Category Archives: politics

More Government Intervention

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Shades of FDR, and a betrayal from the putative right of center.  Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) wants Government to dictate to private enterprises what they must do with company profit.

The plan backed by Rubio encourages domestic investment by making full and immediate expensing permanent “as a way to discourage companies from pursuing share repurchases.”

Right move, wrong reason.  Immediate expensing ought to be a permanent item in tax code reform on its own right.  Delaying expensing or stringing it out is just another aspect of using our tax code for social engineering, which bastardizes our tax collections and distorts our market away from the most efficient use of our money—whether business money or personal.  And that most efficient use might well include stock buybacks; that’s a business decision with which Government has no business interfering.

“Discourage” companies?  That’s a fiction.  What Government starts as “discouraging,” it very quickly converts to barring.  Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) are pushing for precisely this sort barring of legislation,

to curtail the ability of companies to purchase stock buybacks[,]

and Rubio is just as enthusiastically joining with them on this.  A report released by Rubio’s Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee had this in it:

Cash spent on share repurchases is not cash spent on capital investment, though the degree to which a relationship exists may vary by sector and firm type[.]

That’s not strictly true.  Money spent on buybacks is money not spent on that business‘ capital investment.  But do Rubio, Schumer, and Sanders really think that money goes under the mattresses of those now ex-shareholders?

Of course that money does not. It goes into one of three places, each beneficial to our economy. One is investments in other companies, facilitating those companies’ capital investments.

Another is spending on consumer and business goods, which enhances market demand, which increases cash flow into those producers’ coffers—which facilitates their capital investments.

The third is savings.  As anyone who didn’t sleep through their high school econ course knows, savings are banks’ and other lenders’ source of funds which they loan out—to businesses so they can carry out their capital investments.

Hence the need to let businesses make their own decisions without Government diktat.  It’s disappointing that a nominally Republican Senator doesn’t understand any of this.

Sexism Blocking Free Speech

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Now it’s Twitter that’s engaging in toxic (non)-speech, not the speech in the tweets themselves.

A Canadian blogger is having to sue Twitter over the latter’s blatant censorship of free speech because, apparently, she isn’t toeing the Twitter (or me also “movement”) sexual politics line.

Meghan Murphy, the founder of the blog Feminist Current, was locked out of her account last year when the company asked her to delete a tweet that said, “Men aren’t women,” CNET reported, citing the lawsuit. A second tweet said, “How are transwomen not men?” according to the suit.

This is evil?

Two Examples of Gun Control

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In January, a Houston homeowner successfully defended himself and his family against a large, violent home invasion—with a gun.

Authorities say the homeowner defended himself when the suspects entered the home. Following the shooting, the suspects fled from the scene.
…
At another scene, a vehicle was found about two blocks from the shooting, where a man was found dead in the backseat.
Authorities say that out of five people shot, three of them died. All were suspects in the alleged home invasion.

In Florida this week, another homeowner successfully defended his property—with a gun.

The Volusia County Sheriff’s Office said…a woman called 911 to report a stranger on her property.
When the woman’s husband walked outside [with his pistol] to check the situation out, he told deputies he found the man standing at the door to his garage with his hand on the doorknob.
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Once deputies got to the home located south of Daytona Beach they allegedly found a syringe, tools and gloves on Edwards.
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[The man] was charged with attempted burglary and possession of burglary tools, according to police.

No one was shot this time, either—it was only property at risk.

Imagine the mayhem that would have resulted in the first instance had the homeowner not been armed.  Imagine the theft, and the possible mayhem (because burglars really don’t like witnesses), in the second instance had the homeowner not been armed.

This is the gun control Progressive-Democrats and their accomplices of the Left want to take away from us.

Sexist Pandering

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Senator Cory “Spartacus” Booker (D, NJ) says the first criterion he has for his Vice President candidate, should he get the Progressive-Democratic Party nomination, is that the person be a woman.

I’m not going to box myself in, but should I come to it, you know I’ll be looking to women first.

Think about that.  Booker won’t be looking to the best qualified first, and if that turns out to be a woman, great.  He’ll be looking to a woman first because she’s a woman.  How pandering is that?

Think about another implication of that criterion.  His looking to pick a woman because she’s a woman means he doesn’t think women are capable of competing on their own merit.  Women, he’s implying, are just incapable, and the only way they can aspire to the White House is by being selected on the basis of their gender.  How bigoted is that?

Definitions, Progressive-Democrats, and Economics

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Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for President, and mayor of South Bend, IN, Pete Buttigieg is an illustration of the Progressive-Democrat candidates’ lack of understanding of two of those three.

Proximately, he’s upset that President Donald Trump demurs from the socialist movement of Party and its cronies of the Left and Far Left; Buttigieg actually is insisting that

the word [socialism] doesn’t have the same negative connotations it did for past generations.

This is just an Alinsky-esque attempt to change the subject by falsely defining it.  Unfortunately, though, it’s clear (just consult any current English language dictionary*; apparently his grammar school lesson on how to use a dictionary was not a safe space for Buttigieg) that socialism remains government control of the means of production—of our economy.  And that’s exactly what he and his fellow candidates from Party are proposing: high taxes on those who produce; high taxes on the mere existence of wealth and success; nationalization, not just of the industry of health coverage plans but of the very provision of health; government control over our energy production; government control over our transportation means; and on and on.

Buttigieg also said

We are a market-based economy. You can’t kill off a discussion by calling it socialism.

On the other hand, you can kill off a market-based economy with socialism.

 

*Here’s the current American Heritage Dictionary‘s definition:

1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.

Here’s Merriam-Webster‘s definition:

1  : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2   a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state

As Judge James Ho of the Fifth Circuit wrote in a different context,

For our system to work, however, we must share a common language. When the American people come to a consensus, there must be a way to reduce the agreement to words that we can all understand and accept—both today and in the years to come. We must have confidence that our words will be faithfully construed in the future, consistent with our common understanding.

Surely, Buttigieg and his fellows know this.