“It’s not the GOP’s fault it’s useless but it’s useless”
You may be heartily sick of the topic by now, but I thought this article was a very good treatment of it (although I don’t agree with the next-to-last paragraph).
Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
It’s simply too much to expect a political party to stand up to voters and say, “no”. Politics is a market and voters have become consumers. If the GOP as a whole or an individual candidate won’t give the customer what they want, they will find someone else to do business with. Consumers don’t care about the health of the places they shop, they care that they get what they want. If Brand A doesn’t have it but Brand B does, who cares so long as their needs are met.
What America needs is a movement that will not just tell people “no” but also convince them to stop being a consumer of government and look at themselves as they were meant to”¦an owner of the government. Once you own something your value set shifts. Owners care about efficiency, quality and the long term survival of the organization. Owners invest not simply take out.
No political party is set up to do this.
What’s wrong with being an independent? The Republican brand is damaged goods even for many of us that have no other choice.
He’s right. But, remember Milton Friedman’s adage (I paraphrase): It’s not about getting the right people in office to do the right thing. It’s about getting the wrong people to do the right thing.
KLSmith asks:
“What’s wrong with being an independent?”
The problem is if you find the perfect Democrat for the House or the Senate, you will get Pelosi and Reid to go along with him/her.
The GOP has to sell their vision to the public, over the roar of the MSM/Dems.
Rick Caird: sorry, don’t understand. I mean I’d like to see pro small government, free market, liberty loving independents. By definition that excludes today’s Democrats.
This is where academia and the media are so important. God bless Rupert Murdoch for being a billionaire who is willing to put the conservative message in the media. The problem is that Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and Investor’s Business Daily are lonely voices in the chorus.
What is needed is a takeover of one or all of the major networks, a takeover of the WAPO/NYT/LAT or all three, and someone to offer more conservative leaning sitcoms on TV. Until the conservative message becomes at least 50% of our national entertainment/news, we will continue to have low information voters who may live their lives as conservatives, but accept the nostrums of the progressives. The Koch brothers, Boone Pickens, Sheldon Adelson, and others would be candidates to get involved.
Changing academia is another issue. Our best hope there is for the education bubble to burst and having the subsequent damage force schools to deal with the unreality of the progressive economic and social ideas. (WR Mead’s “Blue model.”)
Quotations from the Ace article linked by neo.
“How many people who voted for Mitt Romney or actual conservatives for Senate and the House want their Social Security and Medicare left untouched? How many of them give lip service to a flat tax proposal but would freak if their various tax credits and deductions were eliminated? How many of them talk a good game about getting rid of the Department of Education but would freak if aid to their kid’s district were cut?”
Hey — regarding Social Security and Medicare, I paid in for decades. I am not unprincipled if now I want my money’s worth.
As to the second two questions, negative. Bring on a truly flat tax, and eliminate the DofEd, which was no more than Jimmy Carter’s way of paying back the teachers’ unions.
“Our goal as conservatives must be to spend less time fighting with the left and more time winning over the mushy middle. We need to stop trying to change the GOP and begin to change the American people.”
The unfortunate fact is, it’s a multi-front war. The left will press on (and on and on and on), at the same time we have to devote ourselves to “winning over the mushy middle.”
Well, good luck with that. The “mushy middle” is not only susceptible to the left’s incessant hard core propagandizing, it is susceptible to the left’s soft core propagandizing, such as other mushy middlers enticing them with utopian dreams of “No Labels” and “bipartisanship” and the like.
So the leftist authoritarian state is arrived at a little more slowly. But they’ve got all the time in the world.
M J R: I assume he was referring to younger people, because Romney and Ryan were very explicit about leaving Social Security untouched for people over (I can’t find the exact age he proposed right now, but I think it was 53 or so).
The American polity is under the narcosis of fiat currency — and particularly the narcosis that radiates from hyper-inflationist Wealth Taxation Policy.
That this is going on is passively denied by the typical Conservative American.
It’s still taken as Gospel that sovereign governments in a fiat regime are actually borrowing money from the future, indeed, are borrowing at all. (GAAP style)
The shear idiocy of treating a Sovereign’s accounts as if it’s an entity in any way similar to an Italian trading house four centuries ago is still gulped down like pablum.
It’s still taken as Gospel that hyper-inflation doesn’t start until some magical, fuzzy, event which causes prices to take off. We see that nostrum just about everywhere.
The greater public is unaware that in our modern society that we generate three different types of money.
1) Precious commodities — bullion and specie in gold, silver; with more common metals used for marginal trades.
2) Commercial loan generation — particularly long-term real estate loans. Loan pay-down destroys money, so short-term lending swings create the tight money that we call Recessions. When tight money is triggered by a mass reversal in real estate lending the result is a Depression.
3) Sovereign debt generation — the maturity, per instrument, is irrelevant. This money only shrinks when the sovereign runs a cash surplus — on a cash flow basis.
It is possible for all three monies to be destroyed. Bullion can be sunk at sea in transit. Loans can be paid down. Even sovereign debt can be paid off. Jackson famously caused a staggering contraction when he liquidated the Federal debt by selling off government lands acquired by Jefferson.
Rampant price rises can happen with any of the above three monies. In the California gold fields, you wouldn’t believe what you’d have to pay in gold dust to get a plated meal. We’ve all experienced the real estate booms of the last generations. And, runaway price moves from Germany to Hungary to Zimbabwe are common knowledge.
It has not sunk in that, due to CRA Policy, the city banks were counterfeiting credit.
It has not sunk in that the result was Macro-Embezzlement.
It has not sunk in that once the Democrat Party levered up the urban ghettos of America — via the CRA Policy — that real estate arbitrage caused ALL land values to ramp up.
It has not sunk in that this politically motivated gambit transferred massive amounts of wealth to those on the right-side of events.
We still see vehement denials that CRA Policy had anything to do with Bubble America.
It has not sunk in that Sovereigns are above and outside the monetary system.
This leads to orthodox follies such as Modern Monetary Theory.
It’s the bunkum that’s still taught at all of the Ivies — and elsewhere.
We are left like our forefathers trying to understand chemical reactions before any acceptance of the Law of Conservation of Mass — no correct equations can be drawn; no consequences can be deduced, argumentation is endless.
The result is plaintive whining such as the post from Ace of Spades.
Financial Narcosis causes the polity to actually think that the Sovereign is actually a wealth generator. Conservative nostrums have no traction in such a dreamscape.
(sigh) A sign of the times, or at least of ^my^ times, when 53 is young. How’d ^that^ happen?
“How many people who voted for Mitt Romney or actual conservatives for Senate and the House want their Social Security and Medicare left untouched?”
Looking back at the piece, I see it was indeed in the context of those voting for Romney-Ryan. Well, okay. Isn’t it similar to “don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that man behind that tree”, regardless of age?
I will say that for many years, my feeling was, keep what I already gave you, if only you’ll promise to not take any more and let me fend for myself. But there gradually came a point where I was no longer saying that.
And now I’m in my first year on Social Security retirement — and I just got my first raise! See ya . . .
blert said, “Financial Narcosis causes the polity to actually think that the Sovereign is actually a wealth generator.” So true. The government produces only two things that people should be willing to pay for:
1. Defense from all foes, foreign and domestic.
2. A legal system that protects all citizens’ private property rights.
All else is taking money out of the private sector and recycling it through the halls of government.
Wealth is created when those things that people need and will pay for are produced. Adam Smith was brilliant enough to recognize that many people pursuing their own ends, while seemingly undirected, creates more wealth than a centrally directed system. But that gets no traction when the polity are duped by the progressive media machine.
“What America needs is a movement that will not just tell people “no” but also convince them to stop being a consumer of government and look at themselves as they were meant to…an owner of the government.”
The TEA party has tried that tactic since its formation, it has had decidedly limited success.
The GOP is not controlled by men and women of conservative principle, to which they pay mere lip service but by those who wish to maintain the financial status quo. They fight solely to protect capitalism, not limited government.
For a variety of reasons the tactic of sufficient persuasion is doomed to failure. There is no ‘convincing’ a lemming to avoid its self-destruction. The left has spent the last 40+ years turning much of the American electorate into ignorant, naive, gullible lemmings. The ignorance is too broad, the entitlement too entrenched and the narcissistic arrogance too pervasive. Liberals, the left’s useful idiots, have now reached the necessity of complete denial as a psychological survival strategy. The 2012 election and Ed Koch and Alan Dershowitz’s reaction of disappointment but continued support for Obama, after the appointment of Chuck Hagel perfectly illustrates this assertion.
We have reached a demographic tipping point and the inmates are now running the asylum.
The left has, through popular culture and the schools, inculcated sloth, envy and a sense of narcissistic entitlement into many Americans and the left is using class warfare to incrementally destroy its productive class.
Polls indicate that a substantial number of Americans want Europe’s cradle to grave nanny state. They are willing to trade the promise of security for their liberties and are in complete denial that, that is the bargain that they are agreeing too.
Obama and the left will continue to reduce our military expenditures and, seize through taxes more and more income, all to fund the ever growing entitlement state. They will continue to raise spending to continue to devalue the dollar. They will continue to raise the death tax so as to seize ever greater amounts of American’s inherited assets.
Hollywood, the media and academia will continue their cultural assault upon America’s cultural foundations.
During the next 4 years the make-up of the Supreme Court may suffer irrevocable transformation.
Efforts will continue in the UN through treaties to restrict and undermine America’s national sovereignty.
The assault is too comprehensive to be accidental.
The destruction of America is proceeding according to the left’s planned strategy.
“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next. America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Abraham Lincon
on another related issue
Members of Liberal Site Calls for Jewish “Extermination,” Unironically Proclaim Israel to be “Nazis”
http://www.punditpress.com/2013/01/members-of-liberal-site-calls-for.html
Geoffrey Britain, 7:19 pm — “The GOP . . . fight solely to protect capitalism, not limited government.”
A very salient distinction, one that I have not seen made so explicitly (and, at the same time, so succinctly).
Great observation.
But I don’t believe the GOP is fighting to protect capitalism.
They’re fighting to protect cronyism, corporatism (aka fascism), and their own power in the halls of government.
They’re just not quite as blatant about it as the Democrats.
But capitalism, no. The very last thing the political class wants is a truly free market, because that would empower productive members of society rather than government grifters and parasites.
rickl,
I don’t disagree per se as they do not want a truly free market, fairly but minimally regulated. They are fighting to protect cronyism, their own power in the halls of government and corporate interests, which BTW is not inherently fascist.
But as there is a distinction between what the republicans seek to preserve, which however bastardized does allow for entrepreneurship… and what democrats seek, which is tightly regulated socialism and what the committed left seeks, which is communism… I find your assertion insufficiently precise.
A return to real capitalism is perhaps possible under the republicans, if unlikely. Once they run out of other people’s money, it might even be possible under socialism. But in a world where the US is no longer free, there is no going back from Communism except through violent revolution.
“They are fighting to protect cronyism, their own power in the halls of government and corporate interests, which BTW is not inherently fascist.”
No it is not. But it is in many ways merely putting a few more mattresses between the princess and the pea.
Whistle all ‘they’ want it is still a grave yard.
Despite the fact that it is ‘left wing’ this remains true: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_BoAXopS54
We are all passengers on a ship of fools.
Congress as we all know are the 1% they are desperate to maintain the staus quo.
The information age has brought this all about.
We can all talk to one another get support from those that are sympatico. While the elites the world over are nervous. look what that vile EU is doing over there, regulations galore ! We must demand more freedom not less. Why isn t there a party called the “Constitutionalists” that will adhere to the founders. Our magnificent founding documents in this information age should be celebrated and utilized not attempted to be subverted.
It is doubtful the Republicans do much of anything without consulting their Leftist handlers. Political power is much more than what things appear to be. While many seem to think the Republicans are their own masters, and have simply chosen corrupt mega corporations as the goal, I would tend to believe that Republicans serve as a useful lap dog, infiltrated mostly by the Left, as a way to deceive Americans into thinking they have a choice. But the choice was always and will continue to be, the Left. Vote for either one, and whether either one wins or not, determines not much in the end for the LEft’s cause. This is different from thinking the REpublicans determine their own destiny.
Democrats could not convince the slave freeing Republicans in the past of much of anything, thus they decided to wage their victory through war, which they believed to be handily won over soon enough. Didn’t happen. But afterwards, they had to settle on “other” methods to achieve the same ends, like Jim Crow, Democrat owned serfs in Southern states, etc.
While the South matured and broke out of that trap, the blacks are more and more becoming slaves their ancestors were not.
Until somebody frees Republicans from the shackles of Leftist puppet mastery and frees the various minorities, Jews, blacks, and what not from Leftist slavery and serfdom, “elections” in this United States of America, matter pretty much for zip.