The Republican Party Needs a New Core

The Republican party, so strong in its unity that it defeated more numerous Democratic foes, even while saddled with an inferior candidate, has now crumbled into its respective factions. It is the price both of failure and of choosing a leader that did not represent the center of their ideology. By electing Neocons, they tried to appeal to the center of the populace as a whole, to make a new base of the centrists and undecideds; a notoriously wishy-washy group with no sense of loyalty. I found the above video at the always interesting Osterley Times. This kid is one smooth talker. If McCain had chosen Jonathan Krohn instead of Sarah Palin, he might have given Obama a run for his money. It certainly would have put to rest questions of the ticket being too old. The party needs to find its core and rally around it. So who is that base? The kid seems to have nailed it.

The Neocons have failed. They were too far left with their bitter Hillary supporters, military industrialites, and Toyota Republicans.

The people aren’t yet ready for the more Libertarian wing. We methodological individualists and Ron Paul supporters won’t come into power until both major parties crumble simultaneously.

I see the real Republican center as being the Paleocons. Those rabid nationalists with their eyes distant on brighter days, stars and stripes flapping in the wind, when waitresses wore roller skates, and Mexican labor was done in Mexico. They have the kind of intoxicating vision that pulls the center, and the desire for small government that appeals to the more Libertarian minded. How did they lose? The military industrial complex doesn’t like their distaste for foreign wars.

A Good Primer on the Causes of the Economic Crisis

This is one of the most understandable and least biased explanations I’ve seen for the economic collapse.

I have a couple of minor criticisms of it:

The holders of sub-prime mortgages are portrayed as fat, cigarette smoking welfare parents who just buy the biggest house they can see and predictably fail to pay for it. I’m of the opinion that most of the defaults were not on the primary residences of the poor, but on those individuals who were trying to leverage their own moderate wealth into bigger payouts by buying several homes. The failures came when the credit crackdown prevented them from being able to sell it for enough money to meet their obligations. Those sub-primes which were on primary residences were fought for tooth and nail, because those families didn’t just stand to lose their credit rating, they stood to lose their homes and dreams for the future. In their position I would take on several roommates before letting them take my home.

In one part of the video, *POOF* all the money disappears. Wealth doesn’t just disappear. It either went somewhere else, or in this case, wasn’t actual wealth, but rather was the expectation of returns everyone had on their over leveraged investments. The illusion that what they were holding was owned by them, even though it was not yet payed for.

The Rule of Rules

In this TED Talk, Barry Schwartz speaks on a society gone over the edge with regulations, and the ethical nature of autonomy.

It is easy to fall into the habit of seeing the populace as a conglomerate of ignorant sheep, and there is some truth to it. As a group we consistently make poor decisions, but the group is made up of individuals. They have their failings, but most of them get up every morning and go to work. When faced with decisions in their daily lives, they tend to make good ones.  They share your outrage over the state of the system. It isn’t until they are corralled and herded through all the little reverberating insurance policies against litigation that most of their decisions tend to be bad ones. We haven’t added rules over the years because people have become less upstanding, people have become less upstanding because society has increasingly suppressed their spirit of ingenuity and  drive with devices designed to take all of the rewards in order to ensure that no risks are taken. We now reap what we have sown. Fear of innovation. Bloated government, a litigious populace, listless children, high taxes, and low-flow toilets.

Dirty Politcs by the Obama Administration?

In this interview Ron Paul talks a bit about the stimulus bill, and the process by which it was introduced. Ron Paul is an honest guy, so I’ll take him at his word until I see strong evidence otherwise. Obama made a campaign promise to publish all legislation five days ahead of time to allow congress and the public to peruse it. He didn’t do this for the stimulus. It could be argued that the stimulus is an emergency measure and should be exempt, but he also didn’t do this for children’s health insurance, which was hardly an emergency since it doesn’t kick in until mid-year. But this was more than a simple broken campaign promise; according to Ron Paul, the bill wasn’t revealed until the midnight before the vote, and was 1,000 pages. This was made worse by making only five hard copies available, which seems to me to be a clear tactic to prevent the opposition from being able to work together to get it read and discussed before the vote. Lets get this info out to the public at large. I want to see either a denial, an explanation, or a loss of credibility over of this one. If it is true, it is disappointing.

God, Trust, and Money

I’ve always been irritated with the ‘In God we trust” on our currency. Getting past the obvious hypocrisy and camels and eyes of needles, I felt like it was another attempt by religion to infiltrate governance. Niall Ferguson has changed my thoughts on the matter. In this clip on the Colbert Report, he explains the concepts of currency and  money in a fiat system.

This got me thinking and I did a little research:

In 1862, due to the Civil War, paper money was issued without the backing of precious metals.

In God We Trust first appeared on our currency in 1864.

Coincidence? I think not. God was not put on the currency to make people who have money believe in God, it was put there to make those who have God believe in the value of worthless paper; to give it the divine aura of trustworthiness. We didn’t need to trust God before fiat currency, we could trust silver and gold. No one was going to trust government, so the big G lent a hand.

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