Paul M. Jones

In other words, the narrative about Goldwater as the guiding light of the post-war GOP is wrong. Nixon, and his allies, have driven the agenda since the late 1940s. Other Republicans (Eisenhower, Goldwater, Reagan) represented factions who, at most, were allowed a seat at the table created by Nixon.

First, consider the following facts about the elite Republican leadership:

* Nixon and his coalition were able to put themselves on the national ticket in 1952, which displaced earlier liberal Republicans.

* Nixon and his personal friend Gerald Ford were in office in 1969-1975.

* Regan – who had a different base than Nixon – had to accommodate another Nixon appointee – GHW Bush – as VP in 1980.

* Bush (a Nixon appointee) was president from 1989-93 and brought in more Nixon/Ford appointees (e.g., Cheney) to run things.

* Bush II’s campaign was run by a mix new folks (Rove, Hughes) and assisted by more old Nixonites (James Baker).

* Bush II’s administration, until about 2006 or so, was lead by Nixon and Ford appointees (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell).

The Nixon network (him and former staffers/appointees) have been in control of the presidency or vice presidency every time the GOP has won the national election. Furthermore, this network has controlled key national security positions very often in GOP administrations.

via nixon’s revenge « orgtheory.net.

Two weeks ago, a Muslim extremist shot two soldiers, killing one, outside a recruiting station in Arkansas. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad acted alone, just as James von Brunn apparently did. He was, like von Brunn, captive to a supremacist ideology that, in his mind, justified the murder of an innocent man. Like von Brunn, authorities said, he had mapped out Jewish targets for potential attack. And yet, no mention of the hate crime committed by a Muslim; only hate crimes committed by white, right-wing extremists were worthy of mention in Warner's column. This is true for other columnists on the liberal side of the spectrum. The murder of Private William Long seems to be of no concern, and without larger meaning.

via What Judith Warner Left Out - Jeffrey Goldberg.

Obama has more reason to be mad at Johnson and FDR for bequeathing him intractable legacy costs than at Bush: they will substantially reduce the scope of the things that Obama can do. But I don't expect to hear him explain that he has to run a budget deficit because he inherited a legacy of unsustainable spending by his Democratic predecessors. The fact remains that Bush actually left him very little legacy of permanent spending to be drivng his future deficits. Once we withdraw from Iraq (I assume we can all agree that any president would have invaded Afghanistan), and the tax cuts expire next year, the actual net contribution of everything Bush did to Obama's structural deficits will be well under $100 billion a year of the $1 trillion or so Obama is projected to spend.

Not that I want to get all hysterical about the Obama deficits either. I presume he's planning to deal with them, mostly in ways I don't like. But I'm not going to start claiming that I have scientifically proven, through the awesome power of budget math, that Obama is like the worst president ever: I will hate his health care plans, etc. exactly as much if he raises taxes to pay for them. My worries about his deficits are more prosaic: is he borrowing so much money that we're at risk of a fiscal crisis brought on by excess debt and spiking interest rates, or is he crowding out private investments? These are empirical questions, and it's far too early to have more than hints at the answers. But Obama's deficits, even in 2012 and beyond, are the largest since World War II by any measure. And that's good reason to worry, in a non-hysterical fashion.

via What Would Gore Do? - Megan McArdle.

As we know, most of the stimulus spending does not take place until next year and beyond, so the short-run gains are puny. On the other hand, the big increase in the projected deficit creates the expectation of higher interest rates, which raises interest rates now. These higher interest rates serve to weaken the economy.

According to this standard analysis, the stimulus is going to hurt GDP now, when we could use the most help. Much of the spending will kick in a year or more from now, with multiplier effects following afterward, when the economy will need little, if any, stimulus.

This is the flaw with using spending rather than tax cuts as a stimulus. The lags are longer when you use spending.

Of course, if the real goal is to promote government at the expense of civil society and to create a one-party state in which business success is based on political favoritism, then the stimulus is working exactly as intended.

via The Anti-Stimulus, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

What requires government action - what requires "collective choice" - is protectionism. Free trade exists naturally. Free trade is simply the absence of trade restrictions - the absence of officious interference with those engaged in consensual capitalist acts.

via Dear Baltimore Sun: Perils of Protectionism.

Highly educated people with high-status jobs - investment bankers, professors, lawyers - often believe that they could do anything their less-educated brethren can, if only they put their minds to it, because cognitive ability is the only ability that counts. The truth is that some would not have the physical and cognitive ability to do skilled blue-collar work, and that others could do it only if they invested 20 years of their life in learning a trade. “Shop Class as Soulcraft” makes this quite vivid by explaining in detail what is actually involved in rebuilding a Volkswagen engine: grinding down the gasket joining the intake ports to the cylinder heads, with a file, tracing the custom-fit gasket with an X-Acto knife, removing metal on the manifolds with a pneumatic die grinder so the passageways will mate perfectly. Small signs of galling and discoloration mean excessive heat buildup, caused by a previous owner’s failure to lubricate; the slight bulging of a valve stem points to a root cause of wear that a novice mechanic would completely fail to perceive.

via Cafe Hayek: Hayek (and Fukuyama) on the Use of Knowledge in Society.

Great article from McArdle about budget deficits and who's-to-blame. (For the record, I had little love for Bush's economic policies.)

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/06/the_deficit_blame_game.php

Various excerpts follow, but you should read the whole thing.

Iraq is now at $120 billion a year, and scheduled to decline. It seems churlish to blame Bush for Medicare Part D, given that the Democrats' main complaint was that it wasn't expensive enough, but let's go ahead and blame him anyway: $35 billion a year. The tax cuts sunset in 2010; after that, Obama has to affirmatively act to extend them. The structural deficit projected in 2010 was a little over $100 billion.

But what about all the debt [Bush] racked up? Net public debt rose less than 4% of GDP during Bush's presidency. Net interest (aka Cash Interest We Pay Bondholders) went from $223 billion in 2000 to $244 billion in 2008; adjusted for inflation, and as a percentage of GDP, it actually fell. If we are entitled to expect Bush to close the budget deficit with those kinds of numbers, then we ought to be able to expect it from Barack Obama. Bush's deficits are not holding him back.

But this is what we have been told to expect:

How is a $118 billion structural deficit, $35 billion in Medicare Part D, and a theoretical end to the Iraq presence forcing Barack Obama to spend nearly $1 trillion in 2018? How is it forcing him to spend roughly $650 trillion more than he takes in in 2012?

...

The problem with the budget deficit is not any particular program, or even any particular tax cuts. It is not that George Bush or Obama is a bad person who does bad things. The problem with the budget deficit is that, unlike the deficits George Bush ran, the deficits projected under Obama (and beyond) are actually large enough to potentially precipitate a fiscal crisis. If our interest rates suddenly spiked up, perhaps because lenders were worried about the size of our budget deficits, we'd find ourselves in the kind of nasty fiscal jam that regularly plagues third-world countries. The difference is, no one has enough money to bail us out.

Obama is the one who will have to prevent this. Yet instead of plans, we're getting fairy numbers from the OMB. That's worrying, and it's sure not George W. Bush's fault.

So many laws have eroded our Second Amendment gun rights that, as P.J. O'Rourke notes, if Massachusetts had the same gun laws in 1775 that it has now, we would all be Canadians.

Even political campaign speech is constricted. The Obama administration argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that the McCain-Feingold Act can ban books about ongoing election campaigns. Yet Justice Hugo Black warned that:

"The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate, or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish."

Almost half of all U.S. income is taxed today which means we have lost about half our economic freedom. With record government spending and soaring debt, we are set to lose a lot more. And to think the Boston Tea Party was waged over a three-cent-a-pound tax on tea. Government regulations on business cost us well over $1 trillion a year in higher consumer prices, and there are exactly 26,911 government words policing the sale of a head of cabbage.

In recent years, obsessive-compulsive environmental regulations halted a Massachusetts town from using fireworks on Independence Day since an 'endangered' bird's nest was found near it. News flash: on July 4 we celebrate independence from a tyrannical government. Yet George III never taxed, regulated, or policed us remotely as much as Washington, D.C. does today. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory".

Everywhere rules and paperwork mushroom as nit-picking bureaucrats grow in numbers and power. As a buddy bemoaned, the increasingly shrill message of the establishment is “Sit down - and shut up". No wonder so many Americans feel frustrated and impotent.

Why has our liberty eroded so badly?

via America: closing her door to freedom | Samizdata.net.

Letterman is empty; he’s inert; he stands for nothing except disdain for people foolish enough to stand for anything - aside from rote obesciance to all the things Decent People stand for, of course, all those shopworn assumptions passed around in the bubble.

This posture was fresh in ’80; it even had energy. But it paralyzes the heart after a while. You end up an SOB who shows up at the end of the night to reassure that nothing matters. I think he may have invented the posture of Nerd Cool, an aspect so familiar to anyone who reads message boards - the skill at deflating enthusiasm, puncturing passion with a hatpin lobbed from a safe distance. The instinctive unease with the wet messy energy of actual people.

Yes, reading too much into it. Really, it’s just a rote slam: If your mother is a loathed politician, and your older sister gets pregnant, famous old men can make jokes about you being knocked up by rich baseball players, and there’s nothing you can do. That’s the culture: a flat, dead-eyed, square-headed old man who’ll go back to the writers and ask for more Palin-daughter knocked-up jokes, because that one went over well. Other children he won’t touch, but not because he’s decent. It’s because he’s a coward.

Oh, one more thing: it’s okay for David to say that because someone said something else about someone, and since I didn’t write about that, I’m a hypocrite. Just so we’re clear.

via » Blog Archive » Wednesday, June 10.

YouTube - The Obama Stimulus: Predictions vs. Reality.