Republican rationalizations are unchanged, even in the face of ... facts

Down at the end, I'll offer an excerpt from an essay on my alternate site asking "Does government-funded science play a role in stimulating innovation?" Both the far-left and today's entire-right share in common a cult reflex answer to that question. An answer emblematic of the lobotomization of our time.

But do hang around for that excerpt, at least!

== Another milestone raises a serious question ==

With the passing of the "Greatest Generation" (GG) - parents of the boomers - and now Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter - perhaps it's time to re-evaluate the America... and world... that they made.

Especially the Rooseveltean social contract that transformed the USA into a world titan, science-leader and awash in wealth, while setting us down an inexorable road toward some kinds of equality: first regarding social/working class. But then (admittedly far too-slowly!) race/gender and the rest.

That social contract directly correlated with the highest rates of middle class prosperity increase, fastest startup entrepreneurship and lowest levels of wealth disparity the world had ever seen. But it has been - since the 1980s - carved-away on a range of incantatory excuses and partially demolished by a massive campaign of conservative 'reforms'...  

...economic and social theories that were supposedly aimed at enhancing creative market freedom, but that correlated exactly and always with reduction of innovation and competition, while restoring the one trait that the Greatest Generation despised most... born-class as the primary decider of a child's destiny. 

This campaign was justified by guys like Milton Friedman and Robert Bork, and think tanks such as Heritage and AEI, that continue pushing utterly-disproved notions like "Supply Side (voodoo) Economics" - that never had one successfully predicted positive outcome.  

(In science, a theory is abandoned in the face of relentless predictive failure, but cults don't do that.)

In the 90s, those pro-oligarchy economists were augmented by "neocon" imperialists who urged both Bushes and Dick Cheney etc. to plunge us into blatant traps that had been laid for us by Osama bin Laden and his ilk. Those Middle Eastern wars were supposedly in revenge for 9/11 attacks that (always remember) happened on their watch. The neocons openly brayed their ill-disguised glee at transforming an 80% benign American Pax into a thumping, gallumphing empire.

(My hero - George Marshall - held meetings in 1945 revolving around a question that no leader had ever asked, before: "We are about to become an empire. What mistakes did all other empires make and how can we make something that succeeds? That won't make us hated and eventually destroyed?" (paraphrased))

Look at the blared yowls of Wolfowitz, Nitze, Adelman and the other neocons, in those days, and tell us you see any signs of wisdom, or awareness of the traps they were falling for.  Alas for them, their orgiastic era was brief. America soon soured on imperial preenings that distilled down to $trillion dollar ripoffs. At which point those poor neocons were promptly flushed away by the Republican establishment - without even a word of thanks - as oligarchy decided to veer republicanism away from armed adventures, over to populist/isolationist/lobotomizing/nerd-hating classic confederatism... now called Trumpism or MAGA.

But don't be distracted... all along, those apparent gyrations were superficialities. The central goal has always been the same. To defend and expand "supply side" tax grifts for aristocracy while crippling the Internal Revenue Service, so that a myriad cheats and thefts should remain hidden. 

Scan from 1981 to present. That sole priority was the only consistent policy position of the GOP and the only one always enacted, whenever they got power. 

(Other than that, and recently the abortion mania, can you name any actual legislative activity by GOP Congresses, the laziest in US history?)

No other 'priority' (e.g. the border) got more than lip service. That is, until the virulently riled MAGAs ('Do you still think you can control them?' Watch Cabaret!) demanded real action on abortion and other social incitements.

A lot of dems/libs went along with Supply Side (SS) in the 80s and even 90s, until, by it's 4th round, the effects grew clear: that not a single positive outcome prediction - not one - ever came true. 

Industrial investment? Nada, zip. As Adam Smith predicted, the vast waves of grifted lucre were poured by the rich into passive, parasitical 'rentier investments like real estate and bonds and tax havens. (A third of US housing stock was snapped-up by inheritance brats in cash purchases, immune to interest rates. It's why young couples can't buy homes.)

As for investment in manufacturing? Recipients of Supply Side largess did almost none. America's current, booming re-industrialization only began with the 2021-2 Pelosi bills.

== Why does no one point this out? ==

Well, Robert Reich does. Like the pure fact that federal deficits always worsen across GOP rule and after SS tax grifts (duh?)

Any non-hypocrite, competition-friendly conservative would realize by now that ONLY democrats enact pro-competition and pro-liberty measures. (Have your attorney contact me when you have escrowed $$$ wager stakes over that assertion; but first look at things like the ICC, CAB, AT&T and the damned War on Drugs - and now on reproductive rights.)

Here, in this New York Times article - Google on Trial - a corner of this program is appraised -- whether anti-trust laws can and should be used to break up super-corporations like Google who have inherent advantages. And yeah, that's a major issue. Cory Doctorow rails about it, entertainingly.

Left out are more imaginative solutions. Like whether it's time to help mom & pop America and get needed revenue by instituting a 5% National Sales Tax on interstate internet purchases. Since you-know-who (a South American river) is no longer a baby - but now a market dominating behemoth. In fact, since we all rely on that central market, without much other choice, isn't that the very definition of a public utility? (Ponder that. Treat that unavoidable e-marketplace like electricity and water and trash pickup. If there's no competition, then regulate it to be flat-fair-for-all?)

But the core issue that I keep returning to is one of tactics - at which Democrats (the Union Side in this 8th phase of the 250 year U.S. Civil War) have proved utterly inept! 

It's the reason why I wrote Polemical Judo. A few better tactics and we could peel away just one million residually sane Republicans, leaving the Confederacy in a state of utter, demographic collapse. 

(Of course then the oligarchs will resort to more violent versions of incitement; but we have skilled defenders working on that, right now, e.g. in the much maligned heroes of the FBI.)

And this...

In this conversation, Evan Anderson, CEO of INVNT/IP, an expert on global manufacturing and supply chains, takes us on a deep dive into the power dynamics between the United States, China, and Taiwan.

== Merits and drawbacks of government-funded science ==

And finally, as promised, here's that excerpt from an essay on my more formal, WordPress site asking "Does government-funded science play a role in stimulating innovation?"

There's a deep-cult that underlies many of our familiar political cults. What do the far left and today's entire right share in common? A desperate urge to AMPUTATE our options and methods down to only the few that they prescribe. And hence I posted (on my formal WordPress site) a dissection of this shared, sanctimoniously-oversimplifying, mania.

Excerpt: "For a century and a half, followers of Karl Marx demanded that we amputate society’s right arm of market-competitive enterprise and rely only on socialist guided-allocation for economic control. Meanwhile, Ayn Rand’s ilk led a throng of those proclaiming we must lop off our left arm – forswearing any coordinated projects that look beyond the typical five year (nowadays more like one-year) commercial investment horizon.

"Any sensible person would respond: “Hey I need both arms, so bugger off! Now let’s keep examining what each arm is good at, revising our knowledge of what each shouldn’t do.”

"Does that sound too practical and moderate for this era? Our parents thought they had dealt with all this, proving decisively that calm negotiation, compromise and pragmatic mixed-solutions work best. They would be stunned to see that fanatical would-be amputators are back in force, ranting nonsense."

If you are interested in this... and especially whether government-funded science has played a big role in "Making America (and civilization) Great," then drop on by.

Accusations of socialism

Okay so Bill Weld is going to primary Trump, giving some RASRs (Residually Adult-Sane Republicans) a potential path off the plague ship. But will it matter? While total numbers of self-described Republicans keeps plummeting – especially hemorrhaging members of every fact-using profession – Trump’s percentage support among the remaining GOP masses remains 90% while his organization is frenetically busy enforcing Trumpist purity in every Republican state or county committee. (This isn't new; name one top Republican between Reagan and Ryan who was touted at the 2016 GOP convention? Just Newt, who had frantically toed the line. No other Republican leaders - even presidents - were even mentioned. What can that mean?)

Will folks in the Republican outlier state – Utah, clean and sober – finally come to grips with their wretched quandary? Either stick with a Kremlin-led party of mafiosi, gambling, addiction and sexual perversion, or follow Evan McMullin or Gutless Mitt offstage…  

…or else (shudder) start flirting with the party of socialism?   

== They plan to scream “socialism!” ==

Among liberals’ biggest mistakes: getting lured into expressions of hostility to the markets, enterprises and small/startups that generate the wealth we then use to make things better for all children. The Putin-Fox Party plans to use “socialism” against democrats, despite the GOP now being wholly owned by communist and “ex”-communist foreign despots. 

There are two forceful answers:

1) The Greatest Generation (GG) that endured Depression, crushed Hitler, contained Stalinism and made the world’s greatest middle class adored one living human, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The GGs “made America Great." So why not force our red neighbors to choose: either attack the GGs or accept that they were right?

Only one democrat has edged closer to using this powerful meme. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with her terminology “Green New Deal.” But even she doesn’t seem to quite get the power of a true judo move.

2) Across 6000 years, far more open-flat-fair-competitive-creative enterprise systems were wrecked by oligarchy than were ever harmed by moderate, democratic socialism (e.g. Canada or Sweden.) Oligarchy by uber-rich cheaters must be denounced as the enemy of enterprise. Dems Should claim Adam Smith as one of their own. (If you actually read him, you’ll understand.)

See the point made here. Counter the "socialism!" accusation with the Greatest Generation's love of FDR, then follow through with the favorite Americans of the 1950s, Jonas Salk, who saved a generation of children, and Dwight Eisenhower, who made AOC's socialism seem tame. Here's the info about Ike you can use to shred Fox nostrums into confetti.

== A flawed hero is better than a traitor villain ==

In comments below, watch how the Kremlin-generated meme machine is already in gear with hate-blips aimed at FDR's faults.  And yet, the only sane way to judge men is by the context of their times and their net effects for good. Roosevelt's flaws were real and lamentable; I lost some cousins because of his waffling. But there is a reason why Philip K. Dick set the Nazi-dominated hell of "The Man in the High Castle" in a world where FDR had been killed.

Yes, by our current standards, FDR was bigoted and made some howling-awful decisions. The same could be said of LBJ. And you honestly think they would not have led the way in recanting those mistakes? 

Anyone condemning them, while ignoring all their good, should read Frederick Douglas's eulogy of Abraham Lincoln. Especially the last paragraph of this excerpt:

"I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen.

"Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless.[...]

"Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined."

Likewise, our own mad wing of lefty purists uses genuine tragic history to make true criticisms... and draw utterly useless/counterproductive conclusions, as in this example from earlier threads: 

“Eisenhower is a bad example he toppled democratic nations in South American for taking care of their citizens like “communists” and put brutal dictators in charge. He doesn’t deserve even a small measure of good will.”

To which I answer: try reading the history of empires across 6000 years. Name one that tried harder for a better ratio of good deeds to bad, or did as well when tempted by great power. Go on, please, offer your examples in comments, below.

Oh… and Harry Truman had some insightful thoughts on socialism:

"Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people."             -Harry S. Truman 10/10/1952

Whatever your armchair quarterback/hindsight views of Truman, note that red-boomers still recall how their GG parents admired the man. Use him -- and FDR and Salk and Ike -- against the confederate-putinist-foxite madness.  

 == As the Mueller turns… ==

Given how many Trumpists and Republican operatives have been convicted by juries of their peers – compared to almost nil among Clinton-Obama folks – the Fox-Putin machine has turned to Whatabouts. But the standard “what about Hillary’s emails?” has collapsed now that we find the same regulations against using private servers were violated far worse by both Bushes, Cheney, Colin Powell, Ivanka, Kushner and half of Trump’s aides (not to go into DT’s own unsecure phone and unvetted meetings with dictators.)  

The new whatabout is the word “collusion.” The only thing that matters is direct proof of specific conspiracy between Donald Trump himself and Russia’s spy agency during the 2016 election. (That is the only "exoneration.") 

Anything else, from conniving with Putin-pal oligarchs to vast loans from Russia via Deutsche Bank, is “circumstantial,” while Fox etc. shout “don’t look!” at the tax returns and other document troves that might get to the core. 

Above all, they scream that Russian interference on behalf of Trump and the Republican Party is irrelevant, a non-issue, a trivial matter.

But in fact, it’s the core matter.  HereThis cogent summary in the Los Angeles Times cogently summarizes where the Mueller investigation seems to stand, at-present, and you need to read it, in order to have ready the stunning tsunami of facts, showing we have been attacked in what are clearly, open acts of war.

And yet, of course, the inferno is not what the Kremlin did on behalf of Trump and Fox and the GOP. It is the hellscape that these three have made of every American strength, from our alliances and world standing to the smoking ruin of U.S. science, to betrayal of the tens of thousands of skilled men and women who saved us from Hitler, Stalin, Mao and bin Laden, and who are now derided – (by genuine traitors) – as a so-called conspiratorial “deep state,” just because they believe in the things that Fox hates most and that could defeat Vladimir Putin and gird us for the challenges ahead.

Facts.

The magic folks who can save us, though few are still alive. Plus sending the Electors to "College."

I'll get to this week's fetish -- the Electoral College -- in a bit, with some thoughts that never entered your awareness, before. But first, something you've seen me rant about time and again. How every single democrat and journalist has missed the blatantly obvious.

== Again, go to the Greatest Generation ==

I don't get it. There is a polemical judo move that could be startlingly effective in this civil war: rubbing the noses of Deep-Red America in their hypocritical betrayal of the heroic Greatest Generation (GG). 

 The Boomers' parents are now lionized, but only in abstract, without ever mentioning their politics! Or the name of their favorite living human - Franklin Roosevelt. When Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez talks about a 70% marginal tax rate, she says "it was higher under Eisenhower... clever! But how much more effective to cite those who defeated Hitler, contained Stalin, went to the Moon and built the fantastic-confident American middle class, using exactly the measures she now recommends. 

Screw "democratic socialism!" It's a buzz word to drive confederates back into Hannity's arms. But "Rooseveltean" would let you keep focus on the GGs! 

Hammer home that they were union members. They hated nazis. And every single "supply side" (voodoo) so-called "reform" that rescinded the Rooseveltean social contract led directly to slower growth! To declining investment and R&D. To slackening entrepreneurship and lazier styles of business. To wider disparities and a sickening middle class. Again, not a single Supply Side prediction came true, ever! No wonder they hate science.

Crow that enterprise and ingenuity flourish under democratic policies and wither under republican ones. *You already own the left, dear charismatic-one. Now steal the part of the Fox base that can remember hearing stories from their GG parents, about how FDR helped them save America and the world.* Those hero-parents found a successful balance-point and would be ashamed of Boomers who became tools of oligarchy.

Want redoubled irony? The book that the American right – especially Steve Bannon – fetishes is The Fourth Turning, by Howe and Strauss, claiming that every fourth generation is a “hero” generation that overcomes the crisis caused by the decadent second generation, restoring America to vitality and vigor and wisdom. We boomers are the decadent ones in this scenario, while Millennials will be the heroes, just like the “heroes” of WWII.  Elsewhere, I dissect the right’s fetish with “cyclical history,” a bona fide insanity that’s been disproved again and again. But sure, there are some blurry patterns. And yes, the millennials I know are better people, and we Boomers have made a mess.

Still note the irony: Bannon is flitting around the world, helping Putin to provoke the crisis when there was zero evidence one would have come, without them.  He and his fellow Kremlin-commie-nazi-oligarch-mafia cabal members are pushing boomer buttons hard, to send the West tipping into hot civil war. He rationalizes that Millennials will then rise to the occasion, overcoming even a myriad mushroom clouds and a broiling Earth to restore virility.  

Only… um… Steve? Won’t that entail the young folks rejecting… you? The quintessential sanctimonious-manipulative right-wing oligarch-racist boomer-thug?  Already, polls show youths – even republican ones – turning hard left, while the works of Karl Marx are again flowing across campuses.

Was this the plan, Steve?

  
Now to two nations that really need a better voting system.

== Sending Electors to "College" ==

Elizabeth Warren is growing on me. She’s smart, utterly fearless and targets proto-feudal power in all of its incarnations. Alas, her latest - demanding an end to the Electoral College or EC - is Quixotic without a chance of coming true till this phase of civil war is ended by many dozen other means.  And even if it were possible, we must get past the loony “first past the post” rules that let someone awful, who gets 40% of the vote in a state - or in some national popular vote - defeat two far better candidates with 30% each … or one with 39% plus a spoiler. We’ve long needed Preferential Balloting… and maybe the dems - having to sort through 20 primary candidates - will lead the way.

One workaround popular among liberals is the “the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact”… an absolutely stupid idea that cannot possibly work, at any level, at any stage in any realistic process.  

Anyway, the EC was written into the Constitution in order to offer a way to avoid exactly the sort of the insane result we saw in 2016, a blatant madman and likely traitor given the presidency because the EC is made of party hacks who mail in a form-“ballot” and do not act like a “college,” at all.  

Which suggests a possible way to make things better without having to amend the Constitution! And it could possibly be set in motion by just one rich philanthropist.

In November 2016 I wrote to a few millionaires suggesting they do something historic.  Simply rent a luxury resort hotel somewhere and announce "For one week only Electors will be allowed to enter (other than staff). They will get all meals and amenities on the house. There are no conditions. They are not required to deliberate or talk to each other. But if a quorum shows up, it is within their power to call it a "college" and discuss whatever they like." 

No coercions suasion or influence. Just a place to spend one week in luxury, and experience being - briefly - the 538 most important people on Earth.

Oh, the howls it would have raised! Would a quorum have shown up? I bet it would, but we'll never know. Well, well. Think about it for next time.

Let me conclude this Electoral College musing by quoting from one of the members of my blog community at CONTRARY BRIN:

“There have been 58 presidential elections in the United States. In just five of them did the Electoral College pick a winner who got fewer popular votes. When the EC ratifies the same choice the popular vote did, it is as if the EC had done nothing at all. It may as well be a rubber stamp. It is in those rarer cases, only five in our nation's history, where the greater number of voters choose one candidate, and the EC the other, where the rubber hits the road. In these, the EC has done something! But what has it done?

“Of those five cases, two (the 1824 decision for John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson and the 1888 decision for Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland) do not seem, to me, very important in their effects. In both, the loser would go on to win the office later, and the nation's course not be critically affected for better or worse.

“In 1876, the EC would choose Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden, as a compromise which included the end of Military Reconstruction and the beginning of the Jim Crow era. This stands as an historic disaster America is still paying for.

“The EC didn't overturn another popular vote until recent times, the 2000 and 2016 elections. The 2000 result gave us George W. Bush over Al Gore, plus 9/11 and an ongoing Middle East quagmire plus no action on climate change, the USA Patriot Act, waterboarding, far-right Supreme Court judges, the 2008 economic debacle, and whatever else Pandora's Box had to offer at that moment. The 2016 result, as we know, gave us Donald Trump, a sogheaded, parasitic ponzi charlatan and racist psychopath in the pocket of a hostile foreign spy agency.

“In the 2016 case especially, the winner was precisely the sort of obviously unfit president the 'wiser heads' of the EC were supposed to spit out like a mouthful of gristle. The EC delegates had the power to vote 'faithlessly' if they chose. Instead, (with the exception of a tiny handful of faithless Clinton electors) they dutifully followed party over country and voted Trump into the White House.

“So, to recap: of the five occasions when the Electoral College chose differently than the popular vote, two were (as far as I can tell) a wash, and three were unmitigated disasters for the nation. The Electoral College has a demonstrably worse track record for choosing presidents than the popular vote. It is as useful as a goiter.”

And yet, see my riff above about possibly (at last) listening to the Founders and making the Electors go to College.


== The second nation? ==

Again, Brexit. Let the people vote again. They did not know about Vladimir Putin, first round.

Only do it using a preferential ballot  with four or more ranked choices.  We all know what they'd choose, by a huge margin.

Now let's close with perspective on why the left should accept incrementalism... and why sane conservatism should accept the well-deserved end of the Republican Party.

== Protect the big tent ==

When self-righteousness reigns.... Greenpeace co-founder tears into Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal: ‘Pompous little twit.’  And hence a lesson to the Left: stop doing what Putin and Fox clearly want: splitting and breaking up the Big Tent coalition that’s the only thing that can win this wretched phase of the American Civil War. Stop pissing on your allies!  Think. If the Democrats can win over just ONE million more RASRs (Residually Adult-Sane Republicans) 2020 will be a rout and we can burn Foxism to the ground. 

Squint at that delicious fantasy. But then, what happens next?

The Dems will get a lot of incremental stuff done. Restoring science, freeing the civil service, ending the Drug War, ending gerrymandering and other cheats, providing Medicare at least for all children till age 26, achieving reform of college debt, major action on Climate, restoration of the CFPB and breakup of some monopolies… 

...and none of it will satisfy the Left, which is fine!  The center of argument will be hugely shifted and you can push again from there. 

If history is any judge, the DP will split into a Clinton-Obama wing that wants science and facts, fairness and a healthy-flat-fair-competitive capitalism, and balanced budgets, paid for by the rich...

...and that won't suffice for the a socialist wing! But what a better starting point that would be, from which to make your case for more!

Then you can have the party that you want. After the Confederacy and Putinism are routed, you will have a better chance to take halfway reforms further. Those who demand a liberal civil war are either sanctimoniously suicidal or else witting or unwitting Kremlin stooges.

AOC is smart enough to learn – rapidly! – how to do politics, can you? She’s the one teaching Democrats to do judo, instead of sumo. Try learning.

Oh, BTW, I’ve been a Greenpeace member (with some lapses) for 40 years. Sanctimonious-pushy jerks have real uses! Just don’t let them taunt you into doing stupid things.

== And the same goes for you RASRs ==

I know dozens who admit that the GOP has gone treasonous and insane, but who fear the left. To which I answer read the previous section! If the GOP gets deservedly blasted to smithereens and then the atoms broken down to quarks, what will happen?

The Democrats will break up in two.  You'll see tax-fairness, and end to drug wars and electoral cheating, some anti-trust and consumer protection and a bunch of other things, like an end to insane Supply Side... but then the DP will split and half will be pro-free-competitive-flat-fair enterprise. That half will be pro fact and science but also pro-competition. And what more could you wish for, oh you residually sane conservatives, out there?

Stop clinging to the Putin Party, run by communist and "ex" communist despots and Saudi sheiks. Join the revolution, then help forge a "conservatism" that isn't treason.

Cheating, oligarchy - and an uneven playing field

Below, I'll weigh in in why it doesn't matter at all if some in the FBI or on Mueller's team dislike Donald Trump.  But first, let's talk about te great news being celebrated by the world's owner-caste, right now in Davos. Their biggest investment has paid off.

Now that the Tax Cut for the Oligarchy has passed, watch the pattern of the last several decades play out. The GOP has controlled Congress for all but two of the last 24 years, setting new records for indolence, sloth and corruption, as respect for that institution plummeted and only cheats like gerrymandering keep their grip on power. 

But they are always hard-working - even manic - on one topic. They can be relied upon to deliver "supply side" gifts to their uber-rich lords. For example:

"GOP mega-donor Charles Koch and his wife donated about $500,000 to Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) joint fundraising committee, days after the GOP tax plan was passed... lowering the corporate tax rate and estate taxes....  He and his wife also gave $237,000 each to the National Republican Congressional Committee on the same day..."  

Drain the swamp? There have never been better days for K Street lobbying firms.

To be clear, some tax cuts are different than others. It would be harder to argue against cuts that were actually aimed at achieving - in real life - the fantasy goals of every Supply Side gift to the rich. When cuts are targeted to incentivize R&D, or investment in productive capital, or export sales or job growth, these things historically happened, resulting in economic stimulus on the "supply side." So why did this GOP tax cut (and nearly all of the others) do none of those things?  Not even some infrastructure spending that might prevent a recession?

As Adam Smith described... and every sane economist knows... most plutocrats won't invest in such things, when they get a big new slug of cash. Instead, it nearly always goes to inflating "rent-seeking," passive asset bubbles. (Anyone notice the stock market? Or how passive rentier income was way-advantaged in the Tax Bill, over wages or innovation?) 

The top trend subsidized by Supply Side "reforms" -- after skyrocketing wealth disparity -- has always been ever-shorter ROI (Return of Investment) horizons.

Note: that's diametrically opposite to the long range view of guys like Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, who got super rich by working with engineers to deliver better goods and services. Guess which political party these innovator billionaires are never part of?

== Real entrepreneurs know this... ==

Fully 50% of our economy derives value and function from the prodigiously creative innovation that Americans performed since before the Second World War. That trait defeated Hitler, ended the Depression, won the Cold War, built a great middle class and - more importantly - kept the greatest general peace the world ever knew. It made the U.S. so rich that we could uplift most of the planet through our ironically-beneficent trade deficits: buying anything the world wanted to sell us and thus transforming their nations, cities and lives.

It took us to the moon and made our existence vastly more interesting, putting all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips! Those who would directly undermine our national penchant for innovation are - therefore - at-best fools and at-worst outright traitors.

And you know that I mean the “T-word” literally. It is the only conceivable explanation for the Mad Right’s outright and open War on Science — along with every single other fact-centered profession.  There is only one reason for them to do that… to eliminate any competing elites who might counterbalance a return to 6000 years of feudal power.

New York Times

Now look at an article Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We're Missing, by David Leonhardt in the New York Times - which included a national map that uses one metric — number of patents per 1,000 children — to elicit obvious… well, just look at the map and see what thoughts are roused.

Now I have some reservations about the article itself. It hollers so, over the glass-half-empty that the author fails to note how full it is! This is the core insanity of liberalism. If writers like this were more balanced - giving us glimpses of good news, as well - then Fox & idiots would not control the narrative, so.

Consider this: right wingers -- and the prevalent Dumb Wing of Libertarianism -- sneer at liberal efforts toward equal rights for all genders/races etc. They deride this great project as based on sappy do-gooderism or else sanctimony. They style themselves to be the “practical” ones.

But what is practical about wasting talent? What could be less “libertarian” than pre-biasing a child’s outcome based on traits for which she had no choice, and thus preventing her from proving herself with accomplishment? Thumbing the scale so that the number of skilled/confident competitors is minimized? That was the trick of feudalists for 60 centuries, and shame on every faux-libertarian who justifies it! Even if Ayn Rand approves, Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek despise you.

There are many aspects to this problem, such as the failure of our leaders to stand up to those overseas who steal our innovations hand over fist. Some of that is to be expected - Americans were I.P. thieves in the 19th century - but the insatiably rapacious extremes of recent years are so predatory that they are tantamount to war. Tantamount to stupidity! Because the predators - unable to engender their own creative caste - are killing the goose that has laid their own golden eggs of development. And my biggest disappointment about Barack Obama was how tepidly he addressed that travesty.

Arnold Toynbee, arguably the greatest of all historians, said that the one trait shown by almost all nations that failed or collapsed was when they stopped investing and heeding their own "creative minorities."

Which leads us back to the glaring generality… that the wing of American political life that should care most about the health of innovative enterprise has become its worst enemy. Again, the recent Tax Bill wages open war on every single aspect of American ingenuity, creativity, science, R&D, and innovation, top-to-bottom, so systematically that its true author must have been some foreign despot.

== Prosecutors gotta prosecute... ==

As promised, here's the polemical point that no one seems able to make, in defense against the latest Fox-Mad harrangue about the Mueller probe.

Does anyone in politics or punditry have three neurons to scrape together? Trump supporters scream “bias!” because some at the FBI, or Fusion GPS, or or Robert Mueller’s team may have - despite Mueller’s scrupulous efforts - displayed distaste against DT or even Republicans. “Bias!” 

Alas, Trump opponents should have a trivial answer - one that no Democrat or journalist or independent public figure has spoken, to my knowledge. That answer is… “So?” I mean prosecutorial bias? Horrors! … Um, not!

Dig it, our justice system - like markets, democracy, science etc. - is designed to be adversarial! There is no need for investigators or prosecutors to be completely disinterested or impartial, so long as they follow well-know standards of conduct and eventually, before trial, subject their behavior to defense discovery and scrutiny. Eagerness to “get that guy” is their job!

Take Ken Starr, whose relentless pursuit of Bill Clinton cost the taxpayers upwards of a hundred million dollars, put the nation through hell, and finally came up with just one thing: a husband desperately fibbing about some consensual-adult 3rd-base infidelity in a hallway. That… was… it.

Sure, the whole Starr Chamber witch hunt was disgusting political theater, but among all the decrepit lunacies of that affair, the least noxious one was “these investigators blatantly dislike the guy they’re investigating.” Starr and his pack committed innumerable lies, torts and even criminal offenses. But enthusiasm for their goal was not one of them. So long as a skilled defense team has full access to every action and datum… and so long as the courts are fair and unbiased… then prosecutors should certainly want to succeed at prosecuting.

All of the current, desperate confederate whining against Mueller et. al. is far beyond hypocritical. It isn’t remotely logical! And it is a sign of the microcephalic stupidity of liberals, that they are unable to pause, perceive this counter-meme - and a myriad others - and actually respond with knife-like logic. 

Caught between evil-treason on one side and stupidity on the other… what can we do?

Well, get more folks to subscribe to Contrary Brin!

-----

== Addendum: Hayek would be so mad, by now... ==

I mentioned him earlier: How ironic that Friedrich Hayek is generally dismissed as an apologist for elimination of all market regulation, yet the liberal (leaning-Keynesian) economics site - Evonomics - explores Hayek’s views on both market theory and evolution with considerable respect. (Evonomics is also the one place, online, that most often studies and lauds Adam Smith!) In this conversation, several leaders in both economic theory and evolution start by praising Hayek’s revelations that markets are about information and how over-regulation is inherently fraught with errors that stymie the crowd- and open-sourced wisdom of markets.

Alas, Hayek thereupon was lured to the opposite extreme, as his arguments were used to justify elimination of regulations that kept markets flat-open-fair and competitive. If 500,000 civil servants are too narrow a clade to allocate economic resources well, then how is an incestuous, conniving-secretive and conspiratorially greedy CEO caste of golf buddies supposed to be more wise? 

Hayek’s criticisms of socialism applied cogently to Leninist regimes, but as these scholars point out, they’re much less meaningful when aimed at Norway.

“Regulations” that break up power concentrations (e.g. anti-trust action vs. monopolies and duopolies) are not suppressors of competitive enterprise, but rather gave birth to its golden age… as our parents in the Greatest Generation well-knew, before those beneficial and stimulative regulations were chopped away by right wing “reforms.” (Followed by collapsing growth rates.)

Hayek’s greatest failing? His inability to refer to the other great enemy of market enterprise, feudalism, which wrecked far more nations and economies than poor, dumb socialism could ever dream of. A flawed and stupid system that wrought hell in 99% of past cultures, feudalism is rooted in human temptation to cheat, and it appears to be roaring back. And the shills who work for the lords are - alas - really good at oversimplifying and misquoting Friedrich Hayek.

The fundamental is this: if markets work best when the maximum amount of information (and least deception) is acted upon by the widest diversity of market participants... then liberal policies that intervene to ensure all children get education, health care and infrastructure are best -- not for “goody-two-shoes” reasons but for entirely pragmatic and Hayekian-capitalist reasons! 

And "conservative" policies that empower a narrow caste of 5000 secretive-conniving golf buddies are the worst enemy that free and creative markets could possibly have.