Libertarian Think Tank

Vern Mckinley is a Republican running in Virginia’s 10th District primary against incumbent Republican Frank Wolf. McKinley has a picture of Barry Goldwater on his campaign website, so you know he’s the real deal. Wolf strikes me as one of those conservatives-for-rent that followed strong Republican leaders, but turned into Democrats when nobody was looking. One thing is for sure, though; even if Mckinley beats him, he is going to meet a lot more Wolfs in Congress. Their ranks will have shrunk. They will be tired and forlorn. Can Vern Mckinley give back the cojones that Pelosi snatched away? Maybe his youth is the key.

 Here is Vern with Bob Barr, Wayne Allen Root, and Mike Gravel at Reason Magazine in D.C.

Good luck tomorrow, brother.

 Who else wants to run?

Great Reason.tv piece. It may very well be that it’s stupid for bacondogs to be illegal, but my beef is that Los Angeles City forces vendors to shell-out $26,000 for a hotdog cart if they want to sell the highly-demanded bacondogs. Question: if the cops patrol the streets enough to throw away vendors’ carts without due process, why can’t they just write tickets for violations?

A friend of mine, who is wedded to the idea that Democrats are the poor man’s champions, often asks me how limited government can ever help the poor. Elizabeth Palacios is my answer. Her bacondog sales earned her a car and house. The city has mandated that she purchase a hotdog cart 5 times as expensive as the one she has now. She spent 45 days in the cooler because she couldn’t. Keep seeling those dogs, sister.  

I got wind that there was an effort to draft Alaska’s Governor, Sarah Palin to serve as John “Washington Changed Me” McCain’s Vice President. I didn’t realize the scope of the movement until I learned that Newt Gingrich is pushing the idea as well.

I’ll make this quick:

Why would any real conservative want to see that disaster? Sarah Palin is a faithful conservative. She spanked incumbent, Republican governor Frank Murkowski in the last election precisely because he prostituted his conservative principles for personal gain and she regularly, retroactively embarrasses his administration for the same reason.

Why would she sell her soul to serve under an even bigger sellout -an admitted sellout, no less? I’m all for a Sarah Palin presidency, especially considering that she’s one of the few standup conservatives left in the party. Heck, I’ll run her campaign in 2012 or 2016. But I couldn’t stomach the spectacle of her nodding along as McCain spews his interventionist, neocon agenda, which she would be required to do, no doubt. I couldn’t watch the Republican Party’s Richard Perle/William Kristol/David Frum faction close in on her like a pack of infectious zombies whose only relief from the pain of being undead is to breach the integrity of the conservative soul, turn it inside out, and thusly make more neocon zealots. Worse, I bristle at the idea of a woman, who is immensely more qualified to be a Republican President than John McCain, doing his bidding.

No Ma’am. If Sarah Palin gives McCain anything, it ought to be her Murkowski treatment.

Will Bunch at philly.com has this to say to ABC debate moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos.

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters – you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues…

Sounds good. I’m always happy to read a good criticism of the mainstream media. The same entrenchment that allows for William Kristol to secure a job at the New York Times after proving consistently wrong for the last ten years, also allows George Stephanopoulos to continue existing and Chuck Gibson to continue sagging. But then I read part of Will Bunch’s beef:

 …me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes….And Charlie…could you be any more out of touch with your viewers? Most people aren’t millionaires like you, and if Pennsylvanians are losing sleep over economic matters, it is not over whether the capital gains tax will go back up again.

Is it common for journalists to misunderstand the impact of capital gains taxes on our economy? I doubt that I see more yield from my capital investments than the average Pennsylvanian, but I’m nonetheless concerned with how they will be levied in the future. Here is why:

For a while until the Bush tax cuts of 2001 capital gains taxes rivaled the highest levels of income taxes. So if I invested in an American business that turned a profit, I would likely have to pay around 40% of my returns to the federal government. The same goes if invested in gold, petroleum, grain, or classic automobiles. The problem is that, while that sounds like a windfall for the government, it has a chilling effect on investment. When the market is up, the chilling effect is negligible- prices still go up and investors still realize returns, so everything continues swimmingly.

The problem is that value sometimes depreciates, especially when market bubbles burst. When that happens and the markets start to look bear-ish, investors flee like they were breaking from the penitentiary. Worse, the first investors to leave are the foreigners who tend to have more liquid investments and readier access to other markets. This leaves American investors holding the bag, often with capital investments that are worth less than what the investors originally paid.

But why should non-millionaire Pennsylvanians like Will Bunch care about all that? First, if non-millionaires are not investing in capital assets, they should be. The federal government adds your income to your capital gains together to determine which tax rate to apply. Those who are in the lowest tax brackets are taxed on their capital gains lower than they have been in years, thanks (again) to the Bush tax cuts.

Second, and perhaps more important, where does Will Bunch think jobs come from? About half the jobs in the United States come from publicly-traded companies. That means that over half the jobs come from companies that are equipped to buy and sell their capital assets as casually as their officers flirt with their secretaries. If they lose investors -and they *will* lose investors if the Democrats raise the capital gains tax as they have sworn in blood to do- they will only be able to expand the job supply by leveraging existing profits. This reduces shareholder dividends, which also drives away investors.

For some real-world examples, consider the fallout after the bubble burst of 2000. Then, foreign investment dwindled to almost-nothing. Only the Bush tax cuts brought them back (sorry if you don’t like Bush, but there’s really no question that it worked). The reciprocal to that, of course, is that the threat of a Democrat President could drive it all away again between the months of November and January. This time, the American investors may be more savvy, aware of the foreign flight, and may follow suit. That could knock the the bottom out of the entire market. So, sorry Will Bunch, but capital investment is a pertinent question if one cares about the economy.  If Will Bunch thinks that capital gains taxes are unrelated to overall economic conditions…or if he thinks that Pennsylvanians don’t care about them, he is mistaken and they should.

Sure, Gibson and Stephanopoulos probably stunk last night, but I wouldn’t trust another journalist to tell me why.

This is a bit telling isn’t it? If Nixon hadn’t floated the dollar or if we had returned to some pseudo-gold standard, the price of oil would be about $15/barrel right now. Currently, it is at $115/barrel. I remember a conversation with someone who identified herself as a libertartian about Ron Paul’s monetary platform. She said that one of the things that she found crazy was the idea of a return to the gold standard. For the record, Paul never advocated a return to the gold standard, but he did advocate lifting the capital gains taxes on gold, which would allow people to trade it freely and force the dollar to compete. Instead, the Looney Toons characters on Capital Hill have a complete monopoly over currency, which is hardly a backdrop for a sound monetary policy. So while Paul’s policy on gold may be a little remote, it’s hardly crazy.

My theory on why we haven’t fixed an obviously broken monetary policy? It’s because all the politicians who know shit from Shinola (Shinola was a shoe polish) run on a platform of fixing it. Sure, we want it fixed, but we don’t know shit either. Everything sounds crazy to us. If it takes longer than 15 seconds to explain to the public, politicians are better off just doing it.