GOVERNMENT GREED – THE WORLD’S GREATEST ECONOMIC PROBLEM
At the end of this past week (6/10), The Washington Post ran a long story on the Center for Freedom and Prosperity (CFP), an organization that I have long supported. It appeared that the original goal was to do a hit piece on CFP because it had been a leader in the fight for global tax competition and smaller government.
It seemed to stun The Washington Post’s writers that only a couple of people with a tiny budget were able to stop major governments from even doing more of a tax-and-regulatory grab — mainly because the CFP only needed to effectively expose the facts and the truth, which they did.
Dan Mitchell, chairman of the board of CFP, quoted Michigan’s former Democrat Sen. Carl Levin (1979 to 2015) as saying that the CFP’s “activities run counter to America’s values and undermine the nation’s ability to raise revenue.”
Note: During the time the senator was in office, federal tax receipts soared from $463 billion to $3.2 trillion — and he complained that was not enough, showing there is no limit to the greed on the left to spend other people’s money, no matter how much economic and social damage it causes.
Join the forum discussion on this postTHE POWER OF EMBODYING EMOTIONS
Last week in Using Your Sixth Sense to Change Your Life, I wrote how building more awareness of our physical sensations can help us make essential positive changes. And I described the different sensory systems that allow for this.
Today, we’re going to look at how those same physical sensations can help us master our emotions as well.
For many of us, emotions are something of a mystery. On the one hand, they can be delightful. They give life meaning and depth that would be otherwise impossible. On the other hand, they can be uncomfortable. They can hinder and disturb us. Anger, in particular, can sometimes cause a whole lot of very big trouble.
Learning to feel, understand and use our emotions is central to mastering the complexity of life. Our emotions become much clearer and easier to use the more we pay attention to the physical sensations that go with them. Let’s start learning how to do this.
INFIDEL SCUM
WHY I WILL VOTE FOR BRITAIN TO LEAVE THE EU
With sadness and tortured by doubts, next week (6/23) I will cast my vote as an ordinary citizen for withdrawal from the European Union.
Let there be no illusion about the trauma of Brexit. Anybody who claims that Britain can lightly disengage after 43 years enmeshed in EU affairs is a charlatan or a dreamer, or has little contact with the realities of global finance and geopolitics.
Stripped of distractions, it comes down to an elemental choice: whether to restore the full self-government of this nation, or to continue living under a higher supranational regime, ruled by a European Council that we do not elect in any meaningful sense, and that the British people can never remove, even when it persists in error.
We are deciding whether to be guided by a Commission with quasi-executive powers that operates more like the priesthood of the 13th Century papacy than a modern civil service; and whether to submit to a European Court of Justice (ECJ) that claims sweeping supremacy, with no right of appeal.
The EU Project bleeds the lifeblood of the national institutions, but fails to replace them with anything lovable or legitimate at a European level. It draws away charisma, and destroys it. This is how democracies die.
HALF-FULL REPORT 06/10/16
President Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton, made plans to campaign with her in Wisconsin next week. He met yesterday with Bernie Sanders, who immediately afterward toned down his rhetoric. The more important meeting Obama held Thursday was with Attorney General Loretta Lynch. It’s safe to assume, now, that Hillary won’t be indicted, no matter how powerful the evidence the FBI has gathered.
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It was the Mother of All Corrections which, predictably, has gotten little attention from the “mainstream” media.
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A mob of about 400 attacked people as they were leaving a Donald Trump rally in San Jose June 2. Trump backers were “running for their lives,” some San Jose police officers said. Police watched the attacks for about half an hour before moving in.
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Her Hillaryness granted the reporters covering her campaign an eight minute audience in California Monday in which they could ask her questions. If you thought the journalists might have had a question or two about scathingly critical report by the State Department’s inspector general on her use of a private email server, or about a new book by a former Secret Service agent who said she “lacks the integrity and temperament to serve as president,” you’d have been mistaken.
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Donald Trump is a shameless bigot…who ought to be our next president. That’s the official position of GOP “leaders” in the wake of The Donald’s bizarre rant against Judge Alfonso Curiel, who will preside over the trials of two of the three class action suits accusing Trump University of fraud.
PLEASE DON’T BE SURPRISED
“The media have reached a turning point in covering Donald Trump,” says Paul Waldman of the Washington Post (6/03). “He may not survive it.”
“Mainstream” journalists who think The Donald will pay a price for attacking the news media may be as lacking in self awareness as they are in ethics. In Gallup’s annual survey of trust in American institutions, “television news” ranked 12th, barely ahead of big business and Congress.
“Eighty percent of Americans believe that an alliance of politicians, media pundits, lobbyists, and interest groups runs the country for their own gain at the expense of the American people,” said Greg Orman and Pat Caddell in calling for “a real independent candidacy that offers a path apart from the establishment Democrat and Republican parties.”
Orman and Caddell claim what they advocate “isn’t a whimsical fantasy” – but if you read their plea that’s precisely what it is.
WHAT IS HILLARY HIDING?
Like millions of avid news readers, I’ve been trying to sort out the Hillary Clinton scandals. You know, all that stuff about classified material on her “private” server, sensitive national security secrets that have most likely been lifted by hostiles.
I think we’ve lost track of the central question: Why was she so eager to conceal her communications from Congress and the American public?
Most of the commentary goes something like “because she wanted to evade discovery.” She dreaded all the FOIAs. But that only leads to the question another time: What did she want to hide, and why?
Most of her policy decisions would be recorded elsewhere, and could be discovered. Indeed, policy cables, memos and emails are excellent tools for deception and she could have used them for that purpose (Henry Kissinger advised me a long time ago that the only reason for writing a memo was to have it leaked, and he played that game brilliantly).
What if the concealment had to do with non-policy matters? Or with policy issues linked to something else? Money, for example. Not U.S. government money, but private money that would enrich the Clintons themselves?
A TRUMPEAN SYNTHESIS?
[TTPer Mike Ryan recently posted on the Forum a remarkable argument for what could be called the Trumpean Synthesis. Skye suggested it be a featured article – even though he has a critical objection (which is the same as mine). I can only agree – thanks, Mike! –JW]
This is what the political situation looks like to me, where we are now, how we got here, and where we are going.
To nutshell it, a synthesis of the Conservatism of Edmund Burke and John Locke created and sustained America until it was wrecked by Progressives over 100 years ago, and subsequently revived by Ronald Reagan. This synthesis is despised by the Republican Elite which are all Burke and no Locke. Thus we need a new synthesis which Trump may represent.
THE PANIC OF ELITES IN EUROPE
France has turned even more viscerally eurosceptic than Britain over recent months, profoundly altering the political geography of Europe and making it impossible to judge how Paris might respond to Brexit, the referendum on which is two weeks away (6/23).
An intractable economic crisis has been eating away at the legitimacy of the French governing elites for much of this decade. This has now combined with a collapse in the credibility of the government, and mounting anger over immigration. Remind you of what’s happening in the US?
A pan-European survey by the Pew Research Center released today found that 61% of French voters have an “unfavorable” view of the European Union, compared to 48% in the UK.
A clear majority is opposed to “ever closer union” and wants powers returned to the French parliament, a finding that sits badly with the insistence by President Francois Hollande that “more Europe” is the answer to the EU’s woes.
“It is a protest against the elites,” said Professor Brigitte Granville, a French economist at Queen Mary University of London. “There are 5000 people in charge of everything in France. They are all linked by school and marriage, and they are tight.”
THE FATAL SICKNESS OF FREE STUFF
The U.S. economy has been going nowhere for seven years, and there are increasing fears that it is going into a recession with only 38,000 jobs being created last month.
At the same time, Venezuela, the country with the largest oil reserves on the planet, is sinking into economic chaos. None of this need happen. The disease is the same -- only the fever is higher in Venezuela.
Politicians, at least going back to ancient Rome (with its bread and circuses), quickly understood that they could buy temporary support from the people if they were promised “free stuff.” As Margaret Thatcher famously said:
“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”