…in response to Sen Chuck Grassley (AG, Iowa) and his op-ed piece in the MSM:
@ChuckGrassley is doing the bidding of Tom Donohue, the corrupt U.S. Chamber of Commerce, K-Street, his BigAG benefactors, and selling out the U.S. middle-class while simultaneously cloaking himself in the flag. Despicable.
And he spells it all out in a long, but a very valuable rebuttal of what is so dishonest a piece of writing, it could have been written by a Democratic Socialist.
And in our last look at the economy for today, we have this news:
Private payrolls grew by 275,000 last month, the biggest increase since July, when they expanded by 284,000.
Services-providing jobs increased by 223,000 in April, led by a gain of 59,000 jobs in professional and business services.
The Democratic Socialist Party’s response to this fantastic news has been predictable:
…and:
Why?
Because socialists have a problem recruiting happy people with jobs to The Cause; they can only practice their politics of envy with a willing base of unemployed, surly proles to support them. And well-to-do liberals who are protected from the results of socialism by their wealth.
In the meantime, America’s getting on with it:
“The job market is holding firm, as businesses work hard to fill open positions,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
I was watching some stupid BBC-TV show about how a titled earl’s mansion was saved from ruin only by royal intervention (Prince Charles and his Prince’s Trust), and how the place was restored to its former glory and was now in essence a museum (said earl having relinquished title to the property many decades ago).
Which house and which earl is not important. What was not said was why the place had to be abandoned in the first place, which can be summed up in just two words: inheritance taxes.
Of all instances of government bastardy — and there are thousands — this is the one which gets my goat, because there are two major principles in play, and neither of them is good.
1) The State decides that your property doesn’t really belong to you, so the gummint takes part of it it away from you (or more properly, from your heirs) after your death and puts it into their coffers. It’s nothing less than fucking theft, pure and simple.
2) The principle that “unearned income” — i.e. that your wealth gets passed on to your heirs, who didn’t work for it and therefore it should be treated as a windfall — is a bad thing because it simply perpetuates the wealth inequality of society. The underlying Marxist lie that underpins this idea is self-explanatory: that wealth is a finite quantity, and that keeping it in the family prevents others in society from benefiting from it. (Never mind that history shows that almost all great fortunes are dissipated within four — and usually three — generations because of multiple heirs, wastage, poor judgement and so on.)
What we also know is that inheritance taxes do not affect the very wealthy much, if at all, because they protect their property by a multitude of (perfectly-legal) tax avoidance schemes. Instead, the taxes hit the middle classes (and especially family business owners and farmers) hardest of all.
So it’s all very well for HRH the Prince of Wales to come riding in on his faerie chariot and save some great house from ruin, when in fact it was the policies of his (and his forerunners’) government that was the principle cause of that ruin in the first place.
Just so we know the extent of the villainy: the family was going to be forced to sell off the household effects to help pay the bills. Which sounds trivial except that the earl was the owner of the largest collection of Chippendale furniture in the world (simply because the fifth earl had seen the first-ever catalog of the Chippendale Brothers furniture company in the 1750s, liked what he saw and bought hundreds of pieces of the stuff for his new country home, and all of which had stayed in the house ever since). To give you an idea of its worth: just one large glass-fronted bookcase — now being used to house some of the family’s equally-valuable china — would have fetched at auction around £20 million, and each of the hundreds of Chippendale chairs around £50,000… yes, each.
All the household goods had been packed up in an eighteen-wheeler, and were actually halfway to the auction house in London when the truck was intercepted and turned back to the house. All very heroic stuff — and all completely unnecessary.
What’s interesting is that here in Murka, where we don’t even have titles and such, the popular antipathy towards inheritance taxes is profound — something like 80% of people polled hate the very idea of it, even though the vast majority of people are unlikely ever to be affected by inheritance taxes.
That’s because we’re not stupid, and we can recognize theft when we see it. It’s the principle of the matter, and as this nation was founded upon principle, we can recognize its villainy where other countries’ inhabitants might not.
By the way, here’s the Wikipedia entry for Dumfries House.
Wow. How about this for a headline?
Keynote speaker at Bob Jones University diversity conference says Muslims should be ‘locked up’
Just kidding. Here’s the actual headline:
Keynote speaker at Harvard diversity conference says Christians should be ‘locked up’
Read the rest, if you feel like it. Then load up yer favorite gun and a couple hundred rounds of ammo, and head out to the range. That’s what I’m going to do, later.
Fuck ’em.
As Glenn Reynolds might say, “If you’re going to chronicle Nancy Pelosi’s bullshit, you’re gonna need a bigger blog.”
But this one’s a little more dangerous than her normal:
The United States would not agree to any trade deal with Britain if future Brexit arrangements undermine peace in Ireland, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Wednesday during a visit to Dublin.
Actually, Our Nancy doesn’t have the authority to make such a statement. Trade deals fall squarely under the purview of the POTUS, and are subject only to ratification by the (Republican-controlled) Senate. The House of Representatives, over which Oberfuehrer Pelosi holds only a little influence, doesn’t have much to do with the process.
So she’s telling a Great Big Fat Lie [quelle surprise] in order to undermine Brexit, which (as any fule kno) the U.S. Socialist Party hates as much as the Euroscum do, because both hate the idea that someone somewhere might actually have independence from Big Government.
So, to my Brit Readers: ignore the Trot bitch. We usually do.
Oh, why not:
Conservative French politicians expressed concern Thursday about the prospect of modern architecture being added to Notre-Dame cathedral after the government invited design proposals for a new roof and spire.
Politicians from France’s right-wing Republicans and far-right National Rally (RN) party called on the government to restore the cathedral exactly as it was before the devastating fire broke out on Monday evening.
French President Emmanuel Macron has set a five-year target for the reconstruction to be completed and has said ‘an element of modern architecture could be imagined.’
Of course it could be imagined… in FrogPres Macron’s own tiny little Tranzi-modernist brain. Amongst normal-thinking people, however, it would be a disgusting insult.
Towards the end of the linked article, there’s this thought:
One of the most controversial additions to Paris in recent times was the glass pyramid built in front of the Louvre palace in central Paris.
Hated by many Parisians when it was unveiled by Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, it has celebrated its 30th birthday and has become an attraction in its own right.
I remember standing outside the Louvre in (I think) 2005, chatting to an older French man who’d stepped outside for a cigarette. I pointed at the pyramid and asked him what he and his friends thought of it. He snorted.
“I tell you, mon ami,” he said, “if those Arab terrorists had flown an airliner into this foul thing [cette chose répugnante], in France they would have been considered heroes and not terrorists.”
Here’s another take.
And from Michael Brendan Dougherty comes this exquisite sentiment:
“I promise right now. If you try to rebuild it as a ‘secular’ Notre Dame, reflecting the political priorities of 2019, I will do my damndest to see that the next fire takes it all down. I won’t come alone.”
Sign me up, Mike.