...How to describe that fabled abstraction known
as Wall Street? George Mason University economics professor Russell Roberts
unhesitatingly calls it “a giant government-sanctioned Ponzi
scheme” that played a central role in the recent financial crisis.
Roberts distinguishes Wall Street’s Ponzi
scheme from capitalism. Under capitalism, he explains, “The profits
encourage risk-taking. The losses encourage prudence.” But when
government socializes the losses risk-takers might suffer, the system becomes
a one-sided bet. Capitalism morphs into crony capitalism, and prudence is
forgotten.
Based on his diagnosis, he proposes radical
reform. “The standard policy response,” he observes, “...is
to reduce the size of financial institutions to make them small enough to be
able to fail, to restrict executive pay to reduce the potential for looting,
and to increase capital requirements to reduce the fragility of the system
induced by leverage.” But, he says, “we would have better luck
letting the natural restraints of capitalism re-emerge.” That includes
abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, restraining rather than empowering the
Federal Reserve, and not “rescuing rich people from the consequences of
their decisions with money coming from average Americans.”
...Asked what he thought of Western civilization,
Mahatma Gandhi quipped that he thought it would be “a very good
idea.” Ask those of us who have read Gambling with Other People’s
Money what we think of capitalism, and we will most likely respond: a great
idea, worth trying.
[Russell Roberts book is free at
http://mercatus.org/publication/gambling-other-peoples-money]
5/31/2010: The Road
to Ruin - Editorial Commentary by Thomas G. Donlan
Both houses of congress focused laser beams of
attention last week on a bill ineptly dubbed the “American Jobs,
Closing Tax Loopholes and Business Relief Act of 2010.”
So far, the two houses haven’t agreed on a
final version, but it’s clear that the jobs it might preserve are
mostly jobs that local and state governments deem not worth paying for with
their own taxes. The loopholes it would close are tiny compared to those it
would open or extend. Business relief turns out to be a euphemism for taxing
corporate income from foreign sources.
It’s one of those “omnibus”
bills that American lawmakers like so much. It would carry many passengers to
a common enactment, although the individuals have little or nothing else in
common. The bill probably will produce more than $200 billion in spending and
tax-loophole extensions, not counting the economic loss from taxing U.S.
businesses abroad.
5/29/2010: Obamalaise by
Gary Jason
When it comes to presidential liars,
Obama makes Clinton and Bush look like novices.
An ocean of ink has been devoted to the surprising
election results in Virginia, New Jersey, and especially Massachusetts. There
is so much angst in the country that even the exceptionally obtuse Obama has
become aware of it. To use a term rendered infamous by the feckless Jimmy
Carter, we are experiencing a national malaise. But what Obama fails to
comprehend is that at the root of the current national malaise is Obama
himself.
In this, as in many other ways, Obama uncannily
resembles Carter, who projected his own defects of thought and action onto
the nation, generating the anxiety and distrust he was purporting to heal. We
can rightly call the national mood “Obamalaise,” because it
arises not just from Obama’s agenda but from his character.
A major factor in Obamalaise is, of course, the
lingering economic recession. The unemployment rate seems stuck at 10%. But
it’s really worse than that. The December 2009 Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS) report put nonfarm job losses at 85,000 in November but
showed that unemployment stayed at 10% — because so many people (over
660,000) had given up looking for work. The BLS household survey — a
more accurate indicator of the unemployment picture, because it measures
underemployed along with unemployed — put the November loss at nearly
590,000 jobs.
More recent data are not encouraging. The January
2010 report put the nonfarm job losses at only 20,000, but it showed that the
December report underreported the number of unemployed. The unemployment rate
dropped to 9.7%, but again this was because of the large number of people who
were no longer searching for work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics job report
for Feb. 5 showed that roughly 15 million Americans remained out of work.
Even if the economy continues to expand, job
growth will probably continue to lag, for reasons I explore below. And we
can’t be sure it will continue to expand. Nouriel Roubini — to
cite only one economist who holds this view — predicts that the economy
will grow at only 3% in the first half of the year, then drop to 1% or 1.5%
in the second half, with unemployment possibly hitting 11%.
Which of Obama’s actions have led to this
malaise? Quite a few, but let me just review six major fields in which the
president’s work has been counterproductive, to say the least.
First, he has focused almost exclusively on
forcing some kind of massive new healthcare entitlement on the country. This
has had three perverse effects, all of which have deterred hiring. As Kathryn
Nix emphasized in a report for the Heritage Institute (Jan. 12), no matter
which version of the bill would have been passed, it would have imposed
massive new labor expenses on small businesses, which create the bulk of new
jobs...
Second, there is Obama’s reflexive tendency
to bash business, obviously an outward manifestation of an inner —
what? lack of enthusiasm for? or is it loathing of? — free enterprise.
He has vociferously attacked doctors, insurance companies, banks —
everyone but lawyers...
Third, Obama’s conspicuous stiffing of
secured lenders has — naturally — discouraged lending. His
thoroughly immoral bankruptcy deal with GM and Chrysler cheated the secured
creditors in favor of the United Auto Workers Union...
Fourth, Obama has pushed an extreme
environmentalist agenda that is a major drag on employment...
Fifth, Obama is the most protectionist president
since Hoover. He has refused to enact the free trade agreements (FTA’s)
that were on his desk the day he walked into the Oval Office (including
agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea), much less negotiate any
new ones...
Sixth, Obama’s spending is grotesque and
destructive. Over 2.7 million jobs have been lost since the passage of his
deceptively named stimulus bill (priced at $787 billion). He will add more to
the deficit in the first 20 months of his presidency than his predecessor did
in eight years — and George W. Bush was certainly no slouch in the
deficit department. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the
deficit for 2010 will hit $1.6 trillion, higher than the record $1.5 trillion
deficit of 2009. And it estimates a deficit of nearly $1 trillion in 2011...
But Obamalaise is not the product simply of
Obama’s anti-business, pro-big-government policies. It is tied to his
character, a character with deceitfulness at its core. He has lied on more
matters more often than any other president I can recall... Here is just a
partial list of Obama’s major deceptions (equivocations, lies, broken
promises, and flip-flopped policies). Consider their size and number. [Read
the entire article for a more complete, but certainly not exhaustive, list of
Obama’s lies]
o After bashing Bush for a $498 billion deficit,
Obama ran a $1.5 trillion deficit, to be followed by a $1.6 trillion deficit,
and then trillion-dollar deficits going forward...
o Obama promised that his stimulus bill would stop
unemployment from going above 8%, and that most of the jobs created would be
in the private sector, but the rate went above 10% and most of the jobs
created are in government.
o Obama pretended to agree with McCain about the
evils of pork-barrel spending, and promised to veto every pork-barrel bill,
before signing a bill containing 9,000 pork-barrel projects...
o Obama repeatedly promised that all negotiations on
healthcare would be completely transparent, indeed, would be broadcast on
C-SPAN, but had nothing but closed door hearings with only Democrats present
in the crafting of the legislation.
o On other areas as well, Obama promised greater
transparency, but rammed through controversial bills with little
discussion...
o Obama promised not to hire lobbyists, but wound up
employing massive numbers of them...
This pattern of lies did not result from accident
or coincidence.
Ellis rightly notes that most other politicians
known for their lies have been trying to protect themselves from scandal
(Clinton’s adultery, Nixon’s abuse of power), or just “to
make themselves look good”; but Obama lies about everything. He employs
deceit as a standard tool. This bespeaks a man false to his core — a
man lost in a state of metaphysical mendacity in which one can say anything
one likes to manipulate others.
Gary Jason
is a contributing editor of Liberty.
A few thoughts, that will probably get me lynched,
on the immigration of Mexicans:
Immigration is not something
Mexico did to the United States, but something the United States did to
itself. Decades ago it changed its laws to favor Latin immigrants, gives
immigrant children born in the US citizenship, avidly employs the illegals,
forbids police to check their papers, give them social services and
schooling, establishes “sanctuary cities,” and in general does
everything but send them engraved invitations. And then expresses surprise
when they come...
Now, a reasonable question
might be, “OK, Fred, what would you do?” If I had the power, I would seal the
border to stop the influx, declare blanket amnesty for those already in the
country, and get on with life. Part of “getting on” would be to encourage
assimilation since the last thing the US needs is another indigestible and
permanent underclass.
Note (as
I have never seen noted) that keeping them illegal forces them into something
close to an underclass. If Pablo wants to start a
restaurant or auto-bodywork business, he can’t, because he will be
asked for papers and eventually shut down…
As is so commonly the case in semi-democracies,
whatever might work is politically impossible, and whatever is politically
possible won’t work...
President
Obama’s War on His Own ‘Youthful Irresponsibility’
by Gene Healy
Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato
Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency. This article appeared
in The Washington Examiner on May 25, 2010.
In his high school yearbook photo, President
Barack Obama sports a white leisure suit and a Travolta-esque collar whose
wingspan could put a bystander’s eye out. Hey, it was 1979.
Maybe that explains the rest of young
Barry’s yearbook page, with its “still life” featuring a
pack of rolling papers and a shout-out to the “Choom gang.”
(“Chooming” is Hawaiian slang for smoking pot.)
Far be it from me to condemn our president for
harmless (and amusing) youthful indiscretions. As his predecessor put it,
“When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and
irresponsible.”
But Obama’s older now, and he’s
responsible for administering our nation’s drug policy. Surely he
can’t feel comfortable locking up thousands of Americans for the sort
of behavior that gave him a chuckle three decades ago.
Yet, in his new National Drug Control Strategy,
Obama “firmly opposes the legalization of marijuana or any other
illicit drug” and boasts of his administration’s aggressive
approach to pot eradication. Watch your back, Choom Gang.
Two days after the “new”
strategy’s release, the Associated Press published a comprehensive
analysis of our 40-year drug war, using data obtained through Freedom of
Information Act requests.
Since 1970, we’ve spent a trillion dollars
trying to improve Americans’ character by preventing them from
ingesting federally disapproved substances. Nearly $450 billion went toward
locking up 37 million nonviolent offenders, 10 million for marijuana
possession.
Obama has won praise from liberal pundits by
paying lip service to drug-war de-escalation, but as the AP report shows, he
has devoted more resources to enforcement than any other president.
“We’re not at war with people in this
country,” the president’s drug czar insists, so we should stop
calling it a “war on drugs,” which leads Americans to see it
“as a war on them.”
How did they ever get that idea? You can find the
answer in a horrifying YouTube video that has garnered more than a million
views this month. In it, a ninja-garbed SWAT team breaks into a private home
in Columbia, Mo., and shoots the family dog in front of the suspect’s
7-year-old son.
After seizing “a pipe and a small amount of
marijuana,” they had the audacity to charge the parents with child
endangerment.
Softer rhetoric won’t change the fact that
the drug war is a war. Since the 1980s, the feds have subsidized the transfer
of military ordnance to local police and Special Forces training of SWAT
teams. That has led to a dangerous warrior ethos among civilian peacekeepers
and an appalling body count. Obama has never gone in for Clintonian dodges
about his youthful drug use. Inhaling “was the point,” he said in
2007, and in his autobiography, he copped to occasionally snorting “a
little blow.”
Like many middle-class kids, the president briefly
flirted with drug culture before putting away childish things and becoming a
high achiever. (Indeed, looking at what he has achieved since, you sometimes
wish pot killed motivation as effectively as drug-war propagandists claim.)
The president lacks the moral authority to lock
people up for behavior he engaged in as a young man. Still, political
realities being what they are, we can’t expect him to declare a total
cease-fire in the drug war. To his credit, Obama has at least reversed the
Bush policy of prosecuting medical marijuana cases in states where it’s
legal.
But Obama may soon be presented with an unwelcome
test of character. In November, Californians will likely approve a ballot
initiative legalizing recreational pot use. Will Obama ignore the
people’s will and continue to prosecute marijuana users in our largest
state?
He has five months to think about doing the right
thing.
5/29/2010: He
Was Supposed to Be Competent by Peggy Noonan
The spill is a disaster for the president and his political philosophy.
I
don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive
the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in
office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were
shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.
There
was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its
cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the
majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40
days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I
don’t see how you politically survive this.
The
president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is
chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen.
This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing
in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from
the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the
country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y
and Z. They’re in one reality, he’s in another.
President
Obama promised on Thursday to hold BP accountable in the catastrophic Gulf of
Mexico oil spill and said his administration would do everything necessary to
protect and restore the coast.
The
American people have spent at least two years worrying that high government
spending would, in the end, undo the republic. They saw the dollars gushing
night and day, and worried that while everything looked the same on the
surface, our position was eroding. They have worried about a border that is
in some places functionally and of course illegally open, that it too is
gushing night and day with problems that states, cities and towns there
cannot solve.
And
now we have a videotape metaphor for all the public’s fears: that clip
we see every day, on every news show, of the well gushing black oil into the
Gulf of Mexico and toward our shore. You actually don’t get deadlier as
a metaphor for the moment than that, the monster that lives deep beneath the
sea.
In
his news conference Thursday, President Obama made his position no better. He
attempted to act out passionate engagement through the use of heightened
language—”catastrophe,” etc.—but repeatedly took refuge
in factual minutiae. His staff probably thought this demonstrated his command
of even the most obscure facts. Instead it made him seem like someone who
won’t see the big picture. The unspoken mantra in his head must have
been, “I will not be defensive, I will not give them a resentful sound
bite.” But his strategic problem was that he’d already lost the
battle. If the well was plugged tomorrow, the damage will already have been
done.
The
original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the
president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency.
He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your
most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting
your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of
a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you
ownership and responsibility the hard way. In any case, the strategy was
always a little mad. Americans would never think an international petroleum
company based in London would worry as much about American shores and
wildlife as, say, Americans would. They were never going to blame only BP, or
trust it.
I
wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but
for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for
the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place
in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But
in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise:
“Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your
trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job,
could not meet need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so
much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”
This
is what happened with Katrina, and Katrina did at least two big things
politically. The first was draw together everything people didn’t like
about the Bush administration, everything it didn’t like about two wars
and high spending and illegal immigration, and brought those strands into a
heavy knot that just sat there, soggily, and came to symbolize Bushism. The
second was illustrate that even though the federal government in our time has
continually taken on new missions and responsibilities, the more it took on,
the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs.
Conservatives got this point—they know it without being told—but
liberals and progressives did not. They thought Katrina was the result only
of George W. Bush’s incompetence and conservatives’ failure to
“believe in government.” But Mr. Obama was supposed to be
competent.
Remarkable
too is the way both BP and the government, 40 days in, continue to act
shocked, shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If
you’re drilling for oil in the deep sea, of course something terrible
can happen, so you have a plan on what to do when it does.
How
could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc, so
inadequate, so embarrassing? We’re plugging it now with tires, mud and
golf balls?
What
continues to fascinate me is Mr. Obama’s standing with Democrats. They
don’t love him. Half the party voted for Hillary Clinton, and her
people have never fully reconciled themselves to him. But he is what they
have. They are invested in him. In time—after the 2010 elections go
badly—they are going to start to peel off. The political operative
James Carville, the most vocal and influential of the president’s Gulf
critics, signaled to Democrats this week that they can start to peel off. He
did it through the passion of his denunciations.
The
disaster in the Gulf may well spell the political end of the president and
his administration, and that is no cause for joy. It’s not good to have
a president in this position—weakened, polarizing and lacking broad
public support—less than halfway through his term. That it is his fault
is no comfort. It is not good for the stability of the world, or its safety,
that the leader of “the indispensable nation” be so weakened. I
never until the past 10 years understood the almost moral imperative that an
American president maintain a high standing in the eyes of his countrymen.
Mr.
Obama himself, when running for president, made much of Bush administration
distraction and detachment during Katrina. Now the Republican Party will,
understandably, go to town on Mr. Obama’s having gone only once to the
gulf, and the fund-raiser in San Francisco that seemed to take precedence,
and the EPA chief who went to a New York fund-raiser in the middle of the
disaster.
But
Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We’re in the
middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency,
they’ll probably get the big California earthquake. And they’ll
probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within
their own philosophy: when you ask a government far away in Washington to
handle everything, it will handle nothing well.
5/28/2010: [Read more] Obama’s
Blowout Preventer
In case you hadn’t heard, Ken Salazar had a reform plan...
Once again, an episode from Ayn Rand’s Atlas
Shrugged leaps to life from behind closed doors in Washington, D.C. According
to a recent report from The Washington Post, President Obama is angry about
the British Petroleum oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico:
Since
the oil rig exploded, the White House has tried to project a posture that is
unflappable and in command.
But to
those tasked with keeping the president apprised of the disaster,
Obama’s clenched jaw is becoming an increasingly familiar sight. During
one of those sessions in the Oval Office the first week after the spill, a
president who rarely vents his frustration cut his aides short, according to
one who was there.
“Plug the damn hole,” Obama
told them.
That’s the politician’s answer to every
intractable problem: give orders, issue threats, and wait for obedience. But
the creative human mind cannot take orders like that. Notice I didn’t
say, “refuses to take orders.” I said, “cannot take
orders.”
By that I mean, the task of plugging a leak 5,000
feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico is an engineering feat.
BP’s acknowledged role in causing the leak does not alter the fact that
careful study, creative thought, and the exacting deployment of technical and
mechanical skills over long distances are all necessary in order to fix the
leak. No amount of jaw clenching or bug-eyed threats from politicians can
bring the solution one inch closer to reality. The human mind does not
operate by force from outside. If engineering achievements could be conjured
up by barking orders, the Soviet Union would be a thriving nation overflowing
with engineering marvels, instead of a dead husk…
A
rising tide of anti-immigrant feeling is washing over America, leaving in its
wake a misinformed public and the potential for harmful new laws. Many
Americans seem to be thinking, “I’m glad my grandparents made it
over from the old country, but now that we’re here, let’s shut
the door to any more of those foreigners.”
People
opting to come to our shores is a generally positive development; in fact,
it’s what made it possible to carve this great country from a
wilderness in the first place. The lessons of free immigration may be drowned
out by a host of current concerns, but they are as real and vital as ever.
In
a widely acclaimed 1989 book entitled The Economic Consequences of
Immigration, University of Maryland Professor Julian Simon demolished
virtually every fallacy of the seal-the- borders mentality. He proved that
immigrants do not subtract from the total number of available jobs, are net
contributors to the public treasury, do not commit more crimes than natives,
and generally work harder, save more, and are more likely to create
businesses than native Americans. All things considered, newcomers add
wealth, culture, and human capital to the economy.
Simon
has demonstrated that immigrants are really not the huddled masses, helpless
and dependent, that many people think. Instead, they are usually young and
vigorous adults with excellent earnings potential. His detailed studies show
that on balance, even accounting for all public welfare and other government
“social service” costs imposed by our homegrown nanny state, each
immigrant still contributes far more than he “takes” by being
here.
In
a 1990 Wall Street Journal article, Simon made another point worth repeating.
The foreign-born population in the United States today is only about 6
percent—less than the proportion in such countries as Britain, France,
and West Germany, and “vastly lower” than in Australia and
Canada. We are not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of the descendants
of immigrants.
People
are only economic problems in systems which deny them the ability to be
enterprising, to use their talents and ambitions to produce more wealth than
they consume. Systems that encourage sloth and idleness with generous public
welfare transform people—natives as well as immigrants—into
dependents who subtract more than they add to the economy and society. What
often is perceived as a crisis of immigration is really a crisis of our own
politicized and half- socialized economy, which attracts some foreigners
because of the subsidies it grants rather than with the opportunities for
self-reliance it offers.
Sometimes,
American foreign policy has generated the very waves of immigration that so
many in our government lament. In recent months, far more Haitians fled their
country for our shores because of an American trade embargo against Haiti
than fled because the military dictatorship targeted them for persecution.
(After all, Haiti has almost always had a military dictatorship but when its
people starve because of embargoes, they have to go somewhere.)
In
any event, it seems self-evident to me that of the many pressing problems
facing America these days, none are caused by immigration or immigrants.
Foreigners didn’t impose on us an expensive state education monopoly
that doesn’t educate; red-blooded Americans did. A Congress that
can’t balance its own budget at the same time it attempts to
micromanage every aspect of other people’s businesses is not made up of
Haitian boat people. It wasn’t Korean-born shopkeepers who set fire to
downtown Los Angeles in 1992.
The
case for free immigration today is strongest when it is coupled with the
general argument for a free society, private property, and individual rights.
I can think of no better way to illustrate this than by a personal example.
A Model Citizen
While
visiting the Soviet Union in 1985, I met and befriended a young man named
Constantin. In subsequent correspondence and during later visits I made to
his country, he expressed to me an intense desire to make America his home. A
naturally enterprising, optimistic, and self-reliant individual, he chafed at
the endless inhibitions of the socialist system. Wanting to help him, I
assisted in his eventual journey to America in 1991. He arrived on my
doorstep with his wife and five-year-old son and within weeks requested
permanent asylum.
Constantin’s
values precluded the acceptance of any government benefits. He even enrolled
his son in a private, Christian school. A local church helped him get off to
a good start with donations of clothing and food. As his sponsor, I did all I
could to help as well. Though it wasn’t easy for him—he bounced from
one low-paying job to the next—he never let a productive opportunity
pass without seizing it. While we waited to hear if his request to stay would
be granted, he managed to earn enough to buy a house and became a highly
regarded model citizen.
Only
a few months ago, the bureaucrats in Washington notified him that yes, he
could stay in America and eventually even become a citizen of this country.
He was grateful, but I was angry. The same government that gave us the
permission we all hoped for, I thought, could just as easily have denied it.
Frankly, I didn’t think it should have been any of the
government’s business.
Keep
in mind that Constantin was not a burden on anyone. He never put in a claim
for something at someone else’s expense. He acquired nothing except by
his own efforts or by voluntary charity. He or I or the church or others
interested in his welfare made sure he had what he needed. He trespassed on
no one’s property, posed no threat or danger to anyone, even paid taxes
to support a school system he didn’t patronize. He was an obvious net
contributor to our community and no one who knew him thought he should be
held hostage to the whims of some bureaucrat or to any legislated immigration
quota.
What
rightful claim over the disposition of his life could the U.S. government
possibly have? That anyone could force him to vacate the country and get away
with it was, to me, an unthinkable invasion of his individual rights and of
my freedom of association. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but it
could have, and it does happen to others all the time.
Most
Americans think that freedom means the government gets to tell us who can
come here and live with us. Even many Americans who believe strongly in free
trade in goods can’t quite bring themselves to embrace free movement of
people.
De-socialize
society and the immigration “problem” resolves itself into a
great blessing for us all. Foreigners will come—the best and hardiest
of them—because of the abundance of opportunity a free society
represents.
5/27/2010: from the
May 2010 Issue of Liberty
Magazine
Paradise spurned — I met with a government minister on my last visit to Haiti
— I believe he’s now their ambassador to the United Nations. As
you know, one of my hobbies for the last 30 years has been to go around to
these places — hellholes, generally — and try to sell them on a
plan to totally reform their country. It would change the place
instantaneously from a hellhole into a garden spot — which is entirely
possible.
I’d usually meet
with the head of state — which is not as hard as you might think
— and I’d tell him I could do three things for him. One: I could
put him on the cover of every major news magazine in the world in a favorable
light, which is the opposite of how he’d usually appear at the time.
Two: I could make him legitimately very rich. (It’s impossible to get
rich the way the likes of Mobutu and Marcos did anymore.) And three: I could
set things up so the people would love him, so he wouldn’t have to
worry about every guy he meets being the one who would pull out a .45 and put
a bullet in his head.
The means for achieving
these three things was to basically privatize the whole government, 100% of
their assets, issuing shares to the people, and making them owners of their
country. With, of course, a whack of cheap founder’s stock going to the
retiring dictator and his pals to make them go away — what corporate
types call a “golden parachute.”
Of course, it never went
anywhere. Generally speaking, the guy would listen with some interest, but
all the guys below him would talk him out of it. Ending corrupt government
control of the economy and shifting it to a free market would break their
rice bowls. All of these places are kleptocracies. The power of the state is
the most effective means man has ever devised for stealing. So, in Haiti,
just like in the United States or anywhere else, government doesn’t
attract the best and the brightest; you get the worst, the most sociopathic.
It’s absolutely perverse. — Doug Casey
Union contracts — Under Comrade Obama and his Red Congress, Big Labor has seen
its political power and rent-seeking capacity reach astronomical heights.
From granting it the act euphemistically known as the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay
Act to handing it GM and Chrysler to trying to exempt it from the new taxes
on healthcare benefits that the rest of us would have to pay under Obamacare,
Democratic politicians have given Big Labor the time of its life. And it has
waged economic jihad against businessmen and taxpayers alike.
But apparently the public
has been paying attention, because the favorability rating of unions has been
dropping like a stone. According to a Pew Research Center survey performed in
February, only about 41% of Americans say they have a favorable view of labor
unions, down from 58% in 2007. The percentage of people who have an
unfavorable view now exceeds the percentage of those with a favorable one,
42% to 41%.
Naturally, there is great
variation by party affiliation. Only 29% of Republicans have a favorable view
of unions, compared to 38% of independents and 56% of Democrats. (Maybe that explains
why in every election trial lawyers contribute lavishly to Democratic
candidates) The drop is again significant from 2007, when 47% of Republicans
had a favorable view, as did 54% of independents and 70% of Democrats.
The Pew Research Center is
hardly a right-wing think tank, so union advocates will have trouble
pooh-poohing the survey data. In any case, the data are consistent with a
Gallup poll of last year, which showed that only 48% of all Americans
approved of unions — the lowest percentage since Gallup started
surveying pro-union sentiment in 1936. — Gary Jason
5/26/2010: Obama sinks to new record
low; I guess most people will only put up with so much arrogance, bullying,
dishonesty and downright stupidity before they wise up. Still, who are the
23% who still support him. Maybe the unions thugs, government employees, and
other parasites of society add up to 23%.
5/26/2010: Going
“Green” by John Stossel
We’re constantly urged to “go
green” -- use less energy, shrink our carbon footprint, save the Earth.
How? We should drive less, use ethanol, recycle plastic and buy things with
the government’s Energy Star label.
But what if much of going green is just bunk? Al
Gore’s group, Repower America, claims we can replace all our dirty
energy with clean, carbon-free renewables. Gore says we can do it within 10
years.
“It’s simply not possible,” says
Robert Bryce, author of “Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’
Energy.” “Nine out of 10 units of power that we consume are
produced by hydrocarbons -- coal, oil and natural gas. Any transition away
from those sources is going to be a decades-long, maybe even a century-long
process. ... The world consumes 200 billion barrels of hydrocarbons per day.
We would have to find the energy equivalent of 23 Saudi Arabias.”
Bryce used to be a left-liberal, but then:
“I educated myself about math and physics. I’m a liberal who was
mugged by the laws of thermodynamics.” ...
“One nuclear power plant in Texas covers
about 19 square miles, an area slightly smaller than Manhattan. To produce
the same amount of power from wind turbines would require an area the size of
Rhode Island. This is energy sprawl.” To produce the same amount of
energy with ethanol, another “green” fuel, it would take 24 Rhode
Islands to grow enough corn.
Maybe the electric car is the next big thing?
“Electric cars are the next big thing, and
they always will be.”
There have been impressive headlines about
electric cars from my brilliant colleagues in the media. The Washington Post
said, “Prices on electric cars will continue to drop until
they’re within reach of the average family.”
That was in 1915....
“Minimum
Wage Cruelty” (4/14/10) was my column about the unemployment effects of
Congress’ 2007 minimum wage increase on the canning industry in
American Samoa, a U.S. territory in the far Pacific Ocean. The 2007
legislation mandated 50 cents annual increases in Samoan minimum wages until
it reached the U.S. mainland’s hourly minimum of $7.25. In response,
Chicken of the Sea International moved its operation from Samoa to a highly
automated cannery plant in Lyons, Ga. That resulted in roughly 2,000 jobs
lost in Samoa and a gain of 200 jobs in Georgia. Prior to minimum wage
increases, Samoan wages were about $3.25 an hour. With the legislated
increases, Samoa’s minimum wage is $5.25. So the question is: Which is
preferable for the Samoan worker -- being employed at $3.25 an hour or being
unemployed at $5.25? Which buys more of life’s essentials?
5/26/2010: from the May 2010 issue of Liberty Magazine
Take no prisoners — Ever since its inception, utopian
socialist ideology has included calls for the elimination of prisons. Many of
the early idealists, such as the Ukrainean left-anarchist Nestor Makhno,
believed that prisons were a result of unjust societies; therefore, a just
society would inevitably lead to their eradication.
Lenin
and Stalin, while recognizing the interim usefulness of prisons and still
giving lip service to the ultimate ideal, took a more pragmatic approach.
They instituted policies — starvation, terminal labor, hypothermia, etc.
— to eliminate existing prison populations so as to expedite the ideal
outcome. But they went even further. By summarily executing suspects before
their incarceration, particularly during the Red Terror of the Russian Civil
War — voila! — they ensured that there would be no one to lock
up; ergo, no prisons.
Barack
Obama, in his enthusiasm to close down George W. Bush’s Guantanamo Bay
holding tank for combat-captured jihadists, is tacking awfully close to that
ill wind. The February 27 issue of The Economist reports that Obama
“does not want to add to the problem [of Guantanamo] by bringing more
foreign jihadists into American custody. Instead, American forces are either
killing them or letting less squeamish allies detain them. This seems to be
the rule, not the exception.”
A
recent Washington Post investigation into the matter found “dozens of
targeted killings and no reports of highvalue detentions” by American
forces. Last September, the U.S. pinpointed Saleh Ali Nabhan, one of the
jihadists responsible for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and
Tanzania, in Somalia, coordinating strategy between al Qaeda and its Somali
ally, al-Shabab. As The Economist makes clear, “Had he been captured
and questioned, he could have been a mine of useful intelligence.”
Instead, “American helicopters vaporized him.”
After
Milton Friedman was criticized for helping the Pinochet regime design a
liberal, free-market economy for Chile’s transition out of the Allende
years, some libertarians defended his involvement with the dictator by
observing that economic liberty was more fundamental than civil liberty;
that, given a choice, people would gladly sacrifice their right to vote for
the opportunity to earn money to survive. Are the lives (not to mention the
intelligence) of jihadists being sacrificed for their putative “civil
rights” (a meaningless detail if you’re dead) in the pursuit of
closing Guantanamo? Following the post-Allende logic, I value life itself way
over civil rights.
Of
course, suspected terrorists caught on American soil are taken into American
custody, but those lucky few captured abroad who escape vaporization end up
in Iraqi, Afghan, or Pakistani prisons. Human rights activists who once
thought Obama was their man are not amused. Do I miss W yet? Don’t ask
and I won’t lie. — Robert H. Miller
5/25/2010: Policing
for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture
“This tightly reasoned document is a call for action by
legislatures, citizens and, in the last resort, the Supreme Court.”
—Richard A. Epstein, University of Chicago Law School
By Marian R. Williams, Ph.D.
Jefferson E. Holcomb, Ph.D.
Tomislav V. Kovandzic, Ph.D.
Scott Bullock
Civil
forfeiture laws represent one of the most serious assaults on private
property rights in the nation today. Under civil forfeiture, police and
prosecutors can seize your car or other property, sell it and use the
proceeds to fund agency budgets—all without so much as charging you
with a crime. Unlike criminal forfeiture, where property is taken after its
owner has been found guilty in a court of law, with civil forfeiture, owners
need not be charged with or convicted of a crime to lose homes, cars, cash or
other property.
Americans
are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but civil forfeiture turns
that principle on its head. With civil forfeiture, your property is guilty
until you prove it innocent.
Policing
for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture chronicles how state and
federal laws leave innocent property owners vulnerable to forfeiture abuse
and encourage law enforcement to take property to boost their budgets. The
report finds that by giving law enforcement a direct financial stake in
forfeiture efforts, most state and federal laws encourage policing for
profit, not justice.
Policing
for Profit also grades the states on how well they protect property
owners—only three states receive a B or better. And in most states,
public accountability is limited as there is little oversight or reporting
about how police and prosecutors use civil forfeiture or spend the proceeds.
Federal
laws encourage even more civil forfeiture abuse through a loophole called
“equitable sharing” that allows law enforcement to circumvent
even the limited protections of state laws. With equitable sharing, law
enforcement agencies can and do profit from forfeitures they wouldn’t
be able to under state law.
It’s
time to end civil forfeiture. People shouldn’t lose their property
without being convicted of a crime, and law enforcement shouldn’t be
able to profit from other people’s property.
Liberals have a learning disability when it comes
to the impracticability of socialism. They are so steeped in the seductive
lies of false compassion that no amount of logic, history or everyday
experience registers. Thus, they continue to burden the market system to an
unsustainable level.
Liberals have always denied they intend to unduly
shackle the free market. They say America is exceptionally prosperous --
though it never occurs to them why -- and can afford robust entitlement and
redistributive schemes. But in no way would they favor anything extreme that
would push the market to the tipping point.
Well, now that they are completely in charge,
we’ve seen what they will do. Obama liberals believe not in
America’s promise (and Martin Luther King Jr.’s hope) of equality
of opportunity, but in equality of outcomes. Truth be told, Obama probably
believes in a wholesale reversal of wealth distribution: not just equalizing
it, but making the wealthy poor and the poor wealthy. But I’ll leave
the psychoanalysis to others.
Largely because of their worldview differences,
conservatives and liberals will never agree on the moral merits of capitalism
versus socialism. Conservatives believe, generally, that economic and
political freedoms are interconnected and that socialism, beyond the obvious,
constricts and eventually smothers political liberties. (Hat Tip: Friedrich
Hayek.) They believe that our rights are a gift from God and that it is both
immoral and counterproductive for a central government to confiscate a major
portion of some people’s work product and transfer it to others. Nor is
any man entitled to moral bragging rights for presiding over
government-coerced theft.
But we’re not going to reach a consensus on
these moral questions, and liberals will continue to demonize, bully and
attempt to shame conservatives with their phony moral arguments and ignore
the overwhelming empirical evidence contradicting their intractable views.
They could sneak just a superficial peak at an
unbiased summary of world history -- should any remain in print -- and
confirm that the United States of America has been the freest and most
prosperous nation ever -- by far. Even if they reject that Judeo-Christian
principles undergird the Constitution, which established a system of limited
government that has led to this nation’s freedom and prosperity, they
should at least acknowledge the freedom and prosperity part.
But don’t be so sure, at least not of Obama
liberals. They seem to believe that America’s success was some kind of
historical accident or the result of collective malfeasance on the part of
our forefathers and all those who succeeded them up to November 2008. They
don’t just want to change it, but punish it.
But even liberals less extreme than Obama are
applauding his “transformative” change. What they don’t
understand is that this radical change cannot occur without punishing America
and most Americans.
In their insatiable desire to rearrange the
seating around the economic dinner table, they’re converting the dinner
hall to the Titanic and the dining room chairs to deck chairs. With their
ever-expanding government and increasing regulatory control, they are sapping
the lifeblood out of this country -- and bankrupting it. Even if they
can’t agree that stealing people’s work product is immoral,
can’t they see that the end result of that confiscatory act is overall
financial destruction -- a radical constriction of the economic pie and
diminution of our economic and political liberties? No amount of moral
preening can wipe clean the moral bankruptcy of economic and political
despair born of good intentions.
Sadly, these notions simply do not compute with
them and so they reject the evidence that proves it. Thus we have a jubilant
David Leonhardt, economic columnist for The New York Times, celebrating that
Obama has ushered in a “new progressive period (that) has the makings
of a generational shift in how Washington operates” and that rivals
“any other since the New Deal in scope or ambition.” Leonhardt
appears to approve the income redistribution in Obamacare, the financial
reform bill and the “stimulus.”
Leonhardt says that the “theme” of
Obama’s agenda has been “to lift economic growth while also
reducing income inequality.” But “by focusing on long-term
problems, Mr. Obama and the Democrats have given less than their full
attention to the economy’s current weakness.”
Leonhardt just doesn’t get it. It’s
not that Obama has not focused enough on the economy because he’s been
preoccupied with his agenda. It’s that his agenda is incompatible with
fixing the economy because it is destroying the human spirit and its capacity
for productivity, not to mention that it, and his method of implementing it,
are wholly inconsistent with any powers the framers’ contemplated for
the federal government.
“Children should be educated and instructed
in the principles of freedom.” --John Adams, Defense of Constitutions,
1787
5/22/2010: Rasmussen Reports: Three of Ten Americans are Nuts By Doug
Bandow
Well,
that’s not exactly what Rasmussen Reports said. Technically, the poll
showed that seven of ten Americans don’t believe Congress knows what it
is doing when it legislates on economic issues. According to Rasmussen
Reports:
Even
as Congress puts the finishing touches on legislation asserting more government
control over the U.S. financial industry, most U.S. voters continue to
believe the legislators have little idea what they’re doing when it
comes to the economy.
The
latest national telephone survey of Likely Voters finds that just 27% are at
least somewhat confident that Congress knows what it’s doing when it
comes to addressing current economic problems. An overwhelming majority (72%)
are not confident in Congress to address these problems. These figures
include six percent (6%) who are Very Confident and 43% who are Not at All
Confident.
Who
are the other three of ten, and, more important, why are they allowed to
vote? Especially the six percent who are very confident that Congress knows
what it is doing. The latter folks desperately need professional help. And
they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a ballot box!
Solar scientists are finally
overcoming their fears and going public about the Sun-climate connection
Four
years ago, when I first started profiling scientists who were global warming
skeptics, I soon learned two things: Solar scientists were overwhelmingly
skeptical that humans caused climate change and, overwhelmingly, they were
reluctant to go public with their views. Often, they refused to be quoted at
all, saying they feared for their funding, or they feared other
recriminations from climate scientists in the doomsayer camp. When the
skeptics agreed to be quoted at all, they often hedged their statements, to
give themselves wiggle room if accused of being a global warming denier.
Scant few were outspoken about their skepticism.
No
longer.
Scientists,
and especially solar scientists, are becoming assertive. Maybe their newfound
confidence stems from the Climategate emails, which cast doomsayer-scientists
as frauds and diminished their standing within academia. Maybe their
confidence stems from the avalanche of errors recently found in the reports
of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, destroying
its reputation as a gold standard in climate science. Maybe the solar
scientists are becoming assertive because the public no longer buys the
doomsayer thesis, as seen in public opinion polls throughout the developed
world. Whatever it was, solar scientists are increasingly conveying a clear
message on the chief cause of climate change: It’s the Sun, Stupid.
Jeff
Kuhn, a rising star at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for
Astronomy, is one of the most recent scientists to go public, revealing in
press releases this month that solar scientists worldwide are on a mission to
show that the Sun drives Earth’s climate. “As a scientist who
knows the data, I simply can’t accept [the claim that man plays a
dominant role in Earth’s climate],” he states.
Kuhn’s
team, which includes solar scientists from Stanford University and Brazil as
well as from his own institute, last week announced a startling breakthrough
— evidence that the Sun does not change much in size, as had previously
been believed. This week, in announcing the award of a ¤60,000
Humboldt Prize for Kuhn’s solar excellence, his institute issued a
release stating that its research into sunspots “may ultimately help us
predict how and when a changing sun affects Earth’s climate.”
Earlier
this month, the link between solar activity and climate made headlines
throughout Europe after space scientists from the U.K., Germany and South
Korea linked the recent paucity of sunspots to the cold weather that Europe
has been experiencing. This period of spotlessness, the scientists predicted
in a study published in Environmental Research Letters, could augur a repeat
of winters comparable to those of the Little Ice Age in the 1600s, during
which the Sun was often free of sunspots. By comparing temperatures in Europe
since 1659 to highs and lows in solar activity in the same years, the
scientists discovered that low solar activity generally corresponded to cold
winters. Could this centuries-long link between the Sun and Earth’s
climate have been a matter of chance? “There is less than a 1%
probability that the result was obtained by chance,” asserts Mike
Lockwood of the University of Reading in the U.K., the study’s lead
author.
Solar
scientists widely consider the link between the Sun and Earth’s climate
incontrovertible. When bodies such the IPCC dismiss solar science’s
contribution to understanding Earth’s climate out of hand, solar
scientists no longer sit on their hands. Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark of
the Danish National Space Institute stated that the IPCC was “probably
totally wrong” to dismiss the significance of the sun, which in 2009
would likely have the most spotless days in a century. As for claims from the
IPCC and other global warming doomsayers who argue that periods of extreme
heat or cold were regional in scope, not global, Svensmark cites the Medieval
Warm Period, a prosperous period of very high solar activity around the year
1000: “It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown — a
matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland
and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For
example, China’s population doubled in this period.”
The
Medieval Warm Period, many solar scientists believe, was warmer than today,
and the Roman Warm Period, around the time of Christ, was warmer still.
Compelling new evidence to support his view came just in March from the
Saskatchewan Isotope Laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan and Institute
of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado. In a study
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America, the authors for the first time document seasonal
temperature variations in the North Atlantic over a 2,000-year period, from
360 BC to about 1660 AD. Their technique — involving measurements of
oxygen and carbon isotopes captured in mollusk shells — confirmed that
the Roman Period was the warmest in the past two millennia.
Among
solar scientists, there are a great many theories about how the Sun
influences climate. Some will especially point to sunspots, others to the
Sun’s magnetic field, others still to the Sun’s influence on
cosmic rays which, in turn, affect cloud cover. There is as yet no answer to
how the Sun affects Earth’s climate. All that now seems sure is that
the Sun does play an outsized role and that the Big Chill on freedom of
expression that scientists once faced when discussing global warming is
becoming a Big Thaw.
Financial Post
For more from this author, visit the FP Comment blog
Obama is an idiot…not that Bush
wasn’t, but Obama makes Bush look like an intellectual giant. And,
whatever you have been told, he is not a particularly good speaker. Listen to
him carefully; listen to what he says. He may not sound like a ghetto
resident but, without a teleprompter, he is usually incoherent, and even with
a teleprompter, his speech is usually choppy (unless he’s spouting
nonsense about “spreading the wealth around” or engaged in ad
hominem attacks on his opponents. He is an arrogant narcissist with bad ideas
and very little intellect with which to back up his mouth. He may be
well-meaning but well-meaning zealots are the most dangerous people in the
world.
If George W. Bush had been the first President
to need a TelePrompter installed to be able to get through a press
conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how he
inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the
scenes?
If George Bush or his appointees had commented on the
constitutionality of state laws without reading them, would you think he was
an ignoramus?
If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have
approved?
If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan’s holdings
of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you
have approved?
If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense
of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and
incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and
historically significant gift, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England
an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this
embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?
If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you
have approved?
If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made
reference to the nonexistent “Austrian language,” would you have
brushed it off as a minor slip?
If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with
people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have
approved?
If George W. Bush had stated that there were 57
states in the United States, would you have said that he is clueless.
If George W. Bush would have flown all the way to Denmark to make a
five minute speech about how the Olympics would benefit him walking out his
front door in Texas, would you have thought he was a self important,
conceited, egotistical jerk.
If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate
as to refer to “Cinco de Cuatro” in front of the Mexican
ambassador when it was the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo), and continued to flub
it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?
If George W. Bush had misspelled the word “advice” would
you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and potatoes as proof
of what a dunce he is?
If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of
jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded
he’s a hypocrite?
If George W. Bush’s administration had okayed Air Force One
flying low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan
causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether they actually get
what happened on 9-11?
If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid
to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made
homeless than in New Orleans, would you want it made into a major ongoing
political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?
If George W. Bush had created the position of 32 Czars who report
directly to him, bypassing the House and Senate on much of what is happening
in America, would you have approved.
If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the
CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to
do so, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had proposed to double the national debt, which had
taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would you have
approved?
If George W. Bush had then proposed to double
the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?
So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant
and impressive? Can’t think of anything? Don’t worry. He’s
done all this in 9 months -- so you’ll have three years and three
months to come up with an answer.
…and remember, Boxer’s the stupid one!
The legislature in South
Carolina has passed a “Subversive Activities Registration Act,”
the upshot of which is that any “member of a subversive
organization...who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty,
necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing
the government of the United States...shall register with the Secretary of
State on the forms and at the times prescribed by him.” And there is a
form! Remarkably short by government standards, it requires only your name
and address, the name of your subversive organization, a statement of your
beliefs, and the names and locations of any fellow conspirators. The form is
to be sent in duplicate, accompanied by a $5 processing fee, to the SC
Secretary of State’s office. Failure to file the form is punishable by
fines of up to $25,000 and ten years in prison.
Now while this is on its
face silly, it is a logical outgrowth of a variety of state and federal
legislation designed at evading the constitutional prohibition against double
jeopardy. Any number of states have laws on the books requiring drug dealers
to declare their illicit income (a holdover from Prohibition), or to
preemptively buy “stamps” to place on their products certifying
the drugs as properly taxed.
The expectation,
obviously, is not that any dealers or terrorists will work through the
state-approved channels, but that when they are caught, the penalties for tax
evasion or failure to file will be added onto whatever fines or prison terms
the criminal justice system prescribes — in essence, trying the accused
first in court, and then in the hell of bureaucracy, where guilt is presumed
and the verdict almost always predetermined.
More worrying here, though,
is the vagueness of the statute and its potential chilling of speech.
Certainly it is aimed at Islamic or other religious extremist terrorists, but
what about secessionists, or militia members? Could a political blogger get
rung up for making an off-hand remark about overthrowing the government in
Columbia? Clarification is in order, but I’m not holding my breath for
any: laws such at this are written to blur the boundary between legal and
illegal. The more obscure they get, and the more expansive, the better the
chances that you’re a criminal, and can be put away whenever the state
decides. — Andrew Ferguson
5/21/2010: The
Bankrupting of America by Mortimer Zuckerman
We have a ruinous collaboration of
elected officials and unionized public workers.
The
American public feels it is drowning in red ink. It is dismayed and even outraged
at the burgeoning national deficits, unbalanced state and local budgets, and
accounting that often masks the extent of indebtedness. There is a mounting
sense that taxpayers are being taken for an expensive ride by public-sector
unions. The extraordinary benefits the unions have secured for their members
are going to be harder and harder to pay.
The
political backlash has energized the tea party activists, put incumbents at
risk in both parties, and already elected fiscal conservatives such as Republican
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. Over the next fiscal year, the states are
looking at deficits approaching hundreds of billions of dollars. The Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, estimates that this
coming year alone states will face an aggregate shortfall of $180 billion. In
some states the budget gap is more than 30%.
How
did we get into such a mess? States have always had to cope with volatility
in the size and composition of their populations. Now we have shrinking tax
bases caused by recession and extra costs imposed on states to pay for
Medicaid in the federal health-care program. The straw (well, more like an
iron beam) that breaks the camel’s back is the unfunded portions of
state pension plans, health care and other retirement benefits promised to
public-sector employees. And federal government assistance to states is
falling—down by roughly half in the next fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.
It
is galling for private-sector workers to see so many public-sector workers
thriving because of the power their unions exercise. Take California.
Investigative journalist Steve Malanga points out in the City Journal that
California’s schoolteachers are the nation’s highest paid; its
prison guards can make six-figure salaries; many state workers retire at 55
with pensions that are higher than the base pay they got most of their
working lives.
All
this when California endures an unemployment rate steeper than the
nation’s. It will get worse. There’s an exodus of firms that want
to escape California’s high taxes, stifling regulations, and recurring
budget crises. When Cisco CEO John Chambers says he will not build any more
facilities in California you know the state is in trouble.
The
business community and a growing portion of the public now understand the
dynamics that discriminate against the private sector. Public unions organize
voting campaigns for politicians who, on election, repay their benefactors by
approving salaries and benefits for the public sector, irrespective of whether
they are sustainable. And what is happening in California is happening in
slower motion in the rest of the country. It’s no doubt one of the
reasons the Pew Research Center this year reported that support for labor
unions generally has plummeted “amid growing public skepticism about
unions’ power and purpose.”
In
New York, public-service employees have received gold-plated perks for much
of the 20th century, especially generous health-insurance benefits. Indeed,
where once salaries were lower in the public sector, the salary gaps in the
public and private sectors have disappeared or even reversed.
A
Citizens Budget Commission report in 2005 showed that for most job categories
in the greater New York City region, public-sector workers received higher
hourly wages than private-sector workers. And according to a 2009 survey by
the same group, this doesn’t even count the money that New York City
pays in full premiums for comprehensive health-insurance policies for workers
and their families. Only 8% of workers in private firms enjoy that subsidy.
In virtually all cases, the city also pays the full health-care premium costs
for retirees and their spouses. And city pensions are “defined
benefit” plans, which are more expensive since they guarantee specific
benefits on retirement.
By
contrast, private-sector workers in the survey were mostly in “defined
contribution” plans, which means that, unlike their cushioned brethren
in the public sector, they do not have a predetermined benefit at retirement.
If New York City were to require its current workers to pay contributions
toward health insurance equal to the amounts paid by the employees of local
private-sector firms, the taxpayer savings would be $628 million a year. In
New Jersey, Gov. Christie says government employee health benefits are 41%
more expensive than those of the average Fortune 500 company.
What
we suffer is a ruinously expensive collaboration between elected officials
and unionized state and local workers, purchased with taxpayer money.
“Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”
No
wonder the Service Employees International Union has become the
nation’s fastest-growing union: It represents government and
health-care workers. Half of its 700,000 California members are government
employees. More and more, it wins not on the picket line but at the
negotiating table, where it backs up traditional strong-arming with political
power. It spends vast amounts of money on initiatives that keep the
government growing and the gravy flowing.
The
state’s teachers unions operate in a similar fashion—with the
result that California’s various municipalities, especially Los
Angeles, face budget shortfalls in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
California can no longer rely on a strong economy to support this
munificence. Its unemployment rate of 12.5% runs several points higher than
the national rate and its high-tech companies are choosing to expand
elsewhere. Why stay in a state with such higher taxes and a cumbersome
regulatory environment?
California
is a horrible warning of how dreams can turn to dust. In most states,
politicians face a contracting local economy and shortfalls in tax receipts.
Naturally, they look to cut expenses but run into obstruction from
politically powerful unions that represent state and local government
employees, teachers and health-care workers who have themselves caused
pension and health-care insurance costs to soar. It is not an accident that
in framing the national stimulus program in 2009 Congress directed a stunning
$275 billion of the $787 billion as grants to the states to support
public-service employees in health care, education, etc.
The
lopsided subsidies for pension and health costs are a large part of the
fiscal crises at the state and local levels. The subsequent squeeze on education
and infrastructure investment is undermining the very programs that have made
it possible for our economy to grow.
Between
New York and California, the projected deficits run about $40
billion—and that doesn’t account for projected billions of dollars
in the operating deficits in the states’ mass transit systems or the
multibillion-dollar unfunded liability in many of the state pension plans.
New York would be badly hit because it is on the verge of being deprived of
tax revenues by Washington’s increased regulations on the financial
industry, especially the hugely profitable, multitrillion-dollar market in
derivatives—an industry that is critical to the economy of New York
state and the country.
City
government was developed to serve its citizens. Today the citizenry is
working in large part to serve the government. It is always hard to shrink
government spending. It is particularly difficult when public-sector unions
have such a unique lever of pressure.
We
have to escape this cycle or it will crush us. One way is to take labor
negotiations out of the hands of vulnerable legislators and assign them to
independent commissions. They would have a better shot at achieving a fair
balance between appropriate salary increases and the revenues and services of
local municipalities. The electorate won’t swallow any more red ink.
Mr. Zuckerman is chairman and editor
in chief of U.S. News & World Report.
My sentiments on immigration are expressed by the
welcoming words of poet Emma Lazarus’ that grace the base of our Statue
of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free.” Those sentiments are probably shared by most
Americans and for sure by my libertarian fellow travelers, but their vision
of immigration has some blind spots. This has become painfully obvious in the
wake of Arizona’s law that cracks down on illegal immigration.
Let’s look at the immigration issue step by step.
There are close to 7 billion people on our planet.
I’d like to know how the libertarians answer this question: Does each
individual on the planet have a natural or God-given right to live in the U.S.?
Unless one wishes to obfuscate, I believe that a yes or no can be given to
that question just as a yes or no answer can be given to the question whether
Williams has a right to live in the U.S.
I believe most people, even my open-borders
libertarian friends, would not say that everyone on the planet had a right to
live in the U.S. That being the case suggests there will be conditions that a
person must meet to live in the U.S. Then the question emerges: Who gets to
set those conditions? Should it be the United Nations, the European Union,
the Japanese Diet or the Moscow City Duma? I can’t be absolutely sure,
but I believe that most Americans would recoil at the suggestion that
somebody other than Americans should be allowed to set the conditions for people
to live in the U.S.
What those conditions should be is one thing and
whether a person has a right to ignore them is another. People become illegal
immigrants in one of three ways: entering without authorization or
inspection, staying beyond the authorized period after legal entry or by
violating the terms of legal entry. Most of those who risk prosecution under
Arizona’s new law fit the first category -- entering without
authorization or inspection.
Probably, the overwhelming majority of Mexican
illegal immigrants are hardworking, honest and otherwise law-abiding members
of the communities in which they reside. It would surely be a heart-wrenching
scenario for such a person to be stopped for a driving infraction, have his
illegal immigrant status discovered and face deportation proceedings.
Regardless of the hardship suffered, being in the U.S. without authorization
is a crime.
When crimes are committed, what should be done?
Some people recommend amnesia, which turns out to be the root word for
amnesty. But surely they don’t propose it as a general response to
crime where criminals confess their crime, pay some fine and apply to have
their crimes overlooked. Amnesty supporters probably wish amnesty to apply to
only illegal immigrants. That being the case, one wonders whether they wish
it to apply to illegals past, present and future, regardless of race,
ethnicity or country of origin.
Various estimates put the illegal immigrant
population in the U.S. between 10 and 20 million. One argument says we
can’t round up and deport all those people. That argument differs
little from one that says since we can’t catch every burglar, we should
grant burglars amnesty. Catching and imprisoning some burglars sends a
message to would-be burglars that there might be a price to pay. Similarly,
imprisoning some illegal immigrants and then deporting them after their
sentences were served would send a signal to others who are here illegally or
who are contemplating illegal entry that there’s a price to pay.
Here’s Williams’ suggestion in a
nutshell. Start strict enforcement of immigration law, as Arizona has begun.
Strictly enforce border security. Most importantly, modernize and streamline
our cumbersome immigration laws so that people can more easily migrate to our
country.
5/18/2010: “Enough
Money“ by Thomas Sowell
One
of the many shallow statements that sound good— if you don’t stop
and think about it— is that “at some point, you have made enough
money.”
The
key word in this statement, made by President Barack Obama recently, is
“you.” There is nothing wrong with my deciding how much money is
enough for me or your deciding how much money is enough for you, but when
politicians think that they should be deciding how much money is enough for
other people, that is starting down a very slippery slope.
Politicians
with the power to determine each citizen’s income are no longer public
servants. They are public masters.
Are
we really so eaten up with envy, or so mesmerized by rhetoric, that we are
willing to sacrifice our own freedom by giving politicians the power to
decide how much money anybody can make or keep? Of course, that will start
only with “the rich,” but surely history tells us that it will
not end there.
The
French Revolution began arbitrary executions among the hereditary
aristocracy, but ended up arbitrarily executing all sorts of other people,
including eventually even leaders of the Revolution itself, such as
Robespierre.
Very
similar patterns appeared in the Bolshevik Revolution, in the rise of the
Nazis and in numerous other times and places, where expanded and arbitrary
powers were put into the hands of politicians— and were used against
the population as a whole.
Once
you buy the argument that some segment of the citizenry should lose their
rights, just because they are envied or resented, you are putting your own
rights in jeopardy— quite aside from undermining any moral basis for
respecting anybody’s rights. You are opening the floodgates to
arbitrary power. And once you open the floodgates, you can’t tell the
water where to go.
The
moral bankruptcy of the notion that third parties can decide when somebody
else has “enough” money is matched by its economic illiteracy.
The rest of the country is not poorer by the amount of Bill Gates’
fortune today and was not poorer by the amount of John D. Rockefeller’s
fortune a century ago.
Both
men were selling a product that others were also selling, but more people
chose to buy theirs. Those people would not have voluntarily continued to pay
their hard-earned money for Rockefeller’s oil or Gates’ software
if what they received was not worth more to them than what they paid.
The
fortunes that the sellers amassed were not a deduction from the buyers’
wealth. Buyers and sellers both gained from these transactions or the
transactions wouldn’t have continued.
Ida
Tarbell’s famous muckraking book, “History of the Standard Oil
Company,” said that Rockefeller “should have been
satisfied” with the money he had acquired by 1870, implying greed in
his continued efforts to increase the size and profitability of Standard Oil.
But would the public have been better off or worse off if Rockefeller had
retired in 1870?
One
of the crucial facts left out of Ida Tarbell’s book was that
Rockefeller’s improvements in the oil industry brought down the price
of oil to a fraction of what it had been before.
As
just one example, oil was first shipped in barrels, which is why we still
measure oil in terms of the number of barrels today, even though oil is
seldom— if ever— actually shipped in barrels any more. John D.
Rockefeller shipped his oil in railroad tank cars, reducing transportation
costs, among other costs that he found ways of reducing.
Would
the public have been better off if older and more costly methods of
producing, processing and shipping oil had continued to be used, leading to
prices far higher than necessary?
Apparently
Rockefeller himself decided at some point that he had enough money, and then
donated enough of it to create a world-class university from day one—
the University of Chicago— as well as donating to innumerable other
philanthropic projects.
But
that is wholly different from having politicians make such decisions for
other people. Politicians who take on that role stifle economic progress and
drain away other people’s money, in order to hand out goodies that will
help get themselves re-elected. Some people call that “social
justice,” even when it is anti-social politics.
To
find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators
Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page
at www.creators.com. 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
5/18/2010: This is QUEEN
PELOSI’S NEW JET!
Queen Pelosi wasn’t happy with the small USAF C-20B jet,
Gulfstream III that comes with the Speaker’s job... On no! Queen Pelosi was aggravated that this little jet had to stop
to refuel, so she ordered a Big Fat, 200-seat, USAF C-32, Boeing 757 jet that
could get her back to California without stopping! I understand that a former
Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, flew commercial most of the time.
Many, many legislators
walked by and grinned with glee as Joe informed everyone of what Queen Nancy’s Big Fat Jet costs us, the hard working American
tax payers, literally thousands of gallons of fuel every week. Since she only
works 3 days a week, this gas guzzling jet gets fueled and she flies home to
California every Friday and returns every Monday, at a cost to the taxpayers
(YOU and ME are those taxpayers!) of about $60,000, one way! As Joe put it,
“Unfortunately we have to pay to bring her back on Monday night and
that costs us another $60,000!” Taxpayers, that is $480,000 per month
and that is an annual cost to us of $5,760,000!!!
No wonder she complains
about the cost of this war... it might cramp her style and she is styling on
my back and yours. I think of the military families in this country doing
without and this woman, who heads up the most corrupt Congress in the history
of our country, keeps fueling that jet while doing nothing.
Queen Pelosi wants you and me to conserve our carbon
footprint. She wants us to buy smaller cars and Obama wants us to get a
bicycle pump and air up our tires. Who do these people think they are???
Their motto is... Don’t do as I do... JUST DO AS I SAY!
This is outrageous! Keep
in mind the figures above do NOT include the cost of plane or crew... just
the fuel!!! One has to wonder what the total package costs us? And on top of
that... she wants to tax our IRA’s & 401K’s!
One of the classic examples of the failure of
politicians to communicate with the citizenry is found in a video of Romanian
tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu, giving what turned out to be his last speech to the
teeming masses gathered in a square in Bucharest.
Oblivious to the mood of the people, Ceausescu is
at his bombastic, self-important best until he realizes that the chants from
the crowd below are not praise, but something rather to the contrary.
The look on his face: priceless.
You could say that Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah,
and Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-W.V., have just experienced their Ceausescu
moments. Both longtime incumbents were booted from office by their
constituents Tuesday in a fashion that, while not quite as bloody as
Ceausescu’s departure, was still pretty gory in political terms.
America is a democratic republic, complete with an
excellent Constitution that politicians still feel compelled to acknowledge,
if not take seriously. So the growing communications gap between voters in
places like Utah and West Virginia and the politicians who have been
“representing” them, while worrisome, is not irreparable. Solving
it should be a high priority for all involved.
The communication problem involves the
accelerating realization on the part of many Americans that the essence of
America, namely, a respect for the dignity of the individual, which
inherently involves the government leaving the individual alone, has been
pretty much forgotten by politicians in Washington, D.C., the state capitals
and city councils around the nation.
Which explains why public employees now make on
average 30% more than their private sector counterparts — and 70% more in
benefits.
The political class seems to believe they have
carte blanche to do as they please. While they have been turning a deaf ear
to increasingly vocal expressions of frustration by the American people, if
the trend in primary voting continues, our Washington elite may just be
jarred awake.
Examples abounded even before Utah and West
Virginia made their statements this week. Take the town hall meeting in
Washington state last summer in which a young Marine veteran said to six-term
Rep. Brian Baird, “Now I heard you say tonight about educating our
children, indoctrinating our children, whatever you want to call it.”
The congressman denied wanting to indoctrinate,
but the young father simply responded, “Stay away from my kids.”
Virtually all of the 400 or so people in the hall
rose as one in loud applause.
“Democracy will
soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what
is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or
liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a
system of subordination of all the
moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth,
beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and
the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.” --John Adams, An Essay on
Man’s Lust for Power, 1763
“Nothing so
strongly impels a man to regard the interest of his constituents, as the
certainty of returning to the general mass of the people, from whence he was
taken, where he must participate in their burdens.” --George Mason
There are two problems with Al Gore. First,
he’s a demagogue who lacks an appreciation for the ethics and methods
of science. Second, he’s a not a scientist, but a celebrity and
politician who does not understand the technical aspects of science. Put
succinctly, the man simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
But Gore is now advising the world on complex technical issues related to
energy and climate. That’s a problem for the human race.
As described in my book, Science
and Technology in World History, Vol. 1, what we know as modern science began in ancient Greece in the 6th
century B.C. The Greek philosophers embraced intellectual freedom, open
discussion, and critical analysis. Pupils were not only allowed to question
and criticize their teachers, but they were encouraged to do so. Debate was
elevated by Plato and his students to the science of dialectic. In the
Platonic Dialogue Timaeus, it is noted that anyone who can present a better
plan “shall carry off the palm, not as an enemy, but as a
friend.”
But Al Gore refuses to debate his critics. He has
repeatedly dodged a debate with Christopher Monckton. Instead of engaging
skeptics in reasoned discussions, Gore has relentlessly demonized those who
disagree with him. In a series of infamous character assassinations, he has
stated that people who are skeptical of the hysterical global warming
scenario he has been promoting (and profiting from) are comparable to the
lunatic fringe who believe that the Apollo Moon landings were filmed on a
movie stage. He has also compared global warming skeptics to people who
believe that the Earth is flat.
Scientific issues like climate change are not
morality plays. Scientists are objective and tentative. To be a scientist is
to be skeptical. Science is never “settled” because there can be
no finality in any empirical system of knowledge. Only God has all the data.
Scientists employ multiple working hypotheses. They work together
cooperatively, eager to have their mistakes pointed out to them, so as to
advance a disinterested search for truth.
One of the finest examples of this ethic is found
in a letter written by Robert Hooke to Isaac Newton on January 20, 1676.
Hooke told Newton, “I have a mind very desirous of and very ready to
embrace any truth that shall be discovered though it may much thwart and
contradict any opinions or notions I have formerly embraced.” Why was
Hooke eager to have his errors pointed out? Because, he explained, “my
aim is the discovery of truth,” therefore “I can endure to hear
objections.”
But Al Gore can endure no objections. His aim is
not to find truth, but to tendentiously assemble and present information so
as to mislead. An example of Gore’s dissembling is found in the film An
Inconvenient Truth. One of the most memorable scenes in An Inconvenient Truth
is the unveiling of a startling graph that shows a strong correlation between
carbon dioxide and temperature over the last several hundred thousand years.
Gore then states that “when there’s more carbon dioxide, the
temperature gets warmer.” Because the concentration of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere is now relatively high, the audience is led to believe that
a drastic rise in global temperature is imminent.
But carbon dioxide does not determine temperature
in the way that Gore suggests. On the contrary, temperature controls carbon
dioxide by modulating its release and absorption from the oceans. The
temperature changes found in the ice core data cannot be caused by carbon
dioxide changes, because the increases in atmospheric temperature precede
increases in carbon dioxide by several hundred years.
The Earth’s oceans contain more than fifty
times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is more soluble
in cold water. As the oceans warm, they release carbon dioxide to the
atmosphere. When the oceans cool, they absorb more carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere. The science is no more complex than noting that a warm coke has
more fizz than a cold one. Temperature controls carbon dioxide, not the other
way around.
A film like An Inconvenient Truth is carefully
scripted and checked for errors. Al Gore can be made to appear as if he knows
the science. But a recent television interview [video] was more revealing.
Promoting geothermal energy, Gore said that the temperature in the interior
of the Earth is “several million degrees.” But it isn’t.
It’s not even close.
Since people first started lowering thermometers
into boreholes in the nineteenth century, we have known that the temperature
of the Earth’s core is no more than several thousand degrees Celsius.
The temperature at the inner-outer core boundary is constrained by a phase
transition to be in the neighborhood of 6,000°C. More to the point, the
temperature of near-surface rocks in geothermal areas is typically hundreds
of °C. At temperatures exceeding 1,000 °C in the Earth’s crust,
rock begins to melt. So Gore was wrong by at least a factor of a thousand, or
by one hundred thousand percent.
Gore’s blithe and erroneous characterization
of the Earth’s internal temperature was not an insignificant slip of
the tongue. Widespread development of geothermal energy is not feasible
precisely because Earth’s internal temperatures are not as high as Gore
believes. That is why the practical exploitation of geothermal energy is
limited to areas like Iceland, a country that virtually sits on top of a
volcano.
After declaring that temperatures inside the Earth
are “several million degrees,” Gore claimed that we have
“new drill bits that don’t melt in that heat.” How can
anyone be so remarkably ignorant as to think we have metallurgical techniques
capable of producing drill bits that don’t melt in temperatures of
“several million degrees”?
Gore then made the stunning assertion that
geothermal resources in the U.S. alone are so enormous that they could meet
our entire energy needs for 35,000 years. Is it not remarkable that we ignore
such a vast, unexploited source of energy? Is it not astonishing that
generations of scientists and engineers have failed to recognize the
potential for withdrawing virtually limitless amounts of free energy from the
Earth?
If the promise of geothermal energy sounds too
good to be true, the reason is that it’s not true. The United States
gets less than one percent of its energy from geothermal sources. Extracting
geothermal energy is inherently an inefficient process because you have to
work against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It’s easy to turn
mechanical energy into heat, but difficult to efficiently reverse the
process. Geothermal energy production is limited to exceptional areas like
Iceland precisely because the high temperatures necessary are found only in a
very few locations.
Al Gore may not know what he’s talking
about, but he’s not alone. The world is full of ignorant people. As a
college professor, I interact constantly with students, many of whom are very
concerned with global warming. But in my interactions I have invariably found
that the more science a student knows, the more skeptical he is of the
standard global warming alarmist scenario. Students majoring in engineering
or physics have some appreciation for the scientific method and the
uncertainties involved in understanding and predicting climate change. Unlike
Gore, they also understand that the ability to develop alternative energy
sources is limited by the laws of physics and chemistry, not political
willpower.
Students who buy into global warming alarmism are almost
always from non-technical majors such as journalism. They can’t think
quantitatively, critically, or analytically. They have beliefs, but no
interest in or appreciation for facts. Accordingly, they are almost
completely ignorant of any relevant facts. Their minds are immature and their
thought processes undisciplined. They don’t understand the difference
between fact and opinion. One student recently told me that we have to stop
using oil because global warming is caused by the heat given off by the combustion
of fossil fuels.
Human beings must acquire some education and
knowledge before they can begin to develop an appreciation for the extent of
their own ignorance. But these global warming alarmists know nothing, and
therefore believe that they understand everything.
If I have been too hard on Mr. Gore, I ought to
close by noting that ignorance is the normal human condition, intelligence
the exception. Al Gore is not the only person who doesn’t understand
science. U.S. President Barack Obama takes advice from Gore. And a group of
Norwegian politicians recently distinguished themselves by awarding Nobel
Prizes to both Gore and Obama. As Nobel Prize recipients, Gore and Obama have
joined an elite group that includes Portuguese physician Egas Moniz. In 1949,
Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine for devising an innovative
procedure known as the frontal lobotomy. It seems fitting that Gore and Obama
are grouped with Moniz, since their apparent goal is to lobotomize human
civilization.
David Deming is a geophysicist and associate professor of arts and
sciences at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Science
and Technology in World History, Volume 1.
It’s time to stop
mincing words. Obama is not a fool. He is not incompetent. He is not a
madman. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is purposely overwhelming
the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis, and social
chaos- thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within. But the
bonus is brilliant...as he destroys and taxes to death business owners, he
also cripples his political opposition.
Rahm Emanuel cynically
said, “You never want a crisis to go to waste.” It is now
becoming clear that the crisis he was referring to is Obama’s
Presidency. As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is
following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Obama’s
Columbia University. In 1966, they outlined a plan to socialize America by
OVERWHELMING the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add
up the clues below. Taken individually they’re alarming. Taken as a
whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to overwhelm the system,
wreck the U.S. economy, damage or destroy the free market, in order to turn
the U.S. into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that
desperately needs government for survival.
Universal healthcare. The healthcare bill had very little to do with
healthcare. It had everything to do with adding millions of new union and
government employees (sixteen thousand new IRS agents) feeding at the public
trough. Obama doesn’t care that giving free healthcare to 30 million
Americans will add TRILLIONS to the national debt. Or that not one new doctor
was added to the system, thereby causing a healthcare crisis. What he does
care about is that it overwhelms the system and cements the dependence and
loyalty of those 30 million voters to Obama and big government. Who but a
socialist revolutionary would pass this reckless spending bill in the middle
of a depression? Why now? Why the rush? Why risk destroying the economy on a
reckless, unproven scheme? There is only one answer -- OVERWHELM THE SYSTEM.
Cap and trade. Like healthcare legislation having nothing to do with healthcare,
cap and trade has nothing to do with global warming. It has everything to do
with overwhelming the system, redistribution of income, government control of
the economy and a criminal payoff to unions and Obama’s biggest
contributors. Those powerful and wealthy unions and contributors (like GE who
owns NBC, MSNBC and CNBC) can then be counted on to support everything and
anything Obama wants. They will kick back hundreds of millions in contributions
to Obama and the Democratic Party to keep them in power. The bonus is that
all the new taxes on Americans with bigger cars, bigger homes and businesses
helps Obama “spread the wealth around.” Who but a socialist
revolutionary would pass this reckless tax and spending bill in the middle of
a depression? Why now? Why the rush? Why risk destroying the economy on a
reckless, unproven scheme? There is only one answer -- OVERWHELM THE SYSTEM.
Make Puerto Rico a state. Why? Who’s asking for a 51st state? Certainly
not the Puerto Ricans, who have repeatedly voted against it, and certainly
not American taxpayers. Who’s asking for millions of new welfare
recipients and government entitlement addicts in the middle of a depression?
But this has been Obama’s plan all along. His goal is to add two new
Democrat Senators, five Democrat Congressman and a million loyal Democratic
voters who are dependent on big government. Who but a socialist revolutionary
would support this reckless scheme in the middle of a depression? Why now?
Why the rush? There is only one answer -- OVERWHELM THE SYSTEM.
Legalize 12 million illegal immigrants. Just giving these 12 million potential new
citizens free healthcare alone could overwhelm the system and bankrupt
America. But hey...it adds 12 million reliable new Democrat voters- who can
be counted on to support big government. Add another few trillion dollars in
welfare, aid to dependent children, food stamps, free medical, education, tax
credits for the poor, and eventually Social Security. Who but a socialist
revolutionary would support this in the middle of a depression? Why now? Why
the rush? There is only one answer -- OVERWHELM THE SYSTEM.
Card check. This disastrous bill creates more union employees EVERYWHERE- all of
them Democratic voters. More union employees mean more union dues and
hundreds of millions of new dollars to spend on campaign contributions to
Democrats. Who cares that it will damage the capitalist system? Who but a
socialist revolutionary would support this scheme in the middle of a
depression? Why now? Why the rush? There is only one answer-- OVERWHELM THE
SYSTEM.
Stimulus & Bailouts. Where did all that money go? It went to Democrat
contributors, organizations (ACORN), and unions- including billions of
dollars to save the jobs of government employees across the country, and
billions more to hire new government employees. It went to save GM and
Chrysler, so that their employees could keep paying union dues. It went to
AIG so that Goldman Sachs could be bailed out (after giving Obama almost
$1,000,000 in contributions). A staggering $125 billion went to teachers
(thereby saving their union dues to teachers unions). All those public
employees will vote loyally Democrat to protect their bloated salaries and
pensions that are bankrupting America. And their union dues will be forwarded
directly to Obama and Democrat politicians. All while the private sector is
melting down. Pretty soon a government job will be the only game in town. The
country goes broke, future generations face a bleak future, but Obama, the
Democrat Party, government, and the unions grow more powerful. The ends
justify the means. OVERWHELM THE SYSTEM.
Spend trillions on bailouts. Who needs welfare mothers, when you can addict
America’s largest companies on welfare? These companies are now
beholden to Democrat politicians and therefore powerless to criticize
anything Obama does. The trillions to GM, Chrysler, AIG will never be paid
back. But, that’s no concern to a socialist revolutionary who wants to
destroy capitalism, control business, and OVERWHELM THE SYSTEM.
Raise taxes ONLY on small business owners,
high-income earners, and job creators. Put the entire burden on 10% of the population, redistribute the
income, punish success, and reward those who did nothing (except vote for
Obama). Why? Because such a plan destroys the group that contributes the most
money to fiscally conservative politicians and causes. Reagan wanted to
dramatically cut taxes in order to “starve the beast” (by cutting
off funds for government). Obama wants to starve his political opposition by
taxing them to death. OVERWHELM THE SYSTEM.
With the acts outlined
above, Obama and his regime have created a vast and rapidly expanding
constituency of voters dependent on big government; a vast privileged class
of public employees who work for big government; and a government dedicated
to destroying capitalism and installing themselves as socialist rulers by
OVERWHELMING THE SYSTEM.
My God...Add it up and
you’ve got the perfect Marxist scheme.
Only one thing stands in
their way - you and me, the American taxpayers. If we want to save the
greatest country and economic system in world history, we had better get
busy. We had better fight back hard. Our children and grandchildren’s
futures are at stake. And please don’t assume the GOP is the answer.
They had their chance. Bush spent irresponsibly; Bush never vetoed a single
spending bill; Bush supported bailouts, earmarks and stimulus; Bush was
responsible for the Medicare expansion; Bush spent a trillion dollars on two
never-ending wars; Bush was the disaster that opened the door for Obama.
The answer is to support
true fiscal conservatives who understand that national debt is the real
global threat to our survival. Libertarians who truly support economic
freedom are the real Tea Party candidates who want to truly change
“business as usual” in Washington D.C. Libertarians don’t
just talk the talk- we walk the walk. On November 2nd let’s throw every
incumbent in Congress out (with a few exceptions like Ron Paul)...and if the
new class let’s us down...let’s throw them all out again in 2012.
Eventually they’ll get the message- the citizens are in charge.
Wayne Allyn Root was the 2008
Libertarian Vice Presidential candidate. His new book is entitled, “The
Conscience of a Libertarian: Empowering the Citizen Revolution with God,
Guns, Gambling & Tax Cuts.” For more information on Wayne, please
visit Wayne’s web site at: ROOTforAmerica.com.
Isaac
Newton formulated three laws of motion, No. 3 being: For every action, there
is an equal and opposite reaction. If he were still around, he’d
propose a fourth: For every action, there is an unequal and opposite
overreaction.
Lately,
Americans seem to be taking advice from Oscar Wilde, who said,
“Moderation is a fatal thing.” Stupidity can be met and defeated
with sensible, proportionate measures. Or it can be met with even greater
stupidity. Guess which is the preferred option these days.
Last
week, a 17-year-old knucklehead exposed his idiocy to the world by venturing
onto the field at a Philadelphia Phillies game and running around waving a
towel. When a pursuing policeman got weary of the chase, he pulled out his
Taser and shot the kid.
For
that, the officer won praise from players, sportscasters and city police
commissioner Charles Ramsey, who said the cop “acted appropriately. I
support him 100 percent.” The cop was in line with department policy,
Ramsey said, because “he was attempting to make an arrest and the male
was attempting to flee.”
Really?
Hitting a delinquent with a potentially fatal 50,000-volt burst of
electricity even though he poses no physical danger to anyone and has zero
chance of escaping? Maybe the commissioner should read the directions from
the Taser manufacturer, which say the devices are meant to “incapacitate
dangerous, combative or high-risk subjects.”
The
Police Executive Research Forum says they “should be used only on
people 1) actively resisting or exhibiting active aggression or 2) at risk of
harming themselves or others.” A federal appeals court ruled that cops
may not use Tasers unless “the suspect poses an immediate threat to the
officer or a member of the public.”
Sure,
shooting the kid with a Taser taught him a lesson and will undoubtedly deter
others from following his example. But if that were the only consideration,
riddling him with live ammo would have been even more effective. The rational
response would have been to let him cavort until he ran out of gas, then take
him away, leaving punishment to the courts.
That
is not to say the courts are always rational. The other day, a 19-year-old
woman showed up in a Lake County, Ill., courtroom gallery sporting a T-shirt
that only a person of incompetent judgment would wear outside the house.
“I have the (female sexual organ), so I make the rules,” it
announced.
That
claim might be true if she were the only woman in possession of one. True or
not, it was the wrong message to present to Judge Helen Rozenberg, who
immediately held her in contempt and sentenced her to 48 hours in jail.
The
judge could have ordered the offending party to leave. She could have
insisted that she cover up. She could have delivered a stern lecture.
But
the only remedy the magistrate could devise was to lock her up like a
criminal. In Rozenberg’s case, “judicial temperament” is a
contradiction in terms.
Critics
of the new Arizona immigration law likewise have decided to fight fire with
napalm. Rather than merely object that the statute is shortsighted,
counterproductive and vulnerable to abuse, they decided to pretend it’s
the greatest atrocity of the 21st century.
“When
I heard about it, it reminded me of Nazi Germany,” insisted Hispanic
Federation President Lillian Rodriguez Lopez. Los Angeles Cardinal Roger
Mahony said Arizona was “reverting to German Nazi” methods. A New
Jersey cartoonist drew Hitler with a mustache in the shape of Arizona.
The
only value of statements like those is to reveal how little the speaker knows
about life under the Fuehrer. Where are the concentration camps? Where is the
mass slaughter? Who is the all-powerful dictator?
Arizona
may have become an uncomfortable place for Latinos, legal or illegal, but it
bears about as much resemblance to Nazi Germany as it does to Antarctica. If
a law like this were the worst thing Hitler had ever done, nobody would
remember him today.
In
moments when we are presented with a sore provocation, the temptation is to
respond with unrestrained fury. But wanton indulgence of anger usually ends
up compounding foolishness with lunacy.
You
can fight fire with fire. As a rule, though, it’s better to use water.
5/8/2010: In the
Face of Disaster by Thomas G. Donlan
Murphy’s Law and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
One
thing always seems to happen in every modern disaster: The blame game kicks
it up another notch. Since bad things never happen to good people, someone is
always at fault, someone always must be made to pay, someone must be
punished. Just ask the Greek mobs or Louisiana environmentalists or members
of Congress.
In
the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, there are many targets available
to blame, and many people start with the supposedly greedy corporations and
their supposed eagerness to cut corners for profit.
BP
does have overall responsibility for the accident, acquired by leasing the
drilling rig Deepwater Horizon from its owner and operator, Transocean.
Halliburton provided the casing cement, of interest because more than a dozen
lesser blowouts in the Gulf over the past 20 years have been blamed on problems
with the cement. Cameron International built the blowout preventer that
failed to prevent the blowout on the sea floor. These and other BP
subcontractors face lawsuits by the score, which will settle scores
eventually.
Until
the far-off day when the courts rule, the blame game will be a struggle for
time in front of TV cameras. As a candid environmentalist said,
“It’s very difficult, in our society, to cut through the din and
get people to listen and pay attention.” David Hirsch of Friends of the
Earth added that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste: “These are the
moments when you can be heard.”
Such
moments will only become more frequent, as the sea of sludge comes ashore to
create televised havoc for coastal wildlife.
Empty Words
Unfortunately,
not every player will be heard making good sense -- any more than BP and its
lobbyists made good sense when they said in their application to drill this
well that a disaster like this could never happen.
We
already have heard Interior Secretary Ken Salazar demanding that BP
“work harder and faster and smarter to get the job done.” He
seemed to imagine that BP was holding back resources and doing dumb things,
to cost itself more money.
We
heard Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, accepting responsibility for the clean-up
operation and adding that “all accidents are preventable.” Even
if that’s true for each possible accident, no amount of effort can
prevent every accident.
We
heard Attorney General Eric Holder responding to the crisis by sending a team
of Justice Department lawyers to search for evidence that BP violated federal
regulations. Perhaps they will get in the way of the private tort lawyers
seeking the same thing, but we expect they will obstruct justice as well as
enterprise.
We
heard members of Congress asking Salazar nasty questions about the
effectiveness of federal regulation. They seemed to imagine that there would
never be any offshore oil accidents if the federal Minerals Management
Service had required the latest and best blowout-prevention technology.
We
heard environmental groups claiming ownership of the ocean:
“They’re the ones who have profited from oil and from our
oceans,” said Katrina Johnson of the Sierra Club, speaking of the oil
industry. The oceans, of course, belong to nobody and no group. Even the
fishermen whose livelihood is at stake are not the owners of the ocean or of
the sea creatures they hunt and gather. That’s part of the problem,
known as the “tragedy of the commons” -- and it’s a problem
that regulation can’t solve.
More Hot Air
We
have even heard environmentalists make comparisons between the oil industry
of the Gulf of Mexico and the controversial wind farm in Buzzard’s Bay,
Mass., that Salazar recently approved. Although it’s true that
windmills provide clean energy, except for the dead birds and the ruination
of the view from Hyannisport, the Cape Wind project will make an
insignificant contribution to the U.S. economy. The Gulf of Mexico, on the
other hand, provides 30% of the energy produced in the U.S. and about 10% of
the energy consumed.
Fortunately,
Interior Secretary Salazar also has made sense at times, under pressure of
the blame game. He has pointed out that accidents of this scale come along
infrequently in the U.S. Indeed Union Oil’s Santa Barbara Channel
accident in California in 1969 is the only comparable accident in the history
of American offshore oil drilling.
“There
are 30,000 wells that have been drilled down in the Gulf of Mexico, and so
this is a very, very rare event,” Salazar said last week, while defending
himself from the ritual attacks in Congress.
He
even made an argument using economics. Noting that 30% of U.S. oil production
comes from offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico, he pointed out that shutting
them would have a “very huge impact on America’s economy.”
That’s more awareness of the trade-off between cost and benefits than
we usually see at such times of crisis.
The Nick of Time
The
timing of this disaster is amazingly bad. Just a few weeks ago, President
Barack Obama took a baby step in the right direction, indicating that some
new areas might be opened for offshore drilling.
We
cheered him for bucking the reflexive fear of the oil and gas industry that
dominates Florida and other states where offshore drilling looks promising.
Now
Murphy’s Law, which says that “Anything that can go wrong will go
wrong, and at the worst possible time,” has brought that reflexive fear
back, bigger than ever.
From
the first offshore wells drilled shortly after World War II, Louisiana has
understood that the oil and seafood industries must live together. Fish and
fishermen were there first, but oil and gas have been too attractive to be
considered a nuisance. The Louisiana seafood industry is at most worth $3
billion a year; the state’s oil, gas and chemicals industries generate
nearly 10 times as much economic output.
Seafood
and tourism don’t make states like Louisiana rich; if anything, they
keep many of their residents in a culture of semivoluntary poverty. Louisiana
has done far too little to reinvest its energy wealth in the productivity and
advancement of its people. But restricting the development of the
offshore-energy industry will not help the state or the country.
Editorial Page Editor, Thomas
G. Donlan, receives e-mail at tg.donlan@barrons.com
Most Americans think
that freedom means the government gets to tell us who can come here and live
with us. Even many Americans who believe strongly in free trade in goods
can’t quite bring themselves to embrace free movement of people.
De-socialize society and the immigration “problem” resolves
itself into a great blessing for us all. Foreigners will come—the best
and hardiest of them—because of the abundance of opportunity a free
society represents. — Lawrence W. Reed, The Freeman [October 1994]
5/6/2010: A
Fannie Mae Political Reckoning
Democrats fear a Senate measure to reform the
failed mortgage giants.
One sign that the White House
financial reform is less potent than its advertising claims is that it
doesn’t even attempt to reform the two companies at the heart of the
housing mania and panic, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So we’re glad to
see that yesterday GOP Senators John McCain, Richard Shelby and Judd Gregg
introduced a Fan and Fred reform amendment that will let Democrats show if
they’re serious about reducing reckless lending and taxpayer risk.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry
Commission spent yesterday focusing on financial “leverage,”
using Bear Stearns as an example. But Fannie and Freddie were twice as
leveraged as Bear, and much larger as a share of the mortgage market. Fan and
Fred owned or guaranteed $5 trillion in mortgages and mortgage-backed
securities when they collapsed in September 2008. Reforming the financial
system without fixing Fannie and Freddie is like declaring a war on terror
and ignoring al Qaeda.
Unreformed, they are sure to kill
taxpayers again. Only yesterday, Freddie said it lost $8 billion in the first
quarter, requested another $10.6 billion from Uncle Sam, and warned that it
would need more in the future. This comes on top of the $126.9 billion that
Fan and Fred had already lost through the end of 2009. The duo are by far the
biggest losers of the entire financial panic—bigger than AIG, Citigroup
and the rest.
From the 2008 meltdown through
2020, the toxic twins will cost taxpayers close to $380 billion, according to
the Congressional Budget Office’s cautious estimate. The Obama
Administration won’t even put the companies on budget for fear of the
deficit impact, but it realizes the problem because last Christmas Eve it
raised the $400 billion cap on their potential taxpayer losses to . . .
infinity.
Moreover, these taxpayer losses
understate the financial destruction wrought by Fan and Fred. By concealing
how much they were gambling on risky subprime and Alt-A mortgages, the
companies sent bogus signals on the size of these markets and distorted
decision-making throughout the system. Their implicit government guarantee
also let them sell mortgage-backed securities around the world, attracting
capital to U.S. housing and thus turbocharging the mania.
The virtue of Mr.
McCain’s amendment is that it will give Senators a chance to vote on
the kind of reform that Congress blocked for so long, notably with Senator
Barack Obama helping the blockade. The amendment mandates that the current
government conservatorship of Fan and Fred will end within 30 months. In the
meantime, the companies will have to reduce their mortgage portfolios by 10%
each year. If the terrible twosome can’t stand on their own after
conservatorship, they would then go into receivership and be liquidated.
If they can survive on their
own, they would have three years before the expiration of their federal
charters, during which time they would have new operating restrictions.
Messrs. McCain, Shelby and Gregg would repeal the affordable housing goals
previously legislated for Fan and Fred and which contributed to their
terrible mortgage bets, and the companies would have to reduce the mortgage
assets held on their books by nearly 50% within two years and raise their
capital standards.
Fannie and Freddie would also
have to start paying state and local sales taxes, lose their exemption from
full registration at the Securities and Exchange Commission when they issue
securities, and start paying fees to repay the taxpayer for the value of
federal guarantees. The $400 billion limit on taxpayer assistance would be
reinstated, and for as long as they are in federal conservatorship or
receivership, they would have to be included in the federal budget.
In short, the McCain amendment
precisely targets the problems that caused the mortgage crisis: If the
housing giants are no longer subsidized, they will become small enough to
fail. That means they will stop lending money to people who cannot afford to
pay them back, and in turn they will stop endangering taxpayers.
This is a genuine anti-bailout
vote, and you would think Democrats would be more than happy to go along
given their claims that they want to stop bailouts. Yet Republicans
aren’t even sure that Majority Leader Harry Reid will allow a vote on
the McCain measure lest Democrats get pressure from the White House to oppose
it. They would then reveal that their reform is less about reducing risk than
about giving the political class more control over the financial status quo.
“The President of Greece
warned last night that his country stood on the brink of the abyss after
three people were killed when an anti-government mob set fire to the Athens
bank where they worked.” -- The Times Online
That “anti-government
mob,” it must be understood, consisted of civil servants, tens of
thousands of whom took to the streets to protest austerity measures. Greece
is in the midst of a general strike. Airports are closed. Trains are not
running. Classrooms are empty. Trash is piling up. The Wall Street Journal
reports that “Angry youths rampaged through the center of Athens,
torching several businesses and vehicles and smashing shop windows.
Protesters and police clashed in front of parliament and fought running
street battles around the city.” The Greek crisis, like a fraying rope
on a footbridge, is also sending shudders throughout the Eurozone.
This is more than a financial
crisis. This is a national meltdown. And while facile comparisons to the U.S.
must be avoided, there are nonetheless lessons for us --particularly in light
of the direction the Democratic Party wants to travel.
First, the differences. Greece is a
small nation of 11.3 million people. Its GDP is estimated to be in the range
of $333 billion (though with recent revelations of government dishonesty
about deficit numbers, all figures must be viewed skeptically). Greece
partakes zestily in the Mediterranean tradition of tax avoidance, and
corruption is endemic. Many ordinary transactions are greased with
“fakelaki” (little envelopes) or “rousfeti”
(political favors). Daniel Kaufmann, a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution, compared 40 industrialized countries and concluded that
“If Greece had better control of corruption -- not to Swedish
standards, but even at Spain’s level -- it would have had a smaller
budget deficit by 4 percent of gross domestic product.”
So Greece has cultural problems that
contribute to its economic implosion. But there are similarities to the U.S.
as well -- and because we have elected Democrats, they are growing. By the
end of 2011, Greece’s debt will be 150 percent of its GDP. According to
a March report by the Congressional Budget Office, President Obama’s
2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits
over the next 10 years -- $1.2 trillion more than the administration
projected -- which will increase our debt to GDP ratio to 90 percent by 2020.
One in three Greeks works for the
government. Government employees enjoy higher wages, more munificent
benefits, and earlier retirements than private sector employees. Civil
servants can retire after 35 years of service at 80 percent of their highest
salary and enjoy lavish health plans, vacations, and other perks. Because
they are so numerous, and because Greece is highly centralized, public sector
unions hardly have to negotiate. They simply vote in their preferred bosses.
Some civil servants receive bonuses for using computers, others for arriving
at work on time. Forestry workers get a bonus for outdoor work. All civil
servants receive 14 yearly checks for 12 months’ work. And it’s
impossible to fire them -- even for the grossest incompetence.
Public sector unions are growing in
the U.S. More than 50 percent of all union members are now public employees
who have negotiated sweet deals with local, state, and federal governments.
As economic historian John Steele Gordon points out, “Federal workers
now earn, in wages and benefits, about twice what their private-sector
equivalents get paid. State workers often have Cadillac health plans and
retirement benefits far above the private sector average: 80 percent of
public-sector workers have pension benefits, only 50 percent in the private
sector. Many can retire at age 50.” While private employers were
shedding jobs during the recession, state and local governments hired 110,000
new workers.
Obama’s new spending will
result in a 14.5 percent increase in the number of federal employees in just
two years. And he has looked after union interests with particular zeal,
whether at General Motors and Chrysler, or by funneling one-third of stimulus
spending to state and local governments, or by repealing the rule that
required unions to disclose their spending.
And in a corrupt feedback loop that
may not be so very different after all from the Greek practice, public
employee unions give generously to Democratic candidates, both in cash
contributions and by manning phone banks, getting out the vote, and so on.
It’s no coincidence that the
states with the most powerful public sector unions -- New Jersey, California,
and New York -- are facing the most severe budget crises.
Greece is in flames, but if you look
around, you can smell the smoke here as well.
Some blame a culture of comfort.
Others blame politicians. Why not blame John Edwards?
In Greece, the bill collector knocks
on the front door. The country staggers, one German forefinger from default.
Default means fewer buyers for Greece’s debt, even at much higher rates
of interest. As we see with the housing collapse, financial institutions and
economies globally interconnect. Trouble there spells trouble here.
The Greece deficit as a percentage
of its gross domestic product is over 13 percent. The rules of the European
Union, of which Greece is a member, require a percentage below 3 percent. Its
debt as a percentage of its GDP is 115 percent. The EU requires a level of
not higher than 60 percent.
Greece is but one of many
“advanced” countries with bad balance sheets. To the list add
Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, England, France and many others. Japan
recently saw its bonds downgraded because of high public debt. In America,
government continues to spend way more than it takes in, with the trend line
rising higher. Our deficit-to-GDP percentage is close to 10 percent. Our
debt-to-GDP percentage for 2009 was 83 percent -- with 94 percent expected in
2010.
This brings us to John Edwards.
The former Democratic presidential
candidate talked about the “two Americas.” In one America,
everybody lives off the family trust fund. They know the secret handshake
that admits them into Harvard and gets them the best tables at restaurants.
They name their girls Ashley and give their kids German sports cars when they
graduate from prep school.
But then there’s that Other
America.
In Edwards’ Other America,
everybody’s a victim. “Oppressors” post signs above the
ghetto or barrio or trailer park that say, “Abandon hope all ye who
enter here.” Kids cannot or should not be expected to take advantage of
government-provided education and easy entrance into a junior college,
college or university -- often with subsidized tuition. In this America, we
treat people as if they are too stupid or lazy to act responsibly. Did
Edwards call for more cops, aggressive law enforcement and longer sentences
to combat crime that makes life harder and more dangerous? Does he want
parents to choose the schools their children attend? No, he wants to
subsidize counterproductive behavior with an arsenal of welfare and
entitlement programs, along with the “you owe me” mentality.
Americans, including the poor, live
far better today than at any time in history. Life is easier, safer and full
of choices. Success and upward mobility depend less than ever on physical
strength and more than ever on knowledge. And knowledge is more accessible
than ever. Most rich people did not start out that way. There is a great deal
of upward and, for that matter, downward mobility. Many living in the Other
America own their homes outright, own more than one car and live at a level
of comfort that equals the middle class of even some “advanced”
countries.
But Edwards tells us that it
isn’t enough to be blessed to live in a country that assures an
unalienable right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We need
guarantees. Government -- ignoring its limited duties prescribed in the
Constitution -- must provide an ever-expanding “social safety
net” at the expense of the work and wealth of someone else. Some have
it better than others. And government should address the gosh dang unfairness
of it all.
Class envy, characterizing
“the disadvantaged” as victims, and stoking a sense of
entitlement are the push-pull between politician and citizen. Never mind that
society needs producers. It needs innovators, risk takers, job creators.
Wealth takes work and lots of time. Luck of birth plays a part, but effort
drives the bus.
Edwards, in fact, is a walking,
talking refutation of the need for more government. In speeches, he’d
tell, “My daddy was a millworker.” Yeah, for a time. But Daddy
Edwards got promoted -- as many hard workers do -- to supervisor and then to
manager. The Edwards clan moved from working-class neighborhoods to a
middle-class neighborhood. Then Daddy Edwards became a manufacturing
consultant whose son became a rich medical malpractice lawyer.
Yet Edwards arrogantly insists that
the formula his family applied -- good parenting, education, hard work --
doesn’t work for the Other America, even though he started out in it.
The European social democracies,
including Greece, were built on “economic equality” and
“social justice” -- the costs borne by someone else. The bill is
coming due. Proposed cuts in generous pensions and changes to early retirement
face intense opposition and have already sparked riots. When robbing Peter to
pay Paul, you can guarantee the support of Paul. But try taking stuff away
from Paul.
Edwards’ vision -- and that of
President Barack “I think at some point you have made enough money”
Obama -- is, in the end, self-defeating. It promises protection from want and
uncertainty. But it delivers dependency, less prosperity -- and an even
longer sentence in the Other America.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Freddie
Mac is asking for $10.6 billion in additional federal aid
after posting a big loss in the first three months of the year.
The new request will bring the total bill for
rescuing Freddie Mac, which has been effectively owned by the government
since nearly collapsing in September 2008, to $61.3 billion…
[Read
More]
The
key to understanding the saga of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the
recently nationalized twin government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that
dominate home financing—is this:
They were set up—intentionally—to
distort the housing and mortgage markets. Government planners were not
content to let voluntary exchange and spontaneous market forces configure
those industries unmolested. So—holding the taxpayers
hostage—they intervened.
Make no mistake: The collapse of Fannie and
Freddie is government social engineering predictably gone bad…
[Read
More]
[Who/what is the greater threat to your freedom: terrorists?
Mexicans? Or Big Government? Who/what killed 100,000,000 people in the 20th
century? Terrorists? Illegal Immigrants? Governments? Organized Crime?]
Quotes of the Day:
“Do unto others as you would have them
do to you.” -- Jesus of Nazareth, Luke 6:31 (NIV)
“Liberty is the only thing you cannot
have unless you are willing to give it to others.” -- William Allen
White
Once upon a time, in a country known as the
land of the free and the home of the brave, these words were rarely heard:
“May I see your papers please?”
But, increasingly, the free and the brave
became dependent and cowardly. They begged to wear chains.
Many fought the trend, but even they were
undone, because some in their ranks harbored fears greater than their love of
freedom.
Remember where you heard this . . .
If American freedom dies, the widespread
desire to control immigration will have been a major factor.
And remember where you heard this . . .
If the fight to defeat the creation of a
national ID card FAILS, it will be because of the widespread desire to
control immigration. Let us not forget, we have drawn the line on Real ID.
Five years have gone by, and we’ve stalled implementation. But now,
other Real ID Jr. proposals are building a head of steam.
So remember where you heard this . . .
Americans will have to carry internal
passports, and show them to State officials constantly, and have every aspect
of their lives controlled by far off know-it-alls in the federal bureaucracy.
Your federal overlords will gain increased control over . . .
o Where, how, and even if you can earn a living
o Whether or not you can board a train, or enter a
federal building
o Whether or not you can cash a check, or buy guns
or alcohol
o What kind of healthcare you receive
o How long you’ll stand in line at the DMV,
and whether you can have a license
o Whether or not you can be stopped on our streets,
and even detained, for failure to display your card
o And many other aspects of your life
This total control will be made possible by a
national identification system that was put in place in order to control immigration.
But it will really control YOU!
In this way, immigration control and
registration is just like gun control and registration -- it most deeply
affects law-abiding citizens.
Remember where you heard this . . .
The immigration debate is NOT about what Mexicans will be allowed
to do, IT’S about what YOU will be allowed to do. It’s about YOUR
freedom . . .
o
First the politicians wanted
to curtail your freedom to protect you from terrorists
o
Now they want to curtail your
freedom to protect you from Mexicans
Remember where you heard this . . .
The immigration debate is a scam. It’s
fear-mongering, foisted by busy-bodies of all varieties. The result will be
Bigger Government in Washington, DC. It will control YOU. And now, it’s
up to YOU to decide . . .
Are you afraid of terrorists and Mexicans?
...or whatever hobgoblin the Big Government Fearmongers will conjure next?
Will you be free and brave, or dependent and
cowardly? Will you trade YOUR FREEDOM for a false promise of protection?
This is how we see the issue. And if you end
up in chains, remember who warned you. We did.
Meanwhile, for the brave who want to remain
free, let the spirit of resistance continue . . .
Please send a letter to Congress opposing all
national identification schemes, including the new attempt by Senators
Schumer and Graham, to MAKE ALL OF US CARRY Social Security cards with
biometric identifiers.
In addition to this campaign’s hardwired
letter to Congress, which reads as follows -- “Please don’t try
to fix the REAL ID Act. Please, just repeal it.” -- we suggest you add
the following in your personal comments . . .
“Please oppose any legislation that
contains any support for any kind of national identification system. I
specifically oppose plans for a Social Security card containing biometric
identifiers. I do not want ANY national identification scheme, and I reject
your claim that I need such a system in order to be protected from terrorists
and Mexican immigrants. I am not afraid! And I want you to stop being afraid
on my behalf.”
You can send your letter to Congress here
Our thanks go to those who prefer
bravery and freedom.
5/4/2010:
from Best of the Web
This Ain’t Rocket Science
A public-school
principal in Ann Arbor, Mich., organized a segregated field trip. No, this
isn’t breaking news from 1953; it happened just last week. The twist is
that only black pupils were invited on the trip, which the principal said was
“part of his school’s efforts to close the achievement gap
between white and black students,” as AnnArbor.com reports:
o Dicken Elementary School Principal Mike Madison
wrote the letter to parents following several days of controversy at the
school after a field trip last week in which black students got to hear a
rocket scientist.
o “In hindsight, this field trip could have
been approached and arranged in a better way,” Madison wrote.
“But as I reflect upon the look of excitement, enthusiasm and energy
that I saw in these children’s eyes as they stood in the presence of a
renowned African American rocket scientist in a very successful position, it
gave the kids an opportunity to see this type of achievement is possible for
even them.
o “It was not a wasted venture for I know one
day they might want to aspire to be the first astronaut or scientist standing
on the Planet Mars.
o “I also think it’s important that you
know that I have talked to the children who did not go on the field trip, and
I think they have a better understanding of the purpose of the AA
[African-American] Lunch Bunch now, as I hope you do. I’m sorry if any
kids were upset by the field trip or my discussion afterwards with them, and
I have let them know that.
o “The intent of our field trip was not to
segregate or exclude students as has been reported, but rather to address the
societal issues, roadblocks and challenges that our African American children
will face as they pursue a successful academic education here in our
community.”
We don’t doubt
Madison’s good intentions, nor do we think it was a “wasted
venture.” It seems to us an excellent idea to expose black youngsters
to accomplished black adults, for just the reasons he states.
But why only black
youngsters? We are forever hearing that white Americans continue to harbor
“racial resentment,” derogatory stereotypes, even flatly racist
attitudes toward blacks. In this column’s opinion, that problem is
overstated. But it certainly couldn’t hurt to show pupils of pallor
that rocket scientists don’t necessarily “look like them.”
Further, who’s
to say an accomplished black adult can’t be a role model for a white
child, or vice versa? The multicultural mindset is impoverished inasmuch as
it sees people primarily as members of a subpopulation, rather than as Americans
or human beings.
During our
childhood, we once read a book about Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who
made a career of rescuing other slaves. It never occurred to us that because
Tubman was black, her story was “black history” and therefore not
of interest to us. We were inspired by her heroism in the cause of
freedom--universal human themes.
Similarly, the laws
of physics do not discriminate. Anyone with the aptitude and the interest can
become a rocket scientist. That’s a worthy lesson to teach children of
any color--and that ain’t rocket science.
5/4/2010:
from Best of the Web
Stressed? Get Into Dodge.
The Associated Press
has a list of the 20 most and least “economically distressed”
counties in the country. The most-stressed county is Imperial, in
southeastern California (between San Diego and Yuma, Ariz.). Least-stressed?
Ford County, Kan., home of Dodge City.
Of the 20
most-stressed counties, 12 are in California, 3 each in Michigan and Nevada,
and 1 each in New Mexico and Illinois. Of the 20 most-stressed, 4 are in
Kansas; 3 each in Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota; 2 each in
Louisiana and Oklahoma; and 1 each in Iowa, Virginia and Wyoming.
Didn’t
somebody once write a book called “What’s the Matter With
Kansas?”? Seems as though “What’s the Matter With
California?” would be a more fruitful line of inquiry.
I believe the
political stars are aligning right now for the opening of a new front in the
battle against our gun rights, via the election and work of an anti-gun
president, the disarmament passions of the Washington elite and the United
Nations, the appointments of gun prohibitionists in the White House and
Supreme Court, and the funding of an anti-Second Amendment movement by
billionaire progressives, such as George Soros.
Last week, I
discussed President Barack Obama’s anti-Second Amendment record and his
administration’s goal to use dormant treaties and global agencies to
loosen the boundaries and binds of the Second Amendment. I wish to expand
upon the United Nations’ participation a little further in this second
part of my trilogy.
In October, the
Obama administration reversed the position taken by the Bush White House by
stating its support for a process that could, in 2012, result in an
international treaty to regulate conventional arms sales. Of course,
“regulate” is a euphemism here for “the beginning of
banning.”
U.S. Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton said the United States would support the talks as long as the
negotiating forum, the so-called conference on the arms trade treaty,
“operates under the rules of consensus decision-making.”
Without a single
mention of the Second Amendment or America’s sovereignty in her entire
statement, Clinton said, “The United States is committed to actively
pursuing a strong and robust treaty that contains the highest possible,
legally binding standards for the international transfer of conventional weapons.”
Amnesty
International and Oxfam International jointly declared the action “a
major breakthrough in launching formal negotiations at the United
Nations.” But do Americans really want or need the U.N. to tell us what
to do with our guns with an international treaty? And when we are negotiating
with other countries, do we really expect non-U.S. delegates to be
conciliatory to America’s unique Second Amendment rights? James Madison
noted in Federalist No. 46 that the Constitution preserves “the advantage
of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other
nation ... (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with
arms.”
In 2006, the U.N.
General Assembly passed a resolution titled “Towards an arms trade
treaty.” In 2008, the General Assembly passed another resolution that
accelerated efforts toward an arms trade treaty. In both cases, the U.S. was
the only country opposed. Now it appears that Obama and Clinton have ordered
our team of U.N. negotiators to drop their opposition and move forward to
develop “consensus.”
With the Obama
administration receptive and on board, the General Assembly is moving forward
with a U.N. conference to produce an arms trade treaty in 2012 -- perhaps
sooner. In fact, the U.N. is hosting a major conference on this subject in
June.
John Bolton, who was
the Bush administration’s ambassador to the U.N., explained in
November: “The (Obama) administration is trying to act as though this
is really just a treaty about international arms trade between nation states,
but there’s no doubt -- as was the case back over a decade ago -- that
the real agenda here is domestic firearms control. After the treaty is
approved and it comes into force, you will find out that it ... requires the
Congress to adopt some measure that restricts ownership of firearms. The
administration knows it cannot obtain this kind of legislation purely in a
domestic context. ... (It) will use an international agreement as an excuse
to get domestically what (it) couldn’t otherwise.”
Of course, any
international treaty needs the approval of two-thirds of the Senate to be
ratified, and critics on both sides say there’s no way that will
happen. Cato Institute scholar Ted Galen Carpenter spoke for many others when
he said, “There is no chance of getting a two-thirds vote in the Senate
to pass this treaty; it has too many implications for gun rights in the
United States.” I respectfully beg to differ. Look at how Obamacare was
shoved through the Senate like a ramrod, even after the landmark election of
“no” voter Scott Brown of Massachusetts. Believe me; if
there’s a will, they’ll find a way.
Why the Constitution
is so complicated to some I never will understand. Our Founders ratified a
Second Amendment as a right and defense for all Americans. There’s
nothing easy about defending your life. And taking a life is a mega-tragedy.
But when your life is in danger, the Second Amendment provides for your and
your loved ones’ security.
Case in point: Last
month, Michael Lish and his wife arrived home in Tulsa, Okla., at 10 p.m. to
find the back door ajar and a window open. Unbeknownst to the couple, the
intruder in their house had been released from jail recently and had a
history of drug offenses and driving under the influence. Michael had just entered
his house when he heard a noise coming from the master bedroom. Once Michael
neared the bedroom, the intruder, 19-year-old Billy Jean Tiffey III,
approached Michael with a sword that he was in the process of stealing from
the house. When Tiffey did not comply with his order to stop approaching him,
Michael, who had a concealed-weapons permit, pulled out his gun and shot
Tiffey in the abdomen. However, the intruder dropped to his knees and reached
behind his back, appearing to the homeowner as if he was reaching for another
weapon. (In addition to the sword, he was packing a .38-caliber pistol, a 9
mm pistol, a knife and a stun gun.) Michael had no choice -- and he shot
Tiffey two more times in the chest, killing him.
It was certainly an
understatement of Thomas Jefferson’s when he wrote to George Washington
these words in 1796: “One loves to possess arms, though they hope never
to have occasion for them.”
Recent stories out
of both Philadelphia and San Francisco tell of black students beating up
Asian American students. This is especially painful for those who expected
that the election of Barack Obama would mark the beginning of a post-racial
America.
While Obama’s
winning the majority of the votes in overwhelmingly white states suggests
that many Americans are ready to move beyond race, it is painfully clear that
others are not.
Those who explain racial
antagonisms on some rationalistic basis will have a hard time demonstrating
how Asian Americans have made blacks worse off. Certainly none of the
historic wrongs done to blacks was done by the small Asian American
population who, for most of their history in this country, have not had
enough clout to prevent themselves from being discriminated against.
While ugly racial or
ethnic conflicts can seldom be explained by rational economic or other
self-interest, they have been too common to be just inexplicable oddities--
whether in America or in other countries around the world, and whether today
or in centuries past.
Resentments and
hostility toward people with higher achievements are one of the most
widespread of human failings. Resentments of achievements are more deadly
than envy of wealth.
The hatred of people
who started at the bottom and worked their way up has far exceeded any
hostility toward those who were simply born into wealth. None of the sultans
who inherited extraordinary fortunes in Malaysia has been hated like the
Chinese, who arrived there destitute and rose by their own efforts.
Inheritors of the
Rockefeller fortune have been elected as popular governors in three states,
attracting nothing like the hostility toward the Jewish immigrants who rose
from poverty on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to prosperity in a variety
of fields.
Others who started
at the bottom and rose to prosperity-- the Lebanese in West Africa, the
Indians in Fiji, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, for example-- have likewise
been hated for their achievements. Being born a sultan or a Rockefeller is
not an achievement.
Achievements are a
reflection on others who may have had similar, and sometimes better, chances
but who did not make the most of their chances. Achievements are like a slap
across the face to those who are not achieving, and many people react with
the same kind of anger that such an insult would provoke.
In our own times,
especially, this is not just a spontaneous reaction. Many of our educators,
our intelligentsia and our media -- not to mention our politicians-- promote
an attitude that other people’s achievements are grievances, rather
than examples.
When black school
children who are working hard in school and succeeding academically are
attacked and beaten up by black classmates for “acting white,”
why is it surprising that similar hostility is turned against Asian
Americans, who are often achieving academically more so than whites?
This attitude is not
peculiar to some in the black community or to the United States. The same
phenomenon is found among lower-class whites in Britain, where academically
achieving white students have been beaten up badly enough by their white
classmates to require hospital treatment.
These are poisonous
and self-destructive consequences of a steady drumbeat of ideological hype
about differences that are translated into “disparities” and
“inequities,” provoking envy and resentments under their more
prettied-up name of “social justice.”
Asian American
school children who are beaten up are just some of the victims of these
resentments that are whipped up. Young people who are seething with
resentments, instead of seizing educational and other opportunities around
them, are bigger victims in the long run, whether they are blacks in the US
or lower-class whites in the UK. A decade after these beatings, these Asian
Americans will be headed up in the world, while the hoodlums who beat them up
are more likely to be headed for crime and prison.
People who call
differences “inequities” and achievements “privilege”
leave social havoc in their wake, while feeling noble about siding with the
less fortunate. It would never occur to them that they have any
responsibility for the harm done to both blacks and Asian Americans.
If you ran into
people who insisted on trying to pound nails with a screwdriver no matter how
many times they were shown a better way, wouldn’t you think there was
something wrong with them? What if those people not only used a screwdriver,
but demanded that everyone else use a screwdriver instead of a hammer, too?
Worse yet, what if those people did this for decades on end?
Well, guess what? We
have people like that in this country. They’re called liberals and the
screwdriver they’re using to try to fix America’s problems is
called big government. Despite the fact that we have decades of accumulated
evidence proving that big government doesn’t work, liberals just
won’t give up on it.
Now we may not be
able to convince the hidebound Left that government doesn’t work, but
there are a lot of other Americans with open minds. Maybe some of them can be
reached by pointing out how life would be if big government actually worked
as well as liberals seem to believe it does.
o FedEx and UPS would be out of business because
there’d be no way they could compete with the ruthless efficiency,
amazing speed, & dazzling customer service of the post office.
o Our southern and northern borders would be
completely secure, the fence on the southern border would be done, and there
wouldn’t be enough illegals in the United States to even merit a debate
about amnesty.
o Social Security would be fully funded and every
dime you contribute would be invested, ready to be withdrawn when the
government needs to pay your benefits.
o Something as important as Medicare wouldn’t
be a giant “Bernie Madoff style” Ponzi scheme that would merit
fraud charges if a private citizen tried to create a similar project.
o When George W. Bush said, “Brownie,
you’re doing a heck of a job,” people all across the country
would have said, “Yeah, he’s right. He is doing a heck of a good
job. Go, Brownie!”
o The American people would be clamoring for the
billing departments of private companies to match the professionalism,
customer service, and competence of the IRS.
o The massive government regulation that was already
in place would have prevented the housing crisis that led to the latest
recession that affects America -- instead of creating it by demanding that
housing loans be given to poor risks.
o A trip to the DMV would be no more of a hassle
than stopping by Wal-Mart to pick up some laundry detergent.
o The Soviet Union would have won the Cold War.
o Members of Congress would actually read and
understand the bills they sign into law instead of saying things like,
What good is reading
the (health care) bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t
have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the
bill?--John Conyers (D-MI)
o Prominent supporters of big government like Tim
Geithner, Charles Rangel, Tom Daschle, and Al Franken wouldn’t have
been caught cheating on the taxes required to pay for the huge government
programs they advocate.
o It would be as easy to fill out your taxes as it
is to apply for a credit card.
o Amtrak would be a cash cow instead of a 40 billion
dollar money pit that has never recorded a profit.
o The government wouldn’t have just decided
that sending a manned mission to the moon, something we last did way back in
1972, now and for the foreseeable future is going to be beyond our
capabilities.
o Instead of trying to figure out what to do about
our massive debt, Americans would be debating whether we want to cut taxes or
save all the extra tax dollars we raise in a rainy day fund.
o Government mandated price controls would work and
therefore, we wouldn’t have had gas lines during the seventies,
California wouldn’t have had blackouts, and rent control in New York
would be producing some of the nation’s cheapest housing.
o Having to deal with a government bureaucrat would
produce a feeling of cheerful confidence that things are about to start
looking up instead of a sense of dread that your afternoon is about to be
wasted without getting your problem solved.
o Private schools wouldn’t exist because they
simply couldn’t match the quality education provided by our public
schools.
o Rich people would be pulling strings to get into
public housing.
o After spending 10 trillion dollars plus fighting
the war on poverty, the government would have already won and American
society would consist almost entirely of the middle class and the rich.
5/3/2010: “Strangely enough -- for a bill that
allegedly sticks it to Wall Street -- during the Senate Banking Committee
hearing [last] week, Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein endorsed the Dodd
bill.
Someone should have asked him who from
Goldman wrote it. In 2008, Goldman employees gave a record-breaking
$1,007,370 to the Obama campaign. This year, the ‘securities and
investment’ industry has already given twice as much money to the
Democrats as to the Republicans. ABC News reports that ‘the five
biggest hedge fund donors all gave almost all their donations to
Democrats.’ Among the biggest recipients of hedge fund money were
Senators Harry Reid (Democrat), Chris Dodd (Democrat) and Charles Schumer
(Democrat). Even with the evidence right in front of their eyes, people still
believe that it’s the Republicans who are in Wall Street’s
pocket. How out of touch with reality would a comedy writer have to be to
write the following joke for Jay Leno [last] week: ‘The head of Goldman
Sachs was going through security and was asked to empty his pockets -- and
five Republican senators fell out.’ Why didn’t Barack Obama or
Chuck Schumer fall out? Why not Rahm Emanuel, who worked for Goldman? Or Greg
Craig, who used to work for Obama but just took a job with Goldman? The fact
that anyone laughed at that joke proves that Republicans have a serious PR
problem.” --columnist Ann Coulter
In the high-stakes
poker game of Washington, D.C., power-politics, Democrats are holding a pair
of deuces but telling Republicans they’ve got a royal flush. Poker is
all about bluff and bluster and unfounded confidence. And the rules governing
politics aren’t much different. So, good for the Democrats.
What’s upsetting, though, is that the Republicans are ready to fold,
despite holding a full house, aces high. It’s pathetic. And at this
particular table – where the minimum bet
is the future of America’s free market system – it’s unacceptable.
Watching and
listening to the debate over Obama’s so called “financial reform”
bill, one could be excused the impression that Republicans are “the
party of Wall Street,” flush with corrupt banker cash, desperate to
stymie justice, and eager to craft a reform bill that conforms to Wall
Street’s specific wish list. How do we know? Well, Democrats have been
making the case all week. As they did to the Politico on Wednesday:
“‘Bipartisanship
for Republican leaders means bringing Wall Street to the table, bring Wall Street
banks into the room, and let them help you write the legislation,’ said
Sen.
Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).”
This is akin to
Eliot Spitzer blackmailing a prostitute, Nancy Pelosi calling someone else a
lunatic, or Bill Clinton ascribing “political” motives to an
electoral opponent. But the Democrat
narrative on Wall Street – the corrupting influence of cash, and which
party wallows most in the trough – is just as ludicrous, and just as blatantly
dishonest. And make no
mistake, it is the ONLY narrative on the subject, currently. And yet,
Republicans are too timid, too disorganized or just too plain pathetic to
raise even the smallest flag of protest. How can it be?
For more than a week
now, we’ve been advising Republican Senators that they must demand a
special prosecutor investigate the already documented connection between
President Obama, Wall Street Financiers and the Congressional Democrats who
have been loudly posturing that they are going after “big
business.”
A brief perusal of FEC filings shows that Obama has been the
recipient of nearly a million dollars from Goldman Sachs –
Obama’s largest corporate contributor, the very entity under
investigation by his own SEC, the same folks dragged to the Hill in televised
humiliation this week — AND that the majority of Wall Street dough
lands in Democrat campaign accounts. Pretty shocking revelations, there for
all to witness, and yet, silence from Republicans.
Democrats have been publicly assaulting the free enterprise
system for years. And now, finally, they have the votes, the political
coverage and the compliant press required for them to fashion legislation
that assumes control of certain businesses, allowing them to pick and choose
who succeeds based solely on their record of donations to Democrats.
It’s a modern-day spoils system, designed by shameless and hypocritical
legislators, and guaranteed the approval of America’s first socialist
president. [emphasis added]
So often we hear the
term “crony capitalism” bandied about. It’s a tired, and
clichéd phrase, adopted mostly by those who are too lazy, or too
uninquisitive, to observe what is really going on in the debate over Wall
Street. Today, we declare that term dead. The process we are now witnessing
can go by no other name than, “crony fascism.”
It’s so
Machiavellian and so strategically brilliant that under other circumstances
we couldn’t fail to be impressed by it; Democrats are blackmailing Republicans for
the very corruption the Democrats themselves own. And the Republicans are too stupid, or too
wimpy, or too insecure to cry foul, seize the issue and clobber Democrats
over the head with it.
Republicans in power
may refuse to acknowledge it, but we won’t: Democrats assume this
populist issue of Wall Street “reform,” for show only…and
to continue extorting large piles of cash from big business. It’s as if this
is a pro-wrestling match, where everything about the fight is fake, but the
payday is real. Too real.
And yet, the
solution is simple: demand a special prosecutor to investigate Obama’s
relationship with Goldman Sachs and Wall Street; the taxpayer bailouts and
the individuals who profited from them; and the corruption at Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac – for which Rep. Barney Frank, for one, has never been held
accountable, and for which the Democrats were directly responsible. When the
Democrats object, as they inevitably will, make that the issue.
Not only would this
route allow Republicans to take back the high ground from the Democrats
– and set the stage for a productive, national lecture to the Democrats
regarding the corrupt big business/big government nexus -- it would have the
benefit also of actually being good for the country. Imagine, a win for Republicans
and a win for America!
The night before
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid forced Republicans to capitulate on
“reform,” he took a break from attacking the GOP as the party of
big business, so he could jet up to New York, and prostrate himself in front
of the same Wall Street firms he’d spent the week excoriating, and beg
for some cash. With his reelection campaign coffers newly topped off, he
returned to Washington. And, as the Politico reported, “Reid took his
criticisms a step further Wednesday, calling Republicans
‘anti-American’ for blocking the Wall Street reform bill.”
And in response, how did the Republicans defend themselves? They sheepishly
agreed to allow debate on the bill, as though they were the ones with
something to hide!
Make no mistake, the
“Reform Bill” lays the foundation for this new era of
“Crony Fascism.” It gives Democrats – along with their
lefty, Trojan Horse friends on Wall Street -- the power to destroy the free
enterprise system that they almost succeeded in destroying with ceaseless
meddling in Fannie and Freddie during the past decade.
And to those
conspiracy theorists out there who will protest that “Republicans are
in on it, too; both parties conspire against America and take turns running
the country,” let us just say this: Republicans are too stupid and too
incompetent to conspire with the Good Humor man to even land an ice cream
sandwich. High-stakes poker is well beyond their reach.
President Obama
spoke the most revealing and clarifying 10 words of his control-freak
administration this week: “I think at some point you have made enough
money.” Peddling financial regulatory reform at a rally in Quincy,
Ill., Obama then ad-libbed peculiar definitions of what he called the
“American way” and the profit motive: “(Y)ou can just keep
on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good
service. We don’t want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core
responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.”
Fundamental lesson
of Capitalism 101: Governments and bureaucrats don’t make what people
want and need. They only get in the way. It is individuals, cooperating
peacefully and voluntarily, working together without mandate or central
design, who produce the world’s goods and services. They make what
people desire and demand for themselves, not what Obama and his imperial
overlords ordain that the masses should have.
As usual,
Obama’s populist demagoguery is telling in its omissions and
selectivity. While he lectures on the morality of salary caps for everyone
else, his own cabinet is filled with fabulously wealthy CEOs and statist
creatures who have parlayed government employment (a “good”
service) into private gain as lobbyists, consultants and advisers
(“core responsibilities of the financial system”) and then back
again to public stints. Revolving doors have always grown the Beltway
economy.
To wit: Austan
Goolsbee, head of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, is the 15th
wealthiest member of the Obama administration, with assets valued at between
$1,146,000 to $2,715,000. He also pulled in a University of Chicago salary of
$465,000 and additional wages and honoraria worth $93,000, according to the
Washingtonian magazine.
What
“good” did he provide? The government research fellow and Obama
campaign adviser was a champion of extending credit to the un-creditworthy. In
a 2007 op-ed for The New York Times, he derided those who called subprime
mortgages “irresponsible.” He preferred to describe them as
“innovations in the mortgage market” to expand the pool of
homebuyers. Now this wrong-headed academic who espoused government policies
that fed the housing feeding frenzy is in charge of fixing the loose-credit
mess he advocated. This is the “American way”?
After 16 years in
Congress, four years in the Clinton administration as budget director and
chief of staff, and a lifetime of schmoozing in the halls of power,
Obama’s CIA director, Leon Panetta, cashed in big. He’s sitting
on up to $4 million in assets. While he has zero experience in intelligence
matters, he has extensive experience in parlaying his past political tours of
duty into lucrative speaking gigs, consulting fees and stock options. Welcome
to Obama-approved entrepreneurship.
By Obama’s
definition, first lady Michelle Obama is a model capitalist. Remember: After
serving with real estate mogul Valerie Jarrett in Chicago Mayor Richard M.
Daley’s administration, Mrs. Obama took a post at the University of
Chicago Medical Center, where Jarrett was serving as vice-chair of the
medical center’s board of trustees. Mrs. Obama was promoted in 2005
after her husband won his U.S. Senate race with Jarrett’s invaluable
aid. As “vice president for community and external affairs” and
head of the “business diversity program,” her annual compensation
nearly tripled from $122,000 in 2004 to $317,000 in 2005. Even after she went
on leave in 2007 to help her husband on the presidential campaign trail, the
hospital paid Mrs. Obama $62,709 in 2008, prompting one skeptic to ask:
“We know this is Chicago, but isn’t $63,000 quite a lot for a
no-show job?”
Jarrett, of course,
is now White House senior adviser to the chief spender of other
people’s money. And the first lady is now using her new taxpayer-funded
position not only to tell folks how they should eat, but also which
“good” restaurants and groceries should be built in their neighborhoods.
If there were any
doubts left about the Obamas’ ideological commitment to wealth
redistribution and a command-and-control economy, those doubts have been
thoroughly removed. We have a commander-in-chief who presumes to know when
you have earned “enough,” who believes that only those who
provide what he deems “good” products and services should
“keep on making it,” and who has determined that the role of
American entrepreneurs is not to pursue their own self-interest, but to
fulfill their “core” responsibility as dutiful growers of the
collective economy.
That famous mock-up
poster of Obama as the creepy socialist Joker never seemed more apt.
5/1/2010:
May Fools’ Day: the Day of Celebrating International Communism. What a
perfect day for tens or hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate around
the country against the Arizona anti-illegal immigration law. Let’s
remind everyone that there are millions of immigrants so that more states can
have such misguided laws.
Illegal
Immigration is a very emotional issue, but we should welcome immigrants, to
help build our society, our economy, our culture. The United States has
always been a country of immigrants. We need them to avoid our country
growing old and lazy, like Europe. Read the words of our founding fathers:
“The bosom of America is open to receive not only
the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all
Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our
rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to
merit the enjoyment.” --George Washington
“Born in other countries, yet believing you could be
happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us
in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules.
That these rules shall be as equal as prudential considerations will admit,
will certainly be the aim of our legislatures,
general and particular.” --Thomas Jefferson
Immigrants add
to our society and make it stronger when they come here to work, to raise a
family, and strive for the American dream. However, we need to eliminate the
socialist drag on our economy, especially in California, from overly generous
welfare benefits, whatever their nature.
Good photo to start off the month…
Remember, the Democratic politicians are evil
and
Republican politicians are stupid…
or was it the other way around, or was it both?
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