I am ecstatic because after months of media and establishment conditioning of the base, and the hasty calls for allowing Romney to wrap it up quickly, I was very concerned we’d end up with the grandfather of ObamaCare and a believer in Keynesian style command and control economic planning as our nominee.

Gingrich wasn’t my first choice. My first choice didn’t even run. He wasn’t my second choice either, Perry was. Though, to me, it seemed like his heart wasn’t in it. I don’t think he is stupid or even inarticulate. A three-term governor of Texas could never be those things; Texans are too proud and intelligent to keep sending back a guy like that to run their State. He just wasn’t focused, and I was concerned about that because priority number one after being nominated is to beat Obama, going up against a billion dollars worth of everything Obama has to shovel out. Whoever our nominee will be has to focus on that like a laser beam, and fight that battle like the future of our country depends on it because it does, and I kept getting the vibes from Perry that he really doesn’t want to be President. I could be wrong, but that is the impression I got.

And so I went to Gingrich for lack of anyone better who has the ‘fire in the belly’ that it will take to do the very first job after being nominated. He does have baggage, and it isn’t that I don’t care about that stuff. I do. But comparing Gingrich’s baggage and accomplishments to Obama’s baggage and lack of accomplishment, Gingrich still comes out miles ahead. Some bring up the Fannie/Freddie consulting gig and say Gingrich is sunk in the general election because of that, but they forget that Obama took more money from F&F while in office, surpassing the amount given to politicians who had been in Congress for decades with only a partial term in the Senate under his belt – even more than Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. He’s also been shoveling hundreds of billions in tax dollars into F&F ever since he took office, and hasn’t gotten around to reforming them, which seems strange since they were at the epicenter of the housing crisis. Obama has 10x more skeletons in his closet, built up over a very brief political career in which he has accomplished nothing but mounting disaster; he makes anything that might stick to Newt look like a minor infraction, in a political sense of course.

Newt is not perfect, it’s true. He wasn’t my first choice, or even my second. But I am not concerned about nominating him.

With the debate raging over the who is the ‘true conservative’ in the presidential race, it seems like we may be missing the point that some bit of importance in solving the pressing issues of the day is a matter of political approach that could have a subsequent impact upon the implementation of conservative ideas in the realm of government and politics. The atmosphere surrounding this primary season is lacking almost entirely an explanation of how do we do it and survive politically to keep doing it if we win.

We all have our ideal view of what the world should look like, but we need to be able to effect change on the real world as it is in a way that does not bring about a premature end to our ability to do that and we end up losing far more than we gain. Currently we are suffering from an episode of far left radicals shoving their utopian view on the country with attitude of, “If it doesn’t fit, shove it, at least we get what we want and everyone will have to learn to live with it.” They forget completely that life in a (mostly) free society really isn’t so simple and have politically damaged the institutions of their party in immeasurable ways. It is likely the source of major political dysfunction, as they continue to refuse any compromise  or even soften their approach and I think there is a valuable lesson from this that we can learn as conservatives. Their problem is not just that their ideology is bankrupt, they cannot close the sale and do not care.

Reagan showed us that we can compromise with Democrats without compromising principle. He was not able to complete all the reforms he wanted because he was working with a Democrat congress (which by itself says something about how far he got) and his main strength in achievement was that he brought the American people with him into battle. He recognized that the limiting effect on what is possible is not just Democrats in congress, but more importantly, the interests of where the real political power in the country lies, with the people. We need not and should not compromise the farm. But if we fail to recognize when we do not have the support of the mass majority of the people behind our individual objectives, we will be met with resistance and have very little likelihood of enduring success.

From my own perspective, I would prefer a classical liberal approach to public policy, but I would be completely deluding myself if I thought that one election would be enough to get as close to unbridled and completely free markets for nearly everything as I believe would be optimal. Reality dictates that it simply cannot be done over night without causing more chaos than we currently have. It is something we must evolve toward because the how to do it is just as important as the what to get anywhere at all with lasting effect.

This is just something I’m throwing out here. It’s an interview by Jim Puplava with former commodities broker Ann Barnhardt who closed up shop after the MF Global collapse. She explains why she closed down, not because of financial difficulties as a result of MF Global, but severe dysfunction of the market that emanates from the regulatory bodies. Her account will likely raise the hair on the back of your neck about what kind of calamity we might be confronting, it did for me.

If there is anyone here who knows something about the commodities futures market, I’d really appreciate a comment.

This is a downloadable MP3. I haven’t found a website link yet; I am still looking. It’s about 20 minutes long, but you don’t have to listen that far to get the meat of what she says.

Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute asked this question yesterday in regard to the push back he receives when he attempts to correct the historical record of widespread inconsistencies. The short answer is that people are skeptical of accounts that contradict a prevailing view, even if true. Of course I can’t really say why, when confronted with what certainly could be the truth, some people attack the messenger rather than engage in internal reasoning and studying of the facts.

From a personal perspective, I was once as much in the dark about our history as every other person whose education is the product of the public school system where each pupil receives only a smattering of American history, enough to have a rough idea of where we came from, but leaves complete gray areas about why or how, or the purpose. The moments at which we realize the rather thick haze surrounding what we think to be true come at different points for each person, if they ever notice it.

I realized the thick haze surrounding what I thought to be true shortly after 9/11. Being confronted with the extreme incompetence and ineffectiveness of the many (perhaps too many) agencies within our Federal government that were established in the name of safety and security, I acquired an insatiable curiosity about how government can be so expensive and fail so miserably at its most basic of duties. It was the day I lost a rather innocent and naïve trust in government to do the right things for the right reasons, and embarked on a years-long course of study, although rather meandering at first, to find those answers.

Finding the truth about what our government is when one is well into adulthood isn’t such an easy task, and for me it was especially so when pop culture throughout my lifetime supported and reinforced the innocent trust in government. No one, at least as far as I could tell, was questioning the very basic foundation of government, calling out the incompetence and failure as a symptom of that it was – lack of focus.

I started out studying modern history looking for something, anything that could be a clue to what was wrong. Surely, whatever it was to have gone wrong happened within the last few decades, I thought.  I found myself enclosed in a pile of books from covering topics from J. Edgar Hoover, to Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and onward. I spent days and weeks sifting through them trying to find some logical golden thread that would lead me straight to the problem. I found nothing. Frustrated to the point of nearly giving up, I thought of something that never occurred to me before.  Perhaps it would be easier to find out what our government was intended to be and then work my way from there. I cracked open a copy of “The Federalist” someone had given me as a gift several years prior, that I had never read.  I was shocked and amazed at the differences between what Hamilton, Jay, and Madison had told the founding generation the Federal Government would be versus what it is today.

Since I had to squeeze my studies into free time, I had been reading during breaks at work. One of my colleagues inquired about the book I was reading, and I remember remaking to him that “The government is doing an awful lot of things it was never intended to do.” The next day, he had a copy of “The Federalist” and was reading during break too!

I have to admit, though, my response to Mr. Higgs was rather pointed and emotional, and he did not deserve it.  It was that way because my self-directed journey has been very long and arduous, and is far from complete. It has taken me from the Revolutionary era, through the 19^th century and into the 20^th where I have decided to take a breather. I have a difficult time studying the last 2/3rds of the 20^th century; picking up and forcing myself to read the works of Woodrow Wilson and others from the same line of reasoning disturbs me. Even though I am reluctant, I can say without a doubt, that is where we went wrong. It has everything to do with the dangers and battles we face in the present. In addition to that, Mr. Higgs’ complaint only highlights the immense amount of work we have in front of us in order to take that knowledge of the truth about history and transform it from being just documents and books sitting on a shelf collecting dust into the salvation of great nation.

Thomas Jefferson noted in a letter to James Madison on 18 October 1785 the condition of the poor in France. He had remarked about the king’s autumn retreat for hunting which was attended by foreign diplomats in order to possibly curry favor, but he did not have the personal means to attend and was therefore required to stay in Paris, some 40 miles away. During his stay in Paris while the king was at his retreat, he had occasion to walk with a member of the working poor in France and inquired about her condition. She told him how much it costs to live and how much she makes, and he noted the disparity between her income and cost of living (by today’s standards would be in the area of $700-$1000 per month), adding that she had no money to buy bread.

Mr. Jefferson noted that the majority of land suitable for food production in the area surrounding Paris had been reserved for the upper class for various uses, particularly leisure, and observed what he called inequality in the distribution of land had the effect of rendering large portions of the population unable to achieve basic subsistence.  He ventured that a remedy for such inequality could be a tax on property on a sliding scale depending on the quantity of land held to provide a disincentive for hording and an incentive to allow cultivation of the land by lower classes that would then have a better opportunity at self-subsistence.

While ideas of wealth redistribution have some root in this Jeffersonian line of thought, and there has been considerable changes that have occurred in society since his observations in Paris in 1785, he offered practical solutions to social issues of the day based on observations of finite resource utilization. In addition, he did not advocate direct confiscation and distribution of resources by government, only incentives to produce the desired effect of enabling each human being the ability to provide for one’s family when conditions demand it.

It is one matter to provide disincentive for hording of land in a country where starvation is rampant and an entirely different one concerning attempts at equal distribution of infinite resources such as income, which is the very essence of prosperity. Suppose that GDP is the consequence of incentive to produce, to improve one’s lot in life, and is a measurement of production of national prosperity as a result of that incentive.  This measure can either expand or contract depending upon the success of the national production of wealth in any given year; and creation of wealth out of raw materials is limited only by dynamic elements such as the availability of resources, desire to succeed, market conditions, and productivity technology.

As in Jefferson’s recommendation to incentivize more practical use of land and discourage wanton accumulation of it, government views the distribution of income nearly as much a problem and levies a tax on income or production, not wealth, in a attempt to discourage hording despite the obvious fallacy of hording money in the pursuit of one’s self-interest. As a consequence, it discourages production of prosperity beyond which is necessary for subsistence by those who have the desire to produce, and negatively impacts all possible production of national income, measured in GDP. We tax incentive to produce not some finite tangible object. The more products of production the government gobbles up, the smaller the pie becomes by dampening the incentive to produce.

This is an oversimplification of the effects of government attempts at more equal distribution of national income, as the application of well meaning policy to effect this end has been perverted in all manners of ways so that the intended end is no longer visible with immeasurable impact on potential national income due to depressed incentive to produce.  The reality of the application of these schemes has been the accumulation or expected accumulation of confiscated income in the coffers of government to dispose of as it pleases on any object of political necessity or largess. In addition, government, recognizing the fallacy of income redistribution, has provided backdoor provisions in the tax code that allow for the blunting of the effect of confiscation if the producer engages in activities government determines beneficial to society, any other elements of daily life government wishes to influence, or in the case of malfeasance (which appears to be rampant), to pass out favors to connected individuals by customizing tax incentives. This is the very purpose of high marginal income tax rates for individuals and corporations with deductions piled on, to provide government with the power to control the behavior of society by controlling the fate of national income.

Recently, President Obama has given talks and speeches about the disparity of income distribution as if there were some things, such as increased taxation, that can be done about it. Given the statistics regarding the distribution of tax burden, the top 10% pay 70% of all taxes collected, it would seem reasonable that if there were some magical formula government could employ for closing any perceived gap (another fallacy that will require another diary to explain), it certainly should have been on the way to being well compensated by now. Yet with every new generation of politicians, like Obama, over spans of decades, the complaint persists because not only is it impossible to redistribute infinite resources that arise from basic human desire for success without dragging down the prosperity of the entire nation, government fails to employ the proceeds it collects to appropriately meet that end. It is all smoke and mirrors. If government were a private charity with its efficiency rate of ~30% in social programs, it would have been dragged through the court of public opinion, tarred and feathered, flogged, with severe market discipline employed to clean up the problem. Yet many sit in awe as the president spews his demagogy based on fallacy, failing to be held accountable for the sorry condition of affairs; and they accept the same excuses that the current level of confiscation is simply not enough.

The City of Rochester, NY, has been corrupt ever since I moved to the area in 1994 (which is one of the reasons I do not live in the city proper). If there were ever a contest for the cronyism pin-up of the year, Rochester would surely be a contender. I have been monitoring the live stream from Occupy Rochester, and it seems most of their complaints have to do with local issues.  I agree with many of these in a general sense; about selling public land for $2 to be developed and dumping  millions in public funds into associated projects that always end up going bad. The city has been great at selling these projects to the public as a way to boost economic activity over the years, and Rochester sorely needs it, but failed project after failed project that leaves the taxpayers on the hook with nothing to show for it, and no one ending up in jail, gets real old after awhile.

They also discussed Rochester Gas and Electric (RG&E), which is the largest local energy provider. The gentleman conducting the stream explained to the folks sitting around him that the expensive and plain vanilla services provided by RG&E are because they operate on a solely profit motive, and something needs to be done to put the “public” back into public utilities. At this point I had to keep reminding myself that I was there to kibitz, not to try to pick a fight because I recall that one of the first things to be heavily regulated during first part of the progressive movement back in the early part of the 20^th century, after railroads, was utilities. The high prices and low level of services has very little to do with the profit motive and everything to do with lack of competition. A company such as this one would not be able to survive in an open market with the business model it has and would have been out of business long ago if not for the monopoly fostered by government.

I cannot logically connect the dots between putting the “public” back in public utilities and solving the problems created by regulated utilities monopolies under vague assumptions of “Climate Change” and environmentalism.  The problems go much deeper than that, though. If having a monopoly created by state regulation isn’t bad enough, we have the problem of regulatory overlap where each monopoly has multiple masters, state and Federal, making it extremely difficult to identify where inefficiencies are being created and little hope of holding anyone accountable for out of control utility rates.

Camping out in a park in the city isn’t going to have much mileage in coming up with an equitable solution to any of the mess government has created. It would be nice if we could take more of the “public” out of public utilities, put the competition and power of the consumer back into capitalism that regulatory regimes remove so “We the People” can correct these issues ourselves and bring some discipline to these markets that have been distorted by government.

About the cleanup of Occupy Oakland, they admitted that it had gotten out of control and the speaker voiced agreement with the need for the authorities to step in and clean it up. He then started talking about some of the things that happened at the Occupy Rochester camp at the beginning of the protest. According to him, there were some thugs who mixed in with the protest and there was at least one stabbing. He didn’t go into details about the stabbing. He moved on to talk about the agreement they made with the Mayor of Rochester so they could stay in the park after the outbreak of violence.

I have not made a visit to the park to see what is actually going on there (and I don’t want to, either). The details of the agreement are that they cannot have alcohol, generators, or heaters in tents, build fires, cannot bring in portable toilets, or impede anyone else from using the park, and they have to keep the area clean.  Minors participating in the protest must have written parental consent and the juvenile curfew still applies.  It is dated 11/11/11 and so only time will tell if it is an effective way to keep the protest under control.

According to a US Chamber of Commerce press release, up to 20,000 jobs would be created immediately if the XL pipeline project were approved, with hundreds of thousands more jobs to be generated by this project in the near future.

“In spite of extensive and positive studies from the State Department, this is clearly a political decision and everyone knows it. Unfortunately, it will immediately cost more than 20,000 Americans an opportunity to get a job working on the pipeline and hundreds of thousands more jobs in the future.”

Although the Chamber believes this choice regarding the pipeline is politically motivated, and there is a superficial plausibility, after some deeper thought put toward the larger picture regarding administration actions concerning the condition of the economy, it appears to be a bit more than just politics.

 In this diary, I linked to a memo released by the White House that clears away regulatory hurdles in order to fast track infrastructure projects that are outlined in the President’s plan for “job creation,” citing the need to boost the “competitive edge” in our economy.  I pointed out the apparent lack of comprehension of where the “shovel-ready jobs” really are, and questioned who would be around to compete economically if our most dire needs are not met in short order. I received some flack about deregulation of the private sector in the comments section for that diary, but there is a huge difference between pragmatic regulation and strangling the golden goose with a rabid regulatory agenda while providing mere superficial explanations for these actions. For a nation that is desperate for a functional employment market, one would think that it would not matter so much who creates the jobs, every job and every opportunity for productivity counts for something toward having a “chicken in every pot.” In other words, when our house is burning down, we don’t stop the firemen from doing their job out of fear the fire hose will cause flood damage.

It is true that this particular instance, the Keystone XL pipeline, has to do with expanding distribution capabilities of raw materials for fossil fuels, and political reasons could very well be behind the delaying tactics. But if we consider the definition of a socialist economy, the direct allocation of economic inputs to satisfy economic demands (non-market allocation), and piece this together with the broader economic based behavior of this administration since the inauguration that even pragmatists brand as counterproductive, an ideological motivation for a general blockade of the private sector seems to explain our predicament, and the administration’s obsession with spending, directly and indirectly, much more clearly.  Even more than just a pipeline, or production of energy, it goes well beyond the financial sector where we have had the most recent bout of disorder. Instead of trying to just fix what was broken, there was truly no lie in the desire for a “fundamental transformation of America.”

If we take Greece as an example of a socialist economy, and look at the advice given to help solve its current financial crisis from nations that have their own socialist models:

1.  Privatize, privatize, privatize.

2.  Deregulate market access.

3.  Make it much easier for firms to hire and fire workers.

4.  Raise the retirement age to 67.

5.  Shrink its government, which is already smaller than the French government as a share of GDP.

It seems that even socialists can be pragmatic – too much strangling of the golden goose produces rotten eggs. Perhaps this is the perfect illustration that maybe our President as taken his ideology at least a few steps too far into the realm of unicorns.

In doing some research about what the Occupy movement is all about, I’ve watched many a youtube video, monitored the #OWS twitter feeds, read related blogs and have seen the arguments going on in the comments sections regarding the appropriateness of the movement and what it’s really about. What jumps out at me is a tendency for its defenders to say, when faced with overwhelming evidence that regardless of how it started, it has been co-opted by rent seekers, that those are just some fringe idiots or isolated incidents, and don’t represent the movement’s general character and aversion to cronyism, but no real issue with capitalism itself.

Now we are seeing rioting, vandalism, striking and disruption of commerce (a terrible thing to happen to innocent people who are trying to work to feed their families) while carrying large banners reading “Death to Capitalism” in unmistakable bold red lettering. Despite all this mounting evidence to the contrary of the movement being 1) peaceful and 2) for capitalism, but against cronyism, we are told we are the ones with the real problem for painting the movement with a large brush labeled “socialist revolutionaries.”

It seems like the OWS defenders now have a bit of a credibility problem. For many of us there is a sense of honor and personal responsibility involved in our associations that we do not take lightly. It’s an implied personal responsibility for the goings on of organizations and movements that one empowers even if simply by presence. What we hear when the defenders come out to fight off the onslaught of bad press is really just a tacit acquiescence to such happenings in the fervent disavowals of what is taking place, stopping short of disavowing the movement itself. What it really comes down to is one cannot hitch their wagon to a collectivist movement and escape responsibility for what comes out of it. Saying “It’s not me,” or “I don’t believe that,” is not an effective argument against the facts of what this movement has become. If that isn’t them, and they don’t agree with violence, destruction of property, and denial of income to innocent working people, or with the sentiments of an overwhelming number of the participants who want to nix capitalism and take what is not theirs, then why are they still there when the reality of the movement is simply indefensible?

I was sympathetic toward the movement in the beginning because I understand where most of the people who were there were coming from. I have the same kinds of problems from this economic disaster as everyone else. But there is no way I could voice any kind of support for it now that it has moved way beyond the pale of appropriateness into lawlessness, violence and leftist anarchy. The facts about what is taking place remain indefensible, and if its defenders do not wish to be a part of something that looks to be turning quite ugly, or be implicated in socialist revolution, they should get out now and find some other way to deal with the sorry state of affairs of our once great nation that doesn’t hurt anyone.

If there is one thing to ‘get’ from study of the founding generation it is that unity was the most important goal of politics and much was sacrificed to achieve that goal. Maintenance of unity is the very reason our most cherished document, the United States Constitution, was born and it is announced as such in the very first sentence: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

In 2008, when the Democrats assumed the presidency in addition to the majority in congress that they already held, even though their party is the oldest in the country, dating back to the days of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, not only had they forgotten what the constitution says about the role of government in society, they also neglected its entire purpose – Unity – and the kinds of compromises necessary in order to maintain it. It is one thing to be bold and out on the edge, but there is never a time when it is appropriate or desirable, when entrusted with leadership and governance, to go so far out on the edge that it alienates a large portion of We the People and sacrifices the elements of unity our forbearers fought, bled and died to maintain.

When those of us who felt alienated made our feelings known in mass, we were mocked and ridiculed. We were labeled with all matters of slurs and insults, and though peaceful we were blamed for random acts of violence, all for speaking truth to power and refusing to follow them down a path to destruction like mindless lemmings. We were the first to see the coming train wreck of big government and mercantilism, and cared enough about the heart and soul of this country to become involved, using ballots instead of bullets.

Now, we are seeing a second wave of “disaffected” individuals involved in protests against the mercantilism of crony capitalism. These are the people who didn’t believe us when we told them how dangerous and devastating big government really is to our economy and our society, and likely still do not understand the true cause of their discontent. Some have wrapped the discontent in the package of what they believe, fostered by what rhetoric they have heard. Some even believe that higher taxes on others will benefit them in some way; but of course we know that serves only to make the problem worse, government bigger, and even less responsive to the General Welfare of the nation.

I am disappointed in the response of our leaders and our movement to theirs even though we are upset about many of the same things; we are ALL Americans and ALL going through hard times with a government that has a mind of its own. We are upset about the crony capitalism that caused this economic crisis in the first place that still remains unaddressed. We are upset about the Federal Reserve as an enabler, along with the role of the FDIC and the GSEs in the housing and financial crises.  We are upset that people are still out of work, that the employment market is dysfunctional, and more and more people are being reduced from sold middle class to living in boxes by the day. The most important thing we have in common, however, is the felling that government, as large as it is, is completely deaf. Yet our leaders mock these mostly young people instead of looking at the fact that many of them are affected by the same real problems we are and they likely do not really know how to solve them.  We need to show them and help them – not mock them.

We should be finding places where we agree, like those listed above, and really start working on solving them in a way that does not require drastic compromises in principle on our part. We can start working on the financial regulatory structure in a very public way, holding House hearings, etc… We can at least make those people feel like someone is listening to them, even though we do not all agree on everything. We can and should do everything we can to foster unity, and I fear greatly for the future of this great nation if we turn away.

I made a diary entry a few days ago regarding my thoughts on the TRAIN Act as it stood at that time. It was updated yesterday and in addition to requesting a report on the economic impact of certain classes of regulations, it now would prevent most of those new regulations from taking effect until at least six months after the report is finalized. That would offer Americans being devastated by the EPA some relief until we get a new occupant in the White House.

It isn’t my ideal bill to deal with the regulatory mess, but it does slow it down considerably until we can get more favorable conditions to change the face of the regulatory apparatus.

I support the new version of the bill.