Category: A day in the life

General daily observances

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Follow up on gun control

After I posted the article about gun control the Australian way, I had a quick chat with a friend of mine who is a big gun proponent.

I said that I could understand why somebody would want a rifle or a shotgun for hunting purposes, and why you might want a hand gun for protection. But then I asked why anybody would need an assault rifle like the Bushman that was used in several recent shootings, and is now flying off the shelves like a new product from Apple. The answer surprised me. “Nobody really needs them, but they are a lot of fun to shoot.”

If that is the case, then I don’t see why you cannot have them in special ranges and you can only shoot them there. If you want to own one (rather than rent one) then you would need to lock it at the premise or have special containers for transport and storage. Kind of like how somebody who likes to drive really fast will do that on a race track, and not in normal traffic.

It is a complex and thorny issue, but I think we need to get to a point where people cannot get their hands on the most destructive weapons, and people who are not mentally sound should not have access to guns legally.

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Guns And Control – The Australian Way

Over the week-end I watched Up with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. I guess I’m becoming an #upper, albeit online after the broadcast. It’s a great show, but not 5 AM great on the week-end. But I digress.

The last two week-ends the show has been about gun violence and what to do about it. I know as a European, I don’t get the gun culture that I see organizations like the NRA and certain libertarian groups want to defend. I cannot see why somebody would need a military style semi-automatic rifle. I don’t understand why somebody would need more than a couple or so handguns, unless it’s for something like target shooting competitively.

Continue reading “Guns And Control – The Australian Way”

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I had no idea I was such a Keynesian

I have heard a lot about Hayek and Keynes and how they influence the current financial politics, but not until I read this article in The Nation did I realize how much of a Keynesian I am.

For a long time I have considered myself a social liberal. But I have also seen the consumer economy as a big ponzi scheme, which i guess it is. It is always the people coming in at the end (consumers) that end up paying for all the other people. When the consumers is 99% of the US population, then there isn’t much hope for the country as a whole.

So where did the USA lose its way? I believe it was when they started believing the sirens of Wall Street, who claimed that playing in their casino was actually investing, and that their ideas of what valued a company became the measuring stick. From then on the only measurement that mattered for publicly traded companies was the stock market valuation, and the way of keeping that going up was to very short term inflating the numbers. It ended up being about quarterly results, and companies were rewarded for closing factories and firing staff. This combined with outsourcing based on cheap labor and production has led to a significant trade deficit.

And that is where I learned that I was very much in the school of Keynes. He was very much against big trade deficits, and I guess to some degree to a large trade surplus as well, since somebody else would get a deficit because of that. However, increasing that trade deficit is exactly what all our US corporations have been doing, with moving manufacturing abroad and having the US population buying all the goods. The long term effect is that we have almost no manufacturing base, which means that we are losing research in manufacturing disciplines, since they need factories nearby to test anything new and make improvements.

That is why I’m a Keynesian, and I believe that we need to start making products in the US again, not just services. We don’t want to be like the spaceship that crashed into the second earth in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series.

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Comment on the Mount Vernon Statement

I was looking for some information on George Washington the other day, because I wanted to collect something about him for his birthday. During my research I stumbled across the very recent Mount Vernon statement. I had a look at it, and although I generally don’t see eye to eye with the right wing of the Republican Party, I thought it was interesting that the point they put forward are things I can support. Just look at how I read their bullet points:

It applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal.
I agree. We should limit the government based on law. We should never allow the government or its agencies to commit crimes like whole sale wire tapping, torture and illegal support to corrupt regimes abroad.
It honors the central place of individual liberty in American politics and life.
Individual liberty is essential. We should all be free to make decisions that are about our life, bar some protection to avoid infringements on other people’s rights and their property. For example, if it doesn’t harm you or your property I should be allowed to marry somebody of the same sex, or decide whether I want to take a pregnancy to terms or have a doctor help me to end my life if I feel that is the best thing. To be allowed to do what I want with my life as long as it doesn’t infringe on somebody else’s right to live their life.
It encourages free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions.
I think that far to much of our corporate world are getting welfare. I look at farmers producing super crops with subsidies only to have their crops unfairly undercut another farmer. Banks that are allowed to continue to exist, although they have neither the means nor the knowledge to stay competitive on their own. Fighter planes being produced because members of congress have some of the manufacturing in their state, not because the plane is needed. I can go on, but I think you get my drift when it comes to corporate welfare.
We also have the support for the individual entrepreneur. Free health care and education to make sure that he or she can focus on doing what he or she is good at, without having to worry how to get enough money to buy health insurance for the family and save for college for their kids.
It supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end.
Most tyranny is based on keeping people suppressed and uneducated. Make sure that you help support education and transparency. Call out corrupt governments and fine the corporations that support them.
It informs conservatism’s firm defense of family, neighborhood, community, and faith.
Allow me to choose how I define my family, neighborhood and community, and allow me to have whatever faith I want. Or none at all if that is what I want.

As you can see there are more than one way to skin a cat, although my cat would disagree. She thinks there is no way to skin a cat. The two points I’m trying to make are, firstly, that if you are unspecific of what you mean it’s easy to read into it what you want, and, secondly, that if we could take off our red/blue polarizing glasses I believe that there are a lot of things we could do. Together. For a better and more vital United States of America. But it’s going to take a lot of listening and thinking.