ELSEWHERE

A mindless bigot speaks. Brian Leiter calls Texans mindless bigots because they prefer a traditional definition of marriage. But since he gives no reasoning for his assertion, who is the mindless bigot? Both Keith Burgess-Jackson and Right Reason have given the poisonous old bigot more attention than he deserves -- and I guess I am too.

Blunt talk from a senior Australian conservative: "Federal Treasurer Peter Costello has again urged Islamic extremists to leave Australia, saying there is no point in living in a country with a system of government they oppose. "There are some things Australia stands for, has always stood for, always will stand for, which will never change," he told A Current Affair. "We will never be an Islamic state. We will never observe Sharia law ... We will always be a democracy. "To people who say `well, we've come to this country and we would like to turn it into something it isn't, I say you must understand that will never occur". Mr Costello said rather than try to change Australia, they should leave it".

An interesting research finding: "This paper empirically analyzes the question whether government involvement in the economy is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. This provides a test of a longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory, which predicts that government plays an unambiguously positive role for individuals' quality of life, and public choice theory, that was developed to understand why governments often choose excessive involvement and regulation, thereby harming voters' quality of life. Our results show that life satisfaction decreases with higher government spending. This negative impact of the government is stronger in countries with a leftwing median voter. It is alleviated by government effectiveness - but only in countries where the state sector is already small."

The authoritarian Left at work again: "Massachusetts politicians last week rose to new heights of holier-than-thou arrogance. House members on Thursday-just three days after the 80-page bill was introduced-voted overwhelmingly to tax businesses that do not provide health insurance for their employees, and to require all residents who can afford it to buy health insurance... No doubt, buying health insurance is a good idea. But so is buying a car with a five-star safety rating, brushing after meals and not running with scissors. And yet government lets people decide whether to do these things... If the state can order people to buy health insurance, then where does that authority stop? Why can't it order people to exercise a half-hour a day, quit smoking, and floss regularly?"

Various people have mentioned it but in case you have not seen it, the disastrous way French "unfair dismissal" laws have made Muslims almost unemployable in France is summarized here

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

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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