It is a complete mystery. Why are there votes in allowing anyone who wants to show up to enter your nation state and just stay there while claiming every welfare benefit available to the population that finances them? Explain this to me if you can: OFFICIAL: DEMS ‘REFUSED’ TO EVEN LISTEN TO BORDER SECURITY BRIEFING AT WHITE HOUSE.
Democratic lawmakers brought a border security briefing at the White House to a screeching halt Wednesday, refusing to even listen to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, a White House official tells The Daily Caller.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy echoed this version of events to reporters outside the White House immediately after the briefing, saying, “Once the secretary started, Schumer interrupted her and didn’t want to hear it.”
Republican and Democratic lawmakers after the meeting indicated little progress was made toward ending the partial government shutdown and that they agreed to reconvene Friday. The White House official says there was a consensus in the room that negotiations would be put on hold until Pelosi officially assumed her expected role of Speaker. (Related: Trump Refuses To Budge in Shutdown Demand: ‘As Long As It Takes’)
The White House official told TheDC that both Pelosi and Schumer refused to hear out Nielsen’s briefing and instead advocated for two solutions to end the government shutdown. Neither of the Democratic options would provide the additional funding for border security requested by The White House.
Why is this not the winning hand?
Trump on Democrats saying the wall is immoral: "Well then you got to do something about the Vatican, because the Vatican has the biggest wall of them all. The wall is immoral? Look at all of the countries that have walls, and they work 100%. It’s never going to change." pic.twitter.com/6Fgem53WJI
The papers from the History of Economics section at the US Conference of Economists during the session on “Keynesianism: Its Rise, Fall, and Transformation in Europe and North America”. So long as Y=C+I+G is central to how macro is taught at all levels of study, the notion that there has been any kind of a fall is ludicrous. No economists taught Keynesian macro ever finds their way to understanding how an economy actually works. These were the papers presented.
According to Pierre Rosanvallon (1987), Keynesianism arrived very late in France but its triumph was complete. It offered a common language to a very large group of senior officers and engineers working in public administration and nationalized firms. It reconciled the French tradition of Colbertism with the necessity of a modern State. Richard Arena (2000) insists also on the fact that Keynesian ideas spread in a hostile context and initially outside universities and academia where typically French economic traditions dominated. The situation in universities started to change in the 1970s and 1980s when curricula in French universities began to incorporate macroeconomic courses based on IS-LM and with the development of disequilibrium economics. The paper retraces the unfolding of this historical process and insists on the variety of heterodox interpretations of Keynes that flourished in the French context like the works of Bernard Schmitt and the circuitists.
Keynes had been a central point of reference in debates on economic theory and policy in Germany ever since his Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), as, e.g., in the controversial debates on the wage-employment relationship at the end of the Weimar Republic. No wonder that the first foreign-language translation of the General Theory was published in German. With the great resonance Keynes had in Germany in the interwar period it is no surprise that from the early 1950s onwards neoclassical synthesis Keynesianism became the dominant approach at West German universities. More astonishing is the fact that with Erich Schneider at Kiel, a former student of Schumpeter played a key role in this process. In economic policy, however, Keynesianism gained a rather late entry in the recession of 1967 and only lasted until 1974-75.
Keynesianism in Canada
Robert W. Dimand
Brock University
Abstract
Canada was one of the first countries to commit to a Keynesian goal of maintaining high and steady levels of employment after World War II with the 1945 White Paper. Keynes’s former students A. F. Wynne Plumptre and Robert Bryce were prominent in the Federal Government, notably the Department of Finance, in the quarter century after the war, but others, notably Mabel Timlin, author of Keynesian Economics (1942), also helped spread Keynesian ideas among Canadian economists. William A. Mackintosh, both as an academic and a wartime temporary civil servant, was a central figure, drafting the 1945 White Paper and seconding Keynes’s motion to accept the final act of the Bretton Woods conference. Bank of Canada Governor Gerald Bouey’s 1975 embrace of monetary aggregate targeting signaled the decline of Keynesian influence on Canadian public policy.
Keynesianism in the United States
Mathew Forstater
University of Missouri-Kansas City
Abstract
Two issues are at the heart of Keynesian economics in the United States, one theoretical and the other practical. The theoretical issue regards whether Keynes’s demonstration in the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money that there can be involuntary unemployment in macroeconomic equilibrium requires an assumption that wages, prices and/or interest rates are “sticky” (inflexible) downward, or some other market imperfection. The practical issue is related to the theoretical one. Keynesians have tended to be pragmatic when it comes to economic policy, preferring to use fiscal and monetary policies to pursue macro goals of full employment, price stability, and stable economic growth rather than focusing on efforts to remove the imperfections, which would permit market forces to work out the short-term Keynesian troubles. The most recent mainstream incarnation, so-called “New Keynesian” economics, has all but abandoned the important remaining economic and political legacies of the tradition.
Democrat Nancy Pelosi said Trump’s border wall is immoral and too expensive. Hearing Pelosi lecture Trump and the American people about morality is beyond repulsive.
Pelosi, her fellow Democrats and fake news media seek to prevent our side from using the word “morality” in the political arena. Any Republican and conservative who dares bring up the morality of an issue is immediately branded a religious nut, trying to force their wacko outdated values onto the public.
There is no morality on the left, only the exploitation of every possible flaw in the world as something they will fix if you give them the power. They only want the power, and never ever fix a thing. A socialist “solution” always makes things worse.
President Trump ushered in 2019 in characteristic fashion — with a tweet expressing supreme confidence in himself, contempt for the “fake news media” and optimism for the country.
The famously teetotaling commander-in-chief proved he wasn’t nursing a New Year’s hangover with the early morning missive, his second of the freshly-minted year. The first was a message praising former adviser Sebastian Gorka, who has a book out.
“Happy new year to everyone, including the haters and the fake news media!” the president tweeted. “2019 will be a fantastic year for those not suffering from Trump derangement syndrome.”
The phrase in the heading comes from Oliver Wendall Holmes Jr who described FDR as “A second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament”. In the present case, however, the intellect is as good as the temperament. A rocky year ahead, but if PDT remains optimistic, then why shouldn’t we?
Via Tim Blair under the heading, Spot the Difference.
Sharp-eyed readers may note one or two points of distinction between pre-New Year’s Eve coverage in the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald.
The Herald’s photo caption:
Keeping cool: A woman in traditional Islamic dress beats the heat at Little Bay Cove
She’s already been denied freedom of clothing and a face, and now the Herald even denies her a name. The gal’s basically a non-being. Well done, Riyadh Morning Herald.
It takes all kinds, it is said, but what exactly is “it” that all kinds are taken by?
This is how we start the year with this set of predictions form Dennis Prager: The left will make 2019 a dark year. These are not people of kindness and charity, seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. They are selfish power-hungry vermin without a trace of goodwill or human kindness. There is history enough to learn about what happens if a community is put into the hands of a Mao, Lenin or Castro, but there they line up, moronic fools, whose self-hatred and envy of others drives them into madness and their own ultimate self-destruction. This is part of what is written at the link but the whole piece is short and worth your time.
There is nothing Trump or any member of his administration has done that is comparable to Hillary Clinton’s use of her own email server while U.S. secretary of state, or her destroying tens of thousands of emails after they were subpoenaed by Congress, or foreign governments’ and corporations’ paying vast sums of money to Bill Clinton and The Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Nor is there anything Trump or anyone in his administration has done comparable to the Obama administration’s use of the IRS to suppress conservative nonprofits; its selling guns to Mexican drug cartels, at least one of which was later found at the scene where a Border Patrol officer was killed; or the lies it told about the cause of the murder of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi. Yet any suggestion by Republicans that these activities be investigated is effectively shouted down by the Democrats and the media. And let’s not talk about the real collusion in 2016 – between the FBI, the State Department, the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House, using material sourced in part from the Russian government – to undermine the Republican candidate for president and his presidency. The mainstream media aren’t interested in that.
In other words, the Democratic Party and the media will do to American political life what it has done to the arts; the universities; the high schools; the Boy Scouts; race relations; religion; the happiness of so many women (misled by feminism regarding marriage and career); the moral fabric of American life (morality reduced to feelings); late-night television; mainstream Judaism, Catholicism and Protestantism; pro football; and the sexual innocence of the young: It will poison it.
I don’t know anyone who voted for Donald Trump, or who later came to support him, because he thought the president was a candidate for sainthood.
On the contrary, people supported him, first, because of what he promised to do and, second, because of what, over the past two years, he has accomplished. These accomplishments, from rolling back the regulatory state and scores of conservative judicial appointments, from moving our Israeli embassy to Jerusalem to resuscitating our military, working to end Obamacare, and fighting to keep our borders secure, are not morally neutral data points. They are evidences of a political vision and of promises made and kept. They are, in short, evidences of what sort of character Donald Trump is.
Add them up and I think they go a long way towards a definition of good character that Donald Trump can clear.
Voltaire, writing against Rousseau and his self-intoxicated paeans to “virtue,” occupied a similar semantic neighborhood: “What is virtue, my friend?” Voltaire asked. “It is to do good: let us do it, and that’s enough. We won’t look into your motives.”
Character is not destiny. The future is not fixed. We have a right to hope.
And in this spirit, the best to you all for the New Year.
This is what German Chancellor Angela Merkel told attendants at an event by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin on Wednesday.
“In an orderly fashion of course,” Merkel went on to say. She even went so far as to condemn those in her own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party who think Germany should withdraw from the controversial UN migration pact [as Australia has done]:
“There were [politicians]who believed that they could decide when these agreements are no longer valid because they are representing The People”.
And that is what they say in public.
And then there is this from Powerline which comes under the heading: Progressives are Crazy, which is more than evident
That is a proposition for which we see overwhelming evidence on a daily basis. For today, consider these two videos of progressives gone mad.
The first features, to all appearances, a man with long hair. But he goes insane in a game store when he considers himself to be “misgendered.” My favorite moment is when he threatens to “tell the entire LGBTQ community” about the horror he has experienced. PJMedia posted the Facebook video with a headline referring to ‘roid rage, which seems right. But do men take anabolic steroids when they transition? Not that I know of. The video has been viewed more than 9 million times so far:
The second video is another instance of progressive rage, although in this case the lefty doesn’t look like a steroid user. A guy goes into a vape shop wearing a MAGA hat, and the progressive clerk refuses to serve him. The customer gets out his phone and starts filming, which sends the clerk into a liberal rage against President Trump and free enterprise:
It would be a mistake, of course, to draw conclusions from just two data points. Nevertheless, I will hazard this observation: progressives are crazy.
Not to mention climate change [aka global warming]. This via Instapundit:
“The American people have demanded action to combat the climate crisis, which threatens our public health, our economy, our national security and the whole of God’s creation. Together, we must protect public health by reducing air pollution, create jobs by making America preeminent in green technologies, defend our national security by preventing climate-driven instability and uphold our sacred moral responsibility to leave a healthy, sustainable future for generations to come.”
Nor finally can we leave out their wish to impose a socialist state on the rest of us, from Teen Vogue of all things: The Economic Crisis in Venezuela, Explained. I’m not sure it was explained, but at least it was described. But this is where they will take us if we let them.
In part their value is in having things explained from a conservative perspective and partly it is to correct the lies that are never ending in the traditional media, and given how frequent and relentless they are, seem to be deliberate. This is therefore a useful guide to where to look among American websites to balance the phenomenal media distortions: Top 50 Conservative Websites for 2018. In Oz, there are only Catallaxy and Quadrant Online unattached to media organisations.
On the American list, the top spot goes to Drudge, but in the comments at Instapudit many do notice that Drudge has moved to the dark side. A sample:
I dispute that Drudge Report is any longer a “conservative” website…if it ever was. It was always more populist/libertarian/anti-establishment than it was “conservative”. But more than that, the Drudge flavor from even a few years has clearly been subverted. Whether Drudge has changed, or, as rumor has it, he has semi-retired and essentially sold his name to another management team is unclear. What is clear is that Drudge has moved leftward. There is an arguably anti-Trump tone, sly though it may be, to the headlines and the stories linked. This is doubly surprising because Drudge in 2015 was a Trump early adopter, strongly behind his anti-Washington campaign. Something is going on, and I suspect it is the slow, leftward move of the site, incrementally, which readers, like the frog in the slowly warned pot of water, will not notice until too late. Today there seems to be less support of Trump, with more attention paid to anti-Trump articles. There is considerably less vitriol against Democrat positions in general, although the antipathy to Hillary still seems strong. This rating as a “conservative” site strikes me as a kneejerk reaction, made out of habit, without real thought and attention to what is happening there today.
The quality certainly deteriorated in the last few years, and it wasn’t updated very often, but it was still worth a daily visit. However, Drudge seemed to take a severe leftward tilt right around the time of the midterms this year. In a couple of months, he went from a daily read, to a click occasionally, to an un-bookmark for me.
Also left off the list was Ace of Spades which is the site I send people to if they want to read a hardline conservative blog. And while it is not quite a blog in the same sense as the others, there is great value in going to Steyn Online.
But with the media as consistently far left as it is, there are not many places you can go to set the record straight.
Law of Markets 