Former Fox News Channel broadcaster Glenn Beck, now of The Blaze TV, has been warning theatrically of an inchoate catastrophe should the country choose Donald J. Trump “as its next president.” Trump “will be a monster much, much worse” than Barack Obama, says Beck.

Worse than George W. Bush? Will Trump be worse than the 43rd president, who is ranked 37th by Ivan Eland, author of “Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty”? In Eland’s near-exhaustive appraisal, Bush II falls in the category of “bad,” for having “undermined the Republic at home and abroad with interventionist policies,” policies Trump has criticized. Stumping for Trump, Sarah Palin has taken pains to praise Rand Paul’s libertarian recommendations that Jihadists be left to “duke it out” alone in the Middle East.

President Obama is a dreadful cur. About that Beck’s correct. Like Bush, Obama has made it into the “bad” presidential category. But whereas Obama allowed Hillary to henpeck him into destabilizing one country, Libya; Bush Jr. gave the world the Iraq-Syria Axis of ISIS. Ranked 34th on the measures of peace, prosperity and liberty, the 44th president is “only a slightly improved version of George Bush.”

The charismatic Ronald Reagan, the man “conservatives have enshrined as a demigod,” was certainly as forceful as Donald Trump. Reagan was also remarkably perceptive in his anti-communist oratory. The “evil empire” appellation was as catchy as it was warranted. But face it; “tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev,” didn’t bring down the Soviet empire. Neither was Communist Russia crushed by Reagan’s exorbitant “Star Wars fantasy of space-based missile defense.” Rather, Communist Russia collapsed under the weight of a centrally planned economy (the kind Brainiac Bernie Sanders and his supporters are eager to usher in).

Those of us who love No. 40 for his ability to express the immutably true principles of liberty and free-market capitalism must face the facts. While Elan loses some credibility in ranking Reagan after Obama among American presidents (perhaps because Elan understates the damage done by Obamacare), Reagan did “instigate the Iran-Contra affair,” “let federal spending rise,” “did not reduce big government,” and cancelled out the benefits of a large tax cut by not coupling it with spending cuts.

The lesson here is plain. When you get down to the brass tacks of which American presidents most embodied the values of peace, prosperity, and liberty (PP & L), you find only few—a handful really—acted wisely, avoided unnecessary wars, “demonstrated restrain in economic crisis” and foreign affairs, practiced free-market capitalism and favored hard money; opposed big government and welfare, and limited executive and federal power.

Ranked No. 1 is the stellar John Tyler. He ended “the worst Indian wars in US history,” practiced restraint in an international dispute, “opposed big government and protected states’ powers.” Grover Cleveland is second, as an “exemplar of honesty and limited government.” Martin van Buren excelled—especially in rejecting economic stimulus and national debt and balancing budgets. He ranks third. Rutherford B. Hayes is fourth. Likewise, he didn’t just preach but practiced capitalism and advocated for black voting rights, while recognizing the ruthlessness of Reconstruction.

In the context of the American presidency and our lost Constitution, Beck’s alarm over candidate Trump is peculiar. Not many American presidents lived up to republican ideas of liberty and limited authority.

“Where are the people who say we stand with the Constitution,” protested  Beck. Trump fails to talk about the Constitution in depth, he blathered.

True. Trump is not a TV talker. Moreover, all candidates who talk about the Constitution “in depth” are dishonest. For there is no Constitution left to talk about. That thing died over the course of centuries of legislative, executive and judicial usurpation. That’s why when Iraqis were composing their Constitution (after no. 43 destroyed their country), the late Joe Sobran recommended we give them ours because we don’t use it.

Mention of the Constitution means nothing. It’s on the list of items candidates check when they con constituents. Beck went on to OMG it about Trump saying this: “President Obama’s irresponsible use of executive orders has paved the way for him to also use them freely if he wins the presidential race.”

Amen—provided Trump uses executive power to repeal lots of laws, not make them. We live under an administrative “Secret State.” Very many, maybe most, of the laws under which Americans labor ought to be repealed. The only laws that are naturally inviolable are those upholding life, liberty and property.

Trump, thankfully, has proclaimed: “the one thing good about executive orders: The new president, if he comes in – boom, first day, first hour, first minute, you can rescind that.”

Beck has protested. He apparently accepts the inherent legitimacy of Barack Obama’s executive orders. Beck also seems to believe that the Constitution, or some other higher order, demands that people continue to labor under burdensome government edicts forever after, and that to promise repeal is the act of a progressive.

“Ted Cruz,” countered Beck, who has since endorsed candidate Cruz, “is the guy who says he’s for certain principles and will be tethered and tied to them, exactly like Ronald Reagan was.”

Well, another of Eland’s discomforting observations about Reagan is that he “enhanced executive power through questionable means. Although presidential signing statements, accompanying bills passed by Congress, had been around since George Washington, Reagan began to use these signing statements to contravene or nullify Congress’s will without giving that body a chance to override a formal presidential veto.”

There’s nothing necessarily progressive about overturning laws that have been passed.

There is nothing sacred about every law an overweening national government and its unelected agencies inflict on the people. “At the federal level alone,” the number of laws totaled 160,000 pages,” in 2012. By John Stossel’s estimation, “Government adds 80,000 pages of rules and regulations every year.” According to the Heritage Foundation, “Congress continues to criminalize at an average rate of one new crime for every week of every year.”

America has become a nation of thousands-upon-thousands of arbitrary laws, whose effect is to criminalize naturally licit conduct.

Is Beck implying, in his objection to Trump’s promise to repeal Obama’s executive orders, that laws subjecting over 300 million people to the edicts of one have moral force?

Rather than uphold individual rights, most positive law regulates or criminalizes the business of life.

The nullification of man-made laws comports with American freedoms just fine. Donald Trump had better sit at his desk for a chunk of his first term and issue one executive order after the other to do just that.

From the Middle East comes news that Hamas and Fatah have united to forge a national-unity thugocracy in Gaza and the West Bank.

We in the West can fantasize all we like that fatwas and fanaticism are on the wane across the Arab world. The romantic projections of mushy minds will do nothing to alter reality. A preponderance of newly liberated Egyptians wants the peace with Israel to expire. And a seething Syrian majority, currently clamoring for freedom from the clutches of the Alawi minority, is also rooting for the reclamation of the Golan Heights.

The fact that the Palestinians, unlike their Israeli neighbors, don’t live under the rule of enlightened Western law, don’t have a free and ferociously critical media or liberal courts, and are more likely to approve when brothers “honor-kill” sisters, or when coreligionists strap on belts of nails and dynamite to blow up innocents—this too is immutably true.

Yet the “civilized” world is working diligently to shrink the civilized sphere that is Israel and expand the barbaric Palestinian Authority. As Israel’s Independent News Center has reported, the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia may push Israel to “withdraw to the [indefensible] armistice lines drawn up between the Jewish state and Jordan in 1949.”

The international community’s latest impetus was confirmed by Dori Gold, one-time Israeli ambassador to the Unites Nations, on The Glenn Beck Show. On the eve of the Easter Holy Week, Beck infuriated Fox News’s Saudi shareholders by taking a symbolic, if unequivocal, stand for “the Jew among nations”; for the civilized society that abuts the savage society. Foibles and frailties notwithstanding, in Israel the West has reclaimed a small spot of sanity in a sea of savagery, where Christians and Jews and their holy places are safe. (Muslims, Arab-Israelis included, are always secure in western societies.)

When Jews commenced what must be the most remarkable modern-day national revival, Israel was a wasteland. The utilitarian classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises observed that for centuries the Near East has been a cultural backwater. “The Mohammedans”—Mises’s delightfully archaic usage—have for hundreds of years failed to produce so much as a “book of significance,” much less any scientific or other advancement. As Mises saw it, the catalysts for creativity and prosperity are individual freedom and freedom from the state, ideas that are inimical to the cultures of the Near East, and the Islamic world in particular.

Unfortunately, the rabbi Beck entertained during his hour-long broadcast, “In Defense of Israel,” instantiated a lot of what is wrong with American Jewry—and, as a consequence, what is likely to cause Americans to resent Israelis, indirectly. What do I mean? A woman in the audience probed Rabbi Joseph Potasnik about the differences between American and Israeli Jews. In his incoherent reply, the rabbi was as ghettoized as any representative of CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations). Israeli and diaspora Jews are two different species. Alas, Rabbi Potasnik furnished some tribal retort that all too well demonstrated how Jewish leadership has cast Jews (and Israelis, by extension) as a mere faction among America’s many fractious, multicultural identity groups.

Moreover, there’s a certain truth the rabbi avoided: American Jews tend to stake out left-liberal positions with respect to the concerns of their fellow Americans, but are rightist on matters Israel. For America, leftist Jews advocate a multicultural, immigration free-for-all, pluralist pottage. At the same time for Israel, most Jews claim the right to retain a creedal and cultural distinctiveness and a Jewish majority. Israel, but not the US, should be allowed to control immigration and guard its borders.

Ask any left-liberal American Jew if he supports a “Right of Return” to Israel proper for every self-styled Palestinian refugee, and he’ll recoil: “Are you mad? Never. That’s a euphemism for Israel’s demise.” The very thing he opposes for Israel, the leftist Jew is inclined to champion for America: a global right of return to the US for the citizens of the world. When it comes to “returning” to America only (but not Israel), humankind is said to possess a positive, manufactured right to venture wherever, whenever. (This view is common among American liberals of all religious persuasions.)

The plan hatched by the Middle East Quartet for Israel has been shelved, for now. The US has postponed a Quartet meeting—in all likelihood because Barack Obama is already in bad odor with the American people on so many other fronts.

The Quartet will be back to push Israel back.

This column has been consistently polite about—but disinterested in—the putative push for freedom across the Middle East. Dare I say that such a stance, and not slobbering sentimentality, is the proper, libertarian position? I promised, accordingly, that when liberty deprived peoples the world over supported patriots stateside, I’d return the favor. The same goes for Israel.

Israelis want the support of Americans in standing up for their national sovereignty. Fine. But they should respond in kind.

The titan is tired. We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don’t need our friends looking to us to do so.

Whatever American Sinophobes say about the Chinese, it’s worth noting that Chinese officials did not berate the residents of Arizona ─ the majority of whom support their governor’s gutsy stand against migratory mayhem in their state. An American functionary did so spontaneously. News that Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner had smeared his countrymen during discussions on human rights with the Chinese has sent conservatives into a frothing frenzy; it would appear, mainly, because China itself is so oppressive.

Posner also apprised seemingly disinterested Chinese about errant Americans’ shoddy “treatment of its Muslims … in an immigration context. We had discussion of racial discrimination,” he puled. Not only did the Chinese fail to pile-on Arizonans, but neither did they use the opportunity Posner afforded them to complain about the treatment of Chinese in the US:

Press to Posner: “Did they — did they discuss anything about their concerns about Chinese visiting in Arizona? Any concerns raised?

Posner: No, that was not raised.

Needless to say, the Chinese spared their own “problem” citizens any nasty words. (The Uyghurs, for example, are not trembling under China’s repressive glower. They are to China as the Chechens are to Russia, or the Palestinians are to Israel (oy vey!): very fractious Muslims (a state-of-being also described by left-liberals as a quest for “self-determinism.”)

Equally patriotic about his own people is visiting Mexican President Felipe Calderon. Calderon toils tirelessly for the benefit of millions of Mexicans living in the US illegally. From the White House Rose Garden, and then again in an address to Congress ─ a one-way exchange program America conducts for foreign dignitaries ─ Calderon chastised overrun Arizonans for “forcing our people to face discrimination.”

The American president failed to fend for his countrymen (and their dogs), some of whom have suffered horribly at the hands of Calderon’s compatriots. BHO and his henchmen are clearly traitors to their fellow Americans ─ they have little love for the historic people; and even less appreciation for its daily realities.

Still, I disagree with conservatives who’ve categorized this administration as overly apologetic for America. Contrary to conventional conservative wisdom, there is nothing wrong with expressing regret for wrongs done by your country’s government, as opposed to its people. This is a well-meaning, if perhaps inconsequential, gesture.

Face it, what Republicans are really fuming over is BHO’s public expiation for the Bush I foreign policy, for which they themselves cheered. Were I to encounter an Iraqi Christian forced to flee his homeland because “W” took it from rogue-state status to failed state-status ─ I would be tempted to say, “Sorry,” even though I had loudly opposed that bloodletting from the get-go.

Fox News dynamo Glenn Beck demands that, when they join his 9/12 project, adherents accept the “America is good” maxim. Individual Americans can be good (or bad), but not a collective. A country is a collective. The concept is, therefore, incoherent. Well-aware as we are that very many Americans are unstintingly generous and friendly ─ I suspect that when 9/12ers insist America as an entity is good; they too are alluding to the foreign policies they’ve supported, and for which the current president offers mea culpa. Again, and as I understand it, it is not “America” Obama is apologizing for, but the policies of his predecessor.

Consider: In 1972, arrogant characters in the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT, a chemical crucial to combating malaria in the undeveloped world. The ban in the US diminished the availability of DDT to these countries, subsequent to which many millions have died from an easily preventable infectious disease. It would be nice if the culprits (Senators Joe Lieberman was involved in sustaining the ban) apologized for acting as causal agents in the death of millions.

I hope the next president apologizes for the many innocent Afghanis BHO is busy killing in that country. As do I hope the next incumbent apologizes for this president’s shabby treatment of the Israeli prime minister, or of Mr. Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota.

It’s a bit late, but an apology on behalf of Harry S. Truman is in order for deliberately dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Little Boy and the Fat Man ─ as the atomic duo was dubbed affectionately ─ and vaporizing 210,000 innocent Japanese civilians, in response to an attack on a military base.

Whether it is committed by a group operating within or without the law, terrorism is still terrorism.

Is “America,” then, bad because of deeds its bureaucratic or political corps commits? Not at all. Americans get to vet very few of the policies carried out in their name. Ours is a social democracy, no longer a constitutional republic. Inherent in a social democracy is the free election of freewheeling politicians who are at liberty to do as they please. Commensurate with the unlimited powers they’ve grabbed, our politicians, by default, are to blame for a great deal of bad.

Thus, there is no harm in an American politician expressing remorse for a government policy that has harmed innocents at home and abroad (honkies included). He or she, however, should have the decency to avoid implicating all “Americans” in the sins of their sovereigns.

©2010 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
May 21

Not a week goes by when Fox-New phenom Glenn Beck doesn’t make libertarian pedants and purists bristle. Examples? The mushy slogan “Faith, Hope, Charity” on which, Beck insists, the old republic was founded. I’m with Beck’s favored founder Ben Franklin who said that “he who lives upon hope will die fasting.”

Then there is charity: Americans hardly need a nudge in that direction as they are already abundantly charitable. Our countrymen are also constant in their faith ─ to a fault perhaps, as too much faith in mystical forces beyond one’s control may compound feelings of helplessness. Conversely, Beck could be more reverential in his approach to the free market to which the Talker often refers in rather pedestrian, almost statist terms. “It is the system that we have; it’s a system that works” are refrains Beck is fond of repeating.

If instead of waxing fat about “Faith, Hope, and Charity” Beck built on life, liberty, and property,” his viewers would come to understand that the voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. The free market ─ it has not been unfettered for a very long time ─ is really a spontaneously synchronized order comprising trillions upon trillions of voluntary acts that individuals perform in order to make a living. Introduce government force and coercion into this rhythm, and you get life-threatening arrhythmia. Under increasing state control, this marketplace ─ this magic, organic agora ─ starts to splutter and people suffer.

In the context of the man’s incalculable contribution to liberty, these are, all-in-all, minor quibbles ─ all the more so given that Glenn Beck has now taken his most significant step in defense of freedom and constitutional order. Beck has seen the writing on the tottering walls of Empire, and has dedicated himself to that humble foreign policy espoused by the founders.

Glenn first dipped a toe in these politically turbulent waters at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). During the delivery of the keynote address, Beck blurted out the following: “We don’t need to export democracy; the best example to the world is to lead by example.” Then he fell silent for some time. No further forays into foreign policy were made.

Before CPAC, in January this year, Beck had inched a little closer to denouncing the imperially imposed foreign policy he shared with the major conservative pundits in his orbit. In his groundbreaking series on the American Progressive Movement, the Fox News personality had touched on the differences between Republican and Democratic progressives vis-a-vis foreign policy. Warring for Democracy was the Republicans’ homage to President Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism; nation-building abroad was how Democrats honored the illiberal Wilson’s “legacy.” Two sides of the same foreign-policy coin.

This was the closest Beck, once unambiguously pro-war, had come to examining the contradictions between his opposition to the welfare state and his support for the warfare state; his support for small government stateside and big government overseas. Republicans generally euphemize these inconsistencies by claiming they are for a “strong national defense.”

The final commemorative Beck breakthrough came on April the 15th, when the Fox star roared, “I’m with Ron Paul on foreign policy!” Beck followed with a column, “America Is a Republic, Not an Empire” in which this scrupulously good fellow announced his support for a “no loitering” policy. If Glenn got his way, no longer would the United States be “the world’s loiterer,” spending hundreds of billions (closer to a $1 trillion by the estimation of economist Robert Higgs) on spreading Jacobin ─ not Jeffersonian ─ ideas across the globe.

Glenn appears to have finally grasped that war, as Randolph Bourne warned, is the health of the state.

Hitherto, Hannity, O’Reilly, Malkin; Krauthammer, Kristol; Coulter ─ all had done their bit to collapse the distinction between the wars we’re currently waging and the need for a strong national defense. Their ditto heads were behind them all the way. By declaring war on the Bush/Obama doctrine of gratuitous futile wars and occupations, Beck has driven a wedge between himself and the major conservative and neoconservative opinion-makers on an important point of policy.

By pulling away from the pack and denouncing the talismanic faith in the Bush/Obama wars, Beck has created oscillation in an otherwise-ossifying GOP.But more importantly: Good guy Glenn is finally espousing a foreign policy compatible with limited authority and republican virtues.

©2010 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
April 23

It was wicked when assorted neoconservative organs and tools presented antiwar activists such as Cindy Sheehan as something other than what they were. And it is still execrable now that the left-liberal news filters are tarring anti-Obamacare town hall protesters as something other than what they are.

Sheehan’s cause was just. She spoke stirringly against Bush’s crimes in Iraq. Yet again and again she was dismissed by the neoconservatives as a George-Soros sponsored stooge (the details of that particular conspiracy evade me). The outcry against state takeover of medicine is in the best of traditions too. Yet the malpracticing media are discounting the fractious town-hall participants as proxies for corporate and political interests.

And worse.

The job of the press is to report events, not blanket the facts with conjecture and interpretations that are absorbed into the narrative and serve to fuse fact with fancy. Moreover, it matters not with which organizations groups of demonstrators, left or right, seek solidarity. What matters is the case they present. The rest is ad hominem, which is where discourse in the US stands.

Cronkite died the other day; news coverage croaked a long time ago.

Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow stumbled on a “scoop” in the form of some online “memos,” and was intoning like a solemn commissar about corporate agents and their foot soldiers, all conspiring against state-mediated munificence. As she expounded ominously on imagined conspiracies that were really unremarkable events and associations, I was reminded of Glenn Beck’s delusional diagrams of multiplying giant ACORNS. (Beck before a blackboard, in turn, conjures Russell Crow as John Forbes Nash in “A Beautiful Mind,” minus the mind.)

Unlike comrade Keith (Olbermann), at least Maddow obeyed the journalistic imperative to interview one of the malevolent men mentioned in The Memos. And how delightful this corporatist turned out to be: “Do the oil companies fund us? No, Rachel, but I’d like to take the opportunity to urge them to support our impetus for free medicine.

“Americans with a bias for small government and big society! What next?

Sometime during the week, the Svengali shifted into campaign mode. B.O. took the time to mix it up at a town hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, during which he promised those invited into the charmed circle that it was not to the converted that he was preaching, but to a randomly selected group. Outside, the country was roiling — still is. Inside Barack’s Bubble the debate was flatlining like Nancy Pelosi’s brainwaves.

Speaking of whom, that frozen face and unsupple mind teamed up with Ring Leader Steny Hoyer (House majority leader) to label and libel 50 percent of Americans as “un-American,” in a USA Today op-ed, titled, “‘Un-American’ attacks can’t derail health care debate.”

Compounding their misleading conflation of the political will with the will of the people (“Health coverage for all was on the national agenda as early as 1912… Americans have been waiting for nearly a century for quality, affordable health care”), the dastardly duo dishonestly failed to mention a minor detail: The protests mirrored the polls. According to the latest USA Today/Gallup survey, “More Americans disapprove (50 percent) than approve (44 percent) of the way U.S. President Barack Obama is handling healthcare policy.”

Finally, at the time of writing, a breakthrough. Oh, the medicine of mercy! The tone on MSNBC took a turn. Anchors David “Shyster” and Tamron Hall inferred that the turbulent town hallers were a little simple, rather than “un-American.” T. Hall, who could never be called simple (her online fans vouch for the quality of her cleavage), believes “these people” ─ clearly aliens to a member of the “multicultural noise machine” ─ don’t know that Medicare and Medicaid are government-run; and they don’t get that insurance (a word she pronounces incorrectly with the emphasis on the first syllable) is a third-party entity.

Dear T. Non sequitur Hall:

From the fact that Veterans Health, Medicare and Medicaid are government-run, it doesn’t follow that transferring more of the medical industry into the same gulag is constitutional, insignificant, negligible, or unworthy of fighting.

From the fact that there are one too many mediating entities between doctor and patient, it does not follow that another ─ subject to all the wrong incentives ─ ought to be inserted.

There was one other thing that led our sleuth in a C Cup to “inform” her viewers that the mutinous multitudes were muddled beyond belief: Town hall attendees seemed to be harping on the proper role of government, and not on the minutia of the messiah’s medical plan.

Lo! Making a philosophical point instead of a utilitarian one ─ now that is dimwitted. Let me further dim the debate:

Demonstrators for a government takeover of medicine have a right to discuss their demands, but no right to enact these demands. As Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute put it, “Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action. There can be no such thing as a ‘right’ to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services.”

Protesters for a public plan have the right to seek out a doctor and pay him for his services; they have no claim to the products of his labor ─ and no right to enlist the State to compel third parties to pay for those products. This should help Tamron Hall (and her ilk), whose gaping vacuity is ameliorated only by an unbuttoned blouse.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaliy.com & Taki’s Magazine
August 14, 2009

Prices are like a compass: pegged to supply and demand they ensure the correct allocation of resources. Conversely, in socialized systems there are no prices because there is no private property. Absent such knowledge, misuse, misallocation and mismanagement of capital are inevitable ~ilana

Nothing can grow in the shadow of a State that has squandered trillions and makes up for it by printing more ~ilana

Misallocation of capital is inevitable in socialized systems. This immutable economic truth is anathema to America’s incontinent legislators, president-in-waiting, and their  crooked cognoscenti.

By “misallocation of capital” I mean the following:

In a free market, the institute of private property ensures that we have prices. Prices are like a compass: pegged to supply and demand they ensure the correct allocation of resources. Conversely, in socialized systems there are no prices because there is no private property. Absent such knowledge, misuse, misallocation and mismanagement of capital are inevitable.

You can take THAT to the bank.

The subprime mortgage cesspool is the latest acquisition in the government’s growing disinvestment portfolio.

If you’re working from the right set of first principles, you’ll understand that the State should not have an investment portfolio.

When one works from solid first principles, predicting what will happen upon their violation is easy. What isn’t easy is arriving at the correct principles in the first place.

Holding immutably true, principled positions is both politically unpopular and intellectually unintuitive to the mindless multitudes.

But not for one very clever economist—Bob Higgs—who, like another very clever statesman—Ron Paul—predicted the mortgage miasma into which the country has slid.

In “Ticking Time Bomb Explodes, Public Is Shocked,” Higgs explains how the violation of eternal truths has precipitated “the biggest government bailout/takeover in U.S. history,” likened by Higgs to “the collapse of the USSR’s centrally planned [unworkable] economy”:

“[T]he American people have little interest in liberty. Instead, they want the impossible: home ownership for those who cannot afford homes, credit for those who are not creditworthy, old-age pensions for those who have not saved, health care for those who make no attempt to keep themselves healthy, and college educations for those who lack the wit to finish high school. Moreover, they want it now, and they want somebody else to pay for it. … ”

For its predictive value, the piece deserves to be excerpted extensively:

“In the future, we will see a similar breakdown of the U.S. government’s Social Security system, with its ill-fated pension system and its even more inauspicious Medicare system of financing health care for the elderly. These government schemes are fighting a losing battle against demographic realities, the laws of economics, and the rules of arithmetic. The question is not whether they will fail, but when—and then how the government that can no longer sustain them in their previous Ponzi-scheme form will alter them to salvage what little can be salvaged with minimal damage to the government itself. …”

“Each of these time bombs has at least one element in common: it promises current benefits, often seemingly without cost; but if it must acknowledge a substantial cost, it places that burden somewhere in the distant future, where it will be borne by somebody else. From the standpoint of society in general, every such scheme is a species of eating the seed corn. It satisfies the public’s appetite to consume something for nothing right now, with no thought for the morrow. It represents the height of irresponsibility by permitting people to live higher today than they can truly afford, financing this profligacy by borrowing recklessly and by taxing politically weak and ill-organized people in order to shower benefits on politically strong and well-organized special interests. …”

“… All competent economists understand these things. Ludwig von Mises explained as early as 1920 why a centrally planned economy could not work as a rational system of allocating resources. The reasons why Social Security, especially its Medicare component, and many other such government programs contain the seeds of their own destruction have been explained time and again.”

“Are the politicians who construct these structures really such idiots that they cannot understand the logic of what they are doing? Not at all. But they are not striving to create economically viable institutions that serve the general public interest; they are feathering their own electoral nests in the only way they can in the context of our political institutions.” [My emphasis]

Where this column disagrees with Dr. Higgs is in his upbeat assessment of the collective intelligence of the governing quick-fix quacks.

Understandably, men and women with astringent minds find it hard to comprehend how systemic—and crushing—is the stupidity among corporate, political and academic elites. But they had better believe it. This is the age of the idiot. Bailout Boys Hussein and McCain are asses with ears; every bit as bad as they seem. Psychologizing about—or rationalizing—their motives only gives these intellectual tabula rasa more credit than they deserve.

ON THE TOPIC OF CREDIT: TV talker Glenn Beck deserves quite a bit. Beck is the only media mouth who gets that solvency is a virtue; bankruptcy a vice. He gets, to quote Higgs, that “members of the public are dense … greedy, impatient, and immoral, because the present benefits they hope to gain via politics, however unsustainable in the long run, come entirely at the expense of the taxpayers from whom the government extorts its revenues.”

Glenn is the only pundit in the peanut gallery on whose show you’re likely to hear sentences and sentiments such as, “Where is that in the Constitution?”

One question: Why does this sensitive a scrupulous soul—whose instincts are generally good—invite snake-oil merchants like Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal to obfuscate about the bailout (while making the obligatory noises about the merits of the free market he flouts).

Moore’s last book is titled “Bullish on Bush: How the Ownership Society Is Making America Richer.” If that’s not an indictment, nothing is. “Bush’s bailout society” is an instantiation of the principles upon which “Bush’s ownership society” was founded: credit for those who are not creditworthy.

So is America ever going to fire its failed philosopher kings when they fail to predict anything?

And is America ever going to understand that nothing can grow in the shadow of a State that has squandered trillions and makes up for it by printing more?

©2008 By Ilana Mercer
  WorldNetDaily.com
  October 3