Ther Right Lane update 3.16.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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“Vanishing Middle Class” Is Bad News For Society But Good News For The State
looks like the middle class is “vanishing before our eyes.”  In a real market economy, good news for one person is not bad news for other people. Yes, on an individual level, you can wish that you had someone else’s fortune, but little prosperity could exist in a society where anyone who wanted to grab someone else’s fortune could do so just because they wanted it. Everyone would be poorer. So, rationally speaking, merely wanting someone else’s life and finances isn’t really “bad news.” In a market economy, people are restrained from taking what belongs to others. They can only acquire through production and trade. If you want someone else’s money, you have to give them something they value enough in exchange so that they hand it over to you freely. That is good news for both parties.

In such economies, the rising fortune of one party means the rising fortunes of others. For example, when America’s “first tycoon,” Cornelius Vanderbilt made his immense fortune, he did so by drastically cutting the cost of migration and transport of goods in North America for everyone. Millions of Americans became richer because of Vanderbilt. He didn’t make his fortune at their expense.

But this sort of relationship means that everyone gets better off and, by the law of averages, a middle class grows and expands. What do we see now? It seems we see stores like Wal-Mart and Target losing customers while both high end and low end stores (i.e. “dollar stores”) are doing better. Why? Because instead of a market economy we are under a corrupt fiat currency banking system.

In this system, many of those who are among the richest get the new money that the Federal Reserve is creating first. They then use that cheap money to make a profit that is unavailable to the middle and lower classes. Bubbles produced by easy credit destroy middle class jobs when they go bust. With few exceptions, the middle class gets driven lower. It gets even worse because the upper classes can get the government to plunder everyone else to bail them out; all the while claiming they are “saving Main Street.” It is all a scam that robs most Americans for the sake of the few and the richest.

I get tired of the way Republicans seem to forget how Bush tanked the economy (though if Jeb tries to run, he will find more people remember than he expects). But I am equally weary of how Obama gets away with taking a bad situation and making it much worse. For five years now, Obama has gone along with Bush’s Federal Reserve appointment Ben Bernanke, in pretending that the answer to a debt crisis brought on by over-spending is to go into more debt and spend more. It is an insane plan, but it affects the middle class most of all (at least at first). Who gains from a vanishing Middle Class? In my opinion, no one really benefits if we think of real human needs. Even though the wealthy still feel wealthy, they actually lose some of their standard of living. I remember seeing the homes of wealthy in a Mexican city. They live in bunker houses for fear of kidnapping and other crime. Being wealthy in a thriving economy with a middle class allows far greater prosperity for everyone compared to being wealthy in a sea of poverty. But there are political advantages to a shrinking middle class. A thriving middle class also means you have to deal with informed voters and popular resistance to the ways in which you want to control people. Poorer people who are worried about food and shelter are more distracted and less likely to oppose you. Our ruling class has basically decided they prefer power to real wealth.

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Beware of the New Elites A Commentary By Scott Rasmussen

James Carville famously kept the 1992 Clinton campaign on message with the simple refrain, "It's the economy, stupid!" That's just as true for politicians today as it was two decades ago. However, many politicians, particularly Republicans, tend to misunderstand all that Carville's phrase encompasses. It's not just about economic growth. Fairness is a big part of the equation. Most Americans see both growth and fairness as important.  

  

Today, just 35 percent of voters believe the economy is fair to middle-class Americans. Only 41 percent believe it is fair to those who are willing to work hard.  Some politicians, particularly Democrats, are better at acknowledging the importance of fairness, but they have a pretty limited definition of what it means. They complain about income inequality but ignore the larger context.  For most Americans, the context is very important. If a CEO gets a huge paycheck after his company received a government bailout, that's a problem. People who get rich through corporate welfare schemes are seen as suspect. On the other hand, 86 percent believe it's fair for people who create very successful companies to get very rich. In other words, it's not just the income; it's whether the reward matched the effort. People don't think it's a problem that Steve Jobs got rich. After all, he created Apple Computer and the iPad generation. But there was massive outrage about the bonuses paid to AIG executives after that company was propped up by the federal government.    

On a more routine basis, most Americans are offended by the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street. The practice of working for the government to network and then cash in with a firm that needs your government contacts is seen as fair only by those who practice it. The revolving door hints at the larger problem. The United States is supposed to be a land of opportunity, where everyone can pursue their dreams. Throughout our history, many have started with nothing and risen to the top. But those on top today are busy rewriting the rules to limit entry into their club.    

In her recent Daily Beast column, "America's New Mandarins," Megan McArdle describes a new elite that rates education credentials more highly than any other skills. In this world, having a Harvard diploma means more than being willing to work hard or contributing something of value. Most Americans don't share this view. Only 3 percent believe Ivy League schools produce better workers.    

Given a choice between a worker who gets more done and someone who has a higher level of education, only 9 percent think the person with the higher level of education should be paid more. Seventy-one percent place a higher value on the person who gets more done. In the New Mandarin world described by McArdle, the best jobs are reserved for those who attended the most prestigious schools. Entry into such schools is restricted to those with wealth and connections. The rest of us are expected to trust the elites to decide what's fair.  A better approach is to focus on what people accomplish. That gives everyone a chance to succeed. It is one essential ingredient to creating a society that is fair to the middle class and to those who are willing to work hard.    [ Is this not the principle this country was founded on?  Republicans; you better be paying attention!]

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Conservatism Hasn’t Failed; Republicans Have by Frank Camp

Times change; we all know that. But the interesting thing about time is that it doesn’t always require change. Common wisdom says that as we move forward, we must adapt to cultural changes; as if we are out of control of our own momentum. We define culture; not the other way around. When Mitt Romney lost the election in November, the GOP was brimming with ideas about what we could do to change the Republican Party. Some said it was the politicians themselves; they were too old, white, or out of touch. Some said, however, that it was Conservatism itself that was to blame. It has been approximately four months since that disappointing day in November, and a new wave of young Conservatives are taking the stage at CPAC to defend Conservative values. At CPAC, Conservative darling Marco Rubio said this:

“Our challenge is to create an agenda applying our principles — our principles, they still work — applying our time-tested principles to the challenges of today…The people who are actually close-minded in American politics are the people that love to preach about the certainty of science in regards to our climate, but ignore the absolute fact that science has proven that life begins at conception.”

Jim DeMint—though not an up-and-comer, but still reliably Conservative—said this:

“The conservative movement must get its act together and act now to save our nation…National Republican leaders have not advanced a conservative agenda for almost 20 years. Not since the first few years of the Republican revolution in the 1990s – when welfare reform and a balanced budget were passed – have Republicans in Congress seriously championed conservative ideas.”

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LA Times: “Angry, White Men” More Dangerous than International Terrorists

The LA Times published an article recently on how America is at risk of another terrorist attack, but not from jihadists:

“There are, in increasingly frightening numbers, cells of angry men in the United States preparing for combat with the U.S. government. They are usually heavily armed, blinded by an intractable hatred, often motivated by religious zeal. They’re not jihadists. They are white, right-wing Americans, nearly all with an obsessive attachment to guns, who may represent a greater danger to the lives of American civilians than international terrorists.”

The image they chose to go along with their article was a picture of a group of white men protesting gun control legislation outside the Albany, New York capitol building and holding up signs championing the 2^nd Amendment. If the international terrorists to which the article refers protested like these “angry, white men,” we’d have world peace. Of course, their main primary source for their fear-mongering was none other than the Southern Poverty Law Center. All you have to do to show up on their list of “hate groups” is be white and appeal to the U.S. Constitution as a source of authority. Then, all of a sudden, they lump you in with Timothy McVeigh and David Koresh.  They claim that these “patriot” groups all believe in world government conspiracy theories. And for this reason, they all “bitterly cling to their guns and religion.” I don’t know of any group of people who bitterly clings to their guns more than our own government, namely Homeland Security. Perhaps they’re stockpiling guns, tanks and billions of rounds of ammo because of their beliefs in “patriot” conspiracy theories. They believe that all the angry, white men are planning to wage war against the U.S. government. It’s the “vast, right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton talked about. It’s OK to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist if you work for the government. If you’re a civilian, that’s all the probable cause the government needs to label you a potential domestic terrorist.

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Fifty Years of anti-American Liberalism by Eric Rauch

In a fantastic summary article for The American Spectator titled “Fifty Years in America,” Tom Bethell makes some observations about what he has seen in his time in America including anti-Americanism liberalism. Born in Great Britian, Bethell came to the States in 1962 to study New Orleans jazz. Politics were not his primary interest, but by the time his biography on clarinetist George Lewis was published, interest in the music was waning—both from the performers and the listeners. Bethell became a journalist instead.  One of the things he noticed early on was an “automatic anti-Americanism of the liberals.” This “anti” attitude has not gotten any better in fifty years. Bethell notes:

Liberals adopt a perpetual fault-finding mode about their own country. For a while I kept quiet about this, lest I sound like a right-winger. Maybe, I now think, a quota of liberals should be exiled for two years to see how they like it somewhere else. Come to think of it, Peace Corps volunteers agree. Driven by idealism, with very little sense of how their own country works, they go abroad to instruct others. Some, in their naivete, undoubtedly do learn something. In 2011, an investigation by 20/20 found that over 1,000 young American women had been sexually assaulted while serving as Peace Corps volunteers abroad.

Bethell doesn’t hold back regarding his views about liberalism. He calls ‘em like he sees ‘em. What do modern leftism (American liberalism) and communism have in common? Both are godless and egalitarian, but liberalism has “evolved.” Communists wanted to kill off capitalism, for example, but liberals know it must be preserved—in a highly taxed and regulated form. It must be permitted to create sufficient wealth to redistribute to favored groups—single mothers, minorities, college professors—if the system is to keep Democrats in office. Liberals want market outcomes to be “predictable.” Appeals to envy and blame heaped on the rich can also be used as a bludgeon, as Obama has shown. This is a most important point. Liberals well understand that even in a pure democracy, their value is minimal: they can only give what they first take. Because of this, liberals must toe the line, keeping their radical views under wraps for their own preservation. “Blue-collar workers, once known as the working class, have shown they are not revolutionists. They aspire to join the middle class, not overthrow it. Think ‘Reagan Democrats.’ It’s intellectuals who are, and always have been, the core of the revolutionary party.” That is, it is the intellectuals who are actually out of step with the major part of the work force of this country. According to Bethell, a huge wrench in the liberal-left ideology machine is the “revival of Islam.” He writes:

Islam today probably threatens us as much as international Communism once did, but with this big difference: The intellectuals, who often secretly admired Communism, loathe Islam. They are afraid—rationally afraid—of those who are willing to die for what they believe… Many [liberals] believe little more than that we should make women equal to men and make amends to the planet by ceasing to reproduce. Meanwhile we should feel free to enjoy ourselves by treating sex as fun without consequences. But these ignoble causes are not things liberals will die for and the Islamists probably know this.

Liberals are more than happy to have you live with the consequences of their worldview, but they are less inclined to do so themselves. If Bethell’s “Fifty Years in America” is any indication, the next fifty are going to be very interesting.

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LaPierre : “Let the Elitists Who Scorn You Be Damned”

Based on Wayne LaPierre’s speech at CPAC, it’s abundantly clear that this is a man, who, in the face of harsh criticism and never ending ridicule, only grows more passionate and unwavering in his defense of Americans’ Second Amendment freedom. “In their distorted view of the world, they are smarter than we are. They are special and more worthy than we are. They know better than we do,” the NRA chief said, referring to political elites and liberal media. Although freedom-loving Americans are the ones being labeled as “crazy” in the the gun control debate, LaPierre argued that insanity has consumed the media and political class in Washington.

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All 45 Republican Senators Vote to Defund Obamacare

All Republican members of the Senate voted to defund Obamacare as an amendment to the Continuing Budget Resolution. The vote definitely puts a little heat on certain Dem. Senators up for re-election in 2014. House Republican leadership recently pushed through a Continuing Resolution that included funding for Obamacare, despite the protests of many members of the GOP. Speaker Boehner and House Majority Whip Eric Cantor received flak in conservative circles for rushing through a hasty vote. The House of Representatives possesses the “power of the purse” under Constitutional law, so it is not required to fund the executive branch’s activities. It would be extremely rare to withhold funding for government programs, but if there ever was a program as unethical and fiscally ruinous ever devised, it would be Obamacare. The regulations alone will easily run into the tens of thousands of pages.

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Your Surprise ObamaCare Taxes of the Week

Wow, hey, whaddya know?  Starting in 2014, your employer (and, by extension, you) will begin paying a fresh new $63 annual ObamaCare fee, to cover the extra cost of insuring other people’s pre-existing conditions.  The Associated Press describes how this little “unexpected expense” popped out of recently unearthed regulations:

The charge, buried in a recent regulation, works out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies, employers say. Most of that is likely to be passed on to workers. Employee benefits lawyer Chantel Sheaks calls it a “sleeper issue” with significant financial consequences, particularly for large employers. “Especially at a time when we are facing economic uncertainty, [companies will] be hit with a multimillion-dollar assessment without getting anything back for it,” said Mr. Sheaks, a principal at Buck Consultants, a Xerox subsidiary.

Based on figures provided in the regulation, employer and individual health plans covering an estimated 190 million Americans could owe the per-person fee. The Obama administration says it is a temporary assessment levied for three years starting in 2014, designed to raise $25 billion. It starts at $63 and then declines. Most of the money will go into a fund administered by the Health and Human Services Department.

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Obama Says Some Americans More Equal than Others; Orwellian!?

George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm had the ruling class, the pigs, revise the law that “All Animals Are Equal” to read “Some Animals Are More Equal than others.” President Obama lives by this creed.

We have all had the impending pain of sequestration incessantly drummed into us. The president is going to make certain that “everyone” feels the pain. We’ve been promised reductions in rank-and-file government staff, the military and phantom layoffs of teachers, firefighters and emergency responders. There will be increasing, overall jobless numbers. No more White House tours (there were seven staff members in the tours department), no plowing of National Parks (which doesn’t take place until April of every year and never exceeds more than 15 miles of trails). Fire, brimstone, and plague . . . Oh, my.

After all, we must all share in the sacrifices, don’t we? Well, not really. The President and his entourage aren’t feeling the slightest pinch to his Imperial toes inside of his Cole Haan’s. Miraculously, whatever he considered to be “necessary” remains untouched.

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Administration Tells Benghazi Witnesses to Keep Quiet

Some jobs require an oath of secrecy, particularly certain positions in the military, law enforcement or intelligence fields that may expose a person to genuine national secrets. Then there are those situations where you might be sworn to secrecy but it just doesn’t feel right, like when the school bully warns you not to rat him out to the principal after taking your lunch money. According to Sen. Lindsey Graham, our government is telling witnesses to the September 11 attack on a U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, to keep silent about what they know. Congressional staff members who have been investigating Benghazi believe there are 33 eyewitnesses who have for all intents and purposes “vanished.” The White House has not come forward with a list of names and won’t tell members of Congress who or where the survivors are. White House spokesman Jay Carney has denied that the Administration is interfering with the Benghazi investigation, saying, “I’m sure that the White House is not preventing anyone from speaking.” Yes!  We all believe that Jay.  All 33 independently decided to say nothing and dissapear!

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"In observations on this subject, we hear the legislature mentioned as the people's representatives. The distinction, intimated by concealed implication, through probably, not avowed upon reflection, is, that the executive and judicial powers are not connected with the people by a relation so strong or near or dear. But is high time that we should chastise our prejudices; and that we should look upon the different parts of government with a just and impartial eye."--James Wilson, Lectures on Law, 1791

"Hence as a private man has a right to say what wages he will give in his private affairs, so has a Community to determine what they will give and grant of their substance for the Administration of public affairs." --Samuel Adams, A State of the Rights of the Colonists, 1772

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