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The Political Uses of Inflation

Confusion plays a major role in politics, much of it intentional. The variety of confusion is more various and destructive in the modern period. Benjamin Disraeli is reputed to have said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, dammed lies and statistics.” Lying, as he understood it, has been much improved since the late 19 th century.   By way of example, take the mass confusion surrounding inflation. The tendency in modern politics is to confuse the general public by conflating inflation and high prices. Though increases in the price of goods and services and inflation – a product of government spending, borrowing and currency devaluation – are related, they are not the same. Inflation is caused when the federal government prints and borrows money, thereby reducing the purchasing power of the dollar, therefore making goods and services more expensive. The classic definition of inflation is: too many dollars chasing too few goods. When the federal government over a long period of time
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Bill Buckley -- Skip the Doc, Read The Books

National Review, a magazine founded by Bill Buckley in 1955, has given a thumbs down to National Public Radio’s recent documentary, ‘The Incomparable Mr. Buckley’, and no wonder. The documentary barely scratches the surface of the man who wrote in the inaugural first edition of National Review, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” Buckley was quick witted and aphoristic in his entertaining confrontations with a leftist media determined, for ideological reasons, to misunderstand him: “I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University (Meet the Press, 1965)” Buckley was determined to slough off artificial impositions placed upon him by a power thirsty national government: “I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more po
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A Word to the Wise in Connecticut: Cut Spending, Reduce Taxes

Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly this election year decided not to tinker with Democrat Governor Ned Lamont’s bi-partisan budget. We shall have to wait and see whether progressive Democrats in the state legislature are able, before the curtain finally descends on the two year budget, to make final spending adjustments in the budget through sleight-of–hand maneuverers in what is called the state’s “omnibus bill,” a gargantuan final budget edit presented to spending dissenters (read Republicans) moments before legislative adjournment. Republicans have often complained they had not received the omnibus bill early enough to read it before adjournment and kill all the new spending “rats” in it. So far, according to Democrat leaders, the state’s dominant party has been able to resist the usual blandishments of Connecticut’s clamorous left wing, most ably represented by State Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney of New Haven, the Bernie Sanders of Connecticut politics. Th
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Real Politics in Connecticut and the Big-Business-Progressive Complex

Politics in Connecticut is one of the few continually successful – i.e. money generating – businesses in the state. No one ever went poor in Connecticut betting on the ability of politicians to stuff their coffers with money drawn from hard pressed citizens. That wise old codger Ben Franklin once pointed to the only “two certainties in life” – “death and taxes.” His apothegm is truer in our day than his because politicians in the post-American Revolution era did not have the advantage of an income tax, state or federal. The very first thing to notice about Connecticut politics is that the state has been dominated for several decades by the Democrat Party, an adept money generator. What accounts for the slow and painful disappearance of the state Republican Party when not so long ago both parties shared power and influence and state budgets were modest and reasonable? What are the baleful effects of a one party state? Or, to put the question in another form that true “friends of t
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Biden the Revolutionary

Biden -- The Guardian The Democrat and Republican campaign scripts are beginning to come into view. Here and there, reading newspapers, one finds scattered references to both in news stories and commentary pieces. The creation of the scripts themselves are shrouded in mystery. We know who distributes the scripts: newspapers, largely progressive in the Northeast; television stations, largely progressive in the Northeast; and internet sites, largely progressive in the Northeast. But who creates the scripts? They are fashioned, one supposes, by leaders of the two principal parties in the United States, most of them not containing the warning “Made in Washington DC.” Rather than relying upon the native intelligence of a national audience in shaping the scripts, both parties, the Democrat Party more intensely, rely upon two propagandistic devices to sell their messages: incessant repetition and the power of totemistic words and labels to haul in votes. Political debates in the United
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Joe Lieberman Leaves Us

Lieberman Among some people in Connecticut who genuinely like people who bravely say the inconvenient truth – there are a few – former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman will be missed. He left us without warning and in a pickle not of his making. Republicans in Connecticut still praise Lieberman for flushing former U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker out of the state’s Republican Party. Weicker was the classic “Republican in name only” (RINO) who once said of his state party, “Why doesn’t someone take it over? It’s so small.”   And he referred to himself, approvingly and truthfully, as “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” The state Republican Party did not prosper under Weicker’s tutelage. He used the party under which he prospered politically for 31 years principally as a foil that stood him in good stead with Democrats. When Weicker left the U.S. Senate, his liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating was 10 percentage points higher than that of Democrat U.S.
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Who Decides Who Benefits?

Jefferson "He who gives up freedom for safety deserves neither” – Ben Franklin The two most important political questions are: “Who decides,’ and “Who benefits?” The less important political question is: “What shall be done?” V. I. Lenin answered this last question in his most famous pamphlet: “What Shall Be Done?” Lenin’s answer to this question was: The ownership of property, including wages and benefits, should revert from property owners to workers. This, pretty much, is the unstated program of our new, reform minded, Marxist tinged, neo-progressive Democrat Party. But, of course, business questions must be decided by someone. If not property owners and the managers of businesses under the direction of its stockholders, then who? For Lenin especially, the question “Who shall decide what is to be done?” was paramount. His answer to the question was: All important matters of state, including the direction of the national economy, would be decided by a communist vanguard o
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