Monthly Archives: November 2018

A False Dichotomy

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In an address near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to mark the end of WWI, French President Emmanuel Macron made a pitch for globalism.  In the course of that, Macron let slip his true feelings.

Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of it.  By saying our interests first—who cares about the others—we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what makes it great and what is essential: its moral values.

This is a typically false dichotomy offered by a man of the Left. The situation also could be, as a man of the US has said repeatedly, “Our interests first, but not at all alone.”

Moreover, patriotism is the love of nation and the desire to preserve that which unifies the people of a geographic area into a nation—including especially that people’s moral values.  The best way to preserve those values is to protect a nation’s borders, to get immigrants—freely allowed in, so long as their entry is legal—to assimilate, to embrace the values of the nation they’re joining, rather than hold themselves apart.

There’s nothing in there that says “who cares about the others.”  There’s nothing in there that says one nation of patriotic people who believe in their own nation won’t work with or help the peoples of other nations.

Macron knows all this.

Quick Thought on Tax Reform

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The Progressive-Democrats won a majority in the House, and the Republicans look like they’re going to expand their majority in the Senate.  That looks like legislative paralysis in the next Congress.

However.

The next Congress won’t be sworn in until 3 January 2019.  That gives two months for the present Congress, with Republican majorities in both houses, to get some remaining stuff done.

Top on that list in my august view is tax reform.  This Congress needs to move to make permanent the individual income tax cuts that otherwise will expire in 2025.  Get it done now, before the Progressive-Democrats, with their gridlock, take sufficient office to block the reform.

A Government Personnel Shakeup

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This one in the Republic of Korea.  RoK President Moon Jae-in has removed many of his economic cabinet members because the RoK’s economy has continued to stagnate.

So far, the government’s prescribed medicine—big increases in public-sector hiring and the minimum wage—hasn’t proved an elixir.

What a surprise—government crowding out the private sector, competing with the private sector for labor, demanding that workers be paid more than their work is worth isn’t economically stimulative.

Unfortunately, Moon is only changing personnel; he’s not correcting policy. Here’s Lee Sang-jae, Eugene Investment & Securities macroeconomy analyst:

Mr Moon’s policy will stay on course and hardly change, just with a second line of its original architects at the helm[.]

Veteran’s Day

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I first posted this in 2011; I’ve added to it in 2014.

Thank you for all who have, and are, serving.  And because I couldn’t have said it better, I’ll let Mike Royko, late of the Chicago Tribune, via BlackFive, say it from his 1993 column.

I just phoned six friends and asked them what they will be doing on Monday.

They all said the same thing: working.

Me, too.

There is something else we share. We are all military veterans.

And there is a third thing we have in common. We are not employees of the federal government, state government, county government, municipal government, the Postal Service, the courts, banks, or S & Ls, and we don’t teach school.

If we did, we would be among the many millions of people who will spend Monday goofing off.

Which is why it is about time Congress revised the ridiculous terms of Veterans Day as a national holiday.

The purpose of Veterans Day is to honor all veterans.

So how does this country honor them?…

…By letting the veterans, the majority of whom work in the private sector, spend the day at their jobs so they can pay taxes that permit millions of non-veterans to get paid for doing nothing.

As my friend Harry put it:

“First I went through basic training. Then infantry school. Then I got on a crowded, stinking troop ship that took 23 days to get from San Francisco to Japan. We went through a storm that had 90 percent of the guys on the ship throwing up for a week.

“Then I rode a beat-up transport plane from Japan to Korea, and it almost went down in the drink. I think the pilot was drunk.

“When I got to Korea, I was lucky. The war ended seven months after I got there, and I didn’t kill anybody and nobody killed me.

“But it was still a miserable experience. Then when my tour was over, I got on another troop ship and it took 21 stinking days to cross the Pacific.

“When I got home on leave, one of the older guys at the neighborhood bar — he was a World War II vet — told me I was a —-head because we didn’t win, we only got a tie.

“So now on Veterans Day I get up in the morning and go down to the office and work.

“You know what my nephew does? He sleeps in. That’s because he works for the state.

“And do you know what he did during the Vietnam War? He ducked the draft by getting a job teaching at an inner-city school.

“Now, is that a raw deal or what?”

Of course that’s a raw deal. So I propose that the members of Congress revise Veterans Day to provide the following:

– All veterans — and only veterans — should have the day off from work. It doesn’t matter if they were combat heroes or stateside clerk-typists.

Anybody who went through basic training and was awakened before dawn by a red-neck drill sergeant who bellowed: “Drop your whatsis and grab your socks and fall out on the road,” is entitled.

– Those veterans who wish to march in parades, make speeches or listen to speeches can do so. But for those who don’t, all local gambling laws should be suspended for the day to permit vets to gather in taverns, pull a couple of tables together and spend the day playing poker, blackjack, craps, drinking and telling lewd lies about lewd experiences with lewd women. All bar prices should be rolled back to enlisted men’s club prices, Officers can pay the going rate, the stiffs.

– All anti-smoking laws will be suspended for Veterans Day. The same hold for all misdemeanor laws pertaining to disorderly conduct, non-felonious brawling, leering, gawking and any other gross and disgusting public behavior that does not harm another individual.

– It will be a treasonable offense for any spouse or live-in girlfriend (or boyfriend, if it applies) to utter the dreaded words: “What time will you be home tonight?”

– Anyone caught posing as a veteran will be required to eat a triple portion of chipped beef on toast, with Spam on the side, and spend the day watching a chaplain present a color-slide presentation on the horrors of VD.

– Regardless of how high his office, no politician who had the opportunity to serve in the military, but didn’t, will be allowed to make a patriotic speech, appear on TV, or poke his nose out of his office for the entire day.

Any politician who defies this ban will be required to spend 12 hours wearing headphones and listening to tapes of President Clinton explaining his deferments.

Now, deal the cards and pass the tequila.

– Mike Royko

 

Next, because this is a day of remembrance and of honoring our surviving veterans, take another moment to visit here and take in Mark Toomey’s piece.

And follow his advice at the end.

Jail Works

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Liberal shenanigans in New York during the week before this week’s midterm elections:

Laura Ebert, an economics professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz, was charged with misdemeanor larceny for stealing signs supporting Republican candidates….

She’s making excuses and spinning her misbehavior.

Ebert said she was caught in a moment of weakness and high emotion and meant no harm to McGovern nor did she know she lived there.
“I have family I love that support Trump, so I was after the sign, not the person.  I have apologized and feel bad, but clearly the GOP is putting a big deal [of] spin on this.”

Caught up in the emotion of the moment?  Republicans are doing the spinning?  This is typical Liberal excuse making and blame shifting.  This woman is a professor at a college.  She’s a highly intelligent, well-educated, fully rational woman; she knew full well what she was doing at the time she did it.  She knew what she was doing when she formulated her plan and stopped her pickup to do the theft.

She apologized.  Nonsense; her words are empty rhetoric.  She spoke from the heart at the time she did her stealing.  Her “apology,” now, is solely because she’s in trouble and hoping to get out of it. Will she argue at her court date next week that had Willie Sutton only apologized, he should have been excused?

This looks like a Class A misdemeanor under New York law, for which the maximum penalty is a $1,000 fine and a year in jail.  That works, for someone as talented and rational as a college professor, a woman who plainly knows better.