Trump

More on where Trump came from.

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There is increasing panic among the GOPe about the possibility that Trump could win the nomination. The “Anyone But Trump” fixation is obsessing the usual suspects.

Megan McArdle: As I see it, there are basically three strategies you can follow:

Anyone but Trump: It doesn’t matter, as long as you vote against Trump. Democrats in open primary states can play, too.
Vote the leader: Pick the winner in your state, and force the nomination selection to the convention.
Attempt to generate an actual alternative front-runner by voting for the national poll leader, or the most plausible candidate — probably Marco Rubio, given that he seems to have the most support from the highest number of GOP coalitions, but possibly Ted Cruz, since he appears to be the next most appealing to Trump voters.
I’ll just start by asking: Which of these would someone follow if their main priority is to defeat Trump? Or am I thinking about it all wrong?

Sean Trende: No, I think you have it basically right. I actually think that, for now, their best chance lies behind Door No. 2.

Why are the elites so obsessed with keeping Trump away from the levers of power ? This is not limited to the USA. Germany is having its own voter revolt.

The anti-immigrant AFD – Alternative for Germany – party has scored massive gains in municipal weekend elections which reflect growing public anger at the refugee policies of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The polls for councils in the state of Hesse saw the AFD make significant inroads on the two main established parties – Merkel’s conservative CDU and the centre-left SPD – to come in third with 13.2 percent of the vote, knocking the environmental Greens into fourth place.
Frankfurt CDU politician Markus Frank said: ‘The preliminary result of the AfD is frightening. I had expected a maximum five percent.’

Where does this voter anger come from ?

Maybe it is one manifestation of the Principle Agent Problem.

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The Romney Speech

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romney

I did not watch Romney’s speech attacking Trump but have seen short excerpts and comments about it. I think it was a catastrophic mistake by Romney and has ended any future he might have in the GOP. Had he stayed neutral, with perhaps some comments about what is important in a Republican president, his role might be intact. But nobody, especially Mitt, can out insult Trump. It was a foolish lapse of judgement.

I read a blog every day written by a retired Foreign Service Officer, who calls it Diplomad 2.0, and it has commenters from other diplomatic services. His reaction to Romney’s speech is interesting.

I like Romney. I think him a decent man, and one who would have been a very good president. Our country and the West would be in much better shape today if Romney had won in 2012. I had a very minor role on Romney’s foreign policy team and did my best from my lowly position to get the campaign to sharpen its message on foreign affairs, especially on Benghazi–to no avail.

What follows is revealing in the explanation for Romney’s failure as a candidate.

His campaign was dominated by “the oh-so-clever-ones” who think things to death, and analyze until they paralyze. The papers we sent up to Romney were wordy “on the one hand, but on the other hand” expositions of little to no use in a campaign. They read like something written for a transition team, not a campaign team. It was impossible to get Romney’s main handlers to recommend that he go after Obama and Clinton hard on Benghazi and the rest of the misadministration’s foreign policy disasters. They thought that was “too politicizing” and “unbecoming.” Well, what happened, happened.

Romney now comes out and attacks the probably GOP nominee in terms he would never have used on Obama and probably Hillary.

The result ?

The punchline. I had been sitting uncomfortably on the fence re the GOP candidates. After listening to the Romney speech and the other “establishment” types, and hearing the anchor pundits, the pundit anchors, and all the other assorted wise ones, I have jumped off the fence. I have landed in Trump’s farm. He is not perfect, far from it. I might even change my mind, but for now I support Trump.

I don’t know if Trump will be terrible; I do know that what we have right now is horrible beyond words. I can’t bear the thought of a Hillary presidency.

I kind of feel the same way. Trump’s weakest point is foreign policy and here is a guy with years of experience all over the world, who thinks he is better than Hillary and might be OK.

On This Texas Independence Day

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What I’m feeling for the GOP is a kind of disinterested sympathy, punctuated with schadenfreude, the disinterest arising from never having been a Republican, the sympathy from the GOP identification of a plurality of my close friends – uniformly horrified by what is happening – and the schadenfreude from the abrupt collapse of three-plus decades of pharisaical social conservatism. Turns out that eventually enough of the electorate whose resentment you’ve been stoking figures out that it’s a waste of time and fastens on to something else, something that matches their actual resentments a lot more closely.

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Macroeconomic Fallacies, Fed Chairman Bernanke’s Delusions and the Rise of Donald Trump

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The G20 leaders recently called upon the leaders of the developed nations to employ more massive amounts of debt financed government spending to ward off the current economic stagnation and in some instances the early stages of recession. That fits Einstein’s definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result”. The pursuit of so-called “macroeconomic (fiscal and monetary) policies” has produced a quarter century of economic stagnation in Japan, a $30 trillion debt bubble in China with little to show, and stagnation and looming recession in Europe and increasingly in the US.

Einstein was a genius who remains relevant today. Just within the last few weeks evidence was reported of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein almost a century ago. Proving Einstein’s theories has been the focus of physics during the past century, but he maintained that had he been able to get an academic appointment instead of a position at the Swiss patent office he never would have been able to develop and publish his new path-breaking theories.

In his recently released biography The Courage to Act (2015), former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke describes how, initially failing physics, he turned to macroeconomics as an outlet for his mathematical skills. This was auspicious. In physics, when your equations don’t fit the reality it is the equations that must be changed unless there is new evidence to change the understanding of reality. Einstein’s biggest error was rather than waiting for better data when his equations predicted an expanding universe, he fudged the equation (introducing the Max Planck constant) to fit the current understanding of a stagnant universe, then disagreed for most of his lifetime with the next generation of quantum physicists who proved he had gotten it right in the first place. Einstein’s one mistake is the modus operandi of modern macroeconomists.

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