George Rebane
AG Loretta Lynch, flying hot, true, and normal as the progressive autocrat she is, refuses to submit her coterie of scumbag DOJ lawyers to ethics training as ordered by Judge Andrew Hanen after lying to the court and withholding evidence. To this, an accomplished scumbag herself, she has now stated that the DOJ will not release the names of the illegal aliens to whom she has peremptorily and illegally granted asylum.
The eastern metropolitan cesspool, one of many under decades of Democrat control, known as Philadelphia will loosen the micro-managing ordinances under which its saloons are forced to operate in order to appropriately allow the watering of the Democratic convention delegates. But this little reversion to sanity is only temporary, but exactly what you’d expect from the progressive elites succoring their own. After the convention folds its tent, then it’s ‘Back to standing on your heads again!’ (Everyone knows this punchline to the old joke about Hell, right?)
Speaking of eastern cesspools, its poster child is long progressive Connecticut that tries to outdo California’s insanities. It also runs up deficits from its faltering economy by taxing the bejeezus out of its 1% producers who are leaving the state, and the country in droves. But the butt stupid emulation of the Golden State is that it too doesn’t understand why its tax revenues are not rising as it turns the screws on its wealth producers.
Henry George’s Protectionism and Trade was the best book on the subject according to Milton Freedman. George demolished protectionist arguments – exports good, imports bad – through short thought experiments. He noted that “to have all the ships that left each country sunk before they could reach any other country would, upon protectionist principles, be the quickest means of enriching the whole world, since all countries could then enjoy the maximum of exports with the minimum of imports.” (more here) But my favorite about corporatism was his observation about tariffs needed to support ‘vital domestic industries’ –
These political favors will inevitably go not to the deserving but to the strong and unscrupulous. See if this sounds like Washington today: “infant industries have no more chance in the struggle for governmental encouragement than infant pigs with full-grown swine about a meal-tub. Not merely is the encouragement likely to go to industries that do not need it, but is likely to go to industries that can be maintained only in this way, and thus to cause absolute loss to the community by diverting labor and capital from remunerative industries.”
Joseph Epstein, conservative intellectual, author, and editor (The American Scholar, Weekly Standard, …), has discovered ‘Why Trumpkins Want Their Country Back’, and concludes that "dismissing Trump’s fans as racists and thugs is too self-congratulatory, too easy. There’s something deeper rumbling". No great fan of Trump – “would sooner have my thumbs removed than vote for Donald Trump” – he is told by the many that they support Trump as the only available way to overturn the rotten applecart which has become our federal government, even while the man himself has presented only grandiose objectives with no viable solutions. Today, as Irving Kristol observed about the culture wars, “they are over, we lost.” Kristol’s ‘we’ are the Americans "with a strong regard for tradition, who valued liberty over government-induced equality, the entrepreneurial over the entitlement spirit.”
Ever wonder why some (many?) Silicon Valley billionaires pay tribute to the Democrats? These are smart people who know all the travails that collectivism delivers now and more later. They are optimizing a utility based on their and their families’ near term comfort. They already have money beyond imagining and all they want to do is feed the beast so that it won’t eat them or at least eat their heirs last. In short, their utility is the endurance of their ‘I got mine.’ The only route to that for the rich is corporatism which costs money that they can get from the pricing power that their unique and exceptional high tech products and services provide – i.e. we pay for their bribes. And why do some select the Dems? Easy, they can see how these shylocks have cracked the code of buying ever more votes by increasing entitlements the qualifications for which continue to be reduced.
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