We're in a permanent coup by Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi doesn't support Trump yet his articles show objectivity that is sadly lacking in the news media. His latest piece, We're in a permanent coup, provides another example.

Early in the article Taibbi lays out his concerns.

My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.

The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped.

Towards the end of his article Taibbi says, 

I don’t believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.

Taibbi labels this tug-of-war between Trump and those who want to remove him from office as the Permanent Power Struggle. This is a common theme of Tucker Carlson: that the Democrats lust for power compels them to dispose of Trump who they feel is an illegitimate president.

While I agree with Carlson's point there is a deeper one. Would we even have this perpetual political WrestleMania if the Federal government didn't wield so much power? Would we still have this to-the-death battle to wrest the levers of power from the incumbent party to the political party that lost the previous election? I doubt it!

The Coming Intra-Party Wars - The Atlantic

Megan McArdle's The Coming Intra-Party Wars - The Atlantic posting on the debt limit battle contains two comments that caught my eye. The first one talks about the choices the Republican and Democrats will have to take.

The Democrats ... are going to face unprecedented conflicts between their constituencies in the decades to come. Fundamentally, we're bumping up against the willingness of the American public to pay more taxes, or accept spending cuts. Some constituencies are going to lose. Republicans are going to have to decide whether they'd rather have lower taxes, or a stronger military. And Democrats are going to have to decide who they care about more: old people, or poor people.

The other comment brilliantly captures the shell game we're playing on ourselves.

Me, I'd like a single entitlement system that takes care of people who are actually destitute and unable to work, not this mad scheme whereby America's middle class is supposed to get rich by picking its own pockets.

Tax The Rich? Good Luck With That - Investors.com

When we hear certain politicians, like Obama, constantly demonizing the wealthy for their transgressions and proposing higher tax rates for this group to close the budget gap, consider what Walter Williams says in his Tax The Rich? Good Luck With That - Investors.com. The bottom line: this avenue leads to a dead end that falls woefully short of the declared goal of having enough funds to pay for all of the expenses in our national budget. 


This isn't top secret, impossible to find information so I can only conclude that the motive behind the incessant demonizing of the rich has other motivations than balancing the budget.

A Busted Formula By: Eric Sprott & David Franklin

This analysis by Eric Sprott shows the folly of relying on government bail outs to "stimulate" our way out of the recession. As he concludes,

The key point to remember with bailouts and stimulus is that it’s ultimately your money that the government is spending – and your children’s money. The numbers strongly suggest that your money isn’t being spent wisely. We need real jobs and real growth, not bigger, more leveraged banks. The market isn’t oblivious – it can see what’s happening. Gold’s recent strength in lieu of seemingly ‘deflationary’ economic data confirms the market’s doubts over government intervention in the financial system.

Golden No Longer

George Will's article, Golden No Longer, does a nice job of identifying what ails the country's current economic state by focusing on one state, California.

It took years for liberalism's redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: "Between 1990 and 2007," Voegeli writes, "some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state."

And the state's income tax -- liberalism codified -- intensifies the effects of business cycles on the state's revenue stream: During booms, the stream surges and stimulates government spending; during contractions, revenues dwindle but the new government spending continues. Voegeli says that if California's spending had grown no faster than population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, it would have been $65 billion less in 2006, and per capita government outlays then would have equaled not those of Somalia or Mississippi but of Oregon, which is hardly "a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism."

It took years for liberalism's mania for micromanaging life with entangling regulations to make California's once creative economy resemble Gulliver immobilized by the Lilliputians' many threads. The state, which between 1990 and 2007 lost 26 percent of its factory jobs and 35 percent of its high-tech manufacturing jobs, ranks behind only New York, another of liberalism's laboratories, in the number of outward-bound moving vans.

It took years for compassionate liberalism to make California's welfare menu contribute to the state becoming an importer of Mexico's poverty. It took years for servile liberalism to turn the state into what Voegeli calls a "unionocracy," run by and for unionized public employees, such as public safety employees who can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of the final year's pay for life.

By coincidence I just read a chapter in Arthur Laffer's The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy--If We Let It Happen that digs even deeper into California's policy follies. I'll review it here when I'm done reading the book.

The Effects of a Gangster Government

This YouTube link shows what happens when you turn the control of a private enterprise over to public "servants." They're serving all right, but whose interests? The customer's? I think not! This gives a whole new meaning to organized crime.

Does the government create wealth or redistribute it?

I recently received this e-mail containing a quote by the late Dr. Adrian Rogers (1931 to 2005) Memphis, TN, that seems particularly appropriate in light of the Obama election.

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the rich out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

The government cannot give to anybody anything the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend is about the end of any nation.

You cannot multiply the wealth by dividing it.

While I agree with this sentiment it will most likely carry little or no weight with those who, like Obama, want to “spread the wealth” as he said in the famous exchange with “Joe the Plumber” during the election. I’m sure Obama and Democrats don’t argue that the government creates wealth. Instead they feel it is the appropriate vehicle to redistribute wealth.

A key premise behind redistributionism is the idea that the free market unfairly distributes the wealth, that businessmen and the wealthy ultimately don’t deserve what they have, that they succeeded by exploiting others. (In other words, they hold a form of watered-down Marxism.) Therefore redistributionists believe it is moral to use progressive taxation and other measures to right past wrongs and to create a more egalitarian society.

So in order to make any kind of impact on those who argue this way is to show that:

1. The free market isn’t rigged to exploit the lower classes and that everyone has an equal chance to succeed.
2. The distribution of wealth is such that you could tax the top earners at 100% and still not make a major impact on the people at the other end of the income spectrum.
3. It is moral to pursue one’s own interests as long as you don’t violate the rights of others.
4. Perhaps most important, it is immoral to take what one has earned by their own efforts and give it to others.

Obviously accomplishing all of this is more than I can cover here. I’d recommend sites like the Ludwig Von Mises Institute for the economic counter-arguments and the Ayn Rand Institute for the individualist defense.