Archive Listing
June 16, 2012 - June 9, 2012
Monday, May 16, 2011
The point all
Republicans
are too dumb to make...
are too dumb to make...
THEY'RE RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT, DAMN THEIR HIDES.... They always seem to lose the framing arguments, don't they? Today's the day the debt limit is scheduled to go critical. The Republicans talk about cutting spending. The Democrats talk about the frightful human costs of cutting federal programs and the more sensible alternative of raising taxes. The Republicans resist raising taxes because that somehow hobbles the government's responsibility to create jobs in a weak economy. Because it's rich Republicans who create jobs when they're not otherwise engaged in supervising the custom builds of their $100 million dollar yachts. Why the Democrats tend to win such confrontations. Republicans talk vaguely about growing the whole economy, which the Dems instantly reduce to the old lingo of "tickle down economics," and voters confront the pitched battle between those who would penalize ordinary working people versus those who want to make the richest pay their fair share.
The simple truth the Republicans never state flat out:
Raising
tax rates does not automatically increase tax revenue,
whereas cutting federal spending always decreases the deficit.
whereas cutting federal spending always decreases the deficit.
Forget who's paying the taxes. It's not
a class issue. It's more like simple physics. There's an optimum level
of tax rates that's like a perfectly balanced carpenter's level. When
it's right -- i.e., when the lozenge is floating between the markers on
right and left, tax revenue is maximized. The portion of the lozenge
that's between the markers is tax revenue. You can tip the level either
way, but if you tip it out of balance tax revenues decline.
If tax rates are too low, available revenues are left on the table. If tax rates are too high, available revenues are left on the table.
Note that this is neither a conservative nor a liberal argument. When ideologies are figured in, conservatives don't mind tilting toward lesser federal revenues because they want to shrink government, and liberals don't mind tilting toward lesser federal revenues because -- but wait! -- they do mind lesser federal revenues. They're just stone ignorant about economics and the functioning of the capitalist markets they've never liked.
Which leads us to the underlying philosophies of the parties the Republicans should be doing everything possible to exploit and never do.
The biggest Big Lie Democrats and liberals of every stripe subscribe to is not the idiocy of George W. Bush and all Republicans in general, bad as that libel is. It's worse than that. Much worse than that. It's their reflexive allegiance to the static model and the zero-sum view of human society.
What's the static model? Thank you for asking. It's the belief that the economy is a machine that behaves according to machine rules, which is to say that human decision-making in response to changing circumstances is not a factor. More specifically, it holds everything else constant when it contemplates some change. All will remain as it is now except for the one change we are contemplating. That's how the CBO scores ObamaCare as a net cost saver. ALL OTHER FACTORS REMAINING THE SAME, ObamaCare will reduce healthcare costs and pay for itself. Never mind that premiums are already rising as economic participants in the altered health universe are anticipating huge dislocations of future income opportunities and historically predictable massive cost increases associated with greater federal control. (Medicare now costs dozens of times the most pessimistic Republican projections when it passed.) That's how the Obama administration scores a big tax increase on "rich" people. They will continue to make as much money as they do now and we will simply take a bigger percentage of it. Revenues will automatically increase. The machine motors on and individual human decisions can't possibly affect it. Even though the human record itself makes a joke of static analysis and the machine view.
Interesting perspective for the "party of the people," isn't it? I can illustrate this fallacy by an anecdote from my business school days, with an idiotic but triumphant performance by one of the most esteemed professors at my Ivy League Business School. He said, smirking, "It's been argued that progressive tax rates create a disincentive for income generation. I'd like to deal with that right now." He held up a (Roosevelt) dime. "Here's my proposition. If I offer to give you a dollar with the understanding that I'll take back 90 cents and leave you with only a dime, don't you still want the dime? Of course you do." He smiled happily and repocketed his dime.
I can still remember how very satisfied he was with himself. Of course, his proposition was a fake. Like most illustrious university professors, he forgot about the question of work. Give me a dollar, take back 90 cents, and I'll accept the dime. But would I work for that dollar knowing it's only a dime? No. Not on your life. Because as a human being, I value my time. The more likely outcome is that I refuse to play if 90 percent of my effort is paid to someone else.
His was the machine view, the liberal view. But contrary to the great love, tolerance, and understanding by liberals of all us weak, fallible humans, the economy is not a machine; it's an organism, alive, aware, and alert to the decision points created by every major change in the rules of operation. If you systematically remove my incentives for effort and risk-taking, by penalizing my effort and risk-taking, I will withdraw my efforts and end my risk-taking. I'll make less and have less to tax, regardless of the rates you impose. The carpenter's level has been tilted un the direction of reduced revenues. Don't argue with me. Argue with the damned level and the lozenge that veers out of the optimum zone.
The other Democrat/liberal fallacy -- the second Big Lie they tell themselves so often they believe it (or do they?) -- is that capitalism is a zero-sum game. That's the source of their usually unspecified grudge against the prosperous. The premise of the lie is that every dollar a rich person acquires is at the expense of a poor or middle class person. Almost 300 years after Adam Smith, they would have you believe, they still don't accept the concept of wealth creation, that a rising tide lifts all boats. In point of fact, they have to know this is a lie they are telling for political gain.
Every time they make the argument that the rich have somehow unfairly benefited and need to "give something back," they are explicitly denying the history of the American economy that has made us the richest, freest, and most upwardly mobile society in the record of all human civilizations. If economics were a zero-sum game, we'd all still be sharing the scarcities of 15th century plague-ridden economies in medieval Europe, with no indoor plumbing and life expectancies in the late thirties.
Where do they think the contributions they get from Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, and the Google Boys come from? Their fortunes weren't ripped from the mouths of orphans and widows. They were created, not out of thin air, but out of rich minds who inspired lucrative demand for attractive products. The same way it's always been done in this extraordinary land -- by Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, and (fill in the blanks, ad infinitum).
I understand why most liberals in congress and on the national scene don't understand America. How pitifully few of them have ever created anything but a campaign for their own personal politcal ambitions.
What I have a harder time understanding is why there are so few Republicans who even sense the opportunity to demand a philosophical referendum that would indict their liberal foes as aliens in their own country and vipers in its bosom.
I'm taking no prisoners on this. None of the candidates -- not even the sainted Ron Paul -- has had the wit to state the nub of the argument without descending into thickets of economic jargon and ideological/philosophical jabberwocky:
There's plenty of history to cite. We've already had 90 percent tax rates in the lifetimes of living Americans. In the Eisenhower administration. JFK cut them back and increased revenues substantially. Reagan did the same. His tax cuts also dramatically increased federal revenue, which the Democrat congress happily spent into deficit. George W. Bush increased tax revenues by cutting tax rates. Why the hell is it so hard for a Republican to say these simple words?
Because they're so dumb they can't let go of the idea that their best chance for election is pretending that it's the federal government's job to "create" jobs by running things the right way.
The government doesn't create jobs. The right tax rates aren't about ideology, Paulistas take note. At the moment, the federal government needs all the revenue it can get. It really does. The wolf is at the door. Time to take the ideological bullshit and class warfare out of the discussion.
YEAH, SO LET'S ALL PRETEND TO TAKE RON PAUL SERIOUSLY. Don't get your hopes up. I overcame my irrational sense of his hysterical tone and personal creepiness long enough to watch his interview with Chris Wallace yesterday. So I'm now prepared to talk not about his personal creepiness but his platform.
It's possible that he is, as Juan Williams (never mind his motives) was intimating today on Imus, a seminal figure in the remaking of the Republican Party. As was Barry Goldwater. This is not a small thing.
When I was a management consultant, I gave seminars to top executives a couple decades ago on the subject of "mental models." (A subject I understand Glenn Beck has recently recycled under another name.) The idea is that our sense of the possible is determined by a consensus that can occasionally be wrenched in a different direction, so that what used to seem insane becomes part of our horizon of possibilities.
I accept that Ron Paul is saying things that haven't been said for a long time. In this respect, he is expanding the mental model of what is possible. I'm pleased that young people are undergoing this mental stretching exercise.
I was also impressed that he answered Chris Wallace's questions so directly. He's obviously an honest man. More power to him. I am absolutely convinced that he is sincere.
But here, I confess, is the end of my kudos to Ron Paul. And the beginning of my message to his followers.
Ron Paul will never be president. He may run and run and run....
...but he will never be a nominee of the Republican Party and he will never be president. Why? Because he is more ideologue than politician, and he is running for the presidency of a country that no longer exists.
I'm not even talking about his foreign policy, which is ludicrous and verging on criminal. I'm talking about his very conception of the presidency, the American people, and the state of our culture. It represents a nostalgia for a time that hasn't existed in the lifetime of Americans. He wants to be Calvin Coolidge, basically a remote civil servant located in the White House, with no responsibility for the disasters, ruptures, and snafus that strike every one of the fifty states from time to time. "Not my business," he proudly announces. "That's not who the president is supposed to be."
Fine. But even Reagan knew better than that. Like it or not, the president of the United States is the most powerful and influential man in the world.. Americans are long long past accepting him as a mere accountant of the nation's balance sheet. There may be value in Paul's view but there is no currency in his stated policy. He and all his followers can rue the ancient day when the game changed, but Americans by an overwhelming majority now believe in a national safety net. We can debate how safe that net that should be, battle about its costs and benefits, but if you argue it shouldn't be there at all, you are simply quaint, a curiosity who will never be taken seriously. That part of our national debate is no longer on the table.
Honestly, he puts me in mind of Rip van Winkle. A whole bunch of people who, for reasons of youth or inexcusable inattention, suddenly became aware of a crisis in American poliltics without any knowledge of how we got where we are. Sometimes it seems he's running against FDR in 1936, still trying to undo the Keynesian disaster of the Great Depression and forestall the losses of saving the U.S. from war with Hitler.
What's hard to communicate to the new true believers: The oldness of his positions, meaning not the inveterate wisdom of them but the obsolete temporality in which they might have made sense. Is it a coincidence that he is also old and cannot see the world except through old old eyes that only seem new to youngsters who still think they can turn back the clock to the days before nuclear weapons, the Cold War, and that distant instant when we might have passed up the responsibility to be the adult in the room of the world?
None of him is new. The only thing that is new is the desire of the left to tar all of us with his archaic platitudes. He's having a vogue now because they would like us to be dismissible, all the way down to him and his simplistic perspectives.
I don't begrudge him his right to speak and attract followers. I'm simply tired to death of the evangelical fervor that insists he's a sage voice telling us who are old enough to know better that he's saying anything new. Or, that he as a personality is anything but another manifestation of the fashion called retro.
Goldwater? Reagan? No. Stassen? Tell you in 2016.
But I concede he believes what he's preaching to the last breath.
P.S. You might want to read the exchange between Brizoni and me in the Comments section. That's why I'm inserting this video.
All the Paulistas might want to compare and contrast this with the video of Ron Paul's appearance on Fox News Sunday. If you don't know the history, this is the event known as 'The Speech,' which launched Ronald Reagan's political career. It was the only shining moment in the absolutely disastrous 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. It was run again and again, because it was the only positive, upbeat communication associated with Goldwater's march toward electoral suicide.
I watched it with my parents the first time it aired, 47 years ago. It was absolutely electrifying. (I was 10 and I still remember the moment; only the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 are as seared into my memory.) I think you'll find that the opening citations of federal debt and levels of taxation could be the opening of a Republican candidate address in 2011 almost unchanged.
Like the Paulista Minutemen, Brizoni over-interpreted what I was saying in the post above. I wasn't disagreeing with Paul's ideals. I was saying, "Quit telling us oldsters we don't understand. We do. But we also know that winning the political battles isn't about being a fusspot curmudgeon who insists that he, just like the liberals, knows more about what we need than the average people do."
Compare and contrast. Paul harps on everything that's wrong. Everything he'll undo. Reagan does a lot of that, too. But he also shares a vision of just how great we can be, a magnificent hope and faith in the American people. Somehow, constant kvetching about the Federal Reserve doesn't accomplish the same end result. Note also that the isolationism Paulistas insist is part of the "package" of liberty takes on an entirely different, and far more realistic, spin here.
But I'm sure, as always, you know better, just as you know more about economics than an old fart with thirty-some years of business experience and even more than that in the practice of effective communications.
KEEPING YOU CURRENT. You think I spend all my time puzzling over Mike Huckabee's intentions? Think again.
All right. I saw two movies, one called "Equilibrium." and one called "The Day the Earth Stood Still."
Last first. The Keanu Reeves opus almost caused a fight with the missus. She said, early on, "I hate this." But I was determined. You know me. I love lefties. I had to watch all the way to the bitter end to make the pronouncement that this was the single awfullest big-budget sci-fi movie ever made. Which it was.
I was no fan of the original, which is where I parted company with Mrs. CP. She liked Michael Rennie. I despise the whole genre of movies that make Earth the bad boy of the cosmology set. When the aliens come to tell us that we are somehow uniquely terrible in the community of intelligent species, all I can see is the liberal equivalent of original sin turned back on itself by the presumption of superior rationality,
English translation. If Darwin is right, as the scientists insist he is, life erupts into intelligence as part of an inevitable predatory spiral. The strong eat the weak and get stronger and smarter. How could it be otherwise? So, when the aliens come, they are interfering either because they've forgotten their own evolutionary roots or because evolution isn't an apt description of how mankind came to be in the first place. In either case, they have a lot of nerve threatening us with extinction because, whoever they are now, even we backward whatever-we-ares have never attempted annihilating an entire species on purpose. Isn't committing species-level genocide though you're a million years more advanced than we are a good deal worse than harpooning one too many whales in the early industrial age? You tell me, O You Secular Moralists.
Of course, Keanu had done his intelligence homework. He knew he could do this whole godlike part without a second of acting. He knew the script was as brilliant as anything a Keanu could think of. For example, he got to condemn humanity to death based on a single meeting with one solitary alien mole who had lived as a human in New York's Chinatown for 70 years. Even then, doubts were expressed. But hey, one guy, one neighborhood, one ambigious verdict, how do you think the universe would decide the fate of six and a half billion non-New Yorkers? How any New York liberal would have conducted the research. You just have to love a liberal's sense of fairness and justice...
Why I loved this movie so much. (Loved it, loved it, loved it.) Perfect exhibition of the lefty mentality in the northeast. Perfect. Though maybe one spokesman for all five boroughs shouldn't get the say-so for the whole fucking planet. There's Jersey, too. What do you think?
Sorry but I have to skip to the ending, where all of modern technology is wiped out. Supposedly a happy ending. Only 6.2 of 6.5 billion people are destined to die of starvation, disease, and unspeakable battles for nonexistent resources, as opposed to the whole enchilada. (Even Escape from LA made this the apocalypse it obviously is...) And Hollywood thinks we want to see this kind of crap?
We don't. Which is why the palate cleanser is a very little known movie called Equilibrium. Christian Bale, Sean Bean, and the usual British delight with a hopelessly ecstatic fantasy called "no emotions whatever." It's as fun a movie as an incredibly depressing post-apocalyptic nightmare can be. For once, Christian Bale is good looking. He has a love interest he actually touches fingers with, briefly, oh so slightly, before she is burned to death in a crematory oven. What the Brits call flaming passion.
It's still ten times the movie described above. And for once it doesn't seem leftist but about life and living and all that stuff and what it might mean, even if you're a Brit.
I know that was brief and ambiguous. Whatever you do, Don't watch this -- or at least not all of it. It has big-time spoilers in it. Final Word? In comparison to this movie, Neo was a pussy. Okay?
Courtesy of Mrs. CP film productions.
SILENCE DOES NOT PAY, UNLESS IT DOES. Yeah. Raebert again. Self-explanatory, I think.
YOUTUBES EXPIRE, LOVE DOESN'T . When I left the barber chair, one of the female stylists stepped out and said, "You look like a new man." I thanked her. Then she announced to the entire shop, "He just got his semi-annual haircut."
True. It's a bright sunlit place. I hate their mirrors. While I'm getting my hair cut there, I confront an old man in every pitless detail of time's toll. Not such a big deal. I am old these days. But my shaving mirror is kinder. It lets me feel maybe 40 instead of nearly 60.
I was going to cut grass today. I hope and trust Mrs. CP will forgive me that I didn't. I plan to cut tomorrow, before the universally predicted rain.
But I still look better than Tom Waits. Marginally.
If tax rates are too low, available revenues are left on the table. If tax rates are too high, available revenues are left on the table.
Note that this is neither a conservative nor a liberal argument. When ideologies are figured in, conservatives don't mind tilting toward lesser federal revenues because they want to shrink government, and liberals don't mind tilting toward lesser federal revenues because -- but wait! -- they do mind lesser federal revenues. They're just stone ignorant about economics and the functioning of the capitalist markets they've never liked.
Which leads us to the underlying philosophies of the parties the Republicans should be doing everything possible to exploit and never do.
The biggest Big Lie Democrats and liberals of every stripe subscribe to is not the idiocy of George W. Bush and all Republicans in general, bad as that libel is. It's worse than that. Much worse than that. It's their reflexive allegiance to the static model and the zero-sum view of human society.
What's the static model? Thank you for asking. It's the belief that the economy is a machine that behaves according to machine rules, which is to say that human decision-making in response to changing circumstances is not a factor. More specifically, it holds everything else constant when it contemplates some change. All will remain as it is now except for the one change we are contemplating. That's how the CBO scores ObamaCare as a net cost saver. ALL OTHER FACTORS REMAINING THE SAME, ObamaCare will reduce healthcare costs and pay for itself. Never mind that premiums are already rising as economic participants in the altered health universe are anticipating huge dislocations of future income opportunities and historically predictable massive cost increases associated with greater federal control. (Medicare now costs dozens of times the most pessimistic Republican projections when it passed.) That's how the Obama administration scores a big tax increase on "rich" people. They will continue to make as much money as they do now and we will simply take a bigger percentage of it. Revenues will automatically increase. The machine motors on and individual human decisions can't possibly affect it. Even though the human record itself makes a joke of static analysis and the machine view.
Interesting perspective for the "party of the people," isn't it? I can illustrate this fallacy by an anecdote from my business school days, with an idiotic but triumphant performance by one of the most esteemed professors at my Ivy League Business School. He said, smirking, "It's been argued that progressive tax rates create a disincentive for income generation. I'd like to deal with that right now." He held up a (Roosevelt) dime. "Here's my proposition. If I offer to give you a dollar with the understanding that I'll take back 90 cents and leave you with only a dime, don't you still want the dime? Of course you do." He smiled happily and repocketed his dime.
I can still remember how very satisfied he was with himself. Of course, his proposition was a fake. Like most illustrious university professors, he forgot about the question of work. Give me a dollar, take back 90 cents, and I'll accept the dime. But would I work for that dollar knowing it's only a dime? No. Not on your life. Because as a human being, I value my time. The more likely outcome is that I refuse to play if 90 percent of my effort is paid to someone else.
His was the machine view, the liberal view. But contrary to the great love, tolerance, and understanding by liberals of all us weak, fallible humans, the economy is not a machine; it's an organism, alive, aware, and alert to the decision points created by every major change in the rules of operation. If you systematically remove my incentives for effort and risk-taking, by penalizing my effort and risk-taking, I will withdraw my efforts and end my risk-taking. I'll make less and have less to tax, regardless of the rates you impose. The carpenter's level has been tilted un the direction of reduced revenues. Don't argue with me. Argue with the damned level and the lozenge that veers out of the optimum zone.
The other Democrat/liberal fallacy -- the second Big Lie they tell themselves so often they believe it (or do they?) -- is that capitalism is a zero-sum game. That's the source of their usually unspecified grudge against the prosperous. The premise of the lie is that every dollar a rich person acquires is at the expense of a poor or middle class person. Almost 300 years after Adam Smith, they would have you believe, they still don't accept the concept of wealth creation, that a rising tide lifts all boats. In point of fact, they have to know this is a lie they are telling for political gain.
Every time they make the argument that the rich have somehow unfairly benefited and need to "give something back," they are explicitly denying the history of the American economy that has made us the richest, freest, and most upwardly mobile society in the record of all human civilizations. If economics were a zero-sum game, we'd all still be sharing the scarcities of 15th century plague-ridden economies in medieval Europe, with no indoor plumbing and life expectancies in the late thirties.
Where do they think the contributions they get from Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, and the Google Boys come from? Their fortunes weren't ripped from the mouths of orphans and widows. They were created, not out of thin air, but out of rich minds who inspired lucrative demand for attractive products. The same way it's always been done in this extraordinary land -- by Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, and (fill in the blanks, ad infinitum).
I understand why most liberals in congress and on the national scene don't understand America. How pitifully few of them have ever created anything but a campaign for their own personal politcal ambitions.
What I have a harder time understanding is why there are so few Republicans who even sense the opportunity to demand a philosophical referendum that would indict their liberal foes as aliens in their own country and vipers in its bosom.
I'm taking no prisoners on this. None of the candidates -- not even the sainted Ron Paul -- has had the wit to state the nub of the argument without descending into thickets of economic jargon and ideological/philosophical jabberwocky:
Raising
tax rates does not automatically increase tax revenue,
whereas cutting federal spending always decreases the deficit.
It's not a class issue. It's simple physics. Think carpenter's level.
whereas cutting federal spending always decreases the deficit.
It's not a class issue. It's simple physics. Think carpenter's level.
There's plenty of history to cite. We've already had 90 percent tax rates in the lifetimes of living Americans. In the Eisenhower administration. JFK cut them back and increased revenues substantially. Reagan did the same. His tax cuts also dramatically increased federal revenue, which the Democrat congress happily spent into deficit. George W. Bush increased tax revenues by cutting tax rates. Why the hell is it so hard for a Republican to say these simple words?
Raising
tax rates does not automatically increase tax revenue.
Because they're so dumb they can't let go of the idea that their best chance for election is pretending that it's the federal government's job to "create" jobs by running things the right way.
The government doesn't create jobs. The right tax rates aren't about ideology, Paulistas take note. At the moment, the federal government needs all the revenue it can get. It really does. The wolf is at the door. Time to take the ideological bullshit and class warfare out of the discussion.
posted at
12:19 pm
by
InstaPunk
A Kind(ish) Word
About Ron Paul
About Ron Paul
I
watched the whole thing. Can you?
YEAH, SO LET'S ALL PRETEND TO TAKE RON PAUL SERIOUSLY. Don't get your hopes up. I overcame my irrational sense of his hysterical tone and personal creepiness long enough to watch his interview with Chris Wallace yesterday. So I'm now prepared to talk not about his personal creepiness but his platform.
It's possible that he is, as Juan Williams (never mind his motives) was intimating today on Imus, a seminal figure in the remaking of the Republican Party. As was Barry Goldwater. This is not a small thing.
When I was a management consultant, I gave seminars to top executives a couple decades ago on the subject of "mental models." (A subject I understand Glenn Beck has recently recycled under another name.) The idea is that our sense of the possible is determined by a consensus that can occasionally be wrenched in a different direction, so that what used to seem insane becomes part of our horizon of possibilities.
I accept that Ron Paul is saying things that haven't been said for a long time. In this respect, he is expanding the mental model of what is possible. I'm pleased that young people are undergoing this mental stretching exercise.
I was also impressed that he answered Chris Wallace's questions so directly. He's obviously an honest man. More power to him. I am absolutely convinced that he is sincere.
But here, I confess, is the end of my kudos to Ron Paul. And the beginning of my message to his followers.
Ron Paul will never be president. He may run and run and run....
Ever
heard of Harold
Stassen?
...but he will never be a nominee of the Republican Party and he will never be president. Why? Because he is more ideologue than politician, and he is running for the presidency of a country that no longer exists.
I'm not even talking about his foreign policy, which is ludicrous and verging on criminal. I'm talking about his very conception of the presidency, the American people, and the state of our culture. It represents a nostalgia for a time that hasn't existed in the lifetime of Americans. He wants to be Calvin Coolidge, basically a remote civil servant located in the White House, with no responsibility for the disasters, ruptures, and snafus that strike every one of the fifty states from time to time. "Not my business," he proudly announces. "That's not who the president is supposed to be."
Fine. But even Reagan knew better than that. Like it or not, the president of the United States is the most powerful and influential man in the world.. Americans are long long past accepting him as a mere accountant of the nation's balance sheet. There may be value in Paul's view but there is no currency in his stated policy. He and all his followers can rue the ancient day when the game changed, but Americans by an overwhelming majority now believe in a national safety net. We can debate how safe that net that should be, battle about its costs and benefits, but if you argue it shouldn't be there at all, you are simply quaint, a curiosity who will never be taken seriously. That part of our national debate is no longer on the table.
Honestly, he puts me in mind of Rip van Winkle. A whole bunch of people who, for reasons of youth or inexcusable inattention, suddenly became aware of a crisis in American poliltics without any knowledge of how we got where we are. Sometimes it seems he's running against FDR in 1936, still trying to undo the Keynesian disaster of the Great Depression and forestall the losses of saving the U.S. from war with Hitler.
What's hard to communicate to the new true believers: The oldness of his positions, meaning not the inveterate wisdom of them but the obsolete temporality in which they might have made sense. Is it a coincidence that he is also old and cannot see the world except through old old eyes that only seem new to youngsters who still think they can turn back the clock to the days before nuclear weapons, the Cold War, and that distant instant when we might have passed up the responsibility to be the adult in the room of the world?
None of him is new. The only thing that is new is the desire of the left to tar all of us with his archaic platitudes. He's having a vogue now because they would like us to be dismissible, all the way down to him and his simplistic perspectives.
I don't begrudge him his right to speak and attract followers. I'm simply tired to death of the evangelical fervor that insists he's a sage voice telling us who are old enough to know better that he's saying anything new. Or, that he as a personality is anything but another manifestation of the fashion called retro.
Goldwater? Reagan? No. Stassen? Tell you in 2016.
But I concede he believes what he's preaching to the last breath.
P.S. You might want to read the exchange between Brizoni and me in the Comments section. That's why I'm inserting this video.
All the Paulistas might want to compare and contrast this with the video of Ron Paul's appearance on Fox News Sunday. If you don't know the history, this is the event known as 'The Speech,' which launched Ronald Reagan's political career. It was the only shining moment in the absolutely disastrous 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. It was run again and again, because it was the only positive, upbeat communication associated with Goldwater's march toward electoral suicide.
I watched it with my parents the first time it aired, 47 years ago. It was absolutely electrifying. (I was 10 and I still remember the moment; only the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 are as seared into my memory.) I think you'll find that the opening citations of federal debt and levels of taxation could be the opening of a Republican candidate address in 2011 almost unchanged.
Like the Paulista Minutemen, Brizoni over-interpreted what I was saying in the post above. I wasn't disagreeing with Paul's ideals. I was saying, "Quit telling us oldsters we don't understand. We do. But we also know that winning the political battles isn't about being a fusspot curmudgeon who insists that he, just like the liberals, knows more about what we need than the average people do."
Compare and contrast. Paul harps on everything that's wrong. Everything he'll undo. Reagan does a lot of that, too. But he also shares a vision of just how great we can be, a magnificent hope and faith in the American people. Somehow, constant kvetching about the Federal Reserve doesn't accomplish the same end result. Note also that the isolationism Paulistas insist is part of the "package" of liberty takes on an entirely different, and far more realistic, spin here.
But I'm sure, as always, you know better, just as you know more about economics than an old fart with thirty-some years of business experience and even more than that in the practice of effective communications.
posted at
11:10 am
by
InstaPunk
Two Sci-Fi Reviews in
One day
The
hero hates us. Cool.
KEEPING YOU CURRENT. You think I spend all my time puzzling over Mike Huckabee's intentions? Think again.
All right. I saw two movies, one called "Equilibrium." and one called "The Day the Earth Stood Still."
Last first. The Keanu Reeves opus almost caused a fight with the missus. She said, early on, "I hate this." But I was determined. You know me. I love lefties. I had to watch all the way to the bitter end to make the pronouncement that this was the single awfullest big-budget sci-fi movie ever made. Which it was.
I was no fan of the original, which is where I parted company with Mrs. CP. She liked Michael Rennie. I despise the whole genre of movies that make Earth the bad boy of the cosmology set. When the aliens come to tell us that we are somehow uniquely terrible in the community of intelligent species, all I can see is the liberal equivalent of original sin turned back on itself by the presumption of superior rationality,
English translation. If Darwin is right, as the scientists insist he is, life erupts into intelligence as part of an inevitable predatory spiral. The strong eat the weak and get stronger and smarter. How could it be otherwise? So, when the aliens come, they are interfering either because they've forgotten their own evolutionary roots or because evolution isn't an apt description of how mankind came to be in the first place. In either case, they have a lot of nerve threatening us with extinction because, whoever they are now, even we backward whatever-we-ares have never attempted annihilating an entire species on purpose. Isn't committing species-level genocide though you're a million years more advanced than we are a good deal worse than harpooning one too many whales in the early industrial age? You tell me, O You Secular Moralists.
Of course, Keanu had done his intelligence homework. He knew he could do this whole godlike part without a second of acting. He knew the script was as brilliant as anything a Keanu could think of. For example, he got to condemn humanity to death based on a single meeting with one solitary alien mole who had lived as a human in New York's Chinatown for 70 years. Even then, doubts were expressed. But hey, one guy, one neighborhood, one ambigious verdict, how do you think the universe would decide the fate of six and a half billion non-New Yorkers? How any New York liberal would have conducted the research. You just have to love a liberal's sense of fairness and justice...
Why I loved this movie so much. (Loved it, loved it, loved it.) Perfect exhibition of the lefty mentality in the northeast. Perfect. Though maybe one spokesman for all five boroughs shouldn't get the say-so for the whole fucking planet. There's Jersey, too. What do you think?
Sorry but I have to skip to the ending, where all of modern technology is wiped out. Supposedly a happy ending. Only 6.2 of 6.5 billion people are destined to die of starvation, disease, and unspeakable battles for nonexistent resources, as opposed to the whole enchilada. (Even Escape from LA made this the apocalypse it obviously is...) And Hollywood thinks we want to see this kind of crap?
We don't. Which is why the palate cleanser is a very little known movie called Equilibrium. Christian Bale, Sean Bean, and the usual British delight with a hopelessly ecstatic fantasy called "no emotions whatever." It's as fun a movie as an incredibly depressing post-apocalyptic nightmare can be. For once, Christian Bale is good looking. He has a love interest he actually touches fingers with, briefly, oh so slightly, before she is burned to death in a crematory oven. What the Brits call flaming passion.
It's still ten times the movie described above. And for once it doesn't seem leftist but about life and living and all that stuff and what it might mean, even if you're a Brit.
I know that was brief and ambiguous. Whatever you do, Don't watch this -- or at least not all of it. It has big-time spoilers in it. Final Word? In comparison to this movie, Neo was a pussy. Okay?
posted at
3:59 pm
by
CountryPunk
I warned
you...
Courtesy of Mrs. CP film productions.
SILENCE DOES NOT PAY, UNLESS IT DOES. Yeah. Raebert again. Self-explanatory, I think.
posted at
7:35 pm
by
CountryPunk
Friday, May 13, 2011
Haircut today
Still
as true as it ever was.
YOUTUBES EXPIRE, LOVE DOESN'T . When I left the barber chair, one of the female stylists stepped out and said, "You look like a new man." I thanked her. Then she announced to the entire shop, "He just got his semi-annual haircut."
True. It's a bright sunlit place. I hate their mirrors. While I'm getting my hair cut there, I confront an old man in every pitless detail of time's toll. Not such a big deal. I am old these days. But my shaving mirror is kinder. It lets me feel maybe 40 instead of nearly 60.
I was going to cut grass today. I hope and trust Mrs. CP will forgive me that I didn't. I plan to cut tomorrow, before the universally predicted rain.
But I still look better than Tom Waits. Marginally.
