Steve MacDonald

From Stephen Green: Green is remarking on how Japan’s “buy your way to prosperity binge” has failed miserably and what the real solution is…

Deregulate. Simplify the tax code. Protect the value of your currency. Those three steps are all it takes to achieve prosperity, but as Glenn Reynolds like to say, politicians don’t like them because they provide too few opportunities for graft.

Central planning is the first rule in optimizing graft.  Three and Four trillion-dollar Federal budgets, 8 trillion in new debt (almost as much as from the 230 years that preceded them) with nothing to show for it but twice as much debt.  Nothing to show, unless you are part of the political class, a crony, a lobbyist, or some other barnacle on the rump of DC.

That whole scenario really makes the case for defending state sovereignty and optimizing local control.

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For some reason, this paragraph from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism made me think of the Medicaid Expansion cabal of NH Republican State Senators…(and all Democrats).

The “Middle Way” sounds moderate and un-radical.  Its appeal is that it sounds unideological and freethinking.  But philosophically the Third Way is not mere difference splitting; it is utopian and authoritarian.  Its utopian aspect becomes manifest in it antagonism to the idea that politics is about trade-offs.  The Third Wayer says that there are no false choices–“I refuse to accept that X should com at the expense of Y.” 

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The Republican party has no interest in receiving advice from me, and not just because we’re not exactly on speaking terms.  As a rule, I don’t speak to ‘The Party” I speak to folks who run as Republicans, activists, and voters, who may or may not be Republicans but have traditionally prefered what Republicans run on.

With that in mind,  it occurs to me that someone should be running a (or any) campaign against the progressive plunderers with the under-used tag line…”Who’s In Your Wallet.”

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If you want to keep people off Medicaid, or food stamps, or welfare, you need to improve their employment prospects.   This works best with little or no public money or political interference.   Business flourishes in the sun, so the shadow of the bureaucracy must be as small as possible.

We also know that the more choices people have the better their odds of finding work, and if they lack skills more choices provide on the job training opportunities which also cost taxpayers nothing.

And fostering a labor marketplace that has more jobs than applicants increases starting wages across the board as businesses use wages, benefits, flexible hours, even day-care support and free training to attract employees.

This is all common sense and anyone who is even remotely serious about creating jobs, or helping American families, or lifting people out of subsistence or the dependency culture knows it.

Expanding the fossil fuel energy sector will create massive wage and economic growth, but not here in New Hampshire.  Instead, we have a different opportunity at our disposal–and it is staring us right in the face.

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Right after 28 clueless Senate Democrats held a pajama Party (Up4Climate) on the floor of the US Senate to lobby a California Billionaire for campaign donations, Gallop released its March 2014 polling on what Americans think are the most important problems facing the US.

“Climate” didn’t even make the new list. (Update: Extreme Shaheen is 100% Out of Touch with ordinary Americans.)  And…

A Quinnipiac University poll in January ranked, in order, the three issues voters cared about the most: the economy, the federal budget deficit, and health care.

Oh, and that other distraction the Democrats have been obsessing over, income equality (aka- Minimum wage hysterics), that came in at the bottom, again with only 2%.  So you know what that means?

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This weeks G-File is pretty awesome.  You really should go to National Review and sign up for it.  Until then, here is this weeks pilfered remarks, which represent less than 20% of the whole.

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Consider the fact that Obamacare is now simply untethered from law or policy. This week the administration announced that you can get a hardship waiver from Obamacare if your hardship is . . .wait for it . . . Obamacare. This is like getting out of doing push-ups during basic training if you can prove that doing push-ups would be difficult for you, defeating the point of doing push-ups in the first place. The White House is quite simply making it all up as they go along. You can’t really point to a thing that is Obamacare because doing so would be like pointing at the blob in a lava lamp and saying “that looks like Michael Caine eating a badger.” Maybe it looks like that right now. Give it a second.
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Sure, the defenders will admit, more people have lost their insurance than gained insurance because of Obamacare. Yes, yes, the website is the screen-doored submarine of websites. Sure, the president is simply disregarding countless laws and regulations he and his supporters once considered so sacred only racists, psychopaths, and Koch brothers could oppose. But good God, “DON’T YOU WANT PEOPLE TO HAVE INSURANCE, YOU HEARTLESS BASTARD!?!?!”

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Since I’m already nicking swaths of text from National Review (with links and credits and encouragement to sign up for newsletters and such),  I can’t leave Mark Steyn out.  This is from ‘The Lois Lerner Defense‘ (May 2013) in which he points out some contradictions worth visiting or revisiting…

Let us also overlook the excellent treatment received from the IRS by members of the president’s family. Although acting commissioner Steven Miller apologized for the “horrible customer service” conservative taxpayers had gotten, a gentleman by the name of Malik Obama received impeccable, express service when he took the precaution of mailing in his non-profit application from N’giya, Kenya, rather than notoriously slower mail processing centers such as Phoenix and Dallas. Malik, the brother of President Obama, runs the Barack H. Obama Foundation, named for the president’s father. On May 30, 2011, they applied for tax-exempt status, and had their approval signed less than a month later by Lois Lerner herself, and conveniently backdated by Lois to cover the two-and-a-half years the enterprising Malik had already been raking in “tax-deductible” donations from Americans.

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