Author: White Whale

Error is both seeing things that are not there, and just as importantly not seeing things that ARE there. The classic mistake is being factually wrong: for example, by believing that Jefferson was our second President. This is the sort of error know-it-alls never make.

The error they DO often make is ASSUME things to be true that aren’t, usually because someone they consider of equal intelligence and intellectual grandeur has said it first. Global Warming is a good example.

The great virtue of common sense is that it consists in seeing nothing other than what is there. It is unimaginative, and not focused on radical world-altering schemes. All the same, for practical purposes it performs quite well, and it absence is always a tragedy and a mistake waiting to happen.

Cain’s plan, as I understand it, calls for a 9% income tax, a 9% sales tax, and a 9% corporate tax. For well over half of Americans, a 9% income tax will be a HUGE reduction. The most productive Americans are paying close to 40% now.

Likewise, the corporate tax rate for the non-connected (the OTG: Other Than GE’s) is something like 35%. If you want to ask why corporations choose to build things overseas, there is a big part of your answer. They set up subsidiaries, that are treated as separate profit centers, and thus tax centers. That is my understanding. They do this to pay less in taxes, and to avoid all the regulatory red tape that Washington keeps sending out, and which has gone into overdrive among the anti-business numbskulls Obama has put into positions of power.

China is a Communist nation, in theory, but this also means that they can bend whatever rules they want, when they want. If an American manufacturer wants to build a plant, they just point to the location and the deal is done. At a minimum, that plant will employ many Chinese, who in turn will pay taxes. Thus even at a ZERO rate of taxation, it is still hugely beneficial to China.

If an American manufacturer wants to build in America, there is a multi-year environmental impact study–which they have to pay for–countless meetings, lawyers, contract writing, tax negotiations, etc. etc. Small wonder that busy executives often say “Hell, with it: build the damn thing in Mexico. I can’t stand these assholes one more minute”.

But if we reduce red tape, AND particularly if we make it much more profitable to do business here–a 26% increase in net profit is quite enticing–then many of the businesses that have built overseas will come back here.

We need to be clear that just because the wages are lower overseas does not mean that this is always necessarily a good deal. Whatever is built overseas has to come across the ocean. There are thus logistical difficulties. Further, Americans in general are good workers, and given the right technology can build more per hour than many overseas workers, who have to be trained in their language, and with whom there are many cultural barriers to clear communication and direction.

Put simply, an American automotive worker making $40/hour may well outperform a South Korean worker making $15/hour, once you take their productivity and deduct their total costs. This makes the American a good deal, IF other factors like taxation and regulatory climate are also congenial.

People talk like jobs going overseas is somehow an inevitable process, a result of “greed”. This means the solution is less greed. Good luck getting that to happen. No person and no nation anywhere has ever failed to pursue their own conception of self interest, although the more enlightened found that self interest in generosity. Sainthood is an idiotic prescription for material progress, however.

Jobs go overseas because it makes economic sense. Period. And when it makes economic sense for them to come back, they will. This is simpler than the recipe for apple pie. It is abundantly obvious.

Cain’s plan does this.

More generally, as we hear often, what is needed is more money in circulation. The so-called “Stimulus” (really, jobs for votes) package had this as its rationale. It didn’t work, because the money was not spent on sustainable entities. You build a highway, then you are done. The job is gone. And the money was borrowed, causing anyone with a shred of sense to know that that job was funded with future taxation.

There is a HUGE, HUGE amount of cash in reserve right now among American corporations. They COULD spend it, if they were not afraid of the future. In particular, Obama is plainly anti-business, and they have no idea what his regulatory czars will roll out tomorrow. They can, with reasonable confidence, assume that it will be poorly thought out, and in particular have taken no consideration AT ALL of the effect it will have on business investment.

Further, it is abundantly clear that Obamacare, with all its mandates and tax increases, will have a very painful effect on small business. It will increase health insurance costs across the board, deliver next to no improvements in the delivery of healthcare in the short term, and DAMAGE health delivery, through rationing, in the future. 2013 will see the most aggressive efforts to deliver revenue to the Federal treasury in HISTORY. Obama already plans to tax more than any American President has in the history of our Republic. This is bad.

Cain’s plan will cause an IMMEDIATE and LARGE increase in the circulation of capital, among those best positioned to create jobs. We don’t need tax cuts for those making $20,000 a year. At best, they will buy a few more cigarettes, and in any event are already only paying payroll and State sales taxes anyway. The people who create jobs are those with enough cash to start new businesses, or to consume in large quantities. These are the people we want spending their money, and Cain’s plan will do that.

Given enough circulation of money, the economy will improve drastically and quickly, and permanently.

Finally, tax rates. This is simple math, but 1% of $100,000 is more than 90% of $1,000. What matters is not tax rates, but the amount upon which they are based. If you want to increase tax receipts, don’t increase taxes: grow the economy. And you grow the economy by INCENTING people to spend their money.

Yes, Cain’s plan will increase the share the poor are paying for our government, which is currently zero. Is this fair? Is it fair that nearly 50% of Americans play no role in paying for our military, social programs, highway building, or any of the other countless roles government plays? Self evidently, as a practical matter, the 9% income tax may well get eliminate in implementation for people under a certain income level, and possibly there could even be an exemption card for the Sales tax. The amount of money under consideration is quite small where the poor are concerned.

The big picture, though, is that this program–regardless of the actual numbers used, as long as they are much better than they are now–will generate immediate and robust economic growth.

Whatever work you do, it influences your manner of thinking. Lawyers approach problems differently than, say, salespeople, or accountants.

I personally like manual labor, since it requires the constant physical, measurable solution of problems which actually exist. The contrast, of course, would be mental “work” which seeks to solve problems which may not even exist, and whose output cannot be measured. In many academic settings, treatises are written which cannot readily be understood, and which make NO difference to anybody anywhere, outside of, perhaps, an esthetic pleasure among a very small group of people.

This may sound provocative, but I mean this literally and sincerely: a plumber who fixes a broken toilet does more good than a thousand page book on the perils of post-modernism. Post-modernism is a CREATION of academia, which has been extraordinarily incompetent at solving it.

Self evidently, if your income depends upon the perception of problems by those who pay your salary, there is a strong disincentive to fire yourself through competence. By extension, this pattern BREEDS INcompetence. It fosters it. It encourages the multiplication of problems, and the “problematization” of solutions.

As for me, I have found the demand that things work properly to be a great Godsend in my thought work. I apply the same mindset required to master complicated wiring diagrams and logistical difficulties to large problems of general concern. If you define what you want, you can stop talking when you get there.

This is the doctrine that the world is composed of two sorts of people: those who operate through dichotomies, and those who don’t. Self evidently, most leftists consider themselves to be in the second category. Their moral strength lies in their resolution to oppose, with violence if necessary, the rule of those who divide people into categories.

United in their determination, they resolutely oppose the Republicans, who operate strictly through bigoted Us/ Them categories, such that one need know nothing about any of them to form firm and–of COURSE–accurate judgements. Their perfidy knows no bounds.

This is what you get when you destroy reason. The worst part of it, I think, is that the capacity for irony oriented humor is lost. Nothing is funny, any more, but the most vacuous and angry spiteful sorts of humor.

I was playing with this today. Consider this statement: “this statement is simultaneously true and false”. If it is true, it is false. If it is false, then it is not true, but that is includes as well.

This is the sort of thing academic philosophers do or did, and doesn’t interest me much beyond a couple of points.

Words can never be true or false, in my view, except to the extent they point to a reality beyond words. Math can be true, within its domain, but only beyond it to the extent it incorporates knowable facts like the accelleration of gravity.

Reason, so called, can be infinitely corrupted by the abuse of language. Yes, people can be classified as Other, but this process does not become benign when the “right sorts” do it. This is nothing different than the bigotry that was universal a thousand years ago.

These comments may be a bit disjunct, but arise as a result of recent repetition of a discussion I have done dozens–likely hundreds–of times.

Conservatives are up in arms about attempted leftist take-overs of the nation, which have been underway in earnest since AT LEAST the 1960’s, and in my view the 1930’s (Hell: 1920’s, since Hoover started the New Deal). This is all to the good. It’s good to be awake and not asleep.

At the same time, I think we need to begin reframing this conflict from opposing leftists, to restoring sanity and recovering a free 21st century from those who would oppose it. We need to be thinking not just about winning, but WINNING.

We need to remember that these academics who support the wholesale murder of women and children without using those images: they are lunatics, driven mad by inaccurate abstractions and simple COWARDICE. They can’t figure out a way forward, so they assume the rest of us can’t. Let me ask you this, though: if I pitted a group of academics against a group of people selected at random from a phone book and asked them to build a home, who would finish it first? In my view, there would be no contest. Academics simply do not, as a rule, have practical intelligence. They claim to speak for workers, but they sure as hell do not hang out at their bars.

What people of good will need to remember is that most of the suffering of the last century was completely unnecessary. Given the actual use of reason, good instead of bad decisions would have been made. We would have won the Vietnam War, and frankly Kennedy should have, in my view, invaded Cuba after they tried to install the SS-whatever missiles. It would have saved a great deal of suffering, and Americans would have a great alternative to Las Vegas.

When you ponder, really ponder, how most of the people spouting the most idiotic ideas are in fact intelligent, IQ-wise, capable of reading and understanding books, and possessed of reasonably developed moral sentiments, it becomes clear that if actual facts are allowed to intrude on their sacred narrativess, the change will be quick and complete.

Obviously, this is hard to do: the door is locked. But “persistence prevails when all else fails”. Our task is one requiring patience, but nothing beyond this but understanding. Everyone–EVERYONE–who is currrently espousing ideas which damage the poor and hopeless most, can be shown, over time, to see that better ideas are possible; that most conservatives actually care as much or more about people hurting in this world as they do, and merely differ in their approaches to fixing that suffering.

As it seems to me, the conservative ideal is individual perfectability. The Leftist ideal is SOCIAL perfectability; but if they really analyze what is being proposed, it is the rule by an oligarchy of some sort, which itself will be composed of individuals not required to answer for their actions. This is not perfection at all: it is tyranny.

Give hope; Do hope; Perform hope: all through the filter of a better understanding that can be communicated.

We live in interesting times. Everything we have hoped for remains possible.

I would get a soapbox, and read my ideas on the reform of the financial system. What is striking about these protests is the apparently universal mediocrity and lack of coherent ideas which typify it. Where in the French revolution you had philosophes declaiming their (often idiotic) ideas in every cafe, here you have nothing.

I have called these the Ubu Roi protests, and the squirrel tamer protests (I watched the video–Monty Python’s Lion Tamer skit–and it was actually an ant-eater, but the principle is the same). Now I would like to call it SpongeBob goes to Wall Street. Sponges soak up everything, they have little weight, and the float around easily. Perhaps the “occupy” idea is reaction to an intrinsic sense of rootlessness. Worth considering.

We see this word “inhumanity”, but as I have seen noted by many people, can we really call “inhuman” acts which have been common throughout recorded history, and which presumably preceded it? If they opposed them, the Assyrians would tie conquered peoples to the ground and skin them alive, or cook them over slow fires.

The Mongols put entire cities to the sword, creating a massive pile of heads when they conquered Baghdad.

The Romans enjoyed watching people kill one another in duels, and loved watching people being fed to wild animals. How long did they watch, one wonders? Did they watch the lions literally eat their victims? Why not?

I was listening to Steven Pinker on the radio the other day. He has written a book discussing how violence in general has actually declined in the last half century, maybe more (I have not read the book). I do not normally agree with him on much of anything, but this thesis seems to me to have merit.

As he mentioned, torture used to be something that spectators observed. Western Europe was tremendously creative in the development of implements of torture both because it was useful as an instrument of State repression, but also because PEOPLE LIKED IT. According to Pinker, whole families, children included, would watch people get their intestines wound around a spool, or watch their arms broken with large hammers. As he commented, it was something that initially was abhorrent, but for which a taste could be cultivated.

In point of fact, my interest in the French Revolution began with Terry Gilliams movie “The Brothers Grimm”. In that movie, Jonathan Pryce, as an effete French aristocrat (or revolutionary equivalent), has classical music playing and his wife and others in attendance, as a woman is getting ready to be torn apart by a new implement of torture. Instead, the woman’s poodle somehow gets into the machine, and is shredded.

This left an effect on me. I wondered if it was really like that. I want you to imagine what it MUST have been like on what I recall being called the Place de la Revolution. Thousands were beheaded in front of enthusiastic crowds, sometimes for crimes as minor as not wearing the right colors, or simply having offended someone with the power to get them condemned. How much blood must have spilled? Did they clean it up? They are French; I think not. How it must have stunk in the summer!!! And who gathered the heads and bodies? If you have 20 bodies and 20 heads, that is a lot of cleaning up.

Please watch this video, once. It is horrible, but I think most Americans lack the capacity to imagine a world where people are truly indifferent to human life. We agonize over dogs. We spend fortunes on their health, and many people bury them when they die.

Yet much of the world is not like this. They do not have empathy. They do not care about anyone who is not immediate kin to them.

Watch it.

Having watched this, I want you to realize that this is what human life is worth in Communist nations. I don’t read Chinese, and cannot say for certain this is not Singapore or Hong Kong, or Macau, or elsewhere, but please just IMAGINE for a moment the mindset it takes to contemplate the deaths by starvation of tens of millions of innocent, working men, women and childran, as Anita Dunn’s hero Mao did.

To be a Communist is to be morally equal to the man who, having once run over the child, decides it is easier to run over her again; or the second van, which could easily have avoided her, but ran her over anyway, like roadkill.

I want to be clear: Bill Ayers, on reliable testimony, calculated that tens of millions of “unreeducatable” Americans would have to die in Nazi-like camps they planned to build in the Southwest. There is credible evidence that this man was the actual author of Obama’s books, and that they were in fact friends, which would seem to be implied by the fact that Ayers got Obama on some committees he controlled.

Pinker is right that violence has decreased. Yet, it is not gone. Many of the people who SHOULD be protecting our Enlightenment heritage of reason, which has enabled the decrease in violence (not least through the success of the free market economic system), are in fact rejecting it, and by so doing, issuing de facto calls for returns to much more brutal, less kind, less empathetic, less GOOD times in human history. They are calling for retrogression, under the very thin guise of supposed progress.

NONE of this is necessary. We have people who don’t eat animals on principle effectively supporting people who want a return to their personal version of the Third Reich. They don’t see this, because they don’t THINK. They don’t reason. They feel, which is what they have been taught. They have been taught to feel because it is easier to manipulate.

If these OWS demonstrations were happending 200 years ago, there would already have been many murders. All you need to get an unorganized mob moving is a call to violence. It is as old as time.

Please do not underestimate the accomplishment implied by a nation that weeps for dogs. Please do not underestimate how uniquely kind in human history the modern WEST is. History is filled to overflowing with horrors.

Please do not take what we have built here for granted. It can all end, and it can end quickly. No more Starbucks. No more Ben and Jerry’s. No more kindness. This is nothing to desire, and nothing to work for, but for the most wicked.

We can keep building, or we can tear down. In my view, if we choose the latter, both those who did it, and those who did nothing to stop it, will face a judgement that has been long in coming.

Just watched, again, the John Wayne treatment of the Green Berets. One thing stands out: the cowardice of our retreat. That was not American, and it IS not American failing to realize how horrific the results were of our failure to the South Vietnamese people.

In our Starbuck’s age, people forget that torture was a commonly applied instrument of governance the world over, and when tempered, ONLY tempered as a result of our insistence.

How many of you would want to be placed on a starvation diet, worked 16 hours a day, and forced to spend an added four hours a day admitting what an awful person you are, and chanting pro-Obama or pro-Bush slogans?

Ay: there is so little understanding out there. Why do intelligent, educated people defend torture? I honestly don’t know.

We need a name for structural anti-Fabianism. I propose it be called the Anaconda Strategy.

As those with a decent familiarity with history will readily recognize, this was the strategy Winfield Scott–the most brilliant American General nobody has heard of–came up with to win the Civil War. He knew that the South would not fall easily. Amateurs, looking at maps, assumed that Richmond–less than a 100 miles or so from Washington–could just be marched to, conquered, and the war would be over within a month.

Scott knew that they were too strong there, and that the action would have to begin in the West, by controlling the Mississipi, then the ports, like Mobile Bay. That’s where Grant cut his teeth as a General, and it was only relatively late in the conflict that he got involved in the Eastern theater, I guess I can call it.

The movement was one of constriction: of supplies, of movement, of men. The goal was to make the effective South smaller and smaller and smaller, and finally, at the very end, to complete that short march from Washington to Richmond. It was a non-obvious strategy, but it worked.

Here is an interesting thought: the Leftists in our midst have in effect seceded from the Union. What they want is not a strong and unified America, but one riven by SECTARIAN conflict, of precisely the sort they continuously engender. They no longer want to be part of a larger whole, but rather to attack anyone unlike them, in the hope of ending the defense of our national traditions outright, to be followed by a post-Constitutional world.

We need to be clear that with an intact Constitution, the stakes for winning national political contests would be greatly muted. If the Supreme Court had not arrogated to itself the power to impose unanswerable legislation, it would not matter as much who sat on it. If the Executive had not metastasized to include hundreds of bureaus and–over the course of a Presidency–TRILLIONS of dollars in largely discretionary spending, the Presidential election would not matter as much. If Congress were not needed to counter the power of such an Imperial Presidency, then it, too, would be much less important.

That is neither here nor there, though at this moment. What I want to propose is that the advance of Leftism in the dark has been checked. It is now in the open. Large numbers of people–larger in my view than ever before–are wide awake and largely immune to the smoke and mirrors that have worked so well before. It was not that hard to argue that the Vietnam War was in process of being lost in 1970, even though that was not the case. It was not so hard to argue that an arms race with the Soviet Union was dangerous, even though it manifestly wasn’t. It was not so hard, even recently, to argue that America contained large resevoirs of residual racism. Yet, we just elected a black President, and one with no qualifications and many figurative and literal red flags at that. Even that case is not going to be easy to make going forward.

All the things that leftists have used to distract people from their failures are gone. They have spend their ammunition. They got their Keynesian Stimulus. It did nothing. They claimed their health insurance mandate would decrease costs; it is increasing them, predictably, for clearly definable reasons. Where, in their political landscape, is there room to hide from the truth?

Certainly, the media will continue failing to cover important stories, and failing to provide historical context for current events. The universities will continue to spew out poorly educated, but nonetheless overly self confident graduates.

But they won’t have jobs. And as they ponder, they will slowly realize, if they have any intelligence at all, that small businesses create jobs, and that Democrats in general put pressure, unnecessary pressure, on small businesses, often to the benefit of the very transnational megacorporations they have been bred to hate.

Sunlight is the cure for infections of this sort. The Anaconda Strategy is very simple: educate, educate, educate. Most college graduates have literally NEVER BEEN EXPOSED to coherent conservatism. They literally DO NOT KNOW why nice people could even consider voting Republican.

The task is to shrink the base of ideologically faithful continually over time, such that in 5 or 10 years, Communism is once again the universally evil word it should have been these last 50 years and more.

Look at Occupy Wall Street: these are the sybarites I talk about. They are soft and weak. They believe nothing and know nothing. They don’t even know why they are there, and are incapable of articulating credible reasons why their presence will make the slightest difference to the businesses of the men who drive by them every day in their limousines. I doubt any even bother to look up from the pages of their paper as they drive by.

These people talk about “revolution”, but none of them have the capacity to really grasp what the sort of thing they are calling for would mean. They think they will still get their Starbucks, and video games, and Dave Matthews concerts, their Free Trade Granola (but from local shops), but that instead of having to pay their bills, their bills will be paid for them. And if they just want to sleep in, well the fantastically compassionate State will let them. Basically, all the responsibilities of their lives will be gone, and all that will be left is the stuff they like, absent the evil corporations.

To call this magical thinking is perhaps generous. It is really a form of functional psychosis, that is entirely divorced from the realm of the possible or historical. An analogy I would use is this Monty Python Skit. Our Chartered Accountant dreams of a life of adventure as a lion tamer, but shrinks back when he finds out what lions actually are.

All of these children–and they are all children, regardless of their apparent biological age–are either imagining squirrels, or possessed of such abundant rage that they would qualify as clinical sadists of the Bill Ayers sort.

In both cases, the simple fact is that they can be marginalized, and this process has already begun. Our task now is to continue it. Every copy of a book by Hayek, or Friedman, or Sowell, or Hazlitt, or Paul Johnson, or Jacques Barzun,or of course Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Mona Charen, or many others, that sells, shrinks a little the space they occupy.

Of course the left will continue putting out their books. But we have a basic advantage over time: we are right, and when our policies are implemented–real conservative policies, not RINO policies–they will work. If Perry or Cain get the nod, they will make an immediate difference for the better in our economy, in my view. Same for everyone else in the field but Romney. Make that O an Obama symbol.

Now, given the level of indoctrination out there, it is not inconceivable Obama could win a second term. We need to be clear that this will almost CERTAINLY come with a Republican Senate. Between the two houses, Congress can vitiate almost every Socialist initiative coming out of the White House, and put a cap on much of his spending.

This would not be good, of course, but please think back to the Civil War. 600,000 Americans DIED in that war, which convulsed our nation for 4 long years. We survived that period. We can survive the next 5 years too, one way or another.

Americans are not bred for pessimism, and the simple ineluctable fact is that ALL OUR PROBLEMS HAVE SOLUTIONS IF WE CAN GET THE IDIOTS OUT OF THE WAY. This again will only be possible with education, education, education.

As one good example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, Hillsdale College has apparently put together a set of lectures on the Constitution.

Two more reasons I like the Anaconda analogy:

1) It recollects the encirclement that enabled the complete destruction of the Roman Army by Hannibal at Cannae, after they abandoned the strategy of Fabius Maximus, as the left indeed did by nominating Obama.

2) Don’t tread on me. Different snake: same idea.