Nobody who reads this blog or otherwise knows me will remotely mistake me for being anything but unabashedly pro-free trade.  Philosophically as a matter of fundamental freedom, and practically as a matter of macro-economic health, I consider the liberty of commerce to be a sine qua non of the American way of life.

But then there is the impact at the micro level…both in economic and, more important, in social terms. Some of this impact is real, some is perceived, and all of it is glaring in some demographics and locales. There is hurt and pain in large swathes of the industrial Midwest and in Appalachia. Free trade has turned upside down, in the space of one generation, the social and economic axioms that have been the norm in these communities for almost a hundred years. A diploma from a public high school is no longer a path to lifetime job security, nice house, good marriage, and the brand new truck. Frankly, such a diploma hadn’t meant much of an accomplishment anyway for a couple of generations since the NEA backed labor unions started dumbing down American K-12 education. But until recently, the lack of mobility in capital and knowledge kept up the façade of an efficient blue collar middle class in the industrial Midwest. The breakdown of many trade barriers and the advent of the information superhighway knocked that façade down pretty rudely. A better educated, more productive, non-unionized workforce overseas is now providing the same services (thanks to the superhighway) and goods (thanks to freer trade) for much less. This has resulted in most middle class Americans being able to afford goods once the preserve of only the rich; at the same time shareholders of US based companies (and that includes all those of us with 401Ks, pension plans, and E-Trade accounts) are benefiting from the increased profitability of these stocks. An ancillary to the global liberal trade regime has been the billions in industrial investments by Japanese, German and, now, Indian automakers in the southern United States, creating tens of thousands of new jobs in Tennessee, Alabama, and the Carolinas.

Nonetheless, many in the industrial heartland don’t see the moderately optimistic picture of jobs, investments, and affordability. They see a world turned upside down, a new world that tells them that the drudgery of basic mathematics and science is far more important than high school football and cheerleading. Their phone bills are much lower but the person at the other end of the customer service line has an accent. People moving into the upscale suburbs are no longer union workers who made good but brown, yellow, or multi hued families that have graduate degrees and drive their kids to excel in school and expect them to do homework. What is the world coming to?

The dilemma is real and solutions tough. But left unaddressed, the downside of the new economy will only serve to fuel the latent fires of pessimism, localized unemployment, and xenophobia. First and foremost, there is a need to make our public schools competitive with the world so that their graduates matter in today’s world. That means emphasizing the uncool things like traditional mathematics, science, and homework and scaling back on ancillaries like football, piano, and self-esteem lessons (yep..sounds harsh but facts are facts). School reform also requires cleansing the public education system of the NEA mafia, lengthening the school year, and establishing minimum, concrete, standardized competencies (please, none of that nonsense of ‘tests aren’t everything’).

Secondly, the steady erosion of blue collar employment opportunities must be expanded. Not with a government program or even a bailout but with an approach quite the opposite. A cursory look at one industry-the core of the upper Midwest’s pride and woes-is sufficient to point to the right direction. While Detroit with its bulky Big Three has fallen farther and farther behind, the Deep South is growing with nimble Toyota, Audi, and Nissan plants. The secret? A friendly business environment, open shop labor (workers are free to choose to belong to a union or not), less intrusive state regulation, and stronger family structure (producing more stable and ethically sounder workers). Reducing sharply the regulatory burden, both state and federal, on manufacturing will go a long way in helping the industrial Midwest regain its economic footing.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23537815/

Born into millions of inherited wealth, Spitzer despised people who wanted to make money the hard way by working for it. Hence his incessant bullying, harassment, and elbow twisting use of law enforcement against brokerage houses, investment bankers, and corporations. An ardent foe of allowing poor New Yorkers to use their tax money to send their kids to good schools, Spitzer sent his own three children to elite academies that cost upwards of $ 30, 000 a year per pupil. A vociferous proponent of everyone paying higher taxes, the governor of New York never paid a dime over what was required of him in taxes and, no pun intended, failed to pay sales tax on the escort services he purchased at five thousand dollars a night (well, at least I hope it was a whole night for that kind of money).

This then is who Eliot Spitzer is and always has been. It is just that in this particular case, his hypocrisy was too much even for the liberal Democrats to publicly stomach.

While over for all intents and purposes, in a very technical sense the Republican nominating contest is still ongoing. Am I serious? You bet. Texas gynecologist Congressman Ron Paul continues to raise money and make his case, albeit as a matter of principle more than anything else.

And what a revolutionary principle it is that the federal government should operate strictly within the bounds of the Constitution. The Republican Party establishment would be utterly imprudent to brush off a campaign that has brought in millions of dollars in contributions and an equivalent amount of enthusiasm from otherwise disconnected younger voters in a year which has seen Democrats having a crushing advantage in dollars, enthusiasm, and youth.

 Don’t get me wrong. I have serious problems with Dr. Paul’s semi-isolationist foreign policy, his interpretation of parts of the Fourteenth Amendment, and his desire to abolish the Federal Reserve System.  Nonetheless, his steadfast defense of the ideals of the Founding Fathers is sincere in intellectual rigor and practice. Unlike any other member of Congress, he puts his money where his mouth is in refusing to take pork to his district or ask federal loans and grants to send his five kids through college. Federal overreach in matters of education, police powers, and social policymaking should concern every conservative and it certainly does bother Ron Paul. The Constitution is not any less important, as he says, when we are facing internal tensions or external threats. If anything, it is all the more important to hold on to its core principles to distinguish America from the others. That so many otherwise disengaged people, especially the younger ones, are attracted to such an intellectually sound Constitutional approach from a man old enough to be their grandfather is a sign that the GOP establishment will ignore to its long term peril. The best short term gesture that John McCain can make to the Ron Paul constituency is to let the good doctor speak at the convention. Let us not be like the Democrats who believe in prohibiting from speaking those Democrats who don’t toe the party orthodoxy (remember the 1992 and 1996 conventions where the supposedly ‘tolerant and open minded’ Clintons barred Pennsylvania Democrat Governor Casey and Maryland Democrat Governor Schaeffer from speaking?).

Knowing it from first hand experience that concentrated governmental power is dangerous, the Founding Fathers rightly disbursed such authority horizontally between the states and Washington. Still not convinced of the selflessness of politicians, they further divided power vertically at the federal level by establishing three co-equal branches of the central government.  Over the course of the past century both Democrats and Republicans, spurred on by hysteric demagoguery on the attention grabbing headlines of the day, have worked hard to eradicate the restraints on concentrated federal power. The cause celebre has been different for each major encroachment and the tools used have varied (federal judges, senior bureaucrats, the White House). What has remained the same is the rationale used: power must be concentrated for the good of the people’s [add ‘health’, ‘safety’, nutrition’, ‘children’…or whatever other feel good cause can convince you to give up a little bit of your liberty].

 Sad to admit but Dr. Paul stands as perhaps the only politician of consequence, never mind how limited that consequence is, who is willing to accept at face value the Jeffersonian warning that ‘those who give up a little liberty for a little safety deserve neither and are soon left bereft of either.’

The self inflicted wounds of the Republican Party are evident even in the reddest of the states. In my own Kansas, last year’s elections resulted in not only the Dems laying claim to the offices of governor and attorney general, but also increasing their minorities in the legislature and, more telling, increasing the registration proportion. In response-and only a bewildered group of Republicans can do this-the state GOP (by a plurality, not a majority though) elected as its chairman one of the least suitable people to bring ‘the party back’. A man whose Oxford and Ivy education failed to singularly make a dent in his buffoonish personality, Chairman KK (those are his initials!)  spends most of his time flying around the country hobnobbing with publicity seeking xenophobes, supremacists, and nativist groups rather than building a state party demoralized to its core. Only a guy of such dubious talents could have accomplished what is unheard of in our state’s political history: an alignment of major big business and small business groups with the Democratic Party. Even the farm lobby, usually a staple of sturdy Republican support, is moving towards the Democrats. With the spiky haired Missouri professor (yes, the dude teaches at a Missouri college!) in charge of the Kansas GOP, the Democratic Party of Kansas can lay off its staff: the GOP is doing their work for them for free. Now, I have been a close observer of the Kansas Republican party since my college days and seen some strange people at its helm (the perpetually confused Tim Shallenberger comes to mind). I have also seen some very humble, decent, and hard working folks who built a magnificent winning party (David Miller is a prime example).  But KK has to be the closest thing to a ‘gift to the Democrats chairman’ chairman that the state party has ever had in my memory.

Take it from a pro-military, pro-growth, pro-life, pro-business, pro-God conservative Reagan Republican who has 'been there' since College Republican times: never in recent history has the Kansas GOP selected a more ill-suited (oh yes, the suits he wears are very Hollywood type too), unprincipled demagogue as its chairman.

In yet another crystal clear indication of his unstable temperament and divisive personality, Bill Clinton shouted down pro-life students who asked him questions at a Sunday rally in Steubenville, Ohio. Unbecoming of a former President, and indicative of the type arrogance we can expect from another Clinton term in the White House, Bill Clinton pointed an agitated finger at two placard holding Steubenville University students and shouted “This is not your  rally.” He then went on a bizarre Castro-like tirade accusing the two college kids of trying to imprison patients and doctors (????). The observation lost on the rather otherwise astute former president was the fact that Steubenville is home to what is arguably the most conservative Catholic university in the country and even most of the Democrats in that town, descendants of Eastern European Catholic immigrants, are believers in the sanctity of human life.

Note to HillBill from KsReaganite: Wrong, Mr. President! This is a free country and even prolife folks have some residual free speech rights that you and your administration zealously tried to muzzle in the nineties by crafting new laws specifically targeting the free speech rights of the prolife community. Yet, as long as your wife and you have rallies in America, the First Amendment still applies. As to the substantive issue that irks you and your ilk so much, you got it all wrong and you know it. The issue at hand is not whether to sanction abortionists and their henchmen, but rather who gets to set social policy in a federal representative democracy: we believe that in the United States such policies should be set by the duly elected representatives of the people of the states, reflecting their interests, values, and deliberative compromises. On the hand, radical liberals like Bill and Hillary Clinton, in true fascist fashion, want a handful of permanently tenured ayatollahs, er I mean federal judges, to dictate such policies from high above. The Clintons believe in the Iranian model of policy-making; we conservatives believe in the American one.

Of all the candidates in either party, Mike Huckabee has offered the boldest plan for tax reform. Commonly known as the FairTax, the said plan would uproot the current income-based revenue generation system and replace it with one that taxes spending rather than productivity, savings, and entrepreneurship. There is a built-in threshold for low income families in the Fair Tax whereby they are given ‘pre-bates’ against spending on basic necessities like food, medicine, and clothing. The Republican nominee should adopt the plan and make drastic, structural tax reform once again the centerpiece of the party’s message.  

Understandably, the opposition has been, and will be, swift, powerful, and shrouded in sanctimonious cries of unfairness to the middle class. But it is not the middle class that is protesting the idea of shutting the IRS and gutting the thirty three thousand page long monstrosity of a  federal tax code. Far from it, the most vocal opponents of the FairTax are million dollar tax lawyers, multi million dollar lobbyists, and billion dollar subprime mortgage financiers all of whom feed at the trough of a complicated, loophole ridden tax system that the American public detests. Democrats, liberal Republicans, and federal tax bureaucrats are also dead set against the idea because it takes direct aim at their careers and livelihoods. Dozens of members of Congress who get re-elected by virtue of tweaking the bulky tax code on behalf of special interests are very upset at the prospect of having a tax code that is very short, transparent, and too legible to hide anything within it. Internal Revenue Service civil servants-those entities who neither understand civility nor service-are aghast that a national sales tax system will put most of them out to the pasture looking for productive jobs where they will actually have to serve the customer instead of bullying her. Now that will be an increase in unemployment that KsReaganite will wholeheartedly support: out of work arrogant bureaucrats.