January 2020

Jonah Goldberg objects to Dershowitz’s defense of Trump that proposed that “abuse of power” is not an impeachable act unless it is accompanied by a violation of criminal law.

Goldberg offers the following argument:

So a president who gets fall-down drunk every day and fails to fulfill the barest minimum of his duties cannot be impeached because getting drunk isn’t a crime. Do you want to validate that nonsense?

But being a drunk is not “abuse of power”; it’s the refusal to do the job of the President. It’s precisely not using “power” at all! Obviously, if a man elected or appointed to do X fails to do X, he can be fired. But Trump was not impeached for incompetence or failing to do his job.

The President is chief bureaucrat. He is bound by strict rules emanating from Congress and courts to behave in certain ways. For that lack of freedom he is compensated with power. And this power can be used however the President pleases, provided it does not violate the law.

“Abuse” of power therefore logically entails breaking some law. But Dershowitz argues precisely that no law was broken. And that’s all there is to it.

What does the government, unless it is literally communist, have to do with establishing technical standards?

There are consortia, non-profits, special private standards organizations that take care of this adequately and serve the people and businesses. Standards in the computer industry change every year. The state cannot possibly keep up. It doesn’t have any incentives to keep up. And it has no expertise to keep up.

These guys are nuts to interfere like this.

Most blacks look the same to me — completely non-diverse.

Which is of course entirely their own fault.

Sweet, a small setback to “progress”; there will now be 0.000001% less looting.

The conquest of the US by foreign hordes has been dealt a blow. Go, Trump!

Socialism is the same everywhere: filth, squalor, hopelessness, and nothing works.

Pro-lifers should not associate with bad orange man, say Damon Linker.

Supposedly, this will tarnish the “civil right” roots of the anti-abortion movement.

But the civil rights approach was rotten from the start, and it is long past due to abandon it.

In any case, Trump has never sought to repeal any of the civil privileges falsely called “rights.” This is just more Trump Derangement.

“Libertarianism is just white supremacy,” says a crazy person on Twitter.

This is Marxian polylogism updated for the woke.

For Marx, the economists who demolished the socialist idea were mistaken because in their personal lives they led a bourgeois lifestyle.

Libertarians are mostly white people, and these white people, the woke believe, are wrong by virtue of being white.

I should not have to point out that libertarianism of course is no one’s supremacy; or perhaps individual supremacy, with the individual being the smallest minority who is free from the supremacy of the state, or even in economic terms, consumer sovereignty, with each individual commanding the economy as a consumer.

Thanks to Tom Woods.

A sicko leftist calls the recent Sanders-Warren quarrel “Mom and dad are fighting.”

How about “Stalin and Hitler are fighting” instead?

Remember there are 3 ways for the US gov’t to finance budgets deficits.

First is to borrow on the loan market, which will raise interest rates and may cause a recession.

Second is to monetize debt from the Fed, which is inflationary. This may interfere with “monetary policy.”

Third is to borrow money from foreign central banks. The two keys to that are (1) a relatively strong economy, and (2) keeping the dollar the “world reserve currency,” specifically the currency oil producers most willingly take for their oil. As long as everyone needs dollars to buy energy, foreign central banks will have to keep dollars and may want to loan them back to the US as a safe investment.

The third way may give rise to trade deficits, as we buy a lot more stuff with our new money than we sell. The problem with those is that if America grows lazy and stops producing goods, instead “producing” only money, and foreigners realize they can’t spend their dollars on anything pleasant, the demand for dollars will collapse and devaluation will folow.

The state will alternate between these three methods to maintain its “health.”

The state is an “Old God” of fear, slavery, and suppression of thought.