Links are provided, I include either my own commentary on the articles or some insightful quotes from the article. Emphasis is mine.
"It’s also worth remembering
that the dynamics of this election would be completely different if the popular
vote actually mattered. The election is geared to winning states, not people.
There is no guarantee that Hillary Clinton would have won. There are tons of
conservatives in blue states, for instance, who do not vote because they
understand that the majority around them have a different political outlook. A
direct national election would mean focusing on blue-state Republicans and
red-state liberals. I’m not sure that setup works out for Democrats exactly as
they imagine."
"There are two ways to look at Trump’s
election. We could see his win as an endorsement of dark qualities. Or, we
could see it as a repudiation of a ruling elite which people see as even more
anachronistic, arrogant, entitled, smug, and conceited than Trump himself.
Neither are completely correct."
We’ve seen
lots of haranguing of late about the popular vote vs. the Electoral
College. This article offers a good
lesson on political economy and why the diversification of powers across time,
geography, population, and money, through the structure of the electoral
process is so important. Gives good
discussion of interaction of levels of government, re-election vs. life-time
appointments, appointments vs. confirmations and most obviously the branches of
government.
The author’s conclusion:
"More
significantly, institutions matter more than specific electoral outcomes. The
institutions that determine how the House, Senate, Supreme Court, and President
are decided accidentally restrain the federal government within a two-party system
by dispersing political power between both parties. The
electoral college contributes by deterring any one party from systemically
controlling the presidency through its tampering with the voting system."
"Despite the media’s focus since 9/11 on
Islamophobic incidents and fear of them, the biggest target by a mile for hate
crimes in the United States in 2014 was Jews—long before Trump and the
alt-right came into the picture. The FBI report on hate crimes confirms: ‘A
significant number of the anti-Jewish hate crimes – 451 – consisted of
vandalism or some other type of property damage.’ That’s not to say that
anti-Semitic defacement isn’t worrisome now, but it’s important to note it
existed before Trump and should have been taken seriously prior to his
nomination and election."
Said another way, if you don’t fit the media’s definition
of minority, hate crimes and bias against you don't matter. Think about
it!
My guess is you don't know as much about the Electoral
College system as you think.
Things
that make you say “Hmmm.”
"Race did play a role in
Trump's win, but not in the way that the liberal media thought. Through their
control of what Richard Weaver called the ‘great stereopticon’—the media
construct by which we are all propagandized—we are told that we should think
about race and gender everywhere all the time. The problem is that when Whites
are forced to think about race, they are also forced to act like a minority—as
Cohn points out, a very large one. The problem here is that the result is
almost exactly the opposite of what the purveyors of racial politics
intended."
Entitled “The Healthcare ‘Crisis’.” Written in 1998. Will we ever learn?
I am fascinated by the implications block chain
will have on our future. Hopefully the government doesn't figure out some
way to regulate and ruin it.
OTHER THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY
AV --à Most
people don’t realize that impeaching a President says nothing about whether he
is guilty or not. It simply means there
is enough evidence that the House deems it prudent to send the case to the
Senate for a trial. Both Presidents who
were impeached, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton (Nixon resigned before a
successful impeachment), were later acquitted by the Senate.
I present three articles today from Walter E. Williams, a professor of Economics, who happens to be black, from George Mason University:
"Are the millions of Europeans, Asian
and Latin Americans who immigrated to the U.S. in the 20th century responsible
for slavery, and should they be forced to cough up reparations money? What
about descendants of Northern whites who fought and died in the name of freeing
slaves? Should they cough up reparations money for black Americans? What about
non-slave-owning Southern whites, who are a majority of Southern whites –
should they be made to pay reparations?
On black people’s side of the ledger, thorny
issues also arise. Some blacks purchased other blacks as a means to free family
members. But other blacks owned slaves for the same reason whites owned slaves
– to work farms or plantations. Are descendants of these blacks eligible and
deserving of reparations?
There is no way that Europeans could have
captured millions of Africans. They had African and Arab help. Should Conyers
haul representatives of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Muslim states before
Congress and demand they pay reparations? By the way, is there anyone prepared
to make the argument that blacks in America today would be better off if they
were in Africa? If blacks wouldn’t be better off, then why the reparations?
Reparations advocates make the foolish
unchallenged pronouncement that United States became rich on the backs of free
black labor. That’s utter nonsense. Slavery doesn’t have a very good record of
producing wealth. Think about it. Slavery was all over the South and outlawed
in most of the North. Buying into the reparations nonsense, the antebellum
South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the
opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places
where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, while the richest
states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York
and Massachusetts."
"At one time, black Americans didn’t enjoy
constitutional protections. Today, we do. As such, the civil-rights struggle is
over and won. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other problems, but they are
not civil-rights problems. If we diagnose them incorrectly as civil-rights
problems, however, their solutions will remain illusive."
Might I remind you that these are words coming from a black man who is smarter than you and me?
Let’s be fair about this. Trump pleaded with his supporters
to not antagonize or hurt HRC supporters.
While he could have done more, so too could have both Obama and Clinton done
to urge protestors to end the destruction of private property and the attacks
on people. I am not being unfair. Protest if you like but both sides need
to quit with the hate crimes and destruction of property.
I learned a lot in this article about the Articles of Confederation. More importantly, I was exposed to the Anti-Federalist
insights into how the Constitution does not provide enough protection against
the abuses of government. This may be the first article you and I have
read supporting the Articles.
"The Anti-Federalists
accurately predicted that Congress would interpret the General Welfare Clause
and the Necessary and Proper Clause in ways that allow it to legislate on
subjects beyond its constitutional purview. They foresaw the Supreme Court
becoming an unaccountable body that acts as a super-legislature rather than a
neutral umpire calling balls and strikes. These prophets also recognized that
the states would be rendered impotent and dependent on the national government
for revenue and direction."
http://cafehayek.com/2016/11/quotation-of-the-day-1897.html
"Profits are a
measure of the sustainability of patterns of specialization. When a
business that participates in a pattern of specialization earns a profit, the
value of its output is greater than the cost of its inputs. That outcome
indicates that the business is making a positive contribution to consumer
well-being.
DBx: The
truth of this observation reveals as meaningless and silly that popular trope
of the political left, ‘People before profits!’
Not only are
profits earned only by people – and not only is
nearly all of the value of profitable innovations captured by the general
public in their role as consumers – but in
market economies the only people who profit are those who serve other people
well. And the better other people are served, the
higher are the profits of those entrepreneurs and
business owners who perform these great services."
Don't bother going to the link since I
have pasted the large majority of the article below. The highlighted sections that capture the
essence of the article, namely that our two-party politics have degenerated
into divergent paths toward the same goal of increasing state power, neither of
which is conservative nor focused on returning power to the people.
"Here’s a
reality about the United States that is commonly masked by misleading labels:
The thrust of both major U.S. political parties is decidedly illiberal.
Of course, members and sympathizers of one of those parties call themselves
“liberal.” But the likes of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Harry Reid, and
Paul Krugman are no more liberal than was Chancellor Bismarck. They
mistakenly conclude from the fact that they are not ignorant racists or bigots,
and that some of their policies differ from the policies advocated by people
who are called ‘conservative,’ that they are therefore liberal. But they
are not liberal.
Ms. Clinton & Co. look to the state as the source of
all order and of most goodness. The individual, in their view, has and is
entitled to no more rights other than those rights that state officials choose
to bestow on the individual – ‘rights’ that can be amended or even altogether
removed at the will of those same officials. As these
mistakenly called ‘liberals’ see matters, the state, if it is not simply
another name for society, is the most essential and defining feature of
society. Anyone who proposes that society get along without the active
attention and detailed guidance of the state is regarded by these ‘liberals’ as
being either hopelessly unintelligent or a paid pawn of nefarious capitalists. Modern, misnamed ‘liberals’ – on the most
generous interpretation – seem constitutionally unable to understand
spontaneous order.
Of course, many modern American conservatives aren’t much
different from these misnamed ‘liberals.’ Many modern conservatives see
the state as the great source of national life and identity that must be
protected by good people (that is, conservatives) from being kidnapped and
polluted by bad people (that is, so-called ‘liberals’). But with the exception of some conservatives
in America who, I believe, really are true liberals (or who are very close to
being true liberals) – people such as George Will – most conservatives in
America differ very little from most so-called ‘liberals.’ The differences that are
manifest and that seem fundamental are superficial; these differences are over
the details of just how the transcendent and wonderful state should use its
power and majesty rather than over how much
power the state
should have and how much majesty it really, when you examine its grotesque and
fetid fine points, does possess.
The bottom line
is that Donald Trump is not very different from what are in America miscalled
‘liberals.’ Trump is an economic nationalist. Most ‘liberals’ are
economic nationalists. Trump is utterly ignorant of economics; he
believes that riches spring from state destruction of wealth and restriction of
opportunity. Most ‘liberals’ are utterly ignorant of economics; they
believe that riches spring from state destruction of wealth and restriction of
opportunity. Trump
and ‘liberals’ share a conviction that it’s their job – their duty – as
“leaders” to butt aggressively into the affairs of private people."
How was the wealth produced?
Property rights led to savings, savings led to investment, investment led
to innovation, innovation to less intensive manual labor and more job
mobility and the rest is history.
If credit is backed by savings, it adds value to the economy by
connecting suppliers and demanders of capital. If it isn't backed by
savings, it artificially manipulated interest rates leading to under and mal
investment and thus the business cycle.
I don't know what to make of the table except that we are seeing partisanship
at its finest. Maybe the two party
system really is broken?
More
hypocrisy.
"Or
what about Obama’s Internal Revenue Service targeting scandal? All but ignored
by the liberal press and mostly forgotten amid the drama of election season,
the IRS targeted more than 400 conservative groups in what will someday, one
hopes, be remembered as one of the worst federal
scandals in modern times—which
is still ongoing, by the way.
Then
there’s Obama’s national security fabulist Ben Rhodes, who crafted a false narrative about
political moderation in Iran
to sell a gullible
press on the administration’s unpopular and unworkable Iran nuclear deal. In that March column of mine Sullivan quoted,
I referenced Cuba, where libel is ‘whatever the regime says it is.’ But
she failed to quote the full sentence, which notes that Obama held a press
junket during his visit to Cuba that week—a visit the mainstream media largely
celebrated. Few publications noted that, for the sake of a photo op with Cuban
strongman Raúl Castro, Obama was willing to stage, without irony, a press event
in a country that routinely imprisons journalists.
The
list goes on and on. Yet here’s Politico’s Jack Shafer, clutching his
pearls and worrying that, heaven forbid, Trump’s White House might
coordinate with Breitbart,
‘functioning as his ministry of information as it did during the campaign, and
going on the attack to keep renegade legislators in line.’ This, in a
publication whose chief political correspondent, Glenn Thrush, sent stories to Clinton
campaign chairman John Podesta for approval, imploring him, ‘Please don’t share or tell anyone I did
this.’
No comments:
Post a Comment