One Week Later...

It’s been a week since Sandy Hook and the facts are settling into place.  Here’s what I know so far:

• Adam Lanza, 20, murdered his mother in her sleep with her own gun.  Adam had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome but had no previous record of violence, was a good student and his mother had lavished love and attention on him.

• Adam then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where he shot his way into the building, killed six teachers and staff who tried to stop him and then systematically murdered twenty first-grade children before killing himself as police were entering the school. All the weapons and ammunition he used to commit these murders had been stolen from his mother’s house, and based on the multitude of weapons and ammo recovered at the scene, it is very likely that massacring the youngest children was only the first stage of a plan to wipe out the entire student population. 

This was an unspeakably brutal crime.  Nobody disputes that.  Murdering helpless children revolts us, as it should, and we can only imagine the horror those poor children experienced as they were gunned down by a homicidal maniac.  Their families and friends are devastated, their lives are ruined, they will probably never recover from this horrible tragedy.  It is human nature to want to do something to prevent something like this from ever happening again, but I recall the words of Rahm Emanuel, former Congressman, former Chief of Staff to Priest-King, current Mayor of Chicago and bare-knuckle politician extraordinaire: “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid,” and I instinctively put up my guard.

1) Mrs. Lanza bought, registered and used her firearms legally.  She taught her son how to handle firearms not only because it was the responsible thing to do but because it involved him in an activity they could do together.  If Adam stole her guns and killed people with them, then those are crimes for which laws already exist.

2) Adam was diagnosed with a mental illness and laws also already exist to prevent the mentally-ill from buying or owning guns.  Passing more laws will only waste more paper and criminals will ignore those laws as well as the laws already on the books.

3) If all private firearms in the country were gone tomorrow, criminals would just resort to other means to commit mass murder.  Building home-made bombs is illegal but that didn’t stop Ramzi Youssef and his co-conspirators from trying to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and it didn’t stop Timothy McVeigh from blowing up the Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.  IED’s have been employed in the thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan so if people want to build a bomb themselves and kills dozens of people with it, they can do it pretty easily.

4) Should we outlaw 3D printers?  Those devices have already been used to manufacture workable firearms that have no serial number, aren’t registered and are untraceable.  How far do we take this?

5) While it was good TV to see Priest-King wiping his eyes during his speech last week, I have to wonder exactly why he was upset.  After all, he has vigorously advanced the right to kill fetuses even after they somehow survive a botched abortion, so I guess the question hinges on when an innocent child is killed, not if.  (Two hundred babies were aborted on 14 December for every child that Adam Lanza shot, and two hundred more every day since then.)

6) Adam Lanza, like so many of these mass shooters, chose Sandy Hook Elementary School at least in part because it was a soft target.  Nobody was going to stop him.  He didn’t attack a police station or an Army base or NRA headquarters because doing so would get him killed, and he wanted to kill as many unarmed people as possible.  If he had started shooting his way into the school and the Principal had shot him with her own gun, then we’d be talking about something else today.

7) As much as the Left hates the Second Amendment, the Founding Fathers had very good reason for including it in our basic law.  They didn't want a large standing army because of their experience under British occupation; instead they wanted a small, well-trained militia to defend against foreign invasion or Indian attack.  Since the people would constitute such a militia, it was imperative that each able-bodied citizen have his own firearms and be trained in their use, and thus the people themselves would reduce the threat to liberty posed by a standing army commanded by a tyrant.  Alexander Hamilton said as much in Federalist No. 29: "...if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist."

8) Hearing the Left object to armed guards being assigned to every school puts me in a twist.  They claim that doing so would be too expensive and that it wouldn’t actually increase security, both complaints of course being total hogwash.  (Chris Christie continues to dig himself deeper and deeper as he joins forces with the liberals.  If he thinks he’s ingratiating himself with ordinary Republicans, he’s out of his mind.) They’ve got to be kidding – we borrow $108.3 billion every month so we can send welfare checks to illegals but they draw the line at really securing our schools?  Second, have they not walked through an airport in the last eleven years?  Have they not noticed the armed guards patrolling the terminal with MP-5’s and dogs?  There’s a deterrence factor there. True, there was the JFK Airport plot in June 2007 and we’ve had thugs like Richard Reid and the Underwear Bomber on Christmas Day 2009 attempt to blow up airplanes, but overall, airport security has improved, not least because would-be terrorists can see the retribution right there on the scene waiting for them: They might want to die a martyr but being chewed by a dog and then riddled with submachine gun fire ain’t the way they want to go.  What about the shooting at the U.S. Capitol in 1998? Unfortunately, two Capitol Police officers were killed but they stopped a wacko from getting inside the building and killing even more people, and then there’s the shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in 2009, where a private security guard was killed but stopped a lunatic from getting inside and doing the same thing.  (It so happened that a group of school children were touring the museum when the incident occurred.)  Armed guards have indeed prevented massacres like Sandy Hook, so why the opposition?

This all comes down to the Left having a fundamental philosophical objection to privately-owned firearms.  Rather than counter a potential threat with real, practical and effective means, they’d rather disarm everyone – everyone, that is, except the criminals. I mourn the children of Sandy Hook Elementary and I’m sorry that Adam Lanza isn’t alive to face our justice, but I’m not handing over my firearms just because Michael Bloomberg says so.  A government that fears its own people will seek to disarm them, and if our firearms are gone, with what are we left but tyranny?

Source: http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_29.html

The New Villeins

Besides savagely persecuting the Christians, Emperor Diocletian is known for decreeing that the peasant farmers who worked the land and grew the crops during his rule were legally tied to the manor – the villa rustica in Latin – or the noble who owned it.  This decree sought to remedy the decline in food production from peasants quitting the land en masse to escape disease, barbarian invasion or the aforesaid persecution, and like so many executive decisions, it had unintended consequences.  Forcing some peasant farmers to remain on the land seemed like a straightforward Roman way of fixing a problem (while ignoring the reasons why the farmers were fleeing in the first place) but it also created a new social class between freemen and slaves : the villeins.  Villeins were required to register themselves to a specific township and once registered, they could never leave it unless they were delivering a message or going to war, thus they were doomed to a lifetime of misery, filth and backbreaking labor.  Over the course of the next 1200 years, the term villain came to denote an ugly, dirty, foul-tempered scoundrel, and no wonder: With no relief from their wretched state, no hope, all their labor going to feed someone else, their only escape the sweet release of death, the villeins were only one step above the animals they tended and usually slept with.  In essence, they were slaves – serfs derives from the Latin servus, meaning slave.

As the year of our Lord 2012 comes to a close, His Serene Loftiness Barack Hussein Obama, Emperor of the Americas, Priest-King, Generalissimo and Supreme Leader of the People’s Revolution, seeks to return us to the glory days of fourth century Europe but with an interesting twist: The peasants become the lords and the lords become the peasants.  You see, socialist dogma demands that the industrial proletariat own the means of production and divide the wealth produced thereby equally, but that doesn’t mean that the proletariat can invent the means of production, secure the financing required to start it up, or take the risks and have the talent needed to keep it running – the proletariat just want to own the means and enjoy the profits as their medieval predecessors did. Conversely, the robber barons of the modern industrial age – meaning you and I – will be relegated to serfdom, chained to the estate in perpetuity, forced to plan and work and sacrifice so the proletariat can fatten themselves in their castles, so to speak.  We cannot change jobs, we cannot retrain into some other profession, we cannot retire, we certainly cannot leave.  We can only work ourselves to death for the comfort of others less able than ourselves.  We are the new villeins.

When Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, the top Federal income tax rate stood at 25%.  Twenty million jobs had been created, GDP averaged 4.1% annual growth, industrial production increased 28.5% and Federal revenue increased 28% in constant dollars during his administration, refuting the revisionist claim about depleting the Treasury.  (The problem, as always, was runaway spending, which increased over 35% in constant dollars over that period.  Although defense spending increased by over 50% during the period 1980-1989, the boogeyman frequently cited by Leftist politicians, it declined 15% during George H.W. Bush’s Presidency as the Cold War had been won and the so-called “peace dividend” appeared.  However, means-tested entitlement spending shot up 102% over the Reagan-Bush 41 administrations, not including Social Security and Medicare, and has been climbing ever since.)  In 2011, total Federal revenue was $2.3035 trillion, a staggering sum of money, but that staggering sum of money was dwarfed by $3.6031 trillion of Federal spending, a deficit of $1.2996 trillion or about $108.3 billion of new debt for every month of the year.  And as colossal as this level of debt may be, the real threat is the interest that is accumulating and must be paid.  The interest on the Federal debt represents about 3% of United States GDP and has been spiking during Priest-King’s administration.  With a stagnant economy (2.63% GDP growth or less) and high unemployment (7.7%, above 8% from January 2009-September 2012), there isn’t enough private wealth being generated to pay down the interest on the debt, let alone start paying down the debt itself, and since Priest-King continues to spend titanic amounts of money, there is the very real possibility that interest on the Federal debt will reach 12%, an unsustainable level, and trigger a U.S. Government default.  Priest-King would then blithely observe the disaster from his Presidential Library in Chicago, write his memoirs and blame George W. Bush for it all.

Socialism absolutely depends on a large group of talented, educated, hard-working people generating wealth so that wealth can be redistributed as the government sees fit.  If this group of industrious people should shrink or move away or die or do anything but grind away forever, then the whole scheme collapses into the dust.  (See Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece and a host of cities and towns in this country.  See California itself, where a bloated welfare system has attracted millions of low-wage, high-consumption illegals and driven 3.4 million more people out of the state than those who moved to California since 1990.) Subtract the incentive to work hard, subtract the profit motive, and human nature takes over.  Priest-King’s absolute refusal to throttle runaway entitlement spending represents the triumph of ideology over good sense, and it is the same triumph enjoyed by the Soviet commissars before their country disintegrated.  Yes, he’s upset that despite draconian taxes and stratospheric spending, the rich are still rich and the poor are still poor, he can’t admit that his approach, his political philosophy are failures, but if he cares one whit about the country le leads, he’ll make the compromises necessary to prevent the bankruptcy and depression that will surely come.  Is the only acceptable answer the permanent enslavement of ten percent of the population so the other ninety percent can cash their welfare checks?  If it is, and his answer fails, who will he enslave then?

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villein_(feudal)

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/09/30/2012-federal-income-tax-brackets-irs-tax-rates/

Source: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/yearrev2011_0.html

Source: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/debt_deficit_history

Source: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2001/03/the-real-reagan-economic-record

 

Car Fever

After having lost the Presidency for the fourth time in the last six elections, after losing seats in the Senate and barely hanging onto a weakened majority in the House, the GOP is now under tremendous pressure to submit to Priest-King's demands for higher taxes and more spending in order to avoid the "fiscal cliff" looming on January 1. But before buying a car you don't want because a pushy salesman won't get out of your face, you walk away, and I would urge my Republican colleagues to do the same:

1) One of the core principles of conservatism is that taxes should be as low as possible. Low taxes allow the people to keep more of their own money and the people make better decisions with their money than government bureaucrats do. Low taxes put a brake on spending and thus the size and scope of government, and low taxes result in higher employment, higher GDP, a higher standard of living and higher government revenues, all good things. So given the top ten percent of wage earners already pay seventy percent of all Federal income taxes and given the economy is sputtering along at 1.7% GDP growth, we know that raising income taxes on anyone would be bad, so the GOP should not agree to anything that includes higher tax rates.

2) If the GOP caves and gives Priest-King the tax rate increase he wants, would that solve the problem? No, not even close. Raising the top individual income tax rate to 39.6% would result in about $80 billion in increased Federal revenue, or about enough to offset the Federal deficit for about three weeks, so for Priest-King, it's clearly not about the money but about the principle. (Note: Increasing income tax rates on the highest earners will also result in a decline in revenue after the first year, since those individuals and corporations will shift their assets elsewhere, a fact the Left never seems to learn.) Priest-King harbors a deep-seated animosity toward some of the wealthy (Warren Buffett, George Soros and other lefty tycoons get a pass), believing in his soul that they lied, cheated, defrauded and stole their way to wealth, so they must be punished. Their ill-gotten gains should be seized and redistributed to more deserving people, people who just happened to vote Democrat in the last election, and forcing the GOP to surrender on higher taxes will a) take the GOP's signature issue off the table for a generation or more; b) trigger a Republican civil war that will collapse the Party and thence resistance to his hard-Left agenda; and c) demonstrate his absolute political supremacy for his second term, during which he intends to complete the transformation of America into the grand socialist collective of his dreams. Republicans should resist higher taxes with their dying breath for these reasons alone.

3) Republicans will be viciously blamed no matter what happens, so if the legacy media will never love them, why agree to something they know is wrong? If the GOP agrees to higher taxes without major entitlement spending reform, they'll be blamed for exploding the deficit. If they agree to higher taxes and get major entitlement spending cuts in return, they'll be blamed for starving the poor and the elderly. If they cannot agree with Priest-King on anything and we go over the fiscal cliff, they'll be blamed for gutting the Defense Department (which Priest-King wants to do anyway but the blame for which he will gladly shift to the hapless Republicans), hundreds of thousands of new unemployed, the aforementioned starving poor and elderly and for higher taxes on the sainted middle class. So given they will be excoriated no matter what they do, how should the Republicans proceed? In my view, it comes down to answering this question: Do they act in their own self-interest or in the best interest of the country? If they're more concerned with their own political future, they'll make a hellish bargain with Priest-King that will bankrupt us all. (Bear in mind that Obamacare in its full horror will be implemented alongside any deal the GOP might make, including its own massive taxes.) However, if they act in the best interest of the country, they'll walk away from the negotiating table and let us go over the cliff. Sequestration would indeed take effect but simultaneous with cuts to the Democrats' precious social programs. The Bush tax cuts would expire for everyone, not just the top wage
earners, forcing those who currently pay very little or nothing for the welfare spending they consume to ante up. Priest-King's second term agenda would be upset, at least temporarily, costing him time and political capital, and perhaps the 2014 midterm elections - occurring as the full cost of Obamacare and his colossal deficits bite - would result in Shellacking Part II. Bottom line: No agreement is better than a bad agreement. You didn't want that car anyway.