Garland's Duty

 

“This is a massive FRAUD & ELECTION INTERFERENCE never

seen before in our Country. Remedy:declare the rightful

winner or, and this would be a minimal solution, declare the

2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a

new Election, immediately!” -

- Donald Trump

Merrick Garland has a job to do. He must indict and then persuade a jury to convict Donald Trump of an offense which will make him ineligible to hold public office in this country. It may be tough. It will be politically inexpedient for his party – bringing out Trump fans to vote Republican in November and removing the chance of Democrats getting to run against Trump in 2024 in what likely will be a Republican year if Trump is not the candidate. For the good of the country he needs to ignore that.

From the time of the primaries in 2016, Trump showed himself to be an arrogant, blustering, vindictive, bullying, ignoramus. His actions between December 14^th, 2020 and January 6^th, 2021 made him more than that. They made him and enemy of the republic. His order to Pence to overturn the election was an attempted coup d’etat. He has spent the last year and a half stirring up his followers with his story that he really won the election. Now he has come out with the statement above and later ones standing by it. One should assume that it is not some crazed, thoughtless rant coming from a fit of temper and not to be taken seriously, but rather something that he means, it and then think about what that means.

There is nothing in laws or the Constitution which would allow what he wants. There is no person or organization with the legal or constitutional authority to “declare” him the winner of an election he lost or to schedule an ad hoc presidential election in the middle of another president’s term. If he does not know that, then he is more profoundly ignorant than people have thought and by that alone unfit to hold any political office. If he does know it but does not care, he is a dangerous enemy of the country hoping for somebody, somehow to rise up and restore him to power in the manner of a return from Elba and even more unfit to hold political office.

He is also somebody who won the presidency once and might again. Garland needs to make that impossible.

Hurt Feelings at the IRS

 

Among the very bad things coming from American leftists in the last few years is the notion that rude speech is violence – that harsh or nasty criticism is equivalent to physical assault. As with many other things from the leftists, it is false, phony, and dangerous. The falseness is obvious. The damage from sticks and stones is of a different category from hurt feelings from harsh words. The phoniness is obvious as well. Leftists clearly do not really mean it, at least not as a general principle. They apply their maxim to “hateful” criticism of people and things they like, but almost never to the things they and those they approve of say about people and causes they dislike. The danger is that leftists in power will use the idea to violate their opponents rights to speech and opinion.

Something like this is coming from the Internal Revenue Service. Several IRS employees and friends of the agency in the media have attempted to  conflates political criticism of the  agency from Republicans  and others with threats to attack  agents or offices. It may not fully be an attempt to equate dissent with criminal activity, but it comes  close enough. Someone needs to tell them  that this is in the United States of America and not central Europe in the 1930s, and that criticizing, disliking, or even despising the IRS or the people in power in Washington at any particular time is the right of every American citizen. It’s in the Constitution. And as a pragmatic matter, officials might want to consider whether having people speaking for the  IRS attack one political party might lead even the more gullible members of the public to question the claim that the IRS is an apolitical organization which enforces tax laws fairly and consistently with no political favoritism or prejudice.

Biden's Debt Forgiveness

 

Biden’s plan to forgive three hundred billion dollars of student loan debt is not only bad. It is much worse in important ways than other recent handouts from government. The bailouts of investment banks and other financial institutions in 2008 and 2009 were accompanied by some arguments that they were less bad and less costly than the alternative of the government having to pay even more through the FDIC and other guarantees in an economic depression. Those arguments may or may not have been valid, but they at least provided a cover story. Similarly when the government sent citizens so-called stimulus money in 2020 and 2021, there were claims that the payments were necessary to keep the economy from falling too far or even justified as compensation of a sort for the burdens the government placed on people during the epidemic. Those claims do not hold up well, but they too provided a cover story.

There is no plausible cover story for this one. Biden is attempting to buy votes by shifting the burden of some people’s often poor decisions in borrowing onto other people who either did not make similar decisions or paid up if they did. It is a simple case of robbing Peter to pay Paul in the hope that Paul will be stimulated to vote for Democrats in November. In the long run it brings the risk of incentivizing people to take out large student loans in the hope they will not have to pay them back and the moral hazard of telling people that they should not worry too much about making bad decisions, since one politician or another facing a tough election will bail them out. It definitely harms the country. To function well a society needs a large number of people who deal honestly, honor their word and commitments, and pay their debts. Biden and company just sent those people a message that they are suckers.

It may not even play well for the Democrats politically. There are lots of voters who either never took out student loans or paid them off fair and square. They may be annoyed. I hope so.

Garland and Trump

 

Like many others I do not know yet what to make of Garland’s raid on Trump’s house. I think that Trump’s behavior from December 14^th through January 6^th after the election was criminal, and that it would be good for the country if Garland found that it was also illegal. I also think Trump is arrogant, obtuse, and irresponsible enough to make it plausible that he might have wandered off with some secret information about nuclear weapons – ours or theirs.

 
I do hope Garland’s search was justified. I hope it was not a political maneuver, and that when the facts come out, Trump’s defenders will have to shut up. The Democrats are likely to lose the presidency in 2024 to any likely Republican candidate except Trump. If the raid was a ploy to enrage Trump and goad him into running, well we know how well the Todd Akin trick of promoting Trump in the primaries on the premise that he surely would lose to even Hillary Clinton worked in 2016. It is too dangerous to incentivize Trump to run because of seeing him as a likely loser. He might win, and then where would we be?

More IRS Agents

 People who say taxation is theft are of course right. The income tax is the moral equivalent of feudal barons seizing the food raised by their serfs. The property tax is the moral equivalent of 1920s Chicago gangsters shaking down shopkeepers for protection money. The estate tax is the moral equivalent of one of the slimy bounty hunters in The Wild Bunch asking another for his knife because one of the corpses of the men they had just killed had some gold in his teeth. All governments are funded by criminal activity.

This does not mean there should be no governments. In a world where enough people were fair, just, rational, and honest, there would be no need for governments and thus no need for taxes. We do not live in such a world. In this world police, courts, armed forces for national defense, and various other activities of government are necessary and make Americans more free than the would be in their absence (Rothbardian fantasies notwithstanding). It does mean that people should be skeptical of their governments, that many things that can be done voluntarily should be, and that the amount of criminal activity by the state should be kept to a minimum.

This week the Democrats decided that what this country needs to solve its problems is eighty-seven thousand more tax collectors and passed a law authorizing hiring them. They tried to pass it off as a scheme to squeeze only rich people but voted down amendments requiring that the new hires would molest only the rich. So one may assume they will be coming after plenty of other than rich people. With Trump still around it sometimes is difficult for people to remember the Republicans usually are less bad than the Democrats. This bill is a reminder. Claims that only “cheaters” have anything to worry about are nonsense. Federal tax laws are so vague and complex and subject to capricious individual bureaucratic interpretation that even conscientious taxpayers can get tripped up in audits, sometimes after relying on a statement by one IRS employee that the auditor decides to contradict. (The IRS states explicitly that reliance on what one has been told by one of its employees is no defense.) There is also plenty of evidence that people and organizations whose political views dissent from those of the Democrats will have a lot to worry about. One can guess that interpretations of things in gray areas will not be going their way. Even an audit that results in no charges is unpleasant enough for the threat of being selected for one because of one’s political opinions to be a good tool for keeping political dissidents quieter. Then there is the simple fact of adding eighty-seven thousand people who want to work as tax collectors to the government’s payroll. Without going too far into that, it is enough to ask what sort of person would seek a career as a shakedown artist, and whether we want thousands more of them running around with authority to harm others.

It seems likely that Republicans will take control of the house and the senate this fall. If so, the appropriations they pass should defund the eighty-seven thousand and shrink the IRS back to its present size or smaller.

Cheney and Trump

 Liz Cheney is right, and Donald Trump is wrong. I hope she wins her primary election. She deserves to, but I doubt she will. Her father made some good comments about Trump in that ad for her, though he went a little too far in calling Trump the worst internal threat to the country in 246 years. The names Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee come to mind. Still Trump is bad enough, and if you leave the Confederates out of it, Mr. Cheney is probably right.

I do not know what is wrong with Republicans who are still attached to Trump. He is an arrogant, ignorant, blustering, demagogic scoundrel, and he advertises the fact. Most Republicans say they are conservatives. He is not a conservative as the term usually has been understood. He is not committed to limited government, restraint on executive power, freer trade, traditional mores, or upholding the Constitution. He talked big on national defense, but with people now worried about the readiness of the armed forces, one has to wonder how much he accomplished. He shows no more respect for the citizens of the country or their intelligence than any other continually lying politician. Contrary to his bragging, he has not been a big winner in politics. He barely beat the most unlikable major party candidate in decades in 2016, led his party to a defeat in 2018, and lost to a dull, mentally impaired, political hack in 2020. And then he made himself an enemy of the republic by criminally trying to remain in power by staging an illegal and unconstitutional coup with his order to Mike Pence to overturn the election.

I do not see how they can stick with him. I hope they quit. Opponents of the leftists, whether conservative, liberal, libertarian, or whatever, can ignore him and support Republicans in the coming election, but that will be impossible in the presidential election if he gets the nomination in 2024. Then what?