Private vs. Public

Much has been made about the Socialist Party demanding to be able to scrutinize President Trump’s tax returns over the past fifty years or whatever, and how Senior Socialist Pelosi isn’t able to rein in the demands of the AOC Wing of the Party.  Whatever.

My take is simple:  a private citizen’s tax information is an intensely confidential business — between the individual (or his agent) and the IRS, and no other.

Once an individual starts working in government, i.e. in public service, then his tax returns should be published in the Congressional Record each year, for two reasons:

  1. a position in public service should require that the public be able to scrutinize how it is possible for, say, ex-Senator Harry Reid (or current Speaker Pelosi, for that matter) to become a multi-millionaire while earning only a Congressional salary, and
  2. the knowledge that their financial dealings while in public service are being made public would make all gummint workers and elected officials more circumspect in their behavior, and rein in their corruption tendencies.

In other words, before  someone starts working for the Gummint / is elected to office, those tax records are nunya.  Once you become  a public servant — and only then — those tax records should be subject to public scrutiny.

So if Trump tells Congress to FOAD when they demand to see his pre-presidential tax returns, I’ll support him to the hilt.  But should Red Nancy refuse to let us see her tax returns from all the years she’s been in Congress, she should be impeached herself.

Working Towards A Conservative Democracy

We are constantly being reminded that the United States is a representative republic (which it is) as well as being a liberal democracy (which is also true).  For the longest time, I’ve had the gnawing suspicion that the two concepts may be antithetical, nay even contradictory, and recent events have proven me correct.

The standard-bearers of the modern liberal democracy have tended towards the “liberal” part of the description, and their modernism has turned liberalism away from its classical roots (the Enlightenment) towards a more baleful and statist, ergo illiberal  ethos.  It is small wonder, therefore, that this modern liberalism is attacking both the “representative” and even “republic” towards a full democracy, into a government created by a national popular vote instead of a democracy limited by proportional representation.  (The sudden popularity of socialism — one of the more repressive governmental systems, is simply indicative of this intent, and the “democratic” prefix attached thereto is, like most of socialism, a figleaf to mask its true purpose.)

It seems clear that if we are to reverse this trend, we need to try to implement an antithetical alternative to the liberal democracy — that antithesis being a conservative democracy, as explained here by Yoram Hazony. I’m pretty sure that few if any conservative small-r republicans will take issue with this principle, for example:

Liberals regard the laws of a nation as emerging from the tension between positive law and the pronouncements of universal reason, as expressed by the courts. Conservatives reject the supposed universal reason of judges, which often amounts to little more than acceding to passing fashion. But conservatives also oppose an excessive regard for isolated written documents, which leads, for example, to the liberal mythology of America as a “creedal nation” (or a “propositional nation”), defined solely by certain abstractions found in the American Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address. Important though these documents are, they cannot substitute for the Anglo-American political tradition as a whole—with its roots in Scripture and the English common law—which alone offers a complete picture of the English and American legal inheritance.

Yes.  The famous expression on the Statue of Liberty “Give me your tired, your huddled masses…” etc. is a lovely sentiment, but it is not policy  which allows untrammeled immigration, nor does it confer a “right to immigrate to the United States” upon the rest of the world’s populace.

Read the whole thing.  It’s really long, but it has to be — overturning a liberal democracy and reverting to a conservative one does not lend itself to bumper-sticker aphorisms so beloved by the Left.

And overturn it we must, in order to return to the proud Anglo-Saxon heritage that is the foundation of our Western civilization.


Afterthought:  note the emphasis placed on religion — most specifically, Christian religion — by Hazony.  I should point out that I, an atheist, have absolutely no issue with it.  I am a conservative first, an atheist second, and I treasure the Christian values of our heritage and their foundation of our culture.  That said, the values I treasure are also the traditional  aspects of Christianity and not the modern-day travesty they have become.  My conservatism is all-embracing.

Demonization

So let me make sure I’ve got this absolutely clear:  if the Gummint passes a patently un-Constitutional law and someone refuses to comply with it, that person would be a “homegrown terrorist”?

Got it.  I should also point out that it was Lenin who first equated refuseniks  with being terrorists.

Here’s a tip for this asshole:  you keep making shitty laws and stockpiling bodybags, and we’ll keep buying ammo.  We’ll see who runs out first.

Big Surprise

So one rancid Commie (Jewish) bitch femsplains how another rancid Commie (Muslim) bitch just hasn’t had a chance to “find out about American values” — despite the latter bitch having been in the country for TWENTY FUCKING YEARS.  (Your Humble Narrator — also an immigrant — had been in the country for about twenty minutes  before he got the picture.  The only thing that puzzled him, and still does, is how any rancid Commies get elected to public office at all, but we can talk about that some other time.)

For the record, I will have been in the United States for thirty-two years come Memorial Day weekend.  Other than the accent (which I have been unable to master), I’m about as American as any, and more so than a large number (e.g. the entire Democrat Congressional membership).

Folks, this isn’t difficult.  When you move to another country, your duty is to adopt the ethos of the country in which you live.  You don’t try to make your new country conform to your precepts.  Once again, had I done that, I’d have been preaching apartheid as a valid political system for the U.S. (don’t go there).

The only parts of “American values” which I have been quite unable to understand, let alone conform to, are things like Velveeta, “lite” beer, “fast” foods and why it’s against the law to hang Socialists from lamp posts.  That the disgusting Ilhan Omar can get elected despite all her manifest failings is part and parcel of the American tradition of political toleration, I suppose;  but my calling her a rancid Commie bitch is likewise part and parcel of the American tradition of free speech.  So there.

Old Times, No Longer Relevant

Via Insty, David Bernstein has an interesting post about some Democrat asswipe coming to the assistance of serial anti-Semite / newbie Socialist House Rep. Ilhan Omar.  He makes the issue about “checking privilege”, but I have a different take.  Here’s the screenshot, with the part that interests me highlighted:

Okay, let’s agree with Clyburn’s statement, arguendo.  Here’s my take:

Can today’s Blacks, and the Democrats and Socialists who support their claims, just shut the fuck up about 19th-century slavery and forget all about “reparations”? 

And a footnote to Rep. Omar:  it wasn’t the Jews  who put you in a refugee camp either, so you can STFU as well.

Cutting Out The Middlemen

I think I can safely say that all who visit this here back porch are in agreement that centralization of the governmental kind is generally meant to create efficiencies, but seldom does.

The same is true of pretty much any organization which is dealing solely with collecting and disbursing other people’s money — and here I’m turning my baleful gaze onto the cockroaches known as “international aid societies”, who can skim money out of donations better than any dairy can skim the cream off milk.  And I have some support in this viewpoint, from the BritGov of all places:

Aid minister Penny Mordaunt has drawn up plans for the UK to take more control of how we help countries around the world.
The International Development Secretary has demanded a major overhaul so less of the UK’s £14.1billion aid budget is handed out through staff at international agencies.
She wants to use the cash to fund specific projects chosen by Britain with more oversight to make sure money is not wasted.
The proposal is part of this year’s comprehensive spending review, which will set the course of Government budgets for the next few years. Around a third (37 per cent) of the aid budget is currently spent as contributions to multilateral organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and European Commission.

Leaving aside the need for a minister for aid (the Brits love this Yes, Minister crap), what Mordaunt says is absolutely correct.  For those who know not who she is, by the way, allow me to enlighten with a  couple pics:

 

 

 

The Right Honorable Member from Portsmouth North sure makes a change from the dreary Socialist trolls who infest our body politic, doesn’t she?  And she makes sense — an even bigger change.