Brookes News Update

US productivity and investment: some truths and fallacies : Those who argued that all the US economy needed was the Net never thought about what it really takes just to supply it with cables and electricity let alone those little things called chips
The Society of St Vincent de Paul's Marxist claptrap and its attack on the free market: The Society of St Vincent de Paul recently released a study on inequality that was unadulterated Marxist claptrap
Technology, investment, risk and the state: Interventionists seem incapable of grasping the fact that savings fuel an economy and entrepreneurship drives it. Cripple both or only one of these factors and you cripple growth
China and its generals: The texts of Marx and Engels are the worst evils the West ever visited on an Asian country
The ownerships society: the animating principle of the 21st Century: The 20th Century's energizing dynamic was totalitarian socialism. Leading the parade were dictators like Stalin, Hitler and Chairman Mao

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ELSEWHERE

I pointed out yesterday how economically illiterate are the fears of Chinese economic success. So I guess I should reply to the rumbles over the attempted Chinese purchase of an American oil company. There are two excellent articles for putting that scare to rest here and here but I particularly like this one.

Interesting quote from Hobsbawm -- Britain's famous Communist historian -- about prewar Germany: "If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed." That is of course a implicit acknowledgment of how close psychologically Nazism and Communism were. Hobsbawm also says that he saw the basis of his Communism as a sense of "mass ecstasy"; "pity for the exploited"; the "aesthetic appeal of a perfect and comprehensive intellectual system - dialectical materialism"; a "Blakean vision of the new Jerusalem"; and "intellectual anti-philistinism". So again we see that the main appeal of Communism was the psychological satisfactions it gave him. Whether it was right or benevolent was incidental.

Jeff Jacoby has a good comment on the constant Leftist claims that Bush and the GOP are "like Hitler": "But all they really accomplish is a kind of Holocaust-denial. After all, if congressional Republicans are ‘‘worse than Hitler,’’ then Hitler must have been no worse than congressional Republicans. Which means that the tyrant who drenched Europe in blood, created a hellish network of concentration camps, and sent more than a million Jewish children to their deaths is roughly equal to — maybe even better than — a political party that calls for tax cuts and welfare reform. Anyone who can say (or imply) such a thing is guilty of trivializing the Nazis’ crimes and of cheapening the agony of their victims".

The un-American death tax, the bell tolls for thee: "'The Congress needs to make sure that the Death Tax is gone forever ...' So declared President Bush last week, effectively launching one of the most important debates that will come before the nation this year. Indeed, upcoming deliberations in the Senate over permanently repealing the Death Tax will explore one of the fundamental questions of our time: Do Americans work for the U.S. Government or does the U.S. Government work for us? Do we own the fruits of our labor or are they just on loan from Uncle Sam while we are alive?" [All such taxes were abolished in Australia years ago so why not emigrate when you retire?]

Death tax diagnosis: "Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's designation of Sen. Charles Schumer [D-NY] to be his chief negotiator on the Death Tax issue is extraordinarily revealing. The Democrats are scared to death of the issue which provided the margin of defeat for Tom Daschle and has become a powerful issue in other states, as well. The marching orders to Schumer, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chief, are to defuse the issue before it takes down other small red-state Democrats up for re-election in 2006. Apparently Reid and company have been reviewing the polls that portend disasters in certain states for votes to keep the death tax. Recently, Frank Luntz polled in Maine, North and South Dakota, Indiana, Colorado and Arkansas and found 85 percent support for killing the death tax outright or significantly reducing it."

Individual rights a Christian idea: "The modern roots of our individual rights and freedoms in the Western world are found in Christianity. The recognition by law of the intrinsic value of each human being did not exist in ancient times. Among the Romans, law protected social institutions such as the patriarchal family, but it did not safeguard the basic rights of the individual, such as personal security, freedom of conscience, of speech, of assembly, of association, and so forth. For them, the individual was of value "only if he was a part of the political fabric and able to contribute to its uses as though it were the end of his being to aggrandise the state". According to Benjamin Constant, a great French political philosopher, it is wrong to believe that people enjoyed individual rights prior to Christianity. In fact, as Fustel de Coulanges put it, the ancients had not even the idea of what such rights meant".

Stupidity rules! For now: "Bursting into tears, eighth-grader Anurag Kashyap of California became the U.S. spelling champ Thursday. Tied for second place were 11-year-old Samir Patel, who is home-schooled in Colleyville, Texas, and Aliya Deri, 13, a Pleasanton, California, student." Indian kids have won first place in five of the last seven years". Might be there's a pattern here? Nah. A friend in California has an Asian wife (which both he and I recommend), and so is among the few whites plugged into the state's Asian community. He reports that the Asians are contemptuous of whites. ("Lazy, not very smart.") The evidence supports them. They also believe that the chief aim of schooling in America is to coddle blacks and Latinos, which baffles them. Me too, but it isn't my problem: "Top twelve students on the USA Math Olympiad 2003: Boris Alexeev, Jae Bae, Daniel Kane, Anders Kaseorg (home-schooled), Mark Lipson, Tiankai Liu, Po-Ru Loh, Po-Ling Loh, Aaron Pixton, Kwokfung Tang, Tony Zhang, Yan Zhang." Take out Asians and Jews out of measures of high intellectual performance in America, and you aren't left with much. The foregoing doesn't look much different from staffing lists I have encountered for such things as research teams at Bell Labs. A friend, writing a book on Harvard, calculates that Asians and Jews make up about forty-five percent of the school. The Asians know this, of course. They figure the future is theirs. So do I".

I have just put up a new post on my Scripture blog -- saying why I like the book of Ecclesiastes so much -- for rather the wrong reasons from a Christian viewpoint.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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