Image Credit: Gettyimages.com, via Instapundit and DayLife.com by way of Despair.com

God Save Iran.

Over at A Second-Hand Conjecture, ChrisB, borrowing some ammo from Ted DeHaven and even Matthew Yglesias, critiques Congressional Republicans' proposed spending cuts.

I wish I could convince myself that the Federal government could be meaningfully cut, but I just don't see how. Hanging about our necks are a good number of open-ended entitlements that MUST be paid, and interest on debt that MUST be paid. We have to recognize that we are at the beginning of the end of the New Deal/Great Society era. We've not only voted ourselves more government than we're willing to pay for, we've voted for more government than we can sustainably pay for. To use the analogy of a household, we've been paying our bills with credit cards for years now, including our credit card bills, and now the credit card issuers are beginning to openly question whether we are able to pay off the enormous debt we've acquired. Barring a nearly unimaginable leap in economic growth due to some miraculous technonlogical breakthrough, like, say, the ability to turn seawater into oil, the government gravy train is at the end of the line, even if we haven't crashed into the stops yet. A Rube Goldberg device constructed of mostly Ponzi schemes cannot be fixed. It must be replaced in it's entirety.

We are awakening. We are entering our forming stage. With the Tea Parties, the liberal capitalist majority in America arose from their daily lives and accomplished two things: we gave early notice to the statists who now run Washington that we will have our freedom, and we introduced ourselves to one another, letting the silent part of our majority know that they are far from alone in their alarm and despair at our current political and economic trajectories.

We believe that a Liberal Capitalist Party dedicated to individual freedom, economic prosperity, and strength is the surest and most concise way to political success locally, at the state level and nationally. In each their own ways, the current two major parties are relics in that they have nothing new to offer, and both carry too much social baggage from the past. And each in their own ways, both parties are vulnerable. I do not know which one will fall before us. But fall they will. Now let us continue to find ourselves, and come together.

While the mainstream media is gushing about President Obama's first 100 days in office, what is of greater importance is what the Republicans have done during their first 100 days completely out of power. It's not looking too good for them.

Bruised by charges from Democrats that they've become the "party of no," Republicans on Thursday are launching an outreach effort to reshape their party's image

The initiative, called the National Council for a New America, will send party leaders across the country for a series of town halls on health care, the economy, energy and national security.

The goal is for the council's panel of experts to listen to the American people and report back to House and Senate Republican leaders with new strategies for rehabilitating the party and winning elections in 2010.

Well that's great and all, but the GOP should have done that two weeks after the election. They've waited so long in fact that non-leftist America, not content to wait, sent them a telegram with the ongoing tea party demonstrations. But even though some Republican politicians tried to jump on the tea party wagon, as a party the GOP has yet to demonstrate that they have learned a thing from the demonstrators. There was their first stand against the the stimulus bill (although they ultimately caved completely), and there was a unified stance against a bailout or two and Obama's preposterous budget, but other than that...nada. They're preparing to fight Obama's Supreme Court nominee with a stance wholly in the service of their old public morality agenda. The agenda that's gotten them where they are now.

Friends, the GOP is never going to get it. I've been waiting nearly my entire adult lifetime for Reagan 2.0 (Now With Less Drug War!), but it's time to own up and admit that Reagan's freedom-first presidency was a fluke most likely never to be repeated by the Republican Party.

For those who love freedom, it's time for Plan B folks. We can no longer afford to wait for the GOP to rediscover their classically liberal roots.

I've just posted a brief essay on the Zero-Tax Society, the Liberal Capitalist answer to the national economic knee-capping that is our current primitive pay-as-you-go system of funding government. Although you can't leave comments on items posted in our Essays section, if anyone has any comments please post them here, in the thread for this blog entry.

UPDATE: Now extensively edited. Sorry, editing stuff after I've posted it is a bad, bad blogging habit of mine.

This is cross-posted and edited from a comment of mine at www.thenewrepublicans.net. Socially conservative Republicans are great on freedom until you bring up one of their hot-button issues like abortion. 

The absolutist pro-life position is a political loser. When polled, those who want abortion completely illegal almost never break the 30-35% range. A full 70% of Americans want abortion legal but restricted. 

The dilemma for a free society posed by abortion is found in the fact of human pregnancy, with one human entity completely dependent upon and enclosed within the body of another human entity. If both of those entities have basic human rights, then it is necessary to decide where one’s ends and the other’s begins during pregnancy. Compromise is required. There is simply no room for an absolutist position on either side, for to claim an absolutist position is to claim one side or the other has no rights, a condition unacceptable in a free society.

As it so happens, medical science doesn’t consider a human pregnancy viable until after 90 days. This is why OB/GYNs don’t want to see pregnant women during their first three months; the odds that a fetus will be spontaneously aborted during this period are about 1 in 3, a failure rate that would inevitably expose practitioners to spurious malpractice claims. 

The Republican Party should adopt the Liberal Capitalist position and support abortion on demand within the first 90 days of pregnancy, and then after that point only to spare the life of the mother. This will take the GOP out of alignment with the 30% of religious conservatives and realign the party with the other 70% of Americans, and they don’t have to support Roe v. Wade to do it. The law shouldn’t be based upon the viability of a fetus—which technology has made a moving target—but rather the viability of human pregnancy. 

"Sensible people do not expect justice from chance."

Leslie Michaelis

You just bought yourself an economy. Of course you're going to pay for it with money borrowed from my grandchildren, but hey, you bought it, it's yours. And so far it seems you're putting us on the well-worn path to stagflation. And George W. Bush? I've already forgotten his name.

That is all.

Well our new Treasury Secretary laid out the Obama Administration's plan for dealing with the mortgage-backed securities that are causing our current credit crisis and the public response hasn't been pretty. In a nutshell, the problem is that since no one will buy these securities, no one knows how much they're really worth, including the government. Essentially, in a market, when no one will buy something, the effective value of that asset is zero. A large number of all sorts of financial institutions hold billions of dollars-worth of these zero-market value securities, and zeros do horrible things to balance sheets when there are no other numbers in front of them.

Today's announcement by Tim Geithner should make it clear to all of us that the government, although having a pretty good idea what's wrong, has no idea whatsoever about what to do about it. Well the Liberal Capitalist Party has a tip for President Obama and Congress:

These toxic securities are driving a confidence crisis, which in turn is creating a credit crisis, and the credit crisis is driving our recession. The government is working the wrong end of the mule. Instead of trying to mitigate the recession with stimulus spending, we need to fix the securities, restore confidence, end the credit crisis, and let the markets clear.

What makes these toxic securities toxic is actually only a small part of the securities themselves, which are the "tranches" of contracts containing subprime mortgages. The way to "fix" these securities isn't for the government to buy up the entire security, but instead announce that for any bearer, on demand, it will replace the lowest rated tranches within any of these derivatives presented with higher rated paper drawn on the good mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. And the government needs to hurry. These contracts are time delimited and the longer we wait the more losses with these securities are realized.

By backstopping the risk contained within these securities people will be able to figure out how much they're worth and they will be able to be bought and sold again, making them worth more than zero. That's all that's needed to end the confidence crisis and stop the dominoes falling.

Banner courtesy of Bryan Taylor

Just in time for Christmas, George W. Bush has wrapped in tissue and tied with a bow the perfect gift for the man who truly does have everything, Barack Obama. Furthermore, it is a gift our new President very likely would never have been able to get for himself: victory in the Iraq War. Go read why today, November 22nd, is now and forever Victory in Iraq Day.

From Charlie (Colorado), via Vodkapundit.

FYI, the FAQ document "Why a Liberal Capitalist Party" has been re-written. It really needed it. Although I wrote it, the main concepts were inspired by my brother Eric. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know in the comments to this post.

Seriously. I share the disgust of IowaHawk and millions of others at the despicable treatment of citizen Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher by Barack Obama, his campaign and activist supporters, and his sycophants in the mainstream media after Obama gave a too-honest answer to Joe's honest question. Hey Obama: if you can't take the heat, stay out of working class neighborhoods.

Like many Americans, I was taken aback—way, way aback—by the Democrats' utterly deranged response to the selection of Sarah Palin for the VP slot on the Republican ticket. I regained my bearings after a week, telling myself that it was just politics, and that Palin would have to deal with irrational hatred if she was going to be Vice President, although honestly I was still pretty creeped out and remain so to this day. Compared to this, Hillary Clinton was treated like the Queen of Sheba by the Obama people last fall.

But Joe the Plumber isn't running for anything. If the news reports are correct, he's not even registered to vote. Still, last week Wurzelbacher was minding his own business, tossing a football around with his son in his own front yard when Barack Obama's entourage showed up in the neighborhood. While checking out the excitment with his neighbors, Joe was randomly selected to ask the candidate a question. He asked a relatively simple, non-loaded, non-hostile question and Obama in turn gave a scary answer, and simultaneously demonstated a jarring ignorance of the working class version of the American dream. And apparently it was all Joe's fault.

Hey, Barack? Do you think you could man-up and tell your flying monkeys that it's not Joe or his question that was the problem here, it was YOUR SOCIALIST ANSWER? Gad.

Image Courtesy of Doctor Slogan's Perscriptions

Senator Obama, when you were in Colorado Springs this summer and you said:

"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

What the hell were you talking about?

Instapundit posted a poll "Who Should McCain pick for VP." I thought I'd review the list of potentials, such as they are.

Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman or any other Democrat

Let's dispense with this one first. In a word: please. In two words: come on. It just isn't serious. The day a Republican candidate nominates a Democrat for VP will be the day the Republican Party ceases being a serious political party capable of electing anybody.

Tim Pawlenty

Who?

Tom Ridge

I can hear it now: Orange Alert! Orange Alert! That's what every Democrat will scream at him everywhere he goes. Don't get me wrong, I feel for the guy, I'd never want to be the head of Der Homeland Security Department, and he probably did as good a job with HS as could have been done all things considered. But although  Ridge may be decent and somewhat capable, along with McCain they would be the Tighty Whitey Ticket. If McCain chooses Ridge we might as well just swear Obama in and not bother with an election.

Bobby Jindal

Thank God Bobby Jindal doesn't want to be VP. Bobby Jindal will one day be President, and he knows it. And when he's sworn in, President Jindal will be younger than Obama is now. But right now he's got big messes to clean up in Louisiana, and that's his ticket to the top. If he can fix Louisiana (my beloved home state), he can fix anything, and America will eat him up with a spoon.

Mitt Romney

Mitt did come in second, and he is not a totally unsubstantial politician. Still—and I mean no personal offense toward Romney—his problem is that he comes across as an insincere, plastic McCandidate, which is why his negatives are so inexplicably high in spite of spending massive personal funds to advance his name recognition during the primaries and his relatively uncontroversial past. If McCain picks him, they'll be lucky to get 150 electoral votes. Of course it would help if Romney had a compelling history or agenda, but he has neither; he's just another super-rich guy who wants to be President for some reason.

Condoleeza Rice

I love Condoleeza Rice, and believe she would make a better President than the whole lot of them, but the fact is she has Bush stink all over her, and if McCain were to pick her it would be a Christmas present to all of those democratic jerks that go around calling McCain "McSame." So far the charge hasn't been able to stick to McCain, but if he were to pick Rice it probably would. Which is a shame, especially considering how Russia is rearing it's ugly head. Rice has forgotten more about Russia than McCain or Obama will ever know. Does Bush stink wash off? Unfortunately I have no idea. We'll have to wait four years or so to find out.

Rudy Giuliani

Rudy would be an excellent choice. Before Iowa he was consistently polling not just as the strongest Republican but also as the most liked candidate of either party. So long as he doesn't bring along any of the idiots who managed his campaign, He'd give McCain FL and possibly NY. Out of all of the old white guy picks, Rudy is head and shoulders above everyone else.

Sarah Palin

If McCain were to choose Palin this election would actually turn out to be fun. Imagine that for a moment: a fun presidential election. It would be a ballsy pick, and even though voters are quite inclined to accept a certain amount of greenness in vice presidential candidates anyway, the Dems snuffed their opportunity to criticize her relative inexperience by nominating Obama as their candidate, who has even less. Her youth and vigor, her Alaska tough and her gun rights cred would highlight everything appealing about American conservatism without bringing along all of the religious fundamentalist social conservatism that creeps out independents so much. And she's a super-mom. If she were to nonchalantly unbutton her blouse and nurse her infant son in the middle of the VP debates without missing a beat about how we need to drill, drill, drill for oil in Alaska and elsewhere, Obama would be lucky to win even Illinois come November. There would finally be a prototype of a strong conservative woman that was more positive than Ann Coulter or Phyllis Schlafly.

Even though Rudy would help McCain in New York and Florida and Ridge could help in Pennsylvania, Palin would help McCain be competitive everywhere. There's women in all fifty states.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Buckminster Fuller

Well this is easily the best news from last week: Virginia Postrel is emerging from her bout with breast cancer with "no evidence of disease." I know from my own personal experience with Lance Armstrong disease that this is the closest the medical community will ever come to stating that one has been cured; "total remission without further evidence of disease" is the exact phrase I remember. Cancer in general is still technically "incurable," so the word "cure" is never uttered by the profession with regards to cancer.

Anyway, congratulations Virginia, rock on with your bad self! Is it just me, or does anyone else out there feel that liberal capitalism itself has just dodged a bullet?

It's been a while since I Googled "liberal capitalism," so today I did a few searches and found some interesting tidbits around the web. First up is an unfinished, undated site by one Fred Zimmerman, who uses premises based in game theory to argue that the combination of American political egalitarianism and free markets are responsible for America's success:

America’s egalitarian economic policies have encouraged the distribution of wealth and the rise of the middle class as much as the Industrial Revolution. In modern times this policy has been further optimized using the mathematical modeling of game theory. Game theory views economic activity as a game with players in categories defined as consumers, labor, investor and business. Each player takes on individual strategies to optimize their game performance. Game theory modeling proves the principle that equal economic players operating on a level playing field have the highest long term economic growth. Liberal Capitalism is the philosophy that government must be proactively involved to keep the playing field level, to act as an impartial referee if you will. Government’s goal is to keep the minority of players from pursuing predatory strategies with minimum interference with the majority of players’ normal competitive strategies.

Although Fred proposes some policies which I believe to be wrong-headed, such as higher minimum wages imposed by government, he's definitely on the right track. I hope he reads some Hayek and finishes his site.

Next is a shiny new blog by a fellow named Matt, The Liberal Capitalist. Although he's only been blogging since the end of February, he has some informative posts up regarding inflation and oil prices:

Oil in terms US dollars has increased in price by 275% since March 21, 2003. Oil in terms of Euros has increased only 166%. Therefore, at least 34% in the increase in the price of oil in the United States can be explained by the dollar losing value relative to other currencies.

So far it seems that Matt's liberal capitalism is very nearly what we're pursuing here at LiberalCapitalist.com, so we're looking forward to seeing more from Matt.

And finally I found an excellent article from last summer in what very well may be Australia's version of Reason Magazine, Policy:

In earlier ages, the struggle between liberal capitalism and competing ideologies revolved around the question of which could best provide for the prosperity and economic growth of society.

History has delivered an unequivocal verdict on this question. Over the last two hundred years, the societies that have surged ahead in economic development have been those adopting liberal capitalist systems and open trade. The argument that central planning and government intervention are needed to promote growth has been comprehensively defeated—so comprehensively, in fact, that stubborn proponents of competing ideologies have been forced into an embarrassing U-turn. It is perhaps the ultimate testament to the success of liberal capitalism that the only way its opponents can now muster an objection is to spurn and condemn prosperity itself.

Definitely read the rest; this document may well belong in our Canon. And speaking of which, if you're a liberal capitalist and you've written about something you think is important or helpful to the liberal capitalist cause, email it to admin (atsymbol) liberalcapitalist.com and we'll consider publishing it on this site.

Well it seems that very few politicians from either of the two major parties can pass up an opportunity to buy votes from the public:

The Senate, voting 81 to 16, slightly expanded the House plan to include payments for some 20 million Social Security recipients and 250,000 disabled veterans who would not have qualified because they do not earn income. The final measure also specifies that illegal immigrant workers not receive payments.

I especially like the gratuitous dig at illegal immigrant workers. It's gratuitous because there really isn't a way illegals could get the rebate anyway, unless the government were to send vans full of government checks out to the Home Depot parking lots and lettuce fields of the nation.

Wait! Here comes Santa Claus! Here comes Santa Claus!

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at a rare joint news conference featuring all four Congressional leaders and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., declared: “We are making history. What has passed the Congress in record time is a gift to the middle class and those who aspire to it in our country.”

Got it? A gift. A gift of our own money, returned to us. Way to let us eat cake, Nancy. But I digress. The real joke is here:

“This plan is robust, broad based, timely, and it will be effective,”

That's our President George W. Bush talking. He's telling us that a one-time tax rebate equating to about 1% of GDP is going to forestall a recession, in spite of the fact that there's no 168 billion dollar spending cut to offset it. So not only will we receive a gift of our own money, we'll have to pay it back in the future—with interest of course. But to be fair to our economically illiterate leaders, the timing of the payout—May or June—couldn't be more fortunate. Why? Because that's when Spring Spike will be in full force, and if this year's predictions of four dollars a gallon come true, we're all going to need that money to fill up our cars and buy groceries. By the way, have you ever heard of alkylate? Don't worry, you will.

But all of this gives me an idea, or a pipe dream, take your pick. If the government really wanted to give the economy a break without lighting a fire under the deficit, they could suspend summer blend gasoline requirements for this year. Doing so could have multiple benefits, the first being little or no spike in the fuel prices which have been driving inflation and eating away at our wages for the last two years. Second, suspending summer blend requirements wouldn't fuel the deficit. A third benefit, and perhaps the biggest, would be a chance to collect pollution data that would allow us to factually determine if these fuel blend requirements are having any real positive effect on air quality for the billions of dollars it costs us every year.

Back when these regulations were adopted by Congress, most vehicles on the road had carburetors and mechanical ignition timing. Summer blend requirements were aimed principally at two sources of pollution: the higher quantity of unburned fuel emitted from tailpipes in warmer weather and the ozone producing organic compounds created when summer heat causes a higher rate of gasoline evaporation. But these days things are different. Most of the vehicles on the road use fuel injection, making their fuel systems completely closed, and computers which optimally determine most fuel and ignition parameters in real time, greatly reducing emissions. The predominance of closed fuel systems and computerized engine management may have therefore mooted the original intended environmental benefits of these gasoline regulations. Presuming it's politically possible to roll back a monstrously expensive environmental regulation that does nothing for the environment, this type of liberal capitalist stimulus could be a real economic "gift" to the country, and one that keeps on giving.

Frankly, the internet could use more sites like this: Climate Debate Daily. It's an independent website presenting two columns, pro and con, of links to articles concerning climate change.

Many sites on the Internet, including some of those listed at the far left of the page, take firm views for or against the threat of anthropogenic global warming. As a matter of editorial policy, Climate Debate Daily maintains a studied neutrality, allowing each side to present its most powerful and persuasive case. Our object is to allow readers to form their own judgments based on the best available information.

No spin, no agenda, just sweet, sweet reason in a head-to-head, hand-to-hand, bare-knuckle format. Can't beat it with a ton of carbon. Hat tip: Ginny at Chicago Boyz.

Cross-posted at A Second Hand Conjecture.

It’s all up to the crackers now. Fred Thompson has left the building, leaving Rudy Giuliani the only candidate in the Republican race potentially capable of prevailing in November against either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama—or both. But Rudy may well have made a strategic error: having been the polling frontrunner for almost a year, Giuliani and his captains decided to forgo the smaller early state contests and focus on high-delegate states, beginning with Florida on January 29th. Giuliani's people have been bivouacked there for months. The effort has kept the candidate with a double-digit lead in the Sunshine State—until now.

Enter Duverger’s law, which states that district-based plurality elections favor a two party system due to voter polarization between the frontrunner and the strongest challenger. In the contests he skipped, Rudy finished most often in fourth or fifth place, with single-digit percentages. With John McCain and Mitt Romney now being perceived as the the top two candidates, Giuliani’s poll numbers have been plummeting in Florida, California, New Jersey, and even New York, the very delegate-rich states that he was counting on to elevate him to the nomination. In Florida, the latest polls now have Rudy in a three way tie for first place at best and losing to both McCain and Romney at worst.

But what makes it impossible to write Rudy off yet is the following: historically up to a third of Florida voters have taken advantage of the state’s liberal absentee/early voting rules to cast their ballots prior to actual elections. Giuliani’s team knew this going in, and assembled early voting and absentee voter “chase” teams that have been operating since before Iowa urging Rudy supporters to vote early. No other candidate has done this. With this being a four-way race, it's possible Rudy can absolutely stink on Tuesday yet still win due to early/absentee ballots cast for him back when he was fab.

What's more, given that the media has all but ruled it out, a Rudy win in Florida would turn the press upside down, making McCain's comeback in New Hampshire appear small and uninspired by comparison. The very trend that makes the chances of a Giuliani nomination currently appear hopeless contain the same forces required to make his big-state strategy work by making him the lead story one week before Super Tuesday. Duverger can giveth as well as taketh away.

America is the "land of the free." Not "land of the free if you're male like me," and not "land of the free if you're white like me," and not "land of the free if you pray like me," and not "land of the free if you have sex like me." America is the land of the free...period. Well, actually, comma. We're also supposed to be "the home of the brave."

The Liberal Capitalist Party believes that America could be braver. We could give homosexual Americans their civil rights due, their freedom of association, by allowing them to legally enter into the household-forming contract of marriage.

Time to brave up, America. In the eyes of the government, all marriages should be civil unions, equal and the same, for everyone.

Supporters of Fred Thompson aren't taking the results of yesterday's South Carolina primary very well. John McCain took a third of the vote, followed up by Mike "get thee behind me" Huckabee coming in second with a quarter of the vote. Big Fred only managed about 15% in spite of the fact that the SC primary was the first state contest in which he actually tried to get votes.

Dailypundit's Bill Quick is fed up enough that he's soliciting ideas for a conservative third party. I don't know if he's ever stumbled upon this site, or what he might think of it if he has. But ironically, this site was in no small part inspired by the American Liberty League, a web initiative of Quick himself from a few years back. Still, I don't know that the Liberal Capitalist Party would be Bill's cup of tea. We tangled last year in the comments section on his site over an immigration topic, and it wasn't difficult for me to glean from the exchange that he has a lot of powerful emotions concerning his restrictionist positions. The Liberal Capitalist position of allowing labor markets to determine a level of orderly entry into the US would probably be a deal-breaker for him, even though we probably agree on most everything else.

So out of respect for a fellow (95%) liberal capitalist, and out of gratitude for the original inspiration he gave me, I invite him and his readers to dig into the site and use whatever ideas you can find that might be useful for creating the American Conservative Party Bill envisions. For instance, I actually put together an idea for an internet-based party modeled on the Request for Comments (RFC) system used to develop the internet itself. It's untested in politics as far as I know, but I still believe the idea has potential. And look through the FAQs and essays. There's all sorts of stuff in there.

It's also interesting that Steven Den Beste did a flyby and dropped the Duverger's law bomb in the comments section on Bill's new site. I posted about Duverger's law last year, here. These days I've been more or less persuaded that the odds of establishing a successful third party without the help of approval voting reform are infinitesimal. Even with approval voting Duverger would hold, we'd still have a two-party system, but at least it would loosen the institutional kung-fu grip™ that the Republicans and Democrats have on the first party and second party positions.

This is what we get when we quit:

And this is what we get when we don't quit:

It really is exactly that simple. Any questions?