Tag: QotD

Quote of the Day

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I’m not polit-blogging quite as much as I have in the past, largely because I think at the Federal level the system is unfixably broke, in both the “not working” and “no money” senses. Between the Party of Spending and the Party of Spending Even More,* the FedGov is at this point in time running on bad checks and (relatively) good reputation and as Larry Correia pointed out back on the 15th, the finances are so unprecedentedly far out of whack, there is no tellin’ how it (will) fall when it falls, let alone what form it will take. — Roberta X, Bloggage

I’m figuring hard, fast, and very, very far.  And in 24 months or less.

Quote of the Day – Underwhelmed Edition

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What she said:

Basically it’s a Buchanan-esque populist conservatism with most of the Jesus trimmed off. In other words, Trump is aiming at what he thinks is the bullseye of the Tea Party: Flag-waving xenophobic National Enquirer subscribers who like the F-15 flyovers before football games and want lots of free stuff from the government but hate them some taxes.


I’m underwhelmed.

(*ahem*) Ditto.

Quote of the Day – Smoke-‘n-Mirrors Edition

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“On the one hand, this is the single largest year-to-year cut in the federal budget, frankly in the history of America in absolute terms… probably for that we all deserve medals, the entire Congress,” the Texas congressman (Jeb Hensarling) said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday. “Relative to the size of the problem, it is not even a rounding error. In that case we probably all deserve to be tarred and feathered.”

(My emphasis.)

Which goes along with this:

“Once politics was about only a few things; today, it is about nearly everything,” writes the eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson in a recent collection of essays (“American Politics, Then and Now”). The concept of “vital national interest” is stretched. We deploy government casually to satisfy any mass desire, correct any perceived social shortcoming or remedy any market deficiency. What has abetted this political sprawl, notes Wilson, is the rising influence of “action intellectuals” — professors, pundits, “experts” — who provide respectable rationales for various political agendas.

The consequence is political overload: The system can no longer make choices, especially unpleasant choices, for the good of the nation as a whole.

—

Government is suicidal because it breeds expectations that cannot be met.

Quote of the Day – Church of the New Media Edition

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From Victor Davis Hanson’s latest, Kingdom of Lies:

The media is our ministry of truth of the Oceania brand: one day Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, Predators, the Patriot Act, and Iraq were bad; then one day in January 2009 I woke up and heard of them not all. I then recognized that they were now either good or at least necessary — or perhaps sinister IEDs of a sort left behind by the nefarious Emmanuel Goldstein administration, now too dangerous to even touch.

I now refer you to my January, 2008 überpost, The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation. Read all of Dr. Hanson’s piece, too.

Quote of the Day – Hand of the State Edition

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I believe that markets move in and out of balance on varying temporal horizons naturally. They overshoot and undershoot but become excessive in nature in a systemic way only when they are deliberately distorted.


Intervention in or manipulation of markets by the state is such a distortion. Its acts postpone the day of reckoning for years or even decades. It creates (a) false sense of equilibrium that ultimately gives way to disequilibrium and heightened instability. We have not experienced free markets — that is, the invisible hand — for decades. The recent failure of markets to predict uncertainty was not a failure of free markets but a failure of fiat money and socialism.

Ben Davies, CEO – Hinde Capital, London.
Fall Dinner Meeting of the Committee for Monetary Research and Education
Union League Club, New York
Thursday, October 21, 2010

Quoted in full at No Quarter

The whole speech is worth your time.

Quote of the Day – Nihilism Edition

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While we take the electric light for granted– to be able to read and write after dark by a clear light is a technological achievement that has transformed our civilization. Animals are governed by day and night cycles. Artificial light made it possible for us to work independently of the day and night cycle. There is no way to measure the increase in knowledge gained. And there is no better measure of the unthinking contempt of the environmentalist movement for that achievement than a call to turn off the lights and sit in the dark

—

That is the dark side of environmentalism, an ugly violent side that emerges easily. The most active non-Muslim domestic terrorist group is environmental. The undercurrent of violence finds easy purchase in environmentalism’s creed that the only real problem with the world is the people. No amount of turning off the lights is enough. Eventually you come around to having to turn off the people.

Sultan Knish, Sitting in the Dark

RTWT. Godwin’s Law warning, though.

Quote of the Day – Originalism Edition

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One of the most remarkable features of Justice Scalia’s majority opinion and Justice Stevens’s dissent (joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter) is the view that the Second Amendment means only what it meant at the time of its proposal and ratification in 1789-91. — Sanford Levinson, Huffington Post, D.C. v. Heller: A Dismaying Performance by the Supreme Court

No, they tried to define what it meant at the time of its proposal and ratification – “original public understanding.”  And Scalia was far more correct than Stevens, which Sandy Levinson didn’t bother to point out.  I thought Stevens’ errors were the most remarkable feature of his dissent.

Quote of the Day

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I was a guest on National Public Radio earlier this week, where I debated a left-of-center law school professor. The host asked me whether President Obama could deal with the tension between his agenda of higher government spending and targeted development and the business interests of new advisors with business backgrounds such as former JPMorgan exec Bill Daley, and current General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt.  “What tension?” I asked. Why in the world would a past TARP recipient and future green energy recipient like GE object in the slightest to Obama’s vision of a world of targeted government “investments” in what he believes to be the industries of the future?

The fact that Immelt is a Republican is as beside the point as the fact that Daley is a Democrat. Increasingly our nation is divided, not between Rs and Ds, but between TIs and TBs: tribute imposers and tribute bearers. The imposers are gigantic banks, agri-businesses, higher education Colossae, government employees, NGO and QUANGO employees and the myriad others whose living is made chiefly by extracting wealth from other people. The bearers are the rest of us: the people who extract wealth from the earth, not from others.

What is the difference between crony capitalism and socialism? Not much. Both systems are based on a lack of appreciation of individual liberty. Both systems depend on elaborate centralized bureaucracies. In both systems, large proportions of people work for the government. Does it really make that much difference whether the government money is reported as W-2 income as opposed to 1099 income? Don’t the favored people become rich under socialism?

The QotD is that last paragraph, but I thought you’d appreciate the setup.  It’s from The American Nomenklatura by Jerry Bower at Forbes.  Good piece.  RTWT.  Kinda goes along with the “Apparatchiks and Entropy” theme.

UPDATE: In related news, General Electric paid no taxes in 2010.  In fact, it collected $3.2 billion in tax benefits.  “What tension?” indeed.