In Case You Can’t Recognize It, He’s Talking About Us

Here’s a snapshot about what the rest of the world — or at least that portion that isn’t living under the guns, missiles, armored divisions, and fifth columnists sponsored by goons like Putin, the Muslim Brotherhood, and/or Chavez — thinks about the U.S. presidential race.  It’s the sort of thinking that folks who have the luxury of not having to defend themselves either at home or abroad can indulge.

When writing about a foreign place, it’s generally a good idea to have, you know, some actual knowledge about the joint before hunker down at the keyboard.

Just by way of fish-in-a-barrel:  No president can “sign a law” making illegal what the Supreme Court has decided (whether or not incorrectly) is a constitutional right.

Secondly, he seems to think that the separation of powers designed into the constitution means that the same party isn’t supposed to dominate all three branches of government.  This would be, um, you know, news for any American who lived from 1933 through 1953, or from 1865 through the 1890s.  In fact, the very notion of “parties” would have struck the framers as something repellent; they’d have excoriated any “party” dominating any branch of government.

And of course it’s just horrid, unthinkable that Congress should be primus inter pares, and have the stones to act like it.  Tell that to the first half-century worth of Congress-critters, who were outraged when Jackson began to veto legislation not because he thought it beyond the scope of powers granted by the constitution or otherwise prohibited by it but simply because he didn’t agree with it.  The modern imperial presidency, where the Congress, toad-like, meekly does whatever the president of the moment decides he wishes, is decidedly a modern invention.  This feller seems much, much more comfortable with the system practiced by Stalin:  He humbly proposed to the Plenum and if they didn’t approve it unamimously right off, he just had them all shot and started over with a more cooperative bunch.

State education is in line for a “haircut,” ignoring that comparatively little of education is federally-funded in the first place.  This goober of an author doesn’t quite seem to understand that neither a president nor the president and Congress together can decide that state-level education funding is going to take a haircut.  The fiscal literacy of this clown is demonstrated by his profound insights on what the “sudden removal of trillions of federal dollars from US GDP” will do to the world’s economy.  I have news, Ranger Bob:  Those dollars don’t really exist.  They’re fiat money that’s being, metaphorically speaking, printed by the trainload by the Federal Reserve, and “loaned” to the U.S. government, which is already borrowing . . . I can’t recall the exact percentage, but it’s ominously close to 50% . . . of every “dollar” it spends, and now that the Fed’s the one buying over 90% of all long-term Treasury debt, we’re just making it up (as ol’ Mittens quite correctly pointed out).  So pulling value-less paper money out of the economy is going to do, what, again?

Listen up, ol’ sport:  The political structure of the U.S. was intentionally set up to be slow and obstructionist.  That’s what “checks-and-balances” means; that’s what “separation of powers” is all about.  They weren’t devices to implement a playground teeter-totter system of “you’ve had your turn; now I’ll have mine.”  All three branches of government were set up to answer to different interests, at different intervals, and to be selected by different methods.  It’s only by doing so that you ensure that (i) decisions are limited to Very Important Things, and (ii) the scope of the decision is limited to those areas in which genuinely broad consensus actually exists (see Hayek).  In other words, it’s Not A Bad Thing that Mittens, if he’s elected president, may find himself dealing with a Congress that’s dominated by people who don’t see eye to eye with him.

If this boy can get an appointment within the next eight months from his “free” NHS provider (and hoping his doctor doesn’t just decide he really needs to be on the Liverpool Path or whatever their slow-motion “assisted” death glide path is called), he needs to get him a prescription for a chill pill and then take them, all at once.