Month: March 2019

Before electricity, factories ran their machinery using  a central steam boiler, which powered everything through elaborate sets of belts.  If you ran a lathe, its motive power came from a belt, or cable, which wound back to the power source.  It was dangerous and  inefficient.

Then, from 1900 to 1940, electric motors replaced steam.  Each power tool had its own small, efficient, pollution-free motor.  Needless to say, the adoption of electricity as the power source in manufacture led to an explosion of productivity, a vast creation of wealth that we still enjoy today.

Thus, we had one of the most prosperous decades in all of history, the American Roaring 20’s.  Like all business cycles it ended, and became the Great Depression largely as a result of governmental stupidity.  The reaction to the depression was the New Deal political consensus, which lasted until 2016.

Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge were partly responsible for the Roaring 20’s.  Their low tax, pro-business policies were helpful.  They also severely limited immigration.  By 1924 very few immigrants were being allowed into the country.  This had the effect then, as it would have today, of increasing the bargaining power of the American worker, and of a more widely shared prosperity.

All the stars have aligned for another decade of powerful economic growth, another, 21st century, Roaring 20’s.  Trump, like Harding/Coolidge, is ferociously pro-business.  He wants jobs, and for that he needs business to expand, and hire.  He wants the benefits of all this wealth creation to be shared with the working men and women of America.

Trump’s efforts have a mighty wind at their back, as the wizardry of Silicon Valley permeates every business in America, large or small.  This productivity explosion may well prove to be greater than steam to electricity.  It could last for decades.

If we let it.  The government, under the wrong Democratic President, could screw this all up.  The Democratic nominee will have pledged to enact a program that would end all this magnificent progress.

So if you care about the future of this country, you shouldn’t just vote for Trump.  You should work for him.

 

 

Normally I consume a lot of news, but not so much lately.  I haven’t really followed Russiagate, since it was  obviously fake news.  And every other story seemed to be about Comey/Rosenstein/Mueller/Clapper/Brennan and on and on and on.  To fill my day I’ve been forced to start reading the Aubrey/Maturin novels for maybe the fourth time.

But in half an hour it’s first pitch in a Yankees-Orioles game, and for the next six months we can watch real men play a real, American game.  A game that Babe Ruth played, and would be familiar with.  Baseball is the sporting version of America First.

There are no iron laws in politics, but a few things come close.  Such as, prosperity elects Presidents.  If come election day, voters feel they’re better off than they were, and think they’re likely to get better, incumbent Presidents win.  Even if they had nothing to do with it.

I am firmly convinced the economy will be humming in November of 2020.  Barring, of course, acts of God or acts of war.  Trump can’t interfere with the Lord, but he can certainly keep us out of war, and he will.  And the tax regime he installed, the regulatory relief he’s providing, and the international markets he’s opening are all powerful stimulants.  The Federal Reserve isn’t going to rain on this parade, especially not with Stephen Moore joining it.  Animal spirits are flowing.  There’s a lot of rational exuberance.  If you ever wanted to go into business, now would be the time to do it.

This all makes a pretty economic pie, and there’s a big scoop of ice cream to top it off.  It’s something Trump had nothing to do with.  It’s the best economic news of all.  Productivity is rising!   James Pethokoukis spells it all out in The Week.

This is profoundly good news.  It means all the creativity of Silicon Valley is infiltrating American business, and the long term consequences could be as drastic as the switch form muscle to steam, and from steam to electricity.  It’s that big.

All this means there’s going to be 3% economic growth in 2020, maybe 4%. And that means Trump is reelected.

Dame Fortune smiles, again, on Donald Trump.

[the foregoing appears in American Thinker]

 

They shot at the king, but they didn’t kill him.  And because they didn’t destroy him, they only made him stronger.  If, a year from now, the economy is robust, Trump will be reelected in an historic landslide.  His enemies have played right into his hands.

This is all because of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), an especially virulent form of the psychiatric disorder known as cognitive dissonance.  If you know, for absolutely certain  —  as an article of faith  —  that something is true, and evidence in contradiction of this truth emerges, the psychic toll can be severe.  Experts say stems from the use of degenerate Meta Probability.

So it is with Donald Trump and his critics.  I was one of those critics myself, and suffered severely when he won the Republican nomination.  I knew Donald Trump could never win a Presidential election, for all kinds of reasons.  Even though his opponent was one of the worst political candidates in our history, I knew he still couldn’t win.  He never read a book, had the attention span of a gnat, was a notorious womanizer, had no apparent political convictions, and was a flim flam artist of a businessman.  What kind of a guy is associated with Trump University, for God’s sake?

All the smart people, liberal and conservative, agreed, from National Review to the Wall Street Journal, from the New York Times to the Washington Post.  And then he won.  What in the hell happened?  How was this possible?  How could we explain to our friends, colleagues and families that we were wrong?

Hillary suffered a virtual nervous breakdown, and concocted the Russia collusion theory.  The media flocked to this fantasy, and the Mueller fiasco began.   After two years, this long national nightmare is over.

God bless America, and God Bless President Trump.

(A lightly edited version of this article is in the American Thinker.)

 

In 1980 I was chair of the Reagan for President Committee in Alaska.  Frank Murkowski and Native leader Roy Huhndorf were vying for the Republican nomination for U. S. Senate.  I supported Huhndorf, because I thought he’d have a better chance against incumbent Senator Mike Gravel.  Murkowski won the primary, and Gravel lost the Democratic primary to former state legislator Clark Gruening, grandson of Alaska political legend Ernest Gruening, one of Alaska’s original U. S. Senators back in 1959.

Bill McConkey had helped get Republican Governor Jay Hammond get reelected in 1978, and I had worked for him.  He was now Murkowski’s campaign manager, and he asked me to be his deputy on the campaign.  I got $4,000 a month, the only money I ever earned in politics.  I had one assignment.  Do a hit on Clark Gruening.  At the time, Murkowski and Gruening were tied in the polls.

My hit worked like a charm, and Murkowski immediately jumped to a ten point lead in the polls, which was his margin on election day.

I thought I now had a friend in the U. S. Senate.  I’d certainly earned it.  I got the son of a bitch elected.  But I was wrong.  Murkowski quickly turned into Ted Stevens’ lap dog.  And U. S. Senator Ted Stevens hated my guts, from an incident back in ’76, when I was district chairman for Reagan for President.

Frank appointed his daughter to serve out his term because Ted Stevens wanted her as his junior Senator.  He sure as hell didn’t want me.  Lisa wasn’t very bright, but she knew enough to do what Uncle Ted told her.  So Stevens actually had two votes in the Senate.

Ted Stevens was corrupt.  He was in bed with the gang of thieves who looted the North Slope Borough in the early 1980’s.   The judge who presided at their trial, James Fitzgerald,  told me confidentially that Stevens had hamstrung the prosecution.

The career people at the Department of Justice knew about this, and they wanted to nail Stevens.  They wanted to get the corrupt bastard so bad that they abused their prosecutorial power.  They got Stevens convicted, but it was a dirty conviction, and was overturned.

For those who doubt this story, how was it that George W. Bush allowed his Department of Justice to engage in prosecutorial misconduct in pursuing a powerful Republican Senator?  Explain that.  You can’t.

So now, thanks to Kai Binkley Sims, Stevens’ legacy Senator, Lisa Murkowski, will soon be put out to pasture.  The Stevens era is finally over.

When I arrived in Alaska with my wife in 1974 Don Young had just been elected to the U. S. House of Representatives.  I got to know Don, and I liked him.  He’s a good man.  He’s still in office, but the word is that this will be his last term.  If so, whoever wins his seat is the automatic favorite to take out Murkowski in 2022.

I don’t know how tight Young is with John Binkley.  Binkley donates $500 every cycle, and I’m sure Don is friends with the whole Binkley family, who have been prominent in Fairbanks for a very long time.  It could be that John knows Young is retiring, and his daughter Kai will run for the House in 2020, in preparation for a Senate run in 2022.

John’s not returning my call.  We were never friends.  More like rivals.

I feel kind of badly for John.  After Frank humiliated him in 2002 by appointing Lisa, Binkley decided to run against Frank when he went for a second term as Governor in 2006.  Frank was an absolute disaster as Governor, and Binkley beat him in the primary.  Frank only got 19% of the vote, which may be a record.  But Binkley only got 30%.  A perky little beauty from the MatSu got 51%.  Sarah Palin beat Binkley 5-3.  That’s got to be painful.

Kai Binkley Sims was a 25 year old petroleum geologist in Anchorage when her dad ran for governor.  I’m sure she’s a loyal, loving daughter,  and worked to get her father elected.  Losing to Palin had to be hard for the whole family to take.

More motivation for KBS.