Guns make my family safer

Frum: “Do guns make us safer?”

Well, they make me safer. And my family safer. And that’s all that matters. To me.

Beyond that, there’s not much need to delve into Frum’s tiresome argument, not least because most of the deterrent work of owning a gun doesn’t show up in statistics, largely because they prevent being targeted by criminals in the first place. And in truth, there are very few people who, at that moment just before a violent criminal is set to harm them or kill them — and they realize this — wouldn’t wish they had a gun to defend themselves or their family.

The rest is just playing the odds and pretending you’re “against violence” — as if those who own guns are in favor of violence that is not justified.

Look, if David Frum feels safer not owning a gun, he doesn’t have to own a gun. But he also has no right to decide which of my rights he’d like to see weakened by the kind of “common sense” reforms he favors. Because his common sense is not mine, and what I determine I want or need, so long as I am lawful in its use and keep, is really none of David Frum’s fucking business.

In the end, an armed populace is a threat to a tyrannical government — and it’s no accident that gun control has proceeded so many historical atrocities committed by a State on its citizens.

As Jefferson noted, “Those who hammer their guns into plowshares will plow for those who do not.”

And I ain’t nobody’s unpaid day laborer.

Unemployment

You'd think that $1 trillion in spending stimulus and $2.5 trillion of Fed pump-priming would produce an economy a whole lot stronger than 1.9 percent gross domestic product, which was the revised first-quarter number. 


And you'd think all that government spending would deliver a whole lot more jobs than 69,000 in May. But it hasn't happened. The Keynesian government-spending model has proven a complete failure. It's the Obama model. And it has produced such an anemic recovery that, frankly, at 2 percent growth, we're back on the front end of a potential recession. 


The unemployment rate rose slightly from 8.1 to 8.2 percent [in May]. The so called U6 unemployment rate, tracking the marginally employed or completely discouraged, increased to 14.8 percent from 14.5 percent. And labor earnings are barely rising at 1.7 percent over the past year, almost in line with the inflation rate. 


Barack Obama doesn't get this, but businesses create jobs. And firms have to be profitable in order to hire. Yet the President is on the campaign trail criticizing Mitt Romney by degrading the importance of profits. The Fed may yet launch a new quantitative easing to stop commodity deflation and accommodate the gigantic worldwide dollar demand, but the merits of this move are dubious. On the other hand, an extension of the Bush tax cuts right now would stop the economic and job slide and re-establish certainty. In fact, all the countries around the world should move to the supply side with lower tax rates to spur economic-growth incentives. 

Obama's Lies on the Buffet Rule

Let's do the math. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the so-called Buffett Rule-tax would yield between $4 billion and $5 billion a year.  Hmmm.....if we collect the Buffett tax for the next 250 years -- a span longer than the life of this republic -- it would not cover the Obama deficit for 2011 alone. 


As an approach to our mountain of debt, the Buffett Rule is a farce, and yet Obama repeated the ridiculous claim again last month, "It will help us close our deficit."


Does he really think we're that stupid? Hence the fallback: The Buffett Rule is a first step in tax reform. On the contrary. It's a substitute for tax reform, an evasion of tax reform. In three years, Obama hasn't touched tax (or, for that matter, entitlement) reform, and clearly has no intention to.  [Notwithstanding the ObamaCareTax of $1.7 trillion, the largest tax increase in U.S. History - thank you SCOTUS].


The Buffett Rule is nothing but a form of redistributionism that has vanishingly little to do with debt reduction and everything to do with re-election.  For Obama, fairness is the supreme social value. And fairness is what he is running on -- although he is not prepared to come clean on its price, or even acknowledge that there is a price. Instead, Obama throws in a free economic lunch for all. 


As El Presidente said, "This is not just about fairness. " "This is also about growth." Three years ago, Obama promised universal health care tax that saves money.  Today, he offers a capital gains tax hike that spurs economic growth. This is free-lunch egalitarianism.