hatching budget gimmicks that erode trust, by political hacks who don’t want to lose their precious campaign issues: tax cuts forever, Medicare spending without limit.

Mostly, they are buffeted by the proud, by those who think they have a magic lever to control human destiny and who will not compromise it away. This is the oldest story known to man.

Does the Constitution Still Matter?

The cover story for Time Magazine is on the Constitution of the United States. They ask the question whether the Constitution is under siege?

A new focus on the Constitution is at the center of our political stage with the rise of the Tea Party and its almost fanatical focus on the founding document. The new Republican Congress organized a reading of all 7,200 words of an amended version of the Constitution on the House floor to open its first session. As a counterpoint to the rise of constitutional originalists (those who believe the document should be interpreted only as the drafters understood it), liberal legal scholars analyze the text just as closely to find the elasticity they believe the framers intended. Everywhere there seems to be debate about the scope and meaning and message of the Constitution. This is a healthy thing. Even the framers would agree on that.

So, are we in a constitutional crisis? In a word, no. The Constitution was born in crisis. It was written in secret and in violation of the existing one, the Articles of Confederation, at a time when no one knew whether America would survive. The Constitution has never not been under threat. Benjamin Franklin was skeptical that it would work at all. Alexander Hamilton wondered whether Washington should be a king. Jefferson questioned the constitutionality of his own Louisiana Purchase. (Read about the cult of the Constitution.)

Today’s debates represent conflict, not crisis. Conflict is at the core of our politics, and the Constitution is designed to manage it. There have been few conflicts in American history greater than the internal debates the framers had about the Constitution. For better or for worse — and I would argue that it is for better — the Constitution allows and even encourages deep arguments about the most basic democratic issues. A crisis is when the Constitution breaks down. We’re not in danger of that.

Nor are we in danger of flipping the Constitution on its head, as some of the Tea Party faithful contend. Their view of the founding documents was pretty well summarized by Texas Congressman Ron Paul back in 2008: “The Constitution was written explicitly for one purpose — to restrain the federal government.” Well, not exactly. In fact, the framers did the precise opposite. They strengthened the center and weakened the states. The states had extraordinary power under the Articles of Confederation. Most of them had their own navies and their own currencies. The truth is, the Constitution massively strengthened the central government of the U.S. for the simple reason that it established one where none had existed before.

Richard Stengel does not hide where he stands on the issue the entire article and concludes:

There is an old Latin phrase, inter arma enim silent leges, which roughly translates as “in time of war, the Constitution is silent.” But it’s not just in times of war that the Constitution is silent. The Constitution is silent much of the time. And that’s a good thing. Two hundred twenty-three years after it was written, the Constitution is more a guardrail for our society than a traffic cop. The Constitution works so well precisely because it is so opaque, so general, so open to various interpretations. Originalists contend that the Constitution has a clear, fixed meaning. But the framers argued vehemently about its meaning. For them, it was a set of principles, not a code of laws. A code of laws says you have to stop at the red light; a constitution has broad principles that are unchanging but that must accommodate each new generation and circumstance. (See “How We See Immigration — and Why We’re Wrong.”)

We can pat ourselves on the back about the past 223 years, but we cannot let the Constitution become an obstacle to the U.S.’s moving into the future with a sensible health care system, a globalized economy, an evolving sense of civil and political rights. The Constitution, as Martin Luther King Jr. said in his great speech on the Mall, is a promissory note. That note had not been fulfilled for African Americans. But I would say the Constitution remains a promissory note, one in which “We the People” in each generation try to create that more perfect union.

A constitution in and of itself guarantees nothing. Bolshevik Russia had a constitution, as did Nazi Germany. Cuba and Libya have constitutions. A constitution must embody something that is in the hearts of the people. In the midst of World War II, the great judge Learned Hand gave a speech in New York City’s Central Park that came to be known as “The Spirit of Liberty.” It was a dark time, with freedom and liberty under threat in Europe. Hand noted that we are Americans by choice, not birth. That we are Americans precisely because we seek liberty and freedom — not only freedom from oppression but freedom of speech and belief and action. “What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty?” he asked. “I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”

The Constitution does not protect our spirit of liberty; our spirit of liberty protects the Constitution. The Constitution serves the nation; the nation does not serve the Constitution.

That’s what the framers would say.

Larry Elder of Townhall responds:

Time Magazine’s recent Constitution cover story asks: “Does It Still Matter?” Its answer? Well, yeah, it sort of does, but then again, you know, not so much. After all, the Founding Fathers could neither foresee computers nor Twitter nor predict that Rep. Anthony Weiner would use both to implode his career. So, really, in the modern day, what’s the relevance of the old document crafted by well-to-do, slave-owning white males?

Soon, the 50 percent of voters who pay little or no taxes will march into the polling booth, many pulling levers, pushing buttons and punching chads to vote themselves a raise — at somebody’s else’s expense. If the Supreme Court permits the ObamaCare mandate, anything goes.

Constitution-shredders point not to our bloated federal government, the entitlement mentality or to the desire of politicians on both sides to promise things that the Founders feared would eventually produce an electorate with little or no financial skin in the game. No, the real villain is the dastardly Bush tax cuts! If only they had not been enacted, they tell us!

Why not blame the tax cuts signed by other presidents? President John Kennedy’s plan reduced the top marginal income tax rate from 91 percent to 70 percent. President Ronald Reagan reduced the top marginal tax rate from 70 to 28 percent. President George W. Bush, by contrast, reduced the top rate from 39.6 to 35 percent, making him Scrooge-like in comparison.

The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” says the two Bush tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003, “cost” $2.8 trillion over 10 years (an average of $280 billion per year). In the last two and a half years alone, Obama has presided over the addition of almost $4 trillion in new debt, and this year’s deficit is an estimated $1.6 trillion.

Besides, liberals like the Bush tax cuts — at least for the lower 98 percent of workers. Since most Democrats want to preserve the Bush-era tax rates for all but the top 2 percent, the objectionable “cost” of the cuts becomes even more inconsequential to dealing with budget, deficit and debt problems.

So now what? We drifted away from the Constitution in fits and starts. It is how we must return to it. Voters must remember who talked the talk and walked the walk. This is a time when we change course, when people rediscover American exceptionalism and the wisdom of the Constitution and say, “Enough.”

If not, Greece awaits.

Why You Vote the Way You Do (or maybe one reason)

Under the classic model, you’d expect to find that people who valued equal opportunity would become Democrats and that people who valued limited government would become Republicans. In fact, you’re more likely to find that people become Democrats first, then place increasing value on equal opportunity, or they become Republicans first, then place increasing value on limited government. Party affiliation often shapes values, not the other way around.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (David Brooks)

 

A Political System Acknowledging Sinfulness

Although the Founding Fathers, too, were tempted by perfectionism , they strove manfully to design institutions proportionate not to angels or to saints but to sinners.

They did not try to construct utopia. They tried to check to limit vice, tyranny most of all, even tyranny in the name of morality and religion. They chose as their model citizen, for whom the system was designed, neither the saint nor the preacher, neither the hero of war nor the aristocrat, neither the poet nor the philosopher, neither the king nor the peasant, but the free man of property and commerce…

Every form of political economy necessarily begins (even if unconsciously) with a theory of sin. For every system is designed against something, as well as in favor of something…

The problem for a system of economy is how to unleash human creativity and productivity while coping realistically with human sinfulness. 

Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, 343, 350, 356.

Identify, Promote, and Support

Although the following speaks to political systems, I think the church could do a better job at following this advice. I have seen many churches let “talented/godly” men and women slip away. I have also seen churches who see a person who has talent/interests, and grab a hold of them and will not let them go. In this way, the church is helped by their talents, and the person is helped by being able to employ their talents.

Any society which does not promote and support its best natural leaders punishes itself and weakens its probabilities of survival and progress. In all fields, genius is rare and high talent is in relatively short supply. Any political economy which wishes to be as creative as possible must try to invent a system which permits persons of talent in all fields to discover their talents, to develop them, and to find the social positions in which their exercise bears maximal social fruit…It must reward performance and learn to seek out talent wherever it may be found. Such a system requires vital local communities which identify and promote talents  appearing in their midst.

Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, 85.

On Inequalities

Under democratic capitalism, inequalities of wealth and power are not considered evil in themselves. They are in tun with natural inequalities which everyone experiences every day. Nature itself has made human beings equal in dignity before God and one another. But it has not made them equal to one another in talent, personal energy, luck, motivation, and practical abilities. On the other hand, inequalities of every sort are potential sources of evil and abuse.

Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, 84.

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

The above is the title to Adam Smith’s 1776 work on economics. Michael Novak comments saying:

In inquiring into the causes of the wealth of nations, Smith discovered that societies equally rich in resources might through different systems achieve remarkably different outcomes. A system designed as closely as possible to fit human character, Smith argued, is best designed to unleash human creativity. The key to the wealth of nations lies in human creativity more than any other source. The key to that lies in the “natural system of liberty.”

Adam Smith believed that he had glimpsed an important secret in the way the world works. The best way to try to understand it is not from top down, but from the bottom up, along the fullest extent of its base in individual citizens.

The main thrust of Smith’s argument is that markets as free as possible from governmental and religious command best serve the common good. Such a system frees the intelligence, imagination, and enterprise of individuals to explore the possibilities inherent in world process, which he conceived of as a universe of emergent probabilities.