Moderates United

Here is what all Republicans need to be saying so obsessively that the media cannot fail to hear it and repeat it, even with softening and obfuscating commentary:

The United States borrows $125 BILLION a MONTH, and there is no plan on the table to stop, EVER. EVER.

Further, the top 1% of taxpayers already pays nearly 40% of the income taxes. That is wildly disproportionate to their size.

However, let us make the logical Communistic extrapolation of full confiscation of wealth. According to this website , that 37% constituted roughly $318 billion. The top tax rate is currently 35%. If I divide $318 billion by .35 I get $908 billion and change.

If I then divide $908 billion by $125 billion, I get 7.2 months. That is how long expropriating the ENTIRETY of the income of the 1% would allows us to NOT BORROW MONEY. This would not even touch our actual debt.

Let us say it is all Capital Gains, which of course is not the case, since most of these people are working professionals like doctors, lawyers, and executives, then we use 20%. I get 1.59 trillion dollars. Dividing that out gets us 12 months.

Keep in mind half of America pays NO taxes at all, outside of payroll and sales taxes.

THE CONCLUSION IS INESCAPABLE THAT OBAMA HAS PUT US ON THE PATH TO FINANCIAL RUIN AND THAT NO POSSIBLE INCREASE IN TAXATION CAN PUT A STOP TO IT.

Shout it loud, shout it clear, and shout it with the future of your children in mind.

I will add as a footnote, that I am not even counting in the coming failures of our Medicare and Social Security systems. The monthly deficit is going to get much, much worse.

The question is not whether or not we will be downgraded again and forced to pay higher interest rates, which will make our cash flow situation even worse, but when, and even why it hasn’t already happened.

Stupidity is a poison that works silently, until it is too late.

I was talking with someone who has worked in car manufacturing as a line worker for the last 12 years or so. He works for one of the Big Three, and so of course had to join the UAW as a condition of employment.

He said that absenteeism and sheer laziness are constant problems. He is one of the ones that works, but at least half the people working there are constantly trying to game the system–usually by getting some sort of bogus medical note that allows reduced work loads–and exerting more effort avoiding work than they would have done had they just done their jobs.

Often, he said, they have 2 people trying to do the jobs of 7 since 5 people called in “sick”, which amounts to “not wanting to work today”.

He said the Union bureaucracy is enormous. There are a great many people employed by the UAW who produce literally NOTHING, but whose salaries are paid by those who do, which is to say, ultimately, by Ford, and even more ultimately, by those consumers who still choose to buy Ford vehicles, despite the patently better quality at similar prices of Japanese vehicles assembled here by American workers who are NON-unionized.

This system is idiotic. It indulges the worthless, and punishes the productive. It leads to massive, regular layoffs, since Ford is constantly having to retool to compete.

Here is my net conclusion, studying most unions: unions lead to increased levels of unemployment, since by increasing costs for job-creators, they lower the overall demand for labor. Less buildings are built. Less people are employed, in the United States, by the Big Three.

Now, I work alongside union members on job sites all the time. They are noticeably more professional than non-union members, and in particular it has long seemed to me that where electricians in particular are concerned, there is clear benefit to buying union; but this is, and should be, a process of free markets. Where a given product–here, labor–makes sense even at a higher price because of higher quality, then no coercion is necessary.

As things stand, though, there is no difference in what the UAW does–in having negotiated a collective bargaining agreement across three large corporations, and having gotten government protection for this patent collusion and labor monopoly–and what would be the case if Ford, Chrysler, and GM got together to force wages DOWN, through lockouts and similar methods. The first just happens to be legal, and the second illegal. Further, unions are tax exempt, yet still allowed to contribute to political campaigns, whereas corporations have to pay taxes.

I have repeated Goldwater/Bozell’s ideas in “Conscience of a Conservative” often, but here they are:

1) One union, one company. Let each union work out its own deal with its own company. No more labor monopolies.

2) Union membership needs to be voluntary. If it is a good deal, then it will be a no-brainer. However, take the guy I was talking about at the beginning: if you told him that he could make what he’s making, put it into a FORD backed pension plan (versus Ford-funded UAW administered plan), and do away with all the malingers and whiners, he would jump on that in a heartbeat.

3) If you don’t pay taxes, then you don’t get to lobby or contribute to political campaigns. If you think about it, what unions do, in using union dues for political campaigns, is force people to contribute to political causes they may not believe in. Since union membership is compulsory, then there is no way out of this, if you want to work, and can’t find another, better job. This is ludicrous.

To this I would add that it is logical that all tax payers should have a voice in the political process. Corporations pay taxes, and therefore are entitled to make contributions. However, the same logic applies: it is a violation of the principle of individual sovereignty in the political process. You may work somewhere, but not approve of the use to which the income you help generate for that entity is being put.

My conclusion is that corporations should not pay ANY taxes. Zero. And their ability to make political contributions should likewise be ended.

Most Ivy Leagueish intellectuals will never have tried to form a corporation. They don’t really understand how business works. It is all crass to them. Money grows on Ivy League trees, as far as their practical knowledge goes.

Some years ago, though, I investigated the advantages of various forms of incorporation, which mainly act as legal barriers in law suits. There are two principle types of standard corporations: S Corps and C Corps (I’ll leave aside LLC’s and other forms of organization). In an S corporation, intended for very small businesses, the net profit/loss flows to an individual, who pays taxes on the profits, if any, of the corporation as ordinary income. That is the way I recall it.

In a C corporation, on the other hand, which is what most large corporations are, the corporation pays taxes on its own profit, but every individual in that corporation ALSO pays taxes on their income.

Let us take as an example a C corp consisting of one person. Let us say that I invent a new mousetrap, and go out to market it. First year I have $200,000 in sales, and $100,000 in costs. My corporation has made $100,000. The corporate tax rate is something like 30%. I don’t know if it is progressive, but let us use that number. That means that I pay $30,000 to the government. If I then distribute the entirety of that $70,000 to myself–which is probably a bad idea, since reinvestment is generally need for growth–then I get taxes AGAIN at something like 30%, so my $100,000 in apparent profit is reduced by another $21,000, so that out of $100,000 in apparent income, I have only made $49,000. This is very discouraging.

What people forget is that no business is destined for success. For every Bill Gates there are a number of John Smiths, who nobody remembers because he FAILED. Now, success would be much more likely if you only paid the 30% on your income, and not both your corporate AND individual income, no? The more cash you have in ANY business, the more likely you are to endure the vicissitudes of business cycles.

All of these things–everything I just stated–is to my mind blindingly obvious. I am left to wonder once again just how such stupidity as we see daily in our media became such an endemic parasite on the quality of our shared lives.

I get stuck in my dreams sometimes in history. Once, I was Roman, defending a building full of old statues that were gradually being covered with water. The burden of the past was immense. The Romans used to keep their family crest outside their homes, as a constant reminder of who they were.

Last night, I dreamed of both Sweden and Japan. Sweden felt like a congenial, comfortable place, well insulated from most of the pains of life felt in places like the United States. But it was gradually emptying. I saw a very nice mansion, that had held a zoo and many very interesting buildings, that had been abandoned. There was no one to live there.

Japan was being inundated with water. This of course echoes the very real tsunami most seem to have forgotten now outside Japan, but also echoes, I think, a cultural decline. The Japanese are disappearing. Their very rich and interesting culture is slowly vanishing into the undifferentiated mists of time now gone.

We always live in a burning moment of time, if we are living. The Present is eternal. It never tires or wears out. But WE do, as we attach ourselves to given forms/times.

As I see it, we are more or less condemned to dual identities in this world. We are spiritual beings, temporarily slowed down by the molasses in which we live, yet we feel the need to belong somewhere, in a society, in a family, in a place, in a time. But that form always passes; it must pass.

As I see it, we should now be thinking about the next ten thousand years. In my own detached, likely impersonal way, I see myself as existing in this moment, in this ephemeral world, tasked with figuring out how to create what good I can, where I am.

Hitler dreamed of a 1,000 year Reich. He spent his last days dreaming of the cities he wanted to build on the Soviet steppe, after killing most of the Slavs (root word of slave, remember) and enslaving the rest.

This dream was fantastically effecive, was it not? It was a coercion of history, a twisting of histories arm behind its back until it cried out in submission, where before there has only been chaos and fear. It answered the longing for order, for purpose. Hitler could predict the future because he intended to CREATE the future. He wanted a New Rome, which of course endured far more than a thousand years, if we count the Byzantine Empire, and the ROMAN Universal Church.

You cannot live more than a moment at a time, and this applies if you are a mayfly, condemned to hours of life; and if you are an eternal being, destined to live forever. Beyond this life, beyond time, perhaps that moment swells to occupy every possibility of awareness, of sensation, but here the task at hand is all we have.

We need to connect the worlds, in my view. As comfortable as Sweden is, it lacks a reason to continue living. This is the real underpinning of Conservatism, in my view: it does not look to politics for meaning, but rather looks to politics to PROTECT what meaning systems already exist. This is a crucial distinction.

But we can blend science and meaning. Where we need to start is by bringing the study of the after-life into the realm of mainstream university research. We further need to bring field conceptions of life back–they have been there before, and abandoned for not very good reasons–into the study of biology. We need to understand how we are all interconnected, and work on building what I suppose might be termed a social “moment”, an agreed upon place of rest and contemplation, into our shared dialogue.

As long as our thought leaders view death as a final extinction, they will continue to view the only source of continuing life to be a social arrangement that is permanent because coerced, by them.

Make no mistake: people like Al Gore and George Soros have abandoned traditional sources of metaphysical consolation. What they want is an enduring legacy imprinted on the foreheads of every living man, woman and child, that tells them who they MUST be. This is evil, and it must be fought. We have alternatives, and the fight will consist in vigorously pursuing them.

Freud said these were the secret to happiness, and I agree with him.

I work hard, but I have never felt like I come close to working WELL. I am spasmodic, all too often. I work hard, then rest, then work hard. Proper work is an interaction devoid of friction, of fear, of resentment, of worry. It is teasing out a long line, steadily. It is not relentless–you can rest–but it is in a condition of attached awareness, of connection, of affection.

Love, it seems to me, is over the long haul the same thing. Relationships, all relationships, are work. This is not a bad thing. Work is life. But how we do that work makes a huge difference.

To my mind, the acme of both love and work is reaching a point where you are so relaxed AND focused that you constantly have an overabundance of emotional and physical energy that more or less just flows out of you. Everyone you meet, you are building them. Every task you meet, you feel affection for.

This is an ideal, of course, but a good one.

I listened to a lecture on Wagner the other day. In it, he played a selection from “Tristan and Isolde”. The core dramatic element of the play is that Isolde, the female, wanted to give Tristan, the male, a death potion. She wanted to die, and for his part he did as well, due to a rightfully guilty conscience. But instead of a death potion, they get a love potion. They fall deeply, madly in love, but can never requite that love due to the social context within which they live. Both of course finally die, as they must in a tragedy, and presumably meet again in another life.

The theme is longing, unscratchable, unquenchable longing. Longing was the core element of Romanticism. Wherever you were, you dreamed of distant shores, or long ago times. The pedestrian present was never enough.

I remember lectures on the German author Novalis, and his theme of “Sehnsucht nach dem (der?) Tod”. Sehnsucht is untranslatable fully, but amounts to a vigorous lust for something absent. It has always felt like there was a gap, a hole in you, that sought desperately and to no avail to be filled. Tod is death. Novalis had loved a young girl, who died. Ever after, he longed to die and be with her again.

Death and longing are connected. If you can never be fully who and where you are, restfully, then you can never be anyone at all. If there is a gap in you, can your form, your self, be said to be whole? Can you be said to be fully alive, and not existing simultaneously in some other imaginary moment?

Longing is like sand eroding under your feet at the beach. It undermines everything.

Wagner’s music made me feel weak. It was the same feeling I used to get when listening to Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”. It is the same feeling, I suspect, that fans of Avatar and the Titanic felt. It is simultaneously sickening and addicting. It’s like sugar, and has the same effect emotionally that actual sugar does physically: it give you an energy rush, then a down, and over a long period of time it pulls you slowly into a host of preventable ailments.

Let me connect this with politics. Wagner, as I understand it, was held in very high regard by the Nazis, who saw in the quasi-religious ceremonies of his music dramas the potential of a new form of society, one based upon spectacle and shared emotions. Nazism was not just a political movement, but a lifestyle, a “Weltanschauung”–worldview–as Hitler often said.

Are people who long for more more or less susceptible to the snake oil salesmen that have plied their trade as long as societies have had kings? They are MORE vulnerable, of course.

People forget that Nazism was organic. It was about getting back to nature, caring for the “Heimat” (home, but stronger, and related to the nation as a whole), being physically fit, enthusiastic, and overall having a can-do spirit. Being recklessly alone, this is what Heidegger found so enduringly appealing about it. It made sense.

Or consider this quote from Obama’s ideological godfather:

A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage — the political paradise of communism.

“The political paradise of communism”: does this not seem to imply that, in the end, he has a simple minded longing for a world which does not exist? Do not most revolutionaries and radicals long for a different world, one that does not have all the limitations which our does? Do they not want the world of Avatar and not the one where their milk is pasteurized by law, and they have to live by clocks?

What does the word “Hope” connote? The satisfactory resolution of a longing.

Bottom line: the more empty people are, the more amenable they are to crazy ideas. Many more or less want to be lobotomized, to surrender their autonomy, goodwill, hope, and character, and just be told what to do. This is something aspiring tyrants are only too happy to do.

This is my place where I just let words pour out, which doesn’t take much effort on my part. I just watch the screen, think “oh what a clever fellow” from time to time (as I have said before, I find I agree strongly with nearly everything I write), and hit Post.

When I want to tackle something, though, that is large and important, I make it hurt. I focus my attention so intently that it becomes a physical effort. Your mind wants to wander; you can’t let it. You push and push and push, until this energy builds up in you where you feel like you have x-ray vision and can see everything. It is like rolling a rock up a hill: you can’t let up, at least until the necessary insight appears. It is not Sisyphean, in that you can reach the top . It IS Sisyphean in that after that, you take up another rock, and then another.

This is not futility, though: it is the energy of life.

I say this as an apology in advance for the following post, which I have been wanting to make for several days, and just can’t find the energy and time to make it hurt properly, to hammer it into a better form.

This is a better name for the movement. They are interfering with ordinary citizens trying to do their jobs, pay their bills, and raise their families. There is no positive counterbalance to this. They are attacking people and police. They are trying to shut down the ports on the West Coast.

And to be clear, any “revolution” will necessarily hurt most ordinary, God-fearing Americans, most of whom are mostly decent.

When one studies the rhetoric and practice of class warfare, a reality emerges. There are the supposed elites, the “1%”. There is the supposed 99%. But the group making these distinctions, which itself is perhaps 1% of the population, does not include itself, the revolutionary class.

In the old Russia, there were a number of classes: the land owning aristocracy, the peasants, the proletarians, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, and the REVOLUTIONARIES. What Lenin did was instill naked greed and hate in the peasants, greed and hate in the workers, and used that lust to kill large numbers of adversaries, then used that power to kill and control large numbers of, who? PEASANTS AND WORKERS.

Marx said revolution would be organic. He failed, in his economic analysis, to see how widespread the benefits of the Industrial Revolution would prove to be, and how effective Capitalism as an economic system would be at raising the standard of living of EVERYONE, even if unevenly.

As I have said often–actually that is a lie, as I have only implied this–what is often labelled “Marxism” ought properly to be labelled “Nechaevism”. Read the Catechism of a Revolutionist. This is the actual model Lenin followed.

Marxism cannot be “practiced” any more than gravity can be practiced. Marx thought he has found inexorable natural, historical laws, that could not be controverted. When they were, his theory was falsified.

Nechaevism–for which the term Nihilism was coined in Russia–has no content. It has no more content than the demonic doctrines of Saul Alinsky, who found actual gangsters to be his natural associates.

There is no practical difference between using the alleged victimization of the workers to gain power, and using the purported problems of overpopulation, Global Warming, racism, or anything else to gain power.

Practically, the two classes are a functioning, organic, relatively stable social order, and those who want to destroy it, to topple it.

Much of our financial system is in fact unstable, for reasons I have stated. Much of the instability is in my view, however, created intentionally by the revolutionaries. The people around FDR were tickled pink by the Great Depression, as it enabled them to implement programs they otherwise would never have been able to push through, much of which was actual Fascism, which was struck down by the Supreme Court.

To be or not to be: this remains a question the answer to which dictates, in the end, your politics. If you want death, then some variant of Nechaevism is where you will fall.

Just look at these people in New York and elsewhere: do they actually look like they are affirming life, or simply choosing to continue their process of zombification in public?

All you really need for happiness–and this is an overabundance, but I include all the items I value–is indoor plumbing, heating/air conditioning, a roof, useful work to do, people to love, health and time to sleep 8-10 hours a night. That should be enough for anyone.

I will add that, as I think I have mentioned somewhere, I have seen heaven three times in dreams (hell once). It is so much more beautiful, happier, than here, that the life of the most privileged person on Earth pales besides a handful of moments there. What do literal and figurative kings and queens do? They worry: about keeping their power. Those around them scheme to get it. Yes, they have perks of office, unique privileges, but none of them amount to much. To be innocent is to be free.

Listen to this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMc0ok9_V7Q

The bats are in the belfry
the dew is on the moor
where are the arms that held me
and pledged her love before
and pledged her love before

Chorus

It’s such a sad old feeling
the fields are soft and green
it’s memories that I’m stelaing
but you’re innocent when you dream
when you dream
you’re innocent when you dream

running through the graveyard
we laughed my friends and I
we swore we’d be together
until the day we died
until the day we died

Repeat Chorus

I made a golden promise
that we would never part
I gave my love a locket
and then I broke her heart
and then I broke her heart

Watch Tom Waits. He is such a sensitive soul. It is no wonder he is so notoriously private/defensive in interviews: he is already out there. He doesn’t like it, but it is what he does. Creation is how he deals with his tragedies. He has always felt innocent to me, despite his best efforts. It is comical in a way, for those with a taste for such irony.

There is no better way to destroy a good idea than to push it too far. It is right to be alert, to “fear” God, to remain aware of God. It is wrong to live in fear.

It is right to be loving, but ridiculous to think you can be loving every one, all the time, and that a failure to do so constitutes a failure.

As I tell my children, God, too, has a sense of humor. What loving being can fail to empathize with our frailties, with all the stumblings and to-and-fro-ings to which we are prone on this Earth, which is so resistant to our wishes?

Heaven, in my view, is for most people, except those who are willfully cruel, some of the ranks of which are the supposedly religious. To pervert sacred teachings through hypocrisy is one of the worst crimes, since it damages people not on the outside, which they can endure, but on the inside, which affects their ability to endure.

I am working extremely hard, but woke up today feeling good. May you have a very pleasant day. If it is sunny where you are, enjoy it. If it is rainy, enjoy it. Whoever you meet, try to appreciate what is good in them, and try to be a bit kinder than you normally are. Most of the time this just means actually hearing what people are saying between the lines. More than anything, people want to be heard and appreciated for what they do. This is the most effective form of love in my view.

I keep hearing turkeys gobbling. Many are dying now, in preparation for our national feast day. I choose to eat meat, but I can find common cause with those, ordinarily on the Left, who want massive reform in our food industry. That is a topic I will explore in another post.

Another example, then my point: I can find common cause with those who find Wall Street greed unacceptable. I cannot imagine a world coming into being any time soon without greed, but I can imagine legal reforms which would prevent the greedy from taking without also giving. Henry Ford because very wealthy, because he made something many people wanted, which he made affordable; that something would not have come into existence when it did, had he not lived. We were fortunate to have him.

Jamie Dimon, who is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, and not coincidentally who also sits on the Federal Reserve Board of New York (or did until recently), does not make things. He moves money around, much of which is created for him by the Fed or the process of fractional reserve banking. No actual, tangible wealth is created by what he does, yet he is able to seize the actual wealth created by others through what he does. This is wrong.

My point: imagine two streams of water, colliding head-on with one another. What happens? As it happens, they cancel out, and the water falls. We have a fountain here like that. What happens, though, when they hit from similar vectors? They add to one another. Both become stronger.

There is no such thing as a Hegelian thesis/antithesis in the real world. Such dichotomies are the artifacts of our brain architecture and following intellectual sloppiness. We live in a web of interconnections. Sometimes, a tone issued from one place causes vibration elsewhere in the web. If it then responds, something larger emerges. This is proper synthesis.

The Left and the Right can come together, if we find our common ground, which will begin by defining shared problems. This would have happened a long time ago, had the Left not largely abandoned actual problem solving in favor of complicity in brainwashing narratives that subtracted the possibility of reconciling intent with solution. All it is capable of doing is generating non-substantive rhetoric, repeated with minor variations for all topics and situations.

This is ludicrous. I do not believe all Leftists are stupid or wicked. I think many of them are lazy, and that their contempt for the right blinds them to the fact that alliances are not just possible but necessary.

I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant the other day, and the song “God Bless America” came on. The owner, a former Mexican who came here illegally, was deported several times, and was finally granted citizenship, has a picture of himself and “God Bless America” prominently on his wall, along with this story.

As I listened, the word “Idolatry” popped in my head, and after pondering it, it made sense. Idolatry is reducing the infinite to the finite. God cannot be contained in an image. God cannot be confined to granting very selfish and local wishes. He is not the subject of banquets and special favors.

Patriotism, likewise, is granting special favor to specific lands and people, rather than the ideals to which they in theory aspire. Patriotism, in the time of the French Revolution, led to tremendous death and destruction, despite the supposed attachment to “liberte”, which of course meant tyranny.

America has been a great nation, a great experiment in genuine idealism. That is what makes us great. We are not great simply because we happen to have been born here. There is nothing sacred about our land, our language, or our culture, EXCEPT to the extent it supports the infinite, of which every worthwhile ideal is an example.