Big Government

Government is Failing. At Everything.

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Today, Daniel Henninger has a pretty good column on Brexit.

The Wall Street Journal is not exactly on board with the “Leave” vote or certainly with Trump but this is pretty good.

The vote by the people of the United Kingdom to separate from the European Union was actually Brexit the Sequel. The first Brexit vote took place 35 years ago in the United States, with the election of Ronald Reagan, who carried 44 states.

Reagan, in his first inaugural address in 1981, could not have been more explicit about what his election stood for: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Brexit is shorthand for “government is the problem.”

Liberal intellectuals have mocked Reagan for reducing his theory of government to a bumper sticker. But he elaborated on the idea with words that would have fit in the Founders’ debates:

“We have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”

Reagan is being misrepresented by a lot of Republicans these days. They don’t remember what a radical he was in GOP eyes back in 1976. I do.

Why even George Will thought he was too radical in 1976.

In a November 12, 1974 column appearing in the Washington Post on a potential 1976 challenge by Reagan to incumbent Establishment GOP President Gerald Ford, (titled “Ronald Reagan, the GOP and ’76”), Will wrote of Reagan: “But Reagan is 63 and looks it. His hair is still remarkably free of gray. But around the mouth and neck he looks like an old man. He’s never demonstrated substantial national appeal, his hard core support today consists primarily of the kamikaze conservatives who thought the 1964 Goldwater campaign was jolly fun. And there’s a reason to doubt that Reagan is well suited to appeal to the electorate that just produced a Democratic landslide. If a Reagan third party would just lead the ‘Nixon was lynched’ crowd away from the Republican Party and into outer darkness where there is a wailing and gnashing of teeth, it might be at worst a mixed course for the Republican Party. It would cost the party some support, but it would make the party seem cleansed.”

Will certainly has a way with words. The Administrative State has come to the end of its usefulness, if it ever had any.

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Seth Barrett Tillman: Reflections on the Revolution in the UK: Parts 3 and 4

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Part 3: Farage’s Poster Is Racist:

Farage was called a racist (and worse [1 minute mark]) for this poster.
 
Yet, no one claims this photograph was a fake, i.e., a staged photograph made with actors and props. No one claims that it was photoshopped. No one claims that the skin tone of the people in the photograph was altered or, even, darkened. No one claims that the photograph was out of date. And no one claims that the picture is not representative of the pattern of large scale immigration coming into the European Union (here, Slovenia—an EU member state) from the Third World.
 
In other words, if you reproduce a photograph of an actual, recent event, you are a racist…

and

Part 4: Errors of the Labour Party and the Remain Camp:

A fictionalized exchange on television between any Labour candidate for MP and an audience member during the 2015 general election …
 

[. . .]
 
Labour Candidate for Parliament: I understand. New immigrants—frequently coming without skills that fit the modern U.K. economy—cause wage compression at the low end of the wage scale. We will make sure employers pay the minimum wage; we will ensure that your economic interests are protected.
 
Audience Member: No, that’s not my point (at least, that’s not my only point). I don’t like how our society is being changed by mass immigration. I don’t like polygamy. It is illegal, but no one gets prosecuted for it. I don’t like FGM. It too is illegal, but it is not actively prosecuted. I don’t like it when the immigrants’ customs are accommodated in these ways—I don’t want our criminal laws ignored by the immigrants or by the police and the prosecutors. It makes me feel unsafe—it makes me think the immigrants’ way of life is preferred over ours. The immigrants should be integrated into our communities, not the other way around.
 
Labour Candidate for Parliament: I understand. We will work to ensure that your wages are not compressed.
 
Audience Member: You’re not listening. That’s not what I said: I don’t like the direction your party’s immigration policies under Blair & Brown have taken our country. I don’t like where we are now as a result—not that Cameron has done anything to modify those policies.
 
[. . .]

Read the whole series.

Worthwhile Reading

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No aesthetically-appealing photos or amusing stories today, I’m afraid, just some very serious links and excerpts.

The rockets of Hezbollah.  I knew they had accumulated considerable weaponry, but didn’t know it was this bad.

Men, women, Christianity, and Islam

Kevin Williamson on  preventing jihadist violence

The impact of Islamic fundamentalism on free speech

James Schall of Georgetown University on Orlando in hindsight:

The Orlando killer was not alone. He was a true believer and other believers in the mission of Islam inspire him. Neither he nor any of his predecessors or future companions are to be explained by psychology, economics, or sociology. They are to be explained by taking their word for what they are doing. If the President of the United States or the British Prime Minister, the media, the professors, the clerics, cannot or will not understand this reality, we cannot blame ISIS and its friends. They are also realists who understand where ideas and reality meet, sometimes on a battlefield in Iraq, sometimes in a night club in Orlando.

The Democrats as the American Totalist Party

Football player Herschel Walker reports that he has had speaking engagements canceled because of his support for Donald Trump.   Which is exactly the kind of action one would expect from members of a Totalist party.

Shortly before the Brexit vote, writer Frederick Forsyth wrote about the basic character of the EU:  Government by deception:

You have repeatedly been told this issue is all about economics. That is the conman’s traditional distraction. This issue is about our governmental system, parliamentary. Democracy versus non-elective bureaucracy utterly dedicated to the eventual Superstate.

Our democracy was not presented last week on a plate. It took centuries of struggle to create and from 1940 to 1945 terrible sacrifices to defend and preserve.  

It was bequeathed to us by giants, it has been signed away by midgets.

Now we have a chance, one last, foolishly offered chance to tell those fat cats who so look down upon the rest of us: yes, there will be some costs but we want it back.

A former ‘big proponent’ of the EU has this to say:

To be fair, the EU’s main problem has always been its troubled relationship with democracy…This contempt for the will of the people might still be perceived as tolerable if the leaders otherwise seemed sensible but now that someone as bad as Merkel calls the shots in EU, we’re reminded of just why having perpetual democratic safeguards is so important…the EU’s contempt for European voters and its current attempts to shut down dissenting voices bodes ill for its ability to course-correct on its own. If the EU is to be saved, it first needs to be humbled, nay, outright humiliated in such a manner that no-one can doubt that recent developments can’t be allowed to continue.

John Hussman   of Hussman Funds looks at Brexit from an economic and investing perspective:  Brexit and the bubble in search of a pin.  He quotes his own post from last month:

My impression is that the best way to understand the next stage of the current market cycle is to recognize the difference between observed conditions and latent risks. This distinction will be most helpful before, not after, the S&P 500 drops hundreds of points in a handful of sessions. That essentially describes how a coordinated attempt by trend-followers to exit this steeply overvalued market could unfold, since value-conscious investors may have little interest in absorbing those shares at nearby prices, and in equilibrium, every seller requires a buyer.

Imagine the error of skating on thin ice and plunging through. While we might examine the hole in the ice in hindsight, and find some particular fracture that contributed to the collapse, this is much like looking for the particular pebble of sand that triggers an avalanche, or the specific vibration that triggers an earthquake. In each case, the collapse actually reflects the expression of sub-surface conditions that were already in place long before the collapse – the realization of previously latent risks.

The Preference Cascade is Building.

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Brexit

The Brexit vote in Britain has rocked the country with elites and immigrants most affected.

The vote to “Remain” was a majority in Scotland, Northern Ireland and in London and several other large cities with large “immigrant” populations.

Protesters are planning to march to London’s Shard building to demonstrate against the ‘racist’ and anti-migrant rhetoric of the EU Referendum campaign.

The march, announced in a Facebook post by the Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century, was due travel from a park in Whitechapel to the headquarters of New Corporation next to the Shard at 6pm.

All is proceeding as expected.

The decision has prompted a large market selloff, which will probably persist until the effects are better understood. Those campaigning to “Remain” have used various threats and predictions of doom, so the immediate result is not unexpected. Of course, the political left is hysterical at the idea that voters don’t want to be governed by remote elites.

On Thursday British voters willfully walked off a cliff when they decided to leave the European Union. The “Brexit” victory is a defeat for Britain, Europe and the global economy.

Tens of millions of Britons voted for isolation — to go it alone — rather than for cooperation. The European Union just lost a sixth of its economy, roughly akin to Florida and California seceding from the United States. The impact on the British economy could be catastrophic. Europe’s unified stance against a reemerging and aggressive Russia will be splintered.

Who could imagine that people would not want a thousand bureaucrats in Brussels, or for that matter Washington DC, micromanaging their lives ? Well, I know someone.

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Brexit, Predictions and Trump

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The bookies, until the votes were being counted, were showing greater than 2:1 odds against Brexit in yesterday’s referendum. The subsequent Brexit victory appears to confirm the hypothesis that many Brits were lying to pollsters.

The bookies are showing odds of around 3:1 against a Trump victory in our presidential election. Arguing predictions is a fool’s game, but it may be that our election polls are wrong for the same reason as the Brexit polls apparently were. The Democrats and their media allies have demonized Trump as a racist and misogynist, and it seems likely that many people who intend to vote for him aren’t admitting it. We’ll know soon enough.