Whittaker Chambers (the writer who joined the American Communist Party in the 1930s and ultimately withdrew), in Witness (his autobiography), came right out and said it:  the fundamental point about communism (and he was referring to Russian communism, not necessarily to classical socialism or its watered-down, westernized version) is that its ends justify every imaginable or unimaginable means.  In communism, there is no such thing as good or evil, there is no religious or philosophical morality, there is no right or wrong, there is simply the rational ideal of socialism.  Whatever it takes to achieve that objective – up to and including the murder of opponents and dissidents in the Russian version – is not only justified, but required.

Centerpiece of the Chambers analysis:  Stalin was not, as generations of Soviet apologists would have it, an aberration, an undisciplined monster, a bad choice to lead the 20^th century communist movement, he was the perfect choice – the logical, necessary, inevitable prototype leader of the world’s first large-scale, ideologically-pure communist movement.  He was the ultimate expression of communism, the embodiment of it, the ultimate ends-justify-the-means kind of leader.  The Chambers book is the complete antidote to the whinings of Gorbachev (or of his leading academic acolytes, like Prof. Steve Cohen of Columbia), the suggestion that socialism (whether identified as socialism or communism) is the answer for Russia, if only it could avoid choosing corrupt, evil leaders.  **

This is by way of background and introduction to the astonishing publication of the Gruber/ObamaCare video yesterday, in which Prof. Jonathan Gruber of MIT, one of the principal architects of ObamaCare (possibly the main architect), acknowledges to an audience at a conference of economists and academics in 2013, that he and his party intentionally deceived the American public in order to achieve passage of the ObamaCare law.  For an American, the Gruber statements must be read to be believed:

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes  . . . .  If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. OK, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money — it would not have passed. . . .  Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass. … Look, I wish … we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.” 

The italics were added, for emphasis, but the words almost do not need italics.   Their essence is clear: If the Democrats had told the truth, the bill would not have passed.  So, the Democrats lied, and they figured they could get away with it because the American voter is stupid.  And that was OK, because lying and deception are justified whenever they are performed in support of policies and laws the Democrats consider to be “critical,” and ObamaCare was critical.

In the years to come, whenever someone is looking for a textbook example of the phrase, “the end justifies the means,” Professor Gruber’s amazing statement should be the first item to pop up on any search engine, perhaps even ahead of the thoughts of Machiavelli, Trotsky, and others on this topic.

**  Note to the purists:  This writer has no interest in adding to the literature on the differences between socialism and communism, nor in addressing the nuanced distinctions among the numerous sub-categories.  I observe that the full name of the Soviet Union was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the full name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and I leave to others the task of going off on their tangents of choice.

I offer reactions to a Wall Street Journal review of a new book, How To Speak Money, by one John Lanchester, who is tellingly identified as a British novelist.  Tellingly, because, as the reviewer makes clear, Mr. Lanchester is a novelist trying to explain economic theory, and the match-up is a mismatch.  The reviewer, Daniel Shuchman, characterizes Mr. Lanchester’s views on “quantitative easing” (QE) as profoundly misleading, and so they are.

Mr. Lanchester reportedly defines QE as the process of “the government . . .  buying back its own debt.”  Apparently he thinks the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Bank are just two different agencies of the same branch of the federal government, as “he analogizes QE to an individual who has the power magically to add money to her bank account and uses it to ‘pay off’ her debts” (to quote the reviewer).  As the reviewer indicates, Mr. Lanchester has made the twin mistakes of conflating Treasury and the Fed and believing that when the Fed engages in QE – when it buys government debt obligations (treasuries) – it is paying off that debt, causing that debt to cease to exist.

Mr. Lanchester is half-right:  as he implies, the Fed is in fact creating new money (adding “money to her bank”) in the form of credits given to the reserve accounts of U.S. banks as payment for the Treasuries the Fed buys.  But he is wrong on the more-important half:  the debt represented by those Treasuries does not go away, it remains extant, interest obligations and all.  The Fed, though creating money, is not paying off Federal debt.  The Federal debt continues, undiminished; the Fed has created new money in order to make a particular kind of investment, but not to pay off government debt.  Indeed, it has merely swapped one form of government debt  (money) for another form (Treasuries).

The purpose of that investment, the reason for  QE, is not to finance the federal government, it is to make it easier (in the Fed’s opinion) for the Fed to regulate economic growth by raising or lowering interest rates in the financial markets, while at the same time making the banks more stable and secure.  (QE increases the level of bank reserves at the Fed, and the Fed thinks it can control market interest rates more easily by simply modifying the interest rate that it pays on those reserves, rather than by utilizing the traditional technique of engaging in open market operations.)  Whether fiddling with interest rates at all, either through QE or through open market operations, actually affects economic growth (the avowed purpose of either technique), is another hot topic, but likewise a separate one.  (If you are interested in that topic, watch what happens in Japan, now that their central bank has announced a major interest-rate cut.)

Mr. Lanchester’s mistake is a common one.  Many people, including some conservatives, think that QE is a program through which the Fed accommodates the enormous federal deficits caused by the riotous spending of the Obama Administration.  In other words, the Fed is seen as an enabler of the fiscal recklessness of this White House.  But that is not what happens.  When the federal government runs an annual deficit (when its expenditures exceed its revenues), it covers the shortfall by offering government debt-obligations (“Treasuries”) to the markets – to domestic and foreign financial institutions, individuals, and governments.  So long as there are enough buyers, at high enough prices (that is, reflecting low-enough yields), the U.S. can keep chugging along, running up bigger and bigger annual deficits and a bigger and bigger cumulative national-debt.  In Leftyworld, this scheme (sometimes blamed on Keynes) can be continued indefinitely, the total debt can leap toward infinity, with little real risk to the country, though that premise becomes shakier with each new deficit or other action that accelerates the decline of our international standing (including our creditworthiness).

But remember, it is not the Fed that is buying these Treasuries from the Treasury Department, it is the investing public.  The Fed only comes in after the fact, after the Treasuries have already been floated.  Under QE, when the Fed buys a Treasury, it is buying a debt obligation that is already out there in existence, in the market.  The deficit the Treasury offering was designed to finance, has already been financed; the Fed is not creating money and delivering it to the Treasury Department to cover a deficit, as the bond market has already covered the deficit by buying the initial offering of the Treasury.

Yes, it is true that the Fed, in paying for the Treasuries it buys, is creating new money, and each such addition to the overall money supply does carry significant longer-term implications – e.g., if/when the U.S. finally starts to experience a real recovery from the ’08 recession, this overhang of idle money will complicate things; we might face a problem comparable to the one that President Reagan and Fed Chairman Volcker faced in the early 1980s.  Would that we might have a Reagan and a Volcker to deal with it when that problem again arises.

Anyone who still thinks “net neutrality” has anything to do with neutrality – or is in any way going to be good for the Internet, for America, or for the world economy – should check out the piece by L. Gordon Crovitz in Monday’s (9/14/14) Wall Street Journal, entitled “John Oliver Makes People Dumb:”

http://online.wsj.com/articles/l-gordon-crovitz-john-oliver-makes-people-dumb-1410728274

Crovitz, who took over the reins on IT matters  for the Journal after the Murdoch takeover, is one of the few business writers for major business publications who have been willing to dig into the net-neut movement and to point out that the whole thing is a scam that has been promoted and advanced through a textbook  deployment of Orwellian Newspeak –  “speech or writing that uses words in a way that changes their meaning especially to persuade people to think a certain way . . .  propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings . . . ”  (Merriam Webster online dictionary).

Net-neut is nothing but a blueprint for the imposition of central-planning – i.e., the leftist ideal of governmental micromanagement of the economy  –  upon the Internet in America.  It goes hand-in-hand with its evil sibling, the impending relinquishment of  American control over ICANN (the non-profit organization that controls and maintains Internet-address registrations) to international interests, under the Obama White House’s master plan for the future of information-technology.  Stripped of the do-gooder hype, the whole point of Net-neut is to impose price controls over every aspect of the pricing of usage of the Internet – with the nominal objective of preventing “price gouging” by providers who might have had the temerity to upset the balance of crony capitalism in the IT/telecom world by charging more to customers who make greater usage of the Internet.  The net-neut folks are re-distributionists who simply do not buy the notion of pricing based upon the old-fashioned concepts of supply and demand.  (Supposedly the ‘net’ is kept ‘neutral’ when it locks in the present situation in which certain customers get a bargain by paying no more for high volumes of usage than other customers pay for low volumes.)   When challenged on this argument, the lefties predictably respond by refusing to get out of the way and let the market do its job via efficient pricing of the different levels of service, and by instead proposing still more regulation and picking of winners (and losers)  – e.g., by mandating certain levels of price discrimination while banning other levels, regardless of the extent to which this would eventually have the effect of raising the cost of all things in the IT/telecom world and of retarding the growth and development of the Internet – and of the U.S. economy in general.

If you want a great example of how the left has attempted to obscure the issue by the propagandist “inversion of customary meanings,”  just check out the ever-reliable Wikopedia, which defines net neutrality in ways that effectively ignore the free-market objections to the left’s net-neut agenda while pretending to summarize them.  These guys never learn, and they never give up.  They are like badgers.

Reading the reports on how Sandra Fluke, the notorious spokesperson for the Free-Birth-Control-For- Everyone movement, has found the means not only to pay for her own birth control but also to pay for an extravagantly expensive political campaign for herself.  So, I guess the Fluke episode was a matter of principle, not financial need.  Got it.   Got me to thinking about Ms. Fluke’s fellow FBCFE member, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is apparently still getting even for a sexist snub 54 years ago and is using her bully pulpit as one of the Supremes to continue making her point.  As Justice Ginsburg recently advised Katie Couric on TV, we stupid men are prevented by genetics from grasping the principle that women do not really have control over their bodies until that control is paid for by someone else.  Got it.

From the perspective of the leftist branch of the feminist movement (I nod to the preposterous possibility that there is another branch), apparently a legal right is not really a full-fledged legal right until it is not only conferred but subsidized, regardless of the recipient’s financial means.  You don’t really have it unless you get reimbursed for exercising it. Birth control – whether it prevents conception or terminates whatever it is that the unborn fetus experiences other than life – is not really made into a full, romping/stomping “right” until it is not just made legal and available everywhere, to every woman, but fully paid for either by the government or by a private employer coerced by the government into providing or paying for it.   And of course the mere act of expressing puzzlement (not to mention bemusement) over that clarification is the practical equivalent of changing your online nickname to “sexist misogynist pig.”  Got it.  I think.

The first dividend of the Roberts ObamaCare opinion has now been paid:  yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, by a 6/2 margin (including BREYER in the 6), that the Supremes must defer to the states when states adopt laws that ban or limit Affirmative Action plans or programs.  Yes, the Supremes did not go all the way and rule that AA plans are unconstitutional, it only ruled that anti-AA plans are not unconstitutional.  For example, Texas’s de facto AA plan remains legal (for now) –  you know, the one that the left adores, because it allows the state university to continue to discriminate against non-minority applicants by admitting minority students who graduate in the top 10% of a high school whose top 10% does not have very high test scores, while it rejects non-minority students with much higher test scores because they fell outside the top 10% of a high school whose top 10% has extraordinarily high test scores.  What the current case implies is that it would be perfectly OK, constitutionally speaking, if the Texas legislature were to reverse  itself and eliminate the 10% rule.

As this site has often opined, our Chief Justice plays the long game.  By resisting the temptation to rule ObamaCare unconstitutional, and by finding a somewhat tortured excuse to defer to the will of Congress, Chief Justice Roberts gambled that the country would survive the incompetence, weakness, and far-left partisanship of the Obama regime and, having survived them, would be the better and stronger for having a Supreme Court that had demonstrated both an iron will in resisting political temptation and a solid new precedent for the constitutional, legal, and political primacy of legislative acts – be they the acts of our national Congress or (as in yesterday’s ruling) those of a state.  For that matter, the ObamaCare ruling could conceivably be a part of both the legal and the  political-and-moral support for an eventual challenge to President Obama’s wanton disregard for the will of Congress when he issues Executive Orders and federal regulations that go far beyond – or directly contradict – the plain terms of federal laws adopted by Congress.

I am not at all certain that we will survive the Obama years as anything but a pathetic remnant of the great country we once were, but we now have only 2 ½ years to go.  Meanwhile, I have my doubts as to whether Roberts could have mustered the support of both Justice Kennedy and Justice Breyer in yesterday’s ruling had Roberts not led the Court to the decision it reached in the ObamaCare case.   I am not yet ready to declare myself a Roberts fan, but I am getting there.