Elizabeth Warren and China

This article in Reason does a nice job analyzing the flaws in Elizabeth Warren’s comparison of how much China spends on their infrastructure versus ours. http://reason.com/blog/2012/07/30/ira-stoll-on-why-liz-warren-wants-americThere are a couple links below showing an example of a Chinese ghost city, an entire city that was built by the Chinese government which is unoccupied and likely to stay that way. Just what we need here, right?

Actually she does us a favor in showing how government can build an infrastructure -- which she says businesses need in order to exist – that no one uses. This is the reverseof Frederic Bastiat’s analysis of the broken window fallacy in which he refutes the claim that destroying things actually is good because it creates work for those who can rebuild what was destroyed. See more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window. My point is the opposite: The Chinese government built entire cities for which there was no need. As a result the resources spent on these projects are not available for other projects for which there might be a legitimate need. As Bastiat noted we focus on what can be seen – the brand spanking new but empty city –and not what can’t be seen – the lost opportunities to meet the real needs and wants of people as well as the wasted resources.

This brings me back to Warren’s and Obama’s rant about businesses being unable to do their thing without a strong infrastructure. What strikes me is the indignation both of them exuded. Maybe I missed something but I don’t recall seeing business owners running around claiming they built their enterprises without any assistance. To me both Warren and Obama set up a straw man to advance their case for higher taxes and reveal their deep seated antipathy for business and capitalism.

In China we have examples in these ghost cities of infrastructure being provided that no one is willing or able to use. More importantly it reveals what happens in a country that with a government that doesn’t recognize or protect individual rights. It says a lot that Warren proudly holds up China as an example to which we’re supposed to emulate.

http://reason.com/archives/2012/07/30/why-elizabeth-warren-wants-america-to-be

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1975397_2094492,00.html

http://www.financialpost.com/news/business-insider/ghost+cities+China/3982854/story.html

You Didn't Build That: Two Analyses

I like how Maverick Philosopher dissects Obama's remarks on "you didn't build that." Maverick Philosopher: Who Built the Internet? Obama's Straw Man Fallacy


Better yet is Ari Armstrong's analysis. http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/blog/index.php/2012/07/you-didnt-build-that-obamas-ode-to-envy/

King Barack I vs. the American Gospel of Success By Robert Tracinski

I like this analysis byRobert Tracinski. It covers a lot of ground and I agree with the points he makes.


King Barack I vs. the American Gospel of Success

Over the years I've met several business owners who have created their enterprises from nothing. One is a college friend of my wife who spent years scrimping and saving, working insane hours without knowing whether or not her business was going to succeed or not. Finally over. Here's the business to take off and eventually was bought out by a much larger organization. Our friend was asked to stay on and help continue managing the business the sheep built. But for years we saw very little of her because she was working 18 hour days six and seven days a week.

I also recall meeting a fellow while working on account where he and some of his coworkers bought the plant that was being sold by the parent company. They scraped together enough money by mortgaging their homes to buy the plant. There were no guarantees either business was going to survive. And if the businesses had failed the guys who bought the plant I mentioned above could have easily lost their homes.

Why tell the stories to uphold liberal friends of mine live in the area and indicate how much these people put on the line and how many hours they work I get to look of disbelief as if they are saying, “How could that possibly be?” In fact when one friend almost comes out and says it's not possible anybody could work harder than him. I'm not saying he doesn't work hard but I also know he engages in a lot of activities such as biking, tennis, hiking etc. that our friend I mentioned above had to completely abandon in order to build her business. I don't begrudge her the money she made. But I do sense resentment from our friends.

Obama talks about how people who have succeeded in creating and building their business are basically not smarter than the rest of us or haven't worked harder than the rest of us (although I would dispute that). He conveniently ignores one point that distinguishes people who have succeeded in creating their own businesses: they have taken risks that other people have not taken or are not willing to take.

He also conveniently forgets to mention the fact that the same people who created businesses from nothing did so from a vision of what they wanted to create.

If polled I would assume that the majority of business owners would agree with Obama's general point that it would not have been possible for them to create their business without the foundation of the infrastructure provided by local and federal taxes. To me this is the equivalent of saying we all need soil in order to grow crops. But it still takes someone with initiative, vision, and willingness to take risks to plant their seeds in the soil and spend the time and effort and sweat it takes for the seeds to grow. All this without a guarantee that their seeds will actually sprout.

Socialist or Fascist - Thomas Sowell - Townhall Conservative Columnists

Thomas Sowell makes a distinction that many conservative commentators miss when they accuse Obama of being a socialist or a communist.

It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a "socialist." He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.

What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.

…

One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.

I agree with him on this. He also correctly identifies fascism to the political left, not the right as most people do. However he doesn’t specifically mention how some folks like libertarians lay out the axis of the political spectrum with collectivism on the left and individualism on the right. A fascistic dictatorship, even if it favors business, still is a form of collectivism. The following definition provided in Wikipedia clearly shows the collectivist nature of fascism in which the individual is subjugated to the needs of the nation.

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek rejuvenation of their nation based on commitment to an organic national community where its individuals are united together as one people in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood through a totalitarian single-party state that seeks the mass mobilization of a nation through discipline, indoctrination, physical training, and eugenics.

Getting back to Sowell’s piece he makes a couple of key points.

Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama's point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.

Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous -- something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.

Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the "greed" of the insurance companies.

This might seem like an issue of semantics but I don’t believe it is. I hold that incorrectly identifying Obama’s political position harms the credibility of the person making this claim. A knowledgeable opponent would have cause to ignore the comment because it shows ignorance at worst or sloppy thinking at best. It also incorrectly pits the right as being purely pro-business regardless of its relationship to government (i.e., the right supports big business cronyism while the left is protecting us little folk who need the help of our enlightened politicians to fight for our rights against the juggernaut of big business and the rich.)

Over time the left has done a good job of usurping certain terms in our language. An example is their term “right wing dictatorship” which can be safely uttered and no one challenges it. If we accept this designation we’re faced with the choice of a dictatorship of the proletariat on the left fighting the dictatorship of the bourgeois on the right. The individual is conveniently ignored in this spectrum.

Repo Men - Kevin D. Williamson - National Review Online

This scathing article by Kevin Williamson targets Obama and his Democrat colleagues for their profiteering from intimate connections with Wall Street while pontificating how they're protecting the little guy, us 99% to use the Occupy Wall Street lingo. Republicans aren't spared his scorn either. And rightfully so (no pun intended). Just a warning. If you suffer from high blood pressure be sure to take your medication before reading this expose.

Williamson's points support what I said in my previous post: http://thinkingobjectively.blogspot.com/2011/09/palins-political-observations-plus-my.html

Works and Days » ‘When the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Legend’

Works and Days » ‘When the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Legend’

Yet another brilliant piece by Victor Davis Hanson.

PJ Media » What’s the Matter with Obama’s Kansas Speech?

I like Neoneocon's analysis of Obama's recent speech on PJ Media » What’s the Matter with Obama’s Kansas Speech?

For me a telling phrase in Obama's speech is this one, especially the last sentence.

There is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let's respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. "The market will take care of everything," they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes -- especially for the wealthy -- our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn't trickle down, well, that's the price of liberty.

Now, it's a simple theory. And we have to admit, it's one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That's in America's DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here's the problem: It doesn't work. It has never worked.

Should we really be so surprised by his comment? I ask this because I recall coming across a similar sentiment when helping my daughters with the Social Studies homework when they were in middle school more than ten years ago. I recall reading in their textbook how FDR’s New Deal policies saved capitalism from its own excesses and continue to do so. Obama is just touting the same line of thinking. (For a contrary -- and I think more plausible -- explanation of what caused the Great Depression and our current economic woes I recommend checking out the Ludwig von Mises Institute for the Austrian school of economics perspective.)

Getting back to Neoneocon’s article I would take a somewhat different angle. She correctly identifies that “Obama repeatedly mentioned this goal of fairness while blurring or ignoring the all-important distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome as a measure of that fairness.” While this is indeed a valid distinction fairness also masks an inherent fuzziness that works to the advantage of (to use one of Obama’s favorite phrases) those who want to expand the concept of fairness to suit their agenda. I would argue that the concept of individual rights gets forgotten in this line of argument. We can argue forever over which definition of fairness we use unless we have a valid concept of individual rights to ground this argument and to settle disagreements over what is “fair.”

I’ll admit that the Left has successfully eroded or expanded the idea of individual rights to justify their desired enlarged of the role of government but it took some mighty verbal acrobatics to do it. For a good discussion of how FDR did this check out NeverEnough: America’s Limitless Welfare State by William Voegeli. However if we get sucked into debating definitions of fairness we have already lost the intellectual fight. With individual rights there is some objective standard to which we can repair.

Fairness, like a magician’s sleight of hand, gets us to shift our focus away from the conditions necessary for each individual to live freely and to pursue happiness to the relationship between individuals. In other words Obama and his supporters substitute the concept of individual rights which has an objective basis (if formed properly) to fairness, which can mean whatever one wants it to be. I think this is precisely their motive.

While fairness is a valid concept on the social level in terms of how people treat each other in a non-legal context elevating fairness to trump rights and to be a governing political principle is a path fraught with peril.

Pajamas Media » Obama and Me

This essay presents an eloquent summary of one disillusioned former Obama supporter.

When I first heard about Obama as a rising star in the Democratic Party, a man so refreshingly different from his predecessors and contemporaries, I was intensely curious and quite favorably disposed toward the youngish, African-American legislator and author. And when I gleaned from my local newspaper that he might harbor aspirations to the White House, I found myself very much in his corner, one of his many Canadian fans. He had an effect similar to the new car smell, appropriately called “outgassing” in the trade, which is often irresistible to prospective buyers.

Naturally, I wished to learn as much as I could about the man who represented an unprecedented phenomenon on the American political scene. I soon discovered that very little of substance was known about this rara avis and so began a disciplined search for more information. Within months I had accumulated a towering stack of articles, commentaries, editorials, and diverse kinds of documentary materials, much of this stuff mere unfocused adulation and adjectival irrelevance but many of these items of a distinctly troubling nature. His autobiographies notwithstanding, I was soon caught in the grip of a profound paradox. It seemed the more I knew, the less I knew. But this “less” was more than enough to convince me, by the time he had won the Democratic nomination, that Obama was everything he presumably was not.

I had finally amassed enough documentation to determine that he was not the centrist he affected to be but a far-left ideologue, that he was a gyrating opportunist who could reverse his proclamations on a dime to suit the occasion, that he had neither knowledge of nor competence in the complexities of foreign affairs, that he was an unabashed plagiarist in his stump speeches, that there was no chance of him becoming a “post racial” president but rather a demagogue who would sharpen racial tensions, that his grasp of real-world economics was shaky to non-existent, that he was an unnervingly ignorant man (e.g. the Austrian language) as well as a showboat (e.g., the fake classical pillars), that he was associated with some of the most dubious people in the political, academic, and religious communities, and that he would waste little time putting the screws on Israel while flattering and appeasing the Islamic world.

As the lies come crashing down

This article covers events in Pakistan that have not received much attention. I found these comments within the article to be particularly enlightening and concerning.

Since taking office, the Obama administration has failed to conceive of a strategy for contending with the situation. One of the main obstacles to the formation of a coherent US strategy is the Obama administration's move to outlaw any discussion of the basic threats to US interests. Shortly after entering office, President Barack Obama banned the use of the term "War against terror," substituting it with the opaque term "overseas contingency operation."

Last April, Obama banned use of the terms "jihad," "Islamic terrorism" and "radical Islam" in US government documents.

Maybe there is an innocent explanation for this change in official language although I'm having a difficult time conjuring one.

President 40/60

Victor Davis Hanson offers a good, concise analysis of the reasons for President Obama's continually sliding poll numbers.

The Anti-American President? by Robert James Bidinotto

Good friend Robert Bidinotto penned The Anti-American President?. Well worth reading!

Here is a sample.

Indeed. With the possible exception of Woodrow Wilson, Barack Obama is the only American president to truly despise, at the deepest philosophical level, what America uniquely stands for—which is why he stresses that he aims to be a “transformational president.” He has complained that the Framers of the Constitution failed to allow for “redistributive change.” Andrew C. McCarthy summarized Obama’s frustration with constitutional limits on government power:

American Jeopardy: What is Fascism?

John Giffing has written an insightful analysis of the trend in America towards fascism: American Jeopardy: What is Fascism?

Here is the introductory paragraph.

Over the years, words lose meaning and often take on new forms that in no way represent their original usage. This can be observed in the now taboo word "fascism." Fascism is now most closely associated with the system of government that effected the slaughter of over 6 million Jews and other political prisoners. But at its core, fascism is really no more than a system where government, through agreements with the private sector, controls virtually all property and income indirectly.

Why Business Hates Obama

In browsing different blogs on both sides of the political spectrum, a common theme I've seen on the right is to accuse Obama of being a socialist or a communist. While there might be some merit to applying one of these labels to him I actually think he is more in favor of what some call crony capitalism. Or maybe a more appropriate term is fascism of some sort. According to Wikipedia, “Fascists seek to organize a nation according to corporatist perspectives, values, and systems, including the political system and the economy. ... Fascists believe that a nation is an organic community that requires strong leadership, singular collective identity, and the will and ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong. They claim that culture is created by the collective national society and its state, that cultural ideas are what give individuals identity, and thus they reject individualism.”

The last sentence in the Wikipedia entry captures what I think is a common denominator shared by socialism, communism, fascism and crony capitalism: an antipathy towards individuals. I think it also shouldn't be surprising that small businesses have been suffering under the Obama administration's attempts to "fix" the economy. Many small businesses represent the embodied dreams of entrepreneurs, of a man or woman who create a business on their own instead of working in the corporate world.

Joel Kotkin's article explains why small businesses, which normally lead the economy out of a recession, are staying hunkered down.

Obama’s big problems with business did not start, and are not deepest, among the corporate elite. Instead, the driver here has been what you might call a bottom-up opposition. The business move against Obama started not in the corporate suites, but among smaller businesses. In the media, this opposition has been linked to Tea Parties, led by people who in any case would have opposed any Democratic administration. But the phenomenon is much broader than that.

The one group that has fared badly in the last two years has been the private-sector middle class, particularly the roughly 25 million small firms spread across the country. Their discontent—not that of the loud-mouthed professional right or the spoiled sports on Wall Street—is what should be keeping Obama and the Democrats awake at night.

Small business should be leading us out of the recession. In the last two deep recessions during the early 1980s and the early 1990s, small firms, particularly the mom and pop shops, helped drive the recovery, adding jobs and starting companies. In contrast, this time the formation rate for new firms has been dropping for months—one reason why unemployment remains so high and new hiring remains insipid at best.

...

It’s not hard to see the reasons for pessimism. Entrepreneurs see bailed-out Wall Street firms and big banks recovering, while getting credit remains very difficult for the little guy. In addition, many small businesses are terrified of new mandates, in energy or health, which makes them reluctant to hire new people. Small banks—not considered “too big to fail”—fear that they will prove far less capable of meeting new regulatory guidelines than their leviathan competitors.

...

Among businesses of all sizes, there is now a pervasive sense that the administration does not understand basic economics. This is not to say they believe Obama’s a closet socialist, as some more unhinged conservatives claim. That would be an insult to socialism. Obama’s real problem is that he’s a product, basically, of the fantastical faculty lounge.

For the most part, university professors do not much value economic growth, since they consider themselves, like government workers, a protected class. Many, particularly in planning and environmental study departments, also embrace the views of the president’s academic science adviser, John Holdren, who suggests Western countries undergo “de-development,” which is the opposite of economic growth.

Toxic Environmental Regulations Poison the Job Market

Toxic Environmental Regulations Poison the Job Market

Obama's Greek Tragedy

Victor Davis Hanson's Obama's Greek Tragedy makes a number of good points about the drastic disparity between Obama's hope and change campaign platitudes while merely continuing the policies of his predecessor, George W, who Obama excoriated during the presidential campaign.

The reality of Barack Obama is that he was an inexperienced community organizer with an undistinguished record as a Senate newcomer. A perfect storm of popular anger at eight years of George Bush, a lackluster John McCain campaign, Obama's landmark candidacy as an African-American, a disingenuous campaign promising centrist and bipartisan governance, and the financial meltdown in 2008 got the relatively untried and unknown Obama elected.

Most mortals in Obama's position would have treaded lightly. They would have kept promises, steered a moderate course and listened more than lectured until they won over the public with concrete achievement.

But headstrong tragic figures do not do that. They neither welcome in critics nor would listen to them if they did. They impute their unforeseen temporary success to their own brilliance -- and expect it to continue forever. So would-be gods set themselves up for a fall far harder than what happens to the rest of us.

That's about where we are now, with our president playing a character right out of Greek tragedy, who, true to form, is railing about the unfairness of it all.

Obama's thuggery is useless in fighting spill | Washington Examiner

This piece does a nice job summarizing the fact that Obama's thuggery is useless in fighting spill | Washington Examiner.

In particular I liked these two paragraphs:

And what about the decision not to waive the Jones Act, which bars foreign-flag vessels from coming to the aid of the Gulf cleanup? The Bush administration promptly waived it after Katrina in 2005. The Obama administration hasn't and claims unconvincingly that, gee, there aren't really any foreign vessels that could help.

The more plausible explanation is that this is a sop to the maritime unions, part of the union movement that gave Obama and other Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle. It's the Chicago way: Dance with the girl that brung ya.

Obama’s Gulf War III

This link provides an interesting perspective on Obama's handling of the BP oil spill.

Obama’s Gulf War III

Obama campaigned on competence and cool. But his technocrats, whether Van Jones, Dr. Chu, Larry Summers, or Eric Holder, are at best academic misfits and at worse simply unfit for executive responsibilities. Harvard Law Review may be of value for suing BP later and demonizing it in the press, and community organizing may be valuable in shaking down BP to clean up, but had only the president run an ACE Hardware store, or at least worked the night shift at Starbucks, he could have had some experience in delegating authority and demanding results from employees, while keeping in mind the bigger picture of economic survival. Right now we are being governed by a GS something, who has no idea where money comes from, but lots of ideas how to blow it. This crisis brings that out.

Pigs fly, and the Times chides Obama on the oil spill by neoneocon

Once again neoneocon nails a subject on the head. This time it's Obama's "response" to the BP oil spill, the gentle chiding given by The New York Times and a key oversight in their editorial.

Earth to NY Times: Obama is not a competent leader. He can pretend to be one during a campaign, and the press can assert that he is one when he has so little record to refute their claims. But that is not reality, it’s a co-constructed narrative that can easily fall to pieces when it faces events in the world.

The Times editors, who still appear to believe that Obama could show these things if he would only choose to do so, fail to understand the principle. But as wordsmiths who’ve most likely never had to show results in their lives (including an increase in circulation; theirs has been in freefall), but who believe something to be so merely by asserting it and/or bluffing, they must be very puzzled indeed.

What is enough?

Earlier this week I saw a post titled Obama and Sowell: who can tell when people have made enough money? on the always-excellent neo-neocon about a speech Obama gave regarding the recent push for financial reform. Neo-neocon’s post has the following quote from this speech (which, in the interest of full disclosure, I have not dug up and read, yet).

Here is the quote.

“We’re not, we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.”

Neo-neocon’s response:

One of the most interesting things about the Obama quote under discussion is that, if you look at his scripted speech, he was trying to do his version of supporting what Sowell says—that is, of praising the power of capitalism’s ability to allow the aggregate forces of private enterprise and personal initiative to grow an economy. He knows that’s the American way, and that it is necessary for a president to pay some sort of lip service to it. But he couldn’t help blurting out what for him is the truth—that he doesn’t really believe in it at all—and that he and the other brilliant intellectuals surrounding him know much better, both practically and morally.

Let’s unpack what he says. There is a lot in this one paragraph consisting of four sentences.

“I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Enough for whom and for what? Is the $5,000,000 Obama made last year primarily from his book sales the level that demarks what is enough? What happens if you exceed what is considered “enough”? Does the government cap it so you can’t receive it? Is it taxed at a 100% rate? Notice too the elitism inherent in this statement, that he and his cohorts know better than the rest of us what is “enough.”

“But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service.” Maybe I’m reading too much into his choice of words but it seems as though he harbors disdain for what is known as the American dream, especially with his choice of “just keep on making it.” Apparently once you’ve had enough you’re supposed to do what? Stop? Give away what is considered excess? Or, if you’re enlightened like Obama you don’t strive to just keep on making money in the first place.

“We don’t want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.” Here he seems to be saying that the justification for people succeeding economically is not because it is their right to do so (provided they’re not violating the rights of others). No, he seems to be saying it’s OK for them to succeed (up to a point defined by him, of course) as long as it’s fulfilling a responsibility to grow our economy (i.e., benefit others). I don’t see personal economic success and benefiting others as necessarily being mutually exclusive. Obama seems to be hinting that this success is justified only because others benefit too.

I would argue that socialism and planned economies, which aim to stifle or punish the individual drive for success while supposedly helping the “disadvantaged” accomplishes less of both than free markets. While the free market does a better job of enabling people to achieve personal economic success and benefiting others through the ripple effect of this success in creating opportunities for others or by generating the tax revenue the government needs to fund programs that help others. And that for me is more than enough.

The Health-Care Backlash by Peter Wehner

This article by Peter Wehner (a hat tip to Robert Bidinotto for finding this) has some interesting observations on the nature of Obama, his administration and its policies.

The collateral damage to Obama from this bill is enormous. More than any candidate in our lifetime, Obama won based on the aesthetics of politics. It wasn’t because of his record; he barely had one. And it wasn’t because of his command of policy; few people knew what his top three policy priorities were. It was based instead on the sense that he was something novel, the embodiment of a “new politics” – mature, high-minded and gracious, intellectually serious. That was the core of his speeches and his candidacy. In less than a year, that core has been devoured, most of all by this health-care process.

Mr. Obama has shown himself to be a deeply partisan and polarizing figure. (“I have never been asked to engage in a single serious negotiation on any issue, nor has any other Republican,” Senator McCain reported over the weekend.) The lack of transparency in this process has been unprecedented and bordering on criminal. The president has been deeply misleading in selling this plan. Lobbyists, a bane of Obama during the campaign, are having a field day.

President Obama may succeed in passing a terribly unpopular piece of legislation – but in the process, he has shattered his carefully cultivated image. It now consists of a thousand shards.

… Mr. Obama has revived the worst impressions of the Democratic party – profligate and undisciplined, arrogant, lovers of big government, increasers of taxes. The issues and narrative for American politics in the foreseeable future has been set — limited government versus exploding government, capitalism versus European style socialism, responsible and measured policies versus reckless and radical ones.