"the vice-president long ago became an enemy to the Constitution and to all it represents. He should have been impeached long ago"

Rod Dreher with a great comment, followed by an excellent Andrew Sullivan post:

"Dick Cheney: It's good to be the king

Monday December 22, 2008

Categories: War

Because, says our vice-president, you can do anything you want, regardless of the law, as long as you say you're doing it to defend the country."

Here's Andrew Sullivan:

"One thing you have to concede to Dick Cheney. He says what he thinks. And so we get this:

WALLACE: This is at the core of the controversies that I want to get to with you in a moment. If the president during war decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?

CHENEY: General proposition, I'd say yes. You need to be more specific than that. I mean — but clearly, when you take the oath of office on January 20th of 2001, as we did, you take the oath to support and defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The irony seems lost on him. How can the suspension of all laws into the power of the executive branch in wartime be seen as a defense or protection of the Constitution? Perhaps for a brief amount of time in a dire emergency, after which there would be a thorough accounting to the Congress and the Courts. But indefinitely? As inherent in the office? And with jurisdiction over the entire United States as well as the world? With "enemy combatants" defined as anyone the president calls an "enemy combatant" and no distinction between citizen and non-citizen? Including the right to torture? Indefinitely?

What Cheney has advanced is that the president has the right to dissolve the constitution permanently. That he has the right to commit war crimes with impunity. That there is no legal authority to which he is ever required to pay deference in a war that is his and his alone to declare and end. Now when you consider that, in Cheney's view, these war-powers are limitless, and that war is declared not by the Congress but by the president, and can be defined against a broad, amorphous enemy such as "terrorism", and never end, you begin to see what a dangerous man he is, and how much danger we have all been in since he seized control of the government seven years ago.

And Cheney's colorful explanation of this theory is also extremely revealing:

The president of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States.

He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen. He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.

What Cheney is saying is that if the president of the United States has the power to destroy all civilization alone, he has the power to do anything up to and including that. Chris Wallace asks the right questions, but it is very telling that he didn't ask about torture. I presume that was agreed by Fox and Cheney in advance. I can see no other reason for the lacuna.

But what we know with real clarity is the following: the vice-president long ago became an enemy to the Constitution and to all it represents. He should have been impeached long ago; and the shamelessness of his exit makes prosecution all the more vital. If we let this would-be dictator do what he has done to the constitution and get away with it, the damage to the American idea is deep and permanent."

It doesn't get worse that Cheney in US Politics. I'd prefer Spiro Agnew. At least he was sane.

"This is both clever and facile, in a very Economisty way: it's the sort of thing which reeks of Oxford Union debates."

I decided to give The Economist some free advertising advice. From Free Exchange:

"In May of 2003:

Yet even as house prices start to wobble, many housing experts continue to insist that "this time is different": because interest rates will not rise significantly in the near future, they say, a slump in house prices is unlikely. This survey has argued that even if interest rates stay low, house prices could tumble, undermined by dwindling demand from first-time buyers and waning confidence. However, the experts are right to say that this housing boom is different from previous ones, in two worrying ways. First, inflation today is close to its lowest for half a century. This means that overvalued house prices cannot regain their long-term equilibrium mainly through inflation, as they have done in the past. Instead, house prices will have to fall by at least 20% in money terms in most of the countries with bubbles.

A second important difference is that this time the surge in house prices has gone hand in hand with a proportionately larger jump in household debt. Not only are new home-buyers taking out large mortgages as a percentage of the purchase price, but existing owners have taken advantage of rising house prices to increase their mortgages and turn some of their capital gains into spending money. In America, Britain, and Australia mortgage-equity withdrawal is running at record levels of 5-7% of personal disposable income.

A bubble can never be positively identified until after it has burst, but the rapid increases in both house prices and mortgage debt should set alarm bells ringing. Either way, consumers are living on borrowed time. Even if house prices simply flatten off, the scope for mortgage-equity withdrawal and hence consumer spending will slow sharply. If, as seems more likely, house prices fall, the recent borrowing binge means that more people than ever before will find their homes are worth less than their mortgages.

And in June of 2004:

Housing optimists dismiss these fears by pointing out that doomsters such as The Economist began wringing their hands about a property bubble a year ago, and yet prices have continued to climb. But this has made the housing market not safer, but more vulnerable. The first law of bubbles is that they inflate for a lot longer than anybody expects. The second law is that they eventually burst.

You get the idea."

Here's my comment:

Don the libertarian Democrat wrote:

I'd take this post down, friend. It means no one listens to you. That's hardly what you want on your masthead, is it?

The Economist: Read The Analysis Everyone Ignores

12/1/2008 6:57 PM GST

"Passers-by on Broadway were honking their horns & giving us the thumbs-up. "

Andrew Sullivan's blog documented the protests yesterday about Proposition 8 in California:

15 Nov 2008 08:20 pm

The View From Your Protest: Missoula, Montana

One of his readers writes:

"It was a day which made me feel good about our town & optimistic for our future, gay & straight."

Scroll up and down. Very moving and uplifting.

"All one needs is a modicum of technical and writing knowledge and a website": Do I Have A Modicum? If Not, Where Can I Get One?

No sooner do I begin a blog than the blogoshere is over. Via Andrew Sullivan, Nick Carr plays seer:

"Blogging seems to have entered its midlife crisis, with much existential gnashing-of-teeth about the state and fate of a literary form that once seemed new and fresh and now seems familiar and tired. And there's good reason for the teeth-gnashing. While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there's still a "blogosphere." That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they're part of a "blogosphere" that is distinguishable from the "mainstream media" seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion."

Well, I am middle aged and much given to existential gnashing-of-teeth, and gnashing-of-teeth in general, which is why I had to get one of those mouth guards from the dentist. However, I'm way out of the realm of commercial venture or popular, so I don't really have anything to worry about.

"All one needs is a modicum of technical and writing knowledge and a website like Blogger or Wordpress.com to host a blog for free." I think there's a lot of truth to that - it's considerably easier, assuming you have a computer and net connection, to become a blogger than to become a ham radio operator, and that should, in theory, mean that a fairly steady stream of new bloggers should continue to enter the field (even if they don't stay in it very long). Still, though, Flood exaggerates the death of amateur radio. There are about 3 million amateur ham radio operators worldwide. That doesn't seem to be radically different from the number of active bloggers, despite the fact that blogging is new and sexy while hamming is, well, old and dusty."

Well, I least I'm new and sexy instead of old and dusty. I'll take that, and so will my team of writers and researchers. Take a bow.

Reminds of this scene from "Almost Famous":

Lester Bangs: Your writing is damn good. It’s just a shame you missed out on rock ‘n’ roll.
William Miller: It’s over?
Lester Bangs: It’s over. You got here just in time for the death rattle. Last gasp. Last grope.

At least I'll get a last grope.

Why Do I Focus So Much On Economics?

I tend not to comment on the following things:

1) Polls : They're imprecise, and, if you like the results, they're meaningful, but if you don't, they're crap.

2) Gaffes: Everybody makes them.

3) Changes Of Opinion : Quite often it makes sense, and, if you agree with the change, it's enlightenment, but if you don't, it's hypocrisy or putting your wet finger in the air.

There are probably others.

Also, Andrew Sullivan, Ron Chusid, Kos, a number of people, focus on everything the candidates say or their shortcomings, and that gets the lion's share of the press anyway, and, well, I don't enjoy it.

Some issues, like Gay Rights and Drug Policy, I've left to others like Andrew Sullivan and Reason, although I'll probably mention them more in the future.

However, my main point in focusing on economics and economic policy is that it is where libertarians most blow a gasket about the Democratic Party, and I endeavor to zero in on the crux of the problem. I don't guarantee to do it well, but, you get the point.

My View On Progressive Taxation

Andrew Sullivan gives his views on progressive taxation, which is basically my position:

"To put it as plainly as I can: I don't believe in a governmental attempt to engineer a substantively "fair" society through taxation. I see taxation as a necessary evil to pay for those few social goods that private individuals cannot provide for themselves. And the mode of taxation, in my view, should be as simple and as market-friendly as possible and should treat citizens equally, irrespective of their incomes. I believe in formal equality and a very limited state, not substantive equality and the welfare state. I know this is pie-in-the-sky, given our current Byzantine tax code and the entrenchment of certain socialistic assumptions in our political culture. I don't expect any radical change any time soon. But I'm not going to enable this kind of thinking without a challenge to it.

So yes: a flat tax so far as possible for as many as possible and no deductions. That's my goal. How that differentially impacts the lives of citizens should not be government's primary concern.

Government's primary concern is to raise money as efficiently and as leanly and as equally as possible. I'm happy with the government then setting up programs to assist the poor, to provide better education for those at the bottom, safety-net healthcare and better policing. i.e. to gear spending toward social ends that might help the poor the most. These are measurable, practical goods. What I'm not happy with is the assumption that tax policy should really be about redistributing wealth, and engineering substantive economic outcomes. Yes, of course, at lower income levels, a 20 percent flat income tax will be more onerous proportionally than at higher incomes. So what? Why should that even concern a government that is not aiming to socially engineer more substantive equality? and the alternative - skewing taxes to target success - is an absurd set of incentives to put into a growing society.

Am I heartless? I hope not. I just don't believe that having a heart is what government should be about. It's what the rest of us should be about. This, of course, is my core disagreement with Obama who does indeed have a notion that government has a right and a duty to take money away from those whom he believes can "afford" it and give it to those who "deserve" it. I don't believe in a government with that much power and that lofty a social goal. "

As I say, I largely agree. However, I don't lose a lot of sleep about the issue because of the following from Sebastian Mallaby:

"But those bad effects must be weighed against a good one: Higher tax rates mean a lower budget deficit. According to the Tax Policy Center, over the course of a decade Obama's plan would result in a national debt $1.2 trillion smaller than you would get under McCain's plan. Less government borrowing ultimately means lower interest rates and more private investment. This positive effect may well outweigh the blow to growth and jobs from weaker work incentives.

Tax hikes, in other words, are not automatic job destroyers. Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan, a top expert on this subject, says bluntly, "There is no compelling evidence that a low-tax strategy is better for the economy over the medium or long run." Just look at the Clinton era. In 1993, the top marginal rate (income tax plus Medicare) was raised to 42.5 percent -- the same rate that Obama proposes but minus the candidate's proposed increase in the payroll tax. During the rest of the Clinton period, the economy generated millions of new jobs, and careful academic postmortems find that the 1993 tax hike caused little to no damage to the incentives of top earners.

So McCain's swipe at Obama's tax plan was something other than straight talk. As a share of the economy, Obama's plan would create an overall tax burden similar to the one that existed in Ronald Reagan's time. It would not choke off job creation; rather, it would slow the growth of the deficit and soften inequality. But the really depressing thing is that McCain himself once knew that. He opposed the Bush tax cuts before he supported them, saying that they would deepen inequality. But now he touts a tax reduction that is larger and more radical than even President Bush proposed, and he slams his opponent for holding the view that he himself held until recently."

So, here's the situation. I believe that we should pay as we go. The assets of the government and people of the U.S. vastly exceeds government spending. We don't need to borrow. It's not like a mortgage. You should only take a mortgage if you don't have the cash. Paying interest isn't a good idea unless you have to.

So, in theory, I'm with Andrew Sullivan. In reality, I'll take Mallaby's tax code over huge deficits, caused by a system in which every group tries to get the other to pay for things.

No budget deficits. Period.

Look. The rich are good to pay more under any system. Get used to it.