"What if people with 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' in 2016 were right about pretty much everything, but premature about the timing?"

"What if people with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in 2016 were right about pretty much everything," asks Nick Catoggio, "but premature about the timing?"

The Pax Americana is in flames and burned almost beyond recognition. And with a majority in both Houses of Congress willingly removing the Executive's constitutional guardrails against more destruction—politically, economically, globally—it sure does seem like Trump 2.0 is "shaping up to be what doomsayers thought his first term would be."

Yikes!

Just look:

• Trump will appoint a Cabinet of lunatics. He did try in Trump 1.0. But eventually almost all left in a fit of sanity, leaving only their distaste at the buffoon. 
Not so this term, in which "Kash Patel is the Senate-confirmed head of the FBI, joining embarrassments like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as America’s key policymakers."
• Trump will engage in grotesque corruption. Trump 1.0 did try, but that pales into insignificance compared to "the breathtaking grifts he’s running now. Just yesterday, he announced a new 'U.S. Crypto Reserve,' a blatant scam to use taxpayer money to boost the value of investments held by his crypto-bro fans. 
Meanwhile, the main bureaucratic 'reform' initiative in his administration is being run by a mega-billionaire with immense financial interests in industries regulated by the very agencies whose databases he’s been rummaging through for weeks."

Also: 

• Trump will let grudges and vendettas drive his policies. Check: To a degree unmatched in his first presidency, Trump’s new government brazenly divides politics into friends and enemies. Friends show their appreciation; enemies are apt to lose every public privilege that it’s within his power to deny them.
• Trump will govern chaotically and malevolently. Check: "never did the first President Trump embark on a policy project as haphazard and destructive as DOGE, and not until Election Day 2020 did he do anything as nakedly malicious as pardoning violent loyalists."
• Trump will destroy NATO and the American-led international order. Check: "It took until his second term, specifically this past Friday, for him to fully immolate the United States’ credibility as leader of the free world."

Check, check, and check again.

Trump 2.0, summarises Catoggio,

is what you get when you take Trump 1.0 and subtract nearly every element of accountability. Since his first term in office, the president has gained a considerable degree of legal impunity from the Supreme Court, almost limitless political impunity from his supporters and the cowards in Congress who represent them, absolute administrative impunity from the slavish cronies with whom he’s staffed his government, and electoral impunity from the fact that, one way or another, he’ll never face voters again. ...
    And so, six weeks in, Trump’s second term as president already looks like the sum of all fears that [never-Trumpers] felt nine years ago. If there ever were such a thing as irrational 'Trump Derangement Syndrome,' it died in the Oval Office on Friday.

You'll remember what happened then? You know, that the Western Alliance was split asunder  on national television in a fit of Ukraine-splaining”?

Shaking down Ukraine for mineral interests had a distinct Trump 1.0 feel, not unlike when he demanded that allies with U.S. troops stationed on their territory increase their payments to Washington. Because he perceives no strategic American interest in allying with liberal nations, he needs to believe that it’s in our financial interest to justify continuing that alliance. He’s a famously transactional politician; if you want something from him, you need to hand him some sort of victory, ideally involving cash.
    But dressing down Zelensky publicly on Friday had more of a Trump 2.0 feel. It wasn’t about finances. If it had been, Trump wouldn’t have refused to proceed with the minerals deal after things went south in the Oval Office. It was about 'respect.' Zelensky didn’t show enough of it, supposedly, and that was reason enough for the president and vice president to burn down the transatlantic alliance that’s prevailed since World War II on live television.
    If I had told you in 2016 that America would switch sides in a major war involving Russia and part of the reason would be that the guy we’re allied with didn’t wear a suit to a meeting, you would have accused me of the most hysterical case of 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' you’d ever seen. Yet that’s what happened.

Yes, Orange Man really is Bad.

Really Bad.  You might even say: deranged.

I can't help but think back to 2016 when life-long Republican, the late humorist PJ O'Rourke endorsed Hillary Clinton.: 

I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It's the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, ... She's wrong about absolutely everything. But she's wrong within normal parameters.

About last night …

 

 

There’s a lot to say this morning, and with I certainly won’t be saying it all. I’ll leave most of it to people I respect. But I do wonder, can NZ taxpayers have our $7 miillion back from the Clinton Family Crime Foundation now?

Q: How did it happen?!

Dear Friends on the Left,
I hear your cries about the election of a bully. However, they seem insincere.
Your approach to politics has, for decades, been turning the entire government into a giant authoritarian bully. I get that Trump isn't the bully you wanted to see elected, but... I hope you see the issue from a different perspective.
    “So many people — confused by the Left's distortion of language and constant fight against freedom, individualism and practically everything they see as American — have finally decided to make a stand and grab what they think is the opposite.
    “Yes, they are mistaken.
    “Yes, Trump is a terrible choice.
    “Yes, we are probably doomed.
    “But YOU have helped make him the inevitable choice.
    “So, please don't cry.
    “Maybe the next, even worse, bully will be one from the Left again
Who made Trump? You did. – Mark Conway Munro, FACEBOOK

“It’s extremely early to draw conclusions about the 2016 election results, but here are five factors that at least partially explain what happened.”
Five Things That Explain Donald Trump’s Stunning Presidential Election Victory – FINANCIAL SENSE

“What every liberal who didn't see this coming needs to understand.”
Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash – Robby Soave, HIT & RUN

"If Trump wins, my hope is that it is a vote against [the left],
and not a vote for Trump per se. If you are [on the left],
some introspection on why you are so hated that people
are willing to roll dice on a creepy ignorant power-lusting
bully just to stick it to you might be in order."
~ Mark V. Kormes

“Hillary Clinton was exactly the wrong candidate: a technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.”
Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there – Thomas Frank, GUARDIAN

“Revealed: That the guiding spirit of the modern conservative movement is neither Burke nor Lincoln. It’s Marx. ‘These are my principles,’ Groucho once cracked, ‘and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.’ Everything Republicans once claimed to advocate—entitlement reform, free trade, standing up to dictators, encouraging the march of freedom around the world—turns out to be negotiable and reversible..”
2016’s Big Reveal – Bret Stephens, WSJ

"If you want to know why Trump won, just look at the response to his winning. The lofty contempt for ‘low information’ Americans. The barely concealed disgust for the rednecks and cretins of ‘flyover’ America who are apparently racist and misogynistic and homophobic. The haughty sneering at the vulgar, moneyed American political system and how it has allowed a wealthy candidate to poison the little people’s mushy, malleable minds. The suggestion that American women, more than 40 per cent of whom are thought to have voted for Trump, suffer from internalised misogyny: that is, they don’t know their own minds, the poor dears. This response to Trump’s victory reveals why Trump was victorious: because people have had enough of all the top-down, anti-democratic hatred."
The sneering response to Trump’s victory reveals exactly why he won – Brendan O’Neill, SPECTATOR

“But then it struck me.
    “In our sanctimony, our outrage, our righteousness, we overlook the way in which we appear to the other. The fact is that populism is not only rising on the right.
    “The hard left, too, is angry, scared and increasingly vitriolic. Many on the left are displaying the very traits they disparage the right for exhibiting. Fear is well and truly on the march...
    “Bigotry can exist against minorities but also by minorities. Human rights are a double-edged sword of justice. They work both for and against people, including for and against minorities. We should be able to hold two thoughts at the same time.
    “If Brexit and Trump’s win has failed to stop us in our tracks and reflect, then I humbly suggest we [of the left] are part of the problem.”
The fear that propelled Donald Trump requires no logic – Maajid Nawaz, JEWISH NEWS

“The election of Mr Trump is a further illustration that the old political certainties no longer apply.
    “This was America’s Brexit moment. The liberal consensus that has largely held sway since the end of the Second World War has been shattered. Many of the institutions that rose from that rubble, from Nato and the UN to the IMF and the EU, are fraying at the edges, struggling to fulfil the functions for which they were established.”
If Donald Trump really wants to be Mr Brexit, he must open America to the world, not pull up the drawbridge – TELEGRAPH

“The Democratic Party has only one thing to blame as it stares into the abyss of a Donald Trump presidency: itself.
    “For it wasn’t, as the Clinton camp tried to suggest in the dawn’s early light of a changed world, the whole FBI email saga which did for the party’s prospects of defeating the least qualified man ever to run for the presidency. It was the candidate, stupid.”
Hillary Clinton was a catastrophic candidate – and the Democrats' hubris in nominating her will go down in history – Rosa Prince, TELEGRAPH

Q: How come so much of the commentariat knew so little?

“One important lesson from tonight: The press completely, utterly blew this election.”
Shame on Us, the American Media – Brian Beutler, NEW REPUBLIC

“Trump’s triumph has shown once again how desperately out of touch much of the commentariat is with the mainstream.”
Trump's rise shows media out of touch – Rita Panahi, HERALD SUN (AUS)

“The British academic who led an official review into how pollsters failed to forecast the result of the 2015 general election said their' failure to predict Donald Trump's clear victory is a ‘massive disaster’ for the polling industry, ‘historic, epic,’ which is ‘high up the Richter scale’.”
US pollsters' failure to forecast Donald Trump victory a 'massive, historical, epic disaster' says British academic who led review into mistakes over 2015 general election – Christopher Hope, TELEGRAPH
How the pollsters got the US election wrong - just like Brexit – TELEGRAPH

“The bottom line of the 2016 presidential election is that black, Hispanic, and millennial voters just didn't vote for Clinton, or vote at all, in the numbers that were expected nor the number she needed to counter the older, whiter fan-club of Donald Trump.”
Trump Didn't Win Because He's Trump. He Won Because Clinton Is Clinton – Elizabeth Nolan Brown, REASON

“Women, black and Hispanic voters desert Clinton – the charts that show why she lost.”
Hillary Clinton failed to win over black, Hispanic and female voters - the charts that show why she lost the presidential election – TELEGRAPH

“Unrepresentative of the mood of the country.  Impotent in transmitting from survey design, to candidate's probability.  Most exposed human bias and lack of mathematical confidence; also vigorously feeding into the spineless narrative from mainstream media who have subtly advantaged Hillary Clinton whenever possible.  And specific pollsters overtly managed to distort an otherwise scientific process and renovate it into wild entertainment that was too extreme to ever consider worthwhile during the recent month.”
The Death Of Polling – Salil Mehta, STATISTICAL IDEAS

“Last night's surprising result has left Trump supporters elated, Clinton supporters dejected. Most libertarians have long given up hope that the electoral process can bring substantial improvements to US policies. But there is an important silver lining to this year's election...”
The Intelligentsia Takes a Hit – Peter Klein, MISES WIRE

“There is much to savor this morning, including the hysteria that is sweeping across the Left. We see it in ways large and small. At one of our local colleges, a class was canceled because the professor was crying too hard to teach. “I don’t feel safe here,” she said. The storm troopers were due any minute, apparently.”
Krugman Freaks Out, Vows to Keep Fighting – John Hinderaker, POWER LINE

“To put it bluntly, the media missed the story. In the end, a huge number of American voters wanted something different. And although these voters shouted and screamed it, most journalists just weren’t listening. They didn’t get it.” [Including the Washington Post itself who, fifteen days ago, gave Trump precisely “zero chance” of becoming President. Maybe that’s why this is on their ‘Lifestyle’ page? – Ed.]
The media didn’t want to believe Trump could win. So they looked the other way. – WASHINGTON POST

“The vile Mrs. Clinton lost. True. But did any ideas,
ideology or idealism win? If so, what were they, exactly?”
~ James Valliant

Q: What next?

“It'll be a busy day.…”
Here's Everything Donald Trump Has Promised to Do on His First Day as President – MOTHER JONES

“For the particulars of what he actually campaigned on…”
17 Pledges ... – Lydia De Pillis, TWITTER

“Additionally, some analysts have questioned whether Fed Chair Janet Yellen will remain in her job under the new administration given Trump’s pointed criticism of the central bank’s policies and her leadership in the the past.”
    “The future of Janet Yellen’s chairmanship and the accommodative nature of Fed monetary policy are in doubt…”
Donald Trump's election has Wall Street questioning the future of the Federal Reserve – BUSINESS INSIDER

““If there is any common theme to my predictions, it stems from Trump’s history in franchising his name and putting relatively little capital into many of his business deals. I think his natural instinct will be to look for some quick symbolic victories to satisfy supporters, and then pursue mass popularity with a lot of government benefits, debt and free-lunch thinking. I don’t think the Trump presidency will be recognisable as traditionally conservative or right-wing.”
Deciphering Trumponomics, Chapter One – Tyler Cowen, BLOOMBERG

“Will the left be interested in restraining government now?”
Trump Gives Victory Speech, Liberals Rediscover Appeal of Limited Government – REASON

“Donald Trump’s signature policy issue during his campaign was forcing unauthorised immigrants out of the United States. But it would be a mistake for Republicans in Congress to fund any effort to make this dream a reality…”
GOP Shouldn't Mistake Clinton Loss For a Nativist Mandate – David Bier, CATO

“Long after this election, the alt-right and its enablers in the 'alt lite' will continue to threaten the republic. They are more dangerous than Trump. It is not that they are Trump's puppets; it is that Trump was THEIR puppet.”
Alt-right were Trump’s enablers – Start Hayashi, FACEBOOK

“The era of Obama's Progressivism is over:
    "Obama didn't make history after all. He wasn't a teleprompter demi-god standing athwart of history. He was Carter and Ford. He was there to be forgotten. He didn't change the world. He wasn't the messiah. He was merely mortal. Just another politician who will sag and age. Who will, in the end, be photographed like Bill Clinton, lonely and lost in a world that has passed him by."
The Obama Era is Over – Daniel Greenfield, SULTAN KNISH

“What a waste of a candidacy: ‘Johnson is at just 3 percent of the national vote.’…"
Election Results Coverage – Harry Enten, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

“When you build a gigantic state, and invite factions to struggle to battle it in real-life Hunger Games, there are going to be problems. One group wins and one group loses. Despite the election outcome, resentments persist. Acts of vengeance are already in the making.”
And the Election Winner Is…Enmity – Jeffrey Tucker, FEE

Truth in humour …
FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States – THE ONION

“The present state of the world,” Ayn Rand observed
decades ago, “is not the proof of philosophy’s
impotence, but the proof of philosophy’s power. It is
philosophy that has brought men to this state — it is
only philosophy that can lead them out.”
~ Yaaron Brook in ‘To Win the Battle of Freedom, We Must Win the Battle of Ideas’

Some good news…

“This presidential election produced the strongest showing in 20 years for third-party and independent candidates.”
Where the Third-Party Candidates Were Strongest – REASON

“It’s official! California just legalised marijuana! The end of federal prohibition is within reach now that the biggest state in the country has legalised it.”
California Voters Overwhelmingly Approve Marijuana Legalisation – DRUG POLICY ALLIANCE
Californians vote to legalise recreational use of marijuana in the state – L.A. TIMES

“Marijuana legalisation keeps rolling. The legalisation of recreational marijuana was on the ballot in five states yesterday. The people of California, Massachusets, and Nevada voted to legalize.  As of this writing, legalization maintains a slim, too-close-to-call lead in Maine as well. Legalization failed in Arizona by a small margin.
    “Beyond legalising marijuana in America’s most populous state, the vote in California also means the entire West Coast has now rejected marijuana prohibition. The vote in Massachusetts makes it the first state east of the Rocky Mountains to do the same.”
Drug Prohibition Was a Loser Last Night – Adam Bates, CATO
Pot legalisation marches on – Scott Sumner, THE MONEY ILLUSION

“Good on Clinton for being as gracious in defeat as Trump was in victory. That said, the Democratic Party is clearly in for a reckoning—the reckoning that many in the media thought the Republican Party would be facing the morning after Election Day.”
Hillary Clinton: 'This Is Painful, and It Will Be For a Long Time.' – Robby Soave, HIT & RUN

“Some priceless photos of Hillary supporters...”
Donald Trump has sensationally won the White House – MAIL ONLINE

I see you all shiver with anticipaaaaation ….
16 Celebrities Who Will Leave the U.S. if Trump Wins – BREITBART
Misery for Hollywood's megafans – MAIL ONLINE

“Women shocked by Trump win.”
I am woman, hear me sob – CATALLAXY FILES

“Schadenfreude Wednesday.”
Will Trump's Yuge Win Be a Win for America? – Amy Peikoff, BLOG TALK RADIO

 

And finally …

“The answer to all of this in our very diverse, deeply divided nation is tolerance and liberty, simple rules that treat everyone the same, as long as we don't hurt people or take their stuff.”
The Status Quo Must Go: Message of 2016 – Matthew Kibbe, FEE

“The establishment has crumbled. Now we must build a new politics from the ground up.”
Revenge of the deplorables – Sean Collins, SPIKED

And finally (almost), for all my American friends …
How to move to NZ – STUFF
Dear Americans, Want to migrate to Australia? – SBS
Canada's immigration website just crashed – BUSINESS INSIDER

All that said, and delicious though it is to see the commentariat proved wrong again, and delightful though it is to anticipate all those luvvies moving to Canada, I have two very big worries myself. First, Trump has promised to build a wall in more ways than one: an anti-immigrant, anti-free trade wall around the US that, he says, will Make American Great Again. It won’t, but it may export that brand of toxic nationalism around the world. That’s bad.

Second, we still have a crash to come. All the imbalances that caused the collapse of 2008 are still there, incubated and made worse by all the stimulunacy. If we cast our minds back, we might remember that the Great Depression was laid unthinkingly at the feet of the free market simply because America had a meddling Republican in the White House. I fear we will see the same again.

And the last word, on “what now for you and I?” …

 

[Pic from Mark Conway Munro and others, as noted]

.

Fumigating this blog from TrumClinton

 

Okay, I think I've had enough. I’ve had enough of reading or writing about the American election and the vermin who stand in it, and write about it.

It was an important election. America is at a crossroads economically, morally, militarily, fiscally, politically – yet neither commentariat nor candidate cares, or can articulate a way to actually make America great again.

It's been a long, long, long time since anyone wanted to talk about policy -- all they want to talk about is the candidates' character. And yet the only candidate who actually has good character is the only one not being talked about. Go figure.

Both main candidates are disastrous; and both main parties bear responsibility for their nomination. I struggle to think of an election* in which the issues were so large, the candidates so dire, and the debate so trivialised and possibly even orchestrated. (We are now down to reading emails from the Stroking Gun and watching videos of how Trump kisses.)

Enough! I can’t do it any more. Read the archives if you must on Hillary, Trump, and US Politics. But this blog until the election seven days from now will henceforth be a Trump and Clinton-free zone. You will need to give me very good arguments to persuade me otherwise.

---

* Perhaps the two or three elections before the US Civil War when candidates sought to evade the obvious, their evasions only serving to magnify the oncoming cataclysm? But I’m happy to hear other candidates …

.

POTUS: the most powerful person in the world?

 

I keep hearing that Clinton and Trump are locked in mortal combat to be, and I quote, “the most powerful person in the world.”

I hear it everywhere. On radio, on the interweb, on TV (the few times I watch it), in conversation.

But it’s wrong.

The office of President of the United States grants no special physical powers. When a pipe in the Gulf of Mexico was spewing oil, all the ranting in the Oval Office about “capping the damn well” had precisely zero effect on the well. It continued to flow until plugged by someone who had the power to understand how offshore wells work. It has not the power to move a single drop of recalcitrant oil against the physical laws under which it operates.

And the POTUS’s legitimate powers are only those delegated to it by the people (“We the People…”); POTUS rules legitimately only by the consent of the governed.

So what power does a modern president actually have then ? To put it bluntly, he has the power of physical force. He has the power to compel. He has a bully pulpit to persuade, and guns to back him up when he speaks to the unpersuadable. When used legitimately, to protect rights, great good can flow therefrom. When used illegitimately … well, there’s a reason that creatures like Trump and Clinton are clamouring for the office. Their dance of political power is rather like Salomé's dance of the seven veils, except they both hanker to go all the way. Let's have a brief look at exactly what sort of power these people are after.

To understand the nature of political power, contrast it with economic power. These two kinds of power are too frequently and too dangerously confused. Economic power comes from production and trade, "the ability to produce material values and to offer them for trade." This is the sort of power that in recent years has filled the world with food and fine electronics and made a world in which fewer people in history are living in poverty. By contrast, and in Mao Tse-Tung’s memorable formulation, political power comes from the barrel of a gun. This is the sort of power that fills the world with guns and tanks and planes and drones, and America with trigger-happy policemen and Presidents who enjoy seeing power flowing from surveillance, lies and sundry unconstitutional executive orders.

The great danger in confusing these two separate, distinct and different forms of power is that far too frequently political power is either put in the service of economic power, or it is set dead against it.

Governments have a legal monopoly on the use of force – citizens have no choice but to submit to it. It makes no essential difference that they may have elected the government. Political power is coercive.

Economic 'power,' by contrast, is wielded by producers of goods and services by virtue of the voluntary patronage of their customers – who are free to withdraw or relocate their patronage the moment they become dissatisfied. Economic power is non-coercive.

Comedian George Carlin once suggested the keys to America are the cross, the brew, the dollar and the gun. Economic and political power are represented by the last two: the dollar and the gun respectively. Confusion between what distinguishes them leads to the gun sometimes being put in the service of the dollar, and occasionally the dollar seeking to buy the gun, but the distinction remains. (Harry Binswanger defines the two in an excerpt here.)

'Political power' refers to the power of the government. The special nature of that power is what differentiates government from all other social institutions. That which makes government government, its essential attribute, is its monopoly on the use of physical force. Only a government can make laws—i.e., rules of social conduct backed up by physical force. ...The penalty for breaking the law is fines, imprisonment, and ultimately, death. The symbol of political power is a gun. [Read on here.]

The symbol of political power is the gun. The symbol of economic power is the dollar. Powerful symbols both, but contrasting:

The only power a business has to induce customers to give it money is the value of its products. If a business started to produce an inferior product, it would eventually lose its customers. By contrast, the only power that the government has to offer is a threat: "We'll dictate what businessmen can and cannot do—and businessmen better toe the line or we'll throw them in jail."

This is true, be it noted, even in a free society, where the initiation of force by citizens is illegal, but governments reserve the legal right to use force against those who initiate it. (That is the proper use of political power; it is much more commonly used improperly. See Cue Card Libertarianism: Government.)

Blurring the distinction between the dollar and the gun is a favourite ploy of statists, who use this equivocation to justify the curbing of economic freedom through the extension of political controls. "There is no difference between being dictated to by a politician and by a businessman," fudges the statist, "so what harm is done by giving more to the politician and less to the businessman?" Answer – immeasurable. It places the gun in the service of the dollar.

That's the sort of power these two candidates are dancing for. And the gun they’re after has become enormous. Yuuge!

In the libertarian view, it is essential that the two powers are separated totally and completely and constitutionally. The separation of economy and state is as important as was the separation of church and state, and for the self-same reasons: the abuse of political power without any effective separation of powers.

For their own reasons, neither current candidate is anywhere close to understanding either the distinction between these two powers, or the need for their separation. Trump has been the poster boy for using the state’s (illegitimate) powers of eminent domain to throw people out of their homes so his businesses can benefit, and (among many other brazenly coercive boasts) he proudly proclaims that as president he would shut down media who criticise him and order home American businesses operating overseas. And Clinton has clearly enjoyed every dollar she’s extracted from the levers she’s been able to pull over her last 30 years of pulling the wool over donors, voters and the special prosecutors she’s so far been able to evade.

So barring a miracle, one of them will soon be pulling all the levers of political power that emanate from the Oval Office. In their hands, it will certainly be something of a power to destroy. But of the power to create, to wield political power legitimately or to affect the seas or heavens against the laws that rule them, neither candidate will ever have that power. Or earn it.

MORE READING: Harry Binswanger, 'The Dollar and the Gun'

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“Yes, reopening the investigation looks bad for Hillary, but…”

 

Folk are celebrating that with the FBI reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, the fat lady is about to sing for her in an enticing orange-coloured jump suit.

Not so fast. Note that James Comey’s announcement was made late on a Friday afternoon, precisely at the time when news is best buried. And as a commentator with a few smarts and a bucket of very cold water points out:

You guys have to understand what is going on.
    In the course of the investigation into Anthony Weiner's sexting, the FBI came across emails that are incriminating to Hillary. All of Hillary's emails are subject to release based on both numerous FOIA requests and a lawsuit by Judicial Watch. Indeed there is a court order in the latter case to release them. So if you are James Comey, and have found incriminating emails to or from Hillary, how do you get around the requirement to release them immediately? After all, you need only hold onto them for another two weeks. Well, you reopen the investigation into Hillary's emails. Now the incriminating emails can be held secret since they are "part of an ongoing investigation." The investigation can now proceed, and all of these emails can be kept out of the public eye until after the election. The "investigation" can conclude at some point in the far future with the same illegal standard of "no intent to break the law" as the previous investigation.
    Yes, reopening the investigation looks bad for Hillary, for those few people who are paying attention to this sort of thing. But reopening the investigation was a much better option than having to release whatever was found in response to an active court order.

Still hopeful now?

.

Shaken to *what* core?

 

A friend posted what she decribed as Michelle Obama’s “brilliant speech” in which she claims to have been “shaken to the core” by what the Trump campaign has called “locker room talk.”

So I watched it. And to me every bit of her faux outrage rang false. So I said so:

It's not about politics, she says? I'm not sure I can believe that.
    I'd have a lot more respect for the speech if she'd mentioned the ex-President who demeaned the office with an intern and a cigar, and the wife of that man (for whom Michelle is campaigning here) who impugned every single one of the women accusing her husband of sexual assault. If it's truly not about politics, and all about the treatment of women, how can she stand on the stage with the name 'Clinton' behind her and  not mention that?
    And if it's all about the words used to demean women, as she says, all about words that musn't be spoken in public, why then is she a fan of (for example) hip hop stars for whom the 'locker room talk' about which she's so outraged is just what they'd use in an early morning warm up?
    And if it's the actual treatment of women about which she's genuinely outraged, and shaken to her core, and needing to speak out, the where is her outrage at the treatment of women by Muslims, about women made genuinely second-class citizens by the culture, about the forced clitorectomies, the forced marriages, the wife beatings and the 'honour' killings? Speaking out about *that* vast maltreatment would be a genuine election issue, not this.
    I'd have a lot more respect for her and her speech if I thought she was speaking against all of that, if she were speaking on behalf of all women and not just those she hopes will vote for her candidate against the other fellow, and that all her faux outrage isn't just directed at someone because they happen to be running for office in the opposing party and this is a convenient point of attack.
    It's not all about politics, she say? I'm sorry, I don't believe her for a second.
    Trump's politics and person are odious, and the Republican Party has to own the guilt for putting him on the ballot. But let's not pretend for a second that he's this isn't just another campaign speech in a pretty fetid political year.

Talking like that is probably a pretty good way to be unfriended, I reckon.

.

‘October surprises’ still less bad than what’s right out in the open

 

So this weekend we have before us the spectacle of the group of political tribalists who support “family values” defending sex talk, and the tribalists who claim to support women preparing to defend the enabler of an alleged rapist. As a twitterer observed:

I just want you all to realise that this isn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back.
We’ve all just been staring at a dead Bactrian camel for months like something good was going to happen.

But it’s not, is it.

Did you ever think American democracy would get here, to this place? Or get here this soon?

It makes you think seriously about Gary Johnson’s unofficial slogan: Make American Sane Again.

But still, when what candidates say in public is so bad – promoting protectionism, boondoggles, foreign policy disasters & domestic expulsions -- does it truly matter what they say in private?

And how ironic, or revealing (of both her and how she views voters), that the candidate presently leading the polls thinks it only safe to say in private that she dreams of open markets and open borders – something she would never ever say in public.

So how on earth would you judge this sorry pair of charlatans?

Philosopher Stephen Hicks proposes a score sheet to help choose between the three leading candidates, which you may weight any way you wish, .

You may find yourself wondering for example whether or not it’s possible to give ‘minus’ marks. If so, you have my blessing – especially when it comes to character.

PS: I don’t know about you, but I see no value in watching the carny show this afternoon that they call a “debate.” It’s bad enough having to hear about it …

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Hillary Clinton’s Deplorables: Stefan Molyneux

 

Rarely if ever will you see on this blog the phrase “Hillary Clinton was right” – not unless it were to be concluded with phrases such as “to resign,” “to stand down,” or “to jump off a cliff” – but she was right to condemn the deplorable “alt-right” who have taken Donald Trump to their breast, about whom others such as Robert Tracinski and Stuart Hayashi had already exposed.

Stuart has also done sterling work exposing the downright racism of a one-time anarchist who underwent an “ideological transmogrification” to make himself one of the fonts of these deplorables. Tracinski gives over his own newsletter this week to Stuart, who explains as he has before that for all his fine words, Stefan Molyneux is just an old-time racist in a new guise and with new rationalisations.

When it comes to being the main apologist on the Web for Trump and his antics, Molyneux is second only to Milo Yiannopoulos. It is therefore unsurprising that Molyneux is cited occasionally in essays contributed to ‘Breitbart News’ and frequently in its comments section…
    The podcaster’s latest turn as Trump apologist [however] was particularly flabbergasting for those of us in the liberty movement who have been familiar with Molyneux’s podcast for the past decade. How is it that a man who once consistently advocated “market anarchy”—not coincidentally, similar to Murray Rothbard’s—has rebranded himself as an apologist for a political candidate strongly associated with the expansion of government power to restrict immigration and international trade?

Insert here as answer Molyneux’s need for a new (paying) audience after exposure as a disgusting opportunistic charlatan.

With but a dwindling number of anarchists standing by him, it seemed that either Molyneux would have to end his podcast series or find a new target audience.
    Thereafter Molyneux drifted from one vaguely right-wing ideological hobbyhorse to another, briefly trying to make inroads in the “Men’s Rights Movement.” But by the middle of 2015 he finally found a new movement he could grab onto—the alt-right and its white nationalism.

“White nationalism.” Yes, it is as disgusting as it sounds. Molyneux surfed this wave just in time for his depiction of “modern society as a struggle between native-born whites and brown-skinned aliens threatening Western traditions” to be reflected in Trump’s campaign, making him a natural to cheer the orange-skinned man to a standstill – “even if these rationalisations were convincing to no one other than those already in Trump’s corner.”

Unlike Trump, Molyneux prefers to sound intellectual. To make his predictions of impending race war sound more compelling, Molyneux cites terribly old-fashioned racist pseudoscience.

Stuart cites chapter and verse to demonstrate that this dangerously puerile movement is new only in its terms and rationalisations, beneath which is the same racism and barnyard collectivism of old that views human beings simply as cattle.

That seems to be the popular appeal of [Molyneux’s podcast]—it reinforces prejudices that its audience would otherwise be ashamed to hold.

If it seems unimportant to address this movement and its spokesthings, it’s not, says Tracinski: We should “take seriously the recent resurgence of racism under new guises and with new rationalisations.” Says Hayashi:

Human beings have struggled with racism for millennia. It has been present, historically, in every major culture, and anthropologists theorise that racism, in some form, was even prevalent in the Paleolithic Era, when separate hunter-gatherer clans looked upon one another in mutual distrust and often lingering animosity. One of the greatest achievements of the United States in the late twentieth century was removing the stigma against other races and placing the stigma on racism itself. Open racial hostility became more of an exception, not the norm. It would be a tragedy if we allowed Molyneux and the rest of the alt-right to make brazen racism seem normal once again.

Yes. It would.

So let’s keep calling it what it is, even when both right and left wish to relabel and redefine what is they are both practising.

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Trump’s economic plan: Deep denial about the deep doodoo of deep voodoo

 

Trump’s economic “plan” was voodoo economics when first touted, and is even deeper voodoo in the new and unimproved model rolled out recently.

The tax plan in short: big tax cuts on incomes and entities looking suspiciaoulsy similar to Trump’s own with precisely zero intention to commensurately cut spending.

In the Tax Policy Center’s analysis of the Republican candidate’s proposal, the institute said that Trump’s plan would reduce federal revenues by $9.5 trillion over its first decade, and an additional $15.0 trillion over the next 10 years. Including interest costs, the Center said, the proposal would add $11.2 trillion to the national debt by 2026….
    Trump’s plan continues to stomp down the road of massive debt accumulation we are already on. It takes us further down this path than we’ve ever gone before and does it for all the foreseeable years to come.

Sure, everyone from the Tax Policy Center to his couldn’t-lie-straight-in-bed opponent has berated the plan for its promises of “tax cuts to the rich” – the very opposite of her own plan which promises to soak them. And though “Mrs. Clinton’s proposal would only affect those in the top income bracket,” acknowledges an economist who does understand how things work, “she may be surprised to learn that those are the only people who can afford to make investments in startups.”

We’ve seen this “soak the rick” schtick before, everywhere; it’s one of the main reasons for the very American rust belt that Trump claims he wants to resurrect and make great again: soaking the industrial rich, depriving the factories of the financial seed corn of reinvestment, was one of the very reasons the former industrial heartland is now so poor.

But we’ve seen Trump’s voodoo economics before too – Reagan, Bush I and Bush II all making voodoo incantations amounting tax cuts without spending cuts, every single one dangerously increasing the debt.  This is the main reason America embarked on the journey of indedtedness it is in today, becoming so seriously indebted that the Federal Reserve is now desperately monetising all the debt by “printing” money – and knows of no way out!

To this fiscal calamity Trump would now have another $11.2 trillion poured onto the flames that are already a whopping $19 trillion and threatening to burn down the house.

This is no time for self-serving voodoo. If ever there were a time to talk turkey on the national debt it is now. Yet as Thomas Sowell says so sagely,

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Look at that graph and those raw numbers, and you know yourself which game Trump is in.

A game in which a typical politician’s wish-list of promises is floated in order to get elected (a wall, extra military and veterans spending, six months of federally-paid maternity leave, “investment” in infrastructure, “a push” against illegal immigration, and a health-care reform plan that would cost nearly a half-trillion dollars more over the course of a decade — and lead to nearly 21 million people losing their health insurance.)

But if he were to ever tell the truth, or if his ignorant economic advisers were to ever tell him, then the truth about his voodoo economics might sound something like the truth told by former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman, that “the Trump campaign’s stab at a semi-coherent economic plan is …

a dog’s breakfast of some plausible policy ideas, really bad fiscal math and a relapse to the discredited, 35 year-old dogma of sweeping income tax cuts which pay for themselves.
    They don’t. As the great Dwight D. Eisenhower proved in the context of the modern welfare and warfare states, politicians have to earn the right to favour the voters with tax reductions by first dispensing the pain of spending cutbacks and without an exemption for the military-industrial complex, either.
    Following those precepts, Ike balanced the budget several times; generated an average deficit of less than 1% of GDP during his tenure; shrank the defense budget by 33% in real terms; and presided over the strongest 8-year growth rate (about 3.3%) of any post-war GOP president, including Ronald Reagan.
    By contrast, the Reagan White House—me included—-fell for the theory of “dynamic scoring” and that the big cuts in the income tax rates would partially pay for themselves via revenue “flowback”. Back in those days the latter was expressed in an economic forecast known as Rosy Scenario, which assumed that in response to the supply side tax cuts, the US economy would get up on its hind legs and leap forward at a real GDP growth rate of more than 4% per year, and as far as the eye could see.
    What happened instead, of course, is that the US economy plunged into the drink of the deep 1982 recession and the Federal deficit soared to 5% of GDP—a truly shocking outcome back in those innocent days when the old-time fiscal religion still had roots inside the beltway. And it would have also caused enormous economic havoc had not the Gipper’s advisors—me included—talked him to signing three tax bills over 1982-1984 that recaptured roughly 40% of the revenue loss from his cherished tax cuts.
    Even then, the public debt grew by 250% during Reagan’s eight years—-or by more than under any peacetime President in American history. Yet even to this day the GOP politicians and their economic advisers profess a case of heavy duty amnesia about what happened, claiming that real GDP grew by upwards of 4.5% and that these results were proof positive that “dynamic scoring” of budget of tax cuts is valid.
    Worse still, they appear to have convinced Donald Trump of this same fallacious revisionist history because it was embedded at the core of the Thursday speech’s fiscal math.

Conclusion:

So, yes, tax  cuts stimulate the economy. I would never argue that they don’t [says the Great Recession blog], but they do not stimulate it enough to pay for themselves, as Stockman is willing to honestly admit, but Trump’s advisors are not. Since Trump cannot make the deep cuts that his spending increases and tax cuts require, he simply promises that the economy will be so stimulated that it will automatically make up the difference. (Been there; done that; didn’t work.)
    Do you simply want to hear what you want to hear or want the truth? That’s what this comes down to.

Good question.

One thing is certain to anyone who is capable of learning from thirty-five years of history: the debt under Trump will be great … really great. It’ll be a great debt like you’ve never seen before.

Here’s the American National Debt Clock:

 

 

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Hillary's economically clueless plans would create poverty

 

What qualifies this woman to give folk stuff that doesn't belong to them, to tell them what to do in any aspect of their life? Nothing more than her lust for power, says Daniel Mitchell in this guest post. What has she ever accomplished in life?

Because of my disdain for the two statists that were nominated by the Republicans and Democrats, I’m trying to ignore the election. But every so often, something gets said or written that cries out for analysis.

Today is one of those days. Hillary Clinton has an editorial in the New York Times entitled “My Plan for Helping America’s Poor” and it is so filled with errors and mistakes that it requires a full fisking (i.e., a “point-by-point debunking of lies and/or idiocies”).

We’ll start with her very first sentence.

The true measure of any society is how we take care of our children.

I realize she (or the staffers who actually wrote the column) were probably trying to launch the piece with a fuzzy, feel-good line, but let’s think about what’s implied by “how we take care of our children.” It echoes one of the messages in her vapid 1996 book,It Takes a Village, in that it implies that child rearing somehow is a collective responsibility.

Hardly. This is one of those areas where social conservatives and libertarians are fully in sync. Children are raised by parents, as part of families.

To be fair, Hillary’s column then immediately refers to poor children who go to bed hungry, so presumably she is referring to the thorny challenge of how best to respond when parents (or, in these cases, there’s almost always just a mother involved) don’t do a good job of providing for kids.

…no child should ever have to grow up in poverty.

A laudable sentiment, for sure, but it’s important at this point to ask what is meant by “poverty.” If we’re talking about wretched material deprivation, what’s known as “absolute poverty,” then we have good news. Virtually nobody in the United States is in that tragic category (indeed, one of great success stories in recent decades is that fewer and fewer people around the world endure this status).

But if we’re talking about the left’s new definition of poverty (promoted by the statists at the OECD), which is measured relative to a nation’s median level of income, then you can have “poverty” even if nobody is poor.

For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume we’re using the conventional definition of poverty. Let’s look at how Mrs. Clinton intends to address this issue.

She starts by sharing some good news.

…we’re making progress, thanks to the hard work of the American people and President Obama. The global poverty rate has been cut in half in recent decades.

So far, so good. This is a cheerful development, though it has nothing to do with either the American people or President Obama. Global poverty has fallen because nations such as China and India have abandoned collectivist autarchy and joined the global economy.

And what about poverty in the United States?

In the United States, a new report from the Census Bureau found that there were 3.5 million fewer people living in poverty in 2015 than just a year before. Median incomes rose by 5.2 percent, the fastest growth on record. Households at all income levels saw gains, with the largest going to those struggling the most.

This is accurate, but a grossly selective use of statistics.

If Obama gets credit for the good numbers of 2015, then shouldn’t he be blamed for the bad numbers between 2009-2014? Shouldn’t it matter that there are still more people in poverty in 2015 than there were in 2008? And is it really good news that it’s taken Obama so long to finally get median income above the 2008 level, particularly when you see how fast income grew during the Reagan boom?

We then get a sentence in Hillary’s column that actually debunks her message.

Nearly 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience a year in poverty at some point.

I don’t know if her specific numbers are accurate, but it is true that that there is a lot of mobility in the United States and that poverty doesn’t have to be a way of life.

Hillary then embraces economic growth as the best way of fighting poverty, which is clearly a true statement based on hundreds of years of evidence and experience.

…one of my top priorities will be increasing economic growth.

But then she goes off the rails by asserting that you get growth by spending (oops, I mean “investing”) lots of other people’s money.

I will…make a historic investment in good-paying jobs — jobs in infrastructure and manufacturing, technology and innovation, small businesses and clean energy.

Great, more Solyndras and cronyism.

And, if she gets her way, fewer jobs for low-skilled workers along with less opportunity for women (even according to the New York Times).

And we need to…rais[e] the minimum wage and finally guarantee… equal pay for women.

The comment about equal pay sounds noble, though I strongly suspect it is based on dodgy data and that she really favours the very dangerous idea of “comparable worth” legislation, which would lead to bureaucrats deciding the value of jobs.

Then Hillary embraces a big expansion of the worst government department.

…we also need a national commitment to create more affordable housing.

And she echoes Donald Trump’s idea of more subsidies and intervention in family life.

We need to expand access to high-quality child care and guarantee paid leave.

And, last but not least, she wants to throw good money after bad into the failed Head Start programme.

…we will work to double investments in Early Head Start and make preschool available to every 4-year-old.

Wow, what a list. Now perhaps you’ll understand why I felt the need to provide a translation of her big economic speech last month.

The moral of the story, based on loads of evidence, is that making America more like Europe is not a way to help reduce poverty.

P.S. The only other time I’ve felt the need to fisk an entire article occurred in 2012 when I responded to a direct attack to my defense of low-tax jurisdictions.

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Daniel J. Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specialises in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the ‘Cayman Financial Review.’
This post first appeared at FEE.

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Clinton’s attack on the alt-right, and 7 differences between them and libertarians

 

Who or what is the “alt-right”? Answer to that very soon, but to the delight of that antediluvian bunch of self-described white nationalists previously confined to the more fetid parts of the internet, the Republican nominee has been forthrightly spreading their memes [read here for background] and in a major speech last week the Democratic nominee has now put them firmly on the map.

Clinton’s attack on this movement she says has “taken over” the Republican Party is “in no small part part, aimed at telling moderate Republican voters and GOP-leaning independents that their values aren’t truly represented by the nightmare ideology otherwise known as Trumpism.”

He may be the GOP nominee, but he has perverted and distorted Republicanism into something so twisted and horrifying, so unlike anything else we’ve seen in modern times, that they shouldn’t feel bound by party loyalty or political habit to stand by him.

The attack is calculated to drive a wedge between these traditional Republicans and the candidate and his team whom they would otherwise be beholden to support.

This crowd of racist-right circle-jerkers being attacked however couldn’t care less about political calculations. The only thing for them worse than being calculated about is not being calculated about. So even if they’re being insulted, they’re a happy bunch of Trumpanzees.

Hoping to collect votes from both Republicans and Democrats appalled at their party’s respective nominees is Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, who’s been running a very strong “I’m-the-sane-candidate” strategy against the loony tunes winging their way either side of him.

Confusingly however, many commentators mistake libertarians for these alt-right meatheads focussed on “white identity politics, many nascent libertarians themselves have found themselves seduced by the siren songs, and “more than a few” alt-rightists even claim some relationship to libertarianism – or once had one before sadly shedding their libertarianism later on.

What are the differences in outlook between alt-right ideology and libertarianism? Jeffrey Tucker reckons they come down to five – five different views on history, humanity, order, on trade & migration, and on emancipation & progress:

1. The Driving Force of History
Every ideology has a theory of history, some sense of a driving theme that causes episodic movements from one stage to another. Such a theory helps us make sense of the past, present, and future…

Ayn Rand argued that what drives history most fundamentally is ideas, of which reason and liberty are the most potent, but are by no means inevitable.

There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man’s rational faculty—the power of ideas. If you know a man’s convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course. But convictions and philosophy are matters open to man’s choice. There is no fatalistic, predetermined historical necessity.

Libertarian Murray Rothbard reckoned the specifically libertarian story of history is of that liberty against power. “I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself,” he said, “(or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilisation, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity. Out of liberty, then, stem the glories of civilised life.”

The alt-right reject this outright. On the question of liberty versus power, they come down completely on the side of power.

The movement inherits a long and dreary tradition of thought from Friedrich Hegel to Thomas Carlyle to Oswald Spengler to Madison Grantto Othmar Spann to Giovanni Gentile to Trump’s speeches. This tradition sees something else going on in history: not liberty vs. power, but something like a more meta struggle that concerns impersonal collectives of tribe, race, community, great men, and so on.
    Whereas libertarianism speaks of individual choice, alt-right theory draws attention to collectives on the move. It imagines that despite appearances, we all default in our thinking back to some more fundamental instinct about our identity as a people, which is either being shored up by a more intense consciousness or eroded by a deracination and dispossession from what defines us. To criticise this as racist is often true but superficial. What’s really going on here is the depersonalisation of history itself: the principle that we are all being buffeted about by Olympian historical forces beyond our control as mere individuals. It takes something mighty and ominous like a great leader, an embodiment of one of these great forces, to make a dent in history’s narrative.

Hence the union of white identity politics (an inversion of the identity politics of their political opponents) and the wistful longing for their “man on horseback” to wall out the barbarian hordes.

2. Harmony vs. Conflict

A related issue concerns our capacity to get along with each other. Frédéric Bastiat described the free society as characterised by a “harmony of interests.” In order to overcome the state of nature, we gradually discover the capacity to find value in each other. The division of labour is the great fact of human community: the labour of each of us becomes more productive in cooperation with others, and this is even, or rather especially, true given the unequal distribution of talents, intelligence, and skills, and differences over religion, belief systems, race, language, and so on.
    And truly, this is a beautiful thing to discover. The libertarian marvels at the cooperation we see in a construction project, an office building, a restaurant, a factory, a shopping mall, to say nothing of a city, a country, or a planet. The harmony of interests doesn’t mean that everyone gets along perfectly, but rather than we inhabit institutions that incentivise progress through ever more cooperative behavior. As the liberals of old say, we believe that the “brotherhood of man” is possible.
    The libertarian believes that the best and most wonderful social outcomes are not those planned, structured, and anticipated, but rather the opposite.
    To the alt-right mind, this all seems ridiculous. Sure, shopping is fine. But what actually characterises human association is deep-rooted conflict. The races are secretly at war, intellectually and genetically. There is an ongoing and perpetual conflict between the sexes. People of different religions must fight and always will, until one wins. Nations fight for a reason: the struggle is real.

The libertarian understands that when force is barred from human interaction and all human interaction is voluntary, that each other individual is a net benefit to us, For the alt-righter however, every other human being is a threat, especially those who are “not like us.”

Hence their inevitable racism, a “barnyard” form of collectivism  -- “ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors. Racism;” explains Rand, “claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control.”

Hence for them society is irretrievably divided “vertically” on racial lines, over which each tribe is determinedly in conflict. Ludwig von Mises captures this parallel brilliantly in his identification that, “Nationalist ideology divides society vertically; the socialist ideology divides society horizontally.”

As Tucker observes, “Here, as with many other areas, the far right and far left are strangely aligned.”

3. Designed vs. Spontaneous Order
    The libertarian believes that the best and most wonderful social outcomes are not those planned, structured, and anticipated, but rather the opposite. Society is the result of millions and billions of small acts of rational self interest that are channelled into an undesigned, unplanned, and unanticipated order that cannot be conceived by a single mind. The knowledge that is required to put together a functioning social order is conveyed through institutions: prices, manners, mores, habits, and traditions that no one can consciously will into existence. There must be a process in place, and stable rules governing that process, that permit such institutions to evolve, always in deference to the immutable laws of economics.
    Again, the alt-right mind finds all of this uninspired and uninspiring. Society in their conception is built by the will of great thinkers and great leaders with unconstrained visions of what can be. What we see out there operating in society is a result of someone’s intentional and conscious planning from the top down.
    If we cannot find the source, or if the source is somehow hiding, we imagine that it must be some shadowy group out there that is manipulating outcomes – and hence the alt-right’s obsession with conspiracy theory. The course of history is designed by someone, so “we” might as well engage in the great struggle to seize the controls – and hence the alt-right obsession with politics as a contact sport.
    Oh, and, by the way, economics is a dismal science.

4. Trade and Migration
Of course the classical liberals fought for free trade and free migration of peoples, seeing national borders as arbitrary lines on a map that mercifully restrain the power of the state but otherwise inhibit the progress of prosperity and civilisation. To think globally is not a bad thing, but a sign of enlightenment. Protectionism is nothing but a tax on consumers that inhibits industrial productivity and sets nations at odds with each other. The market process is a worldwide phenomenon that indicates an expansion of the division of labor, which means a progressive capacity of people to enhance their standard of living and ennoble their lives.
    The alt-right is universally opposed to free trade and free migration. You can always tell a writer is dabbling in alt-right thought (or neoreactionary or Dark Enlightenment or outright fascism) if he or she has an intense focus on immigration or international trade as inherently bad or fraudulent or regrettable in some sense. To them, a nation must be strong enough to thrive as an independent unit, an economic or cultural sovereignty unto itself.
    Today, the alt-right has a particular beef with trade deals, not because they are unnecessarily complex or bureaucratic (which are good reasons to doubt their merit) but because of their meritorious capacity to facilitate international cooperation. And it is the same with immigration. Beginning at some point in the late 19th century, migration came to be seen as a profound threat to national identity, which invariably means racial identity.

5. Emancipation and Progress

The libertarian celebrates the profound changes in the world from the late Middle Ages to the age of laissez faire, because we observed how commercial society broke down the barriers of class, race, and social isolation, bringing rights and dignity to ever more people. Slavery was ended. Women were emancipated, as marriage evolved from conquest and dominance into a free relationship of partnership and consent. This is all a wonderful thing, because rights are universal, which is to say, they rightly belong to everyone equally. Anything that interferes with people’s choices holds them back and hobbles the progress of prosperity, peace, and human flourishing. This perspective necessarily makes the libertarian optimistic about humanity’s potential.
    The alt-right mind can’t bear this point of view, and regards it all as naive. What appears to be progress is actually loss: loss of culture, identity, and mission. They look back to what they imagine to be a golden age when elites ruled and peons obeyed. And thus we see the source of their romantic attachment to authority as the source of order, and the longing for authoritarian political rule. As for universal rights, forget it. Rights are granted by political communities and are completely contingent on culture. The ancients universally believed that some were born to serve and some to rule, and the alt-right embraces this perspective. Here again, identity is everything and the loss of identity is the greatest crime against self anyone can imagine.

It should be obvious from Tucker’s analysis that where libertarians view each of us individuals with the power to think and choose, the Alt-Right views each of us instead as part of a “tribe,” our identity irretrievably given us at birth and needing “leadership” to be grafted into its proper whole.

So while libertarianism is indivualistic, the alt-right is demonstrably collectivist. This on its own should stop the mainstream media from lumping us all together. (Yeah right.) And make no mistake, says Tucker: the alt-right knows exactly who its enemies are, and we libertarians are among them. 

To Tucker’s five main differences I would add two more: two contrasting views on The Power of Reason and The Impotence of Evil.

Following Rand, Libertarian Objectivists recognise both the power of Reason and the impotence of Evil – recognising reason to be not just the driving force of history but man’s unique means of survival and flourishing, and evil (being its negation) being essentially parasitic, unable even to survive without mooching on those it would seek to destroy. (This is just one reason a religion like Islam essentially resides in the moral, cultural and historical vacuum created by others, and always has.)

The Alt-Right however consciously reject this thesis. For them it is not man’s mind that has power in the world but his blood. They repair instead to the notion that “intelligence,” culture and all values are simply a product of race, over which none of us has any control; and they see themselves as the true guardians of “white culture,” which is beset on all sides by evil hordes who cannot be reasoned with yet who somehow possess the power and the means to destroy us.

Evil itself has power therefore, and humanity itself becomes our enemy.(“Humanity as a whole is still sub-human” says one former NZ Objectivist, who desperately need to be “wiped out” by some “intervening cataclysm” so that “we” can start over.)

The irony is that in talking up the power of those forces they feel are arrayed against them, so powerful that they must be banned, barred, wiped out and walled out, they implicity stress both power of evil and the impotence of reason to address its challenges; they argue for the power of the culture they damn and the weakness of the culture with which they identify to stand up to those forces. In other words then, the culture they protect they view implicitly as weak and cowardly, and the “intelligence” that they so fitfully measure has no power for them to ultimately move the world.

In that then, the alt-right is not just a racist movement of un-reason, it is one of irredeemable cowardice.

UPDATE:

Objectivist Amy Peikoff discusses the Alt-Right with Stuart Hayashi, who’s recently been analysing Stefan Molyneux’s brand of “race realism”:

 

 

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