Republicans, Tariffs, "Free Trade," and Economics in an Easy-to-Understand Nutshell

The estimable Pat Buchanan writes:

As for “protectionism,” Harding did approve the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922, doubling rates to 38 percent. But he also slashed Woodrow Wilson’s income tax rates by two-thirds, back to 25 percent.

Result: Unemployment, 12 percent when Harding took office, was 3 percent when Calvin Coolidge left. Manufacturing output rose 64 percent in the Roaring Twenties. Between 1923 and 1927, U.S. growth was 7 percent a year. At decade’s end, America produced 42 percent of the world’s goods.

Compare this economic triumph with the fruits of W’s free-trade policy that wiped out 6 million U.S. manufacturing jobs, one of every three we had, and put America in hock to China.

The protectionism Bush calls “evil” was the policy of 12 Republican presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Coolidge, who made the GOP America’s Party and converted this country into the industrial marvel of mankind.

Is Bush oblivious to this? Did someone at Phillips Academy, Yale or Harvard Business School tell him Lincoln, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were free-traders?

Now, don't waste my time pointing out the negatives of tariffs. Of course there are negatives. Every kind of tax has negatives. Income taxes have negatives, too. I am only contending, as always, that on balance, tariffs are better than income taxes. I think the track record is there.

Mr. Buchanan on the Repeal of DADT

I know: I quote Pat Buchanan so often that y'all probably think I agree with everything he says.

I don't. But I do agree with the majority of what he says, and in this case, he was more or less channeling my thoughts. I'd quote the whole thing, but I'll restrain myself, give you just a taste, and strongly recommend that you go read the whole thing:

A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States.

"Don't ask, don't tell" is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed services.

Let us hope this works out better for the Marine Corps than it did for the Catholic Church.

Remarkable. The least respected of American institutions, Congress, with an approval rating of 13 percent, is imposing its cultural and moral values on the most respected of American institutions, the U.S. military.

Why are we undertaking this social experiment with the finest military on earth? Does justice demand it? Was there a national clamor for it?

No. It is being imposed from above by people, few of whom have ever served or seen combat, but all of whom are aware of the power of the homosexual rights lobby. This is a political payoff, at the expense of our military, to a militant minority inside the Democratic Party that is demanding this as the price of that special interest's financial and political support.

Among the soldiers most opposed to bringing open homosexuals into the ranks are combat veterans, who warn that this will create grave problems of unit cohesion and morale.

One Marine commandant after another asked Congress to consider the issue from a single standpoint:

Will the admission of gay men into barracks at Pendleton and Parris Island enhance the fighting effectiveness of the Corps?

Common sense suggests that the opposite is the almost certain result.

Can anyone believe that mixing small-town and rural 18-, 19- and 20-year-old Christian kids, aspiring Marines, in with men sexually attracted to them is not going to cause hellish problems?

The Marines have been sacrificed by the Democratic Party and Barack Obama to the homosexual lobby, with the collusion of no fewer than eight Republican senators.

And you people who have never been in the military? Do be aware that I'm having a hard time understanding why I should take your opinion on the subject very seriously.

On the Edge of the Abyss?

Pat Buchanan makes you wonder:

Irish rage at having to suffer to save Europe’s bondholders of Irish banks, the anarchy in England, riots in France to protest a rise in the retirement age to 62, the violence that wracked Greece, the precarious condition of Portugal and Spain, the anger of Germans at having to bail out their profligate EU partners — raise the question:

Can Europe’s welfare states be downsized without violence surging, governments falling and populists coming to power who will default on debts rather than force the masses that elected them to suffer to save the bank investors?

Can European democracy deal with the gathering storm?

Is not a national default and a collapse of banks across Europe inevitable? And could such a collapse be contained in Europe when America’s big banks are all transnational institutions?

No doubt about it, rough seas are ahead. America still has a lot going for it--I may go into detail sometime, but not today, I should be getting ready for work--that will enable it to come through the crisis in better shape than Europe, I think,though that may not be saying much.

Crap. All this pain and crisis because people wanted to live way beyond their means and wanted government to make it possible.

Told Ya

Free Trade does not actually exist. It is a chimera, a phantom, something from the make-believe world. Other countries find ways to protect their markets.

I keep saying that. And people--at least the people who have a clue what "free trade" means--just look at me (metaphorically speaking--they're seldom physically present) like I have a horn growing out of my head.

Now, with U.S. political, military, industrial and strategic decline vis a vis China manifest to the world, we hear the wails of American businessmen that they are not being treated fairly by the Chinese. And the politicians responsible for building up China are now talking tough about confronting and containing China.

Sorry, but that cat cannot be walked back.

Review commission chair Dan Slane says his members have concluded that "China is adopting a highly discriminatory policy of favoring domestic producers over foreign manufacturers. Under the guise of fostering 'indigenous innovation' ... the government of China appears determined to exclude foreigners from bidding on government contracts at the central, provincial and local levels."

Imagine that! The Chinese are ignoring WTO rules and putting China first. Don't they understand how the Global Economy works? You're not supposed to tilt the field in favor of the home team.

One knows not whether to laugh or cry.

The policy the Chinese are pursuing, economic nationalism, was virtually invented by the Republican Party. Protectionism was the declared policy of the GOP from the day its first president took office in 1861 to the day Calvin Coolidge left in 1929.

Free trade was the policy of a Great Britain whose clocks those generations of Americans cleaned, even as the Chinese are cleaning ours.

The quote is from Pat Buchanan--and about all I have to say is, "Told ya so."

Pat Buchanan on the Fed and QE2

Not much I can add to this, methinks. You'd serve yourself well by reading the whole thing.

If it is the first responsibility of the Federal Reserve to protect the dollars that Americans earn and save, is it not dereliction of duty for the Fed to pursue a policy to bleed value from those dollars? For that is what Chairman Ben Bernanke is up to with his QE2, or “quantitative easing.”

Translation: The Fed is committed to buy $600 billion in bonds from banks and pay for them by printing money that will then be deposited in those banks. The more dollars that flood into the economy, the less every one of them is worth.

Bernanke is not just risking inflation. He is inducing inflation.

[snip]

The other Chinese complaint is that they lent us trillions to buy Chinese goods and now we are robbing them by depreciating the dollar-denominated Treasury bonds they accepted in return for their goods.

Pay back your banker in Monopoly money, and you will find you are soon unable to borrow from anyone anywhere.

[snip]

The Fed...retains a confidence that it does not deserve, when one considers that, when it was created in 1913, a $20 bill could be exchanged for a $20 gold piece.

Today, it takes seventy $20 bills to buy a $20 gold piece, which means the dollar can buy in 2010 what you could get for 2 pennies in 1910. Quite a record for a central bank set up to protect the dollar.

Well, it was ostensibly set up to protect the dollar. Before you fall for that one, maybe you ought to find out what Andrew Jackson thought of the idea of a central bank.

Pat Makes My Point

Mr. Buchanan, in this quoted material, makes much the same point that I would regarding the strength of the Tea Party. In the remainder of the column, he makes other points which you would be well advised to consider, principally this one: both parties, in order to bring the budget under control, are going to have to be willing to embrace some very harsh realities, and the odds are excellent that neither party is going to be willing to do any such thing. Really, do read the whole thing.

But here's the quote. Emphasis is mine:

The media have begun a drumbeat to demand that the new speaker, John Boehner, compromise with Obama for the good of the country.

Are these people delusional?

Republicans were brought to power because they were the Party of No. Boehner takes the gavel from Nancy Pelosi because he led the fight to kill the Obama stimulus, Obamacare, card check, amnesty, cap-and-trade and Barney Frank's financial reform.

Boehner's beliefs are closer to the Tea Party than to Obama. He owes his speakership to the Tea Party. His political interests dictate allying with the Tea Party and moving even further away from Obama.

Why would Boehner lead his caucus into a suicide pact with Obama when, in Boehner's eyes, the national interest and his own interests point in the other direction?

Food Stamp Perspective

Mr. Buchanan provides a little historical perspective on food stamps:

“The lessons of history … show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

These searing words about Depression-era welfare are from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1935 State of the Union Address. FDR feared this self-reliant people might come to depend permanently upon government for the necessities of their daily lives. Like narcotics, such a dependency would destroy the fiber and spirit of the nation.

What brings his words to mind is news that 41.8 million Americans are on food stamps, and the White House estimates 43 million will soon be getting food stamps every month. A seventh of the nation cannot even feed itself.

...a Food Stamp Act was signed into law by LBJ appropriating $75 million for 350,000 individuals in 40 counties and three U.S. cities.

[snip]

Yet when Richard Nixon took office, 3 million Americans were receiving food stamps at a cost of $270 million.

[snip]

By the time he left office in 1974, the food stamp program was feeding 16 million Americans at an annual cost of $4 billion.

Fast forward to 2009. The cost to taxpayers of the U.S. food stamp program hit $56 billion. The number of recipients and cost of the program exploded again last year.

Among the reasons is family disintegration. Forty percent of all children in America are now born out of wedlock. Among Hispanics, it is 51 percent. Among African-Americans, it is 71 percent.

Food stamps are feeding children abandoned by their own fathers. Taxpayers are taking up the slack for America’s deadbeat dads.

[snip]

Obesity rates have soared. Forty percent of all the kids in city public schools from kindergarten through eighth grade are overweight or obese.

Among poor kids, whose families depend on food stamps, the percentages are far higher. Mothers of poor kids use food stamps to buy them sugar-heavy soda pop, candy and junk food.

[snip]

The Department of Agriculture in 2004 denied a request by Minnesota that would have disallowed food stamp recipients from using them for junk food. To grant the request, said the department, would “perpetuate the myth” that food stamps users make poor shopping decisions.

But is that a myth or an inconvenient truth?

[snip]

What we have accepted today is a vast permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by the rest of society — fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayer’s expense for their entire lives. We have a new division in America: those who pay a double fare, and those who forever ride free.

We Americans are not only not the people our parents were, we are not the people we were. FDR was right about what would happen to the country if we did not get off the narcotic of welfare.

Two thoughts, if you're willing to put up with them long enough to read them:

1) FDR was indeed right. Personally, I don't think he really gave a rat's rear end; I am pretty sure that like most leftists, he thought that no price would be too high to pay for the expansion of government. But look at what's happened via the so-called "Great Society" programs, through our so-called "War on Poverty": bluntly, poverty won. The number of "poor" people has not diminished, it has increased. Part of this is because government keeps defining poverty in such a way as to continually guarantee that a lot of people will qualify for these government handouts. It's a good way to keep the serfs dependent, you know. Part of this is because, just as FDR and many others have noted, the availability of handouts is destructive to the work ethic. In economics, this is known as a "moral hazard." It is a real thing, not some chimera dreamed up by right-wing fanatics who want to see babies starve.

The upshot is that anti-poverty programs do little to alleviate or reduce poverty; instead, they escalate and exacerbate it.

2) Money is fungible. If you're not familiar with this concept, I will briefly explain: one dollar substitutes for any other dollar. A dollar you receive in food stamps is a dollar that you can now spend on gasoline, on internet service, on cigarettes, on beer, etc. It is because money is fungible that those of us who are not on food stamps--and I am not trying to be overly judgmental here, I am well aware that in this economy, people who never expected to be on food stamps are getting them--are constantly gobsmacked to see those who are talking on their cell phones in the Wal-Mart checkout line. "How the dickens can they be on food stamps and afford a cell phone?" people ask?

The answer is obvious: it is because they are on food stamps that they can still afford a cell phone, or cable tv, or soda pop, or beer, or cigarrettes.

One of the most indelible impressions I have received in my adult life forever reinforced the concept that money is fungible. At one church, I used to go out on visitation quite regularly. We went in teams, and one night, one of the members of my team was an elderly lady who happened to be in charge of the church's benevolence ministry. That night, she wanted to go visit a family who'd come to the pantry for food assistance, and to whom we'd given, of course, some food.

Imagine our surprise when we arrived at the home and found, to the best of my recollection, four men, all drunk out of their minds on beer. "How," you might ask, "did they afford beer when they were in such desperate straights as to go begging for food?" The answer is, again, obvious: it was not so much that they were desperate for food. They were desperate for beer, and did not want to spend their beer money on food for the family. So they went to the church, and the church, in essence, via the fungibility of money, bought their beer for them. Let me hammer that home for those who aren't getting it: one dollar substitutes for any other dollar. The dollars that household received in food became dollars spent on beer. We bought their beer, we just didn't know it.

Now, let me carry this into a wider context: because money is fungible, in a very real sense, when we give people food stamps, we are often not buying them food. We are buying them all the things that they would like to have but otherwise would not be able to afford. Because they have been freed from the burden of a realistic food budget, they can now buy other things.

How does it feel to be taxed for the sake of paying for other people's cell phones? Because that is exactly what's being done to you. And ironically, all that government taxing and spending is part of what's killing the job market!

God Love Pat Buchanan...

Again, it should be noted that I don't agree with Mr. Buchanan on everything. Perhaps most notably, I think he substantially underrates the threat militant Islam poses to the world (ourselves included) and overrates how quiet Dar al Islam would be if we just completely dropped everything in the Middle East and cleared on out of there.

My principle objection to how we have been fighting the War on Terror is that we keep operating on what I believe to be a very bad assumption: that we can, for lack of a better word, "democratize" societies grounded on beliefs that simply do not, and never have, esteemed democratic values or republican government. Foreign policy based on bad assumptions is ultimately doomed to failure.

But on the following, yes, I do believe Mr. Buchanan has a point...

Every patriot will do what is necessary and pay what is needed to defend his country. But national security is one thing, empire security another.

Why should Americans, 65 years after World War II, be defending rich Europeans from a Soviet Union that has been dead for 20 years, so those same Europeans can cut their defense budgets to protect their social safety nets?

President Eisenhower told JFK to bring the troops home from Europe, or the Europeans would wind up as permanent wards.

Was Ike a closet isolationist?

Almost $14 trillion in debt today, we borrow from Europe to defend Europe, borrow from Japan to defend Japan, borrow from the Gulf Arabs to defend the Gulf Arabs. And we borrow from Beijing to send foreign aid to African regimes whose U.N. delegations laughed and applauded as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the General Assembly that 9/11 was an inside job by the U.S. government. Have we lost all sense of self-respect?

In his 1969 “Silent Majority” address, Richard Nixon said that, after Vietnam, America would provide Asian allies with weapons and assistance in defending their freedom. But Americans would no longer do the fighting.

Why are U.S. soldiers still on the DMZ, 57 years after the Korean War? Why are Marines still on Okinawa, 65 years after Gen. MacArthur took the surrender? Cannot Korea and Japan, prosperous and populous, conscript the soldiers for their own defense?

National security, yes. Empire security we can no longer afford.

Just What I Been Talkin' 'Bout for Years!

One of the objections I've long had to free trade--again, let me reiterate for those who don't know, free trade and free markets are not the same thing, I oppose the one and support the other--is that if you lose some of your industries to foreign competition in the name of free trade, you might just find your tuchus in a sling if you have to, like, go to war. Or something.

Pat Buchanan says, illustrating this very point:

A fortnight ago, a Chinese trawler rammed a Japanese patrol boat in the Senkaku Islands administered by Japan but also claimed by China. Tokyo released the ship and crew, but held the captain.

His immediate return was demanded by Beijing.

Japan refused. China instantly escalated the minor incident into a major confrontation, threatening a cut off of Japan’s supply of “rare-earth” materials, essential to the production of missiles, batteries and computers. Through predatory trading, China had killed its U.S. competitor in rare-earth materials, establishing almost a global monopoly.

[snip]

The Chinese tiger is all grown up, and it’s not cuddly anymore.

And with Beijing’s threat to use its monopoly of rare-earth materials to bend nations to its will, how does the Milton Friedmanite free-trade ideology of the Republican Party, which fed Beijing $2 trillion in trade surpluses at America’s expense over two decades, look now?

How do all those lockstep Republican votes for Most Favored Nation status for Beijing, ushering her into the World Trade Organization and looking the other way as China dumped into our markets, thieved our technology and carted off our factories look today?

The self-sufficient republic that could stand alone in the world is more dependent than Japan on China for rare-earth elements vital to our industries, for the necessities of our daily life, and for the loans to finance our massive trade and budget deficits.

How does the interdependence of nations in a global economy look now, compared to the independence American patriots from Alexander Hamilton to Calvin Coolidge guaranteed to us, that enabled us to win World War II in Europe and the Pacific in less than four years?

That is only part of what's going on. Don't get me started about machine tools, and machinists, and tool-and-die makers. You don't wanna know.

Mr. Buchanan, As Per Usual, Speaking My Mind

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I should note at the outset that there actually are areas where I do not entirely agree with Pat Buchanan. In the column to which I'm linking, reference is made to a few of those. In general, you can tell where I'm going to disagree with Mr. Buchanan by remembering that I think he does not quite get Islam's true hegemonistic ambitions.

---

Mr. Buchanan puts some of my concerns so well in this column that I'm just going to let you have the quotes without adding further commentary.

This party is not ready to rule.

Consider. In its grand strategy to recapture a Senate that George W. Bush and Rove lost in 2006, the GOP Senate leadership endorsed all its own caucus members for re-election, if they chose to run, then picked out all its favorite candidates for the open and Democratic seats.

Conservatives and tea party activists, however, had other ideas. They began to pick their own candidates. And, again and again, the Senate’s chosen were rejected in favor of tea party challengers who had the endorsement of Sarah Palin or South Carolina’s Jim DeMint.

[snip]

To the Republican establishment, tea party people are field hands. Their labors are to be recognized and rewarded, but they are to stay off the porch and not presume to sit at the master’s table.

And what O’Donnell did, with her amazing victory, is to imperil that establishment’s return to power. That is why these Republicans went ballistic.

O’Donnell’s conservative convictions and Castle’s social liberalism mean nothing to them. They are about power and all that goes with it.

And that raises a question too long put off.

What is the Republican establishment going to do, what are the neoconservatives going to do, if returned to power?

Well, okay, one comment: I agree with Mr. Buchanan that the Republican Party is not really ready for power, but you have to keep in mind that I think the Democrats are even less to be trusted with power. As per usual, politically speaking, I am being given the choice between bad and worse, and as the Republicans are merely bad, they're gonna get my vote.

But dadgummit, if people think we're gonna fix the problem just by returning the Republicans to power, they're sadly mistaken. It's gonna take years of slogging...

As Per Usual...

Pat Buchanan says out loud what I have been thinking, and saying quietly to friends and family:

...Beck's believers and the tea party folks are raising hopes and expectations.

But can they succeed?

"We must not fundamentally transform America, as some would want," said Palin, in one of the direct challenges to Obama. "We must restore America."

But can we restore America, or is the old America gone forever?

Consider the issue that unites all on the Mall on Saturday -- the need for the U.S. government to cut spending, to balance its budget and not to shove an immense burden of debt on our children.

Like last year, we are running a deficit of $1.4 trillion, almost 10 percent of the entire economy. With housing starts and housing sales plunging, jobless claims rising, the stock market sinking and economic growth slowing to a crawl, we will face a new deficit equally large in the fiscal year beginning in October.

Where are the victorious tea party Republicans going to cut?

According to USA Today, 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, and perhaps an equal number on Medicare and Social Security. Which of these three will tea party Republicans cut, when Republicans are already denying Democratic charges that they plan to raise the retirement age for Social Security?

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has a 600-page plan to reform Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the tax code, the work of a conscientious conservative. But only one in 16 House Republicans has signed on as co-sponsor.

Are Republicans going to go after other entitlements -- veterans benefits, earned income tax credits, food stamps -- which now go to 41 million Americans, or unemployment benefits that run for 99 weeks?

With the racial achievement gap on test scores returning, will the GOP abolish No Child Left Behind or slash federal aid to education?

The reality is that decades of profligate spending and borrowing to pay for unsustainable programs has finally left us in a situation where extrication will be extremely problematic.

I don't give two hoots who's in charge, cuts in Medicare and Medicaid are coming. They have to. Don't make the mistake of thinking that Republicans are going to be able to rescue those programs by repealing Obamacare. Even if they are successful in repealing Obamacare, those programs are going to be cut. There is no choice. There is simply not enough money. Those of us who work with Medicare and Medicaid patients are already seeing the cuts. You would not believe some of what is happening if you didn't see it with your own eyes.

Personally, it wouldn't bother me if those two programs were phased out. They're grossly unconstitutional. But when the Republicans, in their turn, fail to rescue them, do you think a general public, grossly unaware of what the Constitution actually says, poorly educated in basic economics, and raised to expect superlative medical care in their old age, won't turn around and punish Republicans at the ballot box?

Barring a major revival, we are headed downhill on a bobsled. Big Republican wins in November aren't going to change that.

Pat Buchanan Saith Regarding Islam..

True conservatives are people of the heart who use the weapons of the mind to defend the things of the heart.

Why would Americans be reflexively skeptical and wary of Islam?

We were born a Christian nation, an extension of Christendom. For most of us, it is part of our DNA. And for a thousand years, our ancestors fought a war of civilizations with Islam.

In the name of Islam, Muslim fanatics massacred 3,000 of us. In our media, the names commonly associated with Islam are al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

What are sins in Christianity -- adultery and homosexuality -- are capital crimes in Islamic countries. From the Copts in Egypt to the Chaldeans of Iraq, Christians are persecuted and purged in the Middle East. Few remain in the old Christian towns of Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem. Christian missionaries in Islamic countries risk stonings and beheading. Muslims are attacking Christians in Nigeria, Sudan, the Caucasus, Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Are there scores of thousands of patriotic American Muslims, hundreds of millions of decent, peace-loving Muslims around the world?

Undeniably true.

Yet one would have to be obtuse not to understand that a Western nation that opens its doors to mass migration from the Islamic world is taking a grave risk with its unity and identity.

An apprehension about that is what Burke called the "latent wisdom" of a people.

This is not an argument for war with Islam, but for recognition that "East is East and West is West" and America cannot absorb and assimilate all the creeds of mankind without ceasing to be who we are.

Mr. Buchanan on the Walker Decision

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Here's another one for which I took notes several days ago. My own thoughts at the bottom are several days old, as well.

---

I really would have you go read the whole thing. Eventually, I'll get 'round to putting down more of my own thoughts on the subject. At least I hope I will. There's about a bajillion things I want to get 'round to writing up.

Any emphasis in the following is mine:

Federal Judge Vaughn Walker is truly a visionary.

Peering at the 14th Amendment, Walker found something there the authors of the amendment never knew they put there, and even the Warren Court never found there: The states of the Union must recognize same-sex marriages as equal to traditional marriage.

[snip]

If the Walker decision is upheld by the Ninth Circuit and Supreme Court, homosexual marriage will be imposed on a nation where, in 31 out of 31 state referenda, the people have rejected it as an absurdity.

This is not just judicial activism. This is judicial tyranny.

[snip]

Walker says the only motivations behind Proposition 8 had been "biases" and "moral disapproval," and "moral disapproval ... has never been a rational basis for legislation."

But what else is the basis for laws against polygamy and incest? What else was the basis for the Mann Act, which prevented a man from taking his girlfriend across the state line to a motel?

What is the basis for prohibiting prostitution, a free exchange of money for sexual favors, if not "moral disapproval"?

[snip]

But not even a judge can change the meaning of words. In every language known to man, marriage is defined as a union of a man and a woman. Same-sex marriage is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.

Walker may call such pairings marriages, but that does not make it so. As Lincoln said, "How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

"Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license," said the judge.

He is calling opponents of gay marriage irrational.

This is not just an insult to the intelligence of those Californians who have rejected gay marriage, but to a majority of Americans.

[snip]

Up to today, Walker is the only federal judge to see in same-sex marriage a constitutional right. And what is the origin of this right? Supporters of Walker's decision cite the Declaration of Independence about our "inalienable rights" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

But that same declaration says we were endowed with those rights by our Creator. When did the Creator indicate that among these rights was for homosexuals to have their unions recognized as marriages?

The author of that declaration, Thomas Jefferson, equated homosexual acts with rape and wrote that male homosexuals (they used the term sodomites in that time) should be castrated and lesbians should have a hole cut into their noses.

[snip]

...Walker's personal opinion.

But he is declaring it to be the only rational conclusion that can be reached. And having reached it, he has seized upon a phrase in the 14th amendment, "equal protection," distorted its meaning and dictated that this means his view and his values henceforth are the law in California, the voters be damned.

Ultimately, most people's opinion on this subject will turn upon whether they believe homosexual orientation to be something you are born with, or a choice--a choice conditioned by events in one's upbringing or other events, no doubt, but a choice nonetheless.

I fall into the latter camp. I hold that if you try to make a case for homosexuality being an inborn genetic trait, you also inadvertently make the same case for pedophilia, bestiality, porn addiction, serial adultery, foot fetishes, and so forth. That is, there is no argument that I have heard for homosexuals being "born that way" that could not also be applied with equal facility to the other sexual issues I have just mentioned. Likewise, if you reject the idea--on whatever grounds--that the pedophile is "born that way," I think that you have similar grounds for rejecting the idea that homosexuals are doomed to their particular perversion as an accident of birth.

I am not trying to say here that I think I am better than the homosexual on a moral level. I don't think there are more than a handful of people on the planet who aren't guilty of some sort of sexual immorality, even if it's just lusting after people you're not married to, which Jesus declared to be the equivalent of adultery (I trust I am not over-paraphrasing His words). Personally, I have little interest in legislating homosexuality out of existence for the simple reason that historically, it has never succeeded, and one's efforts appear to be better spent on evangelism and education. If they are willing to leave the children alone and not recruit them (You do realize that actively recruiting others is the only way the homosexual community can stay in existence, don't you? They sure as thunder can't reproduce...), I'm willing to leave them alone. But I draw the line at being forced, under color of law, to call two shacked-up homosexuals "married" or not to speak my mind about the morality of the whole thing (which is not a contradiction to "I'm willing to leave them alone;" if they tell me they don't want to hear it, I respect that), which is, based on what has gone on overseas, where this is all ultimately headed.

Pat Buchanan on Obama and the White Voter

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I took my notes from Mr. Buchanan's column several days ago and promptly forgot all about them.

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The White House fears it is losing white America because of a false perception that it harbors a bias against white America.

{snip]

Whence comes that perception? Several incidents.

First was the startling accusation by Attorney General Eric Holder, days after Barack Obama was inaugurated in a gusher of good feeling, that we are all "a nation of cowards" when it comes to facing issues of race. A real icebreaker for a national conversation.

Second was the instantaneous verdict of the president, when asked about the arrest of Harvard's Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge cop Sgt. James Crowley. With no knowledge of what happened, Obama blurted out that the cops had "acted stupidly."

[snip]

A third was the revelation that Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the "wise Latina" herself, had gone to extremes to see that the case of Frank Ricci and the New Haven, Conn., firefighters never got to the Supreme Court. Ricci and co-defendants had been denied promotions they had won in competitive exams solely because they were white and no black firemen had done as well.

The fourth was the Justice Department's dropping of charges against members of the New Black Panther Party, whose intimidation of voters in Philadelphia had been captured on tape.

When a department official resigned in protest and went to the Civil Rights Commission to accuse officials at Justice of ordering staff attorneys not to pursue such cases, that explosive charge, too, was ignored by Justice.

Came then the NAACP smear that the tea party was harboring racists, which Joe Biden explicitly rejected on national television on Sunday, before the Monday firestorm over Sherrod.

Now, whatever one's views on each of these episodes in which race played a role, white Americans are being forced to address them.

[snip]

Where the erosion is taking place is in white America, among working- and middle-class folks who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries but took a chance with Obama in the fall. Now, every time some new incident erupts, these folks are being tarred.

Opposition to affirmative action is racist. Supporting the tea party gives aid and comfort to racists. Opposing health care puts you in league with folks who used racial slurs on Rep. John Lewis. To raise the issue of the New Black Panther Party is to play the race card.

One understand the bitterness of tea party folks who carry signs that read: "What difference does it make what this placard says. You'll call it racist anyway."

Listen, All Ye Peoples...Free Trade Doesn't Actually Exist

First, let's define the term "free trade" in a nutshell for those not familiar with it: it is the policy of maintaining low or non-existent tariffs on imported goods. It is a shibboleth of mammoth proportions among certain segments of the American body politic, including, aggravatingly, a number of libertarians running under the colors of conservatism. Part of the theory involves a hoped-for utopia wherein if we lower our trade barriers, other countries lower theirs, and everybody enjoys the results of goods being produced where and by whom they can be made best and cheapest.

It doesn't work. It has never worked. Other countries always find ways to protect their markets. Pat Buchanan's column today is a short education in that fact.

How has China vaulted to the forefront in manufacturing, trade and technology? Export-driven economic nationalism. Beijing cut the value of its currency in half in 1994, doubling the price of imports, slashing the price of exports and making Chinese labor the best bargain in Asia. Foreign firms were invited to relocate their plants in China and told this was the price of access to the Chinese market. Beijing began looting these firms of technology, as she sent her sons to study in America. Industrial espionage and intellectual property theft became Chinese specialties.

And how has America fared in the new century?

One in every three manufacturing jobs we had in 2000, nearly 6 million, vanished. Some 50,000 U.S. factories shut down. We have run trade deficits totaling $5 trillion since NAFTA passed. The real wages of working Americans have been stagnant for a decade.

While China has resumed her 12 percent growth rate, the United States, with 25 million unemployed or underemployed, appears headed for a double-dip recession.

[snip]

For decades, America’s leaders have followed the Wall Street Journal ideology. We put a mythical world economy before our own economy. We put “global prosperity” before national interest. We forced our workers to compete, in their own country, against the products of foreign laborers earning a tenth of their pay. And we let in tens of millions of semi-skilled and unskilled immigrants, legal and illegal, to take the jobs of our countrymen.

And the Chinese? They put China first, second and third.

And who won the decade? And who is winning the future?

Inside the July 1 Washington Post is a small story about how the World Trade Organization finally ruled that European nations have been unfairly subsidizing Airbus — for 40 years.

While welcome, what good will it do now for scores of thousands of U.S. workers who built commercial jets for Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas, which Airbus took down, or Boeing, which was outsourcing jobs even before Airbus dethroned it as the world’s No. 1 aircraft manufacturer.

Read the whole thing. Really. You need to. I know you don't want to. Economics is booooooring, right?

But knowledge of such things is part of the price you pay to maintain your liberty and prosperity. You've avoided learning about it for decades, and look where the country is now...

Having trouble finding a job? This long-standing policy ought to be aggravating the livin' snot out of you.

"Real wages," by the way, means "adjusted for inflation." You keep hearing that aggravating line about the gap between the rich and the poor increasing? A big part of that has to do with stagnant real wages.

Take the Time to Take a Peek

Well, first take a look at what the ever-estimable Mr. Buchanan has to say. But then spend some time with the incomparable Diana West:

..."there was a part of me that was hoping (the Times Square bomber) was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country," said MSNBC host Contessa Brewer. Of course, she inadvertently revealed there was a part of her that strongly suspected otherwise.

But that tiny voice of reason, Brewer and her peers seem to believe, is from the dark side. Brewer explains: "There are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent" -- jihad! -- "to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way" -- people who believe in jihad! -- "or come from certain countries" -- that is, countries that practice Sharia and promote jihad! -- "or whose skin color is a certain way." This last bit, a non-applicable race card, works like a last-ditch sympathy-trigger. "I mean," she said, "they use it for justification for really outdated bigotry."

Welcome to your world, where self-defense is bigotry, and thus worse than death by fireball, axe or vaporizing over the Atlantic.

This is as ridiculous as it is obscene. There is no "bigotry" in understanding jihad as the engine of Islamic supremacism driven by the imperative to spread Islamic law (Sharia). Our leading lights shrink from this basic truth lest its clean logic wither the fuzzy, cultural-relativism-based universalism that orders our society.

I really hesitate to identify anyone as stupid. I truly believe that there are very few truly stupid people in the world. On the other hand, it never ceases to amaze me how many people have allowed their unexamined ideologies to turn them into people almost impossible to distinguish from the truly stupid.

Pat and Bay Buchanan on Arizona and Illegal Immigration

Pat and Bay, are, I believe, brother and sister. They each had a column the other day on the same subject. Here are some of the choice bits. From Pat:

With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has ordered sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal aliens, half a million of whom now reside there.

Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to enforce America's immigration laws.

[snip]

What is the response of Barack Obama, who took an oath to see to it that federal laws are faithfully executed?

He is siding with the law-breakers. He is pandering to the ethnic lobbies. He is not berating a Mexican regime that aids and abets this invasion of the country of which he is commander in chief. Instead, he attacks the government of Arizona for trying to fill a gaping hole in law enforcement left by his own dereliction of duty.

He has denounced Arizona as "misguided." He has called on the Justice Department to ensure that Arizona's sheriffs and police do not violate anyone's civil rights. But he has said nothing about the rights of the people of Arizona who must deal with the costs of having hundreds of thousands of lawbreakers in their midst.

How's that for Andrew Jackson-style leadership?

Obama has done everything but his duty to enforce the law.

[snip]

The tasks that Arizonans are themselves undertaking are ones that belong by right, the Constitution and federal law to the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Homeland Security.

Arizona has been compelled to assume the feds' role because the feds won't do their job. And for that dereliction of duty the buck stops on the desk of the president of the United States.

[snip]

Last year, while Americans were losing a net of 5 million jobs, the U.S. government -- Bush and Obama both -- issued 1,131,000 green cards to legal immigrants to come and take the jobs that did open up, a flood of immigrants equaled in only four other years in our history.

What are we doing to our own people?

Whose country is this, anyway?

From Bay:

President Obama had the audacity to call Arizona legislators “irresponsible” for passing the law, claiming it will lead to racial profiling. What about the massive invasion along our border that exposes Americans to ever-increasing levels of violence against Americans, including murder and kidnapping? What about their civil rights? Not so much as a footnote for them.

[snip]

A lot of well-meaning Americans who are sympathetic to people who want to come to this country in search for a better life and who follow the rules are tempted to fall for this trap.

What they don’t know, and what open border fanatics try to hide, is that America is letting in more legal immigrants than ever before. Currently one out of every six workers in the country is foreign born.

The Department of Homeland Security recently released its legal immigration figures for Fiscal Year 2009 (October 2008 through September 2009). During this period, over five million people lost their jobs. Amazingly, we increased the number of green cards from 2008 to a staggering level of 1,130,818, over 800,000 of whom can compete against American workers. Outside of the 1986 amnesty, which led to millions of illegal aliens taking green cards, this is the second highest number of green cards we’ve issued since 1914.

Now, I just know there are going to be readers that think I'm raaaaaacist for even bringing this subject up, let alone quoting the Buchanans. Tell you what, before you play that card, consider that my wife is half Mexican, my children (obviously) are a quarter Mexican, that there's Indian blood (Choctaw, to be specific) in my family, that I teach Mexican immigrants, and so forth, and take the time to read my thoughts on racism. Do at least that much, okay?

You Need To Read This

Every word.

Listen to Pat

Again, Pat Buchanan is not right about everything. But if you miss the lesson he's teaching in this column--well, it's an important lesson. C'mon, read the whole thing.

Ethnonationalism, that relentless drive of peoples to secede and dwell apart, to establish their own nation-state, where their faith is predominant, their language spoken, their heroes and history revered, and they rule to the exclusion of all others, is rampant.

[snip]

In speaking of the rising tribalism abroad, Schlesinger added, "The ethnic upsurge in America, far from being unique, partakes of the global fever."

Friends and neighbors, I am the last person to say that ethnic differences cannot be overcome. They can. My own ancestry is largely Irish, but we have Choctaw blood, too. My nephew is part Jewish. My children are part Mexican. Some of the people I like seeing most every week are the Mexican immigrants in the ESL (English as a Second Language) class I teach. The head of the karate system I study, RyuTe, is an Okinawan immigrant. I do believe in the "melting pot" concept.

But (you knew the "but" was coming) for the "melting pot" to work, something has to provide the "heat." There has to be something, some overriding thing in common, that overcomes ethnicity and cultural division. I submit to you that a more-or-less common religious faith--and Christianity was once professed by the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of this country--is the best candidate, followed closely by a burning desire for liberty, liberty having its strongest foundation in the view of man and God to be found in the Scriptures. For many decades, we had a more-or-less homogeneously Christian, government-phobic, liberty-loving population. That is sufficient to make the "melting pot" concept work. But now? Though the majority of Americans profess to be Christian, polling them on the details reveals that most don't quite understand the basics of the Christian faith and fewer and fewer attend church services or show other signs of a living Christian faith. More and more Americans have gradually been lured onto the government teat in one way or another and are loath to give up what they mistakenly perceive as security in exchange for more liberty. We are rapidly losing the very things that made the "melting pot" work, and it seems to me that the day is coming when this nation might very well fragment. It might not be within my lifetime (though it wouldn't shock me if it were), but unless things change soon, I think it is coming.

Short and Sweet on "Free Trade"

Pat Buchanan's column today is on "free trade." Again, if you're not familiar with the subject, don't confuse "free trade" with "free markets." They are not at all the same thing. "Free trade" is the policy of having low or nonexistent tariffs on imported goods. Used to be that the federal government was financed almost entirely by tariffs. Ran surpluses, too. The United States rose to be an economic colossus during this period.

You cut tariffs, you have to raise other taxes, or create new ones. Tariffs are a consumption-type tax. In their absence, you get income taxes--basically, taxes on economic productivity and success. Brilliant.

Now, as I often say for the benefit of those who, when tariffs are brought up, automatically shout "Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression!" A) That's hogwash, we had a decades-long history of high tariffs without having a decades-long history of "great depression," and B) I'm not unaware that tariffs are not perfect. I favor the Fair Tax, which is not perfect either, but seems to me to be a better system that has some of the same salutatory effects as tariffs, that is, it creates a tremendous tax advantage to manufacturing and doing business in the United States. However, if I can't get the Fair Tax, I definitely want more tariffs and less income tax, capisce?

Now, on to the Patmeister's remarks--and I do recommend you go read the whole thing. Emphasis is mine and in bold:

How many know that every modern nation that rose to world power did so by sheltering and nurturing its manufacturing and industrial base -- from Britain under the Acts of Navigation to 1850, to protectionist America from the Civil War to the Roaring Twenties, to Bismarck's Germany before World War I, to Stalin's Russia, to postwar Japan, to China today?

No nation rose to world power on free trade. From Britain after 1860 to America after 1960, free trade has been the policy of powers that put consumption before production and today before tomorrow.

Nations rise on economic nationalism; they descend on free trade.

What is more, other nations practice economic warfare on us already. Somebody always brings up "retaliation." If there is a question of "retaliation," the question is when are we going to retaliate. Other nations protect their markets, either via their own tariffs, or through such mechanisms as rebating their VATs on exports. This global free-trade zone that some utopians envision does not actually exist, never has existed, and never will exist.

As Pat points out, the pitiful part is that our current crop of Republicans simply don't get this. It's pitiful because, if you didn't know, the same period of time that the United States was rising to manufacturing and national preeminence was also a period of time when the United States was under an almost uninterrupted string of Republican presidents, all of whom favored high tariffs. The Republican Party used to be the party of high tariffs; now, they won't touch 'em, despite the lessons of history.

It's a stinkin' pity.