Conservatism

May 8, 2013

Sex Has Nothing To Do With Economics

By Don Kirk in Conservatism, Economics, Keynesian Myth-Math, Left-Liberalism

In the “kerfuffle” over linking John Maynard Keynes’s sexuality with his famous focus on short-term fiscal policies, Bruce Bartlett has a piece in The New York Times. In Mr. Bartlett’s view, the kerfuffle misses what is more important: Keynes’s recommended stimulus of aggregate demand by government spending is needed now more than ever, because the stagnant American economy is in Keynes’s “liquidity trap.”

Although Keynes is identified with the political Left, there have been a large number of Keynesians–such as Mr. Bartlett–who are from the political Right. Three of the top six Keynesian presidents were Republicans, and they would be vociferous in denying that they support Fabian socialism. Yet Keynesianism is the intellectual force behind Fabian socialism’s incremental attempt to institute socialism without a violent socialist revolution (found on page 375 of Keynes’s General Theory).

It does not matter what Keynes’s sexuality was, and it does not matter whether the call for fiscal stimulus comes from a socialist or a capitalist. What matters is that the RETURN on the taxpayer’s money in the stimulus is greater than the cost. There is no example of the dollar benefit from the many Keynesian stimuli attempted over the past decades being in excess of the dollar cost. Therefore, Keynesian fiscal stimuli are identified as “death spiral” economics, where every dollar spent on stimulus returns less than a dollar to the taxpayer.

Keynes’s Fabian socialism ‘toilet-flushes’ an economy, completely counter to its intent to stimulate an economy. Taxpayers receiving back only 95, 90, 80 cents back on every tax dollar spent in fiscal stimulus means the taxpayer is steadily going Keynesian broke.

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February 22, 2013

Lost Republicans

By Don Kirk in Conservatism, Philosophy of Freedom

Today is the anniversary of the Republican Party, born at convention in Pittsburgh in 1856. The impending war over slavery–the fight for human freedom–was the impetus for the rise of the Republicans.

Now with so many Keynesian (Fabian socialism) Republicans dominating the party (both Bush and Romney are big-government Keynesians), they have rather lost their founding guiding light, haven’t they?

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December 2, 2012

Liberals Bail to Canada, Conservatives Invoke the Constitution

By Don Kirk in Conservatism, Left-Liberalism, Philosophy of Freedom, Political Theory

In the 11/27 Human Events, a magazine for staunchly conservative intellectuals, Jarrett Stepman makes a detailed historical argument against recent calls by conservatives to secede or nullify the growing progressive legislation in the United States. When progressives–a.k.a., liberal or democratic socialists–lost presidential power in the United States from elections in 2000 and 2004, many called for liberals to move to Canada.

Conservatives, in contrast, in losing presidential elections in 2008 and 2012 are calling for nullification or secession, two failed theories settled during the Civil War, that will permit the conservatives to stay where they are instead of moving to ideologically compatible climes.

The issue is actually freedom, although the conservatives, without freedom as a philosophy, cannot see the true nature of the controversy. My comments to Mr. Stepman’s article:

“Conservatives are deep in the weeds when they argue for secession or nullification, resurrecting arguments settled long ago to satisfy their dislike for current progressivism. The key is to avoid basing their secessionist/nullification arguments on the Constitution, but instead, base their argument on the Declaration of Independence. If a large majority of the people of New Hampshire, for example, truly object to the long-term goals of achieving a national ‘democratic socialism’ by the growing progressive movement, they should declare themselves to be independent from the United States and establish a new sovereign nation, a very formidable political task.”

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November 20, 2012

Crash & Burn

By Don Kirk in Conservatism, Philosophy of Freedom, Politics

My Sony Vaio crashed and burned two weeks ago. Put it into Best Buy for repairs and flew off to the piney woods of Georgia. When I returned to the Sierras, the Vaio was still not repaired. Gave them an effin’ Microsoft recovery disk and trudged home, still married to Windows Office and Word.

Best Buy then called to come pick up the ‘recovered,’ repaired computer. Got it home and turned it on. All I had was a blank, black page with a lonely blinking cursor. Took the effin’ Vaio back to effin’ Best Buy, bringing them–again!–the back-up hard drive they did not ever use to restore my data.

On the third trip, today I picked up the effin’ Vaio. Clearly I can now operate, but the email and ‘Favorites’ are still waiting to be restored. After the same thing happened at around the same time-length of ownership to all three different computers I have owned, I am convinced the computer manufacturers have built two-year obsolescence into their products.

Congratulations to Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party for winning two weeks ago. Obviously, they did not run their successful campaign using a Vaio computer. Condolenses to Mr. Romney and the Republicans, but until conservatives decide to agree with John Stuart Mill that a woman is sovereign over both her body and mind–a freedom of philosophy tenet–the conservatives will continue to lose close national elections.

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September 28, 2012

Hot Damn! T.A. in Politics!

By Don Kirk in Conservatism, Ideo/theologies, Left-Liberalism

“T.A.” is short-hand for technical analysis, a technique popular in the stock market for attempting to divine future prices based upon reading charts of past price behavior. This T.A. chart is from the political blog, Political Calculations, and it measures the changes in employment during the Great Recession during the terms of both a Republican and a Democratic administration.

Fascinating, by its slap at the Left/Right ideological manipulations of employment data.

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August 29, 2012

A Review of ’2016′

By Don Kirk in Conservatism, Ideo/theologies, Left-Liberalism

Dinesh D’Souza is a prominent conservative intellectual who made a just-released movie, ’2016,’ out of his best-selling book analyzing the psychological motivations of President Obama.

The conservative’s movie makes no attempt to use humor to make its points, as Left-liberal movie-maker Michael Moore does with such brilliant effect in his movies, such as ‘Farenheit 911′ and ‘Bowling for Columbine.’ Instead, D’Souza deliberately employs his quiet voice in the most understated manner to narrate the film. He treats the film as an inquiry, as a quest for an answer to the author’s principal question: ‘Who is Barrack Obama?’

For the first half of the movie, D’Souza tracks Mr. Obama’s childhood travels and travails from Hawaii to Kenya to Indonesia, to Chicago and Los Angeles and New York in the United States. D’Souza offers the insight that the adult result of these childhood travels and up-bringing in third world poverty made Mr. Obama a committed anti-colonialist, and it is anti-colonialism that must be understood in order to understand who is Barrack Obama.

In the second half of the film, D’Souza turns partisan. The analytical inquiry is now transformed into a proselytizing polemic, harshly critical of Mr. Obama’s policies and pronouncements. Mr. Obama’s childhood exposure to the Marxist and socialist values of his father, mother, grand-parents and key mentors at university are linked to his policies as president. The conservative D’Souza in the film never actualy accuses Mr. Obama of being a socialist or Marxist, but the audience is sold on the unstated idea that the much-admired, much-derided president is a ‘anti-colonialist socialist.’

These ideological movies by the Left and Right are a chore to watch for a freedomist, but they definitely appeal to the passions of their true-believing partisan audience. The white-haired conservative crowd watching the film with me on a Monday lunchtime viewing cheered and clapped at the film’s end. The film fed them full, rewarding them for their ideological loyalty.

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July 8, 2012

Not So Subtle Racism

By Don Kirk in Conservatism, Ideo/theologies, Ideological Monism, Left-Liberalism

Just as one should not judge a book by its cover, neither should one judge a film by its trailer. The trailer for next week’s opening of the film 2016 is so lopsided in telling the tale of good versus evil in racial images that it is hard not to worry this film is not so subtly racist.

The film is an anti-Obama polemic created by two famous conservative intellectuals, one a Catholic and the other a Jew. The Catholic conservative intellectual is notable as the best-selling author of a book claiming that racism is largely behind us. The Jewish conservative intellectual is famous for creating the anti-racist, anti-Nazi award-winning film, Schindler’s List. With such impressive anti-racism credentials by the two creators, how does this new film give the appearance of being racist?

The movie trailer shows black poverty starkly juxtaposed to white prosperity, black family dysfunction juxtaposed to white family joy, a black actor standing for Mr. Obama grieving at the cemetery plot of his socialist father, and the only written name in the piece is the gossamer “Hussein,” Mr. Obama’s Muslim middle name and why is that even shown unless it is to evoke the ‘us versus them’ in the ideological monism of racism?

Hopefully, the movie 2016, if it is as racist as the trailer implies, will be seen by everyone who loves the philosophy of freedom. Then the movie will as thoroughly discredit the monism of conservative racism as the movie Bowling for Columbine discredited the monism of Left-liberal socialism.

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May 18, 2012

Not Exactly Lying, but…

By Don Kirk in Conservatism, Left-Liberalism, Politics

CNN on-line has an article today about the presidential race in North Carolina. In the course of the article, the Democratic Party boasts of registering about 14,000 new voters so far in 2012. No comparable registration quotes from the Republican Party, even though all of the Republican Party quotes in the article are very optimistic about their chances on Election Day.

Hmm. Where is the reporter’s research on how many North Carolina voters the Democratic and Republican parties lost in 2012? Or in 2011? Or in 2010? Nationwide, the Democratic Party lost more than two million voters over the past two years as millions of Democrats bailed out of the party to re-register as ‘independent’ or in another party. Republicans, too, hemorrhaged more than a million voters during the same two years. Where’s the political reporting on the impact of those two massive trends in North Carolina?

No where in the press. Is the national media asleep, or are they merely the unthinking, unquestioning silent partner to the two parties ‘lying with statistics’? The Democrats and Republicans don’t exactly tell lies; they simply do not tell the full truth. Fine, no one expects any organization to advertise their shortcomings, but isn’t revealing such important data the reason the media exists?

When a prominent Democrat running for re-election as President boasts about “saving the auto industry,” shouldn’t the media point out that the full truth of the boast? Out of the twelve auto companies in the United States, only two received taxpayer bailouts, and those two are union-organized while nine of the other ten are not. The auto worker unions are a major influence in the Democratic Party. Not exactly telling a lie, but…using taxpayers’ monies to ‘save’ the unionized two companies in Detroit out of twelve companies nationwide is not an example of saving the entire industry.

Not that Republicans are any better. The most prominent Republican during his recent administration boasted of the four hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars he was going to spend on housing (for the poor people who could not afford to make mortgage payments)–to cheers and enthusiastic applause from assembled party members–and later boasted of how he had created an “ownership society” when home ownership hit a record high. Never saw the same Republicans talk candidly about their role in the subsequent housing collapse which triggered the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Not exactly telling a lie, but…again, where’s the media?

Not every news article can quote every pertinent fact. But every time a politician boasts of the good they do, the ethic of ‘open inquiry’ requires the news reporters to start asking some especially sharper questions, so that they can tell the full story.

May 14, 2012

Duo Economic Semi-literacy

By Don Kirk in Conservatism, Socialism's "intellectual suicide"

Greece is busted. Spain teeters, Italy totters, Portugal wobbles and Ireland stagnates. Everywhere one looks, whether in Europe, North America or Asia, the most prosperous countries are staggering economically. We would expect such financial malaise from socialist governments, but the problems these countries are experiencing largely came about during rule by conservative governments.

Iceland’s collapse was under a conservative government. So was Ireland’s. Spain’s conservatives were thrown out of government as the economy stalled, and Italy’s conservatives have left a besotted economy after years of control. France’s conservatives have choked economic growth and Germany’s vaunted conservatives are losing elections even as the German economy outperforms its broken neighbors. The conservatives in the United States are notorious for their mismanagement of the American economy and Japan’s conservatives have the record mismanagement of twenty consecutive years of stgnation.

This is not an argument for socialist economic policies. Socialism, by its nature, is an ideology that cannot build prosperity; it is an ideology about spending the prosperity that someone else built.

This is an argument that conservative economic ideology is not much better than the ideology of socialism at avoiding the adoption of self-destructive economic policies. Conservatives ideologically are expected to be prudent, but economically conservatives have demonstrated that they lack prudence just as much as socialists.

The dominant ideology in post-industrial economics is spend. The ideology of spending equates spending with growth; after all, if you are spending more you must be growing. By far, the most famous spending ideology is Keynesianism, which is Fabian socialism’s attempt to institute socialism in a market economy without incurring a violent Marxist revolution (Keynes, 1953, p. 376).

Economic growth is not built by spending. Economic growth is built by saving. A modern post-industrial economy is built upon consumer spending, and whenever such spending falters the Keynsian ideology argues for government spending to increase in order to make up the difference. So, nation-states are trying to spend their way to prosperity and borrow their way out of debt, two recipes for impoverity.

The ideology of conservatism has bought into this “death spiral” economics sold by Keynesian Fabian socialists. The result is entirely predictable: conservative governments are impoverishing their peoples just as much as socialist governments, just more slowly.

April 30, 2012

Left/Right Authoritarianism

By Don Kirk in Conservatism, Political Psychology

Today’s blog of the AFSCME–the Left-liberal labor union of government employees–reports that a federal district judge in Miami this morning declared that Florida’s conservative Governor’s executive order of random drug testing for all state employees is unconstitutional.

No kidding. Thank God, again, for the nation’s Founders making the judiciary a check on the power of the other two branches of government.

A Frederick Taylor ‘scientific management’ argument could be made that it is the idiocy of management that sends workers to form a union. Random testing of every employee? This is the third time that random drug testing has been turned down by the courts in Florida; when will the conservative governor get a clue?

A voluminous amount of academic research declares that authoritarianism is solely a phenomenon of the conservative Right. That’s blatant “confirmation bias” by Left-liberal academics–the extreme Left is every bit as authoritarian as the extreme Right–but this clueless Florida governor appears to be determined to prove that authoritarianism has a home on the conservative Right. Clearly, this manager is no freedomist…but then, neither is the labor union.

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