Libertarian Think Tank

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.  

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.

Everyone is hatin’ on Hillary. Maybe everyone is wrong.

The blogosphere has lit up with Hillary-hate. Andrew Sullivan says that the Daily Kos leads the way, yet Sullivan strikes me as a pretty anti-Clinton himself, “the next generation can still stop [the Clintons]”. And, of course, the right-wing cannot help itself. Hewitt interviewed Chris Hitchens, who is super-duper convinced that Clinton will be the next president, not for her merits of course, but for her power-lust.

This seems indicative of the general sentiment that I encounter. My Democrat friends certainly echo Obama’s frustration with Clinton. My Republican friends go insane when I tease them that I’d rather vote for her than McCain. Everyone handicaps her chances against The Maverick. They say her ‘experience’ jig will be up in the general election.

Nonsense. Hillary Clinton could spank McCain in a way that Obama could never hope to. You see, this election proposes an odd twist of ideologies. Actually, it’s more like a wringing of ideologies- as in, McCain is wringing the last drops of conservatism out of the Republican Party and moving back toward a Nixon-esque authoritarian mix. But he has neither Nixon’s brains nor temperance and he would never be able to pull this nonsense in a debate against sharp-tongued Clinton. 

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton doesn’t strike me as all-that-liberal. Not compared to McCain’s brand of confuso-conservatism. And not compared to Obama’s liberalism. Really, the Democrats have no choice but to entertain fiscal conservatism now that unprecedented debt levels, the collapse of Social Security, and the most expensive war in history are all up in their grill. And let us not forget that she was a Goldwater Girl, so she must have some libertarian sympathies. Sure, she proposes Universal Health Care, but faced with seemingly insurmountable financial challenges, I am forced to wonder if anyone as characteristically sharp as Hillary Clinton would really try to push it if the other side framed health care as a fiscal disaster. She cannot charm a Democratic Congress like Obama. She cannot coerce a lily-livered Congress, like McCain. In that sense, she just may become a de facto conservative.

The beauty of all this is that disaffected, limited-government conservatives are looking for a new home. Sure, Rush Limbaugh is pushing Clinton because he doesn’t want to risk an election against Obama, but he has always been anti-McCain, big time. Ann Coulter’s endorsement of Clinton in the McCain vs. Clinton hypothetical strikes me as even more genuine. And these two are more right-wing than us strictly limited government-types, who don’t really side with McCain on anything. Now that Buckley has a grave to roll over in and with Goldwater and Reagan already gone, the conservative diaspora is a vote-in-play. Clinton could line up with the fiscal conservatives like tough old adversaries fighting the greater fight together. She could fight McCain’s moderation as the opposite kind of moderate; liberal where he is conservative, conservative where he is liberal, she could make a case for constitutionalism, while he waxes authoritarian about presidential powers. She would beat him up in debates.

She didn’t cry.  

DIGG THIS