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.

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.

The Nature of the Global Free Market

The significance of the global free market has been vastly underestimated in our efforts to influence our economic outlook. So much of the rest of the world is tied in with the United States in such a way that if we fail, they fail. Everyone has been forced by the extremely competitive nature of trade economics to run their country right at the edges of feasibility. This is great for progress, but it also comes with a risk of more complete failure. It is something of a synonym for our own individual or national credit-investment lifestyles.

As the economic video on a previous post humorously pointed out, in our fiat based monetary system, nations measure their currency not by any fungible commodity, but by relation to other currency. Lets take this to its logical conclusion:

• We incur a large deficit.
• We print a lot of dollars in the hope of decreasing the relative cost of our goods and value of our debts
• This causes the same sort of economic instability in other nations that caused our problems.
• Those nations print money in order to decrease the relative cost of their goods and debts.
• We end up right where we started.

What this proves is that even in a fiat, regulated, socialist heavy world, the free market is still running the show. You can push the numbers around, but in the end, what really matters is whether you produce a desirable product and sell it at a reasonable value.

I found another example of this thought in an odd cooking website, of all places. The Big Mac Index  is a method of measuring the purchasing power parity of various currencies by comparing the price of a Big Mac in each country. My immediate thought was Japan; land of the hundred dollar melon. Strangely enough, Japan wasn’t near the top of the list for cost of a Big Mac (about 280 yen or $2.62). This is because things like the purchasing power of your currency, and the number of zeroes attached aren’t the only important factors. In the U.S. it takes abut 13 minutes for the average citizen to earn enough money for a Big Mac, in Japan, only 10.

As I once learned from a business administration lecture, a man by the name of Deming revolutionized the industrial strategy of Japan after WWII. He put their focus on quality at a time when other nations were putting theirs on quantity. This is how they manage to live on a small island and be one of the best producers of high tech goods in the world, with a thriving economy. People buy their goods, not because they are cheap, but because they are too high tech to be produced in most other nations.

Rather than trying to compete with the cheap labor of China, Mexico, India, and Brazil, we should be competing with Japan for the products of tomorrow. This is the path to progress and prosperity. Adjusting interest rates and printing money is nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Update: I found a great post on the subject here: The U.S. Can’t Unilaterally Inflate

Ron Paul on Gaza and the U.S. Economy

 

I’ve been pretty quiet about the conflicts around Israel. I don’t really want to get bogged down at the moment in a discussion that always ends up invoking Godwin’s law. I will go so far right now as to say that I agree with Ron Paul on the matter. He seems to be claiming that the U.S. knew weeks in advance that the attack was going to begin. I’m not surprised in a general sense if this is true, but I always figured if the whole of congress knew, it would have been leaked early.

He is right to be more worried about inflation than deflation. Deflation may be the current issue, and if nothing is done about that, we are likely in for a long drawn out recession, but the things they have set in motion will end up causing hyper-inflation in the end. I don’t mean to make deflation seem like a lesser threat; the problem is, deflation is a lot easier to counter than inflation, just print money. We have already printed more than enough to fix the problem, but the government and banks are still keeping it out of circulation. Sooner or later they will have pulled all the strings they can pull and then we will be at the mercy of what is left of the global free market. At that point, deflation won’t be the worry.

I found the video via The Osterley Times. They are a self described left wing blog, whatever that even means any more. The site focuses heavily on very current events, providing relevant commentary and video. If they can find common ground with Ron Paul, they are Ok by me.

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