Tag: MAGA

#MAGAWeek2019: Fast Food

The Portly Politico15 Comments

It’s here at The Portly Politico.  Each day’s post will be a SubscribeStar exclusive.  For a subscription of $1/month, you gain exclusive to each day’s posts, as well as exclusive content every Saturday throughout the rest of the year.  Visit my SubscribeStar page for more details.

It’s finally here—#MAGAWeek2019!  It’s the week of the year that we celebrate our great country’s birth, and I honor it with a daily post about a person, place, or idea that has, in its own way, made America great.

I’m writing this week’s posts from New Jersey, where I’m spending a week with my girlfriend’s family.  Contrary to my expectations, the entire State is not a dystopian, concrete-encrusted urban hellscape.  Its nickname, the “Garden State,” is apt:  it’s quite lush, and there are horses—horses!  It feels like South Carolina with less humidity and more crime and corruption.

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Lazy Sunday XVI: #MAGAWeek2018

The Portly Politico63 Comments

This week marks the beginning of , my celebration of the men, women, and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting Monday, July 1 and running through Friday, July 5, this year’s posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

To celebrate , this edition of Lazy Sunday features the four essays from #MAGAWeek2018.  They pull from my years of teaching and reading American history, and I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

1.) “George Washington” – The Father of Our Country!  Social justice bleeding hearts and historical revisionists have striven for years to cast Washington and the other Founders as greedy slave owners who wrote a wicked, capitalistic Constitution to preserve their own power.  What a cartoonishly stupid view of American history!  George Washington was an able leader, and demonstrated a trait that the modern Left would do well to learn:  mercy.

2.) “John Quincy Adams” – John Quincy Adams was a terrible president, and suffered from the aloof elitism of our modern coastal elites (he was even staged against the Trump of his time, the populist hero Andrew Jackson).  That said, he was the best Secretary of State this nation ever had (so don’t be too hasty in drawing comparisons between him and Secretary Hillary Clinton).  JQA crafted America’s expansion across the continent with adept skill.  Read all about it in my lengthy biography.

3.) “Thomas Jefferson & The Declaration of Independence” – Jefferson is, other Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and a handful of other Founders, our most important Founding Father.  He wrote the Declaration of Independence, with its lofty ideals of God-given rights and liberty.  He was a Renaissance Man, talented in many areas, and while he harbored a naive support for the French Revolution (and revolutions generally), his philosophic mind bequeathed to the world a document that is a thunderclap for liberty here and abroad.

4.) “Limited Government” – This post largely focused on the Madisonian system of the Constitution.  I fear that we no longer truly live under the constitutional order that Madison and the fifty-four other Framers created, as our insidious Deep State and bureaucratic elite resist the results of elections and despise the very citizens they are charged to serve.  Let us hope the spirit of 1787 will move Americans again to insist upon the restoration of limited government.

Enjoy this look back at our nation’s history, and stay tuned for more entries this week!

–TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

TPP Review: First Half of 2019

The Portly Politico1 Comment

It’s been a busy week for yours portly as I’ve been on uncle duty.  The little ones are back to their folks, and TPP is wiping away the baby spittle and Cheerios dust—and, hopefully, getting back on schedule.

This Monday, July 1 will kick off , which will be a SubscribeStar exclusive.  Just subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more to get access to these posts about the men, women, and ideas that made America great [again]!  And don’t forget tomorrow is SubscribeStar Saturday, the day of the week subscribers get a post just for them.

July 1 will also mark the halfway point of this year, so I thought I’d use tonight’s post to do a little looking back.  This post will be the 180th consecutive post, which means I have an entire secondary school academic year’s worth of posts in 2019.  I might should start compiling those into a book—the Portly Manifesto, perhaps?

Regardless, here are the five most viewed posts of 2019 up to this point.  Enjoy!

5.) “Nehemiah and National Renewal” – Not only is this post about Nehemiah, the great leader of the Israelites who coordinated the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s dilapidated walls in the face of overwhelming opposition, a reader favorite; it’s one of my favorites as well.  Nehemiah trusted in God, and when God commanded him to rebuild the walls, Nehemiah did so faithfully.  The parallels with the Trumpean program of building a wall and seeking national renewal are hard to miss.  I also wrote a fairly popular follow-up to this post, which explores the spiritual aspects of Nehemiah more thoroughly.

4.) “Hump Day Hoax” – This post garnered a great deal of attention because I linked to it in the “comments” section of GOPUSA, a conservative news and opinion website.  The site featured a piece on my adopted home town’s mayor, who claimed that the heavy pollen on her car was part of a deliberate hate crime.  You can’t make this stuff up.  In the wake of the Jussie Smollett hoax, it seemed at the time like Her Dishonor the Mayor was grasping for some race-based discrimination fame of her own.  I’m pretty sure my mayor reported the story to Newsweek herself, even though county and State law enforcement confirmed that the mystery substance was, indeed, pollen.  Gesundheit!

3.) “Secession Saturday” – This post explored the totalitarian nature of Leftism, particularly the idea that, should our cold cultural civil war ever turn hot, the Left would never allow for a peaceful separation.  Even though they hate us, part of that hate is due to their unwillingness to let us live our lives as we see fit.  As such, there would never be an amicable parting of ways, because progressives can’t stand for people to disagree with them.

2.) “Gay Totalitarianism” – This piece pulled from—as all of my best posts do—the excellent American Greatness website.  It explored a couple of hoaxes involving gays or lesbians concocting incidents of violence to garner media attention and fawning support, all in the service of pushing an increasingly unhinged queer agenda.  Jussie Smollett’s ability to stage a ridiculously clumsy “hate crime” against himself, then to walk scot-free, shows how being gay, black, and famous serves as a talisman against even criminal prosecution.

1.) “The Desperate Search for Meaning” – The most popular post of this year owes its popularity to clicks from Dalrock’s blog.  I posted the link to it in a comment on one of his pieces, and his superior content and traffic spilled over to this piece, which focused on the antics of a New Age charlatan and her female acolytes.  The posts discusses how people (and, in this context, specifically women) are desperately searching for something deeper than empty materialism, to the point that they will endure abuse and slave-like work conditions for the chance to be close to someone offering spiritual fulfillment, even if it’s counterfeit.

So, there you have it.  I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog this year.  Here’s hoping I can keep the momentum going.

Happy Fourth of July!

–TPP

Happy Monday: President Trump’s Approval Rating at 52%

The Portly Politico3 Comments

It’s a damp, dreary Monday morning here in South Carolina, but we’re all smiles here at The Portly Politico:  Rasmussen’s daily presidential tracking poll has President Trump at 52%, Trump’s highest approval ratings since shortly after his Inauguration.  That puts President Trump two points above President Barack Obama’s approval ratings for the same point in his presidency.

39% “Strongly Approve” and “Strongly Disapprove” of President Trump’s performance, giving him a “Presidential Approval Index rating of 0,” according to Rasmussen’s poll.

I’ve followed the Rasmussen daily tracking poll intermittently since President Trump’s inauguration in 2017, and it’s heartening to see the Presidential Approval Index rating at 0 (it’s been negative most of Trump’s presidency).

The president’s tour de force State of the Union performance surely has helped his numbers.  It seems, too, that ending the government shutdown has improved his approval ratings, and the promise of a deal to prevent another one this Friday probably helps.  If the $5.7 billion the president requested for border barriers at key points on the US-Mexican border is part of the deal, Trump will be sitting pretty with his base and independents (that said, I rather relish another extended shutdown, just to slow the Deep State down a bit).

Public opinion polls are fickle, especially daily ones, but if Trump can keep this momentum going, he’ll have no problem winning reelection in 2020.  November 2020 is still a lifetime away, and I have concerns about some of the declared Democratic hopefuls, but you can’t argue with a robust economy, a strong national defense, and greater border security.

Fire Furloughed Feds?

The Portly Politico8 Comments

In a remarkable op-ed for The Daily Caller, an anonymous “senior Trump administration official” blows the lid off the Deep State in the most sensible of ways: he talks about the good the government shutdown can do for the federal government’s efficiency, and how President Trump can use a prolonged shutdown to drain the swamp effectively.

The explosive piece argues that roughly 15% of workers in Washington, D.C.’s sprawling bureaucracy are committed patriots who want to fulfill the president’s agenda (after all, that is their job). 80% are unmotivated to do anything, because it’s virtually impossible to fire them.

The remaining 5% are Marxian change agents (my description) that are actively involved in the Resistance and are seeking to undermine Trump’s agenda with bureaucratic rigmarole. These are the folks that believe it is they, not the American people, who know best how to manage and direct our lives. Trump represents an existential threat to these sleeper agents for Cultural Marxism and technocratic elitism.

Apparently, an extended government shutdown empowers agency heads and the president to remove non-essential personnel far more easily—they can simply be fired like anyone else, instead of having recourse to a lengthy appeals process that can take years.

Perhaps the most absurd and chilling part of this op-ed is when the writer discusses the mindless fealty to “process,” which fuels agency growth—the bureaucracy exists to expand the bureaucracy:

They do nothing that warrants punishment and nothing of external value. That is their workday: errands for the sake of errands — administering, refining, following and collaborating on process. “Process is your friend” is what delusional civil servants tell themselves. Even senior officials must gain approval from every rank across their department, other agencies and work units for basic administrative chores.

Process is what we serve, process keeps us safe, process is our core value. It takes a lot of people to maintain the process. Process provides jobs. In fact, there are process experts and certified process managers who protect the process. Then there are the 5 percent with moxie (career managers). At any given time they can change, clarify or add to the process — even to distort or block policy counsel for the president.

I can’t help but think that many of these federal gigs are just overpriced ways to give excessively-credentialed but essentially useless workers something to do to keep them busy for forty years. No doubt there are plenty of good, hardworking civil servants in the federal government, but they would seem to constitute the minority. The incentives clearly favor inertia and lack of initiative over real drive and pluck. Indeed, there seem to be strong disincentives against making any changes.

As I wrote recently about education, one of the biggest problems any institution can face is excessive bureaucratization. Yes, as an organization grows, administrative oversight and the establishment of procedures—the dreaded “process”—must grow alongside it.

I’ve experienced this necessity first-hand working in a small private school that ballooned from just shy of 100 students eight years ago to about 285 now. That’s still a small school compared to large public high schools and middle schools, and we still get a lot done through what we might call “informal” procedures and custom, but we’ve increasingly had to adopt more standardized procedures to complete certain duties more efficiently.

But there’s streamlining, and then there’s needless obfuscation. Of course, the byzantine structure of the administrative state is designed to protect its beneficiaries and to expand its size and scope. The more arcane and confusing its procedures, the more folks must be hired to tend to the holy cow of process.

Let’s hope President Trump is listening to whoever this official is, and takes an ax to the loafers and traitors that make up 85% of our federal workforce, then let the Freedom Fifteen Make America Great Again!

The Human Toll of Globalization

The Portly Politico30 Comments

Last week’s posts shared a similar theme:  the costs of unbridled free trade; the benefits of cutting corporate and income taxes to unleash economic growth; and the human side to economics that academics tend to miss.

The first and third topics referenced above came into sharp relief as I read an excellent piece by Chadwick Moore, “Left for Dead in Danville: How Globalism is Killing Working Class America.”  It’s a long-form piece of journalism for Breitbart, but it is well worth the read.  I encourage all of my readers to set aside twenty minutes to read it and its terrifying account of globalization gone wrong.

My post today simply seeks to offer up a summary of Moore’s findings, presenting them in an easily-digestible form for those who don’t have the time or inclination to read his full-length piece.

The conceit of the piece is simple:  Moore visited Danville, Virginia, a former textile mill town located on the Dan River, and very close to North Carolina.  The town was once—and “once” doesn’t mean “a hundred years ago,” but about twenty years ago—a thriving town that supported a solid middle-class through its robust textile industry.  Civic pride was abundant, and the Dan River Mill supported a number of youth and community activities and functions that are familiar to anyone who has grown up in a small town.

Then came NAFTA in 1994, followed by China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization in 2000.  After years of struggling to compete with foreign competition, Dan River Mills shut down in 2006 (it had been open since 1882).

As the town’s economy declined and unemployment skyrocketed, social problems grew.  Drug use increased dramatically, as did crime, and formerly-safe, middle-class neighborhoods devolved into dangerous slums.  More than a quarter of the town’s population is on food stamps.

Race relations also grew worse.  The town had enjoyed peaceful, working relationships between black and white citizens, who worked together happily in the mills and other businesses.  Now, the KKK plans rallies, preying off the desperation of the unemployed (the town is roughly half white, half black).

Moore gives a good bit of space to quoting Michael Stumo, the CEO of the Coalition for a Prosperous America.  Stumo elegantly explains the problem in Danville—as with many other small towns in Middle America—tracing it to China and the World Trade Organization.  Some choice bits to chew on:

“‘When China joined the WTO in 2000 with 1.3 billion people underemployed, it began pulling them out of the rice paddies, the farms, and rural areas, and putting them to work. The Chinese under-consume. They produce more than they consume, [in] a country that’s four and a half times as big as ours and relying on the American consumer to fund their path to wealth and doing so with a state-directed economy, which is different than communist, it’s a strategic mix of state capitalism with a little bit of private sector in it. We always thought communism would fail, but China found central planning 2.0 and is pretty good at it,’ he says….

‘We have free trade within the 50 states,’ Stumo says. ‘By impoverishing our middle class with this offshoring driven by free trade policy, you’re killing the U.S. consumer market, which drives growth, because they have no money. Five or ten percent cheaper prices is overwhelmed in this stage by lack of production and stagnant wages,’ he says. ‘The U.S. middle class cannot afford to fund the rise of other countries anymore.

‘Industry doesn’t stand still; industry is always incubating—you give up the jobs, the wealth creation, the supply chain clusters in communities, and that affects the service sector around them,’ Stumo says. ‘You pull those plants out, and a lot of people are out of work, and then the whole general wage level drops because burger-flipping isn’t an upward pressure on wages, but production is.'”

A degree of globalization, in an age of mass transit and mass communications, inevitable.  And open trade with lower tariffs generally is beneficial.  But naïvely-open trade with dishonest trading partners with slave-level wages primarily benefits the dishonest party.  Yes, there are some winners in the United States—I certainly enjoy a higher quality of life because of cheap electronics from abroad, for example—but as I wrote last week, isn’t it worth paying a little more for your television or washing machine, if it means an American keeps his job.

My thinking on this is simple:  the actual, physical and mental of work, in and of itself, important.  Yes, we could pay everyone a guaranteed basic income, or help people through more assistance programs (ignore the astronomical costs of those programs for the moment), but even if they worked beautifully in the material sense, they will, in the long-run, lead to a deterioration of real skills and, more important, a spiritual vitality.

I strongly believe that the three keys to happiness are faith, family, and work, in that order.  Work is ennobling, even if it is unpleasant at times.  As such, if the government is going to do something, would it not be wiser to offer assistance that requires work?

Tariffs accomplish this goal to some extent, and are entirely constitutional (indeed, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, argued for them as Secretary of Treasury).  They also produce revenue for the federal government, and could be used to offset further reductions in corporate and income tax rates.

Ultimately, the social and civic costs of unbridled, unfocused free trade seem too steep.  Read Moore’s observations about the flood of drugs and despair into this once-civic-minded, prosperous town, and understand that the 10% discount you enjoy on your consumer goods is seldom worth the human toll.

To clarify once again, I’m not arguing we return to the massively high tariffs of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  That would be economically disastrous in other ways, and would further enhance our federal government’s penchant for corporatist back-scratching and favoritism.  But some judicious, targeted tariffs, especially against nations like China, are wise.  Why should we be subsidizing China’s growth at the expense of our own?

One final thought:  as I wrote Friday, a married man used to be able to raise his kids on a gas station pump-boy’s salary.  Sure, life was lean, and there weren’t a ton of crazy gadgets to play with or luxuries to enjoy, but the kids grew up well enough and the wife could stay home to raise them.  Are we really that much better off now, when both husband and wife slave for 40+ hours a week (and usually longer), outsource their parenting responsibilities to daycare and public schools, and can’t get out from under student loan, home, car, and consumer debt?

There are a host of factors driving the modern scenario of today versus the “blue-collar father” of yesteryear, but surely one economic solution is to stop burrowing out our families and towns in favor of frosty, urban cosmopolitanism and aloof globalism.  I care about the people of China, and I’m glad to see they’re no longer trapped in rice paddies and collectivized farms, but—like our great President Trump—I care about my country and fellow countrymen first.  So should the United States government—it’s job is, literally, to put Americans first.

Q&A Wednesday – Tax Cuts, Trade Wars, Etc.

The Portly Politico13 Comments

Two of my most loyal readers, Megan and Frederick (I highly recommend the latter’s corporate history blog, CorporateHistory.International), both chimed in via Facebook about Monday’s post on tax cuts.  Frederick pointed out a potential downside to corporate tax cuts—what’s to stop large multinationals from investing that money in physical plants and employees overseas, notably in China?  Megan asked me to elaborate further on tariffs in relation to that very question.

Being a conservative, I like to conserve things—traditions, morals, civil society, working institutions, etc.—but most especially effort.  I’m a strong believer in the dictum, “Work smarter, not harder” (although you need a healthy dose of the latter, too).  As such, I’m adapting my Facebook response to them here.

I think the question of tariffs and trade wars is hugely interesting, and needn’t be bogged down in tedious charts and numbers.  What I do believe is that President Trump has ripped the façade from the bipartisan push for globalism, and particularly demonstrated the real, human cost of unbridled free trade.

I used to be 99% a free trader, with 1% reserved for mild tariffs on national security-related goods, like steel.

Now I’m probably more 85% free trade, 15% tariffs. A tariff is a tax, yes, and it’s borne not just by foreign nations exporting goods to the US, but also by American consumers, who have to pay more for goods that are protected (and, thus, more expensive and potentially of a lesser quality than they would be in a competitive, free market).  That disclaimer aside, it seems like paying a few more bucks for your washing machine is a good way to keep Americans employed and earning a decent wage.

If you take that reasoning too far you fall into the dilemma of minimum wage increases, which increase unemployment (especially for unskilled, young, and minority workers) and raise costs, so that any increased wages enjoyed by the beneficiaries are eaten away by the increased costs of consumer goods—all served up with a side of higher unemployment.

That said, judicious tariffs—I’m not arguing for the high, blanket tariffs of the late nineteenth century, which wouldn’t work well in our modern, interconnected economy—especially related to key industries like steel, could keep a lot of Americans working, and would allow blue-collar workers to earn a wage that wouldn’t require years of expensive schooling.

Also, I think targeted tariffs against unequal trading partners—I’m thinking primarily of China—would level the playing field, and prevent some of the outsourcing and capital flight that might occur with a corporate tax cut (or, more likely, increase). It’s unreasonable to expect American workers—with all their labor protections, etc.—to compete with near-slave wage Chinese workers. China’s currency manipulation to make its exports artificially cheaper, as well its rampant intellectual property theft, needs to be combated, and if it means getting our cheap plastic Happy Meal toys from Vietnam (or the USA!) instead of China, so be it.

The current “trade war” with China sees Americans in a much better position than the Chinese. China needs those exports, but the USA can stand to experience some minor drag to its GDP growth given the massive growth we’re seeing with the tax cuts (not just the corporate tax cut, but also the 20% deduction for small business pass-through earnings, which is YUGE for small business growth—a key driver of employment in our country). I see it as a trade-off—pay a little more for some consumer goods, but create imbalance in the Chinese economy and force them to play ball on par with the Western world and Japan.

My only real concern with this approach is there is no limiting principle (although that’s true for any type of tax, and we have to have some of them), which makes me wary as a limited-government Jeffersonian, but the Hamiltonian commercialist in me sees this moment in history as one in which we can uniquely leverage our economic clout to improve our own economy and our position internationally, and we can afford to go through a trade war longer than China (or Mexico, or Europe).

Everyone loses if a trade war lasts too long, but I think the Chinese will blink first. American workers will be the ones to benefit.

One additional thought, which will require more elegant development in a future post:  even with the inefficiencies and deadweight loss that would occur from overly-high tariffs, wouldn’t protecting domestic jobs be a more effective and fulfilling way to provide a living for blue-collar workers than the current welfare system?  Instead of a massive, government-run bureaucracy administering a complex and redundant system of bennies, society could bear the cost through paying a bit more for consumer goods.  Such a system would create more semi-skilled positions in some industries, and I’d rather we subsidize people through work than to subsidize them not to work.  Again, that’s a very rough sketch, but some food for thought.

Regardless, tariffs are not an unalloyed evil, nor is free trade an unalloyed good.  There’s room for both.  Economics suggests that the balance should favor the latter more heavily than the former, but we can temper the massive social disruption that unbridled globalization unleashes.

Tax Cuts Work

The Portly Politico19 Comments

Back in December, I wrote a post on the old blog begging Republicans to pass tax cuts.  When they did, I danced around my house like a silver-backed gorilla on Christmas.

I cannot understand objections to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, other than fiscal conservatives’ fear of increasing deficit spending.  By that I mean I can intellectually understand objections in an abstract, academic sense, but I’m unable to accept those arguments as valid in this case, and many of them are specious.

The historical record is clear:  tax cuts works.  Be it cuts on income, corporate, estate, or sales taxes, cutting taxes, in general, stimulates economic growth and usually increases government revenues.

Take the example of Calvin Coolidge, whom we might call the godfather of modern tax cuts.  As president, Coolidge used his predecessor’s Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 to carefully monitor and eliminate excess government spending.  He also signed into law the Revenue Act of 1926, reducing the top rate to 25% on incomes greater than $100,000.

By the time he left office, the government had increased revenues (due to the stimulative effect of the tax cuts on the economy—rates fell, but more people were paying greater wages into the system), federal spending had fallen, and the size and scope of the federal government had shrunk, a feat no other president has managed to accomplish.

The perennial wag will protest, “But what about the Depression?”  Certainly, there were a number of complicated reasons that fed into the coming Depression, but the stock market crash—really, a massive correction—did not cause the Depression.  Had the government left well enough alone, the economy should have adjusted fairly quickly, although modern SEC rules and regulations were not in place.  That’s a discussion for another post, but I suspect that Herbert Hoover’s signing of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930)—a tax increase on imports—did much to exacerbate the economic situation, and a decade of FDR’s social welfare experiments injected further uncertainty into markets.

But I digress.  Subsequent presidents have championed tax cuts in the Coolidge vein, albeit without the corresponding emphasis on spending cuts.  John F. Kennedy pushed for tax cuts, which threw gasoline onto the fire of the post-war American economy.  Ronald “Ronaldus Magnus” Reagan’s tax cuts created so much prosperity, the ’80s are remembered for hair metal and cocaine; had he not had to spend the Soviets out of existence (and faced a Democratic Congress), he could have cut spending, too.

President Trump’s tax cuts have breathed new life into a sluggish, post-Great Recession recovery.  Jobs growth is increasing month after month, and wages are rising, slowly but surely.  Black unemployment is down from 7.7% in January to 5.9% as of May—the first time it’s ever been below 7% since the government began keeping statistics in 1972.

Leftists object that the cut to the corporate tax rate benefits big fat cats instead of everyday Americans, but the statistics suggest otherwise (see the article linked in the previous paragraph for more good news).  Further, Leftists moan and groan when companies put increased revenues into dividend payments to stockholders, as if this move is detrimental.  On the contrary, as more Americans invest in mutual funds in their 401(k)s or IRAs, they stand only to gain from these investments.  Progressives only see these investments as “big company benefits,” without following through on what that money does.

Of course, that’s because the Left’s focus is emotional (not economic), and worries about all the sweet government gigs that majors in Interpretative Queer Baltic Dance Studies will lose without the federal government’s largesse.  Getting voters off the welfare rolls further inhibits the Democratic Party’s mantra of “Soak the Rich,” as upwardly-mobile workers naturally want to keep a good thing going.

Conservative concerns of deficit spending are more grounded in economic reality, and while the federal deficit seems like an abstraction to most Americans, it does present a looming crisis.  Perpetual indebtedness in a personal sense seems inherently immoral if undertaken as a financial strategy unto itself (taking out a loan for a car, a house, a business, or education is one thing; living off of borrowed money, and borrowing more, with no intention of paying it back is quite another; I’m referencing the latter situation); the government should be held to the same standard.

That said, the problem of the federal deficit is a longstanding issue that has more to do with excessive and wasteful spending.  The stimulative effect of the tax cuts, by putting more people to work, will increase revenues.  The most pressing concern now is for Congress to make the income tax cuts permanent—another no-brainer, win-win move for all concerned.

Taxes are a necessary evil—we need the military, roads, and the like—and there comes a point of diminishing returns with cuts just as there are with increases, but allowing Americans to keep more of their money is, in almost every situation, the better choice, both economically and morally.

#MAGAWeek2018 – Limited Government

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For the last day of MAGA Week 2018, I’m dedicating this post not to any specific historic individual, but instead to a facet of political (conservative) philosophy:  limited government.

It’s easy to take limited government for granted, or even to fail to recognize it:  it doesn’t seem to occur organically, although modern-day economic libertarians will claim as such (never mind that this ignores most of the last 6000 years of recorded history).  Limited government is rooted in self-government, which did flourish once given a chance, but it certainly required the fertile soil of 550 years of English political history.

Limited government is not quite the same as small government.  A government can be “small” in terms of its expenditures, but still not “limited”—imagine a lean, efficiently-run dictatorship in a very small country.

Limited government, on the other hand, suggests a “smallness” of scale, but also carefully delineates the scope of the government’s purview.  The “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” of the Constitution are key ingredients, not just between the different branches of the federal government, but between the federal and State governments as well.

The whole point of our system—beautifully laid out by the Framers, but particularly James Madison—is to defuse and counterbalance power, and to submit all authority to rule of law.  The Constitution, then, is the limiting of what government can do.  Everything else is left to the people.

Unfortunately, our nation has given up our old attitude—“ask forgiveness, not permission”—for “assume you’re not allowed to do something without getting it sanctioned by some authority first.”  That’s a shocking change from the Framers’ attitude, and to our century of “salutary neglect” prior to 1763.

Recall that Americans didn’t declare independence in 1776 because taxes were too high, but that they were being taxed without their consent—without representation in Parliament.  The whole theory was that government ruled with the consent of the governed, a notion dating back to the feudal privileges of the barons at the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215.

Similarly, the Boston Tea Party was a response to the monopolization of tea entering the colonies—a corporatist scheme cooked up by the British government to bail out the failing, government-subsidized British East India Company.  The colonists rightly reasoned that, should the importation of tea be monopolized, any product could be subject to monopolization—potentially destroying the colonial economy under the thumb of an exploitative British government.

Americans believed—correctly—that their rights as Englishmen were being trampled, and that the British government was overstepping its bounds.  In essence, Parliament and King George III failed to apply the traditional limits of English government to their colonial possessions in British North America.

As such, our Framers put together a written Constitution (unlike Britain’s unwritten constitution, which can essentially be changed at the majoritarian whim of Parliament; thus, people arrested in Britain for posting controversial topics on Facebook—and the persecution of Tommy Robinson), one that clearly delineates the roles of the three branches of government.  The Bill of Rights prudently added the Tenth Amendment, which devolves power down to the States and the people.

As for why limited government is great, I will close with this recommendation:  watch the video below from Prager University.  Adam Corolla lays out the best case for limited government I’ve ever heard.

Enjoy—and thanks for making America great again!

#MAGAWeek2018 – Thomas Jefferson & The Declaration of Independence

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Happy Independence Day, America!  242 years ago, the Second Continental Congress declared independence from Great Britain, changing the course of history and spawning independence movements all over the globe.

As such, it’s only fitting that today we look at the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.

Few figures in the period of the Early Republic have inspired as much debate as Jefferson, who clashed frequently with President Washington’s Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, while serving as Secretary of State.  His friendship with John Adams turned into a bitter, acrimonious rivalry, as the two parted ways on the proper response to the French Revolution, then squared off against one another in the 1796 and 1800 presidential elections.  The two would make amends later in life, exchanging some of the liveliest, most insightful correspondence of the period.

After the publication of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet “Common Sense” electrified pro-independence sentiment throughout the colonies, the Second Continental Congress put aside any hopes of reconciliation with Britain, and instead decided to declare independence.  To draft the document that would take the colonies across the Rubicon, the Congress selected Jefferson.

Jefferson wrote the Declaration with his fellow countrymen and other European nations in mind, although it was addressed to Parliament and King George III.  The Declaration is one of the most brilliant documents ever written, and its opening paragraphs are almost more important than the specific list of grievances against the English government.

Jefferson’s claim—radical at the time—that “all men are created equal”—shook the world, and its reverberations through history are well-documented.  There are, however, some other key phrases.  The phrase “When in the Course of human events” seems innocuous on the face, but carries an important meaning:  the “unalienable” rights are not unique to any one people, nation, or time in history, but are universal.  All peoples enjoy natural rights that are woven into the fabric of the universe—and which were “endowed by [our] Creator.”

Jefferson was likely a Deist, believing that a God created the universe, but afterward left it to work and unfold according to physical laws of nature.  Nevertheless, Jefferson believed—as did many of the Founders, who were often products of the Scottish Enlightenment (and, fortunately, not the more destructive French Enlightenment)—that the Creator imbued the physical universe with natural rights, just as He created gravity.

Regardless, after some revisions—the congressional committee that commissioned Jefferson had him change “Life, Liberty, and Property” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—the Declaration was adopted as both a specific list of grievances detailing America’s case to “a candid world,” and as a timeless expression of America’s belief in natural rights.  The usual disclaimers apply—women and free blacks, not to mention slaves, were left out of this consideration at the time, despite objections from Abigail Adams, wife of our second president (and mother of yesterday’s subject)—but the Declaration paved the way for all Americans to enjoy greater liberty.

When time permits, I will dive into a deeper, lengthier discussion of Jefferson’s legacy; as it is, it’s taken me several hours just to write this much, as I’m fulfilling my avuncular duties of watching my niece and nephew.  For now, I will end on one final anecdote:

On 4 July 1826, Thomas Jefferson passed away—the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  A few shorts hours, in what is likely the most serendipitous event in American history, an aged John Adams slipped away, too.  Moments before his passing, Adams said, “Thomas Jefferson still survives,” although Jefferson had passed just hours before.  An attendant by Adams’s side said that, at the moment of the great man’s death, a sudden thunderstorm whipped up, as if the artillery of Heaven were welcoming him home.

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To read a full transcript of the Declaration of Independence, I recommend this version at Archives.gov:  https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript