Amerika

We all want a pony. Nobody wants to pay the breeders, the trainers, or the vet. Norah O’Donnell is a journalist who earned her corn. She went there and made one of the cock-roaches skitter. She meant to say $20T to $30T, but what are 3 frikkin’ orders of magnitude amongst socialist NPCs who believe in MMT?

“A chicken in every pot is popular as well. How much would ‘Medicare for all’ cost?” O’Donnell asked. “Norah, a couple things,” Booker said. “Just quickly, just so that people know how much it would cost,” O’Donnell said. “Even the CBO says if you lower Medicare to allow 50-year-olds to get into it, you can not only save the government money, but you can lower premiums for all Americans,” Booker said. “This is the thing. We’re not talking directly to issues that can expand access to care and create affordability, and to say that it can’t be done in Washington—” “I’m just wondering if Democrats are having an honest conversation, while they are promising what sounds good, and it should be a universal right that people have access to health care,” O’Donnell said. “But if it’s $20 billion and $30 billion over 10 years, no one is having that discussion about how that will be paid for.”

Again, this was an excellent issue to toss into the discussion and a very nice start in the long-overdue process of injecting some realism into the whole Advanced Dungeons and Dragons adventure that has been the Medicare-For-All discussion. There are other ways than just cost where magic does not function. Quality of care in not-for-profit medicine has long been an issue. Availability rears its ugly head as well. Affordable heart medicines aren’t effective if they can’t be found when some poor patient’s ticker goes kaflooey.

The professional satisfaction of medical workers comes into this. It’s not like most of us are going to perform any brain surgery out in the garage. Medical care requires unique and specific skill-sets that are challenging to develop. You don’t just take up Cardiology because you are bored and feel like reading a few challenging books about science. Every one of the people in the Newark, NJ Emergency Room at 3:25 AM is dreaming of one day being a world-renowned medical expert in something. As we’ve increased the bureaucracy and decreased the stature and pay-off for medical excellence, doctors and nurses are increasingly saying “The heck with this!” This is why socialist countries struggle to find good, motivated professionals to staff the Hospital Burn Unit of Hell at 3:25 AM in the morning.

I’ve only recently reconciled many of my beliefs to those of Patrick J. Buchanan. But anytime that man speaks, I’d recommend you give him a respectful and thoughtful hearing.

The Democratic Party may believe that by throwing Northam to the wolves it will satisfy these forces. It won’t. We are at the beginning of a Kulturkampf to purge America of all monuments and tributes to the white males who created, built and ruled the country, and once believed that they, their nation, their faith, and their civilization were superior to all others. And, without apology, they so acted in the world. Those two guys drinking beer in blackface and Klan robes and a hood thought they were being funny, but to the unamused members of a radicalized Democratic Party, there is nothing funny about them. And, after Northam, these intolerant people will demand that the Democratic Party nominate a candidate who will echo their convictions about America’s past.

Where Buchanan gets this wrong is only that he fails to extend it as far as it can go without loss of generality. The liberals never had to unleash the wolves on John Derbyshire. Or, quite frequently, on Ronald Reagan. The mob gathers, an excitement builds, a herd mentality descends and the torches are lit as the pitch is boiled. What The Democrats (and society as a whole) are attempting to do with Ralph Northham is as old as Moses and Aaron.

“When Aaron has finished making atonement for the Most Holy Place, the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall bring forward the live goat. He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites — all their sins — and put them on the goat’s head. He shall send the goat away into the wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the task. The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place; and the man shall release it in the wilderness.

The stupid goat can go anywhere he wants. I’m not seeing anyone in contemporary Amerikan Society with the conferred stature of a Moses or an Aaron. Multi-cultural empires rarely have them. This is why Queen Victoria was beloved. She somehow managed to be Queen of Everybody. This is what people who voted against their tribe and interest to elect Barack Obama foolishly hoped would happen. They wanted all the racial and cultural animus wracking Amerika to be put on the shoulders of some stupid goat and sent wandering far beyond the last trailer in the trailer-park.

No soda crackers for you, Babykillers! And forget the lukewarm grape juice as well. No, it wasn’t the Soup Nazi. And no, this isn’t Seinfeld.

This is what happens when clergymen stop reading The Rainbow Bible of What Be Happenin’ Now and actually preach the word in ordinary time. Nobody wants that word because they want more of the failed faith that is of the world; not merely in it. The Bishop has tossed down the gauntlet. These earthly princes of filthy lucre and cupiditous deceit can accept condign rebuke or begin the Neronian Persecution. Game on.

Former Republican Governor of Massachusetts and former Libertarian Vice-Presidential candidate Bill Weld has switched his party affiliation to Republican once again. Insiders say that Governor Gary Johnson’s former running mate is gearing up for a 2020 presidential bid against President Donald Trump. Insiders say Weld is expected to make an announcement in the next couple of weeks. Weld has taken a leave of absence from his law office and changed his party affiliation from Libertarian back to Republican as of January 17th. Weld, who has drawn much criticism from many, doesn’t seem to have much fidelity to any party or political ideology which has been the subject of tension among potential voters.

Governor Weld should start his own party. The Weld Party. It would win 100% of the votes he actually cared about. Once you become solipsistic enough, you are a majority of one. Who cares what Bill Weld pretends to still believe in? Just give him another pony to ride into another dung heap.

Those without vision regrettably don’t perish. They take up more useful people’s oxygen instead. I can’t strenuously disagree with Bill Weld. He never says anything. There is no proposition. People who believe in nothing offer nothing. He could call himself the Libertarian Nihil Party and stand for reimporting The Black Pills from Mexico or Canada.

He sure feels entitles to power and the right to make all the big decisions. Based upon what? Noxious self-love. At least Salvadore Allende believed in something. Weld just seems to believe he’ll have another hit of narcissistic supply off of any political party dumb enough to put with him.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden is the strongest Democratic contender for the Iowa caucuses, according to a poll of likely caucusgoers. A survey from Emerson College showed that Mr. Biden, with 29 percent, had a double-digit lead over Sen. Kamala D. Harris, a California Democrat who launched her campaign just weeks ago.

There is a totally clear lane in this year’s Democratic Primaries. Great White Hope. They are an old school Boston Celtics team in search of a Larry Bird. Buy the argument that the Dems have 2020 all but in the bag, and you could see a coalition of White Leftists getting very, very worried. #BLM, #MeToo and #Resistance are great for counterbalancing The Big Orange Meany, but what do you do when they win? That answer may well be simple. If you’re white, you die.

This dichotomy allows for a White Liberal Populist to volunteer himself/herself as a peace-keeper. This person would enact the policies of Leftism while attempting to forstall any sort of SJW Great Leap Forward. This Mondale niche may well have come of age. !SPARTACUS! and Slore of Babylon could scare lots of White Democrats to the polls. Then it comes down to which of these Great White Hopes can spark the imagination.

Blacks aren’t buying into Kamala Harris. She is considered a put up job.

What is history for? Apparently, history is for grinding the axes of modern resentments…

They argue that Miranda got Hamilton all wrong — the Founding Father wasn’t progressive at all, his actual role as a slave owner has been whitewashed and the pro-immigrant figure onstage hides the fact that he was, in fact, an anti-immigration elitist. “It’s a fictional rewrite of Hamilton. You can’t pick the history facts that you want,” said Nancy Isenberg , a professor of American history at Louisiana State University who has written a biography of Aaron Burr and is the author of “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.”

“It’s a musical about the mythology of the ruling class — that anybody can join it,” said the Rutgers professor, noting that both Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney are fans. “It’s the myth that the ruling class of the United States wants to believe.”

As for whether Hamilton is a musical for the ruling class? What a joke. All musicals are for the upper 10%. Who else comprises the audience? People claim William Shakespeare intentionally slants his history. These guys producing entertainment products are getting paid by somebody. They play to an audience. So that makes people who write musicals far different from unbiased, fair-minded historians. Oh, wait….

When somebody entitles their book White Trash, I respectfully question the fair-mindedness. You can sense the same sort of thing if somebody ever writes a “history” entitled The Knee-Grow Chronicles. The historians aren’t fighting bias. They are fighting to impose their bias. History in Amerikan entertainment and academia has descended to the level of semi-enlightened polemic.

“It felt like somebody was driving railroad stakes through my eyes and out the back of my neck,” Greenwood told the I-Team. “Who gets typhus? It’s a medieval disease that’s caused by trash.”

Medieval diseases caused by trash are what you expect when you import a horde of medieval peasantry to spare yourself a few bucks of hour and win a bunch of elections. Peasants notoriously don’t quite do what their feudal overlords expect. The personal hygiene is usually lacking down in the serf quarters. LA is probably a few hundred feral rats and fleas short of a plague epidemic. The US of A is probably one good plague epidemic away from wanting a more coherent solution to our border problems than Ring-Around The Rosie and a pocket full of posies. Let our horde of illegal immigrants break our health and sanitation systems and perhaps the people damaged by this won’t go to the voting booths and ask our leadership to fix this politely.

Any engineer that tried to design anything wishes they could ignore the entire cost constraint. It’s often what keeps their greedy little hands off the Unobtaniam they need for that perfect Left-Handed Smoke-Shifter. Any social engineer wishes the same thing. They’ve now come up with an economic doctrine that claims to have fulfilled all of their fondest wishes.

MMT’ers believe that government’s red ink is someone else’s black ink. Sure, the government owes dollars, but they have a monopoly of creating those dollars, and not only that, the creation of more and more dollars is essential to the functioning of the economy. Here are the policy implications of accepting MMT:

• governments cannot go bankrupt as long as it doesn’t borrow in another currency
  it can issue more dollars through a simple keystroke in the ledger (much like the Fed did in the Great Financial Crisis)
• it can always make all payments
• the government can always afford to buy anything for sale
• the government can always afford to get people jobs and pay wages
• government only faces two different kinds of limitations; political restraint and full employment (which causes inflation)

And then, with a keystroke, the government owns all the means of production. And we all can have a pony…

If you have an economy with underused capacity, having the government spend on infrastructure or other societal useful endeavors is actually raising the total GDP of the country.

John Maynard Keynes has a famous example of this. Labor Crew One digs a bunch of holes. Labor Crew Two fills them back in. Nothing on the landscape has changed, but the aggregate demand for labor just went higher. More people worked. More people got paid. We’re all better off because some genius thought of the idea of paying people to dig holes and then fill them back in. Repeat as necessary until every one of their kids can afford to attend college.

For now, MMT fanatics still feel constrained by inflation. It’s the one thing stopping our national mint from cranking out the currency equivalent Zimbabwean Dollars. I keep hearing that MMT is coming. We all just have to accept it. Government can afford it, so why shouldn’t government do it? MMT is not itself Socialism any more than a shiny, fast red Camaro is in and of itself a DWI conviction. MMT is the vehicle by which Socialism is enacted without any reference to the problems of cost. This is why cost is only one facet of reality in debates over public policy. If you like your doctor, MMT sez Daddy Gubbermint will totally let you keep him.

Bear in mind that an economic crisis is like any other crisis: an opportunity for politicians to capitalize on people’s fear to pass dangerously ambitious legislation that wouldn’t stand a chance under normal circumstances. Think back to 9/11. People were so panicked and terrified that they didn’t notice or care that the government passed Orwellian legislation like the USA PATRIOT Act. Well, this time around there are already countless socialists clamoring for 70% tax rates, wealth taxes, etc.

They reach for the lever that will destroy them all. Slam down hard socialism in the US, and learn how morally and intellectually flawed MMT truly is. There is no Get-Out-Of-Stupid Free Card in life. Disincentivizing anyone with an IQ greater than room temperature will deprive us completely of their drive, their input and their ideas. Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Cuba can always print more money and their governments never go bankrupt as long as they borrow in their own currency. All they have to do is believe that they are all billionaires. See how easy economics really is?

How valuable is any government’s currency once people exchange nothing other than hostile gunfire? When nobody profits from producing anything, how much can that currency actually remain worth? It’s amazing that economic materialists have this naïve misconception that their economic theories require no actual materials.

Not giving rich New Yorkers a Federal tax break on taxes their own state legislature imposed is an economic civil war. You see, these people are either leaving or not earning income. Gov Cuomo has less of other people’s money to spend. And at the end of the day, that seems to be about all that confers any legitimacy to an elected official in our Modern Amerikan Empire. He needs to just declare New York State an MMT Reality-Free Zone. Then government is Santa Claus and Santa Claus really exists.

I can’t understand why he doesn’t just pass the Liz Warren property confiscation tax on them. Paul Krugman swears up and down that raising tax rates doesn’t radically change people’s behavior. I don’t see why Donald Trump making New York’s rich pay their fair share should bother those truly committed to social justice and change.