Tag Archives: Progressive Leviathan

Breathed There a Tyrant Who Did Not Claim Democracy?

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Hi there!

Hi there!

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your mind it will creep

It starts when you’re always afraid

Step out of line, the man come and take you away.

If the threat is accurately assessed, can it be considered paranoia?

Bookworm has a solid rant about how the IRS Scandal is the worst Scandal in US Political history. The argument is thus:

Because you, the People, became the targets of a comprehensive federal government effort to stifle dissent, one made using the government’s overwhelming and disproportionate policing and taxing powers.

All of the other scandals, going back to Andrew Johnson’s post-Civil War scandals, Warren G. Harding’s 1920s Teapot Dome scandal, Nixon’s Watergate, Reagan’s Iran-Contra, and Clinton’s Oval Office sexcapades have actually been narrowly focused acts of cronyism, garden-variety political chicanery, or personal failings. It’s been insider stuff.

The IRS scandal, by contrast, is a direct attack on the American people.

And that’s why the left’s spin is functionally irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if this is just a few rogue agents in Ohio (which it isn’t); it doesn’t matter if Obama personally gave the order or not (although I’d still like to know). Regardless, it means that hostile, tyrannical elements exist within what is arguably the most powerful agency in the federal government. Or, as James Taranto puts it:

As we wrote Friday, this will be a scandal like Watergate if it turns out that the IRS was acting under orders from Barack Obama or Valerie Jarrett. If the White House’s conduct turns out to be unimpeachable, then it is something far worse: a sign that the government itself has become a threat to the Constitution.

Let’s put the shoe on the other foot for a moment, for once not so that we can point out the hypocrisy of the Left (because, duh). Let’s imagine the IRS, at the behest of a Republican Administration, singling out progressive groups for extra scrutiny, denying their applications, demanding to pick through their activities with a fine-toothed comb. Is this a plus for democracy? Is this what the common citizen, left or right, wants to see happen?

Of course not. This is not democracy as anyone in this country understands it. This is a depraved, decadent political class, having long ago convinced itself that winning justified everything, reasonably concluding that its current dominance justifies itself. Democracy will be whatever our masters in Washington tell us it is, and when they offer us a jug-eared, self-besotted  nincompoop and say “Behold the Superman!” we damn well better clamor him most clamoringly.

Or else.

Should Mitt Romney Rescue Detroit?

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It’s an interesting question, but the short answer is: No. Because Detroit doesn’t want to be rescued.

Which is to say, Detroit’s political class doesn’t want anything to change. The people might hope for an economic dictator to cull the mess in city hall, but everyone else has a vested or an ideological interest in the “emergency city manager” failing.

By the same token, Stewart, Colbert, et al will jump all over this with both clown feet. The memegasms of Romney in Fuhrer-wear will tumble out of Facebook. The persistent disaster that has been progressive governance of Detroit these past fifty years will be shunted aside in favor of interviews of somebody’s grandmother being laid off from her clerk’s job.

And when the 18 months are over? Everything will go right back to where it was.

Not even Detroit is too big to fail. Let’s have that lesson learned.

“My Bias is Objective, Because I’m Right”

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The Wall Street Journal finds the essence of progressive thought very conveniently spelled out.

The anonymous reporter, however, goes far beyond bias, and even beyond bad faith–that is, beyond abusing his credibility as an “objective” reporter to further his cause. To judge by his emails to the reader, he has achieved a perfect Orwellian inversion. He has convinced himself that objectivity and bias (or at least his bias) are one and the same thing.

Exactly. So the press doesn’t need to be fair to conservatives, because we’re wrong. They don’t need to consider our concerns or arguments in an honest manner, because everything we say, no matter how reasonable-sounding, is in service of Wrong, because We’re Wrong. Arguments that we are not wrong cannot seriously be discussed, because they are in service of Wrong, because We’re Wrong. Accusations that this line of reasoning involves the logical fallacy of Begging the Question  is also, regrettably, in service of WRONG, because WE’RE WRONG.

Repeat as necessary.

Leviathan and Civil Disobedience

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Jeff Goldstein makes things nice and sparkling clear, like a good intentionalist should:

Either you are a constitutionalist or you aren’t. If you aren’t, then in the most important ways you are anti-American. As such, you are my enemy — and a person looking to enslave me, my children, and those who matter most to me.

Read the Whole Think as he references an ongoing theme of this blog, the Rise of Leviathan.

So how do we proceed? It’s well and good to talk of “letting it burn” and “soft civil war,” but so what? What manner of civil disobedience will usefully bring pain to the opponents of liberty?

Because they seem awfully willing to bring the pain to us.

I’m going to start here. It’s free on Kindle.

This, My Progressive Friends, is What You Voted For…

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The New York Post has the skinny on what ObamaCare is going to do for us.

If you get your health insurance through a job, you might lose it as of Jan. 1, 2014. That’s when the new “employer mandate” kicks in, requiring employers with 50 or more full-time workers to provide the government-designed health plan or pay a fine. The government plan is so expensive, it adds $1.79 per hour to the cost of a full-time employee.

So you can land on Park Place with a Hotel, or you can land on Boardwalk with 4 houses. Or you can Go to Jail.

When you file your taxes, you will have to show proof that you are enrolled in the one-size-fits-all plan approved by the federal government. It’s mandatory, starting Jan. 1, 2014, or the IRS will withhold your refund. If you’ve been going without insurance, or your employer drops coverage, your options will be enrolling in Medicaid (if you’re eligible) or buying a government-approved health plan on your state health exchange.

Which I’m sure will be very reasonably priced.

If you’re a senior or a baby boomer, expect less care than in the past. Cuts to future Medicare funding pay for more than half the Obama health law. Hospitals, for example, will have $247 billion less to care for same number of seniors than if the law had not passed. Hospitals will spread nurses thinner. California nurses already are striking over the increased workloads.

Hmmm. It’s almost as though mandating something doesn’t, of itself, create more of something! Such puzzlers, these economic questions!

For the first time in history, the federal government will control how doctors treat privately insured patients. Section 1311 of the law empowers the Secretary of Health and Human Services to standardize what doctors do. Even if you have a private plan from Cigna or Aetna and you paid for it yourself, the federal government will have some say over your doctors’ decisions, with an eye toward reducing health-care consumption.

Are the feminists listening? The people who wail unto the heavens that they don’t want the government controlling what a woman does with her body?  Are they now understanding what they have crawled over broken glass to vote for? Hello? Is this thing on?

But hey, free birth control, right?

Which is Yiddish for “I support your right to choose not to have my baby.”

Via Protein Wisdom.

Matt Yglesias Never Watched The Wire

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Let us all stomp, like Stacy McCain, like Andy at Ace, upon the socialist fallacy of the day:

@mattyglesias

The concept of “redistribution” falsely implies that the existence of property is prior to the existence of the state.

I assume this to be a commonplace on the Left: that property cannot exist absent the state, so the state is free to distribute property as best suits its own needs. It was a commonplace in the feudal past, as well.

I love it when a plan comes together.

But to hold this few means to say that, prior to the existence of a government, no one thought of anything in terms of “mine”, and it is not possible to think of things as “mine” unless you can demonstrate so in court. But this notion is preposterous:

Bodie refers to the corner he dies at as “my corner”. In the world of The Wire (and presumably, in every inner-city), the “corner” is the place of narcotics distribution. Much of the conflict in inner-city drug trade involves control of corners (there’s a sub-plot in Season 2 of The Wire involving this). Said control is enforced by force of arms alone. If another gang tries to take a corner you have traded at, you must fight them, and kill them if necessary. It’s all very well for Matt Yglesias’ lilywhite ass to muse on the “myth of ownership.” For Bodie, his corner was the only real thing he knew.

Property is use and transference. Gangs use the corner to distribute their product. A kingpin may transfer a corner from one flunkie to another. He may even agree to let another gang use it as part of an agreement, thus transferring it. All of this happens not only outside the purview of the state, but in direct opposition to it. Legally, those “corners” do not belong to the gangs (I don’t know who they belong to, save the city itself). But who else does anything with it? And more to the point, who is stopping them? No one stopped Bodie from trading at his corner until another Gang-Starr gave him the double-tap. Whereupon the corner belonged to whoever Marlo, in the exercise of his seigneurial rights, decided should have it.

The state does not create property. Men claim parts of the earth as theirs to use. When they tire of defending that claim with weapons, they create the state to free their property from violence. The effectiveness of the state in doing so determines how much legitimacy the state enjoys. In The Wire, the state cannot even prevent juveniles from engaging in illegal activity on the state’s own property. Which is at least part of the reason that streets upon streets of empty rowhouses in Baltimore sit, unowned.

Romney Concludes That People Dislike The Government More than Bain Capital…

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Stacy McCain offers up the new attack ad.

You can demagoge about corporate fatcats until Demosthenes himself says “Dude, we get it,” and people play right along. But when you ask the question: “So what’s the government going to do that’s any better?” You won’t get an answer that makes any sense. We have an opportunity to ask that question over and over and over again this year, and it’s refreshing to the the Republican candidate aware of it.