Newt Gingrich

Beating up on Newt Gingrich is becoming kind of an unoriginal blog topic but I can’t help myself.  I’ll keep it brief though.  If you want an exhaustive list of reasons not to vote for Newt Gingrich you can go here.

First, this should terrify you.  I’m so sick of being called a fascist by people on the left.  Can we please not nominate a Republican who in fact is a fascist?  It’s really making us look bad.  The preservation of liberty is an exercise in restraint.  I don’t like a lot of the things the courts have done too.  I agree that someone who thinks “one nation under God” is wrong shouldn’t be on the court.  But that doesn’t mean I want the president to go and kick them off.  There is a process that determines these things and it is carefully designed to protect against tyranny.  If we don’t want these people on the courts we need to not put them there in the first place.  If we don’t like their rulings we need to address it through the legislature.  We can even change the constitution if we have to.  What we must not do is let the president just decide  which courts are acceptable and which are not based on some arbitrary standard like “attacking American exceptionalism.”

And notice what he says is their problem.  They are “grotesquely dictatorial, far too powerful and … frankly arrogant in their misreading of the American people.”  This is a statement I can almost get behind but the ending is all wrong.   If Newt was not a progressive, this quote would go like this: “grotesquely dictatorial, far too powerful and … frankly arrogant in their misreading of the constitution.” The purpose of a justice is not to read the people, it is to read the law!  Furthermore, the trend in the balance of power over the last 100 years has not been in favor of the courts, it has been in favor of the president.  So right now we have Barak Obama railing against an obstructionist legislature and a Republican front-runner railing against a tyrannical judiciary.  One is playing on our frustration with the separation of powers and the other is playing on our healthy distrust of concentrated power but they are both doing it in order to further concentrate power in the executive branch.  At least our side should see through it.

“American Exceptionalism” is an empty vessel.  Just pour in whatever you think is good, chill and enjoy.  It sounds good to everyone (at least everyone on the right).  But what you think it means might not be the same thing that Newt thinks it means.  This is a standard progressive tactic and it reeks of Newt’s favorite modern president FDR, who managed to force his outrageously unconstitutional New Deal through the courts by threatening to pack the supreme court.  They want to redesign the system.  In order to do this they have to break the rules of the system.  In order to do this they have to get the country to not mind that they are completely ignoring the rules and to do this they simply claim that they are doing it in pursuit of something the people want.  We have to stop taking that path: the quicker, easier, more seductive path.

Secondly, nobody who is not a progressive would say this.  Newt thinks Romney should give back the money he earned while laying off employees.  Sometimes, in a free market, employees should be laid off.  This is not an immoral act.  Anyone who thinks it is does not believe in the free market.  They don’t believe that employment is a mutually beneficial, mutually voluntary agreement but that working for someone gives you a claim on their life and their assets.  That employees are the wards of their employers and that if it stops being beneficial to the employer and they end the agreement that they are committing a great injustice.  This view is entirely incompatible with free markets and private property.   It is, however, entirely compatible with progressivism…..

Food Stamps

Recently Newt Gingrich accused the Democrats of being “the party of food stams.”  A comment which Nancy Pelosi quickly denounced before adding that

It is the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance — the biggest bang for the buck.

You see, according to Pelosi every dollar the government spends on food stamps “puts $179 into the economy.”  This of course is nonsense.  It may be true that if you print a dollar and spend it on food stamps it increases GDP by $1.79 but this statement and the economic theory that motivates it conveniently ignores the question of where that dollar and the supposed added production actually comes from.  But I don’t want to spend an hour debunking Keynesianism right now, I want to make a quick statement about values.

 

When you hear things like this you have to ask yourself how we got here.  The answer is that we let ourselves believe that we could exist without a set of values.  To see what I mean consider two sets of values, one like the one I described in “The Conscience of a Libertarian” which holds that everyone owns their own life and the produce thereof and nobody (including the government) has a right to take it against their will for any reason, and another set of values which holds that the government should do whatever it can to maximize GDP (or any other measurement of collective wellbeing like “total utility”). 

 

When someone who subscribes to the second set of values hears a claim like the one above about food stamps they say “great let’s do that.  In fact let’s do that ad infinitum and we will all have infinite amounts of wealth and there will be no scarcity…”  When someone who subscribes to the first set of values hears something like that they say “that’s interesting but it doesn’t matter because such a strategy involves stealing from someone in order to carry it out and that violates my system of values.” 

 

So how did we get here?  We refused to adopt either set of values.  So they came to us and said “if we do this, it will improve the economy and it will only infringe on people’s individual property rights a little bit so it’s worth it.”  And we weighed the imagined benefits against the supposedly minor assault on property rights (most likely on someone else’s property rights) and we decided it was worth it.  Then that becomes normal and later they say “ok we just have to compromise individual property rights a little bit more but it’s worth it because it will help the overall economy.”  And we do the same thing and decide it’s worth it so we go along with it.   And this pattern continues until we find ourselves in our current situation.

But where does this pattern end?  I think the answer is obvious.  We have to realize that we can’t just persist forever in some kind of limbo between two value systems.  The only way to live in an individualistic society is to value individualism and to draw a line in the sand that you refuse to cross no matter what tasty treat someone dangles in front of you on the other side.