"Essentialism": A new stick to beat conservatives with

This latest fashion in psychological research was brought to my attention in an article by Matthew Hutson, a journalist with some qualifications in psychology.  I made some rather scathing comments on Hutson's article here.  In reply, Hutson referred me to the academic journal article which was the chief underpinning of his thinking.  The article is "Social Class Rank, Essentialism, and Punitive Judgment" by Kraus & Keltner (2013).  I thought I might offer a brief evisceration of it.

Essentialism seems primarily to mean belief in genetic determination.  If you believe that a peron is as he is because of his genes, you are an essentialist.  By that criterion conservatives are likely to be essentialists.  And the authors clearly think essentialists are a bad lot.  So who are these essentialists?  In good Marxist fashion, the authors say that your social class position determines that.  So they selected some statements to the effect that your class position was largely genetically determined and correlated that with your opinion of your own class position.  I myself found that your subjective estimation of your social class position was a powerful predictor of other class-related variables back in 1971, so I have no quarrel with them on that score.

What they found in their Study I and Study II was however quite contrary to the Marxist theory.  They found that there was virtually no overlap (a 4% overlap; r = .20) between their measures and your social class.  High social class people were almost equally divided over whether class was genetically determined or not.  So class was NOT behind "essentialist" beliefs.

That might have stopped our dynamic duo but it did not.  In Study III they  looked for other things behind "essentialism".  The disappointing results of their first two studies do however seem to have disheartened them.  Their next experiment was very low quality indeed.  They told a small group of students some lies and then asked them questions about how strongly they would punish certain offences.  If they were serious about measuring punitiveness, they might have used my approach instead of the very ad hoc approach they did use.  Be that as it may, however, the main effect in their analysis was not even statistically significant, let alone meaningful.

Not discouraged, however, they went on to study 4, in which they used tricks to change what class people thought they belonged in.  They then examined how these "manipulated" class perceptions related to punitiveness.  They found some weak effects on type of punishment desired by people in these "manipulated" classes.  In other words, even by abandoning reality altogether they still could not find much in the way of class effects.

With such disappointing results, you will be surprised at their conclusion:

"Social class is a primary determinant of rank in human social
hierarchy, and it profoundly shapes perceptions of the social environment".

Their data if fact warrant the following conclusion:

"Social class is a primary determinant of rank in human social
hierarchy, but it negligibly shapes perceptions of the social environment"

They knew what they were going to conclude from the beginning and stuck with that.  All the experimentation they did was just window dressing that they did not even believe in themselves.  There is no evidence at all that essentialists are the bad guys they were intended to be -- JR

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Lawsuit Against Mandatory Union Dues Moves Forward in California

A federal lawsuit filed last May against the mandatory payment of union dues is moving forward in the courts, Fox News reports, and will soon be heard by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The case was filed by a group of California public school teachers who say that being forced to pay union dues violates their right to free speech.

In states that do not have ‘right-to-work’ laws, like California, union members are forced to pay roughly $1,000 a year in dues that help finance political objectives some members may have objections to.

 Union reps say those fees help their efforts to improve workplace safety, for instance, and get better contracts for all employees. They add that teachers can opt-out of paying dues that fund political activities.
But many teachers say opting out is a difficult and intimidating process and claim they face harassment and losing their liability insurance. Others say they get only a fraction of their money back.

“The unions are free to push whatever agenda they please,” says grade school teacher Rebecca Friedrichs, Fox News reports. “I have no problem with that, but I do have a problem with them taking my money to push an agenda with which I do not agree.”

While it’s OK if a teacher wants to join a union, it’s not OK for the state to not compel union membership, explains Terry Pell of the Center for Individual Rights, the group backing the teachers in court.

SOURCE

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'They had no idea if my insurance was active or not!': Obamacare confusion reigns as frustrated patients walk out of hospitals without treatment

Hospital staff in Northern Virginia are turning away sick people on a frigid Thursday morning because they can't determine whether their Obamacare insurance plans are in effect.

Patients in a close-in DC suburb who think they've signed up for new insurance plans are struggling to show their December enrollments are in force, and health care administrators aren't taking their word for it.

In place of quick service and painless billing, these Virginians are now facing the threat of sticker-shock that comes with bills they can't afford.

'They had no idea if my insurance was active or not!' a coughing Maria Galvez told MailOnline outside the Inova Healthplex facility in the town of Springfield.  She was leaving the building without getting a needed chest x-ray.

'The people in there told me that since I didn't have an insurance card, I would be billed for the whole cost of the x-ray,' Galvez said, her young daughter in tow. 'It's not fair – you know, I signed up last week like I was supposed to.'

The x-ray's cost, she was told, would likely be more than $500.

Galvez said she enrolled in a Carefirst Blue Cross bronze plan at a cost of about $450 per month through healthcare.gov, three days before Christmas.  'No one has sent me a bill,' she said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified in a December 11 congressional hearing that the federal government can't say how many new enrollees have written checks for their first month's premiums.  'Some may have paid, some may have not,' she conceded.

It's unlikely that a valid insurance card would have changed Galvez' fortunes, however.  Her Carefirst plan, identified on the Obamacare website as BlueChoice Plus Bronze, carries a $5,500 per-person deductible for 2014 – an amount she would have to pay out-of-pocket before her coverage would apply to medical expenses.

The Inova radiology department wouldn't speak with MailOnline, and Carefirst did not respond to a request for comment.

A similar situation frustrated Mary, an African-American small businesswoman who asked MailOnline not to publish her last name. She was leaving the Inova Alexandria Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia with two family members.

'I had chest pains last night, and they took me in the emergency room,' Mary said. 'They told me they were going to admit me, but when I told them I hadn't heard from my insurance company since I signed up, they changed their tune.'

She told MailOnline that a nurse advised her that her bill would go up by at least $3,000 if she were admitted for a day, and her doctor told her the decision was up to her.

'Should I be in the hospital? Probably,' she said. 'Maybe it's one of those borderline cases. I have to think that if I were really in danger, they wouldn't give me the choice. But what if I think I'm covered and I'm really not?'  'The emergency room bill is going to be bad enough.'

The Obamacare system has suffered from a long list of setbacks since its October 1 rollout, starting with an inoperable website and ending with rampant uncertainty about whether Americans who enrolled are actually covered.

'We're telling consumers if they're not sure if they're enrolled they should call the insurer directly,' White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters on December 2.

The Washington Post reported that day that because of computer glitches in the 'back end' of healthcare.gov, enrollment records for as many as one-third of new insurance customers were corrupted or otherwise contain errors.

Given the Obama administration's latest claim that 2.1 million have signed up nationwide, that means as many as 700,000 Americans might falsely believe they have a current health insurance policy.

Mary and others like her, who took the time to enroll but may not follow the daily flood of news about Obamacare, likely don't know one way or the other.  'Why is this so complicated?' she asked. 'I had my own private insurance last year, but they cancelled me in November. I'm not sure which end is up.'

Private industry estimates put the number of policy cancellations as high as 4.7 million in the last quarter of 2013, mostly involving health care plans that didn't meet the Affordable Care Act's strict minimum standards.

Democrats serving on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce dispute that number, saying in a new report that no more than 10,000 will wind up without affordable insurance options after losing their old policies.

President Obama has attracted widespread criticism, and a 'lie of the year' award from one newspaper's fact-checker, for promising that Americans who liked their health plans would be allowed to keep them.

Dr. John Venetos, a Chicago gastroenterologist, told the Associated Press on Thursday that he is seeing 'tremendous uncertainty and anxiety' among his patients who signed up for Obamacare plans but don't have insurance cards.  'They’re not sure if they have coverage,' Venetos said. 'It puts the heavy work on the physician.'

'At some point, every practice is going to make a decision about how long can they continue to see these patients for free if they are not getting paid.'

SOURCE

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Health Insurers Are Being Battered By Obamacare, And They Deserve It

Health insurers were always going to be the bad guys in the battle over Obamacare.  While the law affects virtually every sector of the health care system, it was primarily about health insurance, because of the Democrats’ widely held conviction that the private health insurance industry unethically profits off patients needing medical care.

The primary purpose for the Affordable Care Act was to stop what liberals perceived as health insurer abuses and profiteering.

Much of the “credit” for health insurers’ initial embrace of Obamacare has to go to the head of the industry’s leading trade association, Karen Ignagni, the president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP).  Ignagni is a registered Democrat and former director of the AFL-CIO’s Department of Employee Benefits.

She joined several health care trade associations at the White House in May 2009 to offer $2 trillion in health care savings.  The president used their support to convey the impression of unstoppable momentum, even as Democrats increasingly attacked health insurers.  The health insurance industry eventually backed off its initial support, but that resistance was both tepid and conflicted.

At the time I ran a much smaller health insurance trade association, the Council for Affordable Health Insurance.  CAHI was created in the 1990s to represent free market-leaning health insurers fighting the Clinton health care reform plan.

CAHI’s adherence to a free market philosophy kept it much smaller than AHIP, but it had several of the same member companies.  While CAHI wanted to take a principled stand against the legislation, AHIP did not.  Can you say “awkward”?

For example, Democrats wanted to make health coverage “guaranteed issue,” which requires health insurers to accept anyone who applies regardless of their health status.  It’s because of guaranteed issue that Obamacare included the mandate to have health insurance—to keep people from waiting until they get sick to obtain coverage.

And once the government requires people to have insurance, it must then decide what the policies’ coverage must include in order to determine who is in compliance with the mandate.  And then, understandably, the public demands that if they have to buy coverage it must be affordable, which means government subsidies to lower the cost and, eventually, price controls to keep costs down.

In short, once the government imposes guaranteed issue, the other pieces of Obamacare must follow.  AHIP supported the guaranteed issue provision early on; CAHI opposed it.  And so pressure was put on CAHI to moderate its opposition so as not to send “mixed signals” about the health insurance industry’s position.

As the ACA was being written and debated, I spent some time talking to the CEOs of some of the member companies.  One explained to me how he thought Obamacare would be very good for the industry, another was convinced the Democrats crafting the law were taking their suggestions.  They may have been smart businessmen, but they were woefully naive about politics.

I think it is fair to say that several of the health insurers eventually had second thoughts, but by then it was too late.  Had the health insurance industry taken a strong, principled stand against Obamacare from the beginning—or even a less-conflicted stand after its initial flirtation—I do not think the law would have passed.

Now those health insurers are being whipsawed by a president who knows nothing about insurance, really wants a single payer health care system, never ran a business, and has no respect for an industry he believes is profiteering on people’s medical conditions.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Democrats' Feckless Attacks on Income Inequality

As Barack Obama scrambles to eviscerate key sections of his own signature health care law, he and other Democrats are trying to shift voters' focus to another issue -- income inequality.

Unfortunately, the solutions they advocate are pitifully inadequate or painfully perverse.

Start with the minimum wage, which some Democrats see as an election-winning wedge issue in 2014.

True, raising the minimum wage polls well. But does anybody really care much about it? Few minimum wage earners are heads of households; many more are teenagers earning spare cash.

Most economists agree that a higher minimum wage costs some low-skilled workers their jobs. And the economic redistribution it produces, from fast-food consumers to fast-food employees, is pretty minimal.

Another Democratic policy is to continue extending unemployment benefits. The intellectual argument for this is stronger.

Ordinarily, extended benefits tend to discourage the unemployed from looking for work. Their skills atrophy, and finding a job later gets harder.

But in the current new-normal economy, with record long-term unemployment, there simply haven't been enough job openings for many of the unemployed. Many Republicans look open to a compromise on this issue.

In any case the redistributionist effect will be only minor and, if robust economic growth returns, temporary.

One Democrat who argues for greater change is University of Arizona political scientist Lane Kenworthy. He believes the nation is and should be headed to a European-style welfare state, with the government taxing and spending 10 percent more of gross domestic product than at present.

Kenworthy would transform unemployment benefits into wage insurance, would start early education at age 1 and would vastly expand the Earned Income Tax Credit.

That's progressive economic redistribution, but with a catch. For as Kenworthy admits, you can't get the money for this just by raising taxes on very high earners: "The math simply doesn't work."

So he looks to a federal consumption tax, like Europe's value-added taxes. That would mean shifting from the current progressive income tax toward a more regressive European-style tax regime, with middle-income workers subsidizing non-workers.

Other proposals floated by Democrats, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for substantially increased Social Security benefits, would have similarly perverse effects.

Social Security is already on an unsustainable trajectory. Increased benefits would, in time, require higher taxes on the young, who have negative or minimal wealth, to finance payments to the elderly, who tend to have significant net worth.

This echoes the Obamacare provision that limits premiums on the old and sick to no more than three times the premiums on the young and healthy. Is it really progressive to have the young subsidize the old?

Another left-wing Democrat, incoming New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, wants to raise income tax rates on those earning $500,000 to pay for universal preschool for the city's children.

That would certainly amount to economic redistribution, but to whom? Research over the last 50 years shows that Head Start and other publicly financed pre-school programs have no lasting positive effect on learning.

What de Blasio's proposal would do is to put a lot more unionized teachers on the city payroll. The redistribution here goes from the very rich to the public employee unions and their allies in the Democratic Party.

Liberal pundits are hailing de Blasio and his politics as a harbinger of the political future and a return to the liberal tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and his political ally New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.

But in 1944, the heyday of FDR and La Guardia, the five boroughs of New York City cast 7 percent of the nation's votes. In 2012 they cast only 2 percent of the national vote.

It's interesting that New York, which has had more liberal and redistributionist public policies than almost anywhere else in the nation over those 68 years, also has one of the nation's highest rates of income inequality.

High tax rates and high housing costs (exacerbated for many years by rent control) have squeezed middle-class families out of New York. They have migrated in the millions to lower-tax, lower-housing-cost places such as Florida and Texas.

The Obama Democrats did reduce economic inequality somewhat by raising the top income tax rate back to 39.6 percent. The proposals they're talking about now are either small potatoes, or moves to have the working middle-class subsidize non-workers or the young to subsidize the old -- redistribution, but not very progressive.

SOURCE

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Escaping the Rat Maze of the Welfare State

Jonah Goldberg

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," and as the joke goes, "Poverty won." Five decades after a blizzard of programs began descending on the American people, the poverty rate remains essentially unchanged.

That's a little unfair. What counts as poverty today would not have seemed so impoverished 50 years ago, when many of the poor lived without electricity and were no strangers to hunger. Today, the biggest health problems of the poor are more likely to stem from obesity than anything approaching starvation. Defenders of the war on poverty -- and the massive bureaucracy that has built up around it -- insist that underfunding is to blame.

That's a tough sell. The Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector estimates that we've spent $20 trillion on these programs -- not counting Medicare and Social Security. We spend $1 trillion to $2 trillion more every year, depending on how you do the math. But apparently for liberals, that's still too stingy. Perhaps the problem isn't how much we're spending, but how we're spending it.

If you drew a Venn diagram of where the hard left and the libertarian right agreed, the overlapping shaded part would include a bunch of social issues -- gay marriage, drug legalization, etc. -- but almost no economic issues. Save one: the Universal Basic Income.

The UBI is a pretty simple idea. Everyone gets a check from the government. (Actually, it's a little more complicated than that depending on how you implement it, but you get the idea.)

Charles Murray, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute and a legendary libertarian social scientist, wrote a wonderful book a few years ago, "In Our Hands," in which he proposed an annual grant from the federal government of $10,000 for every American over 21 who stayed out of jail and still had a pulse. He was building on arguments made by two titans of libertarianism, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who also supported some version of a UBI.

On the left, the idea has been popular for generations as a way to instantaneously alleviate poverty and to defeat the ol' devil of income inequality.

So what's the catch? Why aren't we getting a fat check from Uncle Sam every month? Some cite the cost, which obviously would be hefty. But that's a secondary problem. The real sticking point is that the libertarian argument is largely an either/or proposition, while the left-wing version is a both/and deal. The libertarians want to liquidate much of the welfare state and convert it into cash payments. The left's version is that the money would, for the most part, augment the welfare state.

New York University professor Lawrence Mead identified the chief flaw with both the libertarian and left-wing approaches to fighting poverty, either through existing welfare programs or through a UBI: the "competence assumption." This is the presumption that the intended beneficiaries of government anti-poverty programs always "behave rationally enough to advance their own self-interest." We all know enough people in our own lives (never mind what we know about ourselves) to realize this isn't always the case. Lots of folks are determined to do things that aren't in their long-term self-interest.

The problems afflicting many poor people are often of their own making, at least in part. Having children before getting married, dropping out of high school, etc., are transparently bad choices that millions of people make. (Also, some anti-poverty programs create incentives that make bad decisions seem rational.) But many poor people have just had rotten luck. There's good reason to believe that, with a little help, they can work their way up the economic ladder. And for countless others, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

For 50 years, we've run a massive experiment around one approach: that bureaucrats and social planners can fix the lives of others by telling them how to live. For some it's worked, for others it's been an abject failure. But few can claim it's all been a smashing success.

Perhaps a compromise can be worked out. Why not give poor people a choice? They can stay within the rat maze of the current welfare state, or they can cash out. According to Rector, 100 million Americans receive aid from the government at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient. Surely some of them are equipped to spend that money better than the government. Why not give them a shot at proving it? If they fail, they can always switch back to the old system. If they succeed, well, that'd be a real victory in the war on poverty.

SOURCE

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The Left’s Necessary Lie

The debates over Obamacare seem to be, like Ben Franklin’s death & taxes, the only certainties in our lives. This has clearly been the case since Inauguration Day, 2009. Yes, President Obama called for an immediate “stimulus” of nearly $1 Trillion to prime the pump, to create shovel-ready jobs. We never heard that phrase shovel ready before Mr. Obama employed it. And, within the first two years after passage of the huge stimulus bill, the president himself acknowledged there was no such thing as shovel ready jobs.

But let’s move on, as the Left is forever urging us. Let’s not “re-litigate” the past.

You may have noticed that even when you are not meeting them in court, even when you are not having to sue them to defend your basic constitutional freedoms, the Left says you are trying to “re-litigate” the past every time you suggest that they might be held accountable for anything they said or did yesterday.

Here is something to talk about from today, right now. Noam Scheiber writes for the premier journal of the Left, The New Republic. In the current issue, Scheiber has penned “How Obamacare Actually Paves the Way Toward Single Payer.”

It’s a remarkable piece of journalism. Scheiber responds to the complaint of Michael Moore that Obamacare did not go far enough.

I happen to agree with Moore’s basic sentiment…And yet I am much more sympathetic to Obamacare than Moore. He thinks it’s awful. I consider it a deceptively sneaky way to get the health care system both of us really want.

Scheiber uses deceptively sneaky not as a conservative might use it. It’s not pejorative. He uses the term as a compliment. He likes the fact that it is deceptive and sneaky. He approves of the lie.

So, we should not expect to see Mr. Scheiber upset about the president’s false promise—echoed by dozens of Mr. Obama’s fellow liberals in Congress—that “if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.”

This, too, is doubtless part of the deceptively sneaky aspect of the federal takeover of health care that Mr. Scheiber and the Left want to see.

We can, of course, debate and differ on whether or not a single payer health system would be a good thing for America. Canada has a single payer system and Canada has not ceased to exist. (But you are not supposed to notice when Canadian premiers get sick, they make a bee-line for the Mayo Clinic in the U.S.A.)

We could have had that debate in 2008 or 2012. But that is not the debate we had.

Obamacare was the law they passed. That was the program they imposed on us. And now, this leading journalist of the Left lets the single payer cat out of the Obamacare bag.

President Obama is on record saying he would have preferred a single payer system. But only now, with this New Republic column, do we see this candid confession that deceit is the order of the day.

He, they, all of them wanted all along to force Americans into a single payer system, but they didn’t have the votes—in Congress, or in the nation—to get what they wanted.

So they had to employ a deceptively sneaky ruse. They had to lie about our being able to keep our own insurance if we preferred it. They had to lie about where Obamacare might eventually lead.

This article by Noam Scheiber goes beyond any Republican talking points or any conservative critiques. It is candid, but candid about lies. And about the need to lie.

How can we react expect to denounce it? It not just the measure we oppose, although oppose it we must. It is the deceptively sneaky way they went about imposing Obamacare on the nation that we must oppose. From the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase, to the Christmas Eve sooty slide down the Senate chimney, to the absurd Supreme Court ruling that it must be a tax if it looks like a tax—even if it failed to originate in the House of Representatives—as the Constitution plainly commands: all of this we must oppose.

And we must oppose lying as a political practice. If we condone lying as Noam Scheiber condones it, our political life will end. We cannot expect to survive if the consent of the governed is fraudulently obtained. We may someday agree to adopt a single payer system. The British have accepted it. But in their defense (defence), the Socialists in Britain were honest and straightforward about what they wanted to achieve. They never deceived the British people at the polls about what they would do.

This move toward socialism by stealth will always de-legitimize the goals of the Left. Worse, it will de-legitimize government itself, even as it poisons the well of our political life.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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I've been outed!



Former Canadian Defence minister, Paul Hellyer, said there were "about 80 different species" of alien, in an interview with Russia Today.

"Some of them look just like us and they could walk down the street and you wouldn't know if you walked past one", he said.

Mr Hellyer also claimed that extraterrestrials were working with the US air force in Nevada, he went on to say that they were "very concerned" about the future of planet Earth.

"They don't want to tell us how to run our affairs ... but they're very, very concerned, they don't think we're good stewards of our planet."

SOURCE

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Obama's Overreaching Military-Related Amnesty

An examination of the USCIS parole-in-place policy

 A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies examines the administration's most recent exemption of a category of illegal aliens from immigration enforcement. This latest category, created by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in a November memo, directs immigration officials to grant de facto amnesty, or parole-in-place, to the illegal alien children, spouses, and parents of active military servicemen, reservists, and those who have previously served in the U.S. military.

"The president now routinely disregards the legislative process, preferring executive action as the means of expanding his amnesty agenda. But this broad amnesty, which according to some advocates could allow tens of thousands of illegal aliens to apply for green cards and citizenship, has far-reaching implications, including security risks and fraud," states Dan Cadman, a research fellow at the Center and author of the report.

The amnestying of a whole class of aliens without the consent of Congress violates the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which states that parole may only be granted "on a case-by-case basis". The administration's action also violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which requires federal agencies to publish policy changes such as this in the Federal Register so the public may review and comment.

View the full report at: http://cis.org/USCIS-Parole-in-Place-Policy

The broad policy extends beyond its claimed objective of relieving the stress that deployed G.I.s might experience from their family members' immigration status. The amnesty applies even to relatives of a service member who received a less-than-honorable discharge or a reservist who has only served for two weeks or has never served in a hostile theatre of operation. The memo could have limited the application of the policy, but the administration chose to draft an overreaching amnesty rather than adhere to the law of case-by-case application for parole.

The above is a press release from from Center for Immigration Studies. 1522 K St. NW, Suite 820,  Washington, DC 20005, (202).  Email: center@cis.org.

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Chris Christie' bridge, choices, and the Dasani Coates sob-story

By Jonah Goldberg

The Christie scandal is an odd thing. Outside the peculiar context of Christie's presidential ambitions, the idea that this should be front-page news across the country is somewhat baffling. Quick: Show of hands. Who is surprised that New Jersey politicians play hardball with other New Jersey politicians at the expense of voters and taxpayers?

Oh, sorry. I didn't realize it would be that many of you. Okay, just out of curiosity, for those of you who are legitimately shocked, I'd like to ask some control questions. Are you also shocked that bears use our national forests for toilets? Are you shocked that dogs lick their nether regions without much concern about who might be watching? Does it blow your mind that the Pope is Catholic? When you smash your thumb with a ball peen hammer are you taken off guard by the throbbing pain?

I see.

Now I am not condoning or even trying to minimize the significance of "Bridgegate" - an idiotic term by the way. What these bozos did was bozo-rific. But come on. Do you think Rahm Emanuel hasn't played games with which streets get plowed first after a snow storm? Do you think that the Cuomos have issued every business permit and license on a first-come, first-serve basis? Wait you do? Oh man, that is adorable. Bless your heart.

Like pretty much everyone else, I think that if Christie is lying about being out of the loop, he's done for. Fair or not, he set the standard by which he wants people to judge him. I grew tired of his constant boasting of his straight-talking a long time ago. But he's the self-declared exemplar of straight-talking. (I like the straight talk, mind you. I just don't like all the allegedly straight talk about his straight talking. It's a bit like Christie's odd way of being arrogant about how humble he is. Just give me the straight talk; don't give me a lot of hot air about how straight the straight talk is, ya get me? I love it when my waiter brings a great steak. But when he hangs around selling me on each morsel as it goes into my mouth, it really creeps me out. "Great steak, huh!? Man, you are lucky to be eating that. Take another bite. I bet it's even better.")

Also, I'm not a huge fan of career politicians talking about how they're not really politicians. It's like a salesman insisting he's not like any other salesman. Maybe that's true in some ways (maybe he has three nipples and a neon orange unibrow; what do I know?) but at the end of the day he's still trying to make a sale which means - tah dah! - he's a salesman. Christie's claim to be above politics-as-usual always struck me as incredibly hackneyed and forced. He's the governor of frick'n New Jersey. Being above politics there is about as possible as cleaning out a stable by hand without getting your white gloves dirty. The fact that voters want to hear that stuff doesn't make it true. It makes it pandering.

Anyway, Christie set the standard for his straight talking. He set the standard of being better than petty politics. And, yesterday, he laid down a marker for what he knew and didn't know. If that marker is proven phony, it will profoundly undermine the criteria by which he asks voters to judge him. And that wound will be entirely self-inflicted.

Upside Down and Backwards

But come on! You have to wonder how some of the folks in the media can look at themselves in the mirror. The three network news shows have devoted orders of magnitude more coverage to a story about closed lanes on the George Washington Bridge than they have to the IRS scandal. I know this is not a new insight, but WHAT THE HELL!?

The sheer passion the New York Times-MSNBC mob is bringing to a partial road closure is a wonder to behold. What about the children! The chiiiiillllldrennnn!!!!!

But using the IRS to harass political opponents - one of the charges in the articles of impeachment for Richard Nixon - well, that's complicated. The president didn't know. The government is so vast. I had a flat tire! A flood! Locusts! It wasn't his fault! Besides Chris Christie joked about putting down the cones himself! The cones, man! The cones!

But forget about the IRS scandal. Obama's whole shtick is to pretend that he's above politics while being rankly political about everything, including his stated desire to "punish our enemies." By comparison, Chris Christie looks like Diogenes and Cincinnatus rolled into one. From inauguration day forward, this whole crew has behaved like Chicago goons dressed in Olympian garb, and the press has fallen for it.

We don't need to recycle the whole sordid history of the sequester and the shutdown to remember that this White House sincerely, deliberately, and with malice aforethought sought to make things as painful as possible for millions of Americans. Traffic cones on the George Washington Bridge are a stain on the honor of New Jersey. (Stop laughing!) But deliberately pulling air-traffic controllers to screw with millions of people is just fine? Shafting World War II vets and vacationing families at National Parks is something only crazy right-wingers on Twitter would have a problem with? And keep in mind, it is at least plausible Christie didn't know what his staff was doing. It is entirely implausible that the president didn't know about the WWII memorial closure, after the news appeared in the president's daily briefing (a.k.a. the New York Times).

I'd say I just don't get it, but I do get it. For the mainstream media, skepticism comes naturally when a Republican is in the crosshairs. It comes reluctantly, slowly, and painfully - if at all - when it's a Democrat.

Free to Choose

The other day I wrote a USA Today column (subsequently reprinted at NRO), in which I made what I believe to be an incandescently obvious observation: Life choices can have a profound impact on your economic prospects. Drop out of high school, start messing around with heroin, rob liquor stores: The odds are very good you will not end up being a one-percenter. No really, it's true.
Your bad decisions don't have to be so stark, either, to have an economic impact; they don't even have to be bad! They just have to be choices.

Among the readers of this slapdash "news"letter there are millionaire hedge-fund types (please make your checks out to "Cash"), homemakers, college students, day laborers, convicted moperers, cops, soldiers, and, I would like to think, professional basset-hound wranglers. (Come on, just picture it.) But whatever it is you do for a living, if you didn't know that your choices about how you wanted to live your life came with economic consequences, you are what social scientists call a "complete fricking moron."

If you decide to become a nun, that's a beautiful and incredibly meaningful thing. But you shouldn't plan on giving the crew from MTV's Cribs a tour of your fat Malibu pad any time soon. The whole vow of poverty thing should have been your first clue. Americans don't join the military to become rich, and few people major in finance because they plan on taking a vow of poverty. If you get a Ph.D. in Aramaic or some other dead language, don't come crying to me that you can't afford a $10,000 Japanese smart toilet. I know some absolutely brilliant and capable women - I even married one -- who made the decision to spend less time in the work force so they could spend more time being moms. It is not a huge shock when their annual income goes down as a result.

Every normal American, man or woman, understands that these kinds of choices come with a price. This isn't a problem with our system. In a very basic way, it's not even a problem at all. Problems can be fixed. Problems that have no solution aren't problems: They're life. You can say the fact that 2+2 is 4 is a problem because you want 2+2 to equal a badger that craps plutonium pellets ready for a cold-fusion reactor. But that doesn't make it a problem; it makes you a really weird dude, who should probably sit out the next few downs. Choices have consequences. That's why they're called "choices."

Earn It

People who choose not to dedicate their lives to getting rich aren't making a mistake, they're doing what they think and hope will make them happy. I almost went to law school. All things being equal, I think I'd make a pretty good lawyer. Except for one thing: I don't think I'd like being a lawyer. I like being a writer - most days, at least. Is it unfair or wrong that I don't make as much money as some lawyer who spends his days reading through stacks of low-flow toilet patents? No, because (a) I don't care enough about money to spend my life doing that kind of work and (b) fairness has nothing to do with it. The market sets the price for such things.

My boss at the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, is the foremost champion of the idea of "earned success." It turns out what makes people happy isn't money, it's the feeling that you made a meaningful contribution to life. Absolutely: You can get that from building a business and getting rich. But you can also get that from raising a family, starting a charity, being a winning coach or an exceptional teacher, from writing a novel, or, in my case, from your record for fitting 37 Cheetos in your mouth at one time. ("They'll never take that away from you." - The Couch)

What can't give you a feeling of earned success is getting stuff you didn't earn. It can make you temporarily excited. But meaningful happiness comes from finding meaning. And what counts as meaningful for you might count as a huge waste of time to me. That's why the inalienable right to pursue happiness has to be an individual right.

There is a caveat. Some people need a little help - either from government or family or a charity of one kind or another - to get to the point where they can figure out how to pursue earned success. Actually all people need help, because we are all born little barbarians with no understanding of the consequences of our actions. This is the main reason why diapers are a multibillion dollar industry. But some people need more help later in life, because of the circumstances of their birth or the crappiness of their parents.

Inequality Follies

Which brings me to the point I intended to make. Which was . . . ? Oh, right. So I wrote this column about inequality. And it made a lot of liberal people really, really angry. And frankly I don't understand why.

Borrowing from Kay Hymowitz, I made the point that the New York Times poster girl for inequality, Dasani Coates (apparently named after the bottled water) is the victim of bad parents more than she is the victim of a bad society:

"The data say something else. Family structure and the values that go into successful child rearing have a stronger correlation with economic mobility than income inequality does. America's system is hardly flawless. But if Dasani were born to the same parents in a socialist country, she'd still be a victim - of bad parents."

[Even the NYT sob-story says:  "Dasani's circumstances are largely the outcome of parental dysfunction. While nearly one-third of New York's homeless children are supported by a working adult, her mother and father are unemployed, have a history of arrests and are battling drug addiction." -- JR]

That doesn't mean I don't have sympathy for her. I have enormous sympathy for her. I'm a bit of a Rawlsian softy when it comes to kids. Kids can't choose their parents. And when crappy parents make crappy decisions - starting with the decision to have kids they can't take good care of - their kids did nothing wrong. What gets complicated as a matter of public policy is that kids of crappy parents often grow up to be crappy parents themselves. Multiply that out and you don't have a family problem, you have a cultural problem. I am open to the idea of doing something to break the cycle of poverty, even if it comes at considerable cost (see today's column). And obviously, all of this can get very complicated. But, at the end of the day, there will always be people who make bad choices, and those choices will have consequences. Why? Because that's life.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Carthage Must Be Destroyed!

By Rich Kozlovich

In 2013 the United States Congress was criticized for not getting things done. The Congress “only” passed 65 new laws. Of course we have to understand that one year they passed over three hundred new laws.

What is really important to understand is when new laws are passed the baton of power is passed to the permanent bureaucracies, whose function is to make even more laws called – “rules”! In 2013 there was an average of 56 new regulations resulting from each law passed totaling 3659 new laws called – “rules”! That multiplier has been as low as 12 per new law, but that was in 2006 when Congress passed 321 new laws. If you average out the multipliers over the last ten years the average multiplier is 25.36.

So what’s the rest of the story? Last year the states passed over 40,000 new laws. If we make a broad assumption that the average multiplier applies to the states we now have a potential of 1,014,400 new laws called – “rules!” Rules created by unaccountable bureaucrats, with their own agendas and views of reality, and who, generally speaking, went to college and then into government.

During the first five years of the Obama administration regulatory costs increased by $500 billion dollars, “with $112 billion in regulatory compliance costs in 2013 alone, and predicted that the burden would continue to increase this year to as much as $143 billion”.  The federal registry, where all the regulations are listed, contain 80,224 pages this year alone.  It’s estimated that in ten years at the current rate of regulatory growth there will generate approximately 900,000 new pages of regulations, which will be on top of the approximately 800,000 pages of regulations passed in the previous ten years.

All of these regulations do one thing for sure - create jobs – for non-productive bureaucrats.  It took government employees 10.38 billion hours to do “the paperwork for the federal government in 2013, and will take 78,000 full-time employees to complete the additional paperwork.”

We also have to look at who benefits from laws and the regulations they generate.  In this kind of hyper-regulatory, high tax economy many of these laws and regulations are promoted by businesses that want to make it harder for companies that will be, or are, competitors.  As a result “all aspects of business, entrepreneurship degenerates into “bribery and diplomacy.” Instead of focusing on creating value for customers, entrepreneurs spend their time lobbying for favors or to avoid penalties, trying to discern the government’s next move, anticipating or adapting to the newest regulations.”

But this was to be expected from a party that loves big government and “more” laws and regulations - all the better to control our lives.  What about the administrations that have been considered conservative, anti-big government and opposed to all these regulations?  There were more regulations passed during George W. Bush’s administration than any president since Richard Nixon.  Furthermore this idea there is some invisible divide between the left and the so-called right regarding regulations and the promotion of the all powerful state is an illusion:

“The modern regulatory state is a bipartisan enterprise: During the half-century before President Obama's election, the greatest growth in regulation came under Presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.  And the Bush administration set the stage for many of the Obama initiatives that Republicans are now attacking. Dodd-Frank's policy of designating some financial firms as "too big to fail" is a codification of the Paulson-Bernanke bailout approach of 2008. It was the Bush Treasury Department that first proposed a financial consumer-protection agency, and the Bush Environmental Protection Agency that first proposed regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The Obama energy rules were authorized — and in some cases, such as the light-bulb ban, required — by a 2007 statute that President Bush vigorously championed.”

What about Richard M. Nixon?  Nixon was a strange man and still an enigma to many, and understandably so, because Nixon was the first to advocate what was called a New Federalism, which would ‘devolve’ power to state and local governments.  But he was the first one to jump on the environmental band wagon promoted by the first Earth Day in 1970.  He believed this was a precursor of public concern and he wanted to benefit from it politically.

Eventually he signed the Clear Air Act, the Clear Water Act the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, requiring environmental impact statements for federal projects.

He created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).  All of which create virtual lava flows of scientifically dubious regulations, creating outrageous burdens on the American people, and the American economy.

Furthermore, all these laws and agencies give rise to lawsuits by activists that plague economic development with lawsuits, legal costs, studies and delays.

What is the cost of all these federal regulations to the nation’s people?  One point eight trillion dollars a year!  And I have no idea what kind of costs of all these state laws impose on society.  So what is the solution - at least at the federal level?

No one can fix this piecemeal because it is a foundational issue and until that foundational problem is recognized it will never be solved. So what is that foundational issue? Passage of the 16th and 17th amendments in 1913, which laid the foundation for our doom.

The 16th amendment gave the federal government the right to tax income.  This gave them the right to confiscate an unending amount of society’s money, [called their fair share] and spend it like drunken sailors. That turned the federal government into an insatiable beast that can never be fed to satisfaction, creating debt that is threatening the stability of not only the nation, but the world.

The 17th amendment changed how Senators are chosen. The Founding Fathers were determined to prevent the federal government from becoming an all too powerful entity that was centralized and out of control. In order to do this they created a government that wasn’t supposed to do very much creating a true balance of power between the central government and the state governments. In those days the word ‘state’ didn’t mean province, it meant an independent nation. So the Senators were chosen by the state governments to be ambassadors to the federal government in order to stop power grabbing by the central government.

After passage of the 17th amendment they would be elected by popular vote, exactly what the Founding Fathers wanted to avoid, because that was already what the House of Representatives was for. That amendment destroyed the balance of power, the 10th amendment notwithstanding. As long as the 17th exists the 10th is meaningless, and by misusing the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution the federal government can overturn any and all local authority, and individual rights guaranteed under the Constitution.

“The deterioration of the Constitution’s separation of, and balance of, powers means that regulators and bureaucrats now make most laws……The executive branch increasingly imposes its will: President Obama and his administration repeatedly say they are not going to wait for Congress…...”

What about the Supreme Court?  Don’t they understand how the Commerce Clause is being misused?  Until the Rehnquist court in 1995 SCOTUS never saw a law that exceeded Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause.  In fact, they held the view that no matter how slight the impact might be on commerce it would now be subject to federal control.  If there ever was a system for abuse and tyranny this was it, and now the states were powerless to do anything about it.

Roman Senator Cato the Elder was born in 234 BC and believed that Carthage was too dangerous to be allowed to exist. Therefore he gave speeches ending in the phrase [no matter the topic of the speech] “Carthago delenda est”, “Carthage Must be Destroyed". The 16th and 17th amendments are our modern Carthage – too dangerous to exist.   This is foundational. The only fix is the repeal of the 16th and 17th amendments.   After that - everything else will fall into place.   But first we must be willing to recognize the 16th and 17th amendments really are the enemy - our modern Carthage!

 SOURCE

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Limbaugh: Obama 'Is an Absolute Economic Idiot'

I think Obama is an empty suit generally  -- but with a nice voice and clever speechwriters.  When he is off the leash he disgraces himself.  I can perhaps forgive him for bowing to the Emperor of Japan.  It could show proper respect for an ancient civilization and a brilliant people.  But bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia was just gross.  The Saudis are just brigands.  And his handshake with Raul Castro at the Mandela funeral was also an embarrassment  -- JR

Rush Limbaugh Tuesday called President Obama an "Absolute Economic Idiot" at the top of his syndicated radio program.

Limbaugh was referring to remarks made by the president earlier in the day at the White House in an effort to extend unemployment insurance.  President Obama said that, "Voting for unemployment insurance helps people and creates jobs and voting against it does not."

"This guy is an absolute economic idiot.  He's sitting here.  He's touting the benefits of unemployment insurance for the last twenty minutes.  And, the first thing that comes to my mind is, 'Wait a minute, I thought we had this great economic recovery going because of him.'  And because of his astute, brilliant policies.  I thought the president had given us an economic recovery, and we're starting to come back here.

"They're reporting fourth quarter growth at four percent, did you hear that?  By the way, they're using new metrics to measure; it's nowhere near growing at four percent.  But that's what they're saying.  And in the midst of all of this economic growth, and all of this economic rebound, the most important thing is avoiding another government shutdown and extending unemployment benefits.

"The president just said that unemployment benefits actually create new jobs.  Now stop and think about that for a second.  Unemployment benefits create new jobs.  What is unemployment insurance?  It is paying people not to work.  Let's change the term.  Let's get rid of 'unemployment insurance' and let's call it 'paying people not to work.'

"The President of the United States just said to resounding applause, well I'm not sure that got applause, the only thing that's really gotten any applause in the White House, he's got all kinds of people standing behind him, is when he said 'we can't dare have another government shutdown.'  That got a standing ovation.  So, it tells you that kind of people in the room.  Anyway, paying people not to work can grow the economy.  Paying people not to work can create jobs."

 SOURCE

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Senate should reject race-baiter Adegbile from Civil Rights post



Americans for Limited Government President Nathan Mehrens today issued the following statement urging Senate rejection of Debo Adegbile as the next Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division:

“The Senate should reject Debo Adegbile from being confirmed as the next Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.

“Adegbile is best known as the man who headed the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s voluntary racial assault on the integrity of a dead Philadelphia police office in a quest to get his murderer off of death row.

“The attack on the character of the dead, defenseless officer was so egregious that the Fraternal Order of Police has come out against the nomination writing:

‘We are aware of the tried and true shield behind which activists of Adegbile’s ilk are wont to hide – that everyone is entitled to a defense; but surely you would agree that a defense should not be based upon falsely disparaging and savaging the good name and reputation of a lifeless police officer.  Certainly any legal scholar can see the injustice and absence of ethics in this cynical race-baiting approach to our legal system.’

“Adegbile has also supported Equal Employment Opportunity Commission efforts to prevent the usage of criminal background checks to screen potential new hires.  As the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Office, Adegbile would be in a position to bring legal action against employers who engaged in the commonsense practice of ensuring that convicted thieves weren’t hired to oversee inventory or rapists weren’t serving as parking attendants.

“The nomination of Adegbile is an affront to the concept of moving toward a non-racial society, and he should be rejected on a bi-partisan basis by the United States Senate.”

 SOURCE

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Owning Up to the Obamacare Lies:  Liberals are finally admitting, quietly, that conservative critiques were right all along.

Those who have elected to keep close tabs on the reactions to Obamacare’s blotchy rollout will presumably have noticed that it has been marked by admissions of guilt. The latest such confession comes from The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber, who bluntly conceded yesterday that “Obamacare actually paves the way toward single payer.” Pushing back against Michael Moore’s unsettling criticisms of the law, Schreiber tweeted:

"Dear liberals bummed about Obamacare: Don't sweat it. It's going to get us to a single-payer system before long."

This, Scheiber made sure to explain, was not an accident, and nor was it merely a dose of post hoc optimism. Obamacare, he claimed, is in fact “a deceptively sneaky way to get the health care system both of us really want” — that is, single payer. And “Republicans are in some sense playing into the trap Obamacare laid for them.”

I honestly do not know whether Scheiber’s prediction is correct. When government wishes to expand itself, it is tough for people to resist, and the instances are legion of people who wanted a little change but were subjected instead to a lot. Still, I suspect that this will not be the case with Obamacare. For a start, the rollicking disaster that has been the law’s launch will now be projected into every home each and every time an expansion of government is suggested. And, disappointingly for the movement that spawned the change, Americans appear to be reacting to it by concluding that government should henceforth have less — not more — to do with health care. Either way, whatever happens in the future, I do know this: When Republicans have written their own version of Scheiber’s column, complaining that Obamacare is but a “deceptively sneaky way to get” to single payer, they have been immediately denounced for hysteria and mendacity and invited to remove the tin foil.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Equality Versus Liberty

John Stossel

President Barack Obama says income inequality is "dangerous ... the defining challenge of our time." The pope is upset that capitalism causes inequality. Progressives, facing the failures of Obamacare, are eager to change the subject to America's "wealth gap."

It's true that today, the richest 1 percent of Americans own a third of America's wealth. One percent owns 35 percent!

But I say, so what? Progressives in the media claim that the rich get richer at the expense of the poor.

But that's a lie.

Hollywood sells the greedy-evil-capitalists-cheat-the-poor message with movies like Martin Scorsese's new film, "The Wolf of Wall Street," which portrays stock sellers as sex-crazed criminals. Years before, Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" created a creepy financier, Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, who smugly gloated, "It's a zero-sum game. Somebody wins; somebody loses."

This is how the left sees the market: a zero-sum game. If someone makes money, he took it from everyone else. The more the rich have, the less others have. It's as if the economy is a pie that's already on the table, waiting to be carved. The bigger the piece the rich take, the less that's left for everyone else. The economy is just a fight over who gets how much.

But this is absurd. Bill Gates took a huge slice of pie, but he didn't take it from me. By starting Microsoft, he baked millions of new pies. He made the rest of the world richer, too.

Entrepreneurs create things.

Over the past few decades, the difference in wealth between the rich and poor has grown. This makes people uncomfortable. But why is it a problem if the poor didn't get poorer?

Progressives claim they did. Some cite government data that show middle class incomes remaining relatively stagnant. But this data is misleading, too. It leaves out all government handouts, like rent subsidies and food stamps. It leaves out benefits like company-funded health insurance and pensions, which make up increasing portions of people's pay.

And it leaves out the innovation that makes life better for both the rich and poor. Even poor people today have access to cars, food, health care, entertainment and technology that rich people lusted for a few decades ago. Ninety percent of Americans living "below the poverty line" have smart phones, cable TV and cars. Seventy percent own two cars.

But hold on, says the left. Even if the poor reap some benefits from capitalism, it's just not "fair" that rich people have so much more. I suppose this is true. But what exactly is "fair"?

Is it fair that models are so good-looking? Why is it fair that some men are so much bigger than I, so no one will pay me to play pro sports? It's hardly fair that I was born in America, a country that offers me far greater opportunities than most other countries would. We Americans should be thankful that life is not fair!

Freedom isn't fair, if fair means equal. When people are free, some will be more successful than others. Some people are smarter or just luckier. Globalization and free-market capitalism multiply the effect of smarts and luck, allowing some people to get much richer than others. So what? Inequality may seem unfair, but the alternative -- government-forced equality -- is worse. It leaves everyone poor.

Opportunity is much more important than equality, and there is still income mobility in America. People born poor don't necessarily stay poor.

Pew research shows 58 percent of the kids born to the poorest fifth of families rose to a higher income group. Six percent rose all the way from the bottom fifth to the top fifth.

Sixty-one percent of kids born to the richest fifth of families fell from that group, and 9 percent fell all the way to the bottom.

Opportunity requires allowing people to take risks and make changes. We won't always like the outcomes. But over the long haul, we're still better off if people are free to strive and fail, or maybe -- reap big rewards.

SOURCE

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Ideology vs. Reality

French President Francois Hollande has been confronted by the glaring light of reality -- sort of.

On New Year's Day, as his massive tax increases began taking effect, Hollande, a member of the Socialist Party, admitted that taxes in France have become "too heavy, much too heavy."

Indeed, as of Jan. 1, French households now must contend with a new value added tax on many goods and services and, writes International Business Times, "French companies will be required to pay 50 percent tax on all employee salaries in excess of 1 million euros. ... The effective tax rate will amount to 75 percent." Unemployment, which Hollande promised to reduce, has risen to nearly 11 percent. Some companies and wealthy people have left France in search of business-friendly environments. More will surely follow unless Hollande's rhetoric is followed by actual tax reductions.

Hollande's head-on collision with reality is reminiscent of President Bill Clinton's remarks in 1995 at a campaign fundraiser in Houston: "Probably there are people in this room still mad at me ... because you think I raised your taxes too much. It might surprise you to know that I think I raised them too much, too."

Neither Hollande (so far), nor Clinton, followed up on their remarks by cutting taxes. Like many other politicians, these men tried to have it both ways.

The next political leader who will be forced to adjust his left-wing ideology to reality is the new mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, who has proposed a tax on the wealthy to fund universal pre-K education. He, too, thinks raising taxes on the successful is the way to prosperity for the poor. He should pick up the phone and ask Hollande how that is working for him, as Hollande's approval ratings are sinking faster than President Obama's. Even better, he might recall Calvin Coolidge's remark: "Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong."

Penalize success and prosperity and you get less of it. Subsidize bad decision-making by giving taxpayer money to the poor, and you may well undermine initiative and personal responsibility and create new generations of poor people.

The left in America and France have gained political power by appealing to voters' emotions, but when they achieve power their ideology harms the very people who voted for them when these well-intentioned programs prove unworkable. This presents conservatives and Republicans with an opportunity, as well as risks.

Liberals are allowed to be as ideological as they wish, and the major media and too many among the unfocused public will mostly support them. The left is never told they must compromise their ideology when reality proves them wrong, or "work with Republicans and conservatives" to achieve common goals. That is the trap liberals set for conservatives, who are repeatedly told they must compromise their principles if they hope to win elections, but whose squishy politics then become as unappealing as cold oatmeal.

Here is the path Republicans and conservatives must take if they not only want to win, but bring positive change to the country. Instead of debating feelings and ideology with the left (territory on which they almost always lose -- recall "compassionate conservative"), conservatives should hold their opponents accountable. Are their policies producing the results they claim? Is the record debt good for the country? Are agencies performing as their charter demands, and should their budgets be reduced or the agency eliminated if it can't show results? Every government agency and program should be regularly required to justify, not only its budget, but its very existence.

Americans typically hate waste. It is why as children most of us were told to clean our plates because somewhere in the world there were hungry people. Requiring the left to prove their programs and policies are producing outcomes at reasonable cost would shift the debate from ideology and good intentions to reality. This is where conservatives have a distinct advantage if they will embrace it.

SOURCE

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Obama vs. the Little Sisters

By the bizarre logic of the White House, the nuns are part of the “war on women.”



It takes some doing to get embroiled in a court fight with nuns who provide hospice care for the indigent. Amazingly, the Obama administration has managed it.

Its legal battle with the Little Sisters of the Poor is the logical consequence of Obamacare’s conscience-trampling contraception mandate. The requirement went into effect January 1, but Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a New Year’s Eve injunction against enforcing it on the Little Sisters.

They are Catholic nuns who follow the doctrinal teachings of the church and therefore oppose contraceptive and abortive drugs and sterilization, all of which Obamacare mandates that employers cover in their insurance plans. Given the ongoing delays, waivers, and exemptions associated with the law, it would seem natural simply to let the Little Sisters go about their business of pouring out their hearts for the sick and dying.

But this is a fight the administration won’t walk away from. For this White House, it is a matter of principle. And the principle is that the state trumps the convictions of people with deep-held religious beliefs.

When the contraception mandate first caused an uproar, the administration contrived a so-called accommodation for religiously oriented groups (actual churches have always been exempt). But whoever crafted it had a sick sense of humor. The very same document by which a group registers its moral objection to contraceptives and abortifacients also authorizes the insurer to cover them for the group’s employees. What the accommodation gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.

The Little Sisters refuse to sign such a document. They happen to be in an unusual situation because they get their insurance from another religiously affiliated organization opposed to contraceptives and abortifacients, so it may be that these drugs don’t get covered no matter what. But the Little Sisters can’t be sure of this — the regulations are complicated and subject to change.

Regardless, they don’t want to sign. They want no part in authorizing coverage of contraceptive or abortive drugs. Enthusiasts for the mandate scoff. What the nuns are objecting to, they insist, is just a piece of paper.

Just a piece of paper? So is a mortgage. So is a wedding certificate. So is a will. How would the board of directors of NARAL react if the government forced them to sign a “piece of paper” tacitly condemning contraception or abortion? Would they shrug it off as a mere formality?

The Little Sisters deserve deference. Their religious sensibility is different from — and, one hazards to say, more finely tuned than — that of the mandarins of President Barack Obama’s administrative state. In a dispute over what their conscience tells them to do or not to do, the Little Sisters are better positioned to know than anyone else.

Besides, who is harmed if the Little Sisters don’t provide contraception coverage? They are a voluntary organization. They aren’t imposing their views on anyone. Who, for that matter, is harmed if a secular organization run by people with moral objections to contraceptives and abortifacients refuses to cover them? Employees are still free to go out on their own and get contraceptives, which are widely available. If this sounds like an outlandish imposition, it is what people managed to do throughout American history all the way up to last week.

The contraception mandate has always had a strong ideological impetus. Opponents of the mandate “want to roll back the last 50 years in progress women have made in comprehensive health care in America,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius notoriously declared in 2011. “We’ve come a long way in women’s health over the last few decades, but we are in a war.” By this bizarre way of thinking, a small congregation of nuns that cares for the most vulnerable is somehow complicit in a war on women’s health.

Instead of respecting the moral views of the Little Sisters, the administration hopes to grind them under foot by force of law. For shame.

SOURCE

There is an argument here that Obama would be wise to drop the contraception requirements for Catholic organizations.  It would get the Catholic church off his back.

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ELSEWHERE

Convicts Vote Democrat:  "According to a new study in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, most convicted criminals register as Democrats. In fact, Breitbart reports, “The study found that felons registered Democratic over Republican by a six-to-one margin in some states, including New York, where 61.5% are Democrats and only 9% GOP. Another fact discovered was that 73% of the felons who would vote would vote Democrat.” They add, “The study said there are 5.8 million eligible voters in jail,” the majority of which are young black males. There's one thing the Left can always count on: support from criminals. Because pickpockets have to stick together.

The progressives’ Achilles’ heel:  "Progressives (i.e., liberals in the corrupted meaning of the term) love to portray themselves as lovers of the poor. That’s what they use to justify their never-ending, ever-growing welfare-state and regulatory programs. But as we libertarians have repeatedly shown, the welfare state and the regulated economy actually constitute an enormous attack on the freedom and well-being of the poor."

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The final death of Lawrence of Arabia

Peter O'Toole, who was marvelous in "Lawrence of Arabia," died recently. Many commentators and critics feel that Lawrence's story and the movie about him influenced the actions of many European statesmen, politicians, and members of Western foreign ministries and security services. However, there is considerable argument as to whether and what, as a matter of historical fact, T. E. Lawrence contributed to the British war effort by collaborating with the Bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula against the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. Not all historians agree to the truth of the glowing reports of his personality, moral stature and personal behavior.

Nevertheless, the enigmatic figure of Lawrence, an intelligence officer, became a role model for Western diplomats and statesmen, and he is revered as a master of mediating with the leaders of the Arab world. He seemed secretive and manipulative, with the rare ability and knowledge to exploit Arab ideology to achieve victory and foster the interests of the West, and to build inter-cultural cooperation and coexistence in a way that was both noble and romantic.

The Arabs with whom Lawrence collaborated were romanticized and made to appear exotic and other-worldly. The murder, grudges, blood feuds, treachery, deception, destruction, violence, theft, robbery and looting, all deeply ingrained in the psyches of the Arab tribes, were wrapped in romanticism and existentialist concepts explained and justified as necessary, forced upon the Bedouins by their daily struggle to subsist in the hard conditions imposed on them by the desert.

That was the foundation for utterly false and baseless concepts such as "Arab honor" and "his word is his bond," from which the image of the noble, almost feral, desert Bedouin Arab was constructed. Tales worthy of the Thousand and One Nights were told about the loyalty of the Arabs, their honor, trustworthiness and other imaginary transcendental qualities, turning the Arab in to a paradigm on which generations of Western intellectuals were reared, especially those who eventually went to work for the British Foreign Office. Critics of the blind worship of Lawrence have always claimed that the image of the British officer and his Arab partners was constructed through an emotional idealization resulting from a general lack of expertise regarding the Middle East, a region veiled in mystery, wonder and enchantment.

Few people have bothered to read the Muqaddimah, or Introduction, written by Arab historian Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century, in which he describes the Bedouins as destructive, lacking any sense of morality or values, and working only to destroy culture and world order. Even fewer have read Fouad Ajami's 1998 book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey, with its painful criticism of the pitiful Arab, whose inherent culture left him no shred of sincerity, creativity or courage. Worse, even fewer members of Arab society itself have dared to honestly criticize its faults for fear of reprisals.

In the West, however, there were scholars who did objectively study the weaknesses and faults of the Arab Middle East, but the lack of openness, jealousy and the dark, ancient tribal pride made the Arabs sneer at such scholars as "Orientalists," unqualified pretenders who had the audacity to claim knowledge of the East. Those industrious, forthright scholars were accused by Arab "intellectuals" like Professor Edward Said of arrogantly patronizing the Arabs. The claim of Said, and others like him, was that they were not scholars but were in reality ignorant, stigmatizing the Arabs because of their imperialist-colonialist mindset and fanatical Christian hatred for the Arabs and Muslims, as well as their unjustified feelings of superiority.

Peter O'Toole was a great actor, but the movie "Lawrence of Arabia" was nothing more than a Hollywood fantasy which, like the imaginary story of Lawrence, swept away many romantics and for decades had a negative impact on the decisions made by influential Western officials and statesmen dealing with policy in the Middle East. The problem is that today as well, Western leaders and policy-makers view and discuss the problems of the Middle East through the prism of Lawrence of Arabia, romantic, distorted and nostalgic as it is, seeing only the unilateral Arab position of every conflict, and adopting paradigms, symbols and historical deceptions as the gospel truth.

Lies told repeatedly, as the past has shown, become historical truths. Actually, Hollywood's world of dreams and fantasy did not penetrate the wandering sand dunes of the evil and unjust acts perpetrated by the Arabs and Bedouins throughout the years of the jahiliyya (the era of ignorance before Islam) which left their indelible imprint of murder and theft. Those crimes accompanied the Arabs and Muslims from the rise of Islam and accompany them to this day. All the evil storms of history visited upon humanity did not expose to the people of Europe (who today host well-established enclaves of radical Islam in their midst) even the surface of the slaughter and injustice carried out by Muslims in the name of Islam, "the religion of peace," against Jews and Christians. Europe is still influenced by the fantasies of Lawrence of Arabia, captivated by the specious charms of the Arabs and Islam and unaware of the catastrophe that will be visited on the world as soon as the Islamist genie is let out of the bottle, making the World Trade Center look like three minutes of "coming attractions."

Emotionally identifying with Lawrence's Arab narrative, the West is in denial. It disregards the warnings radiating from radical Islam and the tragedy of the persecuted, decimated Christian communities in the Arab Middle East as the threat to Europe steadily increases. As a collective blind eye is turned, the lives and property of the Christian communities is stolen, their churches are burned and their honor is defiled, exactly as the ancient Jewish communities in the Arab states were persecuted before they fled for their lives as refugees and eventually found a safe haven in the State of Israel.

Nevertheless, Lawrence of Arabia-style mythology flourishes, the paradigm of the "good, noble Arabs" balancing the paradigm of the "bad, Protocols of the Elders of Zion Jews" who oppress "Palestine," helping to stir the smoldering embers of European anti-Semitism. The ancient European hatred of the Jews, dormant and in remission since the end of the Second World War, has reawakened in a new, politically correct form: Europe does not hate the Jews, but rather it is pro-Palestinian and thus anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli...

Europeans, who for generations (and until the end of the Second World War) evicted the Jews from their countries screeching "Go back to Palestine" now impose boycotts, divestments and sanctions on the descendants of the Jews murdered, tortured and exiled by their grandparents during the Holocaust, persecuting them even after they settled in their ancient home in the Land of Israel. Western leaders claim that as soon as the Palestinian problem, by which they mean the problem of Israel's existence, has been resolved, peace will return to the Middle East. They blame Israel for the stalled negotiations, which have dead-ended simply because the Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jew people, which would end the conflict, preferring instead to plot the destruction the State of Israel.

The leaders of the West are fully aware that the problem of the Palestinian refugees was solved long ago and that there are currently millions of genuine refugees all over the world whose lives are in danger. They know that the Arabs' thirst for blood has a multitude of causes that are not even remotely related to "Palestine," but nevertheless they delude themselves into thinking that the chaos in the Middle East will somehow disappear if the Palestinian issue is "resolved." Israel, democratic and pluralistic, which has absorbed Jews from all the countries of the Diaspora, including Ethiopia, is castigated as "apartheid. Western leaders also ignore the critical role played by the Israel's security fence in protecting the country's civilians from Palestinian terrorism, and call it the "apartheid wall."

Those same European politicians, using threats of economic, academic and political sanctions, are currently trying to force Israel into making concessions to the Palestinians that will endanger its future existence and expose it to deadly terrorist attacks. Politicians like John Kerry and Catherine Ashton, who have virtually no understanding of the Middle Eastern mindset, exert pressure on the Israelis in an attempt to rob them of the land of their forefathers, the only place on earth where they found a genuine haven free of anti-Semitism, and to expose them to existential dangers equaled only the 1930s and '40s.

Fortunately for the West, what was mistakenly called the Arab Spring quickly turned into the Arab Winter, and the storms of internecine Sunni-Shi'ite terrorism and slaughter exposed the convenient lapses of memory for what they were and tore away the myths concealing the true face of the Arab-Muslim world. It is now a recognizable fact that all over the globe, wherever there are Arabs and Muslims there is slaughter, terrorism, mass murder of both brother Muslims and "infidels,' pedophilia, the oppression of women, rape, the murder and persecution of Jews and Christians, the burning of houses of worship, and the use of weapons of mass destruction to kill civilians, none of which has the slightest relevance to the so-called "issue of Palestine."

The Lawrence of Arabia syndrome Western politicians suffer from illustrates the limitations of people like Barack Obama, John Kerry and Catherine Ashton. Raised on Western values of pluralism and integration and influenced by British intellectual orientation, they have absolutely no ability to even imagine let alone appreciate or understand the manipulations of which Shi'ite Iranian Ayatollahs and Sunni Arab sheikhs and leaders are capable.

At the recent meetings held by Western politicians with representatives of Shi'ite and Sunni Islam and with the heads of the Palestinian terrorist syndicate, meetings which dealt with their various religious schools, it was obvious that not only are the Westerners innocents, but that every P5+1 leader goes to bed at night feeling that he, personally, is today's Lawrence of Arabia. It is sad to see how pathetic they were, and how frightening, as they lead the Western world toward the brink of a Third World War.

Anyone who follows the misguided Middle East policies of the European Union and John Kerry in their dealings with Iran can easily understand the extent to which Lawrence of Arabia's deceptive heritage is a dangerous illusion, a desert mirage. In Hollywood the movie ends with the credits, but in reality European and American innocence will end with catastrophic mass killings, with millions murdered by terrorism, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, a situation only hinted at by events in Iraq and Syria. Which of today's Western leaders would like to be remembered by history as responsible, and credited with writing the script?

SOURCE

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Liberals’ Skewed View of Conservatives

Have you ever been pigeon-holed at a party by a liberal? I recommend avoiding it at all costs, but if it happens, go with it. You’ll get an education in what our opponents actually think as he rails, whines and complains about the terrible, inhuman monster that lurks on the fringes of American society.

This scourge is called a “conservative,” and I hope I never meet one in a dark alley. They apparently carry automatic weapons as they stalk the streets, hating science and hunting the poor for sport.

You’ll quickly note how your liberal monologist – they literally never shut up – is a scholar of all things conservative. Of course, he has never actually met one, living as he does in an urban sewer like San Francisco or in a subsidized academic enclave of Marxist fantasy like Berkeley. But who needs experience when you can get convenient bite-sized morsels of pre-processed ideology from MSNBC between the endless reruns of Lock Up?

First off, you’ll learn that conservatives are scary. They tend to identify with the traditional male paradigm that values aggressiveness, fierce patriotism, and personal responsibility. And that’s just conservative women.

Conservatives believe in owning guns, and will barbarically celebrate whenever some poor victim of society gets ventilated trying to invade a conservative’s home. Conservatives owning guns is terrible because they could, in theory, go on one of those shooting sprees liberals love to exploit. Except they never do – shooters inevitably have either written mash notes to the pantheon of liberal idols or received instructions from their talking Rottweilers. The Tea Party gunman remains the liberals’ Holy Grail.

Now, how liberals ignore the utter lack of conservative violence when arguing for confiscating their guns illustrates another theme. A lack of empirical evidence is not a problem for a liberal. Evidence isn’t an issue when your entire ideology trains you to come to a politically useful conclusion, then work backwards.

Take Obamacare. To a conservative, the evidence would seem to be damning. You can’t sign up for it. You can’t keep the policy you like, or buy a new one that meet your needs. The prices are going up. You can’t get in to see your doctor. Grey’s Anatomy is still on the air.

But to a liberal, its total failure is no problem. You see, Obamacare is a self-evident good. It centralizes power to the liberal elite, so trivialities like it being an utter fiasco are irrelevant.

Also, and most importantly, you will learn that Obamacare is a wonderful because conservatives hate black people. If fact, apparently conservatives would eagerly have embraced the President’s entire socialist agenda if only his mother and father had both come from the fjords of Norway.

Your liberal amateur anthropologist will explain to you that racism is the defining characteristic of conservatism. Apparently, all conservatives think of is race, which seems odd considering that it’s liberals who won’t stop talking about it.

Conservatives are also religious, which makes them even worse. Your liberal interlocutor will be happy to put on his theologian hat and start talking about how all conservatives hate evolution, believe dinosaurs and cavemen coexisted, and burn crosses.

Oh wait, that last one is a Democrat thing. Remember, even if you could wedge a word in edgewise, it would be impolite to mention the Democrat origins of the KKK, Democrat hero Woodrow Wilson’s racial theories, or to seek clarification about whether Democrat Senate icon Robert Byrd was an Imperial Cyclops or an Exalted Kleagle.

Your liberal conversationalist might even offer you a few select Bible verses to reinforce how a Jewish carpenter from 2000 years ago who he doesn’t believe in totally would have agreed with all his 21st Century leftist policy prescriptions. He’ll get mad if you suggest that Jesus’s initial reaction to Obamacare would probably be to chide its sponsors for lying about it.

You will also learn that conservatives hate the poor, including conservatives who were poor until adhering to conservative values, along with hard work, made them not poor any more.

After all, hate is the only possible explanation for conservative resentment of a government that steals the money conservatives worked hard to earn to give it to Democrat serfs who, by definition didn’t work hard at all. Well, hate and racism, because the totally-not-at-all-racist liberals assume anyone poor is a minority.

Another great thing about liberals is that they don’t need any “experience” or “training” to feel free to opine. I recall one hipster lecturing me on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Although Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had been my job during Operation Desert Storm, I was enthralled by the perspective of someone whose tactical background consisted of reading slam poetry at coffee house open mics in Burbank.

You’ll find they’re weapons experts too. That’s why they can explain how you don’t need a modern “assault rifle.” Yeah, listen to that guy with the “Arms are for hugging” bumpersticker on this Pirus. He knows. He’ll also be happy to tell you how the law should limit the number of calibers in the magazine clip of your automatic AR-15 assault cannon.

And, finally, you’ll hear about how conservatives totally hate sex. This is likely to be followed with complaints about the large size of conservative families. By that point, you’ve probably been introduced to your liberal acquaintance’s spouse and now understand why liberal families are so small and why your liberal buddy is so very, very unhappy.

Just smile, nod, and spare him a little pity as you excuse yourself to head to the bar to get yourself a double.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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