Alright, Keating.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you, as an outspoken atheist, are a believer in Darwinian evolution (or some close variant).

Would you suggest that humans (or any other form of life) would have been better suited to survive and thrive had they been “intelligently designed” by a God or other central force?  If your answer is “Yes” then the reason you hold fiscally liberal ideals makes more sense to me.  If, however, your answer is “No,” then it begs the question of if Darwinian evolution works for creating the most adaptable, able species in any given environment, why would it not work to create the most adaptable, able entities in any given economy?  Of course, I liken capitalism to Darwinian evolution of companies and other enterprises.

Furthermore, should you state that you do believe humans came to be as a result of Darwinian evolution, it is not a far step to then state that humans are the result of evolution and we will act upon the basic instincts that have been instilled in us over billions of years that made us what we are today.  That is, humans are inherently greedy and selfish and will act on those instincts no matter what the economic structure of a society is.  As such, should we not aim for an economy that benefits from greed and selfishness rather than one that is debilitated by it?

I agree with you that Ms. Bachmann is jumping the gun by going out and suggesting revolution.  However, I don’t entirely disagree with her.  A revolution from time to time is indeed a good thing.  This nation was set up to facilitate revolution.  We are allowed free speech and press so that we may revolt.  We are allowed to bear arms so that we may revolt (though many sectors of government are trying to drastically limit this).  The framers of our constitution realized that the government needs to be kept in check via “checks and balances.”  One of those checks is citizens with weapons that threaten to tar and feather politicians should they go too far.  Granted, this is a very extreme check, but it is one that should be kept burning in the back of every American’s mind.

Law and order are enormously important in a free market – in any society for that matter – and under most any circumstance I am in favor of maintaining that order.  However, when a government begins to break its own laws and creates disorder then revolution may become necessary.

You stated that, “President Obama won the popular vote by 7%, and he received over double the electoral votes as Senator McCain. Yet, this has not stopped some on the political right from calling for violent revolution in the United States.”  I can’t imagine that most, if any, of these people are calling for revolution because they deny that President Obama won the election.  I think it is very clear that he has an incredible following and it was anticipated throughout the months leading up to the election that he would win.  I believe that people are calling for revolution so loudly and so quickly because they see what I see.  They see a man, an Administration and a Legislature that are intent on stripping the people of this nation of the freedoms that they have enjoyed for centuries.  In these short two months, Democratic members of the Legislative and Executive branches have proposed unheard of levels of spending, drastically increased taxation, taken control of numerous large corporations, threatened to revoke bonuses that were agreed upon under contracts while the government owned the company, fired a CEO and board members, given ultimatums to private companies, threatened to force private companies into bankruptcy after sinking tens of billions of dollars into them, suggested a bill for mandatory community service that later had to be changed, went back on many campaign promises, failed to get any support from the Republican Party, begged for help from the hedge funds that they had bashed for over a year in an effort to convince them to buy “toxic assets” from banks’ balance sheets, and a number of other infuriating proposals.  Furthermore, majority does not mean that revolution is unnecessary.  The majority of Colonists did not wish to secede from Great Britain, but there was still a revolution.  Revolution does not require majority, but I can tell you that one of the quickest ways to get a revolution is to legalize theft in the way of taxation for redistribution.

Let me clarify again that I do agree that a Congresswoman should not be inciting violent revolution just yet.  The best way is always the peaceful way so long as it is effective.  At this point we have no reason to believe that if Americans are upset enough that they will somehow peaceably dismantle this government.  Until we have reason to believe that nothing can be done through peaceful measures, violent revolution should take a far back seat.  However, I’d venture to say that we are inching towards the closest point to revolution that we have seen since 1861.  With today’s fast mass communication it makes crowds gather much more rapidly and transmits knowledge that people would have otherwise never known.  In my experience, the more people learn about government the more upset they are apt to become.

I leave you with this: our government was never intended to be a democracy – it is and always has been intended to be a republic.  When Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention of 1787 he was asked by a woman what he had set up for the American people.  He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

People from the Great State of Minnesota Embarrassed Almost Daily

I could be wrong, but after the 2000 election, I don’t remember any prominent democratic commentators or officials calling for the violent overthrow of the Bush administration. This was of course an election Mr. Bush lost (but still won the Presidency). President Obama won the popular vote by 7%, and he received over double the electoral votes as Senator McCain. Yet, this has not stopped some on the political right from calling for violent revolution in the United States. From citizen revolts, military coups, to seceding from the Union, there has a been a chorus of calls for open treason. Notorious Minnesota representative Michelle Bachmann (pictured), launched to fame after calling for McCarthy-era investigations into the ‘anti-american’ members of congress in October 2008. Ms. Bachmann has outdone herself, this time calling for the people of the United States to be “armed and dangerous” in their opposition to the President’s agenda. Here are some of the more treasonous statements Ms. Bachmann made last week on several different ‘news’ outlets..

“At this point the American people - it’s like Thomas Jefferson said, a revolution every now and then is a good thing. We are at the point, Sean, of revolution. And by that, what I mean, an orderly revolution — where the people of this country wake up get up and make a decision that this is not going to happen on their watch. It won’t be our children and grandchildren that are in debt. It is we who are in debt, we who will be bankrupting this country, inside of ten years, if we don’t get a grip. And we can’t let the Democrats achieve their ends any longer.”

Any longer? Its been 2 months, and already she is ready to throw out the greatest example of the peaceful transition of power of any government throughout history? Ironically, a peaceful precedence set by Jefferson. Is she really ready to burn that shining city on a hill? Sadly, it appears so. She continued..

“Right now I’m a member of Congress. And I believe that my job here is to be a foreign correspondent, reporting from enemy lines. And people need to understand, this isn’t a game. This isn’t just a political talk show that’s happening right now. This is our very freedom, and we have 230 years, a continuous link of freedom that every generation has ceded to the next generation. This may be the time when that link breaks. And I’m going to do everything I can, I know you are, to make sure that we keep that link secure. We cannot allow that link to break, because as Reagan said, America is the last great hope of mankind..”

Only someone as tone deaf as Ms. Bachmann could sport these blinders. Does she not see the hypocrisy of talking about the great democratic tradition of America shortly after advocating that our process should be usurped by the minority? I mean come on, did she just say being a member of congress put her behind enemy lines? What happened to ‘Country First’? Sadly, for some, country has taken a backseat to ideology.

As an American, I am appalled by Representative Bachmann’s calls for the unilateral destruction of our great democracy. As a liberal, I’m loving ever minute of it, as Ms. Bachmann’s statements have come at a time when it seems the Republican party is struggling daily to make itself look even worse than it did just the day before. 19 page budget anyone? I suspect we won’t have to hear about this kook anymore after the 2010 election, but I’ve been wrong before.

One problem here is that I am not a supporter of the GOP, I’m a libertarian.  Regardless, since the GOP has closer ideals to libertarianism than does the Democratic Party I’ll defend the GOP here and there.

I agree with you that George Bush spent way too much money, particularly on the wars and the $700 billion bailout.  However, to use his spending as justification to spend even more seems ludicrous and very flawed.  Obama’s 2010 budget is approximately $700 billion more than Bush’s 2009 budget and although Bush’s didn’t include war spending, Obama’s doesn’t include the stimulus, which accounts for more spending than all of the Iraq war by most accounts.  Stimulus and war aside, Obama increased the federal budget by more than 24% in one year.  I have zero justification for the GOP’s spending over the last eight years, but I do know that using their spending as an excuse to spend even more is not only terribly flawed logic, it is taking us down the path of disaster.

It is true that the Clinton administration experienced strong economic growth in the nineties, but this was not a result of Keynesian philosophies.  President Clinton was fortunate to become president at the end of a recession and at the beginning of the tech boom.  If you recall, the NASDAQ, which lists many technology companies, became bloated to over 5,000 in March of 2000.  However, between March and January, when George Bush took office, the NASDAQ fell back to earth and was around 2,600 when Bush was inaugurated.  The point is this: while the economy did grow in the Clinton days, it was not exclusively result of his policies, but rather a result of the tech boom/bubble, which I feel had a lot to do with Greenspan’s monetary policy.

Clinton was actually relatively conservative with his tax reforms.  He kept all of the tax brackets that George H.W. Bush had in place; he just added two brackets on top of the old Bush brackets.  Our tax system went from having three tax brackets to five.  Additionally, he was still able to keep the highest marginal tax rate below 40% because he did not spend much money.  Clinton’s taxes were incredibly low by democrat standards.  The last democrat President, Jimmy Carter, had a tax system that taxed the top bracket at 70%.  Additionally, Clinton actually lowered the capital gains tax to 10%, increased the level of  estate tax (death tax) exemption, increased the amount a person could gift tax-free, exempted capital gains tax on the sale of a personal residence, increased tax deductions for dependents, increased tax exemptions for farmers, and extended certain business tax advantages.  Bill Clinton proved to be more conservative with taxation than liberal.  Furthermore, he signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law, a move that most democrats disagreed with and republicans applauded.  Bill Clinton lowered many taxes and increased free trade.  He even signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, which allowed States to refuse recognition of same-sex marriages.  Bill Clinton was not the fiery liberal we see today in Obama, Pelosi, and Frank.  Compared to the liberals we see today and the ones we saw in the Carter days, Clinton was a bloody conservative.

Obama’s plan is indeed to increase the top marginal tax rates to similar levels as Clinton, but he is also eliminating the bottom tax bracket of 10%, which will mean that the first $17,000 of income will be taxed at 15% instead of 10%, this doesn’t help the poor at all.  It doesn’t help anybody.  Furthermore, he is raising capital gains taxes to 20%, compared to Clinton’s 10% and Bush’s 15%.  This will remove much of the incentive to invest money, something that Clinton realized but Obama does not.  He is also planning on increasing estate taxes and decreases the deductions that people in the top tax brackets can utilize.  This, again, will persuade people to invest less money.  Let us remember that the top 50% of income earners already pay 97% of income taxes.  This means that half of the people in this nation don’t even pay income taxes.  The tax system is already set up to tax the rich and not tax the poor.  The more skewed this becomes the more we will have a situation where people will vote for spending because they are not paying for it and we will inch closer and closer to complete socialism.

Again, the free market did not cause this problem.  Something like 2% of homes were in foreclosure when we started hearing about the end of the world from our government.  When the $700 billion bailout passed congress the Dow Jones was above 11,000.  Constant fear mongering by the federal government has led to people restricting where they will spend and invest and this has been a catalyst for economic collapse.  When the market truly was free our economy was able to rapidly rebound from such catastrophes.  Consider the Panic of 1896 and the Panic of 1913, both times J.P. Morgan and other private financiers teamed up to “bail out” financial institutions, including the U.S. Treasury in 1896, because they knew they could make a hefty profit and stabilize the economy.  Trusting the market is exactly what we must do because it is what works.  There were no government bailouts and everything worked our perfectly.  Another example would be the savings and loan crisis in the late 80s where thousands of banks failed, and were allowed to fail.  We made it out of that just fine as the free market took its course of creative destruction.  When the government has intervened, such as in the Great Depression, the problems did not dissipate, they only became worse.  The great depression lasted for more than a decade because of government intervention and I’m afraid that is the path we are going down again.

As far as Obama doing exactly what he ran on, I disagree.  He campaigned on changing government and getting rid of earmarks.  Now he is telling us that any bill the size of the Stimulus has earmarks and that we can not wait to have a perfect, earmark-free bill.   He campaigned on working with democrats and republicans to pass necessary measures, not one republican voted for his Stimulus Bill – not one.  The only thing he has changed about government is its size.  To have a 24% increase in the budget in one year is absurd, especially when 2009’s was too high to begin with.

Wouldn’t embed…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQEAydTlVXE

Ah the deficit, the rallying point for the right to attack Obama’s agenda. President Obama’s first budget has a federal deficit of 1.75 trillion dollars. His predecessor’s budget has a short fall of 500 billion, but didn’t include the wars. The Iraq war is closing in on 750 billion dollar bill, all of which was off the books to make the Bush Administration look less reckless. The fact is spending has been out of control for the last 8 years, so this budget by Obama is nothing unprecedented if you view it in the context of spending versus GDP.

In 1993, despite hearing the same apocalyptic arguments we are hearing now, President Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. Part of this bill increased the taxes of the top 1.4% of Americans from 35% to 39.6%. Did this cause the economy to collapse? No. Did “small business” in American disappear? No. Well then, if the four horsemen didn’t appear as soon as Bubba picked up his pen, what happened? The largest economic expansion in American history, during his presidency, Bill Clinton with the help of Keynesian economic theory created 23 million new jobs, leading to a large budget surplus. Lots of these jobs, were so-called small businesses that not only survived the devastating 4.6% tax increase, but flourished. This is in direct confrontation with the rights assertion that any tax increases whatsoever on the people with the most money, the people not in danger of losing their homes, the people who can afford to have that surgery on their broken shoulder (yes, my shoulder is broken), is tantamount to economic suicide. It’s just not the case. Indeed, when Clinton took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was right around 3200. Eight years later, the average was a whopping 10,700. All of this was done under the tax rates that President Obama is suggesting we return to.

Overall I would say, we can’t just sit and do nothing. To trust the market to deliver us from a problem that market created is frankly ridiculous. Obama’s plan of action is exactly what he ran on, and what the American people chose in November, so until the right offers better ideas to solve this crisis then just tax cuts for the wealthy, President Obama will continue to enjoy public support for his agenda.