Tag Archives: government

A Brief Thought on Politics and Government

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It’s necessary to keep in mind a fundamental fact of government: government does absolutely nothing; it’s purely a hypothetical construct.

That hypothetical aspect, though, is made concretely extant by the men and women who populate a government and occupy the various positions within it. In our American case, our government is given a framework and the positions within it by our Constitution and the statutes within our Constitution that create specific Departments and Agencies and their structure. Our government—this construction—still does absolutely nothing. It’s the men and women who occupy those positions within our government who do the things vernacularly attributed to “government.”

Politics is what those men and women do. It’s politics that those men and women employ to do things, to enact statutes, execute or rescind regulations, generate legal cases for our government’s courts, and issue court decisions (yes, politics is involved in judges’ and Justices’ development of their decisions, especially at the appellate levels where groups of judges and Justices must agree at least more or less on a ruling).

Those politics center on trading off support or obstruction of this or that position in return for support or obstruction of that or this position. Every politician or court official has something to gain or lose or trade in these tradeoffs. At bottom—because we humans at bottom are venal creatures—these political tradeoffs are as much for personal gain—generally in political power, sometimes for explicit financial—as they are for the nation’s good.

And that’s the danger of politics in government: the men and women who are the real actors, in the name of government, tend to act for their own weal first and the weal of our nation, the weal of us citizens, second.

Against that framework, it’s important to consider the philosophies underlying our two major political parties. In broad strokes, one of the parties holds the position that government can solve most, if not all, of the problems us citizens face, whether as groups of us or individually. This leads to this party moving to constantly expand the role of government in us citizens’ lives.

The other party holds the position that government is necessary because some problems are best worked, or can only be worked, by government, and so statutes should be kept simple and regulations to a minimum. This leads to moves to limit government power and intrusion into our lives.

Thus, one party moves to expand its politicians’ own political power and financial gain, while the other party moves to limit those gains or at least expand them at a much slower rate.

While the two parties tend to converge, they’re not there yet, and elections still have consequences.

Two Short Steps

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The IRS has moved to cancel its “experimental” Direct File program. This is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s…exceedingly pleasurable fantasy…of the IRS online platform that lets filers prepare their taxes for free and submit them through the state.

Aside from the program’s cost ($138 per tax return, which is more than many tax software sellers charge) the editors of The Wall Street Journal noted,

The bigger problem with the program is its threat to the norm of taxpayer autonomy. The push to cut out the tax “middle man,” meaning private services, would have resulted in millions of filers letting the IRS make both the first and final determination of their tax liability and connect to their checking accounts.

Notice that: the IRS gets to connect to our private checking accounts. With Direct File, that’s a deeper connection than simply allowing the IRS to direct deposit a refund. With Direct File, the IRS has been able to extract the tax due from a tax payer’s bank account.

With the cancelation of Direct File, us tax payers, us average Americans, avoided a two-step sequence of events. The first step would have been making Direct File no longer a trial being tested in 24 of our nation’s States, but instead rolling it out nation-wide.

The second step would have been mandating Direct File for all of us.

It wouldn’t have stopped there, though. It wouldn’t be even a short step, more like a small shuffle, after that to alter Direct File to have employers “Direct File” all employees’ pay checks to the IRS instead of sending them to the employees. With that, the IRS would extract the taxes it deemed appropriate and remit to the putative employee the remainder—the amount the IRS would deem appropriate for each tax payer to have.

We dodged a terrible pas-de-deux—that dance for the two performers of tax payer and Government—for the time being, but the Progressive-Democratic Party will return to power eventually, and dangerously sooner than us average Americans want.

What Will She Do with that Intelligence?

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Mexico’s President Claudia Scheinbaum doesn’t want to deal with Mexico’s cartels (mostly drug, but they’re into sex- and child-trafficking, also, and a few other…industries) violently. Her predecessor also swore off hard-style confrontations, insisting on dealing with them with hugs. Scheinbaum wants to increase intelligence efforts in dealing with them, even including a willingness to receive intelligence from the US government. But no more help than that.

Sheinbaum said her government had accepted the US offer for help in obtaining information and intelligence, but she rejected US intervention in Mexico’s affairs. “Intervention isn’t justice,” she said.

That “intervention” was an offer to assist—not to do for or to do instead—Mexico in dealing with the cartels kinetically, which is to say, violently.

Last week, Carlos Manzo, the anti-cartel mayor of Uruapan, the largest city in the state of Michoachan, the state immediately west of Mexico City, was hugged several times, fatally so, by the cartels. Even so,

[Sheinbaum] pledged to continue with her policy of strengthening Mexico’s National Guard, concentrating on the use of police intelligence to take down violent criminals while addressing the social causes of crime.
Sheinbaum criticized political opponents who she said were taking advantage of Manzo’s killing to attack the government, and said she had ordered an investigation into the surge in antigovernment posts on social media.

When those violent criminals and/or their cartel supporters resist being “taken down?” Will she continue to answer their violence with her own hugs? So far, her response is limited to inflicting lawfare violence on those impudent enough to criticize her government’s handling of the cartels. Why not hug them, too, instead?

Scheinbaum apparently has no serious use for that intelligence, American or her own nation’s.

This is what a failing narco- and trafficking-centric nation looks like.

Monetary Misconception

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Judy Shelton, a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, has this one. She wants the Federal government to issue a gold-backed bond would strike a blow for sound money.

Mr Trump has criticized currency manipulation in global trade relations. Challenging other nations to emulate the US [gold-backed bond] by guaranteeing some portion of their sovereign debt in gold would demonstrate America’s vision for stable money as the proper foundation for fair trade.

This is naïve. “Other countries” will continue to manipulate their currencies, just as they do now; this move only would add a new tool for manipulation—varying the value of the metal backing their own debt instrument(s).

Governments have been debasing their metal backed currencies ever since money was invented, doing so by shaving coins minted in the metal; by replacing some of the money-backing metal with other, cheaper metals; outright announcing a differing, lower values for a unit of the metal.

The most infamous recent example of the latter was during our own Great Depression when then-President Franklin Roosevelt (D) seized all privately held gold and then promptly devalued the gold in US dollar terms.

All currency is fiat currency, whether it’s minted in the metal or it’s printed on paper formally backed by the metal (at a rate the issuing government has announced for the time being), or it’s printed on paper and allowed to float in the markets for goods and services—and currencies. That currency has the value, in legal terms, that government says it has from time to time.

Backing a bond with a precious metal has no material meaning. What makes a money sound is the stability of the issuing government; the economy it oversees with a light hand; and that government’s ability to protect its people from invasion, whether physical, economic, or political. Nothing else does.

More Whining and Bodice Ripping

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This time, it’s from a Wall Street Journal editor, Collin Levy.

President Donald Trump (R) is expanding the East Wing with a ballroom fit for its purpose—to entertain visiting numbers of national leaders, not just any dignitary, and to put on the welcome and entertainment that fits such large gatherings. The expansion is to replace convening those same large gatherings in a collection of tents out on the White House lawn. Levy objects, and she opened her cri de coeur with this:

It [the new ballroom] might have been be tacky, but the republic can withstand some nouveau riche architecture on federal property.

That’s typical journalistic arrogance; she’s masquerading her opinion as received fact. On the contrary, what’s tacky is entertaining foreign leaders outdoors in tents as though the White House lawn is home for trailer park trash.

She closed her tearful piece with this:

It [the White House] is a symbol of power, legacy, and national identity. Respect for the nation and all that it has built still matters. These aren’t trifles or overreactions. They are the foundations of the republic we built. That’s worth defending.

The White House as an edifice is, indeed, a symbol. The larger, more important symbols of our nation’s power, legacy, and national identity, though, are our respect for and rule of law, the integrity of our national borders, and our American culture centered on the idea of inalienable rights coming from our Creator, not any government, and of individual liberty along with liberty’s dual, individual responsibility. And that culture, ideal of law (including those borders), and culture are what the White House stands in symbol of.

Those symbols presently are threatened by domestic terrorism; politicians musing on and hoping for the murder of political opponents and their children; attempts at murdering a President by a Leftist; politicians’ threats of violence against Supreme Court Justices and attempts at murdering one of them; the actual murder by Leftists of a leading Conservative activist; and the divisive likening of political opponents to Hitler and fascism, followed by attempts at mass murder of Republican Congressmen.

Yet, all this WSJ editor can find—all she can think of—to worry about is a needed remodel and expansion of the White House’s East Wing, a modification that will add to the White House’s grandeur.