Posts Tagged ‘republican’
By Kurt Bouwhuis, Mackinac Center Intern over at the TryingLiberty blog:
“You actually have a consensus among conservative, Republican-leaning economists and liberal, left-leaning economists. And the consensus is this: that we have to do whatever it takes to get this economy moving again, that we’re going to have to spend money now to stimulate the economy,” Obama said on the program, which aired Sunday.
I hope “whatever it takes” does not include creating money out of thin air and distributing it to individuals and businesses at arbitrary quantities that bureaucrats sees fit. I also hope Obama and his board of economists understand that you do not grow an economy with spending, but rather, investment. You will see short run benefits from spending, but you will see stable long term growth with investment. This is assuming there are no entities messing around with the interest rates (Fed), sending inaccurate market signals to capitalists and entrepreneurs, causing an inefficient allocation of resources.
Sounds to me as though this “market crisis” will convey enough insecurity to pave the way for the unveiling of a new New Deal. Together, these two parties will lead us down a path where we will continue to live way beyond our means through the creation of numerous short run solutions. If we truly want to “fix” the economy, we may want to look at what makes an economy prosper. I would argue prosperity comes from allowing an economy to create goods and services that are demanded by consumers around the globe at a profitable price. If your economy is creating goods and services that people want, your economy will prosper. Aiding the economy has nothing to do with printing money, or stimulus checks, or public health care, or tampering with the interest rates, or subsidizing, or regulating… An economy will prosper when it is allowed to produce.
Tags: animals, bailout, crisis, democrat, economy, gop, government, Obama, politicians, politics, republican, spending, taxes
Posted in From The Blogs | 1 Comment »
From the Coyote Blog:
“Congressional Democrats announced today that they had agreed to a bailout plan for Republicans after last week’s devastating election results. While exact details are unavailable, sources tell us that the Republicans will be given 4 seats in the Senate and 15 in the House. Nancy Pelosi said in a statement today: “We’ve established pretty clearly over the last several months that failed strategies and management should not necessarily have to result in losses in market share, particularly for well-connected Washington insiders.”
Tags: bailout, congress, democrat, funny, republican, satire
Posted in Morehouse, Less Government | No Comments »
The political landscape has changed. The Madisonian idea of competing interest groups and parties balancing each other out is over. There are still two parties, but they’re not the two major political parties you think and the balance of power is permanently tilted in favor of one of them. It’s us and them. The people, and the political class. Jack McHugh explains:
Cross-posted from Mackinac Center for Public Policy
The fundamental problem facing our nation is that true representative government has been supplanted by an inbred, self-serving, self-perpetuating political class that does not represent the people. As a result, the government has escaped the control of the people.
Evidence is all around. For example, whether or not one agrees with the policy, for decades term limits have been consistently favored by an overwhelming majority. Yet they are opposed and sabotaged by the political class at every opportunity (most recently in New York City, where the city council just overturned mayoral term limits despite their being approved by 59 percent of the voters in a 1993 initiative, confirmed in a 1996 referendum.) By what principle of representative government is negating the repeatedly expressed will of the people justified?
Similarly, there’s a durable popular consensus favoring a federal balanced budget amendment, and an equally persistent refusal by the political class to enact it. At the state level, “Taxpayer Bills of Rights” spending limitations enjoy broad public support, but will never pass a single legislative body.
It’s not just the politicians - public employees are an integral part of the problem, too. For example, in Michigan last year there was an effort by some Senate Republicans and House Democrats to outsource certain juvenile justice and adoption services to private social service agencies. Despite bipartisan recognition that it would save money and generate better outcomes for children, the measure was gutted at the 11th hour because some 800 government jobs would have become superfluous.
Locally, can anyone doubt the result if pollsters asked, “Should municipal and school employees be able to retire at age 50 with a full pension and lifetime health coverage?” Yet such benefits are commonplace. The elected officials who grant them and their beneficiaries are all members of the same political/government class, which protects its own above all else.
The political class perpetuates its rule in many ways. One is campaign finance regulations that impose nearly impossible burdens on challengers, while incumbents use tax dollars and their offices in never-ending campaigns. Also, the government’s pampered minions - public employees and their unions - have become what may be the most powerful and effective special interest, and are fully engaged in electoral politics. Their exclusive goal is defeating candidates or initiatives that might diminish their authority, resources or privileges, and their political power all but dominates elections at every level.
That particular power-center is in part the offspring of the 19th century’s Progressive movement goal of replacing the bribes, kickbacks and graft of a corrupt patronage system with a professionalized, non-partisan bureaucracy. With the growth of a massive welfare state this “good government” reform metastasized into a much deeper corruption of the democrat ideal: An unelected bureaucratic nomenkaltura, controlling or allied with today’s political class, manipulating the system to deprive the people of any real choice. You can vote for the red squad or the blue squad, but they’re all members of the same elite, which always promotes its interests ahead of yours.
Can anything be done? What’s needed is a movement that, like the Progressives in their time, captures the public’s imagination by defining a new dimension in U.S. politics: Not Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, or populist vs. capitalist, but the people vs. a political and government class that no longer represents them.
Don’t look for help from the political parties. Parties are all about power, and recent history demonstrates just how quickly a party abandons whatever principles it professes once that object is gained, instead embracing the instrumentalities of big government to keep it.
As always, the true source of reform must be the people themselves. Those who would restore representative government must raise the public’s consciousness regarding this fundamental but little understood divide: The people vs. the political/government class.
The rare candidate who sincerely opposes the status quo, or ballot initiative that challenges it, enjoys the tremendous advantage of an enthusiastic public. But they must also expect concerted counter-attacks from the arrayed forces of the system itself, rippling with political muscles.
These forces will only be overcome when the public explicitly understands where the real divide lies, and so sees through the inevitable demonization, lies and outright thuggery funded by the political establishment’s nearly bottomless resources, much of which come directly or indirectly from the state itself.
We may be approaching a tipping point where this political class and establishment amass such power and resources that efforts to dislodge them become futile, and Americans are no longer sovereigns, but subjects. While we still are able, defenders of liberty must become modern-day Paul Reveres, raising the alarm by identifying freedom’s true and most and potent enemies: Those who run and operate our unrepresentative governments.
Tags: democrat, mchugh, partisan, party, political class, politics, public choice, rent-seekers, republican, them, us
Posted in From The Blogs | 1 Comment »
Some wisdom from Jesse “The Body” (or is it, “The Mind”?) Ventura on the 2008 election, Republicans and Democrats:
“In pro wrestling, out in front of the people, we make it look like we all hate each other and want to beat the crap out of each other, and that’s how we get your money, [and get you to] come down and buy tickets. They’re the same thing. Out in front of the public and the cameras, they hate each other, are going to beat the crap out of each other, but behind the scenes they’re all going to dinner, cutting deals. And [they're] doing what we did, too — laughing all the way to the bank. And that to me is what you have today, in today’s political world, with these two parties.”
Tags: democrat, elections, jesse ventura, party, politics, public choice, republican, voting, wrestling
Posted in Morehouse, Less Government | No Comments »
By SFE Blogger Jonny Slemrod for the Michigan Daily:
I have a simple and honest talking point that both Barack Obama and John McCain can use this campaign season: “I will exponentially grow the size and scope of government.” Indeed, politics of personality and feel-good adjectives such as “change,” “hope” and “reform” have replaced any substantive discussion of the reality that neither candidate will fight our country’s real problem: big government.
Anyone familiar with the tax-spend-regulate-repeat mantra of the Democratic Party knows that Obama’s notion of “change” is feeble. His platform of increasing taxes on everything from energy to investment will surely satisfy big-spending politicians in Washington, D.C., eager to delve into the hundreds of billions in new government spending he has proposed.
Obama regularly attacks “Big Oil,” conveniently avoiding the fact that he voted to give $85 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to the energy industry in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. His ideology injects more government into health care, bails out everything from Fannie Mae to Detroit automakers and willingly grabs the “excessive” profits of oil companies for new spending programs.
This is not to say that McCain is a saint. His “maverick” affinity for bipartisanship has led to sweeping restrictions on free speech through campaign finance reform and an increasingly interventionist and costly foreign policy.
McCain joined Obama in supporting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which legitimizes the illegitimate act of warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. McCain’s opposition to earmarks and wasteful spending deserves praise, but like Obama, he supports an enormously burdensome cap-and-trade scheme that will substantially increase energy prices and damage our economy while having little, if any, effect on carbon emissions.
The rapid growth of government endorsed by both candidates is not a sustainable path for our country. With a national debt nearing $10 trillion, Obama and McCain seem to have determined that the only logical solution to our long-term problems is to spend even more.
A responsible platform that truly embodied change and reform would focus on the big issues that threaten to bankrupt our country: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
The trustees of Social Security and Medicare estimated a couple years ago that Social Security will begin paying out more than the amount of revenue it receives in 2017, necessitating a solution that puts citizens, not politicians, in charge of their futures.
Obama has proposed (you guessed it!) a tax hike to solve the problem, while McCain has reluctantly endorsed a more favorable approach that allows workers to designate a fraction of their contributions for private accounts.
Common sense, free-market solutions to the entitlement crises exist, but neither candidate has stepped up to the plate to consider them.
Instead, Obama and McCain prefer to argue over the babies of the daughters of vice presidents, what someone’s wife said and who is more patriotic. I submit this: A true patriot — Democrat or Republican — desires to expand individual liberty, tackle the out-of-control growth of government and ensure that future generations have the same opportunities we have been afforded. The long-term challenges we face as a country won’t be solved by higher taxes, more wasteful spending and increased government regulation, regardless of how politically popular these solutions may be this week. Reducing the size of government allows the free market to flourish, increasing freedom and prosperity for all.
Any other approach is like putting out fire with gasoline.
Tags: big government, democrat, election, party, politics, president, republican, spending
Posted in Morehouse, Less Government | No Comments »
