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Dale F. Ogden for Governor
of California 2010
www.dalefogden.org

“Small Government is Beautiful”

“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents...” --James Madison

Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right. — Ayn Rand

“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, Query 19, 1781

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H.L. Mencken

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding. — Judge Louis D. Brandeis

“Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it.” — Maimonides

“If you put the Federal Government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand.” — Milton Friedman

A Picture Says So Much

10/28/2009: Self-Governance Works by John Stossel

Much of what government does is based on the premise that people can’t do things for themselves. So government must do it for them. More often than not, the result is a ham-handed, bumbling, one-size-fits-all approach that leaves the intended beneficiaries worse off. Of course, this resulting failure is never blamed on the political approach — on the contrary, failure is taken to mean the government solution was not extravagant enough.

We who have confidence in what free people can achieve have long believed that government should not venture beyond its narrow sphere of providing physical security. It should not attempt to cure every social ill. So it’s good to learn that serious scholars have demonstrated that our intuitions are right. Free people, given the chance, solve what many “experts” think are problems that require state intervention.

For that reason, Elinor Ostrom’s winning of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences ought to kindle a new interest in freedom (See my earlier column here).

Ostrom made her mark through field studies that show people solving one of the more vexing problems: efficient management of a common-pool resource (CPR), such as a pasture or fishery. With an unowned “commons,” each individual has an incentive to get the most out of it without putting anything back.

If I take fish from a common fishing area, I benefit completely from those fish. But if I make an investment to increase the future number of fish, others benefit, too. So why should I risk making the investment? I’ll wait for others to do it. But everyone else faces the same free-rider incentive. So we end up with a depleted resource and what Garrett Harden called “the tragedy of the commons.”

Except, says Ostrom, we often don’t. There is also an “opportunity of the commons.” While most politicians conclude that, depending on the resource, efficient management requires either privatization or government ownership, Ostrom finds examples of a third way: “self-organizing forms of collective action,” as she put it in an interview a few years ago. Her message is to be wary of government promises.

“Field studies in all parts of the world have found that local groups of resource users, sometimes by themselves and sometimes with the assistance of external actors, have created a wide diversity of institutional arrangements for cooperating with common-pool resources.”

She has studied, for example, self-governing irrigation systems in Nepal and found successes never anticipated in the textbooks. “Irrigation systems built and governed by the farmers themselves are on average in better repair, deliver more water, and have higher agricultural productivity than those provided and managed by a government agency. ... (F)armers craft their own rules, which frequently offset the perverse incentives they face in their particular physical and cultural settings. These rules may be almost invisible to outsiders. ...”

In “Governing the Commons,” she writes about self-governed commons in Switzerland, Japan, the Philippines and elsewhere that date back hundreds of years. For example, in the alpine village of Tobel, Switzerland, herdsmen “tend village cattle on communally owned alpine meadows” under rules of an association created in 1483. The rules govern who has access to the grazing lands and how many cows a herdsman can place there, preventing overgrazing. The cattle owners themselves run the association and handle the monitoring. Sanctions are imposed for violation of the rules, but compliance is high.

Don’t mistake the association for government. Rather, it is a private co-op designed for a narrow purpose. “All of the Swiss institutions used to govern commonly owned alpine meadows have one obvious similarity -- the appropriators themselves make all the major decisions about the use of the CPR.”

She found something similar in Japanese villages, where residents use private property for some agricultural purposes and self-managed common forests for others.

Solutions imposed by external authority were not necessary -- and usually self-defeating: “Academics, aid donors, international nongovernmental organizations, central governments, and local citizens need to learn and relearn that no government can develop the full array of knowledge, institutions and social capital needed to govern development efficiently and sustainably. ...”

How about that? Freedom works.

10/26/2009: Obama got elected by scamming the moderates

10/26/2009: We now arrive at the final question, “What are the natural rights?” Although it cannot be answered precisely, that does not mean it is unanswerable. As has been said before, natural rights precede the State and hence are a priori in character. Natural rights are every man’s at birth and are not State-granted. If each man has an equal claim to liberty, that is, the use of his rights, he can be limited in his freedom only by the claims of other men to an equal share of liberty. The circle of rights around every man extends as far as it may without intruding on the rights of other men. For this reason are the “rights” granted by the State bogus rights. A right to receive welfare, for example, is invalid since it requires the abridgement, however partial, of the rights of the citizen who is compelled to pay for the welfare benefits given to someone else. Natural rights, by contrast, require no abridgment of another individual’s rights to exist, but are limited only by the same natural rights of another person.” — Ronald Cooney, The Freeman [October 1972]

10/25/2009: FACT CHECK: Health insurer profits not so fat
By Calvin Woodward

WASHINGTON (AP) - Quick quiz: What do these enterprises have in common? Farm and construction machinery, Tupperware, the railroads, Hershey sweets, Yum food brands and Yahoo? Answer: They’re all more profitable than the health insurance industry. In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making “immoral” and “obscene” returns while “the bodies pile up.”

Ledgers tell a different reality. Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.

Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the largest insurers were downgraded to negative from stable heading into this year, as investors were warned of a stagnant if not shrinking market for private plans.

Insurers are an expedient target for leaders who want a government-run plan in the marketplace. Such a public option would force private insurers to trim profits and restrain premiums to compete, the argument goes. This would “keep insurance companies honest,” says President Barack Obama.

The debate is loaded with intimations that insurers are less than straight, when they are not flatly accused of malfeasance.

They may not have helped their case by commissioning a report that looked primarily at the elements of health care legislation that might drive consumer costs up while ignoring elements aimed at bringing costs down. Few in the debate seem interested in a true balance sheet.

But in pillorying insurers over profits, the critics are on shaky ground. A look at some claims, and the numbers:

THE CLAIMS

“I’m very pleased that (Democratic leaders) will be talking, too, about the immoral profits being made by the insurance industry and how those profits have increased in the Bush years.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who also welcomed the attention being drawn to insurers’ “obscene profits.”

“Keeping the status quo may be what the insurance industry wants their premiums have more than doubled in the last decade and their profits have skyrocketed.” Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, member of the Democratic leadership.

“Health insurance companies are willing to let the bodies pile up as long as their profits are safe.” A MoveOn.org ad.

THE NUMBERS:

Health insurers posted a 2.2 percent profit margin last year, placing them 35th on the Fortune 500 list of top industries. As is typical, other health sectors did much better - drugs and medical products and services were both in the top 10.

The railroads brought in a 12.6 percent profit margin. Leading the list: network and other communications equipment, at 20.4 percent.

HealthSpring, the best performer in the health insurance industry, posted 5.4 percent. That’s a less profitable margin than was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach and Molson and Coors beers.

The star among the health insurance companies did, however, nose out Jack in the Box restaurants, which only achieved a 4 percent margin.

UnitedHealth Group, reporting third quarter results last week, saw fortunes improve. It managed a 5 percent profit margin on an 8 percent growth in revenue.

Van Hollen is right that premiums have more than doubled in a decade, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study that found a 131 percent increase.

But were the Bush years golden ones for health insurers?

Not judging by profit margins, profit growth or returns to shareholders. The industry’s overall profits grew only 8.8 percent from 2003 to 2008, and its margins year to year, from 2005 forward, never cracked 8 percent.

The latest annual profit margins of a selection of products, services and industries: Tupperware Brands, 7.5 percent; Yahoo, 5.9 percent; Hershey, 6.1 percent; Clorox, 8.7 percent; Molson Coors Brewing, 8.1 percent; construction and farm machinery, 5 percent; Yum Brands (think KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell), 8.5 percent.

Associated Press writer Tom Murphy in Indianapolis contributed to this report.

10/23/2009: DON RICKLES ON DEMOCRATS

Hello, dummies! Oh my God, look at you. Anyone else hurt in the accident?

Seriously, Senator Reid has a face of a Saint… A Saint Bernard. Now I know why they call you the arithmetic man. You add partisanship, subtract pleasure, divide attention and multiply ignorance. Reid is so physically unimposing, he makes Pee Wee Herman look like Mr. T. And Reid’s so dumb, he makes Speaker Pelosi look like an intellectual. Nevada is soooo screwed! If I were less polite, I’d say Reid makes Kevin Federline look successful.

Speaking of the Speaker... Nancy Pelosi, hubba, hubba! Hey baby, you must’ve been something before electricity. Seriously, the Speaker may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don’t let that fool you. She really is an idiot. Madame Speaker... want to make twelve bucks the hard way? Pelosi says she’s not partisan, but her constituents call her Madame Pelossilini.

Charlie Rangel... still alive and still robbing the taxpayers blind. What does that make, six decades of theft? Rangel’s the only man with a rent-controlled mansion. He’s the guy who writes our tax laws but forgot to pay taxes on $75 grand in rental income! So why isn’t he the Treasury Secretary? Rangel runs more scams than a Nigerian Banker.

Barney Frank… he’s a better actor than Fred Flintstone. Consider... he and Dodd caused the whole financial meltdown; and they’re not only not serving time with Bubba and Rodney, they’re still heading up the financial system! Let’s all admit it... Barney Frank slobbers more than a sheepdog on Novocain. How did this guy get elected? Oh, that’s right... he’s from Massachusetts. That’s the state that elects Mr.Charisma, John Kerry -- man of the people!

You know, if Senator Dodd were any more crooked, you could open wine bottles with him. Here’s a news flash, Dodd: when your local newspaper calls you a “lying weasel,” it may be time to retire. Dodd’s involved in more shady deals than the Clintons. Even Rangel looks up to him!

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, I really respect you... especially given your upbringing. All you’ve overcome... I heard your birth certificate is an apology from the condom factory. I don’t know what makes you so dumb, but it really works for you. Personally, I don’t think you’re a fool, but what’s my opinion compared to that of thousands of others? Gibbs does his best expositional work in the bathroom every morning.

As for President Obama, what can I say? They say President Obama’s arrogant and aloof, but I don’t agree. Now it’s true when you enter the room, you have to kiss his ring. I don’t mind, but he has it in his back pocket. His mind is open to new ideas -- so open that ideas simply pass through it. Obama lies so much, I was actually surprised to find out his first name really was Barack. Just don’t ask about his middle name! But Obama was able to set a record... he actually lied more in 60 days than Bill Clinton. As far as his administration -- what with the tax cheats and lobbyists -- well, in the words of Patches O’Houlihan, “It’s like watching a bunch of retards trying to hump a doorknob out there.”

With all due respect.

For those that voted for “hope and change”... bend over and prepare to receive your bounty.

10/21/2009: Ill-Conceived Ranking Makes for Unhealthy Debate
In the Wrangle Over Health Care, a Low Rating for the U.S. System Keeps Emerging Despite Evident Shortcomings in Study

During the health-care debate, one damning statistic keeps popping up in newspaper columns and letters, on cable television and in politicians’ statements: The U.S. ranks 37th in the world in health care.

The trouble is, the ranking is dated and flawed, and has contributed to misconceptions about the quality of the U.S. medical system.

Among all the numbers bandied about in the health-care debate, this ranking stands out as particularly misleading. It is based on a report released nearly a decade ago by the World Health Organization and relies on statistics that are even older and incomplete.

Few people who cite the ranking are aware that some public-health officials were skeptical of the report from the outset. The ranking was faulted because it judges health-care systems for problems -- cultural, behavioral, economic -- that aren’t controlled by health care.

“It’s a very notorious ranking,” says Mark Pearson, head of health for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the 30-member, Paris-based organization of the world’s largest economies. “Health analysts don’t like to talk about it in polite company. It’s one of those things that we wish would go away.”

More recent efforts to rank national health systems have been inconclusive. On measures such as child mortality and life expectancy, the U.S. has slipped since the 2000 rankings. But some researchers say that factors beyond the control of the health-care system are to blame, such as dietary habits. Studies that have attempted to exclude these factors from the equation don’t agree on whether the U.S. system looks better or worse.

The WHO ranking was ambitious in its scope, grading each nation’s health care on five factors. Two of these were relatively uncontroversial: health level, which is roughly the average healthy lifespan of a nation’s residents; and responsiveness, which is a sort of customer-service rating encompassing factors such as the system’s speed, choice and quality of amenities. The other three measure inequality in health-care outcomes; responsiveness; and individual spending.

These last three measures struck some analysts as problematic, because a country with unhealthy people could rank above a healthier one where there was a bigger gap between healthy and unhealthy people. It is certainly possible that spreading health care as evenly as possible makes a society healthier, but the rankings struck some health-care researchers as assuming that, rather than demonstrating it.

An even bigger problem was shared by all five of these factors: The underlying data about each nation generally weren’t available. So WHO researchers calculated the relationship between those factors and other, available numbers, such as literacy rates and income inequality. Such measures, they argued, were linked closely to health in those countries where fuller health data were available. Even though there was no way to be sure that link held in other countries, they used these literacy and income data to estimate health performance.

Philip Musgrove, the editor-in-chief of the WHO report that accompanied the rankings, calls the figures that resulted from this step “so many made-up numbers,” and the result a “nonsense ranking.” Dr. Musgrove, an economist who is now deputy editor of the journal Health Affairs, says he was hired to edit the report’s text but didn’t fully understand the methodology until after the report was released. After he left the WHO, he wrote an article in 2003 for the medical journal Lancet criticizing the rankings as “meaningless.”

The objects of his criticism, including Christopher Murray, who oversaw the ranking for the WHO, responded in a letter to the Lancet arguing that WHO “has an obligation to provide the best available evidence in a timely manner to Member States and the scientific community.” It also credited the report with achieving its “original intent” of stimulating debate and focus on health systems.

Prof. Murray, now director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle, says that “the biggest problem was just data” -- or the lack thereof, in many cases. He says the rankings are now “very old,” and acknowledges they contained a lot of uncertainty. His institute is seeking to produce its own rankings in the next three years. The data limitations hampering earlier work “are why groups like ours are so focused on trying to get rankings better.”

A WHO spokesman says the organization has no plans to update the rankings, and adds, “We would not consider it current.”

And yet many people apparently do. The 37th place ranking is often cited in today’s overhaul debate, even though, in some ways, the U.S. actually ranked a lot higher. Specifically, it placed 15th overall, based on its performance in the five criteria. But for the most widely publicized form of its rankings, the WHO took the additional step of adjusting for national health expenditures per capita, to calculate each country’s health-care bang for its bucks. Because the U.S. ranked first in spending, that adjustment pushed its ranking down to 37th. Dominica, Costa Rica and Morocco ranked 42nd, 45th and 94th before adjusting for spending levels, compared to the U.S.’s No. 15 ranking. After adjustment, all three countries ranked higher than the U.S.

Still, people often claim that the 37th-place ranking refers to quality or outcomes. High spending rates pushed the ranking down but didn’t degrade the quality of care. Among those who have recently failed to make that distinction in published comments are Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette; Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin; and Margaret E. O’Kane, president of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, an advocacy group.

Representatives for Ms. DeGette and Mr. Harkin didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for the National Committee for Quality Assurance said, “WHO is a respected organization. ...We have no reason to believe it is inaccurate, and we would never knowingly misrepresent or misuse another organization’s data.”

The flawed WHO report shouldn’t obscure that the U.S. is lagging its peers in some major barometers of public health. For instance, the U.S. slipped from 18th to 24th in male life expectancy from 2000 to 2009, according to the United Nations, and from 28th to 35th in female life expectancy. Its rankings in preventing male and female under-5 mortality also fell, and placed in the 30s.

But even such analyses, more limited in scope than the WHO’s effort, face similar problems: How to differentiate between the quality of the medical system and other factors, such as diet, exercise and violent-crime rates.

Some think that if the U.S. health-care system isn’t responsible for troubling outcomes, trying to fix it doesn’t provide the best return on investment.

“We might get more bang for the buck by setting aside some of our health-care money to support novel approaches to improve nutrition, education, exercise or public safety,” says Alan Garber, an economist and professor of medicine at Stanford University. “Not every health problem has a medical solution.”

Nor can everything be ranked -- especially health-care systems. “I think it’s a fool’s errand,” says Dr. Musgrove.

10/17/2009: Capitalism After the Crisis
National Affairs, Fall 2009
by Luigi Zingales

...Capitalism has long enjoyed exceptionally strong public support in the United States because America’s form of capitalism has long been distinct from those found elsewhere in the world — particularly because of its uniquely open and free market system. Capitalism calls not only for freedom of enterprise, but for rules and policies that allow for freedom of entry, that facilitate access to financial resources for newcomers, and that maintain a level playing field among competitors. The United States has generally come closest to this ideal combination — which is no small feat, since economic pressures and incentives do not naturally point to such a balance of policies. While everyone benefits from a free and competitive market, no one in particular makes huge profits from keeping the system competitive and the playing field level. True capitalism lacks a strong lobby.

That assertion might appear strange in light of the billions of dollars firms spend lobbying Congress in America, but that is exactly the point. Most lobbying seeks to tilt the playing field in one direction or another, not to level it. Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition. Open competition forces established firms to prove their competence again and again; strong successful market players therefore often use their muscle to restrict such competition, and to strengthen their positions. As a result, serious tensions emerge between a pro-market agenda and a pro-business one, though American capitalism has always managed this tension far better than most.

...When the government is small and relatively weak, the way to make money is to start a successful private-sector business. But the larger the size and scope of government spending, the easier it is to make money by diverting public resources. Starting a business is difficult and involves a lot of risk — but getting a government favor or contract is easier, and a much safer bet. And so in nations with large and powerful governments, the state tends to find itself at the heart of the economic system, even if that system is relatively capitalist. This tends to confound politics and economics, both in practice and in public perceptions: The larger the share of capitalists who acquire their wealth thanks to their political connections, the greater the perception that capitalism is unfair and corrupt.

...Once economic and political systems are built to reward relationships instead of efficiency, it is very difficult to reform them, since the people in power are the ones who would lose most in the change.

...In countries with prominent and influential Marxist parties, pro-market and pro-business forces were compelled to merge to fight the common enemy. If one faces the prospect of nationalization (i.e., the control of resources by a small political elite), even relationship capitalism (which involves control of those resources by a small business elite) becomes an appealing alternative.

...But the anti-finance climate that produced it greatly contributed, for instance, to the expropriation of Chrysler’s secured creditors this spring. By singling out and publicly condemning the Chrysler creditors who demanded that their contractual rights be respected, President Obama effectively exploited public resentment to reduce the government’s costs in the Chrysler bailout. But the cost-cutting came at the expense of current investors, and sent a signal to all potential future investors. While Obama’s approach was convenient in the short term, it could prove devastating to the market system over time: The protection afforded to secured creditors is crucial in making credit available to firms in financial distress and even in Chapter 11. The Chrysler precedent will jeopardize access to such financing in the future, particularly for the firms most in need, and so will increase the pressure for yet more government involvement.

...We thus stand at a crossroads for American capitalism. One path would channel popular rage into political support for some genuinely pro-market reforms, even if they do not serve the interests of large financial firms. By appealing to the best of the populist tradition, we can introduce limits to the power of the financial industry — or any business, for that matter — and restore those fundamental principles that give an ethical dimension to capitalism: freedom, meritocracy, a direct link between reward and effort, and a sense of responsibility that ensures that those who reap the gains also bear the losses. This would mean abandoning the notion that any firm is too big to fail, and putting rules in place that keep large financial firms from manipulating government connections to the detriment of markets. It would mean adopting a pro-market, rather than pro-business, approach to the economy.

The alternative path is to soothe the popular rage with measures like limits on executive bonuses while shoring up the position of the largest financial players, making them dependent on government and making the larger economy dependent on them. Such measures play to the crowd in the moment, but threaten the financial system and the public standing of American capitalism in the long run. They also reinforce the very practices that caused the crisis. This is the path to big-business capitalism: a path that blurs the distinction between pro-market and pro-business policies, and so imperils the unique faith the American people have long displayed in the legitimacy of democratic capitalism.

Unfortunately, it looks for now like the Obama administration has chosen this latter path. It is a choice that threatens to launch us on that vicious spiral of more public resentment and more corporatist crony capitalism so common abroad — trampling in the process the economic exceptionalism that has been so crucial for American prosperity. When the dust has cleared and the panic has abated, this may well turn out to be the most serious and damaging consequence of the financial crisis for American capitalism.

Luigi Zingales is the Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and co-author of Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists.

10/16/2009: from the Daily Reckoning: “Social Security recipients are not going to get a COLA [this year]. A COLA is a “cost of living adjustment.” It’s what Social Security recipients [and all government pensioners] get when prices go up. It adjusts their payments to inflation.

“COLA seemed like a fair idea when it was put in place. That was when prices were going up. The old folks were getting a raw deal and people felt bad about it. We remember those years. There was a report in the press in the late ‘70s that old people were ‘forced to eat dog food’ to survive. We suggested that the government allow people to use food stamps to get pet food. But that was greeted like so many of our attempts to be helpful.

“The trouble with the COLA is that there is no UN-COLA. When prices fall, there’s no way to get the money back. [By law, t]he adjustments only go in one direction.

“And prices ARE falling. US import prices rose only 0.1% last month...down 12% from a year ago. Take out energy and they’re still down 4%. And that’s with a dollar that is losing value at the same time. Imports should be going up in price. Instead, the downward tug of deflation is so strong that they are pulled down...even with the dollar buoying them up.”

Dilbert 10/14/2009

10/13/2009: Zero-Tolerance Watch
The New York Times reports from Newark, Del.:

Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother’s fiancé by his side to vouch for him.

Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school. . . .

Some school administrators argue that it is difficult to distinguish innocent pranks and mistakes from more serious threats, and that the policies must be strict to protect students.

“There is no parent who wants to get a phone call where they hear that their child no longer has two good seeing eyes because there was a scuffle and someone pulled out a knife,” said George Evans, the president of the Christina district’s school board. He defended the decision, but added that the board might adjust the rules when it comes to younger children like Zachary.

So confiscate the knife, call the kids’ parents to the school to collect it, and tell them never to let him bring it in again. But 45 days in reform school? That’s more time than Roman Polanski initially spent in captivity for raping a 13-year-old girl.

10/13/2009: Bombs Away:
The only credible threat Obama can leverage against Iran
by Jeffrey Herf

Our negotiations with Iran are not off to a good start...

The essential problem is an old one in the history of negotiations between dictatorships and democracies. As was the case in the famous negotiations over intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe in the 1980s, there is a fundamental asymmetry whenever a dictatorship sits down at the table with a democracy. Criticizing their government’s march to the bomb brands Iranian citizens as tools of foreign powers and possibly as traitors. This dynamic has only worsened in the wake of Iran’s recent crackdown on protesters...

This brings us to the one policy option that Tehran truly fears--and thus the only one that gives these negotiations any realistic chance of success: a credible threat of military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities by the United States, perhaps joined by Britain and France, or Israel. If the Iranian leadership believed that such an attack was a real possibility, it, or some parts of it, might be persuaded to change course.

If President Obama were to make this threat, he would enrage the base of the Democratic Party that made possible his nomination for president, antagonize liberals in Congress, and infuriate the New York Times editorial page. In the eyes of many of his admirers, he would appear to be yet another unilateralist, imperialist American president. So Obama has a choice: He can look out for his popularity or he can do what is necessary to defend the national security of the United States, our European allies, the moderate Arab states, and, yes, Israel. He has reached the point in his presidency when it has become clear that he cannot do both.

[Read the entire essay]

10/13/2009: Magic Numbers in Politics by Thomas Sowell

Back in the days of the Soviet Union, two Russian economists who had never lived in a country with a free market economy understood something about market economies that many others who have lived in such economies all their lives have never understood. Nikolai Shmelev and Vladimir Popov said: “Everything is interconnected in the world of prices, so that the smallest change in one element is passed along the chain to millions of others.”

What does that mean? It means that a huge increase in the demand for ice cream can mean higher prices for catchers’ mitts, among other things.

When more cows are needed to produce more milk to make ice cream, then fewer cows will be slaughtered and that means less cowhide available to make baseball gloves. Supply and demand mean that catchers’ mitts are going to cost more.

While this may be easy enough to understand, its implications are completely lost on many people in politics and in the media. If everything is connected to everything else in a market economy, then it makes no sense to have laws and policies that declare some given goal to be a “good thing,” without regard to the repercussions, which spread out in all directions, like waves that spread across a pond when you drop a rock in the water.

Our current economic meltdown results from the federal government, under both Democrats and Republicans, declaring home ownership to be a “good thing” and treating the percentage of families who own their own home as if it was some sort of magic number that had to be kept growing-- without regard to the repercussions on other things.

We are now living with those repercussions, which include the worst unemployment in decades. That is the price we are paying for increasing home ownership from 64 percent to 69 percent.

How did we get from home ownership to 15 million unemployed Americans? By ignoring the fact that there was a reason why only 64 percent of families owned their own home. More people would have liked to be home owners but did not qualify under mortgage lending standards that had been in place for decades.

Politicians to the rescue: Federal regulatory agencies leaned on banks to lend to people they were not lending to before-- or else. The “or else” included not having their business decisions approved by the regulators, which could cost them more money than making risky loans.

Mortgage lending standards were lowered, in order to raise the magic number of home ownership. But, with lower lending standards, there were-- surprise!-- more mortgage payment delinquencies, defaults and foreclosures.

This was a problem not only for banks and other lenders but also for those in the business of buying mortgages from the original lenders. These included semi-government enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as Wall Street firms that bought mortgages, bundled them together and issued securities based on the anticipated income from those mortgages.

In other words, all these economic transactions were “interconnected,” as the Russian economists would say. And when the people who owed money on their mortgages stopped paying, the whole house of cards began to fall.

Politicians may not know much-- or care much-- about economics, but they know politics and they care a lot about keeping their jobs. So a great distracting hue and cry has gone up that all this was due to the market not being regulated enough by the government. In reality, it was precisely the government regulators who forced the banks to lower their lending standards.

The other big lie is that this was a failure of economists and others to foresee that the housing boom would turn to bust and set off financial repercussions across the economy.

In reality, everybody and his brother saw it coming and said so-- including yours truly in the Wall Street Journal of May 26, 2005. As far away as London, The Economist magazine warned about the danger. So did many American publications and individuals. The problem was that politicians refused to listen. They were fixated on the magic number of home ownership and oblivious to the economic interconnections that Russian economists saw long ago and from far away.

10/13/2009: Dennis Prager: Why President Obama Was Awarded the Nobel Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize, already devalued, has sunk to a new low. This assessment has nothing to do with one’s estimation of this year’s recipient, President Barack Obama. Most of those on the left, with a few predictable exceptions such as the New York Times, regard giving the president the award as belittling him and the prize.

10/13/2009: Chuck Norris: God and Guns, Part I

God and guns are what our country was founded upon. But more and more, these pillars of American life and liberty are being attacked and abandoned out of not only sheer bias but also ignorance of our Founding Fathers, the Revolutionary period and our Constitution.

10/13/2009: Debra J. Saunders: What Happened to Global Warming?

“What happened to global warming?” read the headline -- on BBC News on Oct. 9, no less. Consider it a cataclysmic event: Mainstream news organizations have begun reporting on scientific research that suggests that global warming may not be caused by man and may not be as dire and eminent as alarmists suggest.

10/13/2009: David Limbaugh: Wealth Redistribution on Steroids

Is there no problem Obama and his mesmerized Democrats think cannot be solved with money -- other people’s money? Just when you think you’ve heard it all, more news stories about this bunch surface to shock you.

10/13/2009: John Hawkins: 20 More Questions for Barack Obama

Because our servile journalists spend their days awash in ecstasy, thinking endlessly of the tingle that runs up their leg when they see Barack Obama, they don’t seem to be able to find the time to ask him any tough questions. That leaves the rest of us out in the cold, dreaming of queries we’d like to see asked of the President of the United States -- if our press would turn in its Obama Fan Club memberships and start acting like members of the media again.

10/9/2009: Time to Discuss Impeachment?
by Floyd and Mary Beth Brown

At the tea party in Washington, D.C., a popular sign read simply, “Impeach Obama.”

As a moderator of discussion on the blog www.exposeobama.com, Floyd has observed the discussion of impeachment is mushrooming amongst conservative activists.

Radio personality Tammy Bruce may have captured these activists’ beliefs about Obama best: “Ultimately, it comes down to … the fact that he seems to have, it seems to me, some malevolence toward this country, which is unabated.”

But has Barack Obama committed an impeachable offense? What exactly constitutes an impeachable offense? Former President Gerald Ford, while serving in the House of Representatives, said an impeachable offense was “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution reads: “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

The key phrase here is “high crimes and misdemeanors,” a concept in English common law well-known to our Founding Fathers, but grossly misunderstood in this day and age. “High crimes and misdemeanors” essentially means bad behavior.

Here’s a passage from C-Span.org that succinctly summarizes the historical significance surrounding the inclusion of the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” in the Constitution: “‘High crimes and misdemeanors’ entered the text of the Constitution due to George Mason and James Madison. Mason had argued that the reasons given for impeachment - treason and bribery - were not enough. He worried that other “great and dangerous offenses” might not be covered … so Mason then proposed ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ a phrase well-known in English common law. In 18th-century language, a ‘misdemeanor’ meant ‘mis-demeanor,’ or bad behavior.”

In other words, “high crimes and misdemeanors” does not refer to a criminal act. Our Founding Fathers fully intended to allow for the removal of the president for actions which include: gross incompetence, negligence and distasteful behavior.

For those who mistakenly hold the illusion that impeaching Barack Hussein Obama would be a simple matter of “playing politics,” the founders fully intended that the impeachment of a sitting president be a political act.

As C-Span.org notes: “The Congress decides the definition [of impeachable offenses]: by majority vote in the House for impeachment, and by two-thirds vote in the Senate for conviction. The Framers of the Constitution deliberately put impeachment into the hands of the legislative branch rather than the judicial branch, thus transforming it from strictly a matter of legal definition to a matter of political judgment.”

Impeachment is no more or less than the recall of an elected official who isn’t up to the job. Obama deserves recall much more than Gov. Gray Davis, and he was replaced by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a special recall election Oct. 7, 2003, in California.

America is a monument to the triumph of freedom. When Barack Obama thinks about freedom, he sees a world in which some people, due to personal initiative and good fortune, will do better than others. In that regard, he is right. But Barack Obama sees that as unfair. Where you see freedom, liberty and the opportunity for any American to be all that he or she can be, Obama sees greed and bigotry.

Like so many on the far-left before him, going all the way back to Karl Marx, he believes that it’s his mission to promote “equality of outcome” over “equality of opportunity.” This worldview makes Barack Hussein Obama a very dangerous man, and a threat to your personal liberty.

Worldview explains why he has gobbled up major banks and why the government now controls more and more of our money. And if you wake up one day to discover you’re broke, don’t be surprised. Barack Hussein Obama is Bernie Madoff with the political power of the presidency at his disposal.

Worldview explains why Obama intends to take away your freedom to choose your own doctor and your own treatment. Wherever government controls health care, bureaucrats decide who gets treatments, transplants, dialysis and costly medication.

The groundswell of calls for the impeachment of Barack Hussein Obama is growing.

©2009 Floyd and Mary Beth Brown. The Browns are bestselling authors and speakers. Together they write a national weekly column distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Floyd is also president of the Western Center for Journalism. For more info call Cari Dawson Bartley at 800 696 7561 or e-mail cari@cagle.com.

Floyd’s latest book (with Lee Troxler) is “Obama Unmasked,” from Merril Press. Mary Beth’s latest book is featured at www.condibook.com. Time magazine wrote of Floyd: “Brown has stature among devoted conservatives that almost matches his physical heft (6 ft. 6 in. and 240 lbs.)” See more at Floyd’s blog at www.2minuteview.com. To comment on this column, e-mail browns@caglecartoons.com.

10/12/2009: A Path to Downward Mobility by Robert J. Samuelson

Every generation of Americans should live better than its predecessor. That’s Americans’ core definition of economic “progress.”

But for today’s young, it may be a mirage. Higher health spending, increasing energy prices and stretched governments at all levels may squeeze future disposable incomes -- what people have to spend -- and public services. Are we condemning our children to downward mobility?

Good question. Considering how health spending could threaten future living standards, it ought to be center stage in the “reform” debate. Instead, it’s ignored. An oft-stated view is that the growth of the U.S. economy will make the young so much richer than their parents that they can afford a bigger health-care sector and still enjoy large increases in their living standards. Complaining about providing more generous health care is selfish. This is a powerful argument; unfortunately, it isn’t true.

Look at the table below. It portrays the U.S. economy from 1980, with a projection for 2030 from Moody’s Economy.com. The projection assumes that the recession ends and growth revives. Superficially, the table suggests that economic growth can easily pay for more health care. In 2007 the economy’s total output -- gross domestic product, our national income -- was $13.3 trillion. In 2030 it projects to $22.6 trillion, up 70 percent. (All amounts are in 2005 “constant” dollars to eliminate inflation.)

Year	Total GDP	Per Capita GDP	Per Capita Health Spending
1980 1990 2007 2030	$5.8 trillion $8.0 trillion $13.3 trillion $22.6 trillion	$25,700 $32,100 $43,900 $60,600	$2,300 $3,900 $7,100 (see below)

Surely that’s ample. Not really. First, the economy’s growth is projected to slow in the future, reflecting an aging population. Lots of workers retire; the labor force doesn’t expand much. From 1980 to 2007, GDP grew an average 3.1 percent annually. From 2007 to 2030, Moody’s projects 2.4 percent annually.

Next, it’s necessary to adjust for population. In 2007 there were 302 million Americans; in 2030 there are expected to be about 375 million. As a result, per capita GDP -- the average amount of income for every American, though (obviously) some receive more and some less -- grows even more slowly. From 2007 to 2030, it’s projected to rise from $43,900 to $60,600. That’s a 38 percent increase or 1.4 percent a year, down from 2 percent.

Unless controlled, rising health spending would absorb much of that gain. The increase in per capita GDP from 2007 to 2030 is $16,700. If health spending continued to grow at past rates, it would go from $7,100 per person in 2007 to $15,300 in 2030. This rise of $8,200 is half the overall gain ($16,700) in per capita income. (For policy wonks: This assumes health spending grows 2 percentage points faster than GDP per capita, the 1975-2005 trend.)

Downward mobility is possible. Expanding health spending would raise taxes (to pay for government insurance), lower take-home pay (to pay for employer-provided insurance) or increase out-of-pocket medical costs. Other drains also loom: higher energy prices to combat global warming; higher taxes to pay for underfunded state and local government pensions and repair aging infrastructure; higher federal taxes to cover deficits and payments to retirees (much of which reflect health spending). The pressures will undermine private living standards and other public services (schools, police, defense).

The young’s future has been heavily mortgaged. Taken together, all these demands might neutralize gains in per capita incomes, especially if the economy’s performance, burdened by higher taxes or budget deficits, deteriorated. One study by Steven Nyce and Sylvester Schieber of Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a consulting firm, examined just health spending. The continuation of present trends would result in “falling wages at the bottom of the earnings spectrum and very slow wage growth on up the earnings distribution. These dismal wage outcomes would persist over at least the next couple of decades.”

To be sure, extra health care enhances our well-being. Some care extends life and improves quality of life. But the connections between being healthy and more health spending are loose. The health of most people reflects personal habits and luck. They get few benefits from high spending. The healthiest 50 percent of Americans account for just 3 percent of annual spending, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation; the sickest 15 percent represent nearly 75 percent. Half of spending goes to those 55 and over, a third to those 65 and over. Any expansion of health care tends to be a transfer from young to old.

The road to downward mobility is paved with good intentions. The health debate has focused on insuring the uninsured and de-emphasized controlling runaway spending, much of which is ineffective. The priorities should have been reversed. The chance to reorder the medical-industrial complex to restrain costs and improve care has been mostly squandered. Some call this “reform”; no one should call it progress.

10/12/2009: Obama fails to win Nobel prize in economics
Commentary: Michael Moore, Timothy Geithner also passed over
By MarketWatch

LONDON (MarketWatch) -- In a decision as shocking as Friday’s surprise peace prize win, President Obama failed to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences Monday.

While few observers think Obama has done anything for world peace in the nearly nine months he’s been in office, the same clearly can’t be said for economics.

The president has worked tirelessly since even before his inauguration to wrest control of the U.S. economy from failed free markets, and the evil CEOs who profit from them, and to turn it over to wise, fair and benevolent bureaucrats.

From his $787 billion stimulus package, to the cap-and-trade bill, to the seizures of General Motors and Chrysler, to the undead health-care “reform” act, Obama has dominated the U.S., and therefore the global, economy as few figures have in recent years.

Yet the Nobel panel chose instead to award the prize to two obscure academics -- Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson -- one noted for her work on managing collective resources, and the other for his work on transaction costs.

Other surprise losers include celebrity noneconomist and filmmaker Michael Moore; U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; and Larry Summers, head of the U.S. national economic council.

It is unclear whether the president will now refuse his peace prize in protest against the obvious slight to his real achievements this year.

— Tom Bemis, assistant managing editor

10/12/2009: What’s with all the @#%! language? by Kenneth P. Vogel

President Barack Obama called rap star Kanye West “a jackass.”

Vice President Joe Biden told a senator to “Gimme a f—-ing break!”

Economic adviser Christina Romer declared that Americans had yet to have their “holy s—-“ moment over the economy.

Those who pay attention to political rhetoric say an unusual amount of profanity has emanated from this White House – even without counting famously colorful White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. But before this statement becomes fodder for yet another partisan debate (with conservatives saying Obama is disgracing the presidency, and liberals that the media are once again being unfair), they quickly add that Team Obama is no crasser than administrations past. It’s just that they are being quoted more accurately.

...I always try to use quotes that tell the reader a little bit about how this person actually speaks in real life, which hopefully will tell you a little bit about what they’re like,” said [Ryan] Lizza, who described swearing as “one of the signifiers of authenticity.”

[“colorful” and “salty” are just euphemisms for foul-mouthed morons. Vulgar and crude language is spoken by vulgar and crude people.]

[Read More]

10/12/2009: When thievery is resorted to for the means with which to do good, compassion is killed. Those who would do good with the loot then lose their capacity for self-reliance, the same as a thief’s self-reliance atrophies rapidly when he subsists on food that is stolen. And those who are repeatedly robbed of their property simultaneously lose their capacity for compassion. — F.A. Harper, Essays on Liberty [1952]

10/11/2009: “Lawmakers use a 10-year accounting window to assess new programs. Starting the Medicare cuts and some of the taxes in the early years — and pushing the bulk of new spending into the latter years — helps keep the cost of the health care overhaul within Obama’s $900 billion limit.” (Associated Press, Sunday) Reality is negotiable.

10/12/2009: A Letter to our Nobel Winner by Allen Hunt

Congratulations, Mr. President, you won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now it is time for you to earn it since your nomination was submitted just after you had actually taken office.

Nevertheless, it is possible for you to make some strides in lending legitimacy to an award whose nobility (or nobelity as the case may be) has been less tarnished ever since Al Gore won for his very nice PowerPoint presentation about polar bears. You can restore some semblance of “peace” to the Nobel Peace Prize.

Please begin by withdrawing America’s troops from Afghanistan. Stop the dithering. In the middle of the many things you consider “urgent,” focus on matters of war and peace. You alone are the Commander in Chief. Peggy Noonan was right when she characterized you as “the anti-Lincoln.”. Whereas Lincoln, your ideal, focused every day of his presidency on the war at hand, even personally tracking down General McClellan in bars and parlors, you have barely made time to meet with your own appointed leader, General McChrystal. Then, when he embarrassed you by speaking to the press, he got your attention. If peace is the aim, your attention and focus are key.

American troops are serving gallantly in circumstances that cannot be described as promising. General McChrystal desires to win in Afghanistan. Of course he does. He is a soldier, and a good one at that. He asks for more troops to execute on the mission you gave him in March, the very mission you now are re-evaluating in a long, drawn-out process.

What none of your advisors is telling you is this: it is time not only to reassess the strategy for our war in Afghanistan, but more importantly, to reassess the morality of our war in Afghanistan.

In order to justify morally the use of arms and force, a number of pre-conditions must be met. The use of violent force should be a measure of last resort. War should be an act of defense rather than an act of offense or aggression. Violence inflicted should not proportionally dwarf the violence that is prevented by that action. And most importantly, war and force should only be exercised when there is a reasonable chance of success.

This last condition of what is commonly referred to as “just war theory” brings Afghanistan into clear focus. What exactly would constitute “success” in Afghanistan?

Ÿ A stable central government? If that is the goal, please keep in mind that Afghanistan has never enjoyed such a thing. George Will has rightly noted that far greater odds of success in establishing stability are failing miserably in Bosnia right now. Why would success in Afghanistan be something that we cannot even achieve in a more promising place like Bosnia?

Ÿ The elimination of the Taliban? Are they really our enemy or are they merely a tool of our larger foe, Al Qaeda? Eliminating the Taliban serves what purpose? There is good reason that Afghanistan has been called the graveyard of empires.

Ÿ An environment in which Al Qaeda can no longer nest and train? If that is the goal, we must then prepare to make war in Yemen, Somalia, and countless other lands where Al Qaeda is already at home, alive, and well.

I raise these questions because we no longer seem interested in the morality of our intended actions or their intended results. In order to justify our military action there, one must first know what success actually is. We do not. And where there is no definition of success, there necessarily is no reasonable chance of it.

So, what our intentions were in 2001 no longer matters. Whether our entry into Afghanistan was justifiable then is not of import now. The landscape has changed. The metaphorical sands have shifted. We have been in Afghanistan, we have placed soldiers in untenable positions, and we have never fully grasped what it is we are trying to do. It is time to pull out.

This is not to say that we have failed, nor is this to say that we have lost. This is merely to say that a clear reassessment indicates that our strategy for defense against Islamic terror must change as time passes. We face a real and present danger. Arrests in our own homeland in the last month remind us that the threat is real. However, having troops in Afghanistan serves no real purpose. They can be better deployed or employed elsewhere, rather than remaining in a land where they have no real mission and no definition of success.

Feel free to fight Al Qaeda. Feel free to combat Islamic terror in ways that make a real difference. Feel free to craft a realistic and meaningful strategy for how America can continue to allow Muslim immigration in an era where we are discovering that Islam is incompatible with Western ideals of equality and freedom. But, most of all, feel free to earn your Nobel Peace prize by removing our sons and daughters from a situation where they no longer belong. And use them instead to make a real and lasting difference.

10/9/2009: Who Cares Who Won the Nobel Peace Prize? by Anne Applebaum
We pay far too much attention to the views of five obscure Norwegians

Why did they give it to him? Does he deserve it? Should he have accepted it? Who should have gotten it instead? What would he say? The nation is speaking of nothing but President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. Here is a better question for us to ask ourselves: Why should we care?

Think about it: The Nobel Committee consists of five Norwegians, selected by the Norwegian parliament. In his will, Alfred Nobel, the Swedish dynamite tycoon who thought up this whole thing, specifically wanted Norwegians to choose the winner, apparently because Norwegians, being outside the European mainstream, would be less likely to be politically corrupt. The trouble is that Norwegians, being outside the European mainstream, are also more likely to be eccentric. Norway is a wonderful country, and Norwegians have some of the highest living standards in the world—thanks to their low numbers and their large deposits of oil and gas—but the last time I was there, I got into an argument with someone about which country was more evil: the United States or North Korea. This being a few years ago, at the height of the Bush terror, you can guess which side the Norwegian was on.

[Read more]

10/11/2009: Even many Obama-loving liberals are uncomfortable with his receiving the Nobel peace prize when he has so far done pretty much nothing productive or useful with his life so far. Some have suggested he turn it down. Mickey Kaus, whom I respect, says “Turn it down! Politely decline. Say he’s honored but he hasn’t had the time yet to accomplish what he wants to accomplish. Result: He gets at least the same amount of glory--and helps solve his narcissism problem...” Doesn’t he realize that it’s Obama’s narcissism that will prevent him from turning it down. It would be impossible for Obama to refuse the prize. He (and the First Bitch) believes that he deserves it. He says he’s “humbled” but we all know that that really means the opposite. No one who claims to be “humbled” ever really believes it and our affirmative action president is no exception.

10/7/2009: Obama puts union strings on federal jobs by S. A. Miller

[Obama’s unconstitutional and immoral act shows that he is really is just another corrupt Chicago politician.

Delivering on President Obama’s promise to boost the labor movement, the administration has announced a $35 million federal construction project in New Hampshire that requires union representation for the workers and forces nonunion employees to pay dues and contribute to a union pension fund.

Mr. Obama issued an executive order in the first weeks of his presidency that would make the requirement, known as a “project labor agreement” or PLA, the norm for all government contracts on large-scale construction jobs. The order is under review and a final rule is not expected for months, but that did not stop the Labor Department from rushing to use a PLA to build its new Job Corps Center in Manchester, N.H.

The PLA executive order replaced a Bush administration order that discouraged the use of such agreements.

It was one in a series of early policy moves by Mr. Obama that has dramatically improved the unions’ fortunes, though the president has not delivered on labor’s top legislative priority, the so-called “card-check” bill that would make it easier to organize workplaces.

Critics say imposing the union-friendly rules on the New Hampshire job - the first federal construction contract with such stipulations since President Clinton was in office - will drive up costs, delay the project and force most of the workers to pay union dues and pension contributions for which they likely will never receive benefits.

North Branch Construction, a Concord, N.H.-based general contractor and member of the business group Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), filed a bid protest this week with the Government Accountability Office, claiming the PLA “unduly restricts competition.”

“PLAs are special-interest handouts that deny taxpayers the accountability they deserve from government contracts,” said Ken Holmes, president of North Branch Construction.

Sen. Judd Gregg, New Hampshire Republican, said the scarcity of local unionized workers and a separate requirement that contractors must have completed three previous successful PLA projects to qualify to bid will essentially prevent local firms from competing for the Manchester project.

“The administration’s decision to discriminate against successful and independent construction firms simply because New Hampshire employees choose to work in a union-free workplace and not bow down to the demands of Big Labor is extremely unfair to our state,” the senator said, calling on the administration to revoke the PLA.

“In a time of economic hardship, it is simply absurd to discriminate against local contractors and construction workers for the benefit of national labor unions,” he added.

Union officials argue that PLAs, which incorporate collective bargaining agreements into the contract, ensure the construction companies hire highly skilled workers and pay them fair wages.

“Rather than all the money going to the contractor profit, a fair share goes into the worker’s paycheck,” said Greg Denier, communications director for Change to Win, a coalition of unions that includes the Laborers’ International Union of North America.

Brett McMahon, vice president of business development for Miller & Long Co. Inc., the country’s largest concrete subcontractor and the largest employer of construction workers in the Mid-Atlantic region, argued that it was the unions that are exploiting the workers.

“In order to go to work, you have to pay for it,” Mr. McMahon said.

He said that unless the workers join a union, they would not be expected to accumulate enough consecutive hours on union jobs to become vested in the pension plan. The money paid into the plan would then be forfeited to the fund.

He also noted that the economic recession has left few large-scale construction jobs other than federal projects, and that most construction workers are not union members. As a result, he said, the PLA forces nonunion workers desperate for jobs to choose between joining the union or forfeiting any payments to the unions.

Tom Owens, spokesman for the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department, said the money paid into union pension funds can be used only to benefit workers. He also said pension contributions do not come out of workers’ paychecks.

“It comes from the contractor,” he said.

He said Miller & Long is the perfect example of why PLAs are necessary. He said the company has a history of assembling the most inexpensive work force it can find, relying mostly on illegal immigrants - a practice, he said, that had suppressed wages and forced black workers out of the construction industry.

Mr. McMahon called the union’s accusations a “tired old refrain” that has no bearing on the PLA issue.

“You don’t stay in business 60 years by doing that,” he said.

He also challenged the AFL-CIO’s characterization of the pension contribution, saying that payment into the union fund is calculated as part of a worker’s total compensation package.

About 16 percent of the country’s construction trades workers were union members or covered by union contracts in 2008, despite union workers generally receiving higher pay and better benefits than their nonunion counterparts, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In New Hampshire, just 8.7 percent of construction workers are unionized.

10/9/2009: Obama joins such luminaries as Al Gore (for personally making more than $100 million while perpetrating the global warming fraud), Jimmy Carter (for being the most incompetent president (at least until Obama) and the most annoying ex-president), and Yasser Arafat (the lifelong terrorist and con man) as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, which clearly has become the most meaningless award on the face of the Earth. Obama has accomplished nothing of substance in his life, was nominated two weeks after being sworn into office, and wins. Another affirmative action award. The only thing they all have in common is their large egos and narcissism.

10/8/2009: “The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.”

10/8/2009: “We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”

10/8/2009: “The truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery, while those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.”

10/8/2009: The U.S. victory in the first Persian Gulf War did not immediately translate into terrorist retaliation. It was more than two years before the World Trade Center bombing, more than seven years before the bombings of the embassies in East Africa, and more than a decade before 9-11. The retaliation was slow in coming, but come it did. — Ted Galen Carpenter, “Avoiding Bogus Lessons from the Iraq War” [April 24, 2003]

10/8/2009: To maintain peace throughout the world, the grounds for conflict should be reduced as much as possible. The first step in this direction must be to respect and protect private property throughout the world. The ideal would also include complete freedom of trade and freedom of movement. Political boundaries would no longer be determined under threat of military conquest or aggressive economic nationalism, but rather by legal plebiscite, i.e., by vote of the individuals concerned. In such a world, the national sovereignty under which one lived or worked would be relatively immaterial. — Bettina Bien Greaves, “Foreign Policy” [September 1979]

10/8/2009: Capitalism is a viable economic system or it is not. An active policy of government intervention in a free market business system is a contradiction in terms. Trades of private property are either voluntary or they are not; one cannot legislate the free market or create competition. To have a free market the government must leave the markets alone; to have the state make free markets “free” is again a contradiction in terms. — Dominick T. Armentano

10/8/2009: Welcome to the Potentially Deadly Alcohol-Marijuana Quiz! The purpose of this site is to test your knowledge about the relative harms of alcohol and marijuana. There are 10 questions in all. Here’s the catch – and it’s why the quiz is “potentially deadly”: If you get a question wrong, you will have to “take a shot” of alcohol. At the end, we will let you know what your blood alcohol content (BAC) would be if you actually had that many shots. We will also tell you how that much alcohol would affect you physically. Are you ready to put your life on the line and see what you know? If so, just click “Take the Quiz”. Good luck!

10/8/2009: Michael Moore’s ‘Socialist’ President By Daniel Henninger

...If Mr. Moore and his gallery of weeping victims took a closer look, they’d see their problem is not capitalism but politics. Once elected, virtually all politicians in the U.S. or Western Europe join the Not Much of Anything Party, and that includes Barack Obama, or soon will.

In the U.S., both Republican and Democratic pols define capitalism as a system with economic activity sufficient to produce campaign contributions. But that ensures income stagnation for Mr. Moore’s masses.

The most immediate problem facing the U.S. is not that we have too much capitalism, but that we don’t have enough of it.

In a recent visit to the Journal’s offices, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key suggested Americans and Europeans don’t quite comprehend the enormous “wealth” rising in Asia. Add to that Brazil. This isn’t just fat cats but the wealth of billions rising on commerce—on crude, potent capitalism.

The Olympic Committee’s rejection of Chicago played here as yet another Obama story. The real, less entertaining message is that from where the well-traveled committee members sit, Chicago is a has-been. Rio is the future.

The important difference between the “socialist” Barack Obama and the Republicans is he’d settle for 2% annual growth (gotta pay for the green dreams) and they might get 3%. In a world of China, India and Brazil, growing at rates between 5% and 9%, we need more. A future president who puts the U.S. back in the race with these fast runners could call himself a communist for all I care.

10/7/2009: Random thoughts on the passing scene by Thomas Sowell

[Our education system at work] Upon learning that the Constitution requires a president to be a natural born citizen, a college student said: “What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified than one born by C-section?”

...When politicians propose some hugely expensive new program and are asked how the government is going to pay for it, a standard ploy over the years has been to claim that they will pay for it by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.” At a recent town hall meeting, a citizen raised the obvious question: If you can do that, why haven’t you done it already?

Marxism is an ism that has become a wasm.

What is called “universal health care” can turn out to be universal “don’t care” medical treatment, when Washington bureaucrats can over-rule what you and your doctor want to do.

...After political crusades for “affordable housing” ended up ruining the housing market and much of the economy with it, many of the same politicians are now carrying on a crusade for “affordable health care.” But what you can afford has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of producing anything. Refusing to pay those costs means that you are just not going to continue getting the same quantity and quality-- regardless of what any politician says or how well he says it.

...Congressman Joe Wilson got into more trouble for telling the truth than President Barack Obama got into by telling a demonstrable lie about adding millions of people to the insurance rolls without adding a dime to the deficit. As regards providing medical insurance for illegal immigrants, I doubt that the president will do that. More likely, he will legalize them first and then give them medical insurance.

The way Hollywood elites have sprung to the defense of Roman Polanski to keep him from being extradited to the United States, despite the heinous crime he is accused of, suggests that-- like other egalitarians-- they consider those who are “one of us” to be more equal than others.

...What is most frightening about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. All problems seem to them to be due to other people not being as wise or as noble as they are.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Think things, not words.” In words, many see a need for “social justice” to override “the dictates of the market.” In reality, what is called “the market” consists of human beings making their own choices at their own cost. What is called “social justice” is government imposition of the notions of third parties, who pay no price for being wrong.

Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Muammar Qaddafi and Vladimir Putin have all praised Barack Obama. When enemies of freedom and democracy praise your president, what are you to think? When you add to this Barack Obama’s many previous years of associations and alliances with people who hate America-- Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Father Pfleger, etc.-- at what point do you stop denying the obvious and start to connect the dots?

10/7/2009: Elites and Tyrants by Walter E. Williams

Rep. Diane Watson said, in praising Cuba’s health care system, “You can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met.” W.E.B. Dubois, writing in the National Guardian (1953) said, “Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. ... But also -- and this was the highest proof of his greatness -- he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate.” Walter Duranty called Stalin “the greatest living statesman . . . a quiet, unobtrusive man.” George Bernard Shaw expressed admiration for Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin.

John Kenneth Galbraith visited Mao’s China and praised Mao and the Chinese economic system. Gunther Stein of the Christian Science Monitor admired Mao Tsetung and declared ecstatically that “the men and women pioneers of Yenan are truly new humans in spirit, thought and action,” and that Yenan itself constituted “a brand new well integrated society, that has never been seen before anywhere.” Michel Oksenberg, President Carter’s China expert, complained that “America (is) doomed to decay until radical, even revolutionary, change fundamentally alters the institutions and values,” and urged us to “borrow ideas and solutions” from China.

Even Harvard’s late Professor John K. Fairbank, by no means the worst tyrant worshipper, believed that America could learn much from the Cultural Revolution, saying, “Americans may find in China’s collective life today an ingredient of personal moral concern for one’s neighbor that has a lesson for us all.” Keep in mind that estimates of the number of Chinese deaths during China’s Cultural Revolution range from 2 to 7 million people. Mao Tsetung was admired by many academics and leftists across our country. Just think back to the campus demonstrations of the ‘60s and ‘70s when campus radicals, often accompanied by their professors, marched around singing the praises of Mao and waving Mao’s little red book, “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung.” Forty years later some of these campus radicals are tenured professors and administrators at today’s universities and colleges, as well as schoolteachers and principals indoctrinating our youth.

The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is in a book by University of Hawaii’s Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, “Death by Government.” Statistics are provided at his website. The Nazis murdered 20 million of their own people and those in nations they captured. Between 1917 and 1987, Stalin and his successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tsetung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.

Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there’s little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.” It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today’s Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over.

Few Americans have the stomach or ruthlessness to do what is necessary to make their governmental wishes come true. They are willing to abandon constitutional principles and rule of law so that the nation’s elite, who believe they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, can have the tools to implement “social justice.” Those tools are massive centralized government power. It just turns out last century’s notables in acquiring powerful central government, in the name of social justice, were Hitler, Stalin, Mao, but the struggle for social justice isn’t over yet, and other suitors of this dubious distinction are waiting in the wings.

10/5/2009: from the Patriot Post

“In his address to Congress, President Obama made clear that he and his allies know how to spend your health-care money better than you do. It’s a matter, you see, of ‘shared responsibility’: You share your dollars with the feds, and the feds are responsible for making your decisions. ... On ‘shared responsibility,’ the president brooks no dissent. ‘Unless everybody does their part, many of the insurance reforms we seek -- especially requiring insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions -- just can’t be achieved,’ he said. ‘That’s why under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance.’ This requirement is known as the ‘individual mandate.’ The president’s proposal is historic -- though not in a good way. Never before has Congress forced Americans to buy a private good or service. In fact, for those with a traditional understanding of the Constitution as a charter of liberty (as opposed to the ‘living’ version), the list of Congress’s powers in Article I, Section 8, grants it no authority to require any such thing. ... Requiring everyone to buy government-specified health insurance, whether they need it or not, is an unacceptable violation of personal liberty. It is a way of taxing healthy people without calling it a tax. Since that is an irresistible temptation to politicians, the list of required benefits would be certain to keep expanding. The choice between freedom and responsibility, as the president and his congressional allies portray it, is a false choice. We can and should have both.” --The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Moffitt

“As Harvard economist Greg Mankiw writes, ‘In light of the shifting baseline, it is impossible to hold the administration accountable for whether its policies are achieving their intended effects. The administration, however, has not been particularly forthright in admitting to this lack of accountability. Indeed, the act of releasing quarterly reports on how many jobs have been ‘created or saved’ gives the illusion of accountability without the reality’. This lack of accountability -- this claim of success no matter what happens -- should surprise no one. Many of us warned about it months ago. Remember, Obama didn’t promise to create 3.5 million jobs. He promised to create or save that many. There is no way to test that. If you still have your job, does that mean Obama saved it? If an entrepreneur created a new job, in spite of Obama’s destructive anti-business regulatory apparatus, does Obama still deserve the credit?” --columnist John Stossel

“[T]hough barely reported, Obama made this statement in his U.N. speech: ‘We have fully embraced the Millennium Development Goals.’ I’m not sure where he got the authority to make that unilateral declaration, but he nonetheless made it. I guess now that he’s president, he can sometimes just issue fiats instead of having to deal with the cumbersome legislative process.... So why do you suppose the evil Bush administration opposed the innocuous-sounding ‘Millennium Development Goals’? Well, how about its multi-pronged assault on America’s national sovereignty? It commits participating nations to be bound by the International Criminal Court treaty; support regional disarmament measures for small arms and light weapons; and press for the full implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which Wikipedia describes as ‘an international legally binding treaty’ that includes among its goals a ‘fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from genetic resources,’ the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, described as ‘an international bill of rights for women,’ and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which purports to be a ‘legally binding international instrument’ that gives children the right to express their own opinions ‘freely in all matters affecting the child’ and requires those opinions be given ‘due weight.’ The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as ‘the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development.’ Indeed, under President Obama, ‘We Are the World.’” --columnist David Limbaugh

“Just to recap, [Roman] Polanski drugged a child put in his care for the purposes of a photo shoot. He tried to bully her into sex. She said no. He raped her anyway. He pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse but fled the country before sentencing, allegedly for fear the judge wouldn’t keep his end of the plea bargain. He spent the subsequent three decades living the life of a revered celebrity in Europe. He never returned to America because there was a warrant for his arrest. In a bit of ironic justice, he was apprehended en route to Zurich to receive a lifetime achievement award. That ceremony will apparently go on without him. ... It all boils down to the fact that Polanski is famous and talented and an Olympian artist, living above the world of mortals. Indeed, if he didn’t rape that girl -- and he did -- Polanski would still be considered a pig in most normal communities. This is the man who, after all, started dating Nastassja Kinski when she was only 15 and he was in his 40s. His taste for teenage girls is an established fact. His defenders don’t care. They are above and beyond bourgeois notions of morality, even legality. And that’s the main reason I am grateful for this controversy. It is a dye marker, ‘lighting up’ a whole archipelago of morally wretched people. With their time, their money and their craft, these very people routinely lecture America about what is right and wrong. It’s good to know that at the most fundamental level, they have no idea what they’re talking about.” --columnist Jonah Goldberg

“Imagine how much worse our public schools would look -- assuming that were possible -- if we allowed other countries to exclude one-half of their worst performers! That’s exactly what liberals are doing when they tout America’s rotten infant mortality rate compared to other countries. They look for any category that makes our medical care look worse than the rest of the world -- and then neglect to tell us that the rest of the world counts our premature and low birth-weight babies as ‘miscarriages.’ As long as American liberals are going to keep announcing that they’re embarrassed for their country, how about being embarrassed by our public schools or by our ridiculous trial lawyer culture that other countries find laughable?” --columnist Ann Coulter

10/5/2009: The Same Sad Story by Thomas G. Donlan

Regulations Aimed at Protecting Consumers and Restraining the Rich Often Windup Deluding Consumers and Enriching the Powerful

MORE REGULATION CAN MAKE AMERICANS safer, stronger, happier, better informed and less free. Or so it seems. Insufficient regulation has been the diagnosis offered this year to identify what ails banks, brokers, health care, drugs, medical devices, securities, business competition transportation and the Internet. We can’t deal with them all in one week, so we take special note of the regulators on our turf. Although the Securities and Exchange Commission was founded in the 1930s, its efforts to protect consumers have not yet succeeded. But it knows why: All it needs is a little more power.

We have heard that a government with enough power to do a lot of good is a government with enough power to do a lot of harm. After examining a recent report from the SEC’s inspector general, we must add a codicil: A government pretending it can do a lot of good automatically will do a lot of harm.

Looking at the Books

The inspector general went through two decades of records of the agency’s dealings with Bernie Madoff. According to the report, the SEC conducted nine investigations and audits of Madoff’s now-infamous operations and was unable to detect his Ponzi scheme or the fictitious nature of the trades he reported to his investors.

“The SEC never conducted a competent and thorough examination or investigation of Madoff for operating a Ponzi scheme, and had such a proper examination or investigation been conducted, the SEC would have been able to uncover the fraud,” the IG said.

Many people claim that the SEC is understaffed, overworked or underfunded. How about incompetent? As with most regulatory agencies, neophyte lawyers usually work at the SEC for sub-market wages, just long enough to acquire the expertise in regulatory arcana that makes them really valuable in private practice as advisers to those being regulated.

As the inspector general summed up one of the nine Madoff probes: “The relatively inexperienced enforcement staff failed to appreciate the significance of the analysis in the complaint, and almost immediately expressed skepticism and disbelief about the complaint. Most of the investigation was directed at determining whether Madoff should register as an investment adviser or whether Madoff’s hedge-fund investors’ disclosures were adequate.”

Regulation and regulators frequently drift from substance to form. Paper-pushing and registration are a defense against inquisitive supervisors, but they are no substitute for forcible disclosure, aggressive investigation and well-supported prosecution.

How many corporate filings are read by officials at the SEC, out of billions of electronic bits squirted in each year? Not more than the number of bills read by congressmen each year. Practically none.

Though it looked down its nose at the SEC’s staff, even the office of the inspector general hired two expert consulting firms to do its investigation. And the IG had the advantage of knowing what had happened.

Path of Least Resistance

Even when the SEC does find a fraud or a failure to disclose, it almost never prosecutes. It reaches a settlement. The alleged miscreant neither admits nor denies the charges; the agency closes its case, collects a voluntary payment little better than a bribe and moves on to the next minor-league shakedown.

So it was heartening to see U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff rise up in his New York courtroom recently and refuse to approve a boilerplate settlement in which Bank of America agreed to pay $33 million to avoid prosecution for covering up $3.6 billion in bonuses paid just before the bank swallowed up Merrill Lynch. Given that the legal question was whether the bank harmed its shareholders, the judge found it interesting that the SEC’s legal remedy was to make the shareholders pay $33 million.

The judge has scheduled a trial next year, which could be even more interesting, but our bet is that the SEC will find another way to settle the case, or even to roll over and play dead. A gang that couldn’t gather evidence against a one-man hedge fund may have even more trouble investigating the nation’s largest bank.

The Verdict is In

Probably the least important part of the inspector general’s report are the recommendations to reform the SEC’s handling of complaints and investigations.

The IG wants to add more forms, not more effort. It urges new systems to list complaints and keep track of them, to handle tips and assign them to knowledgeable investigators, to acquire and hold data, to train employees, to plan and to analyze enforcement.

Fighting red tape with red tape is futile. Everyone everywhere is understaffed, overworked and underfunded. Not everyone is overwhelmed. The SEC should re-staff with a bunch of traders and a flock of high-priced lawyers who have defended crooks and won.

Perhaps the most important conclusion reached by the SEC’s inspector general is the one least remarked on by newspapers and lawmakers: The SEC provides a dangerous illusion of security.

“We also found that investors who may have been uncertain about whether to invest with Madoff were reassured by the fact that the SEC had investigated and/or examined Madoff, or entities that did business with Madoff, and found no evidence of fraud. Moreover, we found that Madoff proactively informed potential investors that the SEC had examined his operations. When potential investors expressed hesitation about investing with Madoff, he cited the prior SEC examinations to establish credibility and allay suspicions or investor doubts that may have arisen while due diligence was being conducted. Thus, the fact the SEC had conducted examinations and investigations and did not detect the fraud lent credibility to Madoff’s operations and had the effect of encouraging additional individuals and entities to invest with him.”

Economic regulatory regimes are created to protect consumers and restrain the rich and powerful. They frequently achieve the opposite ends, deluding consumers and enriching the powerful.

Editorial Page Editor THOMAS G. DONLAN receives e-mail at tg.donlan@barrons.com.

10/3/2009: We live, as F. A. Hayek observed as long ago as 1935, not in a market system, but in a situation of interventionist chaos, where virtually every market is so hog-tied by regulations, laws, and taxes or so artificially pumped up by subsidies, regulatory advantages, and tax loopholes that virtually nothing remains pure and unsullied by the filthy hand of the interventionist state. —Robert Higgs, “Progressive Claptrap” [September 29, 2009]

10/2/2009: The Fall Guy
Ken Lewis’s fatal mistake was believing the feds.

The political class has finally got its man, which is to say that Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis has announced he will retire at the end of the year. Don’t you feel better already? Someone had to be sacrificed as expiation for the financial panic and bailout, and the politicians are determined to convince voters that the bankers did it all. So heave-ho, Mr. Lewis had to go.

His alleged offense—investigated by the SEC, a House oversight committee and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo—is that his bank failed to adequately disclose to shareholders potential losses and employee bonuses at Merrill Lynch prior to their December vote to approve the BofA takeover of Merrill.

Thus the same government that told Mr. Lewis to keep his mouth shut and close the Merrill transaction now says he should have been more candid with shareholders. The same government that also threatened his job if Mr. Lewis didn’t accept Merrill’s mounting losses along with new federal money—while refusing to provide an agreement in writing because it didn’t want to inform taxpayers—now questions the disclosures he made to investors. Too bad the same investigative resources will never be used to find out how financial “systemic risk” was supposed to be reduced by forcing Mr. Lewis to merge the country’s largest deposit-taking bank with a failing Wall Street trading firm.

On the weekend that Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008, could Mr. Lewis have bought a teetering Merrill Lynch for less than he agreed to pay? Probably. Could he have killed the deal or negotiated a better price before the January closing if Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson hadn’t pressured him not to make an issue of Merrill’s rising trading losses? Perhaps.

But his real, and ultimately fatal, mistake was to believe the feds when they urged him to buy Merrill—and, before that, Countrywide Financial—in the name of saving the financial system. He forgot the oldest lesson about the second oldest profession: Never trust a politician.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A18

10/1/2009: You Lie by Wayne Allen Root

When Congressman Joe Wilson screamed “You Lie!” at President Obama, many liberal critics, political commentators, and media experts responded by criticizing the lack of manners and civility in modern-day politics. But I believe the opposite is true. The truth is that we’ve all been too nice, too well-mannered, and too civil.

For far too long, we’ve stood by as politicians destroyed our country, wrecked our economy, spent us into bankruptcy, and indebted our children and grandchildren for generations to come. The current situation doesn’t demand civility; it demands rage. Why should we show respect and civility to the corrupt thieves who are lying to our faces and robbing us blind? Why should we show respect and civility to the very people who are stealing our children’s future?

The problem isn’t civility; it’s stupidity. We’ve been far too civil and docile for far too long. We’ve been intimidated and blinded by the power and fancy titles of our political leaders. We’ve accepted their lies without flinching. We’ve given the benefit of the doubt to the people in charge - even though most of them are criminals.

We’ve reelected the very people who have been lying to us and robbing us. In reality, we should have been throwing all of them out - from both parties. We should have been limiting our politicians to two terms - one in office, one in prison!

We stuck our heads in the sand. We wanted to believe they were telling us the truth. We might have cursed Congress, but we each praised, thanked, and reelected our own congressperson. We showed respect for Congress’s authority. It’s like a political Groundhog Day: Each day we keep doing the same illogical things (supporting the same incumbents who are bankrupting the country) and waking up the next morning hoping the outcome will be different. But it never is.

A half century of manners and civility has led to the worst depression since 1929, an unimaginable annual deficit of almost $2 trillion, and over $100 trillion in national debt. Our country is on the brink of economic ruin, bankruptcy, and insolvency, because we’ve been so civil, so naive, and so trusting. We should have been screaming “You Lie” a long time ago.

Off Track Betting (government-run gambling) recently filed for bankruptcy in New York. The government can’t make a profit in the gambling business, but Obama wants us to believe that it will run national healthcare profitably? That’s a lie. Obama wants us to believe that we’re going to add 50 million uninsured people to the healthcare rolls and it won’t cost us a thing? That’s a lie. The government will save us money by spending trillions on a new program? That’s a lie.

The trillion dollars Obama wants to spend on government-run healthcare won’t add to the ballooning deficit? That’s a lie. Adding 50 million new patients, while losing doctors, won’t result in rationing? That’s a lie.

We can forever keep our present health insurance and doctors at no added cost? That’s a lie. Illegal immigrants won’t soon be included in universal healthcare? That’s a lie. (Even if illegal immigrants are removed from the new healthcare bill, soon thereafter they will be granted legal citizenship, thereby allowing all of their healthcare bills to be added to the government’s tab.)

Or how about cap and trade? Obama wants us to believe that a massive multi-trillion dollar cap-and-trade program won’t hurt business? That’s a lie. That cap and trade won’t put us at a competitive disadvantage with China and India (who won’t agree to the same rules and standards)? That’s a lie. That cap and trade won’t double or triple our energy bills? That’s a lie. That this massive increase in our utility bills is not a tax increase on the middle class? That’s a lie. That cap and trade isn’t an excuse for a government takeover of business? That’s a lie. That cap and trade is necessary to fight global warming (even though the last decade has actually seen global cooling)? That’s a lie.

Do you remember the original fairytales told to us by Obama? He said that his $800 billion stimulus bill was necessary to “save” the economy. That was a lie. Instead, it was an almost trillion dollar handout to his campaign contributors and supporters that did nothing for the economy.

Obama said we had to spend trillions to create 3 million new jobs. That was a lie. Instead, we wasted trillions and lost 3 million jobs. Obama said we had to spend billions to save U.S. automakers. That was a lie. Instead, Obama fleeced taxpayers, stockholders, lien holders, banks, and hedge funds to hand control of the U.S. automakers to the auto unions - his highly valued campaign contributors.

Now, GM and Chrysler are $100 billion government-funded welfare programs that just happen to make cars (that no one wants). Obama said that corporate bailouts would be paid back. That was a lie. Now, it turns out that we may never get back tens of billions loaned to AIG, GM, and Chrysler. How many more lies are we willing to accept while still being civil and well-mannered?

But Obama is far from being the only politician to lie to us. They all lie. Pelosi, Reid, Dodd, and Frank have lied about virtually every spending bill that Congress has passed. Bush lied about the war in Iraq and wasted a trillion dollars (or more) on his military misadventures, all while allowing Congress to break the bank on spending, earmarks, and waste. The leaders of the Republican Congress lied about virtually every bill they passed. It’s what politicians do.

Just don’t tell me to accept it anymore. Don’t tell me to respond to lies with civility. It’s well past the time for civility. It’s time for rage. It’s time to throw the bums out. It’s time to veto the entire Congress. It’s time to send a message to the spoiled, corrupt, overpaid D.C. political class. It’s time to vote all of them out.

It’s time for a political revolution. It’s time to increase unemployment - by at least 435 members of Congress (and every senator up for reelection). It’s time to say to every incumbent politician in America: YOU’RE FIRED!

In 2010, let’s forget civility and get loud and angry. Let’s fight with tenacity and passion. Because this is the battle of our lives - our country, our economy, and capitalism itself. Our children’s futures are at stake. It’s time to take back our country from the liars and thieves who are currently in control. It’s time to admit it to ourselves: THEY ALL LIE!

Wayne Allen Root was the 2008 Libertarian Party’s vice presidential candidate. His new book (highly recommended) is titled The Conscience of a Libertarian: Empowering the Citizen Revolution with God, Guns, Gambling & Tax Cuts. For more of Wayne’s views and commentaries, or to watch his many national media appearances, please visit his web site at: www.ROOTforAmerica.com.

10/1/2009: Balance in the Earth by Alan Brinkley

But Is It True? A Citizen’s Guide to Environmental Health and Safety Issues
by Aaron Wildavsky (Harvard University Press, 574 pp., $35)

A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism
by Gregg Easterbrook (Viking, 745 pp., $27.95)

The New Ecological Order by Luc Ferry translated by Carol Volk
(University of Chicago Press, 190 pp., $34.95)

The conservative tide, which has been successfully assaulting almost every other American reform movement for fifteen years, has finally caught up with environmentalism. Industry lobbyists sit on Capitol Hill rewriting environmental legislation. Crudely drafted bills move through the House gutting appropriations for the Environmental Protection Agency and requiring government to weigh all new environmental regulations against economic cost, a likely route to endless litigation and paralysis. Popular culture may still revel in environmental correctness, as Disney’s Pocohontas makes clear, but in the real world of politics and law the American greens are on the defensive.

The political assaults are, for the most part, from ancient enemies of environmentalism acting out of economic self-interest or ideological rigidity. But the same cannot be said for another emerging body of criticism: a series of reassessments by a group of respected academics and journalists who are challenging much conventional environmental wisdom and calling into question some of the movement’s most important claims. These writers are generally liberal, with a basic sympathy toward at least some forms of environmental activism, but they have lost patience with what they believe are the inflated claims and extremist values of much of the environmental establishment. Important new books by Aaron Wildavsky, Gregg Easterbrook and Luc Ferry give us a revealing glimpse of (to paraphrase Easterbrook) the coming age of environmental skepticism...

Wildavsky and his students sifted methodically through mountains of difficult scientific studies and have presented their conclusions in reasonably clear prose. Their conclusions are stark and provocative. In reviewing dozens of health and safety controversies of the last few decades, they find none that appears nearly as serious as environmentalists have claimed. Some are familiar examples of overreaction, widely cited by critics of environmentalism: the cranberry scare of 1959, the controversy about Alar on apples in 1989. But others are widely publicized environmental horror stories that few people have publicly questioned. These are a few of Wildavsky’s more provocative claims:

• The ban on DDT, one of the first great triumphs of modern environmentalism (and a tribute to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring), did “more harm than good.”
• Despite the hysterical fears of parents, asbestos in schools poses no detectable danger to children.
• There is no evidence that acid rain poses significant danger to the environment except in a few isolated places (such as some high-altitude forests).
• Most hazardous waste sites (including such notorious ones as Love Canal in upstate New York and Times Beach in Missouri) posed no significant danger to residents. The government’s extraordinarily costly Superfund program for cleaning up such sites is, on the whole, a waste of money.
• There is no credible evidence to support fears of global warming.

[Read the entire article]

Read Blogs from Prior Months

January 2009 February 2009 March 2009

April 2009 May 2009 June 2009

July 2009 Aug 2009 Sep 2009

Oct 2009 Nov 2009 Dec 2009

January 2008 February 2008 March 2008

April 2008 May 2008 June 2008

July 2008 August 2008 September 2008

October 2008 November 2008 December 2008

January 2008, December 2007 & November 2007

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Other Information about Dale F. Ogden

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Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California Insurance Commissioner, 2006
www.dalefogden.org

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California State Senate, 2004

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California Insurance Commissioner, 2002

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California State Assembly, 2000

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California Insurance Commissioner, 1998