The King's "New Socialism" Speech

President Obama is a pyromaniac in a field of strawmen.*

In Kansas, Obama railed against nefarious forces …

“They want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years,” Obama said of the GOP. “And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

Just who are the people who believe this? I don’t know any. Playing by your own rules is perfectly ok in your own domain, but it has no place in a free marketplace. Free market capitalism is predicated upon a known set of rules that everyone must follow. You can’t steal from others or murder your opponents, for example. You can’t lie to your business partners or customers. And what specific policies “stack the deck against middle-class Americans?” Give us specifics!

Mickey Kaus (America's smartest liberal) homed in on Obama’s attempt to shame corporations into what Kaus calls patriotic charity: staying here and hiring people even if you have to lose money or forgo greater profits or productivity gains to do it:

A patriotic Charity Economy is a conveyor belt to corporatism!

After all, what happens when the factory of celebrated businessman X who recognizes his patriotic obligation to employ Americans at $20 an hour is faced with competition from uncelebrated, selfish businessman Y who employs Chinese ex-peasants at $2 an hour? Businessman X is going to need a “partnership” with government, sort of a pre-bailout bailout. Obama doesn’t seem to have a problem with this sort of cozy arrangment. (Kaus – Obama’s Charity Capitalism)

An Unfair Presidency

Obama compared capital gains tax apples to personal income tax oranges, excoriating greedy CEOs for paying less taxes than their secretaries (a blatant lie).

He decried a system of laws that does not treat everyone equally, as his administration favors certain companies (Solyndra, GM) over others.

He hectored companies for using modern technology like ATMs, digital phone switches and that newfangled contraption known as the internet, while his armed agents raid workplaces and he shuts down job-creating factories and pipelines.  And then he taunts his pornographic lover Big Biz for not hiring. The man is a walking, talking BS machine.

But by Obama's own measure, the country has gotten more "fair." The richest 1% now pays almost 40% of all federal income taxes, up from 25% two decades ago, while the bottom half pays only 2%, down from 6%. The federal regulatory state has never been as big, and government spending as a share of the economy is at record levels. (IBD)

Here’s the kicker:

the only winners since Obama took office have been corporations (profits are up 68%) and Wall Street investors (the Dow's up more than 45%). The rest of the country has gotten the shaft. (IBD)

I’d like to see him try to get reelected running on that...

As Socrates would say, let’s define our terms

Just what exactly is “fair?” Or a better question, what specifically is unfair here in the US? Wage disparity? Unequal outcomes? Can it be traced back to a root cause?

East coast Massachusetts kids named Kennedy have about a 100% chance of going to an Ivy League school, regardless of how dull they may be. Silverfiddle kids have about zero chance. Is that fair? Who knows? Who cares? It’s all a waste of time. We are individuals, our needs and wants are unique, and our efforts produce disparate and varied outcomes.

Now, if we find that a certain class of people is rounding up other people and kicking them and their progeny down a hole so as to keep them from pursuing their American dream, that would be unfair. I don’t see that happening in this country. We are not all born into identical circumstances, so equalization would be quite a task. Everywhere it’s been tried, those on top were dragged down, rather than those on the low end being elevated.

Rather than all this inflated fascistic rhetoric designed to whip the proles into a revolutionary frenzy, how about restoring the rule of law? Forcing Big Banking and Corporate America off of the government teat? How about getting the federal government’s snout out of every corner of our lives and allowing us to solve our problems at the lowest level?

Even the venerable bastion of corporate statism, The Washington Post, gave Obama’s Robespierre acid trip flashback in Kansas three Pinocchios for its bald-faced dishonesty.

* - William F. Buckley’s description of John Kenneth Galbraith

Further Reading:
Harsanyi – Obama vs Capitalism
NY Times – Obama Tongue Bath
IBD - A Lesson in Fairness for Obama
Obama Urges Fair Play

Barry Plays Dress Up, Again

We're all laughing at Obama

First, Obama wanted to be Abraham Lincoln when he grew up. Then he laughably compared himself to Ronald Reagan. Now he’s playing dress-up again, this time as the Rough Rider, Teddy Roosevelt.

Teddy Roosevelt was a tough, self-made man who was forever seeking out ways to challenge himself physically and mentally. He was a conservationist, a crime fighter and war veteran. Barack Obama is an effete metrosexual who has had everything handed to him on a silver platter.

A banker grandmother who funded his private schooling, an Ivy League education paid for by others, a political career in the corrupt Chicago sewer, where well-connected crooks took care of the competition for him…

Teddy Roosevelt, born into wealth, went out west to toughen himself up, fought in the Spanish American war, and once sparred with a professional prizefighter, damaging his eyesight in the process. The closest Obama has come to matching TR’s impressive tough guy record is occupying a bank lobby and fighting for more government money for the various agitation groups he was a community organizer for.

Obama’s only accomplishment is hoodwinking enough Americans to vote for him by promising billowy nebulae of Hope and Change and promising transformative leadership. He hasn’t led and he hasn’t been transformative. Those on the disappointed left will tell you he's George Bush without the flight suit.

Obama and the Pelosicrats serve up these absurd and ridiculous comparisons because it’s all they’ve got. No economic freedom, no hope, no change, no jobs; just more of the same with a corrupt Chicago spin. 

 

Further Reading:

Obama's no Lincoln

Barack Obama is no Harry Truman

Mr Obama, you're no Ronald Reagan

Mr Obama, You're No Reagan!

Deroy Murdoch, a most astute man, does us a favor by assembling a concise catalog of Obama's economic blunders...

"Under Obama, federal spending has risen from 20.7 percent of gross domestic product to 25.3 percent, Washington’s largest slice of apple pie since 1945."

"Obama’s spend-o-rama includes federally funded green jobs that Boskin dismisses as “the leprechaun economy.” The apotheosis of this blarney was last month’s $1.2 billion Energy Department loan guarantee to SunPower Corporation of Richmond, California. Its solar-equipment project promises 15 permanent positions. Cost per job-created: a staggering $80 million." (NRO-Deroy Murdock)

Reagan's Recovery vs. Obama's Sagging Non-Recovery

Boskin compared snapshots of Obama’s and Pres. Ronald Reagan’s post-recession recoveries, 27 months after each downturn hit bottom.

In September 2011, on Obama’s watch, non-farm payrolls had grown 0.6 percent, yielding 841,000 jobs since June 2009.

Under the tax-cutting, business-boosting Reagan, non-agricultural employment swelled 8.7 percent, generating 7.7 million new jobs. (NRO-Deroy Murdock)

How Mr. Volker Would Fix It

Reading that comparison reminded me how Obama, to much fanfare, brought the venerable Paul Volker on-board as a convenient counter-weight to his socialist advisers who were discomfiting those serious people not in a hopium-induced daze those first heady days of the Obama Presidency.

It calmed people down, and then Obama proceeded to completely ignore the former Fed Chair who tamed Carter's dreaded stagflation and ushered in the historically-unprecedented Reagan economic boom. Volker has offered his advice on how to fix this mess. It's too wonky to go into here, but it involved breaking up anyone too big to fail, no more government underwriting Wall Street gamblers, putting the different financial functions into their own boxes and jailing those who stray, among other things. You can read the whole thing here: Volker's Advice.

Free Market Ideas for Increasing Employment

For the libertarians among us, taking advice from a former Fed Chairman just won't do, so Reason Magazine has an article entitled Get a Job! that is chock full of free-market remedies sure to get people back to work.

The ideas are too simple-minded and timeless for the progressive eggheads powering Obama's economic failure: Less regulations, less government intervention in the marketplace, no more government bureaucrats picking winners and losers...

Free marketeers know that government cannot power the recovery.  The path to economic success begins with economic freedom. Bill Frezza explains:

Do you sometimes wonder why economists are accorded such respect and influence given the fact that they claim knowledge over the unknowable, promote theories that are untestable, and make forecasts for which they are never held accountable? Isn’t that the definition of a witch doctor?

If engineers were held to the same standards, bridges would collapse as often as banks, planes would fall from the sky (if they ever got off the ground), and cyclical blackouts would be a permanent feature of our electrical grid. But at least they would get to visit the White House.

This gets to the heart of why we should take all macro economic advice with a grain of salt.  It is a soft science, useful for gaining insight, but incapable of predicting market behavior.  Government-planned economies fail, free markets succeed. 

Have you ever watched engineers from different schools argue on Sunday morning talk shows about the validity of Bernoulli’s Principle or Ohm’s Law? No? Yet economists, like rival witch doctors, get red in the face promoting diametrically opposed economic remedies, sometimes sharing Nobel Prizes in the same year for theories that directly contradict each other. Take $2 trillion and call me in the morning. (Bill Frezza - Fundamental Fallacies of Macro Economics)

Obama's "Jobs" Program: Government Money is Stupid Money

Money taken out of the economy via taxation is a net negative.  Beyond infrastructure and the enumerated constitutional duties, government does not and cannot spend your money more efficiently that you can yourself.  

Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat trying to unseat Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, delivered a tart message with dictatorial undertones to the nation's greedy rich:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . -- Elizabeth Warren

Despite such lectures by Ivy League professors who enjoy burning strawmen, conservatives are not anti-government nor anti-tax. It's all about proportion. Famed economist Henry Hazlitt says it best:

A certain amount of taxes is of course indispensable to carry on essential government functions. Reasonable taxes for this purpose need not hurt production much. The kind of government services then supplied in return, which among other things safeguard production itself, more than compensate for this. (Henry Hazlitt)

If government would limit itself to just funding that infrastructure liberals continually blather on about, we would not be having these arguments, and we would not be mired in this economic morass.

Elizabeth Warren's factory owners benefit not at all from the cawing aviary of special interest rent-seekers now roosting in thousands of government agencies and gobbling billions of dollars in taxpayer contributions.    Also, Warren's factory owner, along with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and even famous tax dodger Warren Buffet, paid far more for those roads than did the other 99% of America.

Taxes Kill Economic Activity

we took a look at British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne's still new (2011) program of increased taxes directed at oil and gas companies operating in the North Sea. Amazingly, the chancellor's tax hike took a 52% year-over-year chunk out of the area's second-quarter drilling activity. (The Fastest Way – David Lee Smith)

According to the author, Global consultant Woods Mackenzie estimates Obama’s proposed tax and regulation on the gas and oil industry “would lop off about 700,000 barrels a day of oil-equivalent production at a cost of some 170,000 industry jobs.”

Let's Go All The Way

Obama wants to claw back the special exemptions, loopholes and tax breaks gas and oil lobbyists have cajoled and bribed out of congress.  Fine. But don't stop there. Do it across the board. Make GM, their union partners in crime, and Wall Street welfare queens give us back the tens and hundreds of billions in taxpayer money they've absconded with.

No loopholes, no special deals for any group. If the Obamacrats are not willing to do this, then they are not serious, but are instead demagoguing the issue for naked partisan gain.

It's a simple calculus:

When a corporation loses a hundred cents of every dollar it loses, and is permitted to keep only 60 cents of every dollar it gains, [...] its policies are affected. It does not expand its operations, or it expands only those attended with a minimum of risk. (Henry Hazlitt – Economics in One Lesson)

A better approach is to categorically and unapologetically remove all government loans, subsidies, tax breaks, loopholes and special exceptions. Period. Again, Henry Hazlitt explains:

Each private lender risks his own funds. [...] When people risk their own funds they are usually careful in their investigations to determine the adequacy of the assets pledged and the business acumen and honesty of the borrower.

But the government almost invariably operates by different standards. The whole argument for its entering the lending business, in fact, is that it will make loans to people who could not get them from private lenders.

This is only another way of saying that the government lenders will take risks with other people's money (the taxpayers') that private lenders will not take with their own money. (Henry Hazlitt – Economics in One Lesson)

And that is the crux of the problem, and that is why private sector spending is inherently more efficient than government spending.

Obama blew a trillion dollars and we've got nothing to show for it but more economic misery.  We would be stupid to give him one more dime, let alone another $500 billion.

Obama's Scorched Earth Campaign

President Obama took his classless act on the road, making political hay out of the catastrophic wildfires in Texas...

Without mentioning him by name Obama mocked Perry as "a governor whose state is on fire, denying climate change." (AP News)

A US president mocking a governor whose state is a disaster area because of wildfires (which also occurred before the “global warming” era) is unprecedented. President Obama is a low-class, disgusting Chicago machine pol.

Imagine President Bush mocking New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco after Hurricane Katrina:

"… a governor and a mayor who still believe in nanny-state liberalism, when it’s bred generations of people so benumbed by government assistance they no longer have the good sense to get out of the way of a hurricane! he he heh...”

This is not a man who is president of all Americans and unites us. This is a cornered, cracked-out street punk fearful of going down, wildly swinging iron bars at his enemies and dividing us so he and his gang can continue to dominate the government special interest trade.

It’s all about rescuing the progressive agenda

ATHERTON, Calif. (AP) — President Barack Obama charged Sunday that the GOP vision of government would "fundamentally cripple America," as he tried out his newly combative message on the liberal West Coast.

No, Mr. President, you’re confused...

 The “GOP vision” if guided by the tea parties, would fundamentally cripple the progressive feral beast that has wiped its ass with the constitution, suborned the federal government, and is now engorging itself on more and more of our tax dollars and our freedoms. That is what we set out to “fundamentally cripple,” and America will be much the better once we get it done.

Progressives make an arrogant mistake: Equating Government with America

Their doctrinaire religion inextricably entwines the two, conflating them into one pseudo-patriotic package. It's a neat trick that allows them to slap an American flag on their horrible statist creature and then damn to hell anyone who speaks heresy against it.

It's not working anymore. Americans are turning againt the soulless progressive beast.

The Lyin' King, Starring Barack Obama

Anyone who believes a plumber pays more in taxes than a billionaire is probably also dumb enough to vote for Barack Obama. 






It's going to get worse before it gets better...

Even Obama's people are saying unemployment will not go down before the 2012 election, and I believe them. Removing $1.5 trillion from the economy is not the way to grow jobs.  That's according to Reaganomics as well as John Maynard Keynes.  The president is economically illiterate and his policies are an incoherent clash of careening desperation and overheated class warfare populism, all fueled by crony crapitalism.

Obama Will Run in 2012

Don't believe the speculation that Obama may go quietly into that good night and make way for another Dem candidate.  He's young and America is not yet completely broken.

President Obama is an effete liberal metrosexual who's "down with the struggle" community organizer persona is just a pose.  He's never been in a fight in his entire life, other than the time he and  his gay Muslim "porn 'stash" roomate both discovered a roach under the sofa cushion, and the room broke out into a cocaine-frenzied pillow fight.

Regardless, he ain't giving up his current gig without a global-billionaire-funded fight (where others do the dirty work.)

But anyway...  Greece will default, and who's in and who's out of the Eurozone won't really matter; Germany will end up on top...  It's gonna be ugly.

We here in the US will continue sliding sideways, but I think we'll come out OK, even after the ten years or so of misery and chaos we are facing.  For the most part, we still know how to take care of ourselves, our kinfolk and our neighbors; Those who do not should probably partner up with that Spanish-speaking family down the street.  Where they came from, you had to have some basic survival skills or you'd end up dead.

Our fundamentals are better than Europe's, and I really do remain optimistic that no matter how bad it gets, riots and all the rest, we will make it through, if only because North America (thanks in no small part to Canada) will remain fertile ground for capital, especially when compared to the rest of the world.  

China?

Are you kidding?  Their one-child policy has made China a dead man walking.  And the men not dying will not be able to find a woman, because the poor little commies aborted way more little girls than little boys.

Their environment is a nightmarish catastrophe bubbling just below the surface.  Hundreds of millions are still mired in poverty.  Smaller countries chafe at their role as The Middle Kingdom's slave state, while other nations find ways to undercut them with cheaper labor, just as China did to the developed world.  China will get old before it gets rich.

The Collapse Won't be Pretty
 
The Chinese Communist Politburo still nurtures the illusion that they can ride the beast, doling out freedom with an eyedropper.  Good luck with that.  Gorbachev thought he could just crack the door open, and next thing he knew, freedom's hordes were storming the breach.  His Eastern European clients were hanging from lamp posts while Boris Yeltsen was blasting the walls of Parliament with hijacked tanks.  It's folly.  Once human beings get a whiff of liberty, it's all over.

China's Totalitarian-Capitalism chemistry set will blow up.  And it won't be a little ka-boom, it will be a roaring fireball seen and heard around the world.

Forget investing in the stock market.  Put your faith in God and your money in gold and lead.

Government Money is Stupid Money

Barack Obama has ushered in a brave new era of unabashed Crony Crapitalism, gleefully rewarding friends and punishing enemies 

As if President Obama didn’t have enough bad news last week, Solyndra, which manufactures solar panels, filed for bankruptcy and laid off almost its entire work force of 1,100. Going down the tubes with it, of course, is a $535 million loan that was guaranteed by the federal government as part of the stimulus program.

And it seems the White House put pressure on the Department of Energy to OK the loan.

This is looking more and more like ‘Chicago Way’ political patronage; the president rewarding his friends. Even if it wasn’t, it is still criminally stupid

While Energy Department officials steadfastly vouched for Solyndra — even after an earlier round of layoffs raised eyebrows — other federal agencies and industry analysts for months questioned the viability of the company. Peter Lynch, a longtime solar industry analyst, told ABC News the company’s fate should have been obvious from the start.

“Here’s the bottom line,” Lynch said. “It costs them $6 to make a unit. They’re selling it for $3. In order to be competitive today, they have to sell it for between $1.5 and $2. That is not a viable business plan.” (Obama’s Patronage Pigs Can’t Fly)

As stated in the article, no investment officer would have granted such a loan, and if she did, she would be fired for gross incompetency.  In fact, said loan officer would end up on the business end of a federal lawsuit for such bald-faced malfeasance.  Government bureaucrats who produce nothing and who pay no price for wasting billions of taxpayer dollars are woefully ill-equipped to pick winners and losers.

This was just one company. Imagine the money-wasting debacle an Obama “Jobs” program would be. Corruption, fraud and waste on a grand national scale.  This and other government-sponsored financial fiascos argues against giving one more dime to the Obama Administration for a "jobs" program.

Accountability at the Local Level

The way you build infrastructure is at the local and state level, in discrete pieces as its done now. Those projects are funded by taxes and people hold governors and mayors responsible for the efficient completion of such projects. Accountability at the local level. The state has a budget and the government has a vested interest in getting the project done ahead of time and on-budget. It’s a model that has worked well. When it doesn’t, people get voted out of office, or worse, put on trial and sent to jail.

How do the states fund these projects? Revenues from working people and the businesses that hire them. No economic activity, no revenue. Create a favorable climate for the jobs providers and the rest will take care of itself.

Obama’s Patronage Pigs Can’t Fly

Reason - Obama's Crony Capitalism

God Save us from Another Cerebral President

A liberal at Politico has taken the original step of questioning the intellectual capacity of a GOP candidate for president

Funny, no one on the left ever questions the intelligence of laff-a-minute good-for-nothing-but-government Maxine Waters or gaff-master good-for-nothing-but-government Joe Biden. Dim bulbs flicker across the liberal landscape, but progressives persist in smearing successful conservatives (George Bush got higher grades than Al Gore, remember?). Here’s the latest poop throwing monkey attack:

Another Texas governor who drops his “g’s” and scorns elites is running for president and the whispers are the same: lightweight, incurious, instinctual.

Strip away the euphemisms and Rick Perry is confronting an unavoidable question: Is he dumb — or just “misunderestimated?” (Politico - Is Rick Perry Dumb?)

Cerebral presidencies are rarely successful

Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama. All supposedly highly-intelligent, all dismal failures.  A president doesn’t need to be a genius, he just needs to be an effective manager and a bold leader, traits not normally found in ivory tower eggheads.

There are different kinds of smarts. There’s book smarts, street smarts, and an ability to think on ones feet, evaluate information and make good decisions using a combination of logical thinking and gut instinct nurtured by experience. Those of us with working class dads who never saw the inside of a college classroom can tell you how we marveled at the man’s ability to smell a rat and avoid making stupid mistakes. 

Leadership takes that special kind of smarts, and intellectuals usually don’t fit the bill. The best leaders, be they sergeants or generals are smart, but not the brainy Newt Gingrich intellectual type. They are interested in ideas only for their practical use, not as an academic pursuit.  Good leaders can ingest information, often conflicting, presented to them by experts. They can evaluate that information against experience and empirical evidence and pull the trigger without the dithering and the drama.

The two most important qualities to look for in a president are Philosophy and Judgment

Philosophy tells us where the candidate wants to lead the nation, and judgment tells us if he can take us there or not. Our best leaders picked good people and trusted them, encouraging open debate and then synthesizing the information to craft policy. Putting philosophy aside, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George Bush were all very good at this. Barack Obama is not, and he's ill-served by an inept staff to boot.

Rick Perry has demonstrated these successful leadership qualities in his 10 plus years as Texas Governor:

“If he doesn’t know the answer, he’s going to find someone who does,” the lobbyist said. “He recognizes good help and brings ’em on for advice. He’s not going to know every foreign leader — but he has the good sense and instincts to pick good people who help him make good decisions.”

“Pilots execute flight plans,” Miller said. “They have a plan, they fly a certain pattern and that’s the way he’s always operated — he has a flight plan for what he’s trying to do and he executes.”

Mike Baselice, Perry’s longtime pollster, said his client is of the Ronald Reagan school of management: “Trust people and manage well.” (Politico - Is Rick Perry Dumb?)

Indeed, it’s the presidents who get too far in the weeds who get into trouble

Think Lyndon Johnson with maps of Vietnam on his desk planning bombing raids or Jimmy Carter making unilateral and ill-considered moralistic decisions on foreign policy that redounded greatly to our nation’s detriment. I’ve seen sergeants and colonels make the same mistakes during my military career.

A president can’t do it all anyway; the galaxy of subject matter is too vast for any one brain to comprehend.  I had the great fortune to study colonels and generals up close during my last few years in the Air Force. Like presidents, people who are in charge of vast enterprises are not the technocrats figuring out every problem. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were not writing code while running their respective companies as CEO. They are leading a team and managing its efforts.

The best leaders take the long and broad view, set the tone and transmit the game plan, leaving their experts to solve the Rubic's Cube.  David Harsanyi explains…

That doesn't make them "dumb." What makes a person dumb is repeating mistakes when all the evidence tells him to stop for his own good. We will witness this human shortcoming when the president rolls out his new "stimulus" package.

Some ideas, goes Orwell's saying, are so dumb only intellectuals can believe them.

On the other hand, reflexive anti-intellectualism (a misguided belief on the right that was spurred by having to share the word "intellectual" with Cornel West) is also destructive. If you're going to propose more than hope in 2012—say, some policy—you have to be prepared with scholarly backup. (Harsanyi – You Don’t Have to be Smart, Just Right)