Politics and Prosperity | Seeing the world clearly

Time 2020-12-08 16:08:39

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That s the title of an amusing and insightful piece by Michael Warren Davis at The Spectator (U.S. edition). I agree with every word of the title, not just because I m a reformed libertarian (i.e., Burkean conservative or libertarian conservative) but also because I agree with Davis s central point:According to the latest figures, the Libertarian candidate for president, Jo Jorgensen (pronounced Yo Your-gun-sin), has spoiled the election. The number of votes Yo-Yo received in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania exceeds Joe Biden’s margin over Donald Trump in all those states. In other words, had the libertarians in each of those states voted for Mr Trump, he would have been reelected handily.Thus do big L libertarians vote against their own interests by helping to elect Democrats, who are diametrically opposed to almost everything that libertarians claim to stand for.I have made Davis s point at least three times (here, here, and here). The third time I quoted a portion of a blog post by the late Bill Niskanen, who served as chairman of Cato Institute for many years. It is now appropriate to reproduce Niskanen s post in full:A Case for a Different Libertarian PartyAll of this blogtalk about which major party is likely to be more receptive to libertarian policy positions, I suggest, is a waste of time unless the winning candidate of either party is dependent on the votes of libertarians.Increased outrage about the state of American politics and the prospect for a larger number of close elections increases the potential effectiveness of a different libertarian party — one that sometimes endorses one or the other major party candidate but does not run a party candidate for that position.The Libertarian Party’s efforts to promote their policy positions by running Libertarian candidates is counter-productive when they reduce the vote for their favored major party candidates. A disciplined group that is prepared to endorse one or the other major party candidate in a close election, however, can have a substantial effect on the issue positions of both major party candidates. The following conditions must be met to achieve this effectiveness:The party cannot run a separate candidate.The size of the party must be larger than the expected vote difference between the major party candidates.After the major party candidates are selected, the party leadership must have the opportunity to bargain with both major party candidates on the issue positions of highest priority for the party.The party, as much as possible, must act in concert to support the major party candidate who is chosen by the members of the party in that district.There is no reason for this libertarian party to be active in any district for which the party does not meet all four of the above conditions. (For most libertarians, the most difficult of these conditions to meet, I suspect, is condition 4.) In addition, the party should not emphasize the same issues in every district, because the choice of these issues should depend on those for which the major party candidates are willing to bargain.This is a strategy to increase the approval of libertarian policy positions rather than the usually counter-productive effort to increase the number of votes for Libertarian candidates. Maybe it is better to term the organization that I have described as a libertarian political action group, not a libertarian party.Bill was a wise man, as his argument amply illustrates. I take his seeming neutrality between the major parties to be a rhetorical device. He was, as he described himself a private conversation with me, a libertarian of conservative mien . As a member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Reagan administration he was one of the architects of Reagan s economic policy, about which he wrote in Reaganomics.Share this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading... In the wake of the most fraudulent election in America s history, the result of which will be further diminution of America s liberty and prosperity, the country s deep and seemingly unbridgeable divisions have become accentuated.Victor Davis Hanson captures some of the divisions in a dissection of the rural-urban dichotomy:Ideological differences are now being recalibrated as rural-urban on issues from guns and abortion to taxes and foreign policy. Red/conservative is often synonymous with small-town and rural. Blue/progressive is equivalent to urban/suburban .The cities since antiquity been considered cosmopolitan and progressive; the countryside, traditional and conservative. In the positive appraisal, Western literature always thematically emphasized the sophistication and energy of cities, balanced by the purity and autonomy of the country .That fact of the rural/urban dichotomy is underappreciated, but it remains at the heart of the Constitution — to the continuing chagrin of our globalist coastal elite who wish to wipe it out. The Electoral College and the quite antithetical makeup of the Senate and the House keep a Montana, Utah, or Wyoming from being politically neutered by California and New York. The idea, deemed outrageously “unfair” by academics and the media, is that a Wyoming rancher might have as much of a say in the direction of the country as thousands of more redundant city dwellers. Yet the classical idea of federal republicanism was to save democracy by not allowing 51 percent (of an increasingly urban population) to create laws on any given day at any given hour .So much of the absurdity of the modern world relates to a culture entirely divorced from the commonsense audits of 2,500 years of rural pragmatism. Antifa is the ultimate expression of tens of thousands of urban youth, many deeply in college debt, many with degrees but little learning — and oblivious of how they are completely dependent on what they despise, from the police to those who truck in their food and take out their waste, to those who make and sell them their riot appurtenances and communications gadgetry. The current fear is not just that America is becoming an urbanized and suburbanized nation — in the manner that many of the Founders feared would make our nation a European replicant. Rather, what is strange is that so many who are not rural are becoming fearful of their cannibalistic own, and what they have in store for the suburbs and cities — and thus are becoming desperate either to graft the values of the countryside onto the urban sprawl or leave the latter altogether.Unless the courts and the Supreme Court in particular are roused in time to salvage the election and declare Trump the winner, along with at least one GOP senatorial candidate who was robbed, Trump s large and vocal base will not go quietly into the night. That is because the base is united not so much by its allegiance to Trump, but by a sense that it is the remnant of what was once a great nation. (I will nevertheless refer to this mass of Americans as Trump s base , for the sake of convenience.)Trump s base, in addition to being rural is also (but not exclusively) working class, white, religious, and anti-cosmopolitan. There are many members of Trump s base, including this writer, who do not conform wholly to that profile. But my working-class, religious upbringing is deeply ingrained in me, as it must be in many others who don t conform to the stereotype of a Trump supporter.I am also a person with the credentials and tastes of a cosmopolitan who is deeply anti-cosmopolitan. My anti-cosmopolitanism derives from long, direct exposure to the smug, over-educated elites who who deign to rule the unwashed by edict, censorship, and ostracism. Those members of the base who lack direct exposure to such elites are nevertheless aware of the elites superiority complex and dictatorial bent.Trump s base is weary of being told what to think, what not to say, what to do, how to do it, and for whom to do it by cosmopolitan (i.e., anti-American) elites and their surrogates. The elites and their surrogates populate and dominate government and corporate bureaucracies, academia, the news and entertainment media,, Big Tech, and (most insidiously) public education .The sense of entitlement that propels the elites and their surrogates carries over into the impunity with which their protegees have been allowed to loot, riot, and attack Trump supporters (physically and verbally).This sense of entitlement carries over into electoral fraud, which has long known to be an almost-exclusive practice of Democrats. ( We are supposed to win, so win we shall, by any means. ) Having been unprepared in 2016, because Hillary was a sure thing , the masters of electoral fraud took no chances in 2020, with the result that the election was stolen from Trump, blatantly and massively.But our masters are confident in their success. Their media mouthpieces keep saying that there is no evidence of fraud when there is plenty of evidence (e.g., this). It s just that the evidence may not result in reversal of the election. And so the fraud will go down the memory hole.Trump s base will seethe, grow more bitter, and abandon the electoral field in droves allowing the elites to tighten further their grip on the legal, economic, and information levers of the nation. This will be done directly through the central government, through the control of information by the media and Big Tech, and by granting amnesty to of tens of millions of prospective new (and mostly Democrat) voters.There will be much hollow talk about unity. But unity, to the left, means submission. And Trump s base knows it.The nation is almost certainly broken, and broken irrevocably. That leaves the question of what is to be done about it. I have offered options in the past. The only one that can deliver (a lot of us) from the evil that bears down is a concerted secession effort by many States, perhaps leading to a negotiated partition of the country. The choice is stark: either a breakup or a complete takeover by America s domestic enemies.Related reading:Theodore Dalrymple, The Age of Cant , City Journal, Autumn 2020Theodore Dalrymple, The Decline of Cultural Understanding , Taki s Magazine, November 27, 2020 Tyler Durden , The Great Relocation: Americans Are Relocating By The Millions Because They Can Feel What Is Coming , ZeroHedge, November 23, 2020Mike LaChance, After Four Years of Democrat Attack on Trump Supporters, Biden Can t Unify the Nation , Legal Insurrection, November 25, 2020Francis Menton, Will Biden Denounce Efforts to Silence Dissent? [No!], Manhattan Contrarian, November 23, 2020J. Robert Smith, This Is War , American Thinker, November 24, 2020A virtual symposium at The American Mind, November 30, 2020:Matthew J. Peterson, A House Dividing? Gregory M. Vaughan, Madison Wins, Factions Lose Rebecca, The Separation Tom Trenchard, 2020: A Retrospective from 2025 Share this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading... UPDATED AS NOTED BELOW.It seems that the economy and with it the livelihoods of millions of Americans has been severely damaged for no good reason. Not only are face masks useless, or worse than that, but lockdowns are ineffective in halting the spread of COVID-19. If the reports that I ve linked to are correct, COVID-19 is essentially unstoppable until an effective vaccine is produced and administered in vast quantities.In the early going, there was a lot written about misdiagnosis and wrongful attribution of deaths. I haven t seen much of that lately, but that doesn t mean that those things aren t still happening. Regarding misdiagnosis, consider what has happened this year to the official tally of flu cases, as against the tallies of the preceding five years:This year, the cumulative number of flu cases was on track to set a new record, surpassing the totals of 2018 and 2019 (source). Then, just as word of COVID-19 was beginning to seep into the news media, the number of recorded cases suddenly stopped growing. How can that be? Did COVID-19 kill the all of the flu germs that were floating in the air and lurking on surfaces? Hah! I wonder what other conditions are being misdiagnosed as COVID-19.UPDATE 11/27/20: Well I wonder no more. Because it seems that a lot of deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 when they should have been attributed to other causes. (See this and this.) In fact, for the period studied, the rise in COVID-19 deaths was almost exactly offset by the decline in deaths due to other causes.UPDATE 11/28/20: For a detailed discussion of the meaning of cause of death , see this. It should reinforce your skepticism about the validity of official tallies of COVID-19 deaths.If you were to believe the media and I m sure you don t COVID-19 is the worst scourge since the Black Plague. Well, it s not even close:As of yesterday, about 1 in 100 COVID-19 diagnoses becomes a death statistic. And the rate seems to be dropping. Which can mean that the number of cases is overstated; the most vulnerable persons have already been killed by COVID-19; or that both statements are true and the vast, healthy majority of the populace is being penalized out of political fear fomented mainly by leftists, of course.Finally, let s put COVID-19 in perspective:Enough said, for today.Related reading: Kip Hansen, Survey Results: Where Are All the Sick People? , Watts Up With That?, November 21, 2020 (see especially the discussion of the number of flu cases)Share this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading... ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 11/09/20; UPDATED 11/27/20, TO REFLECT THE MOUNTING EVIDENCE OF FRAUD.Possibly, despite considerable evidence of fraud. In any event, Barring a smoking cannon or two, the Supreme Court probably won t salvage the election for Trump. However, based on Gorsuch s recent smackdown of Robert in the religious liberty case, I hold out some hope for a rescue by the Supremes, if a case that flips the outcome gets that far.A post by Trump supporter Anatoly Karlin though I don t agree with all of it makes some good points. The vote counts are incomplete in several States, but the results to date support Karlin s central thesis, which is that Trump lost just enough ground in key States (or Biden gained just enough ground in those States) to cause them to flip from Red to Blue.If fraud isn t at the bottom of Biden s tentative victory, what might be? A degree of revulsion for Trump that blinded many voters to the dire consequences of a Biden win, especially if accompanied by Democrat control of Congress. Nothing else, that I can see.Here s the table that shows Trump s (almost) across-the-board slippage, where the light-blue fill indicates States that flipped from Red to Blue: This table shows, in light-blue shading, the States whose votes were manipulated to tilt the election toward Biden:Despite my faint hope for a reversal of the apparent outcome, I will carry on:I will continue to update the list of links to allegations of election fraud (here) just in case.When all of the votes have been tallied and certified, I will update the graph that describes the statistical relationship between GOP candidates shares of electoral votes and shares of popular votes. (See this post for a preliminary update.)And I will write about the likely consequences of a Biden-Harris presidency (you read that right), with a GOP-controlled Senate, which are dire but not quite as dire as the outlook implied in this post.Share this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading... Be careful what you wish for.There are already 400 million privately owned firearms in the United States. It is obvious that most owners of those firearms are law-abiding citizens. But they are not supine or spineless citizens. They are prepared to defend themselves, their families, and their property. That s why gun sales go up whenever there s a perceived threat to law and order; for example:What will happen if there are drastic cuts in the funding of police departments? Or if persistent physical and political attacks on police lead to understaffing of police departments and higher crime rates?Here s what I believe will happen. The number and size of community defense groups will increase rapidly. despite hostile reactions from leftist politicians (and some political police chiefs who are their lap dogs). And when the time comes for serious action and the police fail to do their duty because they have been ordered not to, or because they are overwhelmed the gun owners will be there. This is more likely to happen in suburbs and exurbs. But there is no reason that the beleaguered (and well-armed) denizens of big cities should continue to stand by while their homes and businesses are looted and burned.Citizens who are defending themselves, their families, and their property are likely to be less discriminating than police when it comes to shooting someone who is perceived as a possible threat.You have been warned.Share this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading... Despite my long-standing reliance on Rasmussen Reports, I have decided to add two polls to my must-follow list: The Hill/HarrisX and IBD/TIPP. Rasmussen s final poll before this year s election had Biden leading Trump by 1 percentage point. In fact assuming that the final vote count resembles the current tally the nationwide count of popular votes puts Biden ahead of Trump by almost 4 percentage points. That was the spread predicted by The Hill/Harris and IBD/TIP in their final pre-election polls. If I had used that spread in my final projection, I would have nailed Trump s share of the electoral vote, which now stands at 43 percent (before all results have been certified and all court challenges have been heard and ruled upon).In fact, this year s (apparent) result is exactly in line with the equation that I had derived from the results for the elections of 1972 2016:With the addition of 2020, the relationship between popular-vote share and electoral-vote share looks like this:The only change is a slight improvement in explanatory power (r-squared rose from 0.92 to 0.93).The GOP continues to hold an edge in the electoral college, but it is a slight edge. According to the equations in the graphs, a GOP candidate must muster at least 49.5 percent of the two-party popular vote to be sure of winning an electoral-vote majority.Trump got lucky in 2016. Because of razor-thin victories in a few key States, he got 56.9 percent of the electoral vote with only 48.9 percent of the two-party popular vote (i.e., a deficit of just over 2 percentage points).This year, however, Trump seems to have eked out only 48.1 percent of the two-party popular vote (i.e., a deficit of almost 4 percentage points), and the close calls (apparently) went to Biden. Result: A reversal of the 2016 outcome.For more about the accuracy of various polls, see this piece at NewsMax (behind a paywall). Here s some of it:The Investor s Business Daily/TIPP poll defended its title as the most accurate pollster for predicting presidential outcomes. The pollsters take the No. 1 spot for the fifth presidential cycle in a row, a Newsmax review reveals. Among the worst polls were those from CNN and Quinnipiac.One of only two polls to predict President Donald Trump s 2016 win, the IBD/TIPP poll came closest to predicting the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The Hill-HarrisX poll also predicted election results with the same accuracy, according to American Research Group, Inc .Also making the top of the list were Emerson and Rasmussen Reports — one of Trump s favorite pollsters. Fox News, USA Today/Suffolk University, and New York Times/Siena College came in at the middle of the pack. Among the worst polls were Economist/YouGov, CNBC/Change, NBC News/ Wall Street Journal, USC Dornsife, Quinnipiac, and CNN. All predicted Biden would lead Trump by double digits. Occam s razoris the problem-solving principle that entities should not be multiplied without necessity or, more simply, the simplest explanation is usually the right one . This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same [phenomenon], one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions, and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions.Similarly, in science, Occam s razor is used as an abductive heuristic in the development of theoretical models rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models. In the scientific method, Occam s razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result; the preference for simplicity in the scientific method is based on the falsifiability criterion. For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives. Since failing explanations can always be burdened with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are more testable.But simplicity isn t a guarantee of correctness. More complexity may be necessary in order to explain a phenomenon or to make accurate predictions about it. Thus the weasel-words without necessity . If a thing is well explained by two independent variables, and a third independent variable adds nothing to the explanation, only two were necessary. But the number of necessary variables isn t known ahead of time. It takes data-gathering, testing, and statistical analysis of the tests to determine how many are necessary .Occam s razor, in other words, is merely a tautology. The correct number of necessary explanatory variables is an empirical matter, not one that can be determined a priori by a vague and meaningless aphorism.With that in mind, let us apply Occam s razor to the presidential election of 2020. The tentative outcome of that election is a victory for Joe Biden. There are at least four explanations for the tentative outcome:1. Every State that Biden won, he won fair and square. There were no fraudulent votes, no fraudulent counting of votes, and no errors in the counting of votes.2. Biden s victories in key States, though perhaps tainted by some degree of fraud or error, are legitimate; that is, the victories would have occurred absent fraud or error.3. Biden s victories in at least some States are illegitimate; that is, the victories wouldn t have occurred absent fraud or error. But overturning the fraudulent or erroneous victories in some States wouldn t change the outcome; Biden would still have enough electoral votes to be elected president.4. Biden s victories in at least some States are illegitimate; that is, the victories wouldn t have occurred absent fraud or error. And overturning the fraudulent or erroneous victories in those States would change the outcome; Biden wouldn t have enough electoral votes to be elected president. But this explanation, if true, may not be confirmed in time to change the tentative outcome of the election.The simplest explanation, number 1, is almost certainly false. So much for Occam s razor. What about explanations 2, 3, and 4?I honestly do not know which of them to believe because I am withholding judgement until all of the legal votes have been counted correctly. That probably won t happen before January 20, 2021, and so it will never happen. And so I will forever suspend judgement but I will also suspend belief that Biden was elected honestly.Why won t the facts emerge before January 20, 2021? Dov Fischer explains:[F]or those who have actual real-life professional high-stakes litigation experience, people like Rudy Giuliani and those of us who know what’s what, the reality is that no one can just walk into a courtroom a week or two after a massive fraud has taken place and just lay all the fraud on the table. It takes weeks, months, and years to unpack this stuff. No experienced attorney can just show up with all the evidence in a week or two. For example, who among us, even a week ago, had ever heard of “Dominion Voting Systems”? In only a matter of days, we now know not only of them but of their software and that they donated to the Clinton Foundation. And, oh by the way, their equipment was used in the election by North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania — comprising 84 electoral college votes in six of the tightest battleground states. On the other hand, Texas rejected using them Or take the dead voters. (Please.) Or the harvested and dumped ballots. Was it legal in the respective state to harvest the votes? If so, were the votes harvested by legally authorized harvesters — or by unauthorized out-of-state college kids who had nothing to do once it got too cold to march with Black Lives Matters thugs and threaten octogenarians at restaurants? It takes times — weeks, months — to unpeel that onion. And, again, what about the dead voters? It takes time to go through the voters’ rolls and to compare them with the rolls of the living.And signatures. It is commonplace in litigations that, when disputes arise over signatures, handwriting experts are called in. One place to find handwriting experts is at a website called — take a seat for this one — www.handwritingexperts.com. But that is the point. When the stakes are high, you can’t just have volunteer housewives and househusbands comparing signatures. Not only valleys forge but people do, too. Could there be stakes greater than whether we have four more years of a Trump presidency or an alternative quadrennium of a Harris and Biden White House? Who is comparing the signatures on the mail-in envelopes with the actual signatures on registration rolls? How is it done? How carefully? How expertly?It is wrong, unfair, and preposterous for media, including Fox News, regularly to parrot the Democrats and say that the Republicans so far do not have buckets and suitcases full of vote-fraud evidence. This kind of evidence — fraud — is the hardest to uncover and the hardest to gather. Mueller took two years. Durham, assuming there is such a person, already has been at it for a year and a half. States allow three years for claims of fraud. Usually, it takes document demands, demands for computer discs and drives, interrogatories, and depositions to root out the fraud and corruption. That is how long it takes. I know: I personally did this stuff for 10 years in matters entailing multi-million-dollar complex business disputes. Those of us who actually know the practice of law, not from Ally McBeal and from the 45 cable stations that simultaneously televise Law and Order reruns but from real life, know that the Trump team cannot possibly have all its evidence at hand yet.Nevertheless,they indeed are compiling anecdotal evidence, testimony of poll watchers who saw abuses and were kept away from monitoring ballot counting. The Trump team is gathering sworn affidavits, a recognized form of admissible evidence, and they are going as fast as they can. They report that they already have 234 sworn affidavits. Steve Cortes has published a wonderful piece raising four examples of circumstantial evidence arising from logical improbabilities:1. Incomprehensibly high turnout in Wisconsin. For example, Milwaukee ended up with an 84 percent turnout, while a nearby Midwest city with a comparable demographic, Cleveland, had a 51 percent turnout. In all, Wisconsin reported voting by 90 percent of their registered voters. Numbers like that are off the charts. Biden inched ahead of Trump in Wisconsin by under 1 percent. By contrast, Trump’s lead in Ohio was too large to overcome with shenanigans.2. The improbability of a lethargic Biden scoring significantly stronger voter turnouts than did an energetic Obama in certain battleground Obama districts.3. The quirk of over 450,000 Biden-only ballots, on which the submitted ballots showed a vote for Biden but no one else at all, even in states where there were tight congressional and Senate contests down-ticket. That of course is technically possible, and certainly some such ballots could be expected. Curiously, Biden-only ballots were predominantly prevalent in battleground states like Georgia. By contrast, there were only 725 such ballots in Wyoming, which was a Trump–Republican blowout. For comparison, there was only a fraction of Trump-only ballots in Georgia.4. The virtual absence of mail-in vetting. In New York, which tried large-scale mail-in balloting for the first time last June, the natural process of vetting saw 21 percent of ballots disqualified. Likewise, it is common that, among people mailing in ballots for the first time in their lives, usually some 3 percent get disqualified. That simply is the human nature of some who forget to sign, forget to date the ballot, fill it in wrong, and otherwise mess up. That’s people. Yet, in Pennsylvania only 0.03 percent of such ballots were rejected, 10 times fewer than all experience would have anticipated.Circumstantial evidence matters and carries serious evidentiary weight. Murderers have been sentenced to death based solely on circumstantial evidence. Honest, reasonable minds cannot expect all evidence of fraud to be at hand only 10 days or even a month or two after the election has ended. Democrats had half a year and more to plan strategies for aspects of their fraud and ways to cover it up. If given enough time, enough production demands for computer drives and discs, enough time to read secret and deleted emails, the Trump team would have an opportunity to say “We have the evidence” or to present as Mueller did after his two-year investigation. Any shorter time frame is unrealistic.Conclusion: The correct explanation of the tentative outcome of the presidential election of 2020 will never be known. Biden will be inaugurated on January 20, 2021 (if he lives that long), and the memory hole will swallow almost all doubts about how Biden won. Remaining doubts, and even hard evidence, will be dismissed as delusional and fabricated.And so we will be frog-marched into a brave new world.Share this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading... The Iraq War has been called many things, immoral being among the leading adjectives for it. Was it altogether immoral? Was it immoral to remain in favor of the war after it was (purportedly) discovered that Saddam Hussein didn t have an active program for the production of weapons of mass destruction? Or was the war simply misdirected from its proper and moral purpose: the service of Americans interests by stabilizing the Middle East? I address those and other questions about the war in what follows.THE WAR-MAKING POWER AND ITS PURPOSEThe sole justification for the United States government is the protection of Americans interests. Those interests are spelled out broadly in the Preamble to the Constitution: justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty.Contrary to leftist rhetoric, the term general welfare in the Preamble (and in Article I, Section 8) doesn t grant broad power to the national government to do whatever it deems to be good . General welfare general well-being, not the well-being of particular regions or classes is merely one of the intended effects of the enumerated and limited powers granted to the national government by conventions of the States.One of the national government s specified powers is the making of war. In the historical context of the adoption of the Constitution, it is clear the the purpose of the war-making power is to defend Americans and their legitimate interests: liberty generally and, among other things, the free flow of trade between American and foreign entities. The war-making power carries with it the implied power to do harm to foreigners in the course of waging war. I say that because the Framers, many of whom fought for independence from Britain, knew from experience that war, of necessity, must sometimes cause damage to the persons and property of non-combatants.In some cases, the only way to serve the interests of Americans is to inflict deliberate damage on non-combatants. That was the case, for example, when U.S. air forces dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Japan s surrender and avoid the deaths and injuries of perhaps a million Americans. Couldn t Japan have been quarantined instead, once its forces had been driven back to the homeland? Perhaps, but at great cost to Americans. Luckily, in those days American leaders understood that the best way to ensure that an enemy didn t resurrect its military power was to defeat it unconditionally and to occupy its homeland. You will have noticed that as a result, Germany and Japan are no longer military threats to the U.S., whereas Iraq remained one after the Gulf War of 1990-1991 because Saddam wasn t deposed. Russia, which the U.S. didn t defeat militarily only symbolically is resurgent militarily. China, which wasn t even defeated symbolically in the Cold War, is similarly resurgent, and bent on regional if not global hegemony, necessarily to the detriment of Americans interests. To paraphrase: There is no substitute for unconditional military victory.That is a hard and unfortunate truth, but it eludes many persons, especially those of the left. They suffer under dual illusions, namely, that the Constitution is an outmoded document and that world opinion trumps the Constitution and the national sovereignty created by it. Neither illusion is shared by Americans who want to live in something resembling liberty and to enjoy the advantages pertaining thereto, including prosperity.CASUS BELLIThe invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the armed forces of the U.S. government (and those of other nations) had explicit and implicit justifications. The explicit justifications for the U.S. government s actions are spelled out in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq of 2002 (AUMF). It passed the House by a vote of 296 133 and the Senate by a vote of 77 23, and was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 16, 2002.There are some who focus on the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) justification, which figures prominently in the whereas clauses of the AUMF. But the war, as it came to pass when Saddam failed to respond to legitimate demands spelled out in the AUMF, had a broader justification than whatever Saddam was (or wasn t) doing with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The final whereas puts it succinctly: it is in the national security interests of the United States to restore international peace and security to the Persian Gulf region.An unstated but clearly understood implication of peace and security in the Persian Gulf region was the security of the region s oil supply against Saddam s capriciousness. The mantra no blood for oil to the contrary notwithstanding, it is just as important to defend the livelihoods of Americans as it is to defend their lives and in many instances it comes to the same thing.In sum, I disregard the WMD rationale for the Iraq War. The real issue is whether the war secured the stability of the Persian Gulf region (and the Middle East in general). And if it didn t, why did it fail to do so?ROADS TAKEN AND NOT TAKENOne can only speculate about what might have happened in the absence of the Iraq War. For instance, how many more Iraqis might have been killed and tortured by Saddam s agents? How many more terrorists might have been harbored and financed by Saddam? How long might it have taken him to re-establish his WMD program or build a nuclear weapons program? Saddam, who started it all with the invasion of Kuwait, wasn t a friend of the U.S. or the West in general. The U.S. isn t the world s policeman, but the U.S. government has a moral obligation to defend the interests of Americans, preemptively if necessary.By the same token, one can only speculate about what might have happened if the U.S. government had prosecuted the war differently than it did, which was on the cheap . There weren t enough boots on the ground to maintain order in the way that it was maintained by the military occupations in Germany and Japan after World War II. Had there been, there wouldn t have been a kind of civil war or general chaos in Iraq after Saddam was deposed. (It was those things, as much as the supposed absence of a WMD program that turned many Americans against the war.)Speculation aside, I supported the invasion of Iraq, the removal of Saddam, and the rout of Iraq s armed forces with the following results in mind:A firm military occupation of Iraq, for some years to come.The presence in Iraq and adjacent waters and airspace of U.S. forces in enough strength to control Iraq and deter misadventures by other nations in the region (e.g., Iran and Syria) and prospective interlopers (e.g., Russia).Israel s continued survival and prosperity under the large shadow cast by U.S. forces in the region.Secure production and shipment of oil from Iraq and other oil-producing nations in the region.All of that would have happened but for (a) too few boots on the ground (later remedied in part by the surge ); (b) premature nation-building , which helped to stir up various factions in Iraq; (c) Obama s premature surrender, which he was shamed into reversing; and (d) Obama s deal with Iran, with its bundles of cash and blind-eye enforcement that supported Iran s rearmament and growing boldness in the region. (The idea that Iraq, under Saddam, had somehow contained Iran is baloney; Iran was contained only until its threat to go nuclear found a sucker in Obama.)In sum, the war was only a partial success because (once again) U.S. leaders failed to wage it fully and resolutely. This was due in no small part to incessant criticism of the war, stirred up and sustained by Democrats and the media.WHO HAD THE MORAL HIGH GROUND?In view of the foregoing, the correct answer is: the U.S. government, or those of its leaders who approved, funded, planned, and executed the war with the aim of bringing peace and security to the Persian Gulf region for the sake of Americans interests.The moral high ground was shared by those Americans who, understanding the war s justification on grounds broader than WMD, remained steadfast in support of the war despite the tumult and shouting that arose from its opponents.There were Americans whose support of the war was based on the claim that Saddam had ore was developing WMD, and whose support ended or became less ardent when WMD seemed not to be in evidence. I wouldn t presume to judge them harshly for withdrawing their support, but I would judge them myopic for basing it on solely on the WMD predicate. And I would judge them harshly if they joined the outspoken opponents of the war, whose opposition I address below.What about those Americans who supported the war simply because they believed that President Bush and his advisers knew what they were doing or out of a sense of patriotism? That is to say, they had no particular reason for supporting the war other than a general belief that its successful execution would be a good thing . None of those Americans deserves moral approbation or moral blame. They simply had better things to do with their lives than to parse the reasons for going to war and for continuing it. And it is no one s place to judge them for not having wasted their time in thinking about something that was beyond their ability to influence. (See the discussion of public opinion below.)What about those Americans who publicly opposed the war, either from the beginning or later? I cannot fault all of them for their opposition and certainly not  those who considered the costs (human and monetary) and deemed them not worth the possible gains.But there were (and are) others whose opposition to the war was and is problematic:Critics of the apparent absence of an active WMD program in Iraq, who seized on the WMD justification and ignored (or failed to grasp) the war s broader justification.Political opportunists who simply wanted to discredit President Bush and his party, which included most Democrats (eventually), effete elites generally, and particularly most members of the academic-media-information technology complex.An increasingly large share of the impressionable electorate who could not (and cannot) resist a bandwagon.Reflexive pro-peace/anti-war posturing by the young, who are prone to oppose the establishment and to do so loudly and often violently.The moral high ground isn t gained by misguided criticism, posturing, joining a bandwagon, or hormonal emotionalism.WHAT ABOUT PUBLIC OPINION ?Suppose you had concluded that the Iraq War was wrong because the WMD justification seemed to have been proven false as the war went on. Perhaps even than false: a fraud perpetrated by officials of the Bush administration, if not by the president himself, to push Congress and public opinion toward support for an invasion of Iraq.If your main worry about Iraq, under Saddam, was the possibility that WMD would be used against Americans, the apparent falsity of the WMD claim perhaps fraudulent falsity might well have turned you against the war. Suppose that there were many millions of Americans like you, whose initial support of the war turned to disillusionment as evidence of an active WMD program failed to materialize. Would voicing your opinion on the matter have helped to end the war? Did you have a moral obligation to voice your opinion? And, in any event, should wars be ended because of public opinion ? I will try to answer those questions in what follows.The strongest case to be made for the persuasive value of voicing one s opinion might be found in the median-voter theorem. According to Wikipedia, the median-voter theorem states that a majority rule voting system will select the outcome most preferred by the median voter .The median voter theorem rests on two main assumptions, with several others detailed below. The theorem is assuming [sic] that voters can place all alternatives along a one-dimensional political spectrum. It seems plausible that voters could do this if they can clearly place political candidates on a left-to-right continuum, but this is often not the case as each party will have its own policy on each of many different issues. Similarly, in the case of a referendum, the alternatives on offer may cover more than one issue. Second, the theorem assumes that voters preferences are single-peaked, which means that voters have one alternative that they favor more than any other. It also assumes that voters always vote, regardless of how far the alternatives are from their own views. The median voter theorem implies that voters have an incentive to vote for their true preferences. Finally, the median voter theorem applies best to a majoritarian election system.The article later specifies seven assumptions underlying the theorem. None of the assumptions is satisfied in the real world of American politics. Complexity never favors the truth of any proposition; it simply allows the proposition to be wrong in more ways if all of the assumptions must be true, as is the case here.There is a weak form of the theorem, which says thatthe median voter always casts his or her vote for the policy that is adopted. If there is a median voter, his or her preferred policy will beat any other alternative in a pairwise vote.That still leaves the crucial assumption that voters are choosing between two options. This is superficially true in the case of a two-person race for office or a yes-no referendum. But, even then, a binary option usually masks non-binary ramifications that voters take into account.In any case, it is trivially true to say that the preference of the median voter foretells the outcome of an election in a binary election, if the the outcome is decided by majority vote and there isn t a complicating factor like the electoral college. One could say, with equal banality, that the stronger man wins the weight-lifting contest, the outcome of which determines who is the stronger man.Why am I giving so much attention to the median-voter theorem? Because, according to a blogger whose intellectual prowess I respect, if enough Americans believe a policy of the U.S. government to be wrong, the policy might well be rescinded if the responsible elected officials (or, presumably, their prospective successors) believe that the median voter wants the policy rescinded. How would that work?The following summary of the blogger s case is what I gleaned from his original post on the subject and several comments and replies. I have inserted parenthetical commentary throughout.The pursuit of the Iraq War after the WMD predicate for it was (seemingly) falsified hereinafter policy X was immoral because X led unnecessarily to casualties, devastation, and other costs. (As discussed above, there were other predicates for X and other consequences of X, some of them good, but they don t seem to matter to the blogger.)Rescission would have (might have?/should have?) occurred through the operation of the median-voter theorem if enough persons had made known their opposition to X. (How might the median-voter theorem have applied when X wasn t on a ballot? See below.)Any person who had taken the time to consider X (taking into account only the WMD predicate and unequivocally bad consequences) could only have deemed it immoral. (The blogger originally excused persons who deemed X proper, but later made a statement equivalent to the preceding sentence. This is a variant of heads, I win; tails, you lose .)Having deemed X immoral, a person (i.e., a competent, adult American) would have been morally obliged to make known his opposition to X. Even if the person didn t know of the spurious median-voter theorem, his opposition to X (which wasn t on a ballot) would somehow have become known and counted (perhaps in a biased opinion poll conducted by an entity opposed to X) and would therefore have helped to move the median stance of the (selectively) polled fragment of the populace toward opposition to X, whereupon X would be rescinded, according to the median-voter theorem. (Or perhaps vociferous opposition, expressed in public protests, would be reported by the media especially by those already opposed to X as indicative of public opinion, whether or not it represented a median view of X.)Further, any competent, adult American who didn t bother to take the time to evaluate X would have been morally complicit in the continuation of X. (This must be the case because the blogger says so, without knowing each person s assessment of the slim chance that his view of the matter would affect X, or the opportunity costs of evaluating X and expressing his view of it.)So the only moral course of action, according to the blogger, was for every competent, adult American to have taken the time to evaluate X (in terms of the WMD predicate), to have deemed it immoral (there being no other choice given the constraint just mentioned), and to have made known his opposition to the policy. (This despite the fact that most competent, adult Americans know viscerally or from experience that the median-voter theorem is hooey more about that below and that it would therefore have been a waste of their time to get worked up about a policy that wasn t unambiguously immoral. Further, they were and are rightly reluctant to align themselves with howling mobs and biased media even by implication, as in a letter to the editor in protest of a policy that wasn t unambiguously immoral.)Then, X (which wasn t on a ballot) would have been rescinded, pursuant to the median-voter theorem (or, properly, the outraged/vociferous-pollee/protester-biased pollster/media theorem). (Except that X wasn t, in fact, rescinded despite massive outpourings of outrage by small fractions of the populace, which were gleefully reflected in biased polls and reported by biased media. Nor was it rescinded by implication when President Bush was up for re-election he won. It might have been rescinded by implication when the Bush was succeeded by Obama an opponent of X but there were many reasons other than X for Obama s victory: mainly the financial crisis, McCain s lame candidacy, and a desire by many voters to signal to themselves, at least their non-racism by voting for Obama. And X wasn t doing all that badly at the time of Obama s election because of the troop surge authorized by Bush. Further, Obama s later attempt to rescind X had consequences that caused him to reverse his attempted rescission, regardless of any lingering opposition to X.)What about other salient, non-ballot issues? Does public opinion make a difference? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Obamacare, for example, was widely opposed until it was enacted by Congress and signed into law by Obama. It suddenly became popular because much of the populace wants to be on the winning side of an issue. (So much for the moral value of public opinion.) Similarly, abortion was widely deemed to be immoral until the Supreme Court legalized it. Suddenly, it began to become acceptable according to public opinion . I could go on an on, but you get the idea: Public opinion often follows policy rather than leading it, and its moral value is dubious in any event.But what about cases where government policy shifted in the aftermath of widespread demonstrations and protests? Did demonstrations and protests lead to the enactment of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s? Did they cause the U.S. government to surrender, in effect, to North Vietnam? No and no. From where I sat and I was a politically aware, voting-age, adult American of the liberal persuasion at the time of those events public opinion had little effect on the officials who were responsible for the Civil Rights Acts or the bug-out from Vietnam.The civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s didn t yield results until years after their inception. And those results didn t (at the time, at least) represent the views of most Americans who (I submit) were either indifferent or hostile to the advancement of blacks and to the anti-patriotic undertones of the anti-war movement. In both cases, mass protests were used by the media (and incited by the promise of media attention) to shame responsible officials into acting as media elites wanted them to.Further, it is a mistake to assume that the resulting changes in law (writ broadly to include policy) were necessarily good changes. The stampede to enact civil-rights laws in the 1960s, which hinged not so much on mass protests but on LBJ s white guilt and powers of persuasion, resulted in the political suppression of an entire region, the loss of property rights, and the denial of freedom of association. (See, for example, Christopher Caldwell s The Roots of Our Partisan Divide , Imprimis, February 2020.)The bug-out from Vietnam foretold the U.S. government s fecklessness in the Iran hostage crisis; the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Lebanon after the bombing of Marine barracks there; the failure of G.H.W. Bush to depose Saddam when it would have been easy to do so; the legalistic response to the World Trade Center bombing; the humiliating affair in Somalia; Clinton s failure to take out Osama bin Laden; Clinton s tepid response to Saddam s provocations; nation-building (vice military occupation) in Iraq; and Obama s attempt to pry defeat from the jaws of something resembling victory in Iraq.All of that, and more, is symptomatic of the influence that liberal elites came to exert on American foreign and defense policy after World War II. Public opinion has been a side show, and protestors have been useful idiots to the cause of liberal internationalism , that is, the surrender of Americans economic and security interests for the sake of various rapprochements toward allies who scorn America when it veers ever so slightly from the road to serfdom, and enemies Russia and China who have never changed their spots, despite liberal wishful thinking. Handing America s manufacturing base to China in the name of free trade is of a piece with all the rest.IN CONCLUSION . . .It is irresponsible to call a policy immoral without evaluating all of its predicates and consequences. One might as well call the Allied leaders of World War II immoral because they chose war with all of its predictably terrible consequences rather than abject surrender.It is fatuous to ascribe immorality to anyone who was supportive of or indifferent to the war. One might as well ascribe immorality to the economic and political ignoramuses who failed to see that FDR s policies would prolong the Great Depression, that Social Security and its progeny (Medicare and Medicaid) would become entitlements that paved the way for the central government s commandeering of vast portions of the economy, or that the so-called social safety net would discourage work and permanently depress economic growth in America.If I were in the business of issuing moral judgments about the Iraq War, I would condemn the strident anti-war faction for its perfidy.Share this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading... PreambleIn the debates about the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), there were charges (and denials) that ACA would include death panels . In fact, a central feature of ACA was the now-defunct Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which wasto have the explicit task of achieving specified savings in Medicare without affecting coverage or quality .Beginning in 2013, the Chief Actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services determined in particular years the projected per capita growth rate for Medicare for a multi-year period ending in the second year thereafter (the implementation year ). If the projection exceeded a target growth rate, IPAB was to develop a proposal to reduce Medicare spending in the implementation year by a specified amount.With regard to IPAB s recommendations, the law said: The proposal shall not include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums , increase Medicare beneficiary cost sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co-payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria. Defenders of ACA claimed that IPAB wasn t a death panel (or an incipient one) because ACA specifically prohibited it from recommending the rationing of health care. But IPAB didn t have to ration health care directly. All it had to do was develop a proposal to reduce Medicare spending by a specified amount . Any such proposal, which would go into effect unless Congress overrode it, would have had the effect of forcing rationing of some kind, by some means (e.g., reducing or eliminating Medicare coverage for certain conditions, or reducing the compensation of providers who might treat certain conditions, thus discouraging them from treating those conditions in the first place).It s true that IPAB, or something like it, was (and still is) necessary in a government-run systems like Medicare and Medicaid, where the amount of money available to provide health care is limited by Congress. (In fact, some lefties openly admit it.) But that just moves the problem up a level. It means that Medicare and Medicaid, which are essentially mandatory for tens of millions of persons, constitute a system for rationing health care. (All misguided rhetoric to the contrary, free markets are not rationing mechanisms.)But what if Medicare and Medicaid didn t exist and many older Americans had to do without many of the health-care products and services that they enjoy because they couldn t afford those products and services? The existence of Medicare and Medicaid, whatever their benefits, is tantamount to governmental rationing; that is, their existence forces the redistribution of income among citizens (beneficiaries of Medicare and Medicaid vs. those who subsidize it) and the reallocation of resources toward health care and away from other uses.The bottom line: It s true that ACA doesn t mention death panels and prohibits rationing. But ACA in fact established a death panel (IPAB) and authorized (even more) rationing of health care than was already the case under Medicare and Medicaid, pre-ACA.In sum, a thing can exist without being called by a particular name. Reverse discrimination, for example, exists because Affirmative Action and various diversity programs, as they are practiced, foster discrimination against straight, white males of European descent. But to say that Affirmative Action and diversity programs are discriminatory is verboten in left-speak.The Issue at Hand: Whether the Powers of Congress Are Specifically Enumerated in the ConstitutionThe same principle that a thing can exist without being called by a particular name applies to the Constitution of the United States. An obvious case is found in the structure of the Constitution, which is characterized as a system of checks and balances. The term check and balances is found nowhere in the Constitution, but the Constitution does nevertheless provide checks on the power of the central government and balances between the powers of the central government s branches and between the powers of the central government and State governments.Likewise, the Constitution nowhere says that the powers of the central government are enumerated (and therefore limited). But they are, despite Richard Primus s casuistry in Herein of Herein Granted : Why Article I s Vesting Clause Does Not Support the Doctrine of Enumerated Powers (U of Michigan Public Law Research Paper No. 681, October 8, 2020).What is the Vesting Clause? It is Section 1 of Article I, which says this:All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.Primus makes much of what he calls the lack of parallelism between that language and the its counterparts in Article II (which defines the executive branch) and Article III (which defines the judicial branch); viz.:The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.Which, as I will show, is akin to making a mountain out of a molehill. To what end?This: Primus s attack on the Vesting Clause is really an attack on the doctrine of enumerated (and therefore limited) powers. As he says,the idea that Article I’s Vesting Clause limits Congress to a set of textually enumerated powers was virtually unknown in the ratification debates of 1787-88. 18 It was also absent from the First Congress, and conspicuously so. The First Congress prominently featured conflict over the question of whether Congress was limited to powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution: think, for example, of the fight over chartering the Bank of the United States. The Representatives arguing for the enumerationist position in those debates had every incentive to point to the Vesting Clauses for support, if they thought the Vesting Clauses supported their view. None of them did, which suggests that none of them thought Article I’s Vesting Clause established the enumeration principle.In all of the Federalist Papers, for example, thirty or so of which specifically addressed questions about the extent of congressional power, Publius invoked the Vesting Clause exactly zero times.This is nothing but argumentative sleight of hand. The Vesting Clause may not have been invoked, but the Constitution was ratified on the clear understanding that the powers of the central government were limited because they were specifically enumerated (mainly in Section 8 of Article I). The proponents and opponents of specific legislation wouldn t have argued about the broad language of the Vesting Clause. Rather, they would have argued about the specific inclusion or exclusion of the subject matter in text of the Constitution. The main repository of specific language is Section 1 of Article I.Enumerated and Limited Powers: The Lynch-Pin of the ConstitutionUnder the Articles of Confederation (Articles) that preceded the Constitution, the central government such as it was depended on the whims of member States to finance its operations. It therefore proved difficult to provide for such things as the defense of the United States, the conduct of foreign affairs on behalf of all of the States, and the free flow of trade among the States. Further, every State was equal to every other State one State, one vote which made it possible for regional coalitions and even individual States to wield disproportionate power. (Among the compromises that underlay the adoption and ratification of the Constitution was the creation of the Senate, which wields some amount of disproportionate power but not as completely as did the States of the confederation.)The Constitution doesn t specifically say that the powers of the central government are enumerated and limited, but they are, as a legacy of the Articles:Article II. Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.(Aside: Whereas the Articles of Confederation refer specifically to a perpetual Union of the member States, the Constitution nowhere says or implies that the resulting union was meant to be perpetual.)During the debates about the ratification of the Constitution, a great many speeches were given and great amounts of ink and paper were devoted to the issue of constraints on the central government. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay leading advocates of ratification issued their arguments in the series of essays that became known as The Federalist Papers. Among Madison s contributions are Federalist Nos. 41, 42, 43, 44, and  45. Those five papers constitute a defense of the specific powers granted to the central government by the Constitution. Madison nowhere adverts to unmentioned, free-floating power because the Constitution doesn t grant any such power to the central government.As Madison puts it in Federalist No. 45:The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined [emphasis added]. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.Related posts:The Slippery Slope of Constitutional RevisionismThe Constitution: Original Meaning, Corruption, and RestorationDoes the Power to Tax Give Congress Unlimited Power?Does Congress Have the Power to Regulate Inactivity?Our Perfect, Perfect ConstitutionDoes the Power to Tax Give Congress Unlimited Power? (II)The Constitution: Myths and RealitiesShare this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading... In Election 2020: Some Betting Propositions , I laid out the terms of a bet that I had proposed to correspondent who is a conservative collabo. The underlying conditions Democrat control of the White House and Congress may not be met, at least not in 2021-2023. But the day will come, and Americans will rue it.So, what will happen if Biden is elected but the GOP still controls the Senate and is able to prevent the left from enacting some of its agenda? Plenty. I have gleaned some examples from the blogosphere (links at the bottom of this post), and here they are:Stopping construction of the border wall by not requesting funds for it, not reapportioning funds to it, and canceling all work in progress.Encouraging illegal immigration (e.g., lax enforcement, reinstatement of DACA) to reopen the floodgates at the southern border.Issuing executive orders that reverse the economic recovery in the name of combating COVID-19.Rejoining the Paris climate scam, severely restricting U.S. oil production and the use of fossil fuels, and promoting renewable energy through  executive-regulatory actions, which will have almost zero effect on the climate and make Americans generally poorer and more miserable. (A full-bore legislative package if Biden could get it passed would be disastrous.)Reinstating U.S. support of WHO, a corrupt pro-China, anti-life operation.Reinstating Obama s supine, America-last foreign policy. In particular, reinstating the Iran nuclear deal and resuming the shipment of bales of money to Iran to finance its peaceful nuclear research, continue to build its regional military prowess, and acquire the means to strike the U.S. with missiles; and ilting strongly in favor of radical Islam and Palestine, and strongly against Israel, which will foment conflict in the Middle East.Progressing further toward thought control by encouraging more and stricter pro=left censorship by internet-based purveyors of news and anti-social media.Advancing critical race theory , which blames whites for all of the miseries of blacks, many of which are self-inflicted by black culture, and others of which are due to innate racial differences in intelligence.Actively pursuing extra-legal punishment of Trump s allies and supporters.Using the Justice Department to further erode law and order in the United States by hamstringing police departments.Not mentioned at any of links below, but a key proposition from my earlier post: Diminution of America s armed forces in the face of increasing adventurism by Russia and China thus encouraging even more and bolder moves by those countries against American s interests. This is a move that Harris-Biden can make unilaterally by slashing defense budgets submitted to Congress, and which the House can help to attain by holding the defense budget hostage until the Senate acquiesces in the cuts.And one more crucial thing. Harris-Biden will openly flout rulings by the Supreme Court when such rulings conflict with the regime s policies. (This is something that Trump/Hitler never did.)I will package these items as a proposed bet for my correspondent. He will probably decline to take the bet (as he declined my earlier offer) because, in his ostrich-like way he doesn t want to acknowledge the damage that Harris-Biden will do to the nation. He couldn t see past his Trump hatred.I will end this on a more pleasant note, with a link to Joy Pullman s post at The Federalist, 12 Ways For Trump To Bomb The Battlefield While Biden Claims The Presidency (November 10, 2020).Links:Carina Benton, Totalitarian Left Promises Purges And Punishment For All Trump Voters , The Federalist, November 10, 2020Sam Dorman and Hillary Vaughn, Biden Plans to Rejoin Paris Agreement, WHO, and Undo Other Trump Decisions on Day 1 , Fox News, November 9, 2020Tilak Doshi, The Coming Energy Shocks Under a Biden Administration , Forbes, November 11, 2020David Gerstman, Former Biden Aide: Rejoining Nuclear Deal Is High on Biden s Agenda , Legal Insurrection, November 10, 2020Fred Lucas, 7 Big Items on Biden s White House Agenda , The Daily Signal, November 8, 2020Heather Mac Donald, The Biden Threat to Law Enforcement , City Journal, November 10, 2020Steve Postal, How a Biden–Harris Administration Would Unravel Middle East Peace , The American Spectator, November 10, 2020Jarrett Stepman, Biden Would Likely Issue Flurry of Executive Orders on Climate, Abortion, Immigration , The Daily Signal, November 10, 2020Jonathan Turley (eponymous blog), Shredding The Fabric Of Our Democracy : Biden Aide Signals Push For Greater Censorship On The Internet , November 10, 2020Francis Menton, How Much Damage Can Biden Do to America with His Climate Plan? , Manhattan Contrarian, November 14, 2020Eugene Volokh, Biden Transition Team Member s Op-Ed on Why America Needs a Hate-Speech Law , The Volokh Conspiracy, November 17, 2020Frances Martel, Six Disastrous Obama-Era Foreign Policies Set to Return Under Biden , Breitbart, November 26, 2020Art Keller, Will Biden Resurrect the Iran Deal? , Quillette, November 29, 2020Share this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading... Here s my guess. Roberts, who has shown animus toward the Trump administration in some of his opinions will join the liberals Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan in decisions that favor Biden. Many commentators will simply ascribe Roberts s rulings to his desire to maintain an appearance that the Court is non-political. They will also ascribe to him a desire to fend off court-packing by making it seem less threatening to Democrats, despite its supposed conservative majority. The mainstream media will simply ignore or minimized Roberts s animus.But Roberts plus the three lefties do not a majority make. So how will Roberts achieve his real objective, which is to remove Trump from office? He will appeal to Gorsuch, who seems to march to a different drummer than the Court s real conservatives (Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett). Neil , he ll say, here s our chance to reassure the Democrats, who would surround us with their lackeys, that we aren t rubber stamps for Republican policies. And so Gorsuch will join Roberts and the lefties, for an anti-Trump majority. And perhaps (though I doubt it) Roberts will be able to recruit Kavanaugh or Barrett to the cause of making the Court seem to be above partisan politics. (Ironically, that s precisely what Roberts will be engaged in, and everyone will know it.)And so, Trump will lose despite evidence of massive election fraud in key Democrat-controlled States. And when the Democrats next get their hands on the Senate, court-packing will proceed apace, and Roberts will be an impotent chief justice who is dominated by the Court s new, permanent left wing.Share this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading... UPDATED AT 4:00 PM CST, 11/04/20In yesterday s post, I forecast a 285-253 electoral-vote victory for Biden. As of this morning afternoon, according to FoxNews, Biden has locked up 264 electoral votes and is leading in three States (Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin) whose electoral votes would give him a total of 270 just enough for victory. It s possible that Biden s total could be higher, given the number of votes still to be counted in Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, where Trump is currently ahead. And, of course, Biden could still lose any or all of the three undecided States where he is currently ahead. And both candidates can be expected to demand recounts, and recounts of recounts, and to seek judicial intervention all the way to the Supreme Court. But, whatever the outcome, I am pleased by the accuracy of my forecast. (Though I will be most displeased by the outcome if Biden proves to be the winner.)I based my forecast on polling conducted by Rasmussen Reports, which has been my go-to source for presidential polling for the past 12 years. Rasmussen has acquired a bum rap for being pro-Republican because its generally accurate polls aren t biased toward Democrats as are most other polls. This year s presidential race provides further evidence of Rasmussen s lack of bias.As of now, Biden has a 2 percentage-point lead over Trump in the nationwide tally of popular votes. That lead might rise a bit when all of the Left Coast votes have been counted, but it s statistically the same as the 1-percent edge forecast in Rasmussen s final poll. And how did Rasmussen do relative to other major polls? See for yourself:Share this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading... Who knows? But the results from a few States in the Eastern time zone may tell the tale. Look at the results reported by late Tuesday and compare them with Trump s performance in 2016.The following information is borrowed from The New York Times and Dave Leip s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.Maine (polls close at 8 p.m. EST):Officials are not expecting delays processing mail ballots. As of Sunday, the vast majority of absentee ballots had been returned.Trump won 48 percent of the two-party vote in 2016.New Hampshire (most polls close at 7 p.m. EST):No information provided about counting mail ballots, but New Hampshire is a small State.Trump won just under 50 percent of the two-party vote in 2016.North Carolina (polls close at 7:30 p.m. EST)Early votes and processed mail ballots, which are likely to be relatively stronger for Biden, will be reported around 7:30 p.m. Election Day results, which are likely to be relatively stronger for Trump, will be reported between 8:30 p.m. and 1 a.m. As of Monday, officials estimate that 97 percent of ballots cast will be reported on election night. Although postmarked ballots can arrive as late as November 12, a clear winner may emerge on election night.Trump won 52 percent of the two-party vote in 2016.In general, look to States where most of the ballots have been counted by, say, midnight on election night and compare Trump s percentage of the two-party vote in those States with the results for 2016. You can guesstimate the outcome by adding and subtracting electoral votes from Trump s tally in 2016:If it s a blowout for Trump or Biden, mostly complete returns by late Tuesday or early Wednesday should tell the tale. If it s too close to call, look for an election that s decided in the Supreme Court.Share this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading... Gallup isn t polling Election 2020. It s polling a lot of related things, but not voters preferences as between Trump and Biden. Why is that? It seems that Gallup abandoned the business of presidential prognostication after its poor (but not uniquely poor) sounding of the 2016 presidential election.Gallup s final poll had Clinton leading Trump by 4 percentage points, 46 to 42. A 4-point spread surely meant that Clinton would win. But Trump won, despite Clinton s final 2-point victory in the mythical nationwide popular vote. (Why? See this.) Trump exceeded Gallup s final estimate by 4 percentage points while Clinton bettered it by only 2 percentage points. Game, set, and match to Trump.It was only the second time since Gallup s first presidential poll in 1936 that Gallup recorded a clear failure. The first time was when Gallup had Dewey ahead of Truman 50-45 in the 1948 race.There were several races in which Gallup s final spread was 2 percentage points or less, so failure in those cases could be attributed to sampling error. Even in those cases, the candidate who was ahead, in Gallup s estimation, lost only once: Gerald Ford in 1976.Gallup s departure signaled a realization that polling had become too fraught with uncertainty because (a) voters have become increasingly reluctant to respond to pollsters. And among those that do, there are more and more voters who are unwilling to divulge their true preferences (e.g., shy Trump supporters).Election 2020 confirms the wisdom of Gallup s departure from the field. Almost all of the pollsters, including the highly overrated FiveThirtyEight, are predicting victory for Biden. This comes in the face of huge pro-Trump crowds, a late swing toward Trump in Iowa, unusual endorsements of Trump (e.g. police unions, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), and Trump s standing in an unbiased poll, that of Rasmussen Reports.I m not quite ready to say that Trump will win. But the outcome will be a lot closer than FiveThirtyEight et al. would like it to be. (Yes, like is the proper word.) I will issue my final prediction on the morning of Tuesday, November 3.Share this:TwitterEmailPrintLinkedInFacebookRedditPocketTelegramTumblrPinterestWhatsAppSkypeLike this:Like Loading...

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