It Can't Happen Here

Mr. America, walk on by your schools that do not teach Mr. America, walk on by the minds that won't be reached Mr. America try to hide the emptiness that's you inside But once you find that the way you lied And all the corny tricks you tried Will not forestall the rising tide of hungry freaks daddy!

Having been a pubescent Frank Zappa devotee in 1966 when these lyrics from Hungry Freaks Daddy resonated through the fertile psyche of the nascent underground counter-culture movement, I'd like to think Frank, had he lived, today would have been aghast to see that the movement which he served to spearhead has done more to undermine individualism and critical social thinking than anything. The tie-dyed kids who danced lyrically and spasmodically to his music have now infested professionally the corridors of our schools and government and spare no effort in protecting their sinecures and all pervasive, unchallengable, enviromental, politically correct, faux-compassionate, big-government mass-conformist worldview. (Step out of line and they'll take you away. It's time to stop, hey what's that sound ...) Veritable Hawthornian ostracism for those amongst you who dare to don the socially ignominious status of being ....a denier! Be forewarned. You're never going to get to 1000 Facebook friends if you persist with those viscerally dis-settling notions about the behavioral and artistic levelling effects of the Nanny State. Why, just look at all those little Rembrandts and Shakespeares our public school system and politically correct culture gestates on a regular basis. It's OK to stand out, but not too much..... Not so much it might make someone else feel inferior. Venerating individual achievement has frequently become perceived as a form of bullying.

Frank was the consumate individualist. Mocking and satirizing what he saw as the Stepford Wife, nine-to-five, American middle-class culture of the 1950's. I think he would have been equally critical of today's tattoo ridden, neo-grunge, quasi-illiterate, texting addicted, hip-hopping monolithic teen culture that dominates today's contemporary scene. I suspect too that he might have been highly critical of the nuevo-baby-boomer, share-the-wealth, don't keep score communalism that ameliorates the veneration and compensation justly due Mr. America's most individualistic wealth and artistic creators. And surely someone as perspicacious as Frank would have discerned the inherent destructive consequences to economic growth of the greenest generation's acquiescence to big-government's insinuation into almost every aspect of our lives. For after all, isn't every rule at some level a limitation of individual freedom? And isn't individual freedom of thought and expression the wellspring of all creativity both economic and artistic? Can there be true artistic freedom separate and distinct from economic freedom? Ever hear of Solzhenitsyn?

But probably most of all Frank would have been horrified that his children of the Mothers of Invention have created an American culture where nothing could shock anyone, no matter how disgusting, violent or perverted; where the guiding tenet of civility had become non-judgment; the blind acceptance of any viewpoint as legitimate; where civilization itself would potentially risk annihilation rather than risk offending someone.

Sorry Frank. Wish you were to here to see that despite your radically individualistic, creative admonishments on your tour de force debut album Freakout, it can happen here*... and we are Freaking Out, new sustainable, come together, non-offensive establishment style, somewhere in Kansas...and Minnesota... and Rome... and...


* 'It can't happen here' was another lyric from this influential album


M.D.T.

Pelosian

I've surely plenty of company with those whom when the year 1984 passed by quietly without major event, we somehow felt a small pang of disappointment. Well, better late than never! Endless similes have been made to Orwell's fabled, literary, distopian slogan, "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength", but probably none more viscerally quizzical and unsettling, til now, than Nancy Pelosi's equating the Tea Party's staunch opposition to increasing the country's debt limit as 'acting like terrorists'; essentially denoting that Fiscal Prudence is Terrorism. Or to express it more Pelosian... Government borrowing good, balanced budgets un-american. The pigs have moved into the farmhouse, are sleeping in the human's beds and we're all supposed to work harder and pay more taxes to make them comfortable and keep our mouth's shut. There are now two sets of rules; one for our leaders and another for us.

Not beyond a stretch of the imagination that we might soon see, in our neo-orwellian America, a new bumper sticker on leftist's cars, Expand Guantanamo ..... to make room for the Tea Party, the new terrorists.  After all, hasn't our would be patriotic American left already labeled Christians the American Taliban?

Unfiddlable

We’re against higher taxes not because you shouldn’t raise them in a recession but because you shouldn’t raise them EVER. This endless fiddling with the tax code is one of the major sources of economic uncertainty in the country and just leads to one party fiddling with the code to benefit their friends and preferred interests while they’re in power and vice versa. What’s worse is that allowing the government to perennially mess with it, in effect, necessitates, for appearances sake, a higher tax rate than would otherwise be required. A fairer, flatter, lower and consistent tax rate creates more revenue for individuals and the government via increased economic activity. We (the few, the proud, the rational) are against the Obama tax hikes because they will slow the economy and the net negative effect of a slower economy on government revenues is greater than the amount of extra money that might be garnered from higher rates.* Tax revenue soars when the economy is good. Lower, flatter, fairer, unfiddlable rates are good for the economy, whether we’re in recession or not.

So why if lower tax rates increases government revenue does the left stake they're credibility on this issue above all others? Their consuming obsession with fairness. They'd rather have their constituency make do with less than have a small minority do appreciably better. In numerical terms, if there were 10 people in the world they'd rather 9 have $1 and one have $2 than 9 have $2 and one have $100.

*And that my friends, summarized in a single concise statement, is what has been universally disparaged as voodoo economics in distinct contrast to the stonehenge economics practitioned by the Democrats which can be neatly summarized in their nothing short of pathological fallacy, more taxes equals more money.





M.D.T.

How to Stop Worrying and Love the Rich

It would seem to be a no-brainer that if the left believes that the rich should pay the lion’s share of taxes, as in fact they do, then they would similary agree that policy should support creating the greatest number of rich possible; that it would actually be a good thing if economic inequality were increasing? Wouldn’t it be better, hypothetically, if 10% of the people made over $1,000,000 a year and paid 60% of the total tax burden rather than having, say, 20% paying 50%? Clearly that would provide beau coup billions more revenue to the treasury.

When the country was founded, extremely minimal taxes never provided for taking care of individuals that slipped through the Republic's cracks. It took 150 years for our country to buy into the idea that it was government's job to take care of people. Taxes started going up dramatically as the burden of caring for the destitute and the aged poor became a shared value. Clearly in America we'll never allow these aforementioned groups to suffer so the problem should simply become - what’s the best way to practically fund their requisite additional assistance? More rich people paying more taxes creates more revenue to help the needy. Simple right?

The vast majority methinks would agree with this syllogism but for a pervasive mass perpetrated popular delusion; that if the rich have more then the rest of us as a result must have less. This is a truly one of the most dangerous economic myths and contributes mightily to decreased productivity, social unrest, resentment and class warfare. Now I'm only going to say this once so please pay attention. Just because Bill Gates has billions it doesn’t necessarily follow that any of us have one dime less. His billions didn’t come out of everyone else’s pockets. His wealth was created, not moved. It’s not a zero sum game. The pie got bigger. Capitalism is a wealth creating system. What? Your social studies teacher never told you that?

The truth is that the wealthy in the USA are paying the biggest share of total taxes in our history even at the Bush tax levels and it's entirely possible that if their rates were lowered that their share might actually increase. It's unarguable that since the early 80's when tax levels were reduced on high earners their share has increased. So if it costs us, the less than rich, nothing to have more millionaires, ( kindly review the previous paragraph ) it would incontrovertibly behoove us as a society to adopt policy that creates as many rich people as possible so they can pay an even greater share! Now is there a clinically sane person in the country that would make the argument that higher taxes on the rich will create more millionaires? You'd have to be an intellectual to believe such a thing...

But why stop with having them pay only for 40% of the tax burden*? If we have enough of them they can pay for everything! Imagine.. no taxes unless you make over 100K... or 200K! We should be teaching Napoleon Hill in the 3rd grade. Does Trump get invited to talk to grade schoolers and high school graduates? Imagine all the people... living off the rich. But as for me fellow Americans, I don’t care how many billionaires there are in this world as long as they’re paying for my health care and social security... and why not green's fees. Love them rich folks! Maybe we should stop denigrating them and start thanking them? They might work even harder.....

*The last government reported share of taxes paid by the top 5% of wage earners.

M.D.T

It Wasn't My Idea

It’s official. We’ve opened a new front in the War on Crazy Arabs in Libya to ‘protect civilians’ and ... ‘we’re not leading this’ according to S.O.S. Clinton. How ingenuous. At least have the guts to state clearly the reasons for getting involved. 'Protecting civilians'? Securing and stabilizing the oil markets and preventing a mass exodus of Islamic refugees to Europe rings truer for me somehow. How about you? If saving civilians were justifiable cause, we'd be fighting in a 100 countries. This deliberate obfuscation and disavowal of some credible and meaningful rational is insulting, demeaning and distasteful if not outright dangerous and unlawful. We appear, at this time, to be fighting in multiple theatres with no clear, guiding higher national purpose. At least Bush had the dignity and respect for our national heritage to frame our heroic adventures and misadventures alike under the idealistic maxim 'universal freedom and democracy for all'.

So if the Saudi princes were to violently suppress a democratic revolution would we attack them with cruise missiles and drones to save civilian lives? Apparently only if we don’t have to lead, there's no guiding higher ideological purpose and the U.N. says 'let's roll'. Ostensibly our latest, successive Democratic president's rationalizations have devolved from the encapsulating, edifying and inspiring maxim of “ I didn’t inhale” to “It wasn’t my idea”. Or does that depend on what your definition of my is? Just who's leading this whatever-you-want-to-call-it again?

Who hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword? What truth is marching on?

It's frightening and confusing to watch an administration with no moral tether to either America's bedrock founding principles nor to any discernable traditional religious value system wage noncommittal war under the banner of relativistic secular humanism. Even an infidel, methinks, would rather be led into battle by someone who believes in something strongly enough to die for it...

4/11/11 M.D.T.

Locophelia

Please. Someone tell me. Am I losing my mind, or did our President just propose a 53 billion dollar federal downpayment on new bullet trains to financial oblivion? Clearly Obama and his ilk must honestly believe that we're all playing some kind of game with play money. Trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see and we're going to build the new George Jetson Orient Express? How could this lefty locomotive leviathan end up being anything else but Amtrak on steroids? Subsidies and yet more subsidies. You don't have to be Edgar Cayce to forsee the thousands of environmental lawsuits, a whole new federal department of Choochanomics, cataclysmic cost over-runs, and endless delays. Maybe we should commission a dozen or so feasability studies to research if government is even capable of building anything of this magnitude? Could they even get through their own labyrinth of city, state, county and federal permits, environmental impact studies, union strikes and death and injury lawsuits ? Hell, we can't even rebuild Ground Zero in a decade. Bullet trains could take 100 years! But then again, maybe that's the whole idea. Bullet trains are just like government; they'll devour money at even greater speeds than ever before, create prevailing wage, politically correct jobs for new age John Henry's for untold decades, and never have to justify their existence on any pragmatic, fiduciary level, and of course provide unparalleled myriads of photo-ops for politicians nationwide. Government's become nothing more than a jobs program floating upon an influential minority's collective, delusionary, futuristic vision. At least Disneyland was built with private capital. If we can't cope with any of our real day to day problems, at least we can dream! Fiscal conservatives just aren't 'young at heart'.

I think the left's romantic obsession with trains mirrors their subsurface yearnings for a totally planned economy, a compulsory society where the 'trains run on time'. (Could Denzel Washington's new runaway train movie, Unstoppable, be a serendipitous, national subliminal metaphor for the runaway train as the American experiment gone out of control?) But it will take more than 30 years of Denzel's cinematic rail-yards practical experience, ingenuity and individual heroism to stop this latest 21st century socio-politico-enviromento-cultural bullet train to oblivion. It will require the leadership of a superhero of mythical proportions. Who was it again that was 'more powerful than a locomotive?'*

*Even if we find our Superman or Superwoman wasn't it green kryptonite that could kill them? Hope theyve saved some of Reagan and Thatcher's DNA for the first successful human clone. That's what I'd call a bonofide Sputnik moment.


George Will writing in Newsweek, Feb. 27:
Generations hence, when the river of time has worn this presidency's importance to a small, smooth pebble in the stream of history, people will still marvel that its defining trait was a mania for high-speed rail projects. This disorder illuminates the progressive mind. . . .
Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.
To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.
Time was, the progressive cry was "Workers of the world unite!" or "Power to the people!" Now it is less resonant: "All aboard!"

M.D.T.