When at the end of the debate the question came up about whether the candidates would accept the election result, I said to myself that well, here is an exercise in the obvious. Of course you say that you will accept the result. And then Donald didn’t. And therefore we have either seen one of the largest political mistakes in history, or an act of such genius that it raises Trump to among the greatest candidates ever to run for president. And on thinking it over, I am now almost convinced that the question may even have been suggested to the moderator by Trump himself, precisely so that he could give the answer he gave. All this is by way of an introduction to my take on the third debate which you can find at Quadrant Online under the heading, “Lies and Loathing 3.0”. From which:
This is an issue of immense importance in a democracy. Legitimacy is bestowed only if the system is fair and perceived to be fair. Trump is in the middle of a battle he thinks, and I think, is for the future of America and the West. What he said is that he is not going to give the outcome his prior approval before he has actually seen what has happened on the day.
And I do have to say that I was surprised that he didn’t bring up Al Gore and the disputed election in 2012. It would no doubt have crossed his mind, so you have to think Trump had sifted this on the spot and didn’t wish to change the focus to sixteen years ago. He wants this election, this year, run clean. And since this is his greatest vulnerability – an election stolen by those with a proven track record of electoral theft – he wants to keep the pressure on as best he can.
Politics is ultimately what works. Does it cost him votes to focus on voter fraud in this way? No doubt. But will it also gain him votes if he can contain the fraud? Yes again. The question really comes down to how it will play out.
Trump has put voter fraud on the map, which is discussed further at the link, and is now, in fact, being discussed across America. That has got to work for the Republicans.
Also discussed at QoL is the way in which Trump massively defeated Clinton on the issues, showing far greater depth and understanding on every topic raised. And I will finish with another quote from the article which is what I think all of this really comes down to.
Nothing stands still, but the changes that her presidency would bring will have the equivalent effect on just about everything that Obamacare has had on the health system. With Hillary it is all downhill from here. At least with Trump there remains hope. Not necessarily a lot, but at least some.
The issue of issues in the third debate is Trump’s refusal to pre-commit himself to accepting the results of the election as tallied on the day. He has, in effect, stated that an election result would not be acceptable if there is serious evidence of voter and electoral fraud. I wish he hadn’t said it since it will diminish his outstanding performance on the rest. But what do I know about politics at that level, since what it will do is put the spotlight on the way in which the deceased vote early and often, how voting machines are hacked and the multiple voting that is rife across the American system. And for all my misgivings, he is the one that has taken the Trump train to the edge of the White House, so we shall see what happens now.
I have often thought about this issue, in particular in relation to the 2012 election: In 59 Philadelphia voting divisions, Mitt Romney got zero votes. Not one person voted for Romney, not even by accident, not even by pulling the wrong lever, not even my mis-reading the ballot paper! Not one? To quote:
The unanimous support for Obama in these Philadelphia neighborhoods – clustered in almost exclusively black sections of West and North Philadelphia – fertilizes fears of fraud, despite little hard evidence.
Upon hearing the numbers, Steve Miskin, a spokesman for Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, brought up his party’s voter-identification initiative – which was held off for this election – and said, “We believe we need to continue ensuring the integrity of the ballot.”
The absence of a voter-ID law, however, would not stop anyone from voting for a Republican candidate.
Which is exactly the point. The polls showed a super-majority voting for Obama, but the polls also showed the score at 94-6. Six percent is not zero percent. And then there’s this:
The video was put up just the other day, on October 18, and comes with this caption:
In the second video of James O’Keefe’s new explosive series on the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign, Democratic party operatives tell us how to successfully commit voter fraud on a massive scale. Scott Foval, who has since been fired, admits that the Democrats have been rigging elections for fifty years.
This is an issue of immense importance in a democracy. Legitimacy is bestowed only if the system is fair and perceived to be fair. Trump is in the middle of a battle he thinks, and I think, is for the future of America and the West. What he said is that he is not going to give the outcome his prior approval before he has actually seen what has happened on the day.
And I do have to say that I was surprised that he didn’t bring up Al Gore and the disputed election in 2012. It would no doubt have crossed his mind, so you have to think Trump had sifted this through on the spot and didn’t wish to change the focus to sixteen years ago. He wants this election, this year, run clean. And since this is his greatest vulnerability – an election stolen by those with a proven track record of electoral theft – he wants to keep the pressure on as best he can.
Politics is ultimately what works. Does it cost him votes to focus on voter fraud in this way? No doubt. But will it also gain him votes if he can contain the fraud? Yes again. The question really comes down to how it will play out.
Given the rest of the debate was overwhelmingly in his favour, a clear winner on each of the issues for someone like me who is seeking a stronger US both internationally and at home, he is the only candidate worth considering. Hillary, if elected, will trash America, leaving the 2020 election of no genuine interest since, by then, the US will be even farther on its way towards becoming a third world economy. Hillary’s idiotic, but thoroughly focus-tested statement, that “we are going to go where the money is”, that is, she is going to raid corporations and the wealthy for as much as she can shake them down for, is to guarantee a continuation of, if not an actual deterioration from the descending living standards that are now entrenched and becoming worse. The wealthier will get wealthier and the bottom 60-70% will find things getting worse by the year.
As for foreign policy, the election as president of the architect of what we see in Libya, Syria, Iran and Iraq ought to terrify anyone who thinks about the future. She has never shown good judgement, so why should she start now. Trump described American policy as “stupid”. It must have resonated with many across his constituency when he said it during the second debate. And stupid is really only the mildest term he might have chosen.
Not to mention open borders. Hillary’s patent lie that when she was talking about open borders in her secret speech in Brazil she meant electricity is also such irritating stupidity that it is a wonder anyone can even pretend to believe a word. But what is more of a wonder is that those who support her are not personally terrified about open borders and what it will do to their country and their own individual way of life. Nothing stands still, but the changes that her presidency would bring will have the equivalent effect on just about everything that Obamacare has had on the health system. With Hillary it is all down hill from here. At least with Trump there remains hope. Not necessarily a lot, but at least some.
The economic triad of rule of law, property rights, and sound money — which counter the nemeses of cronyism, interventionism, and redistribution — regained currency in the 1980s as supply-side economics and became indelibly known as the miracle of Reaganomics (and, in Britain, as Thatcherism).
Partisanship stand in your way? Dispel it through its nineteenth-century nomenclature, “the law of markets,” that reached its explicatory apogee in political economists J.B. Say and J.S. Mill. Exchange means exchange was its ethos and the inexhaustibility of demand its engine; rebutting with finality and prescience the latter-day Keynesian fallacy of demand deficiency, which served only as cover for political intrigue and aggrandizement under the guise of eliminating poverty.
Economic growth is the route to eliminating deficits and debt, the route to employment and prosperity (and immigration reform). Any other path is the wrong one and, unlike Hillary Clinton’s pledge not to grow the debt, no laughing matter.
There are many forms of insanity but political forms are the worst and largely incurable. If you are able to believe that she really can lower taxes, increase benefits, create more jobs and raise living standards all at the same time, then you are as politically deluded as it is possible to be.
“Both Candidates are equally terrible!” bleats the anguished cry.
Oh yeah?
Really?
Let’s just examine that carefully for a moment, shall we? Hrmm.
You are encouraged to read this one right through, and if you go to the link you will read it through. But let me first provide a sample of what you will find.
One Candidate is an unindicted career political criminal with a verifiable record of political and personal corruption and illicit activity stretching back more than a decade before her ascendance to her first major political position by virtue of marriage of convenience to an even more charismatic and electable political criminal.
The other Candidate is a multi-decades long figure who’s been in the world wide media and public scrutiny for longer than some hostile media figures have been out of diapers about whom the worst that has been dug up and exposed is that he’s filed for bankruptcy a couple of times and that he once said “pussy” in a taped conversation. Oh, and he has tiny, vulgar hands, too. So there.
Donald Trump’s rallies have never been the friendliest places for reporters. But lately, as Trump has come under increasing fire, an unwelcoming atmosphere for the press has turned into outright hostility.
Reporters who cover Trump on the campaign trail say his supporters have become more surly and abusive in the past week, egged on by a candidate who has made demonizing journalists part of his stump speech.
Trump’s traveling press contingent of about 20 has been met with boos, shouts and obscenities as it entered — as a single group — the venues where Trump has spoken this week. One reporter who is part of the traveling group described it as “a mob mentality,” particularly at larger rally sites.
“We’ve been on the receiving end of that throughout the election, so we’ve largely become numb to it,” he said. “But in the last few days it’s just been so much louder, so much angrier. The people who are shouting look at us like we’re their immediate enemies, not as like . . . primarily late-20-to-early-30-somethings there to do a job.”
And if the job happens to be to do everything they can to see Hillary elected, that is no one else’s business but their own. The story is that the crowd boos and shouts at the press. But if the media becomes a player, this is not exactly unexpected? So far as the story goes, not so much as a tomato has made its way towards any of them. Meanwhile:
The most liked comment on the story reads: “Trump’s supporters are making Hillary’s case that they are in fact deplorable. Right along with Trump.” Completely oblivious to everything around them and to their own natures. They have been complicit in the ruining of America.
It only occurred to me in writing the heading that HRC are also the initials for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Unbelievably appropriate, but in this case we are dealing with the Human Rights Commission. It’s an obscure title – Complications and Curating – so let’s get to the point:
One of the reasons I’m in favor of Hillary Clinton being decisively defeated next month is because a Democrat victory, bolstered by a five-four (or six-three, or seven-two) majority on the Supreme Court, will be disastrous for free speech in the United States. President Obama has just declared that the “wild wild west” of the Internet has to be “rebuilt” to “flow” through “some sort of curating function” – because apparently the ever less subtle filtering of Big Social (the Twitter and Facebook monopolies, the Standard Oil of our time) are no longer enough. What’s next? As I had cause to remind the Democrats during my Senate testimony, too many prominent members of their party are already wholesale enthusiasts for the criminalization of dissent – a position that renders politics both irrelevant and impossible. Think of the most repressive safe-spaced college campus in America: that’s where the whole country’s headed.
And some advice on how The Australian should run its case:
The likes of Commissar Soutphommasane are not interested in a debate with you; they’re interested in eliminating you from the debate, banishing you from public discourse, and shriveling that discourse to the ever tighter bounds of a state ideology. I hope Bill Leak and The Australian fight this outrageous system not through narrow lawyerly arguments but out in the open – shining a bright cleansing sunlight on an ugly regime that cannot withstand exposure to the light of day.
Fascism and state socialism are not two sides of the same coin, they are the same coin on both sides. They pretend to be about equality and economic justice but it is essentially about achieving power and grinding opposition into the dust. Free speech is all you have to keep you safe and when it’s gone, so is pretty much everything else.
A sort of amusing post where a group of students struggle to find a single accomplishment that would qualify Hillary for president. That’s a neutral way to put what is the actual point found here on The Clinton Record which is a series of disasters of such gigantic proportions that you have to wonder about the sanity of those who support her. You can read through the article to refresh your memory but these are the headings that are in themselves almost all you need to know. As you can imagine, a long article.
Clinton’s Private Email Server & the Espionage Act
The Clinton Foundation Scandals
Clinton’s Support for the Iran Nuclear Deal
Clinton Helps Russia Gain Control of 20% of All U.S. Uranium
The Benghazi Debacle, and Clinton’s Role in Arming Jihadists in Libya and Syria
The Radical Islamist Affiliations of Clinton’s Closest Aide
The Deadly Consequences of Clinton’s Absurd Fictions About Islam & Terrorism
Clinton’s Role in the Rise of ISIS and the Stratospheric Growth of Worldwide Terrorism
Clinton’s Role in Squandering America’s Victory in the Iraq War
Clinton’s Horrible Judgment Regarding Another Terrorist Enemy
Clinton’s Empty Talk Regarding Russia and China
Clinton’s Reprehensible Treatment of Israel
Clinton Turns Libya into a Terrorist Hell Hole
Clinton’s Plan to Import 65,000 Syrian Refugees into the U.S. As Quickly As Possible
Immigration: Clinton Explicitly Favors Amnesty, Sanctuary Cities, and “Open Borders”
Clinton’s Opposition to Gun Rights
Clinton’s Plans to Expand Obamacare into a Government-Run, Single-Payer System
Rejecting School Vouchers for Poor Minority Children in Failing Urban Schools
“Criminal Justice Reform”: Going Soft on Crime, and Filling America’s Graveyards
Fighting Voter ID Laws As “Racist” Schemes to Disenfranchise Minorities
Clinton’s Affiliation with Al Sharpton & Black Lives Matter
Clinton’s View of the Supreme Court and Its Purpose
Clinton Supports Partial-Birth Abortion
Clinton’s Personal Persecution of a Young Rape Victim
The conclusion:
In the final analysis, Hillary Clinton is a woman with a mindset that is totalitarian in every respect. To make matters worse, she is a lying, deceiving, manipulative, self-absorbed criminal without a shred of personal virtue. Truly it can be said that never before in American history has anyone so unfit and so undeserving, run for president. Never.
And all this before we get to her misjudgements about markets and the economy. We are back to mediaeval forms of governance with a baronial class and the rest of us a peasantry who had better learn to mind our betters.
That anyone thinks of Hillary Clinton as presidential is the genuinely most astonishing outcome of the American election. She can only be viable if the problems that beset the United States are invisible to the majority of the people who will be voting. She offers no solutions to any existing problems, she has failed to deal with every major political issue she has ever faced, and she has no policies that would in any way address any of the issues that are confronting the United States and the Western world.
Victor Davis Hanson has written another piece trying to alert others to the catastrophic future that lies right before us if Hillary is elected. I am now astonished at the meme that has developed about how awful the two candidates are, as if one is as bad as the other. That is a Democrat talking point that is aimed at those who might vote Republican. Why bother? Trump is just as bad as her, so what’s the difference? Might as well vote for Hillary.
All I can say is that if you don’t know what difference it will make, you are about as dumb as any of the people described by Hanson, who are our predecessors from the past. His article is titled, America’s civilizational paralysis. Here’s the analogy – this is us:
Given the hardship and sacrifice that would have been required to change the late Byzantine mindset, most residents of Constantinople plodded on to their rendezvous with oblivion in 1453.
It is, to mix metaphors, step by step until we are over the waterfall. He is filled with a kind of weariness about our collective attitudes that will be our doom.
Under the Obama administration, the old postwar order led by the security guarantees of the United States abruptly ended—the vacuum filled by ascendant regional (and often nuclear) hegemons. Russia is expanding control, or at least influence, over the old Soviet republics and Eastern Europe. China carves out a new version of the old Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere at the expense of the democracies in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. Iran is on the path to be the nuclear adjudicator of the Persian Gulf’s oil depot. Radical Islamic terrorism has made the Middle East a wasteland.
America’s “lead from behind” abdication is variously explained by financial weakness, anti-imperial politics, or simply exhaustion. But the result is not so ambiguous: to restore deterrence as it existed before 2009 could be in the short-term as hazardous and costly as the long-term consequences of appeasement are fatal.
What would once have been seen as radical neglect of our existential problems is now the normal way of getting by one more day. What destroys civilizations are not, as popularly advertised, plagues, global warming, or hostile tribes on the horizon, as much as self-indulgence, self-delusion—and, finally, abject paralysis.
But here is David Gelernter with the now typical Republican, pass the smelling salts and vote for Trump. How pathetic this is:
I’ll vote for Mr. Trump—grimly. But there is no alternative, no shadow of a responsible alternative.
Mr. Trump’s candidacy is a message from the voters. He is the empty gin bottle they have chosen to toss through the window.
Are there no positive reasons to vote for Trump? Is there nothing in his policies or ambitions that overlap with the kinds of things you want? He mentions Trump’s stand on open borders and migration as if it’s just a fluke that he was the only candidate who wishes to do something. So in the end, this is what he writes:
There is only one way to take part in protecting this nation from Hillary Clinton, and that is to vote for Donald Trump. A vote for anyone else or for no one might be an honest, admirable gesture in principle, but we don’t need conscientious objectors in this war for the country’s international standing and hence for the safety of the world and the American way of life. It’s too bad one has to vote for Mr. Trump. It will be an unhappy moment at best. Some people will feel dirty, or pained, or outright disgraced.
But when all is said and done, it’s no big deal of a sacrifice for your country. I can think of bigger ones.
It’s better than saying it will make no difference, but only by a bit.
Let me begin with this quote from Tel in the comments on my previous post which was on the just published interview with me on Say’s Law. Tel begins with a quote from my post and then discusses the difficulty in dealing with savings in the form of money versus savings in the form of resources:
Say’s Law remains the single most important principle in all of economics.
Only because Keynesians need to insist they have disproven Say’s Law in order to perpetrate their price manipulation and power grab.
The problem being that there are methods to confuse a lot of people for a limited time, and give a convincing illusion that Say’s Law no longer applies. How long this illusion can be extended is questionable, but with sufficient power behind it, seems like quite a while.
That’s why I prefer the explanation, “Money is a veil over barter” which is easier to understand and contains within it the concept of two layers: the barter layer where every good or service exchanges for another good or service, plus the money layer which attaches prices to these things and (just like any “veil”) also hides something. Say’s Law in it’s pure sense applies to a barter economy and when all we have is a barter economy it becomes so obvious and irrefutable that it seems barely worth a mention. Once the veil is in place it’s possible to lose track of what’s happening underneath.
Say’s Law does, of course, apply to an economy in which money is the medium of exchange, a store of value and the unit of account. If it didn’t, there would be no point in mentioning it at all. And by coincidence, on the same day that Man and the Economy published my article on Say’s Law, Quadrant has published online my article on money and the real economy: That’s the Way the Money Goes. There is a lot in the article – it’s 4500 words long – but this is the core issue:
At the centre of a proper understanding of rates of interest is the recognition that when someone is looking to invest, what they borrow is money but what they are actually seeking are capital assets, labour time and other forms of input such as electricity and transport. There was therefore a dual focus [in pre-Keynesian economic theory] that was essential to make sense of what actually went on. One had to absolutely keep an eye on the market for money and credit, and at the same time to be completely mindful of the supply of real resources available for productive investment.
Money is more than a veil, of course. Things do not go on just as if it were all perfectly visible. The existence of money causes massive misdirection and distortions in the structure of production. You can barely make sense of anything unless you understand the role of money, but you also cannot understand the way money distorts economic reality unless you also understand Say’s Law which explains the nature of the actual reality the existence of money distorts.
Law of Markets 