Left-Liberalism

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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December 19, 2012

Propaganda as Science

By Don Kirk in Ethics, Ideo/theologies, Ideological Legal-Corruption, Left-Liberalism, Politics

These are two views of gun use in mass murder in the United States. It’s not exactly lying with statistics, but note the ideological discrepancy. The Mother Jones chart is from a Left-liberal media, and measures “spree” killings of four or more people. The bottom chart is from Northeastern University criminologist, Dr. James Allen Fox, and measures all mass murders using guns.

Mother Jones is committed to the democratic socialist agenda of gun control, so they use an accurate chart of increasing ‘spree’ mass murders. The criminologist has no ideological agenda, so his accurate chart reflects no increase if the measure is gun use in mass murder overall.

They are both honest charts of empirical data. But the careful selection of the data in the first chart makes an agenda, so its filtered and slanted use is propaganda, not science.

Typical. All too typical. Not exactly corrupt, but legally-corrupt it is.

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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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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 12, 2012

‘Death Spiral’ Economics

By Don Kirk in Left-Liberalism, Socialism's "intellectual suicide"

There is an article by Don Terry in July 2nd’s American Prospect, a prominent magazine of the Left-liberal ideology, which bemoans the collapsed status of Gary, Indiana from steel-mill powerhouse to impoverished decrepitude. In the article, mention is made–but only in passing–that there are no super-box stores in the city.

Hmm. A quick check of Walmart stores in Gary confirms there are no Walmarts within city boundaries. The closest Walmarts are six or seven miles away in neighboring cities.

For many years across the United States, Left-liberal activists prevented Walmarts from locating in their cities, using lawsuits, protests, and demonstrations to compel local city councils to forbid local Walmarts. Especially in cities with strong union membership–like steelworker’s Gary, Indiana–the non-union Walmarts were prevented from opening their highly competitive stores. The clear result is local consumers within Gary pay more for the same goods that are cheaper at a distant Walmart.

As the local Gary economy based on steel was hollowed out by Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction,’ the frigid thinking that goes into forbidding competition–regardless of the ‘reason’–proved to be economically suicidal. Gary is on an economic ‘death spiral,’ some of it self-inflicted by employing ideology to make economic decisions.

Gary’s economy might well have collapsed with or without any Walmart presence. But the suicidal economics makes sure the collapse is deeper and longer than would otherwise have been the case.

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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 20, 2012

Anti-Democrat Democrats

By Don Kirk in Left-Liberalism

Less than two weeks ago the State of West Virginia conducted its Democratic presidential primary. Mr. Obama won handily, taking 59% of the voter count while his only opposition earned 41% of the vote. Yes, the otherwise routine election made news because Mr. Obama’s opponent was incarcerated at the time in a Texas prison (still is), ran no campaign and yet he managed to garner 41% of the Democratic Party vote. The media is astonished by the unusual strong showing of a locked up felon nobody knew.

Does the mainstream media’s take on the WV primary election accurately describe what happened? Granted, no one in West Virginia knew the name of the President’s challenger, but the Democrats stress the positive win, not the size of the negative votes.

First of all, the voters who show up at a primary election are usually the party’s most committed ‘true believers.’ Oops. The president only earned 60% of the vote of his staunchest supporters? Put it another way: Out of the most loyal, dependable, and committed Democrats in West Virginia—people who know the President very well—forty percent turned against him.

Second, does it even matter whether the voters knew the challenger? Doesn’t the 41% of Democrats who voted for the felon actually send a message: ‘We don’t care who the challenger is or what his/her name is or what crimes they committed; we just want this incumbent off the ballot, or out of office, or gone out of our party.’ How does this vote NOT represent an insurrectionist angry shout: ‘anybody but Obama’ in the Democratic Party?

Finally, if the argument above is accurate, then Republicans have no cause to congratulate themselves. These Democratic Party mountain voters are not going to vote for Republicans in November if they have a third party alternative.

Oops again. They have no viable third party alternative in West Virginia, so the Republicans will win in West Virginia in November, likely believing center-Left voters prefer Republicans to Mr. Obama. That’s an ego-centric mistake, I believe. The two parties are only able to hang on to win elections because there is presently no viable third party alternative to the duopoly. If there is a viable third party alternative, watch Republicans lose just as badly as the Democrats in West Virginia.

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.

April 24, 2012

The Left vs. Laffer

By Don Kirk in Left-Liberalism, Socialism's "intellectual suicide"

Economics Nobel laureate Peter Diamond and Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez have an Op-Ed in today’s Wall Street Journal which argues that higher personal income tax rates upon the wealthy will not impede national economic growth. This argument is, of course, postulated by two Left-liberal economists in the nation’s pre-eminent conservative newspaper in an attempt to influence passage by Congress of the Buffett Rule, which will raise income taxes on the wealthy.

Part of their argument is that our current tax rates on the wealthy are not even close to the top range of the Laffer Curve, which is a supply-side economic theory of maximizing tax revenues by avoiding over-taxing. The two brilliant Left-liberal economists argue that the current top rate of 35% on the richest Americans could be safely increased to 50%, or even to 70%, without harming economic growth. They back up their argument by noting that since tax rates in Ronald Reagan’s first term were at 50% maximum and yet an economic boom began in Reagan’s mid-term, 50% is not anti-growth.They conclude their argument by calling for higher taxes upon the already-wealthy, while also suggesting that, in the interest of promoting economic growth, the approaching-wealthy should not have their tax rates increased.

Oops. This is an intellectually-corrupt example of using fact-filtered ideology to make an argument. The Diamond/Saez argument relies, in part, upon what is known in philosophy as a fallacy by conflation and in economics as a “static” analysis: 50% maximum taxes in 1982 yet we had a boom, so we can safely raise maximum taxes to 50% in 2012 and the higher rates will not shut down growth. In a “dynamic” analysis, the economic historian would quickly point out that the 50% tax rates under Reagan were a Laffer Curve DROP of rates from 70%, thus spurring economic growth. If we adopt 50% taxes now, that represents a RISE in tax rates from 35%, thus likely to dampen economic growth.

As I understand their second argument, once you are rich you no longer invest for greater economic growth but instead invest for passive income, therefore you should be taxed at higher maximum rates. Otherwise if you are merely almost-rich, you are still investing in greater economic growth and should pay a lesser tax rate.

Let’s first tackle their Laffer Curve argument. When I studied the Laffer Curve at university years ago, the optimum personal income tax rate was believed to be 40%. Above 40% would result in a fall of tax revenues as the wealthy altered their productive behavior in order to avoid paying at the higher tax rate. Perhaps there is just something about the human being ever since the Roman Empire that naturally resents paying more than half their income to the government, and if that’s true then keeping the maximum tax rate below 50% makes sense if you want to maximize actual tax collection.

The argument that the Laffer Curve permits 50% to 70% as the top tax rate for individuals before negatively affecting economic growth is fallacious. 40% is the suggested maximum, which is perhaps why President Obama years ago suggested increasing personal income taxes only to a maximum of 41%; he was apparently trying to squeeze an extra 1% for the maximum tax rate just above the Laffer Curve’s 40% optimum.

Also, the Diamond/Saez secondary argument–that the wealthy are no longer active investors in economic growth so they should therefore pay higher tax rates on passive income–is plainly wrong. Many tax-free municipal bonds that the wealthy purchase finance infrastructure projects for local cities, counties, and States. As the two eminent economists point out elsewhere in their Op-Ed, infrastructure investments can be high-return investments in future economic growth. So their argument that the wealthy are not investors in economic growth is refuted by their ignoring the greater infrastructure investment financed by the wealthy who buy tax-free bonds. Their argument is self-contradictory, hence, fallacious. If their ‘static’ argument is flawed about the maximum tax rate that diminishes tax revenues, and if their argument is also wrong about the wealthy being non-investors in greater economic growth, then doesn’t their main argument–that higher taxes do not impede economic growth–suffer from an irrational grounding?

They make a collander argument, full of holes. Higher tax rates on the wealthy might very well be a policy most Americans want, but this argument is too hollow to achieve the goal. This Diamond/Saez argument is an example of socialism’s “intellectual suicide,” the ideological myth-making by the liberal-Left, which is no better than the ideological myth-making in economics by the conservative-Right.

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