THOSE WHO DENY FREEDOM TO OTHERS DESERVE IT NOT FOR THEMSELVES.

Despite all the attendees at Wednesday night's presidential^* address having received their Trump shots during the closing days of the Trump presidency, they were still wearing their Biden muzzles and sitting apart from their unclean colleagues.  And I'm not referring to the Republicans staying away from the Democrats by that.  Bizarre even by Twilight Zone standards, indeed.

Henry Payne used to be a libertarian-leaning cartoonist.  Of late his observations about Democrats have become blunter and more critical.

As for the speech itself, Power Line's Scott Johnson is on point, and I will elaborate.  "The speech should have worked its greatest effect on those who know nothing of LBJ and the Great Society, the Carter administration, and of American history generally."

Yes, I watched the whole thing, and my impression was that the Sixties called, and they want their bromides back.  Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball is of like mind.  "I thought it was a horrible speech — cliché-ridden, yes, but also deeply mendacious."

Throughout our history, if you think about it, public investment and infrastructure has literally transformed America — our attitudes, as well as our opportunities.

The transcontinental railroad, the interstate highways united two oceans and brought a totally new age of progress to the United States of America.

I suppose it's churlish to point out that rent seekers captured both projects, and that those interstate highways of the 1950s are either crumbling infrastructure or enabling environmental abuse today.  (It took a lot of Harriman money to uncrumble Union Pacific and Southern Pacific, back in the Cleveland administration, but that's too much history, isn't it?)

And all the investments in the American Jobs Plan will be guided by one principle: Buy American.

Biden mercantilism good, Trump mercantilism bad.

And we’re falling behind the competition with the rest of the world.

I gave away my copy of Paul Krugman's Pop Internationalism at retirement, but that comes pretty close to making a false comparison of a company, which engages in competition, with a country, that does not.  (It's called comparative advantage for a reason.)

China and other countries are closing in fast. We have to develop and dominate the products and technologies of the future: advanced batteries, biotechnology, computer chips, clean energy.

Are those future winners, or maturing technologies that others might have imitated?

Look, we can’t be so busy competing with one another that we forget the competition that we have with the rest of the world to win the 21st century.

Countries, to repeat, are not companies. Fortunately, he didn't say "win the future" there. WTF?

Twelve years [of education] is no longer enough today to compete with the rest of the world in the 21st Century.

That's stuff for several posts, right there! What happens if that very early childhood education gets youngsters competent enough to learn in high school what they should have learned in high school, so social promotion in the common schools, and remediation in college, become relics of barbarism?

And we’ll increase Pell Grants and invest in Historical Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges, Minority-Serving Institutions.  The reason is: They don’t have the endowments, but their students are just as capable of learning about cybersecurity, just as capable of learning about metallurgy — all the things that are going on that provide those jobs of the future.

He left out the law, and medicine, and bond trading. Poor kids don't get to compete with white kids?

In fact, we pay the highest prescription drug prices of anywhere in the world right here in America — nearly three times — for the same drug, nearly three times what other countries pay. We have to change that, and we can.

Let’s do what we’ve always talked about for all the years I was down here in this — in this body — in Congress. Let’s give Medicare the power to save hundreds of billions of dollars by negotiating lower drug prescription prices.

Can you say monopsony?

In the manner of politicians for time immemorial, it's always pie in the sky with somebody else's dough.

Sometimes I have arguments with my friends in the Democratic Party.  I think you should be able to become a billionaire and a millionaire, but pay your fair share.

A recent study shows that 55 of the nation’s biggest corporations paid zero federal tax last year.  Those 55 corporations made in excess of $40 billion in profit.  A lot of companies also evade taxes through tax havens in Switzerland and Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.  And they benefit from tax loopholes and deductions for offshoring jobs and shifting profits overseas.  It’s not right.

We’re going to reform corporate taxes so they pay their fair share and help pay for the public investments their businesses will benefit from as well.

First, will somebody, anybody, spell out what the tax incidence calculations are, and on that basis, what is that fair share of taxes that the high income earners aren't currently paying?

Second, are we really back in the late 1960s, where Sophisticated Opinion was getting all worked up about those millionaires who didn't pay any income taxes?  All we got for that was an alternative minimum tax that became a snare for normal people (Paul Krugman pointed that out) until Our Political Masters adjusted it for inflation.

Third, even if you take a fair share out of that $40 billion, that's a rounding error in the trillions of dollars that the Donks are throwing around.

I suppose we should give the coot credit for saying "public investments their businesses will benefit from" without the "you didn't build that."

The pandemic has only made things worse.  Twenty million Americans lost their job in the pandemic — working- and middle-class Americans.  At the same time, roughly 650 billionaires in America saw their net worth increase by more than $1 trillion — in the same exact period.  Let me say it again: 650 people increased their wealth by more than $1 trillion during this pandemic.  And they’re now worth more than $4 trillion. 

My fellow Americans, trickle-down — trickle-down economics has never worked and it’s time to grow the economy from the bottom and the middle out.

That accumulation of wealth (it's probably owners' equity) during the lockdowns has been a pet socialist hobbyhorse for some time.  That the money was flowing in because the smaller competitors were closed, as a matter of quote public health unquote, has not.  The quickest way to restore that entrepreneurship and employment among the middle- and low- income people is to lift the lockdowns.  That, though, would run counter to the theater of all those masked gerontocrats keeping their distance from each others' cooties, or is it body odor?

If we act to save the planet, we can create millions of jobs and economic growth and opportunity to raise the standard of living to almost everyone around the world.

Maybe, although the way our ancestors lived, without those annoying trains or airplanes, was sustainable.  We are all underemployed relative to them.

Talk to most responsible gun owners and hunters. They’ll tell you there’s no possible justification for having 100 rounds in a weapon.  What do you think — deer are wearing Kevlar vests?  (Laughter.)  They’ll tell you that there are too many people today who are able to buy a gun but shouldn’t be able to buy a gun.

It is not the place of a president, real or placeholding, to tell me what we are justified in buying.  In addition, responsible gun owners would probably tell you there are no hundred round magazines.  Maybe for a Russian Banjo, but you'd have to scratchbuild that.

We have to prove democracy still works — that our government still works and we can deliver for our people.

That's where the fun is going to begin.

Our Constitution opens with the words — as trite as it sounds — “We the People”.  Well, it’s time to remember that “We the People” are the government — you and I.  Not some force in a distant capital.  Not some powerful force that we have no control over.  It’s us.  It’s “We the People.”

In another era when our democracy was tested, Franklin Roosevelt reminded us, “In America, we do our part.”  We all do our part.  That’s all I’m asking: that we do our part, all of us.

That's an interesting allusion to Ronald Reagan's famous "small remote capital" at the end of a string of proposals to increase the power of a national government on the strength of the slimmest of majorities.

And the fun begins.  The Associated Press engages in its fact-checking ritual.  "Biden also made his spending plans sound more broadly supported in Washington than they are."

He's taking stick from his left, apparently for not throwing enough money and rhetoric at the perceived problems.  "[Self-styled] progressives are unlikely to be satisfied with Biden's agenda no matter how aggressively profligate it gets. That's in their nature. What's more worrying is how far they've already managed to push Biden—with the notable exception of criminal justice reform—and how much more they intend to squeeze out of him."

He's getting hammered from his right, with mockery. "It’s not easy to put people to sleep while at the same time promising to destroy the country, but Biden managed it."

If we take that longer view I opened the post with, bear in mind what Rich Lowry wrote, in advance of the speech.

No one listening to that or a thousand other things Biden said during the campaign would have had him pegged as the guy who would immediately set about making wrenching changes in the American way of life.

For a would-be FDR, Biden doesn't seem to understand that a fundamental source of the New Dealer's power was enormous congressional majorities. FDR came into office in 1933 with almost a 200-seat majority in the House, 313-117, after Republicans lost more than 100 seats.

Biden came into office in 2021 with a bare nine-seat majority in the House after Democrats surprisingly lost ground all over the country. It's the narrowest Democratic House majority since the last two years of the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes.

In the Senate, FDR had 58 Senate Democrats, as Republicans lost 12 seats in 1932 in one of the worst senatorial drubbings in history.

Biden has a 50-50 tie after Democrats eked out two special-election victories in Georgia this year, with Vice President Kamala Harris on standby to break ties.

Mr Roosevelt signed more executive orders and more legislation than Mr Biden has.

More recently, we could consider the Congress that took office in 1965, with perhaps the best Senatorial arm-twister ever sitting in the White House.  Those seemed like heady times for the same sort of expansion of government that Mr Biden seems to be pushing for, and yet, that came undone.

Perhaps the more relevant example might be the Carter presidency, which was likely the last gasp of got-a-problem-pass-a-program thinking, at least among voters.  I'm still not sure whether it's Senate manipulator or somebody's puppet sitting behind that desk signing orders and legislation.

It's just business as usual for tax and tax, spend and spend, big government Democrats, notes Reason's Peter Suderman.

Biden's presidency is barely three months old, but it's already fallen into a predictable pattern: Point to the pandemic. Declare that it's an emergency, and that something must be done. Then insist on an expensive, expansive policy overhaul that Democrats have pushed for years—first, in some cases, as a temporary measure, and then, inevitably, for much longer. It's deceptive and dangerous. And if he keeps this up, he may leave a new crisis in his wake.

Of course he will. But will there be a coherent opposition, with a way forward that involves rolling back the administrative state, and favoring more modest federal actions in future?  The editors of National Review hope so.  "Biden is providing Republicans plenty of material to work with, and nothing to intimidate them."