Imagine you are an unborn spirit whom God has
condemned to a life of poverty but has permitted to choose the nation in
which to live. I'm betting that most any such condemned unborn spirit would
choose the United States. Why? What has historically been defined as poverty,
nationally or internationally, no longer exists in the U.S. Let's look at it.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, the 2009 poverty guideline was $22,000 for an urban four-person
family. In 2009, having income less than that, 15 percent or 40 million
Americans were classified as poor, but there's something unique about those
"poor" people not seen anywhere else in the world. Robert Rector,
researcher at the Heritage Foundation, presents data collected from several
government sources in a report titled "How Poor Are America's Poor?
Examining the 'Plague' of Poverty in America" (8/27/2007):
-- Forty-three percent of all poor households
actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as
poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths,
a garage and a porch or patio.
-- Eighty percent of poor households have air
conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S.
population enjoyed air conditioning.
-- Only 6 percent of poor households are
overcrowded; two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.
-- The typical poor American has more living space
than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other
cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in
foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
-- Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a
car; 31 percent own two or more cars.
-- Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a
color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
-- Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player;
62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
-- Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more
than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic
dishwasher.
What's defined as poverty is misleading in another
way. Official poverty measures count just family's cash income. It ignores
additional sources of support such as the earned-income tax credit, which is
a cash rebate to low-income workers; it ignores Medicaid, housing allowances,
food stamps and other federal and local government subsidies to the poor.
According to a report by American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas
Eberstadt, titled "Poor Statistics," "In 2006, according to
the annual Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, reported
purchases by the poorest fifth of American households were more than twice as
high as reported incomes." That additional money might represent
earnings from unreported employment, illegal activities and unreported
financial assistance. A proper measure of well-being is what a person
consumes rather than his income. A huge gap has emerged between income and
consumption at lower income levels.
Material poverty can be measured relatively or
absolutely. An absolute measure would consist of some minimum quantity of
goods and services deemed adequate for a baseline level of survival.
Achieving that level means that poverty has been eliminated. However, if
poverty is defined as, say, the lowest one-fifth of the income distribution,
it is impossible to eliminate poverty. Everyone's income could double, triple
and quadruple, but there will always be the lowest one-fifth.
Yesterday's material poverty is all but gone. In
all too many cases, it has been replaced by a more debilitating kind of
poverty -- behavioral poverty or poverty of the spirit. This kind of poverty
refers to conduct and values that prevent the development of healthy
families, work ethic and self-sufficiency. The absence of these values
virtually guarantees pathological lifestyles that include: drug and alcohol
addiction, crime, violence, incarceration, illegitimacy, single-parent
households, dependency and erosion of work ethic. Poverty of the spirit is a
direct result of the perverse incentives created by some of our efforts to
address material poverty.
Economic Policy: Nobel Prize-winning economist
Paul Krugman says the U.S. is in the "early stages of a third Great
Depression." If he's right, it's only because American policymakers have
been following his advice.
Hell knows no wrath like that of an economist
scorned - especially one on the left of the political spectrum. Case in
point: New York Times columnist and sometime economist Paul Krugman. The
world is going to hell in a handbasket, Krugman suggested this week, thanks
in large part to its refusal to follow his advice to the letter.
Actually, he has it exactly backward. Krugman was
among those who encouraged the new Obama administration and the Democratic
Congress to spend massive amounts of money early on in a kind of Keynesian
frenzy to shock the moribund economy back to life.
It didn't work. With a stimulus - a deficit, that
is - of nearly 11% of GDP, our economy is barely growing, while unemployment
remains shockingly close to 10% of the adult working population.
This even prompted our nation's vice president,
Joe Biden, to admit last weekend: "There's no possibility to restore 8
million jobs lost in the Great Recession."
And he's right - at least with current policy,
which is based on massive spending, new tax hikes, trillion-dollar deficits
for decades to come and tight government control of vast swaths of our
nation's economy, from banking to autos to energy.
Krugman recognizes, too, that it's a "failure
of policy."
Only problem is, he completely misdiagnoses the
problem: "Around the world - most recently at last weekend's deeply
discouraging G-20 meeting - governments are obsessing about inflation when
the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the
real problem is inadequate spending."
Inadequate spending? That's laughable. The reason
our economy hasn't improved is because our government has spent too much,
siphoning badly needed investments and savings from the highly productive
private sector to feed the nonproductive, inefficient, heavily unionized
government sector. It's a recipe for stagnation.
This has happened the world over. To their credit,
even the socialist nations of Europe now recognize this. They were behind the
move at the G-20 to reduce government budgets. Only the neo-socialist Obama
administration and its pals in Congress don't get it.
Krugman faults policymakers for failing to learn
from history. Since he used the word "Depression," let's look at
the last one.
It's an enduring myth that the Great Depression was
caused by inadequate government "stimulus," of the sort Lord Keynes
and President Obama would have approved. In fact, as a study by economist
Randall Holcombe shows, under President Hoover, who served from 1929 to 1933
just as the Depression got under way, real per-capita spending surged 82%.
That was even greater than the 74% rise from 1933 to 1940 in FDR's time.
So why did that slump last so long? UCLA economist
Lee Ohanian studied that question. His conclusion: "The main culprit
appears to be government policies that restricted competition." Indeed,
stupid economic policies, including higher taxes, trade protectionism and the
government's foolish effort to prop up wages, added seven years to the
Depression. But for the government's tinkering, we would have exited that rut
in the early 1930s, says Ohanian.
Economists Charles Rowley of George Mason
University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute came to a similar
conclusion in their study of Keynesian policies during the 1930s:
"(FDR's) interventionist policies and
draconian tax increases delayed full economy recovery by several years by
exacerbating a climate of pessimistic expectations that drove down private
capital formation and household consumption to unprecedented lows."
Sound familiar? It should. Others, ranging from
economic historian Amity Shlaes to economist Robert Higgs, tell the same
story.
Today, Obama is following a script eerily similar
to the one followed by Hoover and FDR: He wants to spend wildly, raise taxes
on all Americans, erect trade barriers and protect unions, his biggest
supporters, to boost their wages at others' expense.
The only difference this time is the Fed has
refused to let the money supply contract by a third, as it did during the
Depression, deepening the economy's collapse.
The hole in which we find ourselves is the result
of bad policy responses to a short-term financial crisis. We'll pay for it
with an enfeebled economy for years to come.
And if, as Krugman believes, we are about to enter
a global depression, it's only because our policymakers were foolish enough
to take his advice.
Now that the Supreme Court of the United States
has decided that the Second Amendment to the Constitution means that
individual Americans have a right to bear arms, what can we expect?
Those who have no confidence in ordinary Americans
may expect a bloodbath, as the benighted masses start shooting each other,
now that they can no longer be denied guns by their betters. People who think
we shouldn't be allowed to make our own medical decisions, or decisions about
which schools our children attend, certainly are not likely to be happy with
the idea that we can make our own decisions about how to defend ourselves.
When you stop and think about it, there is no
obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in
the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing
ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of
violence.
Many people who are opposed to gun laws which
place severe restrictions on ordinary citizens owning firearms have based
themselves on the Second Amendment to the Constitution. But, while the
Supreme Court must make the Second Amendment the basis of its rulings on gun
control laws, there is no reason why the Second Amendment should be the last
word for the voting public.
If the end of gun control leads to a bloodbath of
runaway shootings, then the Second Amendment can be repealed, just as other
Constitutional Amendments have been repealed. Laws exist for people, not
people for laws.
There is no point arguing, as many people do, that
it is difficult to amend the Constitution. The fact that it doesn't happen
very often doesn't mean that it is difficult. The people may not want it to
happen, even if the intelligentsia are itching to change it.
When the people wanted it to happen, the Constitution
was amended 4 times in 8 years, from 1913 through 1920.
What all this means is that judges and the voting
public have different roles. There is no reason why judges should
"consider the basic values that underlie a constitutional provision and
their contemporary significance," as Justice Stephen Breyer said in his
dissent against the Supreme Court's gun control decision.
But, as the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes said, his job was "to see that the game is played
according to the rules whether I like them or not."
If the public doesn't like the rules, or the
consequences to which the rules lead, then the public can change the rules
via the ballot box. But that is very different from judges changing the rules
by verbal sleight of hand, or by talking about "weighing of the
constitutional right to bear arms" against other considerations, as
Justice Breyer puts it. That's not his job. Not if "we the people"
are to govern ourselves, as the Constitution says.
As for the merits or demerits of gun control laws
themselves, a vast amount of evidence, both from the United States and from
other countries, shows that keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding
citizens does not keep guns out of the hands of criminals. It is not uncommon
for a tightening of gun control laws to be followed by an increase-- not a
decrease-- in gun crimes, including murder.
Conversely, there have been places and times where
an increase in gun ownership has been followed by a reduction in crimes in
general and murder in particular.
Unfortunately, the media intelligentsia tend to
favor gun control laws, so a lot of hard facts about the futility, or the
counterproductive consequences of such laws, never reach the public through
the media.
We hear a lot about countries with stronger gun
control laws than the United States that have lower murder rates. But we very
seldom hear about countries with stronger gun control laws than the United
States that have higher murder rates, such as Russia and Brazil.
The media, like Justice Breyer, might do well to
reflect on what is their job and what is the voting public's job. The media's
job should be to give us the information to make up our own minds, not slant
and filter the news to fit the media's vision.
He was born in the 19th century, wrote his most
influential book more than 65 years ago, and he's not quite as well known or
beloved as the sexy Mexican actress who shares his last name. Yet somehow,
Friedrich Hayek is on the rise.
When Glenn Beck recently explored Hayek's classic,
"The Road to Serfdom," on his TV show, the book went to No. 1 on
Amazon and remains in the top 10. Hayek's persona co-starred with his old
sparring partner John Maynard Keynes in a rap video "Fear the Boom and
Bust" that has been viewed over 1.4 million times on YouTube and
subtitled in 10 languages.
Why the sudden interest in the ideas of a
Vienna-born, Nobel Prize-winning economist largely forgotten by mainstream
economists?
Hayek is not the only dead economist to have
garnered new attention. Most of the living ones lost credibility when the
Great Recession ended the much-hyped Great Moderation. And fears of another
Great Depression caused a natural look to the past. When Federal Reserve
Chairman Ben Bernanke zealously expanded the Fed's balance sheet, he was
surely remembering Milton Friedman's indictment of the Fed's inaction in the
1930s. On the fiscal side, Keynes was also suddenly in vogue again. The
stimulus package was passed with much talk of Keynesian multipliers and
boosting aggregate demand.
But now that the stimulus has barely dented the
unemployment rate, and with government spending and deficits soaring, it's
natural to turn to Hayek. He championed four important ideas worth thinking
about in these troubled times.
First, he and fellow Austrian School economists
such as Ludwig Von Mises argued that the economy is more complicated than the
simple Keynesian story. Boosting aggregate demand by keeping school teachers
employed will do little to help the construction workers and manufacturing
workers who have born the brunt of the current downturn. If those school teachers
aren't buying more houses, construction workers are still going to take a
while to find work. Keynesians like to claim that even digging holes and
filling them is better than doing nothing because it gets money into the
economy. But the main effect can be to raise the wages of ditch-diggers with
limited effects outside that sector.
Second, Hayek highlighted the Fed's role in the
business cycle. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's artificially low rates
of 2002-2004 played a crucial role in inflating the housing bubble and
distorting other investment decisions. Current monetary policy postpones the
adjustments needed to heal the housing market.
Third, as Hayek contended in "The Road to
Serfdom," political freedom and economic freedom are inextricably intertwined.
In a centrally planned economy, the state inevitably infringes on what we do,
what we enjoy, and where we live. When the state has the final say on the
economy, the political opposition needs the permission of the state to act,
speak and write. Economic control becomes political control.
Even when the state tries to steer only part of
the economy in the name of the "public good," the power of the
state corrupts those who wield that power. Hayek pointed out that powerful
bureaucracies don't attract angels—they attract people who enjoy
running the lives of others. They tend to take care of their friends before
taking care of others. And they find increasing that power attractive. Crony
capitalism shouldn't be confused with the real thing.
The fourth timely idea of Hayek's is that order
can emerge not just from the top down but from the bottom up. The American
people are suffering from top-down fatigue. President Obama has expanded
federal control of health care. He'd like to do the same with the energy
market. Through Fannie and Freddie, the government is running the mortgage
market. It now also owns shares in flagship American companies. The president
flaunts the rule of law by extracting promises from BP rather than letting
the courts do their job. By increasing the size of government, he has left
fewer resources for the rest of us to direct through our own decisions.
Hayek understood that the opposite of top-down
collectivism was not selfishness and egotism. A free modern society is all
about cooperation. We join with others to produce the goods and services we
enjoy, all without top-down direction. The same is true in every sphere of
activity that makes life meaningful—when we sing and when we dance,
when we play and when we pray. Leaving us free to join with others as we see
fit—in our work and in our play—is the road to true and lasting
prosperity. Hayek gave us that map.
Despite the caricatures of his critics, Hayek
never said that totalitarianism was the inevitable result of expanding
government's role in the economy. He simply warned us of the possibility and
the costs of heading in that direction. We should heed his warning. I don't
know if we're on the road to serfdom, but wherever we're headed, Hayek would
certainly counsel us to turn around.
Mr. Roberts teaches economics at George Mason
University and co-created the "Fear the Boom and Bust" rap video
with filmmaker John Papola. His latest book is "The Price of
Everything" (Princeton, 2009).
6/28/2010: Triumph
of the Regulators
The
Dodd-Frank financial reform bill doubles down on the same system that failed.
President Obama hailed the financial bill that House-Senate
negotiators finally vouchsafed at 5:40 a.m. Friday, and no wonder. The bill
represents the triumph of the very regulators and Congressmen who did so much
to foment the financial panic, giving them vast new discretion over every
corner of American financial markets.
Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, those Fannie Mae
cheerleaders, played the largest role in writing the bill. Congressman Paul
Kanjorski even offered a motion to memorialize it as the Dodd-Frank Act. It's
as if Tony Hayward of BP were allowed to write new rules on deep water
drilling.
The Federal Reserve, which promoted the housing
mania and failed utterly in its core mission of monitoring Citigroup, will
now have more power to regulate more financial institutions and more ability
to dictate the allocation of credit.
The Treasury, which bailed out institutions
willy-nilly without consistent rules, will now lead the Financial Stability
Oversight Council that will have the arbitrary power to define which financial
companies pose a "systemic risk" and which can be shut down without
recourse to bankruptcy. Willy-nilly will now be the law.
And the SEC, which created the credit-ratings
oligopoly and missed Bernie Madoff, will get new powers to decide how easy it
should be for union pension funds to get their candidates on corporate proxy
ballots.
Oh, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? They aren't
touched at all, even as they continue to lose billions of taxpayer dollars
each quarter.
In other words, our Washington rulers have taken
2,000 or so pages to double and triple down on the old system that failed.
Perhaps the most striking irony is that even in
2,000 pages Congress isn't precisely defining new bank powers. That task will
be left to the regulators in the coming weeks and months, a reality that some
in the media are finally figuring out. They are now reporting, with notable
alarm, that this means bank lobbyists will be able to influence those rules
behind the scenes. What did reporters think would happen in a system built
not around clear parameters of what institutions can and cannot do, but
instead entirely on regulator discretion?
Take the Volcker Rule, which proscribes banks that
accept insured deposits from engaging in the riskiest kinds of trading. This
makes sense in theory but the rule's execution will depend on how regulators
define and enforce it. It's hardly reassuring when the Davis Polk &
Wardwell law firm has to write a seven-page memo, as it did on Friday,
explaining how this rule-making will proceed. The Volcker Rule may work in
restraining excessive risk-taking. Or it may merely drive that risk-taking
into other institutions that will attract the best and brightest drawn to the
higher profits such trading can gain.
Consider as well the doctrine of "too big to
fail," which FDIC Chair Sheila Bair says this bill will end. It is true
that, thanks mainly to Ms. Bair and Alabama Republican Richard Shelby,
Dodd-Frank puts more constraints on bailouts than Treasury Secretary Tim
Geithner or Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke wanted.
But the Fed (with the consent of the Treasury
Secretary) can still use its emergency lending authority to rescue a firm as
long as it also provides loans to similar institutions at the same time. The
bill also gives access to the Fed discount window to the new clearinghouses
that are supposed to handle most derivatives trades. So the same exchanges
that are supposed to reduce the riskiness of derivatives trades will know the
feds will bail them out if they get into trouble.
Meanwhile, the FDIC Chairman will be free to
choose which creditors to rescue and which to punish when a company goes into
"resolution," even discriminating among creditors who bought the
same bond issue. Expect union pension funds to fare better than other creditors
when the feds roll up a bank in the future.
In the same way, Congress also added a
last-minute, dead-of-night $19 billion tax on some financial institutions to
pay for the implementation of these vast new regulatory powers. Who will pay
this tax? Whoever the council of regulators decides should pay. The tax can
hit any financial firm with more than $50 billion in assets (excluding banks
that have deposit insurance, and Fannie and Freddie or any
government-sponsored enterprise) and hedge funds that manage more than $10
billion.
This will take $19 billion out of financial firms
that supply capital to growing companies, and it will punish precisely the
firms that have attracted the most capital because of their
better-than-average performance. This is only one of many new ways that
Dodd-Frank will reduce the supply and raise the cost of credit across the
economy. Think of how last year's limits on credit card fees have already
reduced the supply of consumer credit and are leading to the end of free
checking for all but wealthy bank customers.
We could go on, but perhaps the best summary is to
hail Dodd-Frank as the crowning achievement of the Obama "reform"
method. In the name of responding to a crisis, the bill greatly increases the
power of politicians and regulators without addressing the real causes of
that crisis. It makes credit more expensive and punishes business without
reducing the chances of a future panic or bailouts.
The only certain result is that when the next
mania and panic arrive, and they will, Congress and the regulators will claim
they were all someone else's fault.
I have a former student who has found the perfect
job. She’s working with troubled youths in a faith-based program that
allows her to finally put her psychology degree to use – a full eight
years after she graduated from college. She likes the job, but she called my
office recently to vent about a boy who suffers from Oppositional Defiance
Disorder (ODD).
I have a B.A. and an M.S. in psychology. But I
must confess that I needed some explanation of ODD because it wasn’t
yet a disorder when I studied psychology back in the 1980s. So I asked my
former student simply to describe the behavior of the boy with ODD. The
conversation went something like this:
Erica (not real name): He is constantly pitching a
fit over nothing – or nearly nothing. He argues with everything I say
and there is no such thing as a rule he does not question.
Me: So, in other words, the boy is a jerk.
Erica: No, he has ODD. I mean, he actively defies
and refuses to comply with every request made by every adult. I mean that
literally. And he does it just to annoy us and to upset us. But he
won’t take responsibility for his behavior or his mistakes. It’s
never his fault.
Me: So, in other words, the boy is a jerk.
Erica: No, I said he has ODD. He’s also
easily annoyed by other people. And he’s full of resentment and anger.
Me: So, in other words, the boy is a jerk.
Erica: No, there’s more to it than that. I
know he has ODD because of the hateful words he uses when he’s upset.
He is just so spiteful and so bent on gaining revenge against anyone he
thinks has wronged him.
Me: So, in other words, the boy is a jerk.
Erica: I guess you’re right. He is a jerk.
The exchange with Erica was funny and we both
eventually laughed about the absurdity of the whole idea of ODD. But the current
trend towards viewing all undesirable behavior as symptomatic of a disorder
to be treated, as opposed to a wrong to be punished, is no laughing matter.
There are a number of problems associated with
redefining all undesirable forms of behavior as “disorders” to be
cured. Among them is the unanticipated consequence of depriving man of his
humanity. If a man is merely a victim of some disease then he cannot really
be considered evil. If he has no potential to be evil, he has no potential to
be good.
C.S. Lewis pointed out another unanticipated
consequence of our rush to treat, rather than punish, people who do evil
things. He noted that the same intellectuals who determine when an illness
has set in will also determine when that illness has dissipated. And they
have a powerful incentive to drag out the entire process. Who among us would
not rather take our punishment and be done with it – as opposed to
waiting in perpetuity for the official clearance of a doctor?
If you are not at all concerned with what I am
saying please consider the history of the 20th Century. Not long after
Nietzsche declared that “God is dead” we began to
“progress” beyond the concepts of good and evil. Nietzsche
predicted that we were moving into dangerous territory. He also predicted
that the 20th Century would be our bloodiest. Even a broken philosopher is
right twice a day.
During the 20th Century, Theodor Adorno initiated
a movement towards classifying conservatism as a psychiatric disorder. Long
before that, Sigmund Freud had been working hard at the task of classifying
religion as a psychiatric disorder.
Today, the effort seems to have spread into the
realm of nearly every conceivable form of behavior. It is worth noting that
the number of disorders legitimated within the medical profession is directly
correlated with the number of defenses legitimated by our legal system.
We must rethink our deference to intellectual
busybodies who are in a constant search for complex “problems” in
need of “solutions” which require their expertise. Put simply,
the principal “problem” with humanity is the human heart. It is
inclined towards evil, which must be punished if there is to be any hope for
humanity.
Returning to an emphasis on punishing evil, rather
than curing disorders, is an idea that has consequences. Among those
consequences would be a loss of livelihood for many psychiatrists who need to
earn a living. But to do otherwise would result in a loss of humanity for
many lost souls in need of redemption.
As is always the case, that which seems to be a
“problem” in need of a “solution” is nothing more
than a simple trade-off. And where trade-offs are involved, choices between
alternative visions of the world are inevitable.
6/25/2010: A
Sad Day by Thomas Sowell
The
flap about General Stanley McChrystal's "resignation" was nobody's
finest hour. But there are some painful lessons in all this that go beyond
any of the individuals involved-- the general, the president or any of the
officials at the Pentagon or the State Department.
What
is far more important than all these individuals put together are the lives
of the tens of thousands of Americans fighting in Afghanistan. What is even
more important is the national security of this country.
It
is certainly not politic for a general or his staff to express their contempt
for civilian authorities publicly. But what is far more important-- from the
standpoint of national security-- is whether what those authorities have done
deserves contempt.
My
hope is that General McChrystal will write a book about his experiences in
Afghanistan-- and in Washington. The public needs to know what is really
going on, and they are not likely to get that information from politicians.
This
is, after all, an administration that waited for months last year before
acting on General McChrystal's urgent request for 40,000 more troops, which
he warned would be necessary to prevent the failure of the mission in
Afghanistan. He got 30,000 eventually-- and a public statement by President
Obama about when he wants to start withdrawing American troops from that
country.
In
no previous period of history has an American president announced a timetable
for pulling out troops. They may have had a timetable in mind, but none of
these presidents was irresponsible enough to tell the world-- including our
enemies-- when our troops would be leaving.
Such
information encourages our enemies, who know that they need only wait us out
before they can take over, whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere. At the same
time, it undermines our allies, who know that relying on the United States is
dangerous in the long run, and that they had better make the best deal they
can get with our enemies.
But
the worst aspect of the national security policy of this administration is
its clear intention to do nothing that has any realistic chance of stopping
Iran from getting nuclear weapons. This may be the most grossly irresponsible
policy in all of history, because it can leave this generation-- and future
generations-- of Americans at the mercy of terrorists who have no mercy and
who cannot be deterred, as the Soviet Union was deterred.
All
the current political theater about "international sanctions" is
unlikely to make the slightest difference to Iran. Nor is the administration
itself likely to expect it to. What then is its purpose? To fool the American
people into thinking that they are doing something serious when all that they
are doing is putting on a charade by lining up countries to agree to actions
that they all know will not have any real effect.
There
is another aspect to General McChrystal's "resignation."
Everyone
seems to be agreed that Stanley McChrystal has been a soldier's soldier--
someone who knows what to do on a battlefield and is not afraid to put
himself in danger to do it.
Do
we need more generals like this or do we need political generals who know how
to cultivate Washington politicians, in order to advance their own careers?
Some
people see a parallel between McChrystal's "resignation" and
President Harry Truman's firing of General Douglas MacArthur. No two
situations are ever exactly the same, but some of the parallels are striking.
MacArthur
was proud not only of his military victories but also of the fact that he won
those victories with lower casualty rates among his troops than other
generals had. But General MacArthur too was not always discreet in what he
said, and also had reasons to have contempt for politicians, going all the
way back to FDR, who cut the army's budget in the 1930s, while Nazi Germany
and imperial Japan were building up huge military machines that would kill
many an American before it was all over.
If
we are creating an environment where only political generals can survive,
what will that mean for America's ability to win military victories without
massive casualty rates? Or to win military victories at all?
6/25/2010: Obama
zones out by Mark Steyn
Search for president's core uncovers - nothing
What do Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and BP have in
common? Aside from the fact that they're both Democratic Party supporters.
Or they were. Gen. McChrystal is a liberal who
voted for President Obama and banned Fox News from his headquarters TV. That
may at least partly explain how he became the first U.S. general to be lost
in combat while giving an interview to Rolling Stone. They'll be studying that
one in war colleges around the world for decades. The managers of BP were
unable to vote for Mr. Obama, being, as we now know, the most sinister,
duplicitous bunch of shifty Brits to pitch up offshore since the War of 1812.
But, in their "Beyond Petroleum" marketing and beyond, they signed
on to every modish nostrum of the eco-left. Their recently retired chairman,
Lord John Browne, was one of the most prominent promoters of
"cap-and-trade." BP was the Democrats' favorite oil company. It was
to Mr. Obama what TotalFinaElf was to Saddam Hussein.
But what do Gen. McChrystal's and BP's
defenestrations tell us about the president of the United States? Mr. Obama
is a thin-skinned man and, according to Britain's Daily Telegraph, White
House aides indicated that what angered the president most about the Rolling
Stone piece was "a McChrystal aide saying that McChrystal had thought
that Obama was not engaged when they first met last year." If finding
Mr. Obama "not engaged" is now a firing offense, who among us is
safe?
Only the other day, Sen. George LeMieux of Florida
attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America's overpaid, overmanned
and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something about the oil
debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States; weeks after the
spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly
nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers;
the Dutch volunteered their "superskimmers." Mr. Obama turned them
all down. Raising the problem, Mr. LeMieux found the president unengaged and
uninformed. "He doesn't seem to know the situation about foreign
skimmers and domestic skimmers," the senator reported.
He doesn't seem to know, and he doesn't seem to
care that he doesn't know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't care.
"It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama's foreign policy is no
heart at all," Richard Cohen wrote in The Washington Post last week.
"For instance, it's not clear that Obama is appalled by China's
appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued
repression in Russia. ... The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing
much.
"This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is
this guy? What are his core beliefs?"
Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask
those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.
And even today, Mr. Cohen is still giving
President Whoisthisguy a pass. After all, whatever he feels about
"China's appalling human rights record" or "continued
repression in Russia," Mr. Obama is not directly responsible for it.
Whereas U.S. and allied deaths in Afghanistan are happening on his watch -
and the border villagers killed by unmanned drones are being killed at his
behest. Mr. Cohen calls the president "above all, a pragmatist,"
but with the best will in the world, you can't stretch the definition of
"pragmatism" to mean "lack of interest."
"The ugly truth," wrote Thomas Friedman
in the New York Times, "is that no one in the Obama White House wanted
this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how
to get out of it."
Well, that's certainly ugly, but is it the truth?
Afghanistan, you'll recall, was supposed to be the Democrats' war, the one
they supposedly supported, the one from which the neocons' Iraq adventure was
an unnecessary distraction. Granted the Dems' usual shell game - to avoid
looking soft on national security, it helps to be in favor of some war other
than the one you're opposing - candidate Obama was an especially ripe
promoter. In one of the livelier moments of his campaign, he chugged down
half a bottle of Geopolitical Viagra and claimed he was hot for invading
Pakistan.
Then he found himself in the Oval Office, and the
dime-store opportunism was no longer helpful. But, as Mr. Friedman puts it,
"no one knew how to get out of it." The "pragmatist"
settled for "nuance." He announced a semisurge plus a date for
withdrawal of troops to begin. It's not "victory," it's not
"defeat," but rather a more sophisticated melange of these two
outmoded absolutes: If you need a word, "quagmire" would seem to
cover it.
Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, the Taliban
and the Pakistanis on the one hand and Britain and the other American allies
heading for the checkout on the other all seem to have grasped the essentials
of the message, even if Mr. Friedman and the other media Obammyboppers never
quite did. Mr. Karzai is now talking to Islamabad about an accommodation that
would see the most viscerally anti-American elements of the Taliban back in
Kabul as part of a power-sharing regime. At the height of the shrillest
shrieking about the Iraqi "quagmire," was there ever any talk of
hard-core Saddamite Baathists returning to government in Baghdad?
To return to Mr. Cohen's question: "Who is
this guy? What are his core beliefs?" Well, he's a guy who was wafted
ever upward from the Harvard Law Review to the state legislature to the U.S.
Senate without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. "Who
is this guy?" Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate
by his mid-40s with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he
evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else.
"What are his core beliefs?" It would seem likely that his core
belief is in himself. It's the "nothing else" that the likes of Mr.
Cohen are belatedly noticing.
Wasn't he kind of unengaged by the health care
debate? That's why, for all his speeches, he could never quite articulate a
rationale for it. In the end, he was happy to leave it to the Democratic
Congress and, when his powers of persuasion failed, let them ram it down the
throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.
Likewise, on Afghanistan, his attitude seems to be
"I don't want to hear about it." Unmanned drones take care of a lot
of that, for a while. So do his courtiers in the media. Did all those
hopey-changers realize that Mr. Obama's war would be run by George W. Bush's
defense secretary and general? Hey, never mind: Moveon.org has quietly
disappeared its celebrated "General Betray-us" ad from its website.
Cindy Sheehan, the supposed conscience of the nation when she was railing
against Mr. Bush from the front pages, is an irrelevant kook unworthy of
coverage when she protests Mr. Obama. Why, a cynic might almost think the
"antiwar" movement was really an anti-Bush movement and the
protesters really don't care about dead foreigners, after all. The more
things "change you can believe in," the more they stay the same.
Except in one respect. There is a big hole where
our strategy should be. It's hard to fight a war without war aims, and in the
end, they can only come from the top. It took the oil spill to alert
Americans to the unengaged president. From Moscow to Tehran to the caves of
Waziristan, our enemies got the message a lot earlier - and long ago figured
out the rules of unengagement.
Ponzi
schemes rely on people falling for promises that are literally too good to be
true – but the outcomes are never really in doubt for the perpetrators
of these scams, are they?
First
they are playing with money that does not belong to them – which means
they cannot lose. Also, when the scams finally unravel, the perpetrators have
invariably moved on to their next group of unsuspecting victims –where
the fleecing begins anew.
Sound
familiar? It should. This is the modus operandi of governments all over the
world in our current era of Keynesian excess – an era in which new
taxes, fees and fines must be continually created and levied in order to pay
for promises made in previous years. Of course these government promises are
never actually “paid for,” the IOUs just keep mounting as the
burden of repayment is extended further down the line to future generations
of taxpayers.
Crisis
compels the scammers to grow even bolder in their efforts to fleece the
taxpayers. In fact, these “too good to be true” scams have only
grown more expensive in response to the recent economic downturn.
Take
the ongoing financial crisis in Greece, which has prompted a $144 billion
bailout from the European Union and International Monetary Fund. This EU/IMF
bailout – part of a larger $1 trillion “rescue” plan for
the Euro – is nothing but a massive Ponzi scheme, as the leaders of
fiscally reckless nations are basically saddling their debt onto the
shoulders of their more responsible neighbors.
Not
surprisingly, the root cause of the crisis that is threatening to bring down
the global economy lies in the unsustainable expansion of the welfare state
– which should be a lesson for American politicians of both parties.
First,
let’s look at what’s happening in Greece.
“Greek
governments have spent years buying social peace and votes with public
spending, generous pensions, tax breaks, EU money and jobs for life, directed
to an array of rent-seeking interest groups,” The Economist noted last
month. “This sort of social contract, lubricated by endemic corruption
and lax law-enforcement, has evolved to suit a country emerging from a vile
civil war and years of dictatorship in which consensus was painfully absent.”
Also,
let’s not forget that Greece sought for years to hide its growing debt
problem from the rest of the world, paying hundreds of millions of Euros to
various financial institutions in an effort to conceal the extent of its
profligate borrowing.
Greece
is now implementing several so-called “austerity” measures as a
pre-condition of receiving the rest of Europe’s bailout benevolence.
But what sounds “austere” to the Greeks is still quite excessive
when compared to the government largesse being doled out elsewhere on the
continent. In fact, at its heart Greek “austerity” amounts to
little more than tinkering around the edges of the nation’s
overextended entitlement culture, and in typical Ponzi fashion this political
path of least resistance includes several new tax hikes that will only
exacerbate the fundamental problem.
Meanwhile,
even more frightening is the likelihood that the financial woes in Greece
presage a broader European solvency crisis – one that will spread to
other nations that are similarly drowning in the red ink of unsustainable
government welfare. Spain, for example, is on the verge of having to tap into
hundreds of billions of Euros tied to the EU/IMF bailout, and even that may
not be enough to stabilize its teetering economy.
Spain’s
welfare state includes a socialist labor system that makes it nearly
impossible to fire workers for any reason. And like Greece, its habit of
dispensing unsustainable taxpayer-funded largesse has been propped up for
years by government denials and deception. Most recently, Spanish Prime
Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero chose to deal with the
brewing fiscal crisis by ignoring it and delaying long-overdue reforms in an
effort to maintain his political positioning.
It’s
the Ponzi mentality all over again.
Eventually,
though, the scammers will run out of people to scam – and Spain could
very well represent the last great heist. Spain represents 10% of the euro
zone banking system and 16% of all net euro-zone loans, meaning that its
collapse could very well bring the entire global house of cards tumbling
down. Such an outcome would clearly have disastrous effects on the American
economy, which makes the aggressive expansion of the welfare state here in
the United States all the more unexplainable. Greece and Spain (as well as
Portugal and Ireland) are clearly cautionary tales – not examples for
America follow.
6/23/2010: They’ve Got Him Figured Out By Eddie Sessions
The Wall Street Journal
“I
have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he’s led a kind of
make-believe life in which money was provided and doors were opened because
at some point early on somebody or some group took a look at this tall, good
looking, half-white, half-black, young man with an exotic African/Muslim name
and concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics where his facile
speaking skills could even put him in the White House.
In
a very real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else do you
know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? “Dreams of My
Father” was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The
“Audacity of Hope” followed in 2006. If, indeed, he did write
them himself. There are some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill
Ayers, a man who calls himself a “communist with a small
‘c’“ was the real author.
His
political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be deemed
controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois legislature to the
Senator from that state because he had the good fortune of having Mayor
Daley’s formidable political machine at his disposal.
He
was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency was either
an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game plan that
had been determined before he first stepped foot in the Capital. How, many
must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at the Democrat
convention that nominated John Kerry when virtually no one had ever even
heard of him before?
He
outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A charming
young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black population, he
oozed “cool” in a place where agriculture was the antithesis of
cool. He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of volunteers drawn to a
charisma that hid any real substance.
And
then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select one of
the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And then John
McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown female governor
from the very distant state of Alaska. It was a ticket that was reminiscent
of 1984’s Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and they went down to
defeat.
The
mainstream political media fell in love with him. It was a schoolgirl crush
with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning then and now over the
man. The venom directed against McCain and, in particular, Palin, was
extraordinary.
Now,
nearly a full year into his first term, all of those gilded years leading up
to the White House have left him unprepared to be President. Left to his own
instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It
swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the briefest of
statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.
Far
worse, however, is his capacity to want to “wish away” some
terrible realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to
destroy America and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how
swiftly Islam initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe, having gained
a foothold in Spain .
The
great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign “world
tour” were no substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history
and the reality of a world filled with really bad people with really bad
intentions.
Oddly
and perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk, has
positioned him to destroy the Democrat Party’s hold on power in
Congress because in the end it was never about the Party. It was always about
his communist ideology, learned at an early age from family, mentors, college
professors, and extreme leftist friends and colleagues.
Obama
is a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police officer who
arrested an “obstreperous” Harvard professor-friend, but would
warn Americans against “jumping to conclusions” about a mass
murderer at Fort Hood who shouted “Allahu Akbar.” The absurdity
of that was lost on no one. He has since compounded this by calling the
Christmas bomber “an isolated extremist” only to have to admit a
day or two later that he was part of an al Qaeda plot.
He
is a man who could strive to close down our detention facility at Guantanamo
even though those released were known to have returned to the battlefield
against America . He could even instruct his Attorney General to afford the
perpetrator of 9/11 a civil trial when no one else would ever even consider
such an obscenity. And he is a man who could wait three days before having
anything to say about the perpetrator of yet another terrorist attack on
Americans and then have to elaborate on his remarks the following day because
his first statement was so lame.
The
pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush
administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.
Knock,
knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the sock puppet
of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and manufactured this
pathetic individual’s life.
When
anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate, this man
has spent over a million dollars to deny access to his. Most other documents,
the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been sequestered from review.
He has lived a make-believe life whose true facts remain hidden.
We
laugh at the ventriloquist’s dummy, but what do you do when the dummy
is President of the United States of America?”
It’s all too predictable. A day after a gunman
killed six people and wounded 18 others at Northern Illinois University, The
New York Times criticized the U.S. Interior Department for preparing to
rethink its ban on guns in national parks.
The editorial board wants “the 51 senators
who like the thought of guns in the parks -- and everywhere else, it seems --
to realize that the innocence of Americans is better protected by carefully
controlling guns than it is by arming everyone to the teeth.”
As usual, the Times editors seem unaware of how
silly their argument is. To them, the choice is between “carefully
controlling guns” and “arming everyone to the teeth.” But
no one favors “arming everyone to the teeth” (whatever that
means). Instead, gun advocates favor freedom, choice and self-responsibility.
If someone wishes to be prepared to defend himself, he should be free to do
so. No one has the right to deprive others of the means of effective
self-defense, like a handgun.
As for the first option, “carefully
controlling guns,” how many shootings at schools or malls will it take
before we understand that people who intend to kill are not deterred by gun
laws? Last I checked, murder is against the law everywhere. No one intent on
murder will be stopped by the prospect of committing a lesser crime like illegal
possession of a firearm. The intellectuals and politicians who make pious
declarations about controlling guns should explain how their gunless utopia
is to be realized.
While they search for -- excuse me -- their magic
bullet, innocent people are dying defenseless.
That’s because laws that make it difficult
or impossible to carry a concealed handgun do deter one group of people:
law-abiding citizens who might have used a gun to stop crime. Gun laws are
laws against self-defense.
Criminals have the initiative. They choose the
time, place and manner of their crimes, and they tend to make choices that
maximize their own, not their victims’, success. So criminals
don’t attack people they know are armed, and anyone thinking of
committing mass murder is likely to be attracted to a gun-free zone, such as
schools and malls.
Government may promise to protect us from
criminals, but it cannot deliver on that promise. This was neatly summed up
in book title a few years ago: “Dial 911 and Die.” If you are the
target of a crime, only one other person besides the criminal is sure to be
on the scene: you. There is no good substitute for self-responsibility.
How, then, does it make sense to create mandatory
gun-free zones, which in reality are free-crime zones?
The usual suspects keep calling for more gun
control laws. But this idea that gun control is crime control is just a myth.
The National Academy of Sciences reviewed dozens of studies and could not
find a single gun regulation that clearly led to reduced violent crime or
murder. When Washington, D.C., passed its tough handgun ban years ago, gun
violence rose.
The press ignores the fact that often guns save
lives.
It’s what happened in 2002 at the
Appalachian School of Law. Hearing shots, two students went to their cars,
got their guns and restrained the shooter until police arrested him.
Likewise, law professor Glen Reynolds writes,
“Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the
school’s vice principal took a .45 from his truck and ran to the scene.
In (last) February’s Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police
officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun”.
It’s impossible to know exactly how often
guns stop criminals. Would-be victims don’t usually report crimes that
don’t happen. But people use guns in self-defense every day. The Cato
Institute’s Tom Palmer says just showing his gun to muggers once saved
his life.
“It equalizes unequals,” Palmer told
“20/20”. “If someone gets into your house, which would you
rather have, a handgun or a telephone? You can call the police if you want,
and they’ll get there, and they’ll take a picture of your dead
body. But they can’t get there in time to save your life. The first
line of defense is you.”
As crude oil continues to pour into the Gulf of
Mexico, the politicians are waving the “green energy” shirt
again. The logical chain goes as such: (1) crude oil is messy and dirty,
especially when it is spilled into water; (2) “green” fuels and
energy methods are clean and don’t result in oil spills; (3) therefore,
the government should force us to use “green energy.”
The following article highlights that position:
Alternative energy proponents say the time is
right for help from Washington. “Our thoughts are with the people
living and working in the Gulf as they and other organizations deal with the
oil spill,” said Denise Bode, CEO of the American Wind Energy
Association. “Americans’ support for pure, clean energy is clear,
and events such as this heighten the need for Congress to pass needed energy
and climate legislation.”
Not surprisingly, the ethanol crowd has jumped
into the mix:
“The Gulf oil spill is a heartbreaking
catastrophe, and it demonstrates in stark terms why we need to accelerate the
use of renewable energy alternative like ethanol,” said Stephanie
Dreyer, spokesperson for ethanol advocacy group Growth Energy.
“The long-term ramifications of the oil
spill are yet to be determined, but it definitely indicates a need for us to invest
in alternative fuels in a renewable way and move away from oil.”
Throw global warming into the pot, and you have
yet another round of government intervention into the energy business, as
though there was not “enough” intervention already. To make matters
worse, the new plan from President Obama would make gasoline prohibitively
expensive, and gasoline price increases no doubt would trigger yet more
condemnation of oil and lead to more demands that the government
“nationalize” the industry.
Whose Idea Was It?
In reality, government intervention played an
important role in the spill’s happening in the first place. As Judge
Andrew Napolitano points out, BP originally sought to drill in 500 feet of
water, a plan approved by the state of Louisiana but then nixed by the
federal government, which demanded the company drill in 5,000 feet depths
instead. Judge Napolitano writes:
Never mind that no oil company had ever cleaned up
a broken well at that depth and never mind that the feds had never monitored
a broken well at that depth and never mind that BP only needed to set aside
$75 million in case something went wrong. The feds trumped BP’s
engineers and the feds trumped the wishes of the folks who live along the
Gulf Coast and the feds decided where this oil well would be drilled.
Furthermore, the federal government has stymied
efforts by local and state governments, along with private individuals, to
deal with the spill, and has turned away offers from well-trained and
well-equipped outfits from foreign countries because of the Jones Act, which
protects American maritime unions.
Is this merely incompetence and protection of
special interests? Or is more going on: namely, an opportunity to grease the
skids to the less-efficient and much more costly energy “alternatives,”
such as windmills and corn-based ethanol, both of which are highly
inefficient and kept alive only by massive government subsidies. In a free
market consumers would reject these costly sources, but thanks to the magic
of political “investing,” they continue to destroy wealth.
So we have a spill the Obama administration and
many others hope will change our attitudes toward oil. The fuels that come
from crude oil are unmatched in their energy production and
cost-effectiveness, so it would take a major event to make American consumers
willing to impose huge costs on themselves. We may not need alternative
fuels, and we may not want them, but apparently the government and its allies
are using this unfortunate event to increase State power and to make us
poorer.
When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi
movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he
deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much
attention to politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political
base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler’s rhetoric and
had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.
“Useful idiots” was the term
supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters
of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.
Put differently, a democracy needs informed
citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive. In our times,
American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes
by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be
concerned about it.
The president’s poll numbers are going down
because increasing numbers of people disagree with particular policies of
his, but the damage being done to the fundamental structure of this nation
goes far beyond particular counterproductive policies.
Just where in the Constitution of the United
States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of
money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever
he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.
And yet that is precisely what is happening with a
$20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their
oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Many among the public and in the media may think
that the issue is simply whether BP’s oil spill has damaged many
people, who ought to be compensated. But our government is supposed to be
“a government of laws and not of men.” If our laws and our
institutions determine that BP ought to pay $20 billion-- or $50 billion or
$100 billion-- then so be it.
But the Constitution says that private property is
not to be confiscated by the government without “due process of
law.” Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but
that is a distinction without a difference.
With vastly expanded powers of government
available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private
individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of
powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution.
If you believe that the end justifies the means,
then you don’t believe in Constitutional government. And, without
Constitutional government, freedom cannot endure. There will always be a
“crisis”-- which, as the president’s chief of staff has
said, cannot be allowed to “go to waste” as an opportunity to
expand the government’s power.
That power will of course not be confined to BP or
to the particular period of crisis that gave rise to the use of that power,
much less to the particular issues.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt arbitrarily took the
United States off the gold standard, he cited a law passed during the First
World War to prevent trading with the country’s wartime enemies. But
there was no war when FDR ended the gold standard’s restrictions on the
printing of money.
At about the same time, during the worldwide Great
Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law “for the relief of the
German people.” That law gave Hitler dictatorial powers that were used
for things going far beyond the relief of the German people-- indeed, powers
that ultimately brought a rain of destruction down on the German people and
on others.
If the agreement with BP was an isolated event,
perhaps we might hope that it would not be a precedent. But there is nothing
isolated about it.
The man appointed by President Obama to dispense
BP’s money as the administration sees fit, to whomever it sees fit, is
only the latest in a long line of presidentially appointed
“czars” controlling different parts of the economy, without even
having to be confirmed by the Senate, as Cabinet members are.
Those who cannot see beyond the immediate events
to the issues of arbitrary power-- versus the rule of law and the
preservation of freedom-- are the “useful idiots” of our time.
But useful to whom?
Presumption of
Competence by Wendy McElroy
The nanny state wants to turn adults into
children
from the July 2010 issue of Liberty
Magazine
A core principle of the nanny state is that people
do not know their best interests and must be treated like children, with the
state acting as guardian. Indeed, that’s what the word
“nanny” means. The nanny state proceeds from the presumption that
you are incompetent to administer your own life. Even fully functioning
adults are deemed unable or unwilling to make wise decisions, so the state
rushes in to fill the void with regulation of every individual’s
personal health and safety.
How much trans fat or salt can be in your burger?
You are too obese, too nutritionally ignorant, too addicted to
McDonald’s to be trusted. Should you smoke, drink, or chow down on
sweets? Of course not! But if you do, then, like a good parent, the state
will force you to bear the cost of irresponsibility by uber-taxing your minor
vices and imprisoning you for your major ones.
The “wise parent” list scrolls on and
on: wear a helmet while bicycling, don’t use saccharine, no public
nudity, don’t loiter in parks, monitor your words to coworkers,
don’t download porn, take a urine test at work, don’t drive too
fast, take only approved drugs and only in the prescribed fashion, strap on
your safety belt, pay a tax for the error of fast food, no smoking in public
places, register your handgun, don’t use incandescent bulbs, recycle,
homogenize all milk, buy health insurance. . . . Recently, Maine was pushing
to eliminate sex- specific bathrooms because separate
“men’s” and women’s” rooms discriminate against
your gender rights.
Yes, where you take a piss is now a matter of
state, to be debated by legislatures, and all because they want to protect
you. Happily, Maine has backed away from politicizing toilets — but
this didn’t put the issue to rest.
Since adolescence I’ve known that the state
is not there to protect me or be my wise guide; I have to protect and guide
myself. In that process, my mistakes have been more valuable to me than the
“wisdom” doled out by bureaucrats; my mistakes are what I learn
from.
I did not gain this knowledge through reading or a
high school debate society. I ran away from home when I was 16 years old and
lived on the streets for as short a period as I could manage, sleeping in an
unlocked church at night to keep from freezing. I was always cold, I was
always afraid, but I was lucky. In short, at 16 I was prime protection
material; I was the sort of social problem about whom Sunday newspapers run
human interest stories that touch the heart and end with by declaring that
“there oughta be a law!”
The opposite of “there oughta be a
law” was true. I call myself lucky because I was 16 years old and so
legally able to work. I was lucky because the law did not
“protect” me completely. I had a legal presumption of competence
that gave me the option of taking a minimum wage job in a safe, warm place
where I could earn enough to rent a room in a safe, warm boarding house.
But what if I had been 15 years old and unable to
work legally? What options would I have had then? I could have begged on the
street or worked illegally and so been entirely marginalized. I could have
stolen or sold my body for sex, and ended up in jail. All these options would
have placed me in conflict with the police and placed me outside of
“respectable” society, into which I might never have integrated
again. The child labor laws meant to protect me could have destroyed my life.
Inevitably, nanny staters will respond, “The
government would have protected you, had you let it. There were social safety
nets, such as foster care, just waiting to help a 15-year- old.” In
short, they claim that the nanny state works just fine; the problem was me.
The waywardly independent are blamed for their own misfortunes.
Those who make this claim vastly overrate both the
availability and the quality of public assistance. Note: I am not arguing for
more tax-funded aid or for more caring civil servants. Trillions of dollars
and millions of bureaucrats have done nothing to prevent homelessness and the
other social problems they allegedly solve. Those problems have turned into
lucrative industries that have little to no connection with helping people,
rather like public schools that produce illiterate and innumerate graduates. Moreover,
such industries as child protective services constitute the main barrier to
private charities that do a much more efficient and humane job.
A bit of reality needs to be injected into such
questions as “Why do runaways and other homeless people so often prefer
to sleep on the streets rather than be sheltered by government?” I can
only speak for myself, but I think my reaction was a common one, or a common
mixture. The only voluntary encounter I had with the subspecies of humanity
known as the social worker guaranteed that I would never willingly turn
myself into the authorities. Literally, I had to stand my ground in order to
get a bed in which to sleep because I might have frozen outside; the clerk
had to choose between housing me for one night and calling the police. When I
did go to the second floor of the facility, I found dozens of empty beds. She
clearly would have preferred me to freeze rather than fill out forms. Only
because a call to the police would also have required forms was I allowed to
stay.
Yet people remain baffled by those in need who
refuse government assistance. Part of the reason is that those people have
never had to deal with nanny-state bureaucrats from a position of utter
vulnerability. Civil servants process humans as though they were slabs of
meat; their goal is to reduce the meat to a number affixed to paperwork that
can be filed away. There is no more humanity in the various welfare
industries than there is efficiency in postal workers, kindness at the DMV,
or concern for dignity at airport screenings.
Add to this scenario another feature. Kids on the
street are often there because every authority figure in their lives has
betrayed them. Runaways know that being dependent means being vulnerable.
When social workers tell them that being thrown into the system is for their
own good, this only adds the insult of the kids’ being considered
stupid, even while they are being set up for institutionalized abuse. People
on the streets are not stupid about the system. They rub shoulders with the
system every day; they know its daily realities far better than well-meaning
people who pass a law and never give the homeless another thought, other than
how to avoid the scruffy fellow sitting on the curb.
Still, it is important to remember that nanny
staters who support child labor laws usually have good intentions. They want
to prevent exploitation so that kids can have happy childhoods, good
schooling, and fall asleep safely in their own beds. But those weren’t
the choices I confronted. And had I been 15 years old, all that the
well-intended laws would have accomplished would have been to narrow my
choices to ones that made me a criminal or completely dependent upon the
kindness of strangers. Laws would have eliminated my best chance to survive
and emerge intact, to have the ability to trade my labor on the open market
and so take care of myself.
What I have just written is not merely a rant
against the nanny state. It is the prelude to an argument for what I call
“the presumption of competence.” Some time ago I read this phrase
in connection with the criminal law. In a criminal case, if a defendant
asserts mental incompetence as a defense, the burden of proof is upon him or
her to prove it; otherwise, the default position for the defendant is a
“presumption of competence.” The phrase immediately called to
mind one that is a close parallel: the presumption of innocence. The latter
phrase describes the requirement for due process according to which the
government has to prove the guilt of a criminal defendant beyond a reasonable
doubt before it can impose punishment. The default position for the criminal
defendant is the presumption of innocence.
Historically, the presumption of innocence has
been one of the most important guarantees of justice for the individual
against the overweening state. I was interested to see whether or not
“a presumption of competence” could serve the same function. If
people are protected from state aggression by being considered innocent until
proven guilty, then perhaps they could be similarly protected by being
considered competent until proven otherwise. I mentioned that possibility
briefly in a reflection in the June issue of Liberty; this article results
from my growing conviction that the presumption of competence is an important
concept.
To restate: A “presumption of
competence” means that every adult is presumed competent to make his or
her own choices as long as those choices do not interfere with the equal,
peaceful right of others.
I specify “adults” because I want to
avoid the various complexities of “children’s rights.” If a
presumption of competence were to become entrenched in the law and society,
then the age of competence would obviously become an important point. But
until undisputed adults are accorded this presumption, it is premature to
introduce the complication of children.
In some circumstances, of course, adults cannot be
presumed competent; an obvious case is a man in a coma. The comatose man
would retain his natural rights, so no one could properly aggress against
him; but someone would have to assume guardianship in order to make the
choices that would keep him alive. In many cases, people manage this problem
themselves by giving someone a power-of- attorney or its equivalent. But for
a functioning adult — that is, for a person who maintains his or her
own life, whatever quality of life is chosen — the bar to proving his
or her incompetence should be so high as to be insuperable. The legal
assumption of competence for anyone who handles daily life without committing
violence or fraud should be unassailable.
Another way to state the foregoing is to say that
a third party should never interfere with the peaceful choices of another
merely to be useful; interference can be justified only when it is necessary
to preserve life. The distinction between “useful” and
“necessary” is crucial.
Almost every measure passed or proposed by the
nanny state is sold on the basis of “usefulness.” The measure
will make you healthier or happier or more secure. Next to nothing that is
passed or proposed serves to safeguard life and equal liberty. Some measures
are packaged as “necessary” — for example, creating no-
smoke environments. But granting a correlation between smoking and a
heightened risk of cancer at some undisclosed point does not mean that every
puff is life- threatening. At most, puffing away is risky behavior in much
the same way as crossing a busy intersection, skiing, driving in the snow,
and a thousand other common activities. The objective of the nanny state is
not to save your life or liberty but to redefine its own role in society so
that it runs the daily lives of people who are competent to run their own.
When the nanny state usurps the right to make
decisions for you, it is placing itself in a position of unsolicited
guardianship over your life. But the usurpation involves much more than this.
A comatose man retains his natural rights; a third party cannot take his life
— or even his property, absent legal proof that he will never again be
competent to control it. By contrast, the nanny state is quite willing to
imprison those who disrespect its guardianship, and confiscate their
property; it is willing to aggress against those pursuing their own peaceful
choices. The nanny state claims more than mere guardianship, though that is
bad enough; it claims the right to control and punish your choices. It claims
ownership.
And this is what the conflict between the nanny
state and the individual comes down to: not whether X or Y choice is the
correct one to make, but who owns the person making that choice.
Libertarianism is based on self-ownership. This is
the claim of jurisdiction that every human being rightfully has over his or
her own body, simply by virtue of being human. Self-ownership underlies all
other rights. Indeed, if you don’t own yourself, then it makes no sense
to speak of freedom of conscience or belief, freedom of speech or
association, or to lay claim to the products of your labor. If you do not
have jurisdiction over your skin and everything inside it, then you cannot
claim anything.
There is a word to describe the situation in which
another party claims ownership over the body of another: it is
“slavery.” In light of that, the nanny state is misnamed. It
would like to project the image of a wise guardian of children, and adults
who are treated like children — a sort of stern Mary Poppins who uses a
“spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.” But a more
accurate image is that of a slave owner. One hand of the nanny state may be
wagging an admonishing finger, but the other hand is holding a whip.
The presumption of competence abolishes both.
Productive people who are occupied with what Henry David Thoreau called
“the business of living” do not take well to the state lecturing them
like a priggish maiden aunt. People who assert the presumption of their own
competence will not submit either to the lash or to the laws that the nanny
wants to wield.
“For more than
six hundred years-that is, since Magna Carta, in
1215—there has been no clearer principle of English or American
constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right
and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was
the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their
primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all
laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all
persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such law.
— Lysander Spooner, An Essay on Trial by Jury” [1852]
“Freedom, as people enjoyed it in the democratic countries
of Western civilization in the years of the old liberalism’s triumph,
was not a product of constitutions, bills of rights, laws, and statutes.
Those documents aimed only at safeguarding liberty and freedom, firmly
established by the operation of the market economy, against encroachments on
the part of officeholders. No government and no civil law can guarantee and
bring about freedom otherwise than by supporting and defending the
fundamental institutions of the market economy. Government means always
coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty.
Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if
its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom.
Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of
constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.” — Ludwig von Mises,
Human Action [1949]
“Society in
every state is a blessing, but government even in
its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable
one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government,
which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is
heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”
— Thomas Paine, Common Sense [February 14, 1776]
“We live in a Constitutional Republic.
The President’s job under the Constitution is to enforce the laws made
by the elected Congress. His job is not to create new laws and enforce them
all by himself. His job is as magistrate under the Constitution, not as
Caudillo. He is not the law. He is supposed to enforce what Congress decides.
The BP behavior is reminiscent of how, immediately after assuming office, Mr.
Obama, with no Congressional authority or administrative allowance, simply
made a phone call to fire the head of GM. When I called the White House press
office to ask under what law or regulation Mr. Obama was acting, I was told
he did not need a law. If the government put a lot of money into GM, it could
call the shots at GM, I was told. But under what authority, I asked.
‘None needed,’ was the final answer. ... The same goes for Mr.
Obama’s demand that BP pay the lost wages of oil and gas workers
suspended from work because of the moratorium on Gulf of Mexico underseas
drilling. There simply was no legislation allowing this kind of specific
demand. Mr. Obama’s demand was in the nature of a threat, more than a
Constitutional act. ... [T]o create specific enactments and actions without
any authority -- now Mr. Obama’s specialty -- is so at odds with the
law of the land that it terrifies me. These are not the acts of a teacher on
Constitutional law. These are the acts of a big city boss or a third world
dictator.” --columnist Ben Stein
6/21/2010: In case you
missed Obama’s Oval Office Address, here’s the short version:
“I’ve
returned... I assembled a team... I’d like to lay out... I’ve
authorized... I urge the governors... I saw and heard... I’ve talked...
I’ve seen... I’ve talked... I refuse... I will meet... I make...
I asked... I approved... I want to know... I met with... I’ve
established... I’ve issued... I know... I urge... I expect... I was a
candidate... I laid out... I say... I am happy... I will not accept... I will
not settle...”
6/18/2010: from the
July 2010 issue of Liberty
Magazine
Have you ever felt an
obligation to be unhappy? I have, and probably you have too. We’re all
serious people.
After the so-called healthcare bill was signed
into law, I felt that obligation very
strongly. Here was a vast deformation of the American idea, a
hodgepodge of lies and
discredited notions, the world’s largest experiment in giving people
nothing for something, the
world’s largest pig in a poke. And that wasn’t all. Here was
California, the state I live in, bankrupt in all but name. Here was my
nation, crippling its future with
every kind of fatuous, corrupt, and ruinous scheme. Here was the world, dividing its governance between
mousy bureaucrats and vicious dictators,
with the former usually assisting the latter.
I saw that, and I did my best to feel unhappy.
Yet the sun rose, the spring came, the clouds blew
past my windows.
Tchaikovsky’s Fifth was as thrilling as
ever. “His Girl Friday” was as funny as ever. Cheap zinfandels were as interesting
as ever. Lunch at Bleu Bohème was as good as ever, especially with a friend to
share the meal. Macaulay’s prose had never seemed more succulent; the life of Washington
had never seemed more beautiful — and the modest pleasures of life had never
seemed more significant. I couldn’t resist: I enjoyed these things, and I was happy.
I’ll admit the truth: I found that I’m
complacent. But I think I’m complacent about the right things.
I’m not complacent about the stupendous
waste of human life entailed by this
century’s idea that the solution to all problems is an increase
of government power. I’m
not complacent about the poverty, cruelty, and futility that follow, as the
night the day, every increase in
that force of error.
But I am complacent about the ability of human
life to assert itself, no matter
what the obstacles. I’m complacent about the power of the free
market to minister to human
desires, both the “low” ones and the “high” ones
— and to do it and to keep
doing it, as long as there’s a breath of freedom left. And I’m
complacent about the power of the
individual to think and know and survive and triumph — because any individual is cleverer than any
state. In that contest, I know who’s going to win. In Boswell’s
life of Johnson, the old sage meets a humble college friend, who tells him, “You are a
philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know
how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”
That man speaks for me. I suspect that he speaks
for many other libertarians. We
don’t have a duty to be sad, just because of our philosophy. Instead,
we have an inspiration to share
the cheerful news of freedom — what freedom is, what freedom does, what freedom can do even under
the most adverse conditions.
Come to think about it, that’s not a bad
philosophy.
For Liberty, Stephen
Cox, Editor
6/18/2010: The
epitome of mediocrity by Mark
Steyn
Oleaginous Obama is even making
fans queasy
I believe it was Jean Giraudoux who first said,
"Only the mediocre are always at their best." Barack Obama was
supposed to be the best, the very best, and yet he is always, reliably,
consistently mediocre. His speech on oil was no better or worse than his speech
on race. Yet the Obammyboppers who once squealed with delight are weary of
last year's boy band. At the end of the big Oval Office address, Keith
Olbermann, Chris Matthews and the rest of the MSNBC gang jeered the
president. For a bewildered President Obama, it must have felt like his
Ceausescu balcony moment. Had they caught up with him in the White House
parking lot, they would have put him up against the wall and clubbed him to a
pulp with Mr. Matthews' no-longer-tingling leg.
For the first time, I felt a wee bit sorry for the
poor fellow. What had he done to so enrage his full supporting chorus? In The
Washington Post, the reaction of longtime Obammysoxer Eugene Robinson was
headlined "Obama disappoints from the beginning of his speech."
So what? He always "disappoints." What
would have been startling would have been if he hadn't
"disappointed." His eve-of-election rally for Martha Coakley
"disappointed" the Massachusetts electorate so much it gave Ted
Kennedy's seat to a Republican. His speech for Chicago's Olympic bid
"disappointed" the Oslo committee so much it gave the games to
Pyongyang, or Ougadougou, or any city offering to build a stadium with
electrical outlets incompatible with Mr. Obama's teleprompter. Be honest,
guys, his inaugural address "disappointed," too, didn't it? Oh, in
those days, you still did your best to make the case for it. "He carries
us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to
contemplate," wrote Stanley Fish in the New York Times. "There is a
technical term for this kind of writing - parataxis, defined by the Oxford
English Dictionary as 'the placing of propositions or clauses one after the
other without indicating ... the relation of co-ordination or subordination
between them.'"
Gotcha. To a fool, His Majesty's new clothes
appear invisible. But, to a wise man, the placing of buttons and pockets
without indicating the relation of co-ordination is a fascinating exercise in
parataxical couture.
And so Mr. Obama bounded out to knock 'em dead
with another chorus of "I'll be down to get you in a parataxis,
honey," only to find himself pelted with dead fish rather than Stanley
Fish. The Times' Maureen Dowd deplored his "bloodless quality" and
"emotional detachment." This is the same Maureen Dowd who in 2009
hailed the new presidency with a column titled "Spock at the
Bridge" - and she meant it as a compliment. Back then, this
administration was supposed to be the new technocracy - cool, calm and
credentialed chaps who would sit down, use their mighty intellects to provide
a rigorous, post-partisan, forensic analysis of the problem and then break
for their Vanity Fair photo shoot.
What was it all the smart set said about Mr. Bush?
Lazy and incurious? Had President Obama or his speechwriters chanced upon
last week's fish wrap, they might have noticed that I described the president
as "the very model of a modern major generalist," and they might
have considered whether it might not be time to try something new. For
example, he could have demonstrated, as he and his energy secretary (whoops,
Nobel Prize-winning energy secretary) have so signally failed to do, an
understanding of what is actually happening 5,000 feet underwater and why
it's hard to stop. Instead, lazy and incurious, this is what the technocratic
mastermind offered: "Just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our
nation's best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge - a team led
by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation's secretary
of energy. Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and
other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice.
"As a result of these efforts, we've directed
BP to mobilize additional equipment and technology."
Excellent. The president directed his Nobel Prize-winning
head of meetings to assemble a meeting to tackle the challenge of mobilizing
the assembling of the tackling of the challenge of mobilization, at the end
of which they directed BP to order up some new tackle and connect it to the
thingummy next to the whachamacallit. Thank you, Mr. President. That and
$4.95 will get you a venti at Starbucks.
The boring technocrat stuff out of the way, he
then did his usual shtick. In the race speech, invited to address specific
points about his pastor's two-decade pattern of ugly anti-American rhetoric
and his opportunist peddling of paranoid conspiracies to his gullible
congregants about AIDS being invented by the U.S. government to wipe them
out, Mr. Obama preferred to talk about race in general - you know, blacks,
whites, that sort of thing. The media loved it. This time around, invited to
address specific points about an unstoppable spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr.
Obama retreated to more generalities - the environment, land, air, that sort
of thing. "President Obama said he is going to use the Gulf disaster to
push a new energy bill through Congress," observed Jay Leno. "How
about using the Gulf disaster to fix the Gulf disaster?"
When he did get specific, he sounded faintly
surreal. "As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind
turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows.
. . ." Energy-efficient windows? That's a great line - if Mr. Obama's
auditioning to play himself on "Saturday Night Live" parodies.
And hang on - isn't this the same guy who was
promising to start kicking "ass" just a few days ago? You may find
yourself recalling the moment in the film "In and Out" when Kevin
Kline is trying to master the "How to Be Manly" audiotape and
accidentally says, "What an interesting window treatment."
But, as Rahm Emmanuel shrewdly noted, never let a
crisis go to waste, not when you can get a new window treatment out of it.
My colleague Rich Lowry suggested the other day
that most people not on the Gulf Coast aren't really that bothered about the
spill, and that Mr. Obama has allowed himself to be blown off course entirely
unnecessarily. There may be some truth to this: For most of America, this is
a Potemkin crisis. But what better kind to trip up a Potemkin leader? So the
president has now declared war on the great BP spill - Gulf War III - and in
this epic conflict, the speechgiver-in-chief will surely be his own unmanned
drone:
"I fired off a speech
But the British kept a-spillin'
Twice as many barrels as there was a month ago
I fired off a speech
But the British kept a-spillin'
Up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico.
..."
Chris Matthews and the other leg-tinglers invented
a Barack Obama that doesn't exist. Unfortunately, they're stuck with the one
who does, and it will be interesting to see whether he's capable of plugging
the leak in his own support. If not, who knows what the tide might wash up?
Memo to Secretary Rodham Clinton: Do you find
yourself on a quiet evening with a strange craving for chicken dinners and county
fairs in Iowa and New Hampshire, maybe next summer? Need one of those
relaunch books to explain why you're getting back in the game in your
country's hour of need?
"It Takes a Spillage."
George Orwell admonished, “Sometimes the
first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.” That’s
what I want to do -- talk about the obvious. Suppose that a person is faced
with the choice of spending $50,000 on a brand-new car or paying two years
worth of college tuition for his 18-year-old. What is the solution?
That’s a stupid question. In the world of economic decision making,
there are no solutions -- only tradeoffs, where having more of one thing
means having less of another. Having one desire fulfilled means having
another unfulfilled. For example, there’s no solution to our health
care issues. Congress’ health care law simply substitutes its judgment
on the delivery of medical services in the name of helping the uninsured. The
tradeoff is that Americans have less of something else such as fewer personal
choices, less after-tax income and very likely a lower quality of medical
services.
How about the criticism that businesses are just
in it for money and profits? That’s supposed to be an anti-business
slam but upon simple examination, it reflects gross stupidity or
misunderstanding. Wal-Mart owns 8,300 stores, of which 4,000 are in 44
different countries. Its 2010 revenues are expected to top $500 billion.
Putting Wal-Mart’s revenues in perspective, they exceed the 2009 GDP of
all but 18 of the world’s 181 countries. Why is Wal-Mart so successful?
Millions of people voluntarily enter their stores and part with their money
in exchange for Wal-Mart’s products and services. In order for that to
happen, Wal-Mart and millions of other profit-motivated businesses must
please people.
Compare our level of satisfaction with the
services of those “in it just for the money and profits” to those
in it to serve the public as opposed to earning profits. A major non-profit
service provider is the public education establishment that delivers primary
and secondary education at nearly a trillion-dollar annual cost. Public
education is a major source of complaints about poor services that in many
cases constitute nothing less than gross fraud.
If Wal-Mart, or any of the millions of producers
who are in it for money and profits, were to deliver the same low-quality
services, they would be out of business, but not public schools. Why? People
who produce public education get their pay, pay raises and perks whether
customers are satisfied or not. They are not motivated by profits and
therefore under considerably less pressure to please customers. They use
government to take customer money, in the form of taxes.
The U. S. Postal Service, state motor vehicle departments
and other government agencies also have the taxing power of government to get
money and therefore are less diligent about pleasing customers. You can bet
the rent money that if Wal-Mart and other businesses had the power to take
our money by force, they would be less interested and willing to please us.
The big difference between entities that serve us
well and those who do not lies in what motivates them. Wal-Mart and millions
of other businesses are profit-motivated whereas government schools, USPS and
state motor vehicle departments are not.
In the market, when a firm fails to please its
customers and fails to earn a profit, it goes bankrupt, making those
resources available to another that might do better. That’s unless
government steps in to bail it out. Bailouts send the message to continue
doing a poor job of pleasing customers and husbanding resources.
Government-owned nonprofit entities are immune to the ruthless market
discipline of being forced to please customers. The same can be said of
businesses that receive government subsidies.
The ruthlessness of the market discipline, which
forces firms to please customers and thereby earn profits, goes a long way
toward explaining hostility toward free market capitalism.
The Foundation: “Here comes the orator! With his flood of
words, and his drop of reason.” --Benjamin Franklin…
The BIG Lie: “We consume more than 20 percent of
the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil
reserves. And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a
mile beneath the surface of the ocean -- because we’re running out of
places to drill on land and in shallow water.” --Barack Obama (The reason for
deepwater drilling is government putting land and shallow water off limits.)
Surely she can’t be serious: “[C]arbon
pollution, leading to climate change, will be, over the next 20 years, the
leading cause of conflict, putting our troops in harm’s way.”
--Sen. Barbara Boxer
(D-CA)
[Read the entire
article]
The
big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is bad enough in itself. But politics can
make anything worse.
Let’s
stop and think. Either the government knows how to stop the oil spill or they
don’t. If they know how to stop it, then why have they let thousands of
barrels of oil per day keep gushing out, for weeks on end? All they have to
do is tell BP to step aside, while the government comes in to do it right.
If
they don’t know, then what is all this political grandstanding about
keeping their boot on the neck of BP, the Attorney General of the United
States going down to the Gulf to threaten lawsuits— on what charges was
unspecified— and President Obama showing up in his shirt sleeves?
Just
what is Obama going to do in his shirt sleeves, except impress the gullible?
He might as well have shown up in a tuxedo with white tie, for all the
difference it makes.
This
government is not about governing. It is about creating an impression. That
worked on the campaign trail in 2008, but it is a disaster in the White
House, where rhetoric is no substitute for reality.
If
the Obama administration was for real, and trying to help get the oil spill contained
as soon as possible, the last thing its Attorney General would be doing is
threatening a lawsuit. A lawsuit is not going to stop the oil, and creating a
distraction can only make people at BP start directing their attention toward
covering themselves, instead of covering the oil well.
If
and when the Attorney General finds that BP did something illegal, that will
be time enough to start a lawsuit. But making a public announcement at this
time accomplishes absolutely nothing substantive. It is just more political
grandstanding.
This
is not about oil. This is about snake oil.
Nothing
will keep a man or an institution determined to continue on a failing policy
course like past success with that policy. Obama’s political success in
the 2008 election campaign was a spectacular triumph of creating images and
impressions.
But
creating political impressions and images is not the same thing as governing.
Yet Obama in the White House keeps on saying and doing things to impress
people, instead of governing.
Once
the elections were over and the time for governing began, there was now a new
audience to consider— a much more savvy audience, the leaders of other
countries around the world.
However
impressed the media and the Obama cult might be with the President’s
image, rhetoric and style, leaders of other countries— allies and
enemies alike— are interested in results.
Even
our domestic policies can affect foreign leaders, as Ronald Reagan’s
breaking of the air traffic controllers’ strike impressed the Russians
with what kind of man they were going to have to deal with, as former Soviet
officials said publicly many years later.
By
the same token, domestic bungling by Barack Obama sends a dangerous signal to
countries hostile to us, in addition to the signal sent by his displays of
amateurism on the world stage.
President
Obama had barely settled into the White House before he began demonstrating
his willingness to sell out this country’s friends to appease our
enemies. His trip to Moscow to try to make a deal with the Russians, based on
reneging on the pre-existing American commitment to put a missile shield in
Eastern Europe, was the kind of short-sighted betrayal whose consequences can
come back to haunt a nation for years.
Obama
spoke grandly about “pressing the reset button” on international
relations, as if all the international commitments of the past were his to
disregard.
But
if no American commitment can be depended upon beyond a current
administration, then any nation that allies itself with us is jeopardizing
its own national security, because dangers in the international jungle last
longer than 4 years or even 8 years.
We
are already seeing the consequences. Even Turkey— formally a NATO
ally— is cozying up to Iran, now that it is painfully clear that Obama is
not going to do anything that has any realistic chance of stopping Iran from
going nuclear.
If
leaders of other nations can’t depend on the United States, then they
need to make the best deal they can with our enemies. They understand that
preserving their nation’s security is a leader’s top priority,
even if Barack Obama doesn’t.
Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University,
Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
Copyright
2010 creators.com
6/14/2010: Obama Can’t
Stop the Oil Spill
Acting like politicians can solve all our
problems just makes us look weak.
by Anne Applebaum
…Given that he
cannot stop the oil from flowing, why has President Barack Obama decided to
act as if he can? And given that he is totally reliant on BP to save the fish
and the birds of the Gulf of Mexico, why has he started pretending
otherwise—why, in his own words, is he looking for someone’s
“ass to kick”? I am guessing that there are many reasons for this
recent change of rhetorical tone and that some of them are ideological. Of
course, this is a president who believes that government can and should be
able to solve all problems. Obama has never sounded particularly enthusiastic
about the private sector, and some of his congressional colleagues—the
ones talking of retroactively raising the cap on BP’s liability, for
example, or forcing BP to pay for the lost wages of other oil company’s
workers—are downright hostile…
Paradoxically,
“talking tough” about this oil crisis also makes both Obama and
America look weak internationally—just as “talking tough”
about Iran made the Bush administration look weak. Harsh rhetoric is fine if
it reflects a real will to do something, a real plan of action, and the
existence of a Plan B for when the first one fails. But when angry
words—anti-BP, anti-British, anti-oil-company—reflect the absence
of any alternative policy whatsoever, they just sound pathetic. It’s
right for Obama to be concerned about the consequences of this disaster, but
wrong—and dangerous—for him to pretend he is capable of
controlling it. We should stop calling on him to do so.
[Read
the entire article]
6/15/2010: Obama’s
Political Oil Fund - WSJ.com
In its Gulf spill panic, the White
House runs roughshod over the rule of law.
The BP oil spill is already a calamity for the Gulf Coast ecosystem and
economy, but now that Washington is looking to deflect all political blame it
could also became a disaster for the rule of law. Exhibit C, or perhaps
it’s now D, is the new White House demand that BP pay into an escrow
account controlled by government to pay for the economic costs of the spill.
Exhibit A was the public announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder
that his Department had opened a criminal probe of the spill, a fact usually
kept under wraps to protect the innocent.
Then came the President’s suggestion that BP suspend its
dividend, which is crucial to the retirement of thousands of shareholders. BP
may decide it is prudent to suspend its dividend while it gets a better handle
on its ultimate liability. But the White House has no legal basis to compel
such a decision. Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress are preparing to lift their
own $75 million liability cap and apply that retroactively to BP, another
move of dubious legality.
No wonder Britain’s Prime Minister and other officials are
alarmed about the fate of one of their country’s foremost corporations.
This is the kind of treatment that Americans would protest if it were applied
to U.S. companies by Venezuela or Russia.
None of this is to absolve BP for any bad judgments or shortcuts that
contributed to this disaster, but there is not a chance of that happening.
The more pertinent question is whether BP will survive, despite its ample
cash flow, once the U.S. political and liability systems are done making the
company pay. Neither punishment-by-bankruptcy nor extralegal looting will
help Gulf victims.
Which brings us to the escrow demand that the President will presumably
elaborate on in his Oval Office speech tonight. The idea is for BP to turn
its assets over to a fund administered by an “independent”
trustee who would decide what are legitimate damage claims from Gulf
residents and businesses. Senate Democrats have graciously advised BP to
start its payments to the fund at $20 billion.
The White House knows it has no legal authority to demand such a
corporate ATM card, but it is counting on public anger to coerce BP to go
along. The White House also knows BP is currently operating under the Oil
Pollution Act, a piece of legislation passed in 1990 by a Democratic
Congress.
A comprehensive response to the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, the law was
the product of 15 months of Congressional work and earned nearly unanimous
bipartisan support. The bill made polluting oil companies responsible for all
containment and clean-up costs. The law also established a claims process,
which requires that companies compensate businesses or individuals harmed by
oil spills.
BP has more than 600 claims personnel working to pay fishermen and
others that have suffered economic damage. It has vowed to pay all
“legitimate” claims and has worked through 20,000 of 42,000
submitted so far, at a cost of $53 million. BP has also promised it will not
limit its payments to the Oil Pollution Act’s $75 million cap on these
damages, and last month it announced it would hire an independent mediator to
review claims. Any claimant denied payment has the right to sue for redress
under the law, which means BP has an incentive to get these payouts right.
By contrast, a government-administered fund more or less guarantees a
more politicized payment process. The escrow administrator will be chosen by
the White House, and as such would be influenced by the
Administration’s political goals. Those goals would include payments to
those harmed by the Administration’s own six-month deep water drilling
ban. That reckless policy will soon put thousands of Gulf Coast residents out
of work, but the White House knows that BP isn’t liable under current
law for those claims. The escrow account is an attempt to tap BP’s
funds by other means to pay the costs of Mr. Obama’s own policy
blunder.
Every $1 spent to pay for damages caused by the moratorium is also $1
less available for the oil-spill victims for which this money was intended.
And that’s before other interest groups popular with Democrats, such as
the plaintiffs bar, plead their cases to the escrow fund’s King
Solomon.
Democrats are vowing this fund will be tightly crafted and used only
for oil-spill payments. But only last week Democrats on Capitol Hill wanted
to siphon money out of the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund—established
in 1986 and funded by oil taxes to help clean-up spills—to pay for
their extension of unemployment benefits. The history of such government funds
is that they are always raided for politically favored purposes.
BP is financially responsible for the Deepwater Horizon gusher, and the
White House should want the company to stay healthy enough to honor those
obligations. Instead, the Administration’s denunciations and legally
dubious demands are compounding the damage.
Offshore drilling, even in shallow water, is coming to a stop as the
entire industry considers the additional political risks of operating amid a
political panic in which even the President of United States seems oblivious
to the rule of law. We hope BP resists Mr. Obama’s demands to put a
political actor in control of its Gulf payments—both for the sake of
legitimate Gulf claims, and to vindicate the U.S. as a nation that
doesn’t discard the law for the sake of political retribution.
We also hope other politicians, in the U.S. or U.K., begin to push back
against a White House more concerned about its poll numbers than about the
U.S. or Gulf Coast economies.
6/14/2010: Goldman
Sachs’ Ethics Reflect Its Ethos by Joan Lappin
Goldman culture rewards hard-nosed aggressiveness and doesn’t put
the client’s interests before those of the firm.
In the age of Wikipedia and everything accessible online, I am a
diehard with a big old dictionary. A lot has happened in the world and
especially in the world of Wall Street since my Random House Dictionary of
the English Language, unabridged edition, was published in 1966, just as I
was entering the research training program at Merrill Lynch.
What prompted me to take my dictionary down from the shelf was
listening to the sworn testimony of a platoon from Goldman Sachs ( GS - news
- people ) at the start of Sen. Carl Levin’s, D-Mich., Senate inquiry
into the doings of Goldman Sachs a few weeks ago. After 20 minutes and just
about all of his initial time allotment, Sen. Levin could not get a single
one of the men subpoenaed to represent Goldman to answer as to whether what
they had done was “ethical” in terms of packaging up toxic
mortgage backed securities to sell to others. Those securities had been hand
selected by John Paulson who wanted to make a negative bet that the whole
system was flawed and would collapse as it ultimately did. He needed some
entity to bundle them together and then peddle them to others who
hadn’t done their homework.
As I listened, I thought the entire lot of them needed a little help
from my dictionary. As for ethics, definition 4: “that branch of
philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the
rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of
the motives and ends of such actions.”
The folks testifying for Goldman were primarily tutored by their
lawyers to focus on whether what they had done had violated what remain of
U.S. securities laws, as they have been dismantled over the last number of
years. Sen. Levin seemed to be more focused, as is most of America on the “goodness
and badness … of the ends of their actions.” How ethical was
their behavior?
What we do know is that Bear Stearns, even as it was descending out of
existence, retained its ethics to say it wouldn’t help out Mr. John
Paulson in his quest to find someone to package up a basket of handpicked
toxic mortgages. Management felt selling such a basket of bad loans to an
unwitting buyer didn’t pass the “smell test” and they
simply wouldn’t do it.
Goldman and its self proclaimed “Fabulous Fab” Tourre were
more than willing to step up to the plate and try to find the other side of
the transaction to help Mr. Paulson achieve his objective. Goldman purports
that they were simply acting as a matchmaker. Of course this match was made
in hell and surely not in Heaven. Goldman was forced to become a principal in
the transaction when they couldn’t find buyers for all of it and had to
take some of it onto its own books to complete the deal.
When you talk about intelligence, smart people are usually a cut above
others because their memories are superb. They might not have a photographic
memory of every detail on a page, but rapid recall is surely a sign of
intelligence as our society defines it. Henry Paulson Jr. (no relation to
John Paulson) is both former Goldman CEO and George W. Bush’s last
Treasury Secretary. In that latter role he was also the inventor of the
Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Henry Paulson is proud of his
exceptional memory. In the first page of the author’s note of his
recently published book, On The Brink, Paulson cites that he has been
“blessed with a good memory so I have almost never needed to take
notes. I don’t use e-mail. I rarely take papers to meetings. I
frustrated my Treasury staff by seldom using briefing memos.”
Since Goldman prides itself so in hiring the best and the brightest,
wasn’t it a shocker that to a man, they all had such very bad memories
when testifying before the U. S. Senate that they just couldn’t recall
almost anything? Somehow that doesn’t seem to fit the Goldman culture.
So let’s revert to my oversized dictionary, where I looked up the
word “ethos.” It’s “the fundamental character or
spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs,
customs, or practices of a group or society.” It seems to me that what
was on display at the Senate hearings was the disconnectedness of folks who
are lucky enough to work at a money machine. What came clear in some of the
testimony was that when they were reprimanded, either they had failed to
generate enough profit for the firm in a particular transaction, they
hadn’t generated enough revenue for the firm or they hadn’t
demonstrated that they were smarter than the guy on the other side of the
trade.
The public face of Goldman has been to repeat the mantra that the customer
comes first, but those in the bonus pool or vying to become a managing
director seemed to have mastered a completely different ethos: the cultural
distinctions of shrewd, smart, aggressive and hard working more than the
ethical distinctions of whether you would sell this product to your mother.
There is a clear distinction as to how the hearings were viewed among
different age groups who still work on Wall Street. For the veterans who
remember when Goldman wasn’t the well-oiled trading machine it has become,
there is a view that it has lost its way ethically in recent decades. At a
recent reunion I attended of the research department at the old Manufacturers
Hanover Trust where I worked 20 years ago, C. Roderick O’Neill, former
head of the trust division and long since retired, brought down the house
when he said, “Goldman doesn’t have clients. It only has
counterparties!”
The younger ones, almost to a person I have spoken with, have a reason
to explain why Goldman wasn’t doing anything that was wrong at all or
any different than any other firm prospering on Wall Street today where they
might work. Their view is that the senators asked dumb questions. Their
careers have been confined to a period during which the major banks and
investment banks were working aggressively to eliminate Glass Steagall and
remove most government restrictions on their activities.
What they also know and cut their teeth on was the era of Qwest’s
Joe Nacchio, many of Enron’s top management, Scrushy at HealthSouth,
MCI’s Bernie Ebbers, Tyco’s Dennis Koslowski, Martha Stewart and
Bernie Madoff. All of those folks have served jail time or are still in jail
now. Senators view Wall Street as the no-holds-barred Wild West it has
become.
Goldman Sachs’ ethics and its ethos are intertwined, but now the
veneer has been breached. The world has seen exactly how Goldman Sachs
chooses to conduct itself. Governments around the world are refusing to do
business with the firm in the future--last month Germany, this month China.
Goldman helped Greece obfuscate its true financial picture. It was at the
core of the AIG scandal. It was front and center in the collapse of the U.S.
mortgage market, helping one group of clients to buy securities that other
clients thought were toxic. It was betting against Bear Stearns and Lehman to
make a quick buck until its own stock came under attack and it ran to Hank
Paulson for help to survive itself by becoming a bank. Customers are
launching lawsuits.
All of this is likely to be an ongoing problem for the firm and its
future. Its culture of greed has been revealed. The degree to which it has
become ethically challenged is now in plain public view. Even after its
plunge from above $185 to its recent $133, the stock is likely to be a laggard
at best and more likely a good short in the months ahead.
6/14/2010: Where
Are The Taxpayers’ $7 Million Retirement Funds?
a blog by Rich Karlgaard
Where Are The Customers’ Yachts? is a classic investment book. It
was written by Fred Schwed Jr. years after he lost his shirt in the 1929
crash after believing broker pitches. The book is a rowdy Menckenesque punch
at lying Wall Street brokers.
Now in 2010 some clever wit needs to write a book called Where Are The
Taxpayers’ $7 Million Retirement Funds?
I think the book would sell. You can sense it when the leftish San
Francisco Chronicle runs a piece called “Public
employee unions on the defensive,” featuring lines like
this:
Public unions’ traditional strength--the ability to finance their
members’ rising pay and benefits through tax increases--has become a
liability. … Voters turn resentful as they sense that they are
underwriting, through their taxes, a level of salary and benefits for
government employment that is better than what they and their families have.
Yup--there are millions of overtaxed families wondering the same thing.
That’s why the book would sell.
More from the Chron piece.
The biggest blow to unions’ public support has come from
revelations about jaw-dropping compensation and pension benefits. Police have
received unwelcome attention for budget-busting overtime and the manipulation
of eligibility rules for “disability pensions,” which provide
higher benefits and tax advantages. Other government employees, particularly
managers, have been called out for “pension spiking”: using
vacation time, sick pay and the like to boost income in the last years of
employment, which are the basis for calculating retirement benefits.
Such gaming of the system boosts starting pensions to levels that can
approach, and even exceed, employees’ salaries. Some examples from the
reporting of the Contra Costa Times’ Daniel Borenstein: A retired
Northern California fire chief whose $185,000 salary morphed into a $241,000
annual pension; a county administrator whose $240,000 starting pension was 98
percent of final salary; and a sanitary district manager who qualified for a
$217,000 pension on a salary of $234,000. At a time when most Californians
anticipate an austere retirement (if they can afford to retire at all),
government pensions are a source of real voter anger.
The harm to the credibility of public employee unions from these
excesses is made far worse by the unions’ attempts to hide them. The
revelations about pay and pension abuses have surfaced only as a result of
lawsuits.
I applaud the San Francisco Chronicle for publishing it. You get the
sense that the public debate is turning when even the Chron grumbles about
the size of public employee pensions.
I would only add that the net present value of the retired fire
chief’s $241,000 annual pension is about $7 million given today’s
low yields. Got that? Seven million dollars.
Question for California taxpayers: How is your $7 million retirement
fund coming along?
For June 8, 2010,
Primary Election
When in doubt, vote against the incumbent!
6/3/2010: The
Parable of Prohibition by Johann Hari
A very bizarre chapter of history can teach us a lot.
…With the
passage of the 18th Amendment in 1921, the dysfunctions of Prohibition began.
When
you ban a popular drug that millions of people want, it doesn’t
disappear. Instead, it is transferred from the legal economy into the hands
of armed criminal gangs. Across America, gangsters rejoiced that they
had just been handed one of the biggest markets in the country, and unleashed
an armada of freighters, steamers, and even submarines to bring booze back.
Nobody who wanted a drink went without. As the journalist Malcolm Bingay
wrote, “It was absolutely impossible to get a drink, unless you walked
at least ten feet and told the busy bartender in a voice loud enough for him
to hear you above the uproar.”
So if it
didn’t stop alcoholism, what did it achieve? The same as prohibition
does today—a massive unleashing of criminality and violence. Gang wars
broke out, with the members torturing and murdering one another first to gain
control of and then to retain their patches. Thousands of ordinary citizens
were caught in the crossfire. The icon of the new criminal class was Al Capone,
a figure so fixed in our minds as the scar-faced King of Charismatic Crime,
pursued by the rugged federal agent Eliot Ness, that Okrent’s
biographical details seem oddly puncturing. Capone was only 25 when he
tortured his way to running Chicago’s underworld. He was gone from the
city by the age of 30 and a syphilitic corpse by 40. But he was an eloquent
exponent of his own case, saying simply, “I give to the public what the
public wants. I never had to send out high pressure salesmen. Why, I could
never meet the demand.”
By 1926, he and his
fellow gangsters were making $3.6 billion a year—in 1926 money! [more
than $44 billion in today’s dollars] To give some perspective, that was
more than the entire expenditure of the U.S. government. The criminals could outbid and
outgun the state. So they crippled the institutions of a democratic state and
ruled, just as drug gangs do today in Mexico, Afghanistan, and ghettos from
South Central Los Angeles to the banlieues of Paris. They have been handed a
market so massive that they can tool up to intimidate everyone in their area,
bribe many police and judges into submission, and achieve such a vast size,
the honest police couldn’t even begin to get them all. The late Nobel
Prize winning economist Milton Friedman said, “Al Capone epitomizes our
earlier attempts at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this
one.”
One insight, more
than any other, ripples down from Okrent’s history to our own bout of
prohibition. Armed criminal gangs don’t fear prohibition: They love it. He
has uncovered fascinating evidence that the criminal gangs sometimes
financially supported dry politicians, precisely to keep it in place.
They knew if it ended, most of organized crime in America would be
bankrupted. So it’s a nasty irony that prohibitionists try to present
legalizers—then and now—as “the bootlegger’s
friend” or “the drug-dealer’s ally.” Precisely the
opposite is the truth. Legalizers are the only people who can bankrupt and
destroy the drug gangs, just as they destroyed Capone. Only the
prohibitionists can keep them alive.
...Yet
it [the repeal of Prohibition] happened. It happened suddenly and completely.
Why? The answer is found in your wallet, with the hard cash. After the Great
Crash, the government’s revenues from income taxes collapsed by 60
percent in just three years, while the need for spending to stimulate the
economy was skyrocketing. The U.S. government needed a new source of
income, fast. The giant untaxed, unchecked alcohol industry suddenly looked like
a giant pot of cash at the end of the prohibitionist rainbow. Could the same
thing happen today, after our own Great Crash? The bankrupt state of
California is about to hold a referendum to legalize and tax cannabis, and
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has pointed out that it could raise massive sums.
Yes, history does rhyme.
[Read entire
article]
6/7/2010: Counting on Government Stupidity
The specious reasoning of Census
employment
...from the Daily Reckoning
Well, the
much-awaited unemployment report came out on Friday. The pundits, analysts,
and kibitzers were all waiting. Their mouths open. Their pulses racing. They
expected an “I told you so” moment.
Bloomberg polled them
a week or two ago. The 2000 of them surveyed were overwhelmingly
bullish...with the average forecast of a 27% increase for the stock market in
2010.
They must have
thought the job figures would show that the ‘recovery’ was firmly
underway...with unemployment finally turning down in a big way. Then it would
be clear sailing...
Oops... Bummer!
It turned out that 95%
of the new jobs were census takers - people paid by the government to
count the people who pay the government.
It also turned out
that people are waiting longer than ever to find a job...an average of 34
months compared to only 16 months in 2007.
Investors’
mouths turned down. They sold stocks so they could go home for the weekend
without worrying. The Dow dropped 323 points.
The shorthand
interpretation? It’s a Great Correction...not a recovery.
The census takers
illustrate our point. Government spending - including government
jobs - do not really make us richer. They make us poorer. If you
could make people better off by hiring them to count each other, why not
count them twice? Or three times?
The trouble is, no
matter how often you do it...or how well you do it...counting people
doesn’t add to our wealth; it takes away from it. Because it diverts
resources - human labor - from worthwhile activities to activities that are a
waste of time. And the more people you hire, the bigger the waste...and the
poorer you get.
Why count people
anyway? So you can apportion seats in the House of Representatives? We got a
census form in the mail. It looked official...and very nosey. As far as
we’re concerned, it’s none of their damned business!
But wait a minute.
What if the government hired people to do useful things - such as baking and
pole dancing? Well, as Jefferson put it, if you expect the government to do
your baking for you, you “will soon want bread.”
As for the pole
dancing, we don’t know...
But there’s no
secret to what makes people wealthier. No magic. No miracles. No free
lunches.
People want to
believe that the feds can pull off some trick...that they can turn this Great
Correction around by stimulating this or regulating that. Or how about
tarring and feathering the BP chairman? Or sacrificing a few of
Goldman’s young virgins? What? There are no virgins at Goldman? Well,
how about some old sluts from JPMorgan?
JPMorgan just got
fined $50 million - the largest penalty ever handed out by a UK regulator.
What was its crime? “Failing to protect billions of dollars of client
money by keeping it in segregated accounts,” says The Financial Times.
How much did
clients lose as a result of JPMorgan’s faithlessness?
Not a penny. But
they could have lost big-time, said the FSA. And besides, the regulators are
getting tough everywhere.
Back in the USA, BP
faces criminal charges. We don’t know exactly what its crime was
either...but with so many laws on the books, it’s hard to imagine the
giant oil company didn’t break a few of them.
Not that we’re
shedding any tears for the goo pumper. If they can’t keep the oil in
their pipes, they should get out of the oil business. But it’s a tough
business. And accidents are bound to happen.
Destroying the
oceans and endangering life on planet earth could be called a mistake. But
destroying the economy is malicious mischief. Which is what the feds are doing.
So, Friday, the news
was let out that the jobs stimulus effort was a flop. And as it made its way
from one Bloomberg terminal to the others...the traders sold!
‘Risk
off’...the traders call it. It means that they are selling their
‘risky’ investment positions and putting the money into safe
positions - notably, US treasury bonds. The dollar rose on the news - and is
now near a 4-year high.
6/7/2010: The Patriot Post [some great stuff today]
The Foundation
“[T]o preserve
liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess
arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.”
--Federal Farmer
Liberty
“Gun owners
might not feel besieged right now, but they should be very concerned.
[Recently] the Obama administration announced its support for the UN Small
Arms Treaty. This treaty poses real risks for freedom and safety in the
United States as well as the rest of the world. According to the U.N., guns
used in armed conflicts cause 300,000 deaths worldwide every year. Their
proposed solution is a simple one. Keep rebels from getting guns by requiring
that countries ‘prevent, combat and eradicate’ what those
countries define as ‘the illicit trade in small arms.’ The
UN’s solution isn’t too surprising when one looks at the long
list of notorious totalitarian regimes, such as Syria, Cuba, Rwanda, Vietnam,
Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone, which support these ‘reforms.’ But
not all insurgencies are ‘bad.’ To ban providing guns to rebels
in totalitarian countries is like arguing that there is never anything such
as a just war… Political scientist Rudy Rummel estimates that 262
million people were murdered by their own government during the last century
-- that is 2.6 million per year. This includes genocide, the murder of people
for political reasons, and mass murder. Even if all 300,000 deaths from armed
conflicts can be blamed on the small arms trade, an obviously false claim,
people have much more to worry about from their governments. ... The Small
Arms Treaty is just a back door way for the Obama administration trying to
force through gun control regulations. With the huge standing ovation that
House and Senate Democrats recently gave Mexican President Calderon for his
advocacy of a new so-called ‘Assault Weapons Ban,’ Americans who
care about self-defense have been put on notice.” --economist John Lott
Government
“Today, as it
has been for a century, American politics is an argument between two
Princetonians -- James Madison, class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, class of
1879. Madison was the most profound thinker among the Founders. Wilson,
avatar of ‘progressivism,’ was the first president critical of
the nation’s founding. Barack Obama’s Wilsonian agenda reflects
its namesake’s rejection of limited government. ... Today, government
finds the limitless power of dispensing not in Madison’s Constitution
of limited government but in Wilson’s theory that the Constitution
actually frees government from limitations. The liberating -- for government
-- idea is that the Constitution is a ‘living,’ evolving
document. Wilson’s Constitution is an emancipation proclamation for
government, empowering it to regulate all human activities in order to treat
all human desires as needs and hence as rights. ... Needs breed rights to
have the needs addressed, to the point that Lyndon Johnson, an FDR
protégé, promised that government would provide Americans with
‘purpose’ and ‘meaning.’ ... Lacking a limiting
principle, progressivism cannot say how big the welfare state should be but
must always say that it should be bigger than it currently is. Furthermore,
by making a welfare state a fountain of rights requisite for democracy,
progressives in effect declare that democratic deliberation about the
legitimacy of the welfare state is illegitimate. ... Wilsonian government,
meaning (in Wilson’s words) government with ‘unstinted
power,’ is hostile to Madison’s Constitution which, Madison said,
obliges government ‘to control itself.’” --columnist George
Will
Re: The Left
“President
Obama and congressional Democrats say the DISCLOSE Act, which is expected to
come up for a vote soon, is aimed at ensuring transparency and preventing
corruption in the wake of Citizens United v. FEC, the January decision in
which the Supreme Court lifted restrictions on political speech by
corporations and unions. But the bill’s onerous, lopsided requirements
suggest its supporters are more interested in silencing their critics. ...
The anxiety and uncertainty created by the new rules would be compounded by
the fact that they would take effect 30 days after the law is enacted, before
the FEC would have time to issue regulations clarifying them. Opposing an
amendment that would have postponed the effective date until Jan. 1, Rep.
Michael Capuano, D-Mass., said he wants people to worry about a fine or
prison sentence when they dare to speak ill of him. ‘I hope it chills
out all -- not one side, all sides!’ said Capuano. ‘I have no
problem whatsoever keeping everybody out. If I could keep all outside
entities out, I would.’ Similarly, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., upon
unveiling the bill, said ‘the deterrent effect should not be
underestimated.’ For those who view nonpoliticians as meddlesome
‘outside entities’ and criticism of incumbents as a crime to be
deterred, the chilling effect of campaign finance laws is a feature, not a
bug.” --columnist Jacob Sullum
Faith & Family
“Again and
again, Americans find themselves at war with each other over public
schooling. Yet furious conflict over religion in this country is almost
unheard-of. ... So why does the endless variety of religious life in the
United States lead to so little strife, while the strife over public
schooling never seems to end? The answer is no mystery. America is a land of
religious freedom, in which people decide for themselves what to believe and
how to worship. No religion is funded by government. No church or synagogue
has a state-supported monopoly. Elected officials have no say in the
doctrines of any faith or the content of any religious service. Religion
flourishes in America because church and state are separate. And it
flourishes so peacefully because no one is forced to support anyone
else’s faith, or to attend a church he isn’t happy with, or to
bring up children according to the religious views of whichever faction has
the most votes. Religion is peaceful because it is government-free. Liberate
the schools, and they too would be at peace. Taxpayer-funded,
one-curriculum-fits-all schooling makes conflict inevitable. There would be
far less animosity if parents were as free to choose how and where their
children learn as they are to choose how and where they worship. Separation
of church and state has made America an exemplar of religious pluralism and
tolerance. Imagine what separation of school and state could do for
education.” --columnist Jeff Jacoby
6/5/2010: The Dr. Zhivago Option By Robert Ringer
The
other day, one of my son’s friends, who had just come home from college
for the summer, stopped over to say hello. We chatted briefly, and I asked
him if he was still planning on becoming an entrepreneur/businessman after he
graduated from school next spring.
To
my surprise, he said that because of the economy, he had changed his mind
about pursuing a business career. He told me that he now planned to apply for
a job with the CIA. Surprised, I asked, “What in the world made you
decide to go to work for the CIA?”
Without
pause, he responded, “It’s so tough to get a job nowadays that I
figured I’d just go to work for the government, because there’s
much more security in a government job.” I immediately thought to
myself that standing right in front of me was a new Barack Obama voter!
It’s
simple: Get as many people as possible working for the government - which can
always meet its payroll by taking money from entrepreneurs and small
businesspeople who create private-sector jobs - and thereby assure winning a
majority of votes in every election.
It
reminded me of a conversation I had many years ago with a brilliant,
ultra-pragmatic, narcissistic acquaintance who had a hugely successful
economic consulting business. One day we were having a discussion about the
United States’ relentless move toward collectivism, and I asked him,
“Given how you’re addicted to the material things in life, what
would you do if the United States ever became a full-fledged communist
country?”
Without
so much as a pause, he answered, in a matter-of-fact tone, “That
wouldn’t be a problem. I’d just become a member of the Communist
Party and work my way into the inner circle.” His response evoked a nervous
chuckle from me, but the chuckle quickly faded as I realized he was deadly
serious. His answer bothered me then, and it bothers me even more today.
The
first thing that went through my mind after that conversation was the
movie Dr. Zhivago and Rod Steiger’s character Viktor
Komarovsky. Komarovsky was a member of Russia’s elite class that dined
on caviar and expensive vodka while the masses lived on the edge of
starvation in abject poverty.
But
when it became clear that the Bolshevik Revolution would succeed, Viktor
Komarovsky simply cozied up to the revolutionary hierarchy and proclaimed
himself to be a communist. He was well aware that revolutionary rhetoric was
a fantasy, and that in every revolution, it’s the toughest and wiliest
thugs who emerge as the new royalty.
For
the masses, of course, things stay pretty much the same, though under
communism they usually end up even worse off than they were before the
revolution (as was certainly the case in Russia following the Bolshevik
Revolution).
Today,
the Komarovsky mind-set is a serious problem in the United States. I keep
saying that Obama and Co. know they are going down to massive defeats if
there are elections in 2010, but maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps I’ve
underestimated their determination to get enough people on the government
dole and government payroll to mathematically assure victory.
I
continue to say that most of the big stories in the news are nothing more
than distractions - distractions that take people’s focus off the biggest
problem Americans are facing: an irreversible loss of their liberty. That
includes the BP oil spill, illegal immigration, and even Obama’s
attempt to buy off Joe Sestak to get him out of the race so he could pay back
Arlen Specter for his open conversion to the progressive cause.
It’s
not that some of these issues aren’t important; they are. But they are
not as important as Americans unthinkingly submitting to servitude. And that is
what the Obamaviks don’t want the masses to think about.
When
it comes to the mid-term elections in 2010, Republicans are running a race
against the clock, because it’s only a matter of time until the
government has a large enough percentage of voters on its payroll and on the
dole to assure a permanent majority in the House and Senate, not to mention
permanent control of the White House.
Worst
of all, the Republican Party itself has a whole army of Viktor Komarovskys in
its ranks, ready to support the Obamaviks at the drop of a vote. Names like
Mitt Romney (the de facto architect of Obamacare), John McCain (“I was
in favor of illegal immigration before I was against it.”), Lindsey
Graham (an unabashed hard-core progressive), Mike Huckabee (the slickest -
and possibly most dangerous - man in America), Orrin Hatch (a deeply entrenched
member of the go-along-to-get-along club), and Mitch McConnell (another
deeply entrenched member of the same club) come quickly to mind.
These
men have conclusively demonstrated that they are more than willing to support
the progressives’ notion of “social justice” if
that’s what it takes to get elected and reelected. Their greatest
threat comes from people with names like Bachmann, Ryan, DeMint, Rubio, and
Paul & Paul.
Over
the next five months, you can be sure that a lot of Republican blood will be
spilled in the war between the Viktor Komarovskys of the Republican Party and
those who refuse to go along with the business-as-usual Dr. Zhivago Option.
And you can guess which side the socialists in the Democratic People’s
Party will be cheering for.
Copyright
2010 Tortoise Press, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
6/5/2010: Employers
on Strike - WSJ.com
Congress keeps giving business reasons not to hire.
It’s
too bad we can’t do the Census every year, because maybe the U.S.
economy would then show some jobs growth. That quip was one of the rueful
asides we heard yesterday as Americans learned that the economy created a net
total of 431,000 new jobs in May, including 411,000 temporary Census hires.
The
private economy—that is, the wealth creation part, not the wealth
redistribution part—gained only 41,000 jobs, down sharply from the
encouraging 218,000 in April, and 158,000 in March. The unemployment rate did
fall to 9.7% from 9.9%, but that was mainly because the labor force
contracted by 322,000. Millions of Americans, beyond the 15 million Americans
officially counted as unemployed, have given up looking for work.
Worst of
all, nearly half of all unemployed workers in America today (a record 46%)
have been out of work for six months or more. Normally job growth accelerates
during the early stages of an economic rebound, but this dismal report
suggests that the recovery remains well short of becoming a typical
expansion.
There
were some slivers of good news in the May jobs report. For those who have
jobs, the average work week rose by 0.1 hours to 34.2 hours and earnings
nudged upward by 0.3%. Manufacturers added 29,000 workers, and their hours
worked jumped 5.1%, the best since 1983.
Perhaps
this is what White House chief economist Christina Romer was looking at
yesterday when she cited “encouraging developments” in the jobs
market and “continuing signs of labor market recovery.” We doubt
this was the private reaction in the Oval Office, whose occupant was told by
Ms. Romer and economic co-religionist Jared Bernstein that the February 2009
stimulus would kick start a recovery in growth and jobs. Whatever happened to
the great neo-Keynesian “multiplier,” in which $1 in government
spending was supposed to produce 1.5 times that in economic output?
Imagine
if Ms. Romer had instead promised in 2009 that Congress could spend nearly $1
trillion, and 16 months later the unemployment rate would be nearly 10% and that
more than 2.5 million additional Americans would be without jobs. Would
Congress have still spent the cash? Well, sure, Congress will always spend
what it can get away with, but the American public would have turned against
the stimulus even faster than it has.
The
multiplier is an illusion because that Keynesian $1 has to come from
somewhere in the private economy, either in higher taxes or borrowing. Its
net economic impact was probably negative because so much of the stimulus was
handed out in transfer payments (jobless benefits, Medicaid expansions,
welfare) that did nothing to change incentives to invest or take risks.
Meanwhile, that $862 billion was taken out of the more productive private
economy.
Almost
everything Congress has done in recent months has made private businesses
less inclined to hire new workers. ObamaCare imposes new taxes and mandates
on private employers. Even with record unemployment, Congress raised the
minimum wage to $7.25, pricing more workers out of jobs. The teen unemployment
rate rose to 26.4% in May, and for those between the ages of 25 and 34 it
rose to 10.5%. These should be some of the first to be hired in an expansion
because they are relatively cheap and have the potential for large
productivity gains as they add skills.
The
“jobs” bill that the House passed last week expands jobless
insurance to 99 weeks, while raising taxes by $80 billion on small employers
and U.S-based corporations. On January 1, Congress is set to let taxes rise
on capital gains, dividends and small businesses. None of these are
incentives to hire more Americans.
Ms. Romer
said yesterday that to “ensure a more rapid, widespread
recovery,” the White House supports “tax incentives for clean
energy,” and “extensions of unemployment insurance and other key
income support programs, a fund to encourage small business lending, and
fiscal relief for state and local governments.” Hello? This is the
failed 2009 stimulus in miniature.
It’s
always a mistake to read too much into one month’s jobs data, and we still
think the recovery will lumber on. But if Ms. Romer wants this to be more
than a jobless recovery, she and her boss should drop their
government-creates-wealth illusions and start asking why so many private
employers remain on strike.
6/5/2010: Storming
the School Barricades By Bari Weiss
A new documentary by a 27-year-old
filmmaker could change the national debate about public education.
“What’s funny,” says Madeleine
Sackler, “is that I’m not really a political person.” Yet
the petite 27-year-old is the force behind “The Lottery”—an
explosive new documentary about the battle over the future of public
education opening nationwide this Tuesday.
In the spring of 2008, Ms. Sackler, then a
freelance film editor, caught a segment on the local news about New
York’s biggest lottery. It wasn’t the Powerball. It was a chance
for 475 lucky kids to get into one of the city’s best charter schools
(publicly funded schools that aren’t subject to union rules).
“I was blown away by the number of parents
that were there,” Ms. Sackler tells me over coffee on Manhattan’s
Upper West Side, recalling the thousands of people packed into the Harlem
Armory that day for the drawing. “I wanted to know why so many parents
were entering their kids into the lottery and what it would mean for
them.” And so Ms. Sackler did what any aspiring filmmaker would do: She
grabbed her camera.
Her initial aim was simple. “Going into the
film I was excited just to tell a story,” she says. “A
vérité film, a really beautiful, independent story about four
families that you wouldn’t know otherwise” in the months leading
up to the lottery for the Harlem Success Academy.
But on the way to making the film she imagined,
she “stumbled on this political mayhem—really like a turf war
about the future of public education.” Or more accurately, she happened
upon a raucous protest outside of a failing public school in which Harlem
Success, already filled to capacity, had requested space.
“We drove by that protest,” Ms.
Sackler recalls. “We were on our way to another interview and we jumped
out of the van and started filming.” There she discovered that the
majority of those protesting the proliferation of charter schools were not
even from the neighborhood. They’d come from the Bronx and Queens.
“They all said ‘We’re not
allowed to talk to you. We’re just here to support the
parents.’” But there were only two parents there, says Ms.
Sackler, and both were members of Acorn. And so, “after not a lot of
digging,” she discovered that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT)
had paid Acorn, the controversial community organizing group, “half a
million dollars for the year.” (It cost less to make the film.)
Finding out that the teachers union had hired a
rent-a-mob to protest on its behalf was “the turn for us in the
process.” That story—of self-interested adults trying to deny
poor parents choice for their children—provided an answer to Ms.
Sackler’s fundamental question: “If there are these
high-performing schools that are closing the achievement gap, why
aren’t there more of them?”
The reason is what Eva Moskowitz, founder of the
Harlem Success Academy network and a key character in the film, calls the
“union-political-educational complex.” That’s a fancy term
for the web of unions and politicians who defend the status quo in order to
protect their jobs.
In the course of making “The Lottery,”
Ms. Sackler got to know the nature of that coalition intimately. “On
day one, of course, I was very interested in all sides. I was in no way
affiliated.” From the beginning, she requested meetings with then UFT
President Randi Weingarten, or anyone representing the union position. They
refused. Harlem’s public schools weren’t much more accessible.
“It was easier to film in a maximum security
prison”—something Ms. Sackler did to interview a
parent—”than it was to film in a traditional public
school.”
Viewers still get a sense of the union’s
position, but it comes from the mouths of some unsavory New York pols. Take,
for example, a scene from the film featuring a City Council hearing on
charter school expansion. “The UFT was exposed at this particular City
Council hearing,” she says, “because they were caught giving out
scripted cue cards with specific questions for City Council members to ask
charter representatives in the city.” Unlike many of the politicians,
who came and went from the chamber during the seven-hour hearing, Ms. Sackler
remained. And she watched as the scripted questions were repeated and
repeated and repeated.
“It was just a colossal waste of
time,” she says. “And it was incredibly frustrating as a citizen
to be sitting there. Out of all the things they could be talking
about—like the fact . . . that at the majority of schools in Harlem
kids aren’t passing the state exams—instead of talking about this
stuff, they were cycling through those questions.”‘
Evasion is one tactic. So is propagating myths
about Harlem Success—that it only succeeds because it has smaller class
sizes; or that its children’s test scores are so high because it gets
more money. The truth is that the school gets superior results with the same
or slightly bigger class sizes and less state money per pupil. In 2009, 95%
of third-graders at Harlem Success passed the state’s English Language
Arts exam. Only 51% of third graders in P.S. 149, the traditional public
school that shares the same building, did. That same year, Harlem Success was
No. 1 in math out of 3,500 public schools in New York State.
The unions and the politicians also play on
Harlemites’ fears by alleging that charters divide the community and
are a “tool for gentrification.” This canard only holds up if you
think uniforms and longer school days are a sign of cultural imperialism.
In a particularly cringe-inducing exchange
captured on film, Councilwoman Maria Del Carmen Arroyo of the Bronx accuses
Ms. Moskowitz of lying when the charter school leader talks about being a
parent in Harlem (the neighborhood where she grew up, where she attended
public school, and where she is raising her children, who attend the
charter). The subtext, of course, is that Ms. Moskowitz is white and
well-off.
This is par for the course, Ms. Sackler tells me.
Harlem Success Academy is “protested more than any other charter school
in this city—and there are some bad charter schools. So you would
wonder why that would be.”
Those wondering why need look no further than
2002, the year that Ms. Moskowitz, then a Democratic City Council member,
became chair of the city’s education committee. “She held a lot
of hearings on the union contract—and the custodian contract, and the
principal contract,” says Ms. Sackler. New Yorkers learned that the
teachers’ contract is hundreds of pages long and littered with rules
mandating every detail of how teachers will spend their workday.
The union was not pleased. So when Evil Moskowitz,
as she was dubbed, ran for Manhattan borough president in 2005, the UFT
campaigned hard for her opponent, Scott Stringer, who won.
Ms. Moskowitz, who confirmed in an interview that
she has mayoral aspirations, was surely disappointed by the defeat. But her
loss was Harlemites’ gain. As one mother says of Ms. Moskowitz at a
town hall meeting in Harlem, “She’s our Obama. She brought change
to our kids, okay?”
Some parents in the film do not know what exactly
a charter school is. And the truth, as the film implicitly points out, is
that such technical designations don’t much matter. What these parents
know is that they desperately want their children to have the best possible
education, and to have opportunities that they themselves could only imagine.
Winning a spot in Harlem Success Academy—or another high-performing
school—is critical to reaching that goal.
“Going into it one of the goals was to
expose one myth . . . which is that some parents don’t care,”
says Ms. Sackler. “The reason for telling the parents’ stories is
that I never thought that was true.”
In “The Lottery,” we are introduced to
Eric Roachford, who, like his father, works as a bus driver. As an MTA
employee, Mr. Roachford is a “union man, but at the same time, we want
our child to learn.” He believes that going to college “is the
difference between a job and a career.” That’s why his wife,
Shawna, has taken time off to home school their two young sons.
Nadiyah Horne, a single mother who is also deaf,
is raising 5-year-old Ammenah. “If others don’t like this school,
I don’t care,” she says, using sign language. “I want my
child to get the best education.” So does Emil Yoanson, who is raising
his son Christian alone, and who prays to God that his name will be drawn.
“Being a single mom is very, very
hard” says Laurie Brown-Goodwine, who has applied to several charters
for her son, Gregory Jr. Her husband is serving 25 years to life in prison
for a third-strike felony.
These are parents who don’t have the means
to move to a richer neighborhood with better public schools, so instead they
have to rely on luck. When demand for a charter school exceeds supply, the
random drawing is required by law. Some schools inform parents by mail, but
Harlem Success holds a public lottery. “Harlem Success is very explicit
about why they do it,” Ms. Sackler says. They want to show demand. “I’ve
heard them say to parents ‘We hope that you’ll come and show that
this is something that you want. Because if you don’t, we’re not
going to get more schools.’”
In the film, Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker says
he can’t go to lotteries anymore because they break his heart. “A
child’s destiny should not be determined on the pull of a draw.”
Nothing drives home this point more than seeing the parents and kids, perched
at the edge of their chairs, hoping their names flash on the big screen.
Critics of “The Lottery” will probably
contend that the absence of anti-charter voices hurts its credibility. But
the scene Thursday night at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater, where
the film was screened, underscored the film’s fundamental point about
parents’ apolitical dedication to educating their kids. After the
documentary played, the film’s parents took to the stage to answer
questions from the theater’s packed audience. Their message: Research
options early and ignore labels—all that matters is the school’s
results. It’s the same message, the parents said, that they now
regularly share in neighborhood grocery markets and libraries.
Harlem Success, meanwhile, is trying to keep pace
with parents’ demand. Right now the network has four schools, but in 10
years it hopes to operate 40, with some 20,000 kids enrolled. Even then,
there would be more work ahead: This year, some 40,000 New York kids will end
up on charter school waiting lists.
“The public education system is at a
crossroads,” Ms. Sackler says. “Do we want to go back to the time
when children are forced to attend their district school no matter how
underperforming it is? Or do we want to let parents choose what’s best
for their kids and provide a lot of options? Sometimes those options might
fail. But . . . I don’t see how you could choose to settle for what
we’ve been doing for half a century when it’s been systemically
screwing over the same kids—over and over and over.”
Ms. Weiss is an assistant
editorial features editor at the Journal.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A13
Taxman Obama Remix (parody)
The
Beatles - Taxman Cartoon
Taxman
by the Beatles (original)
One, two, three, four...
Hmm!
One, two, (one, two, three, four!)
Let me tell you how it will be;
There’s one for you, nineteen for me.
‘Cause I’m the taxman,
Yeah, I’m the taxman.
Should five per cent appear too
small,
Be thankful I don’t take it all.
‘Cause I’m the taxman,
Yeah, I’m the taxman.
(if you drive a car, car;) -
I’ll tax the street;
(if you try to sit, sit;) - I’ll tax your seat;
(if you get too cold, cold;) - I’ll tax the heat;
(if you take a walk, walk;) - I’ll tax your feet.
Taxman!
‘Cause I’m the taxman,
Yeah, I’m the taxman.
Don’t ask me what I want it
for, (ah-ah, mister Wilson)
If you don’t want to pay some more. (ah-ah, mister heath)
‘Cause I’m the taxman,
Yeah, I’m the taxman.
Now my advice for those who die,
(taxman)
Declare the pennies on your eyes. (taxman)
‘Cause I’m the taxman,
Yeah, I’m the taxman.
And you’re working for no
one but me.
Taxman!
Pete Stark is an idiot;
this man should not be allowed to run a cash register, let alone vote on how
we run our lives.
Obama: Pinko and the Brain
– Narf!
Everything you need to understand
about Barack Obama can be gleaned from watching any episode of Pinky and The Brain. All the elements are there, the quest for world domination, the
Byzantine plots, a brilliant and dreadfully persistent mind hatching schemes
of impossible complexity on a daily basis.
The punch line of course is that
President Obama is not The Brain, he is Pinky — or, perhaps more
properly, Pinko. Whoever The Brain is — singular or plural — is
still a matter for conjecture, but nobody watching this man’s
performance over the last 18 months can possibly still believe that Obama is
the super competent, coolly analytical, near genius the media continues to
try to sell us.
Rest
of Article
6/1/2010: The loss of liberty, to a generous mind,
is worse than death. And yet we know that there have been those in all ages
who for the sake of preferment, or some imaginary honor, have freely lent a
helping hand to oppress, nay to destroy, their country... This is what every
man who values freedom ought to consider. He should act by judgment and not
by affection or self-interest; for where those prevail, no ties of either
country or kindred are regarded; as upon the other hand, the man who loves
his country prefers its liberty to all other considerations, well knowing
that without liberty life is a misery... — Andrew Hamilton, The Trial
of John Peter Zenger [1735]
6/1/2010: The
Real Public Service by Thomas Sowell
Editors’
Note: this is a reprint of a classic Thomas Sowell column. Enjoy!
Every year about this time, big-government liberals
stand up in front of college commencement crowds across the country and urge
the graduates to do the noblest thing possible-- become big-government
liberals.
That isn’t how they phrase it, of course.
Commencement speakers express great reverence for “public
service,” as distinguished from narrow private “greed.”
There is usually not the slightest sign of embarrassment at this self-serving
celebration of the kinds of careers they have chosen-- over and above the
careers of others who merely provide us with the food we eat, the homes we
live in, the clothes we wear and the medical care that saves our health and
our lives.
What I would like to see is someone with the guts
to tell those students: Do you want to be of some use and service to your
fellow human beings? Then let your fellow human beings tell you what they
want-- not with words, but by putting their money where their mouth is.
You want to see more people have better housing? Build
it! Become a builder or developer-- if you can stand the sneers and disdain
of your classmates and professors who regard the very words as repulsive.
Would you like to see more things become more
affordable to more people? Then figure out more efficient ways of producing
things or more efficient ways of getting those things from the producers to
the consumers at a lower cost.
That’s what a man named Sam Walton did when
he created Wal-Mart, a boon to people with modest incomes and a bane to the
elite intelligentsia. In the process, Sam Walton became rich. Was that the
“greed” that you have heard your classmates and professors
denounce so smugly? If so, it has been such “greed” that has
repeatedly brought prices down and thereby brought the American standard of
living up.
Back at the beginning of the 20th century, only 15
percent of American families had a flush toilet. Not quite one-fourth had
running water. Only three percent had electricity and one percent had central
heating. Only one American family in a hundred owned an automobile.
By 1970, the vast majority of those American
families who were living in poverty had flush toilets, running water and
electricity. By the end of the twentieth century, more Americans were
connected to the Internet than were connected to a water pipe or a sewage
line at the beginning of the century.
More families have air-conditioning today than had
electricity then. Today, more than half of all families with incomes below
the official poverty line own a car or truck and have a microwave.
This didn’t come about because of the
politicians, bureaucrats, activists or others in “public service”
that you are supposed to admire. No nation ever protested its way from
poverty to prosperity or got there through rhetoric or bureaucracies.
It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity,
not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground,
not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the
isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not
Ralph Nader.
Those who have helped the poor the most have not
been those who have gone around loudly expressing “compassion”
for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and
distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that
the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.
The wonderful places where you are supposed to go
to do “public service” are as sheltered from the brutal test of
reality as you have been on this campus for the last four-- or is it six?--
years. In these little cocoons, all that matters is how well you talk the
talk. People who go into the marketplace have to walk the walk.
Colleges can teach many valuable skills, but they
can also nourish many dangerous illusions. If you really want to be of
service to others, then let them decide what is a service by whether they
choose to spend their hard-earned money for it.
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