Month: April 2015

Hal Wick doesn’t think the Reagan Initiative is necessary.  He’s afraid it might backfire.  By providing an agenda for the Convention, and a basis for organizing it, it’s designed to allay the fears of a runaway.  Hal thinks it might stoke them.

He’s going to Arizona next week to see family, and promised to go to Phoenix to touch base with sponsor Bob Thorpe.  He may even get to see Senate President Andy Biggs, the man between us and a win in Arizona.  He’ll get the lay of the land, and see if he can help come up with a plan of action for next year.  One that doesn’t include the Reagan Initiative.  It will be interesting to see what he thinks.  I’m all ears.

Thorpe has made some D.C. liberals uncomfortable.  He got a bill passed that directs state agencies and sheriffs to ignore executive orders from Obama.  It’s nullification lite, and an idea that might have some merit.  I’m not sure.  I admire him for coming up with it.  I haven’t met him.  I hope he can get to Seattle.

Earlier today I wrote a little about the first Americans, the Virginians.  The Puritan political philosophy was communistic, in that land, and the proceeds thereof, was all to be shared.  From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.  The preachers would decide these things.  It was a kind of religious tyranny.  As you can imagine, that didn’t work out well.  They nearly starved to death.  Many of them did.  Then they saw the light, became capitalists, survived, and celebrated at the first Thanksgiving.

They weren’t communists in Virginia, they were feudalists.  The rich men who financed the whole thing wanted to be landed gentry, and to monopolize political power.  Everybody else would have to work for them.  The poor, who were the vast majority, simply refused.  They wouldn’t work unless they had their own land.  They also nearly starved to death.  And many of them did.  Then the rich relented, and gave land to the poor, who soon prospered.  They found a crop, tobacco, they could sell in England, and had the basis of an economy.

Two of these people were my ancestors.  In 1633 they had a son, James, who was the first Pettyjohn born in this country.  He married Isabel Heath, and they had four children.  I am descended from their youngest, John.  John’s grandson, also named John, now in Delaware, was a soldier in the Revolutionary War.  It’s possible that he served under Washington.

In 2033 I’ll be 88 years old, if I’m alive.  My family is long lived.  My sons have promised me they’ll get me back to Virginia on the Fourth of July.  We’ll all celebrate the 400th birthday of James Pettyjohn.

Lord willing.

One of the better books I’ve read recently was “The Origins of English Individualism” by Alan Macfarlane.  The first Americans landed in Virginia, and were English.  Their culture evolved into ours.  It was a culture of liberty.  It wasn’t the culture of the religious zealots in Massachusetts.  They were fanatical about their faith, and that fanaticism took them far afield.  If your religion varied from theirs, they expelled you.  They were intolerant then, and their political heirs are intolerant today, just in service of a different faith.  If they thought you were a witch they killed you.

Macfarlane was a British patriot, and didn’t like to admit it, but he basically said that the ultimate source of his culture was Germany, home of the Anglo-Saxons.  He quotes Montesquieu, “In perusing the admirable treatise of Tacitus “On the Manners of the Germans” we find that it is from that nation the English have borrowed their idea of political government.  This beautiful system was invented first in the woods.”

The reason it came from Germany is because this is where women first emancipated themselves.  Equal rights for women is the foundation of freedom.  These German women of 2,000 years ago, famously described by Tacitus, insisted on freedom of choice in the selection of their husbands.  And when they married they were under no one’s control, from their husband’s family or their own.  When they acquired property they and their husbands owned it outright.  They could leave their estate to their children, but were not obliged to do so.  Unworthy children could be disinherited.  A man was expected to leave his father’s home and make one of his own for his own family.

This is called the Absolute Nuclear Family.  It died out in Germany, but migrated North to southern Scandinavia, western Netherlands, Brittany, and, with the Anglo-Saxons, to England.  It’s the basis of our culture today in America.

Tacitus describes the German women as tall and well built, with pale skin, red hair, and bright blue eyes.  They would follow their men in battle, to inspire them.  They were women to fight for.  The Romans found that out in 9 A.D. when they tried to conquer Germany.  Three legions were completely annihilated.

Spiritually, at least, they were our mothers. I’m proud of that.

The Aubrey-Maturin series of novels was the best literature of the 20th century.  Co-hero Jack Aubrey engaged in a lot of naval battles, and he was always trying to get the weather gauge, to have the wind at his back.  It gave him the freedom of maneuver, and was often the key to his victory.  It’s like having the high ground in a land battle.  You want to fight on the field you choose, not your enemy.

So I want to have a fight over wedding cakes, and homosexual marriage, and Christianity, and the overweening state.  This is good ground for our side.  Ideal, really.  Our opponents claim to be fighting for tolerance, but they’re anti-Christian bigots and bullies.  The people of this country get it.  I read on Drudge that some couple back east are losing their pizza parlor because of these fascistic bastards.  And people from all over the country have ponied up over half a million dollars to help them out.  Politically, who’s side do you want to be on in this fight?  I think I’ve got that figured out.

Sometimes I think I’m a little old to be doing what I’m doing.  But then I of think of Patrick Ross, who wrote those books I love so much, and have read repeatedly.  His father was German, but he was raised an Englishman, and changed not just his name, but his identity to his own invention, Patrick O’Brian.  He started writing these books when he was 56.  He wound up writing twenty of them, right up until he was 85.

So maybe I’ve got some time left.

The guys on the Task Force told me calling the supply side BBA the Reagan Amendment was confusing people.  So it’s now the Reagan Initiative. They told me to lay low, and I agreed to that as well.

I’m a reasonable guy.  I have a good attitude.  Bill Fruth told me I’m the nicest, most congenial, affable person he’s ever met.  He must hang around some real assholes.

The part of the Reagan Initiative I haven’t really thought through is regulatory reform.  We’ve got to do it so we don’t scare the horses.  But real regulatory reform would be its abolition.  When Congress creates an agency, like the EPA, it gives it a regulatory agenda.  The agency implements that agenda by rule making, adjudication, and enforcement.  It’s almost as though they’ve set up a separate branch of the government, with legislative, judicial, and executive functions.

It’s all thoroughly unconstitutional.  Philip Hamburger of the Columbia School of Law gets credit for making that case in his important book, “Is Administrative Law Unconstitutional?”  Hamburger is no whack job.  He’s a very well respected legal scholar, and his work is taken seriously.  I have to read his book, and see what his solution is, if he has one.  Whatever it is, I’ll see if it can be worked into the Reagan Initiative.

Fruth says our economy is so over regulated that we’ll probably never see 4% annual GDP growth again.  We need 4%, or better, to get out of the mess we’re in.  You want to balance the budget?  Long haul, you do it with growth.  And the modern American regulatory state won’t allow that growth to happen.

A lot of people in business, and government, understand this.   They just don’t know what to do about it.  The Reagan Initiative may be the answer.

The Federal Land Commission would set off an economic expansion.  Cutting the regulatory state down to size would do even more.  We’d have an economic boom, bigger than the 80’s even.

We just have to figure out a way to do it that the gal who works down at the 7-11 will support.  She’s the key.  A lot of deep thinkers come up with brilliant ideas to save the world.  But you’ve got to find a way to get her behind it, or you’ve got nothing.  That’s politics.  That’s what I’ve spent my life watching, studying, and practicing.

First I’ve got to find out how it would work, in practice.  Can you just declare administrative law is unconstitutional in one fell swoop, and end it?  Would that prove too disruptive to the economy, to society?  How, exactly, are we going to do this?

This is an important question that I’m not qualified to answer.  I’ve asked Dave Guldenschuh to think about it.  Monday I’ll call Rob Natelson and see what he thinks.  He may know Hamburger, who I would love to talk to.  Mike Stern might have some ideas, or know someone who would.  I’m definitely going to look in to this.  I haven’t been this jacked up since I came up with the Federal Land Commission.

To tell you the truth I’m not much of a lawyer, just like I wasn’t much of a law student.  I figured out after about a month that it was all bullshit.  Law is just a form of politics. But I was about to get married, and needed a way to make a living.  My degree in political science wasn’t exactly a ticket into the fast lane.  I figured if I became a lawyer I’d find a way to make some money at it.

After my encounter with my Speech Professor when I was a freshman, I pulled in my horns a bit, and never really had any more problems in college.  My grades were mediocre because I wasn’t particularly interested in a lot of these classes.  And I was a little lazy.

I didn’t know what to expect in law school.  I don’t think I ever personally met a lawyer, or even a law student.  In my first quarter we all had to take “Law, Lawyers and Social Change”.  Complete, total, 100% bullshit.  The teacher was Henry McGee, a former assistant U. S. Attorney from Chicago.  He was a black guy who supposedly had a fair amount of trial experience.  Nixon appointed Harold Carswell to the Supreme Court, and this guy comes into class and has a meltdown.  He goes berserk, stomping around and waving his arms. Finally he said “Nixon has no right to do this!”  I’d had enough, and I yelled out at him, “What do you mean he has no right?  He’s the President of the  United States, he can appoint anyone he wants!”  That slowed him up a bit, and he started calming down.

I got a “D” in that one too.

Drought might change the politics of California in the next few years.  10% of our water is urban use, 40% agricultural, and 50% “environmental”  — used to support our ecosystem.  If this is the mega-drought that some serious scientists say it is, all will have to be reduced.  The enviros run this state.  They’ve got a lock on it.  They will hold their breath, roll around on the floor and turn purple before they let one God damn bait fish be discomfited.  Crops will die, orchards will be destroyed, and fields lay fallow  — that’s all fine.  The already depressed economy of the Central Valley will be ruined, for a long time to come.  Tough.

This is serious business, but the media in this state won’t want to talk about it.  It’s off limits.  But at some point the wall of silence will be breached.  There’s almost 40 million people in this state, and some of them will step up.  Millions of acre feet are fed into the delta, and then out to sea, to save the habitat of the delta smelt.  That fish (it looks like a good sized minnow) will be the symbolic center of a hugely consequential political battle.

I don’t know this state well enough to predict the outcome, except to say the Latino population is the key.  Their political elites are in lock step with the crazy wing of the Democratic Party.  Some Mexican-American needs to be a leader here.  His or her people are the ones who will suffer.  I’m keeping my eye out for one.

If I find one, I’m going to help.