The War on WalMart—D.C. labor bosses and community organizers dislike the big jobs provider
No one needs to tell you how big an issue unemployment is in America, and especially in Washington, D.C. As of March 2011, the District of Columbia posted an unemployment rate of 9.5 percent.
Knowing that the unemployment rate is that high might surprise you when you learn that D.C. politicians, labor unions, and community organizers are trying everything they can to block one of the largest job providers and retailers in the world from coming to Washington. These supposed "leaders" want to prevent Walmart from setting up shop, which would prevent the creation of hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs for D.C. residents.
The grocery industry is one of the few remaining industries where labor unions thrive. While most sectors are seeing a decline in unions, grocery stores have remained a powerhouse for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). A threat to this labor-organizing stronghold is Walmart, a company that is not unionized and has taken drastic measures to prevent their shops from falling under the labor union's heavy hand.
Because Walmart is able to price their products lower than their competitors, they are able to force their competitors to change business practices or close-up altogether, which has been a blow to the grocery store labor unions. The UFCW is not concerned about whether or not people have jobs in a city where unemployment is hovering around double digits, rather, they are concerned that they are able to corner the market on the grocery stores to keep their political power intact.
More HERE
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Public servants – more money, less accountability
Union arguments in favor of their members' lush pensions are falling by the wayside as the public examines the facts. For instance, union officials argue that the average public-sector pension benefit in California is "only" $30,000 a year, while neglecting to mention that the number, according to the state's watchdog Little Hoover Commission, rises to $66,000 a year for recent retirees – a reflection of the widespread pension boosting of the past decade.
Virtually no one in the workaday private sector gets that level of guaranteed benefit, and the number of retired government employees grabbing $100,000 a year is growing by at least 40 percent a year. No wonder the public is angry. But the public is angry at more than the unsustainable pension debt and the unfair imbalance between the amounts received in the public vs. the private sector. People are getting angry at the abuses by public employees and at the lack of accountability even when miscreants are caught red-handed.
The Sacramento Bee reported recently on state employees who walk away at retirement with as much as $800,000 in unused sick time – a clear violation of the rules. Now the newspaper is reporting that a "top NATO general who formerly led the California National Guard enhanced his salary during his state tenure by collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in dual pay." Maj. Gen. William Wade padded his pay by about $155,000 – "beyond the legal limits" as the Bee put it.
There are hasty legislative proposals to stop such greedy enrichments in the future, but there's no apparent push to put Wade – since promoted to a top NATO position in Italy – where he belongs, in the hoosegow. Somehow, when government officials commit offenses we get euphemisms about conduct being beyond legal limits and improper behavior.
Try to find any effort to deal with massive disability fraud that goes on at police and fire stations, as majorities of public safety union members discover a back injury or knee injury just in time to protect half their retirement pay from taxes.
Union officials such as the Orange County Employees Association's Nick Berardino argue that the public is demonizing public employees. In reality, the public is waking up to the scams perpetrated on us for years. A statewide union official, Art Pulaski, claims that the public is simply envious of public employees. There's some truth to that – and why not be envious when the people who are supposed to work for us live far better than most of us, courtesy of our tax dollars? – but what these union leaders miss is the brewing anger over the accountability issue.
The private sector doesn't work perfectly. No human endeavor does. But in my lifetime there, I have never seen managers cover up for and defend miscreants. If you don't produce enough to justify your salary, you are gone. If you commit crimes or do things "beyond the legal limits," corporate managers are all too happy to turn the case over to the authorities. There is too much downside in keeping around lazy, misbehaving and lawbreaking employees. It can put you out of business or can prompt prosecutors to look for fraud and other crimes.
In government, officials typically circle the wagons. The unions stand up to protect the worst of the worst. The disciplinary rules are so cumbersome that it's generally not worth trying to do anything about misbehavior. That's why the public schools have "rubber rooms" – places where allegedly bad teachers wile away the years receiving full pay and benefits as their cases are adjudicated at a glacial pace. That's why police officers accused of wrongdoing and misjudgment – even misjudgments that lead to unjustified killings and violations of individual rights – end up with months of paid leave (i.e., additional vacation time), before eventually being returned to the streets after a closed process that tilts heavily in the officers' favor.
Notice how only a handful of sleeping air traffic controllers – union members who endangered lives by neglecting their responsibilities – received suspensions and other minor punishments. There's rarely any accountability. The California Supreme Court ruled recently in a case involving two Orange County social workers who were found by a jury to have filed false reports and held back evidence so that they could unjustly take away a woman's two children. This is almost hard to fathom, but I've reported on Child Protective Services and find it easy to believe in the context of my research. Social workers have immense power and few checks and balances, and some of these workers are on power trips – "Obey or we take your kids!"
In this case, the state's highest court upheld a verdict of nearly $5 million plus millions more in legal fees and noted that this was no isolated incident. So what happens to these people who were admonished by the courts and who put a family through more than six years of living hell?
Marcie Vreeken and Helen Dwojak were not even disciplined. As the Register's Kimberly Edds reported, Dwojak retired in 2006, and Vreeken was promoted. Get this – Vreeken now trains other social workers. Let's hope it doesn't include the class, "Creative methods in snatching people's kids."
Orange County officials actually argued that social workers should be afforded immunity, even for wrongdoing. I recall a bill that would have done the same thing for firefighters after a D.A. had the audacity to try to prosecute a firefighter for alleged misbehavior that killed someone.
Do we really want to provide powerful government agents with full immunity even when they break the law and misuse their power? Isn't that situation the opposite of what our nation's founders had in mind? It's in totalitarian nations where officials are untouchable, and lowly citizens had better obey or else.
My prediction is that the public employee issue is not going away – not simply because the pension debts are depleting budgets, but because we are only scratching the surface of the accountability issue, which touches on the foundation of what we are as a society. It's about time that we bring on this necessary debate.
SOURCE
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Where are the doctors going to come from?
The United States already faces a growing physician shortage. As our population ages, we require more and more intensive health care. At the same time, enrollment in medical schools has been essentially flat, meaning we are not producing new physicians at anywhere near the rate we need to. In fact, according to the American Association of Medical Colleges, we face a shortfall of more than 150,000 doctors over the next 15 years.
And it could get a whole lot worse. The health reform bill signed into law last year is expected to significantly increase the number of Americans with health insurance or participating in the Medicaid program. Meanwhile, an aging population will increase participation in Medicare. This means a greater demand for physician services.
Promising universal health coverage is easy. But what does universal coverage mean if you can't actually see a doctor?
But at the same, the bill may drive physicians out of practice.
Existing government programs already reimburse physicians at rates that are often less than the actual cost of treating a patient. Estimates suggest that on average physicians are reimbursed at roughly 78% of costs under Medicare, and just 70% of costs under Medicaid. Physicians must either make up for this shortfall by shifting costs to those patients with insurance — meaning those of us with insurance pay more — or treat patients at a loss.
As a result, more and more physicians are choosing to opt-out of the system altogether. Roughly 13% of physicians will not accept Medicare patients today. Another 17% limit the number of Medicare patients they will see, a figure that rises to 31% among primary care physicians. The story is even worse in Medicaid, where as many as a third of doctors will not participate in the program.
Traditionally, most doctors have been willing to take some Medicare patients either out of altruism or as a "loss leader," to reach other family members outside the Medicare program. Others try to get around Medicare's low reimbursement rates by unbundling services or providing care not covered through the program. (Nearly 85% of seniors carry supplemental policies to cover these additional services). With many office and equipment costs fixed, even a low reimbursement patient may be better than no patient at all for some doctors. This is even more true for hospitals where Medicare patients may account for the majority of people they serve. And doctors can take some comfort in the fact that Medicare is pretty much guaranteed to pay and pay promptly. The same is not always true of private insurance.
But if reimbursements fall much more, the balance could be tipped. The government's own chief actuary says that reimbursement cuts could mean "reductions in access to care and/or the quality of care." Once the cuts hit hospitals, they too will be in trouble. Medicare's actuaries estimate that 15% of hospitals could close. Inner-city and rural hospitals would be hardest hit.
Nor is the pressure on reimbursement rates likely to be felt solely in government programs. The health care law contains a number of new regulations that are already driving up insurance premiums. The government is responding by cajoling and threatening insurers. If insurers find their ability to pass on cost increases limited, they too may begin to cut costs by cutting reimbursements.
For a lot of older physicians, retirement in Florida may begin to look like a very good option. Roughly 40% of doctors are age 55 or over. Are they really going to want to stick it out for a few more years if all they have to look forward to is more red tape (both government and insurance company) for less money? Those that remain are increasingly likely to join "concierge practices," limiting the number of patients they see and refusing both government and private insurance.
And, at the same time, fewer young people are likely to decide that medicine is a good career. Remember, the average medical school graduate begins their career with more than $295,000 in debt.
A 2010 IBD/TPP Poll found that 45% of doctors would at least consider leaving their practices or taking early retirement as a result of the new health care law. And, an online survey by Sermo.com, a sort of Facebook for physicians, found that 26% of physicians in solo practices were considering closing. Of course, not every doctor who told these polls that he or she would consider leaving the field will actually do so. But if even a small portion depart, our access to medical care will suffer.
In fact, we have already seen the start of this process in Massachusetts, where Mitt Romney's health care reforms were nearly identical to President Obama's. Romney's reforms increased the demand for health care but did nothing to expand the supply of physicians. In fact, by cracking down on insurance premiums, Massachusetts pushed insurers to reduce their payments to providers, making it less worthwhile for doctors to expand their practices. As a result, the average wait to get an appointment with a doctor grew from 33 days to over 55 days.
Promising universal health coverage is easy. But what does universal coverage mean if you can't actually see a doctor?
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Leftist mourns the death of bin Laden: "And the killing of bin Laden, who has absolutely no operational role in al-Qaida—that’s clear—he’s kind of a spiritual mentor, a kind of guide … he functions in many of the ways that Hitler functioned for the Nazi Party. We were just talking with Warren [Beatty] about [Ian] Kershaw’s great biography of Hitler, which I read a few months ago, where you hold up a particular ideological ideal and strive for it. That was bin Laden’s role. But all actual acts of terror, which he may have signed off on, he no way planned."
Philosophy and politics: "Many political philosophers overestimate the importance of abstract principles for the design of institutions. Most issues of the day cannot be resolved by a sole appeal to basic principles. Whether we talk about healthcare, the economy, poverty alleviation, crime control, and even foreign policy, philosophical principles at best underdetermine results, and at worst are irrelevant. Yet many philosophers think that if they can just make the right conceptual distinctions and identify the right political principles they can select the best institutions, laws, and policies."
The NLRB overreaches — once again: "The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has gone lawsuit crazy. With the U.S. House of Representatives now under Republican control, the Board is now a key vehicle that the Obama administration is using to push policies favorable to its Big Labor allies. And it seems willing to stretch the law beyond recognition. Now the NLRB is trying to tell companies where to locate factories and dictate to states how they may amend their constitutions."
A tale of two situations: "Once upon a time selling a chicken was fraught with few if any legal implications. Remodeling a shed was equally simple from a regulatory standpoint. Today, however, we live in more enlightened times. Protected from our wayward desires by an empowered bureaucracy, we can rest easier knowing that decisions like what we eat and where we build is being carefully managed by authorities."
Free trade agreements don’t kill jobs: "Trade is going to be a hot issue this summer. Pending agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea might finally pass. Opponents of liberalization are already on the attack. My colleague Jacque Otto already covered the creative destruction defense of trade today. Over at the Daily Caller, I look at employment data and find out that the labor force has grown by 23 million people since NAFTA passed. Doesn’t sound like a job-killer, does it?"
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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 Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Wednesday, May 04, 2011
The best way to deal with evil is to pulverise it, says law professor
A professor who believes that evil exists! Australian moralist, Professor Mirko Bagaric, comments below on the demise of bin Laden. Bagaric is responding in part to the carping legalism that we hear from the likes of prominent Leftist lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, also an Australian but best known in Britain
FROM Canberra to Washington and even some parts of the Middle East, the champagne corks are popping after the assassination of Osama bin Laden.
Killing bin Laden at any cost has an important subtext - one which has the capacity to teach us lessons about the moral fog within, which we live and the rationality-free zone that occupies much of mainstream moral discourse.
The most illuminating aspect of the targeting of bin Laden is that it has near-universal support, despite it being an egregious breach of international law and dozens of human rights instruments. What about his right to life?
The presumption of innocence, and right to a fair trial, is also enshrined in international law and most domestic legal systems. Yet, even civil libertarian groups can't bring themselves to shed any concern for Bin Laden.
Civil libertarians are invariably quick to denounce any interferences with rights, especially those that imperil fundamental interests, such as the right to life and liberty.
The "end doesn't justify the means" is the catch-cry they trumpet most loudly in opposition to incursions of fundamental freedoms that are carried out for the common good. Truth is it does.
Failure to realise this is symptomatic of an unremitting deluded self-righteousness that freezes one's moral compass into an inward position, foreclosing consideration of the thing that matters most - the common good.
The reason civil libertarians are cheering with the rest of us, regarding the killing of bin Laden, has zero to do with the application of universal moral principles and everything to do with emotion - particularly their emotions. That their emotional response coincides with the morally correct stance is purely accidental.
The human misery caused by bin Laden has withered the compassion gland of civil libertarians towards him, to a point where they've fallen off their self-erected moral high horse. Hopefully that's where they will stay and join the rest of us in coming to understand that the end does justify the means. Always has. Always will.
No action is intrinsically bad or good. No principle is absolute. Matters are always context-sensitive. The best way to deal with evil is to pulverise it.
The moral and political debate in relation to important societal issues must move on from whether the end justifies the means to what end we, as a species, should be attempting to secure.
In this regard, there can only be one answer. The ultimate end is to maximise net flourishing, where each agent's interests counts equally - even those who do not excite our emotions.
The insurmountable conundrum that civil libertarians need to address is if the end does not justify the means, then what does?
Hopefully the reminder of the misery inflicted by bin Laden will encourage misguided libertarian groups to get out of their delusional comfort zone, and take a few steps up the moral mountain beyond the rights fog in which they are enveloped.
The world would be a better place, if we all applied our energies towards securing the right end instead of obsessing about their self-serving middle-class concerns.
SOURCE
Also read Bagaric on torture
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Finally, Justice is Done
Jeff Jacoby
Good people rejoice when evil monsters are cut down, and by the tens of thousands good Americans from one end of the country to the other came pouring into the streets last night to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden. From the White House to Ground Zero, from the Boston Common to Miami's Little Havana, the scenes of jubilation were spontaneous, heartfelt, and overflowing with American pride.
"We love death," bin Laden once told an interviewer. "The US loves life. That is the big difference between us."
He was right. But some deaths even an American can love, and the death of the al-Qaeda mastermind who murdered so many innocent victims is one of them. For the bloodbath of 9/11, for the hundreds slaughtered in the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, for those who died in the unprovoked attack on the USS Cole -- for all the violent and malignant savageries he committed against men, women, and children who had done nothing to deserve them, bin Laden's day of reckoning was long overdue. But it came at last. Now the archterrorist is in hell, and Americans are rightly overjoyed. "The son of a bitch is dead. Ding dong," exults the New York Post in an editorial. Not the most refined formulation, perhaps, but it certainly captures the nation's satisfaction.
Political life in this country so often plays out as a struggle between those who champion freedom and those who fight for equality. But at moments like this we are reminded that a virtue greater than either of them is justice. In his remarks to the nation last night, President Obama emphasized that the killing of bin Laden meant that the "pursuit of justice" had been rewarded -- that "justice has been done." Knowingly or not, he was echoing the words his predecessor addressed to a joint session of Congress just nine days after the 9/11 attacks. "Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies," George W. Bush said on that occasion, "justice will be done." Ten years later, it finally was.
The political significance of bin Laden's death will give pundits, pollsters, and politicos something to chew over for months to come. The successful US operation in Abbottabad -- the Pakistani garrison town where bin Laden was apparently hiding in plain sight -- is a tremendous feather in the president's cap, and already some partisans have rushed to suggest that his re-election next year is now a foregone conclusion.
Much the same was said about George H. W. Bush after the swift American victory in the 1991 Gulf War. Bush's popularity zoomed into the 90-percent stratosphere, and the Democratic Party's strongest potential challengers -- Mario Cuomo, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt -- all decided that the 1992 nomination wasn't worth fighting for. But in the end Bush went down to a crushing defeat, and a little-known Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton became president of the United States. Obama's prospects are brighter today than they were yesterday, but between now and November 2012, anything can happen.
One of the great ironies of Barack Obama's presidency is the extent to which he has embraced and benefited from national security policies and priorities he sharply rejected as a candidate. The killing of bin Laden only deepens that irony. He was hunted down, we now know, with the help of intelligence acquired at Guantanamo -- the military prison Obama swore to shutter. He met his demise in a military operation undertaken by the United States on its own and in secret, with no multilateral consultation and no waiting for UN resolutions -- just the sort of "cowboy" unilateralism the Obama campaign opposed. What candidates say when they are seeking office is rarely a guarantee of what they will do after they have won it.
SOURCE
Why on earth would Obama get credit for an accomplishment of America's professional military? He was essentially just a bystander to processes set in motion by George Bush. Obama was in fact an obstruction to the strike. He took months to give it the go-ahead
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Obama's ungracious and egotistical speech
Obama played subtle and wholly undignified games. He underlined that Osama had "avoided capture" under Bush and "continued to operate" during his tenure. But "I directed" CIA director Leon Panetta to make getting Osama the "top priority" (as opposed to?), and "I" gave the go-ahead to the final mission.
Obama also avoided Bush in a Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday afternoon. Even in a Monday night "bipartisan" event at the White House, Obama honored the "military and counterterrorism professionals" and "the members of Congress from both parties" who offered support to the mission ... but no credit for Bush.
What about our media? No one in the media wondered if Obama was being rude. No one seemed in any hurry to give Bush credit, either. In the media's mind's eye, Bush just doesn't deserve it. They didn't like him then; they don't like him now.
More HERE
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Obama's dislike of America shows in his prevention of American oil independence
Here’s a snippet of Obama’s April 20 remarks:
“I will not reduce our deficit by sacrificing the things that have always made America great. The things that have made Americans prosper. I won’t sacrifice our investments in education. I will not sacrifice those. I won’t sacrifice our investments in science and basic research. I won’t sacrifice the safety of our highways or our airports.”
Read: Republicans want cars and planes to crash, scientists to hang up their lab coats and kids to get dumber.
In one of the most appalling displays of sheer gall, Obama actually decried America’s dependence on foreign oil. This is the president whose executive agencies have strangled new ventures to tap America’s enormous fossil fuel resources.
“I won’t sacrifice our investment in clean energy at a time when our dependence on foreign oil is causing Americans so much pain at the pump,” he told the DNC crowd.
And more pain is on the way. Obama’s EPA has denied a permit to Shell Oil Company to drill off Alaska’s coast. The company spent five years and nearly $4 billion preparing to give America a 27-billion-barrel shot in the arm of our domestic oil supply, which is down to 7 million barrels a day, 13 million short of what America uses.
Too bad, Shell. The extremist green lobby that dominates this administration is intent on destroying fossil fuel industries to prepare us for a mythical wind, solar and rickshaw-powered immediate future. You can’t say Obama did not warn us. He said explicitly in January 2008, for example, that his proposed cap and trade system would “bankrupt” anyone who wanted to build a new coal-fired plant.
On Tuesday, Obama was at it again, urging Congress to punish oil companies by ending “unwarranted” tax breaks. The man who has done more than anyone to jack up the price of gas said that high pump prices “provide more than enough profit motive to invest in domestic exploration and production.” Yes, if you will stop flirting with Brazil and get your foot off the neck of U.S. energy companies.
More HERE
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Gasoline and Onions
The speculators are ripping us off!
"The skyrocketing price of gas and oil has nothing to do with the fundamentals of supply and demand, and has everything to do with Wall Street firms that are artificially jacking up the price of oil in the energy futures markets. ... (T)he same Wall Street speculators that caused the worst financial crisis since the 1930s through their greed, recklessness and illegal behavior are ripping off the American people again by gambling that the price of oil and gas will continue to go up."
Here we go again. That quote was Sen. Bernie Sanders doing what some always do when the price of oil spikes: complain about speculators. Now, President Obama says he'll investigate them: "We are going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain." I assume that his new Financial Fraud Enforcement Working Group, like its predecessors, will uncover nothing untoward.
In America, we don't have a free market -- we have a government-saturated economy in which oil companies and other corporations have a cozy relationship with politicians and bureaucrats. That's wrong, but even that can't explain the recent run-up in prices. Oil companies today are no more greedy or clever than they have been all along.
We have to look for a better explanation -- and it isn't hard to find. Demand for oil rises with the growth of China, India and other developing countries. When poor people get a little richer, they buy cars, computers and refrigerators. They burn more fuel to make them and to run them. Rising demand, other things being equal, increases prices.
And other things have not been equal. Japan's nuclear plants are out of commission, and Libya, which accounts for about 2 percent of world oil production, is wracked by civil war. This is small compared to previous disruptions in the region, but it still affects the price.
The evil oil-speculator theory also runs up against the fact that the Federal Reserve's inflationary policies (QE2) and other factors have continued the dollar's slide against foreign currencies -- to a three-year low. As the dollar loses value, oil sellers demand more for their product. "Commodities, along with most traded goods globally, are priced in dollars," former Federal Reserve official Gerald P. O'Driscoll of the Cato Institute writes. "It is the old story of too much money chasing too few goods."
If Sanders and other economic illiterates get their way, we'll have new laws banning "speculation." That will raise prices further. Don't believe me? Think back to a previous time when a Senate committee said that "speculative activity causes severe and unwarranted fluctuations in the price. ..." That was in 1958, when people got upset about the price of onions. Fools in Congress addressed that problem by banning speculation on onion prices.
The result? A Financial Times analysis found that the ban made prices less stable. This year, the retail price of onions rose more than the price of gasoline -- 36 versus 24 percent. Most years, the price of onions fluctuates more than other goods. No mystery there. Speculators help keep prices stable. When they foresee a future oil shortage -- that is, when prices are lower than anticipated in the future -- speculators buy lots of it, store it and then sell it when the shortage hits. They know they can charge more when there's relatively little oil on the market. But their selling during the shortage brings prices down from what they would have been had speculators not acted.
Speculators are like the ants in Aesop's "Ants and the Grasshopper" fable: They save resources for lean times. Everyone benefits because everyone has a chance to buy from them in those lean times. Speculators don't "artificially jack up the price of oil" -- they take risks. Those who guess wrong lose a lot of money.
Historically, speculators have been convenient scapegoats, and they have suffered greatly for it. So have the rest of us.
While government should never create political opportunities for speculation, it should also stop interfering with its legitimate economic function. We all are harmed when central planners take charge.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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A professor who believes that evil exists! Australian moralist, Professor Mirko Bagaric, comments below on the demise of bin Laden. Bagaric is responding in part to the carping legalism that we hear from the likes of prominent Leftist lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, also an Australian but best known in Britain
FROM Canberra to Washington and even some parts of the Middle East, the champagne corks are popping after the assassination of Osama bin Laden.
Killing bin Laden at any cost has an important subtext - one which has the capacity to teach us lessons about the moral fog within, which we live and the rationality-free zone that occupies much of mainstream moral discourse.
The most illuminating aspect of the targeting of bin Laden is that it has near-universal support, despite it being an egregious breach of international law and dozens of human rights instruments. What about his right to life?
The presumption of innocence, and right to a fair trial, is also enshrined in international law and most domestic legal systems. Yet, even civil libertarian groups can't bring themselves to shed any concern for Bin Laden.
Civil libertarians are invariably quick to denounce any interferences with rights, especially those that imperil fundamental interests, such as the right to life and liberty.
The "end doesn't justify the means" is the catch-cry they trumpet most loudly in opposition to incursions of fundamental freedoms that are carried out for the common good. Truth is it does.
Failure to realise this is symptomatic of an unremitting deluded self-righteousness that freezes one's moral compass into an inward position, foreclosing consideration of the thing that matters most - the common good.
The reason civil libertarians are cheering with the rest of us, regarding the killing of bin Laden, has zero to do with the application of universal moral principles and everything to do with emotion - particularly their emotions. That their emotional response coincides with the morally correct stance is purely accidental.
The human misery caused by bin Laden has withered the compassion gland of civil libertarians towards him, to a point where they've fallen off their self-erected moral high horse. Hopefully that's where they will stay and join the rest of us in coming to understand that the end does justify the means. Always has. Always will.
No action is intrinsically bad or good. No principle is absolute. Matters are always context-sensitive. The best way to deal with evil is to pulverise it.
The moral and political debate in relation to important societal issues must move on from whether the end justifies the means to what end we, as a species, should be attempting to secure.
In this regard, there can only be one answer. The ultimate end is to maximise net flourishing, where each agent's interests counts equally - even those who do not excite our emotions.
The insurmountable conundrum that civil libertarians need to address is if the end does not justify the means, then what does?
Hopefully the reminder of the misery inflicted by bin Laden will encourage misguided libertarian groups to get out of their delusional comfort zone, and take a few steps up the moral mountain beyond the rights fog in which they are enveloped.
The world would be a better place, if we all applied our energies towards securing the right end instead of obsessing about their self-serving middle-class concerns.
SOURCE
Also read Bagaric on torture
**********************
Finally, Justice is Done
Jeff Jacoby
Good people rejoice when evil monsters are cut down, and by the tens of thousands good Americans from one end of the country to the other came pouring into the streets last night to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden. From the White House to Ground Zero, from the Boston Common to Miami's Little Havana, the scenes of jubilation were spontaneous, heartfelt, and overflowing with American pride.
"We love death," bin Laden once told an interviewer. "The US loves life. That is the big difference between us."
He was right. But some deaths even an American can love, and the death of the al-Qaeda mastermind who murdered so many innocent victims is one of them. For the bloodbath of 9/11, for the hundreds slaughtered in the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, for those who died in the unprovoked attack on the USS Cole -- for all the violent and malignant savageries he committed against men, women, and children who had done nothing to deserve them, bin Laden's day of reckoning was long overdue. But it came at last. Now the archterrorist is in hell, and Americans are rightly overjoyed. "The son of a bitch is dead. Ding dong," exults the New York Post in an editorial. Not the most refined formulation, perhaps, but it certainly captures the nation's satisfaction.
Political life in this country so often plays out as a struggle between those who champion freedom and those who fight for equality. But at moments like this we are reminded that a virtue greater than either of them is justice. In his remarks to the nation last night, President Obama emphasized that the killing of bin Laden meant that the "pursuit of justice" had been rewarded -- that "justice has been done." Knowingly or not, he was echoing the words his predecessor addressed to a joint session of Congress just nine days after the 9/11 attacks. "Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies," George W. Bush said on that occasion, "justice will be done." Ten years later, it finally was.
The political significance of bin Laden's death will give pundits, pollsters, and politicos something to chew over for months to come. The successful US operation in Abbottabad -- the Pakistani garrison town where bin Laden was apparently hiding in plain sight -- is a tremendous feather in the president's cap, and already some partisans have rushed to suggest that his re-election next year is now a foregone conclusion.
Much the same was said about George H. W. Bush after the swift American victory in the 1991 Gulf War. Bush's popularity zoomed into the 90-percent stratosphere, and the Democratic Party's strongest potential challengers -- Mario Cuomo, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt -- all decided that the 1992 nomination wasn't worth fighting for. But in the end Bush went down to a crushing defeat, and a little-known Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton became president of the United States. Obama's prospects are brighter today than they were yesterday, but between now and November 2012, anything can happen.
One of the great ironies of Barack Obama's presidency is the extent to which he has embraced and benefited from national security policies and priorities he sharply rejected as a candidate. The killing of bin Laden only deepens that irony. He was hunted down, we now know, with the help of intelligence acquired at Guantanamo -- the military prison Obama swore to shutter. He met his demise in a military operation undertaken by the United States on its own and in secret, with no multilateral consultation and no waiting for UN resolutions -- just the sort of "cowboy" unilateralism the Obama campaign opposed. What candidates say when they are seeking office is rarely a guarantee of what they will do after they have won it.
SOURCE
Why on earth would Obama get credit for an accomplishment of America's professional military? He was essentially just a bystander to processes set in motion by George Bush. Obama was in fact an obstruction to the strike. He took months to give it the go-ahead
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Obama's ungracious and egotistical speech
Obama played subtle and wholly undignified games. He underlined that Osama had "avoided capture" under Bush and "continued to operate" during his tenure. But "I directed" CIA director Leon Panetta to make getting Osama the "top priority" (as opposed to?), and "I" gave the go-ahead to the final mission.
Obama also avoided Bush in a Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday afternoon. Even in a Monday night "bipartisan" event at the White House, Obama honored the "military and counterterrorism professionals" and "the members of Congress from both parties" who offered support to the mission ... but no credit for Bush.
What about our media? No one in the media wondered if Obama was being rude. No one seemed in any hurry to give Bush credit, either. In the media's mind's eye, Bush just doesn't deserve it. They didn't like him then; they don't like him now.
More HERE
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Obama's dislike of America shows in his prevention of American oil independence
Here’s a snippet of Obama’s April 20 remarks:
“I will not reduce our deficit by sacrificing the things that have always made America great. The things that have made Americans prosper. I won’t sacrifice our investments in education. I will not sacrifice those. I won’t sacrifice our investments in science and basic research. I won’t sacrifice the safety of our highways or our airports.”
Read: Republicans want cars and planes to crash, scientists to hang up their lab coats and kids to get dumber.
In one of the most appalling displays of sheer gall, Obama actually decried America’s dependence on foreign oil. This is the president whose executive agencies have strangled new ventures to tap America’s enormous fossil fuel resources.
“I won’t sacrifice our investment in clean energy at a time when our dependence on foreign oil is causing Americans so much pain at the pump,” he told the DNC crowd.
And more pain is on the way. Obama’s EPA has denied a permit to Shell Oil Company to drill off Alaska’s coast. The company spent five years and nearly $4 billion preparing to give America a 27-billion-barrel shot in the arm of our domestic oil supply, which is down to 7 million barrels a day, 13 million short of what America uses.
Too bad, Shell. The extremist green lobby that dominates this administration is intent on destroying fossil fuel industries to prepare us for a mythical wind, solar and rickshaw-powered immediate future. You can’t say Obama did not warn us. He said explicitly in January 2008, for example, that his proposed cap and trade system would “bankrupt” anyone who wanted to build a new coal-fired plant.
On Tuesday, Obama was at it again, urging Congress to punish oil companies by ending “unwarranted” tax breaks. The man who has done more than anyone to jack up the price of gas said that high pump prices “provide more than enough profit motive to invest in domestic exploration and production.” Yes, if you will stop flirting with Brazil and get your foot off the neck of U.S. energy companies.
More HERE
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Gasoline and Onions
The speculators are ripping us off!
"The skyrocketing price of gas and oil has nothing to do with the fundamentals of supply and demand, and has everything to do with Wall Street firms that are artificially jacking up the price of oil in the energy futures markets. ... (T)he same Wall Street speculators that caused the worst financial crisis since the 1930s through their greed, recklessness and illegal behavior are ripping off the American people again by gambling that the price of oil and gas will continue to go up."
Here we go again. That quote was Sen. Bernie Sanders doing what some always do when the price of oil spikes: complain about speculators. Now, President Obama says he'll investigate them: "We are going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain." I assume that his new Financial Fraud Enforcement Working Group, like its predecessors, will uncover nothing untoward.
In America, we don't have a free market -- we have a government-saturated economy in which oil companies and other corporations have a cozy relationship with politicians and bureaucrats. That's wrong, but even that can't explain the recent run-up in prices. Oil companies today are no more greedy or clever than they have been all along.
We have to look for a better explanation -- and it isn't hard to find. Demand for oil rises with the growth of China, India and other developing countries. When poor people get a little richer, they buy cars, computers and refrigerators. They burn more fuel to make them and to run them. Rising demand, other things being equal, increases prices.
And other things have not been equal. Japan's nuclear plants are out of commission, and Libya, which accounts for about 2 percent of world oil production, is wracked by civil war. This is small compared to previous disruptions in the region, but it still affects the price.
The evil oil-speculator theory also runs up against the fact that the Federal Reserve's inflationary policies (QE2) and other factors have continued the dollar's slide against foreign currencies -- to a three-year low. As the dollar loses value, oil sellers demand more for their product. "Commodities, along with most traded goods globally, are priced in dollars," former Federal Reserve official Gerald P. O'Driscoll of the Cato Institute writes. "It is the old story of too much money chasing too few goods."
If Sanders and other economic illiterates get their way, we'll have new laws banning "speculation." That will raise prices further. Don't believe me? Think back to a previous time when a Senate committee said that "speculative activity causes severe and unwarranted fluctuations in the price. ..." That was in 1958, when people got upset about the price of onions. Fools in Congress addressed that problem by banning speculation on onion prices.
The result? A Financial Times analysis found that the ban made prices less stable. This year, the retail price of onions rose more than the price of gasoline -- 36 versus 24 percent. Most years, the price of onions fluctuates more than other goods. No mystery there. Speculators help keep prices stable. When they foresee a future oil shortage -- that is, when prices are lower than anticipated in the future -- speculators buy lots of it, store it and then sell it when the shortage hits. They know they can charge more when there's relatively little oil on the market. But their selling during the shortage brings prices down from what they would have been had speculators not acted.
Speculators are like the ants in Aesop's "Ants and the Grasshopper" fable: They save resources for lean times. Everyone benefits because everyone has a chance to buy from them in those lean times. Speculators don't "artificially jack up the price of oil" -- they take risks. Those who guess wrong lose a lot of money.
Historically, speculators have been convenient scapegoats, and they have suffered greatly for it. So have the rest of us.
While government should never create political opportunities for speculation, it should also stop interfering with its legitimate economic function. We all are harmed when central planners take charge.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Tuesday, May 03, 2011
Splendid: Canada's Conservatives win outright majority
Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper won his coveted majority government in elections Monday that also marked a shattering defeat for the opposition Liberals, preliminary results showed.
Harper, who took office in 2006, has won two elections but until now had never held a majority of Parliament's 308 seats, forcing him to rely on the opposition to pass legislation.
While Harper's hold on the 308-member Parliament has been tenuous during his five-year tenure, he has managed to nudge an instinctively center-left country to the right. He has gradually lowered sales and corporate taxes, avoided climate change legislation, promoted Arctic sovereignty, upped military spending and extended Canada's military mission in Afghanistan.
Elections Canada reported preliminary results on its website, giving the Conservatives 164 seats, which will give Harper four years of uninterrupted government. "It's stunning. We're elated," Conservative lawmaker Jason Kenney said in an interview with CBC. "We'll be a government for all Canadians."
The leftist New Democratic Party was projected to become the main opposition party for the first time in Canadian history with 106 seats, in a stunning setback for the Liberals who have always been either in power or leading the opposition.
Former colleagues of Harper say his long-term goals are to shatter the image of the Liberals - the party of former Prime Ministers Jean Chretien, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau - as the natural party of government in Canada, and to redefine what it means to be Canadian.
Harper, who comes from the conservative western province of Alberta, took a major step toward that goal on Monday night as the Liberals dropped to 35 seats from 77, according to the preliminary results.
Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff congratulated Harper and New Democrat leader Jack Layton and accepted responsibility for the "historic defeat." "I will play any part that the party wishes me to play as we go forward to rebuild," said Ignatieff, who even lost his own seat in a Toronto suburb.
Stephen Clarkson, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said Harper will now be considered a transformative figure in Canadian history. "It's a sea change," Clarkson said.
The New Democrats' gains are being attributed to Layton's strong performance in the debates, a folksy, upbeat message, and a desire by the French-speakers in Quebec, the second most populous province, for a new face and a federalist option. Voters indicated they had grown weary with the separatist Bloc Quebecois, which had a shocking drop to three seats from 47 in the last Parliament.
The NDP's gains marked a remarkable shift in a campaign that started out weeks ago looking like a straight battle between Harper and Ignatieff, with the 60-year-old Layton recovering from prostate cancer and a broken hip.
Harper campaigned on a message that the New Democrats stood for higher taxes, higher spending, higher prices and protectionism. He called the election a choice between "a Conservative majority" and "a ramshackle coalition led by the NDP that will not last but will do a lot of destruction."
Gerry Nicholls, who worked under Harper at a conservative think tank, has said that having the New Democrats' as the main opposition party would be ideal for Harper because it would define Canadian politics in clearer terms of left vs. right.
The Conservatives have built support in rural areas and with the "Tim Horton's crowd" - a reference to a chain of doughnut shops popular with working class Canadians. They also have blitzed the country with TV attack ads, running them even during telecasts of the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl.
Lawrence Martin, a political columnist for The Globe and Mail newspaper and author of "Harperland: The Politics of Control," calls Harper "the most autocratic and partisan prime minister Canada has ever had."
But to remain in office through the longest period of minority government in Canadian history, Harper has had to engage in a constant balancing act. He has deliberately avoided sweeping policy changes that could derail his government, but now has an opportunity to pass any legislation he wants with his new majority.
SOURCE
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Lawsuits make us less safe
Imagine if an evil business routinely deprived us of products that would help us live longer with less pain and more comfort. We’d be outraged, and lawyers would line up to sue. Yet something similar happens today, thanks to lawsuit abuse. Makers of all kinds of products are afraid to sell them to us because one lawsuit could ruin them.
Personal-injury lawyers claim they make America safer, but that’s a myth. It’s easy to see who benefits from those big damage awards we read about. Less obvious — but just as real — are the things we’d all like to have but never will get because of this climate of fear. Here are a few examples.
Monsanto once developed a substitute for asbestos — a new fire-resistant form of insulation that might save thousands of lives. But Monsanto decided not to sell it for fear of liability. Richard F. Mahoney, the CEO at the time, said, “There may well have been a safe, effective asbestos replacement on the market, and now there isn’t.”
Why do we have to worry about shortages of flu vaccine? Because only a handful of companies still make it. And why is that? Because when you vaccinate millions of people, some get sick and sue. Between 1980 and 1986, personal-injury lawyers demanded billions of dollars from vaccine manufacturers. That scared many American drug companies out of the business.
In 1986, Congress stepped in. To help curb the lawsuits that discouraged vaccine production, the government established a fund called the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It would pay victims’ families directly so they wouldn’t have to hire lawyers and suffer the delays of litigation. This was supposed to entice vaccine makers back into production, but drug companies were still leery, fearing that plaintiffs’ lawyers would sue them anyway.
They were right to worry. Eli Lilly developed a mercury-based preservative called Thimerosal that was used in many children’s vaccines. Plaintiffs’ lawyers jumped on scaremongers’ claims that mercury causes autism in children. Although a government-issued review found no such link, more than 100 autism lawsuits have been filed against vaccine makers since the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act passed. No wonder most drug manufacturers still steer clear of vaccine research.
Even when new vaccines are discovered, drug companies are sometimes afraid to sell them. The FDA has approved a vaccine against Lyme disease. Want some? Forget about it. No company wants to take the risk.
Fear of being sued reduced the number of American companies researching contraceptives from 13 to two.
After scientifically groundless lawsuits against breast-implant makers bankrupted Dow Corning, Japanese silicone makers stopped producing a pain-reducing silicone coating for hypodermic needles. A company director said, “We’re sure our product is safe, but we don’t want to risk a lawsuit.”
Union Carbide has invented a small portable kidney dialysis machine. It would make life much easier for people with kidney disease, but Union Carbide won’t sell it. With legal sharks circling, the risk of expensive lawsuits outweighs the possible profit.
Are you pregnant and nauseous? Bendectin would probably cure your morning sickness. For 27 years doctors prescribed the drug to 33 million women because it was so good at stopping nausea and vomiting. But you can’t buy Bendectin today because lawyers kept suing the manufacturer, Merrell Dow, claiming the drug caused birth defects.
Studies did not show that Bendectin caused birth defects, and Merrell Dow won most of the lawsuits. But after spending $100 million in legal fees and awards, the company gave up selling the drug. Bendectin has never been effectively replaced, and morning sickness is now a major contributor to dehydration during pregnancy.
Dr. Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, says, “Within two years of discontinuing Bendectin, the incidence of hospitalization for dehydration during early pregnancy doubled; the incidence of birth defects was unchanged.”
Those are just some of the life-enhancing products we know we must do without because America’s peculiar legal system makes it profitable for trial lawyers to pursue extortion — like litigation. What wonderful products will we never even hear about because the lawyers have created a climate of fear?
SOURCE
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The trajectory of the Democratic party from moderate and responsible Leftists to the hard Leftists of today
With big rusted-on groups of supporters -- blacks and Hispanics -- they feel less need to appeal to the moderate voter
One of the worrisome aspects of President Obama’s peculiar brand of leadership is to watch how radically he and most Democrats in Congress have broken with the wisdom of liberal, Democrat leaders of the past. Media wags, largely ignorant or mostly indifferent to history, will tell you that the growing alarm over Obama’s leadership is all about style over substance. Don’t believe it. Obama and most of the Democrat congressional leaders seem interested in pandering to special interest groups, with little care for the overall economic health of the nation. They have betrayed their history and are mere shadows of their Democrat predecessors. Americans know it too.
The Democrat leadership has strayed far from their once-rational roots. For example, when enacting the landmark social welfare programs in 1935, (Social Security Act) and again in 1965 enacting Title 18 (Medicare), Democrats were almost unanimously concerned about the potential costs for future generations.
A reading of the floor speeches at the time shows that while Democrats wanted to expand programs for the needy. None were willing to do that, if it would erode the economic vitality of the entire nation. These earlier Democrats were moored by their concern for the financial health of the nation, the well-being of small businesses and concern about the potential for undue burdens to the American taxpayer that might arise as a result of far reaching entitlement legislation.
In August 1935, President Roosevelt said: “We can never insure 100 percent of the population against 100 percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family.”
Roosevelt’s endorsement of the payroll tax to create an earned right that would “act as a protection to future administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy” is a far cry from the current Democrat drumbeat that entitlements must cover all Americans (and illegals) regardless of the cost to the country.
In 1965, Democrats were clearly worried about the impact of the Medicare legislation. Medicare was viewed as an experiment that might not be sustainable, and therefore needed to be carefully reviewed. Democrat congressman, Wilbur Mills, then Chairman of Ways and Means argued: “when tax rates are as high as they are now, we must take into account the fact that any changes we make will inevitably have far reaching economic effects…It would be folly… To nationalize health care as some have proposed, and thus federalize medical personnel, institutions and procedures—eventually if not at the start—also would amount to a stunning new financial burden for every American taxpayer.”
It is also important to note that in 1965, Democrat supporters for expanded entitlement benefits realized they might be wrong. Reading though the debate in Congressional Register of 1965, one sees humility and open-mindedness. But, as Pelosi shows, the current Democrat leadership are rigid ideologues. To placate the ravening appetites of their left-wing extremists, special interest groups, they are willing to ruin the nation.
President Obama’s vision of America calls for an ever-expanding welfare state with ever-increasing government handouts and bailouts, even as the financial health of the nation teeters on the brink of insolvency. Then, to rub salt in the wounds of the fiscally conservative, Obama lectures on the need to address our “unsustainable” government spending, even as he continues to press for more spending aimed at supporting loyalists’ union causes, his own special interests, and dubious spending schemes.
Democrats from the 60s seemed determined to balance their desire for expansive entitlements with a respect the needs of those taxpayers--the businesses and workers-- whose taxes pay for it all. Above all, there was a cautious consciousness that huge, federally run government programs are rarely cost-effective and rarely operated efficiently.
In June 1966, discussing the implementation of the Medicare legislation, President Lyndon Johnson said “Washington is no place to patrol matters in 50 States. The farther you get away from the community, the less efficient you are and the more expensive you are.”
On the other hand, President Obama’s recent road tour (with stops at Facebook, Oprah’s couch and NYC) to promote the need for additional taxes to pay for spending schemes and to increase the debt ceiling without implementing dramatic spending cuts, reeked of demagoguery and implying that the federal government in Washington, is better suited to care for citizens than the citizens themselves. Or at least, that seemed to be his explanation, for the buzz-words adopted by the Left of “shared sacrifice” and “fair share” are deceptive. Just send your money to Washington and all will be taken care of and only the “rich” will pay; the middle class, citizen will be unaffected.
Is there any wonder why Americans are increasingly worried? Modern Democrats have lost their way and have become selfish, irresponsible and blind. They make intellectually dishonest pleas to protect unsustainable social welfare programs without the slightest interest in finding an honest way to pay for them.
Reading the speeches of Obama and other senior Democrat leaders gives one the distinct impression that they are far more interested in rewarding their core constituents than in protecting the nation’s financial health. Democrats would bankrupt the nation rather than make prudent and long-overdue changes to over-generous entitlement programs.
And that is why Americans are so worried.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Medical consumer or ward of the state?: "How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as 'consumers?' The relationship between patient and doctor used to be considered something special, almost sacred. Now politicians and supposed reformers talk about the act of receiving care as if it were no different from a commercial transaction, like buying a car — and their only complaint is that it isn’t commercial enough. What has gone wrong with us?"
The economics of slushy drinks: "'That's quite a markup,' remarked my father as he paid for my six-year-old son's treat after a soccer game. 'Three dollars for a cup of ice.' It's true; the price tag did seem steep at first. But as we analyzed the situation more carefully — my father is also a fan of free markets — we realized that there was no reason to be outraged at the vendor's price."
Risky business: "UK transport minister Norman Baker this week refused to apologise for saying that cyclists may be safer not wearing helmets. Baker, whose role includes responsibilities for cycling, cited research that drivers tend to go closer to cyclists who are wearing helmets, but give a wider berth to those who are not. Indeed, the national cyclists' organisation itself argues that those who wear helmets are 14% more likely to have a collision than those who don't."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper won his coveted majority government in elections Monday that also marked a shattering defeat for the opposition Liberals, preliminary results showed.
Harper, who took office in 2006, has won two elections but until now had never held a majority of Parliament's 308 seats, forcing him to rely on the opposition to pass legislation.
While Harper's hold on the 308-member Parliament has been tenuous during his five-year tenure, he has managed to nudge an instinctively center-left country to the right. He has gradually lowered sales and corporate taxes, avoided climate change legislation, promoted Arctic sovereignty, upped military spending and extended Canada's military mission in Afghanistan.
Elections Canada reported preliminary results on its website, giving the Conservatives 164 seats, which will give Harper four years of uninterrupted government. "It's stunning. We're elated," Conservative lawmaker Jason Kenney said in an interview with CBC. "We'll be a government for all Canadians."
The leftist New Democratic Party was projected to become the main opposition party for the first time in Canadian history with 106 seats, in a stunning setback for the Liberals who have always been either in power or leading the opposition.
Former colleagues of Harper say his long-term goals are to shatter the image of the Liberals - the party of former Prime Ministers Jean Chretien, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau - as the natural party of government in Canada, and to redefine what it means to be Canadian.
Harper, who comes from the conservative western province of Alberta, took a major step toward that goal on Monday night as the Liberals dropped to 35 seats from 77, according to the preliminary results.
Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff congratulated Harper and New Democrat leader Jack Layton and accepted responsibility for the "historic defeat." "I will play any part that the party wishes me to play as we go forward to rebuild," said Ignatieff, who even lost his own seat in a Toronto suburb.
Stephen Clarkson, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said Harper will now be considered a transformative figure in Canadian history. "It's a sea change," Clarkson said.
The New Democrats' gains are being attributed to Layton's strong performance in the debates, a folksy, upbeat message, and a desire by the French-speakers in Quebec, the second most populous province, for a new face and a federalist option. Voters indicated they had grown weary with the separatist Bloc Quebecois, which had a shocking drop to three seats from 47 in the last Parliament.
The NDP's gains marked a remarkable shift in a campaign that started out weeks ago looking like a straight battle between Harper and Ignatieff, with the 60-year-old Layton recovering from prostate cancer and a broken hip.
Harper campaigned on a message that the New Democrats stood for higher taxes, higher spending, higher prices and protectionism. He called the election a choice between "a Conservative majority" and "a ramshackle coalition led by the NDP that will not last but will do a lot of destruction."
Gerry Nicholls, who worked under Harper at a conservative think tank, has said that having the New Democrats' as the main opposition party would be ideal for Harper because it would define Canadian politics in clearer terms of left vs. right.
The Conservatives have built support in rural areas and with the "Tim Horton's crowd" - a reference to a chain of doughnut shops popular with working class Canadians. They also have blitzed the country with TV attack ads, running them even during telecasts of the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl.
Lawrence Martin, a political columnist for The Globe and Mail newspaper and author of "Harperland: The Politics of Control," calls Harper "the most autocratic and partisan prime minister Canada has ever had."
But to remain in office through the longest period of minority government in Canadian history, Harper has had to engage in a constant balancing act. He has deliberately avoided sweeping policy changes that could derail his government, but now has an opportunity to pass any legislation he wants with his new majority.
SOURCE
****************************
Lawsuits make us less safe
Imagine if an evil business routinely deprived us of products that would help us live longer with less pain and more comfort. We’d be outraged, and lawyers would line up to sue. Yet something similar happens today, thanks to lawsuit abuse. Makers of all kinds of products are afraid to sell them to us because one lawsuit could ruin them.
Personal-injury lawyers claim they make America safer, but that’s a myth. It’s easy to see who benefits from those big damage awards we read about. Less obvious — but just as real — are the things we’d all like to have but never will get because of this climate of fear. Here are a few examples.
Monsanto once developed a substitute for asbestos — a new fire-resistant form of insulation that might save thousands of lives. But Monsanto decided not to sell it for fear of liability. Richard F. Mahoney, the CEO at the time, said, “There may well have been a safe, effective asbestos replacement on the market, and now there isn’t.”
Why do we have to worry about shortages of flu vaccine? Because only a handful of companies still make it. And why is that? Because when you vaccinate millions of people, some get sick and sue. Between 1980 and 1986, personal-injury lawyers demanded billions of dollars from vaccine manufacturers. That scared many American drug companies out of the business.
In 1986, Congress stepped in. To help curb the lawsuits that discouraged vaccine production, the government established a fund called the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It would pay victims’ families directly so they wouldn’t have to hire lawyers and suffer the delays of litigation. This was supposed to entice vaccine makers back into production, but drug companies were still leery, fearing that plaintiffs’ lawyers would sue them anyway.
They were right to worry. Eli Lilly developed a mercury-based preservative called Thimerosal that was used in many children’s vaccines. Plaintiffs’ lawyers jumped on scaremongers’ claims that mercury causes autism in children. Although a government-issued review found no such link, more than 100 autism lawsuits have been filed against vaccine makers since the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act passed. No wonder most drug manufacturers still steer clear of vaccine research.
Even when new vaccines are discovered, drug companies are sometimes afraid to sell them. The FDA has approved a vaccine against Lyme disease. Want some? Forget about it. No company wants to take the risk.
Fear of being sued reduced the number of American companies researching contraceptives from 13 to two.
After scientifically groundless lawsuits against breast-implant makers bankrupted Dow Corning, Japanese silicone makers stopped producing a pain-reducing silicone coating for hypodermic needles. A company director said, “We’re sure our product is safe, but we don’t want to risk a lawsuit.”
Union Carbide has invented a small portable kidney dialysis machine. It would make life much easier for people with kidney disease, but Union Carbide won’t sell it. With legal sharks circling, the risk of expensive lawsuits outweighs the possible profit.
Are you pregnant and nauseous? Bendectin would probably cure your morning sickness. For 27 years doctors prescribed the drug to 33 million women because it was so good at stopping nausea and vomiting. But you can’t buy Bendectin today because lawyers kept suing the manufacturer, Merrell Dow, claiming the drug caused birth defects.
Studies did not show that Bendectin caused birth defects, and Merrell Dow won most of the lawsuits. But after spending $100 million in legal fees and awards, the company gave up selling the drug. Bendectin has never been effectively replaced, and morning sickness is now a major contributor to dehydration during pregnancy.
Dr. Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, says, “Within two years of discontinuing Bendectin, the incidence of hospitalization for dehydration during early pregnancy doubled; the incidence of birth defects was unchanged.”
Those are just some of the life-enhancing products we know we must do without because America’s peculiar legal system makes it profitable for trial lawyers to pursue extortion — like litigation. What wonderful products will we never even hear about because the lawyers have created a climate of fear?
SOURCE
***********************
The trajectory of the Democratic party from moderate and responsible Leftists to the hard Leftists of today
With big rusted-on groups of supporters -- blacks and Hispanics -- they feel less need to appeal to the moderate voter
One of the worrisome aspects of President Obama’s peculiar brand of leadership is to watch how radically he and most Democrats in Congress have broken with the wisdom of liberal, Democrat leaders of the past. Media wags, largely ignorant or mostly indifferent to history, will tell you that the growing alarm over Obama’s leadership is all about style over substance. Don’t believe it. Obama and most of the Democrat congressional leaders seem interested in pandering to special interest groups, with little care for the overall economic health of the nation. They have betrayed their history and are mere shadows of their Democrat predecessors. Americans know it too.
The Democrat leadership has strayed far from their once-rational roots. For example, when enacting the landmark social welfare programs in 1935, (Social Security Act) and again in 1965 enacting Title 18 (Medicare), Democrats were almost unanimously concerned about the potential costs for future generations.
A reading of the floor speeches at the time shows that while Democrats wanted to expand programs for the needy. None were willing to do that, if it would erode the economic vitality of the entire nation. These earlier Democrats were moored by their concern for the financial health of the nation, the well-being of small businesses and concern about the potential for undue burdens to the American taxpayer that might arise as a result of far reaching entitlement legislation.
In August 1935, President Roosevelt said: “We can never insure 100 percent of the population against 100 percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family.”
Roosevelt’s endorsement of the payroll tax to create an earned right that would “act as a protection to future administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy” is a far cry from the current Democrat drumbeat that entitlements must cover all Americans (and illegals) regardless of the cost to the country.
In 1965, Democrats were clearly worried about the impact of the Medicare legislation. Medicare was viewed as an experiment that might not be sustainable, and therefore needed to be carefully reviewed. Democrat congressman, Wilbur Mills, then Chairman of Ways and Means argued: “when tax rates are as high as they are now, we must take into account the fact that any changes we make will inevitably have far reaching economic effects…It would be folly… To nationalize health care as some have proposed, and thus federalize medical personnel, institutions and procedures—eventually if not at the start—also would amount to a stunning new financial burden for every American taxpayer.”
It is also important to note that in 1965, Democrat supporters for expanded entitlement benefits realized they might be wrong. Reading though the debate in Congressional Register of 1965, one sees humility and open-mindedness. But, as Pelosi shows, the current Democrat leadership are rigid ideologues. To placate the ravening appetites of their left-wing extremists, special interest groups, they are willing to ruin the nation.
President Obama’s vision of America calls for an ever-expanding welfare state with ever-increasing government handouts and bailouts, even as the financial health of the nation teeters on the brink of insolvency. Then, to rub salt in the wounds of the fiscally conservative, Obama lectures on the need to address our “unsustainable” government spending, even as he continues to press for more spending aimed at supporting loyalists’ union causes, his own special interests, and dubious spending schemes.
Democrats from the 60s seemed determined to balance their desire for expansive entitlements with a respect the needs of those taxpayers--the businesses and workers-- whose taxes pay for it all. Above all, there was a cautious consciousness that huge, federally run government programs are rarely cost-effective and rarely operated efficiently.
In June 1966, discussing the implementation of the Medicare legislation, President Lyndon Johnson said “Washington is no place to patrol matters in 50 States. The farther you get away from the community, the less efficient you are and the more expensive you are.”
On the other hand, President Obama’s recent road tour (with stops at Facebook, Oprah’s couch and NYC) to promote the need for additional taxes to pay for spending schemes and to increase the debt ceiling without implementing dramatic spending cuts, reeked of demagoguery and implying that the federal government in Washington, is better suited to care for citizens than the citizens themselves. Or at least, that seemed to be his explanation, for the buzz-words adopted by the Left of “shared sacrifice” and “fair share” are deceptive. Just send your money to Washington and all will be taken care of and only the “rich” will pay; the middle class, citizen will be unaffected.
Is there any wonder why Americans are increasingly worried? Modern Democrats have lost their way and have become selfish, irresponsible and blind. They make intellectually dishonest pleas to protect unsustainable social welfare programs without the slightest interest in finding an honest way to pay for them.
Reading the speeches of Obama and other senior Democrat leaders gives one the distinct impression that they are far more interested in rewarding their core constituents than in protecting the nation’s financial health. Democrats would bankrupt the nation rather than make prudent and long-overdue changes to over-generous entitlement programs.
And that is why Americans are so worried.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Medical consumer or ward of the state?: "How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as 'consumers?' The relationship between patient and doctor used to be considered something special, almost sacred. Now politicians and supposed reformers talk about the act of receiving care as if it were no different from a commercial transaction, like buying a car — and their only complaint is that it isn’t commercial enough. What has gone wrong with us?"
The economics of slushy drinks: "'That's quite a markup,' remarked my father as he paid for my six-year-old son's treat after a soccer game. 'Three dollars for a cup of ice.' It's true; the price tag did seem steep at first. But as we analyzed the situation more carefully — my father is also a fan of free markets — we realized that there was no reason to be outraged at the vendor's price."
Risky business: "UK transport minister Norman Baker this week refused to apologise for saying that cyclists may be safer not wearing helmets. Baker, whose role includes responsibilities for cycling, cited research that drivers tend to go closer to cyclists who are wearing helmets, but give a wider berth to those who are not. Indeed, the national cyclists' organisation itself argues that those who wear helmets are 14% more likely to have a collision than those who don't."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Islam rots your brain
Osama bin Laden was a hero to Muslims worldwide. Will his killing stop jihadism? It might have a temporary depressing effect but the adverse effect of Islam on the intelligence of its followers will remain. After Osama's little 9/11 caper, the U.S. government took out two hostile Islamic regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan yet not even that convinced the jihadis that they were losers. Islam just deprives Muslims of any ability to make rational calculations, apparently. Any rational calculation would not lead to a conviction that a few bearded nobodies could impose Islam on the West.
The kindness of a civilizatin originating from Christian thinking indulges them for the moment but if ever they start to do serious harm they will be squashed, as bin Laden eventually was.
It's a pity he was not taken alive, though. Crushing his balls to squeeze information out of him could have been very productive. Just the threat would probably have made him very talkative.
*********************
America's Orwellian present
It might help getting our minds around what is so wrong in America today by thinking about the local police force.
It’s not hard to understand that the job of the police is to protect lives and property.
Suppose we decided to broaden their mandate. Suppose each municipality decided that the job of the police was not just protection but to make every community more fair and just and to improve the quality of life.
To do this, we’d have to let them decide what is fair and just and give them authority to implement their sense of these things.
They could force families they thought had too much money, or who earned their money in a way they thought not fair, to turn some of their resources over to others who the police concluded more deserving.
Or, if they happened to hear parents yelling at their child, they could enter the house and instruct them how they should be raising their children.
It seems pretty absurd. But it’s exactly what is going on in Washington and why things are such a mess. The very entity – our government - that is supposedly there to protect us now has incredibly wide latitude to invade our lives and property.
Even worse, not only is there considerable latitude to do this openly, but it can occur insidiously in ways where citizens don’t even realize it’s happening to them.
In the former instance, at least Congress openly votes to pay for expanded programs and spending by raising taxes.
But even with a license to steal, government power brokers know they can just take this so far. Spending may provide a path to political popularity for some, but paying for it all through taxes is a path to popularity for few.
Over the last couple years, we’ve had a vast expansion of government spending to bail out banks, automobile companies, those with mortgages they can’t afford, expand unemployment insurance, create all kinds of projects under the headline of “economic stimulus,” etc.
If government is spending a trillion and half dollars more than it is taking in through taxes, which is the case with a deficit of the size that we have now, where’s the money coming from?
We can turn to Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, who this past week held the very first press conference ever held by a Federal Reserve chief.
This reflects the fact the Federal Reserve has been transformed into a political entity. The Fed should, in principle, be a special kind of police force. Their job should be to protect one very unique aspect of our property – our money.
But instead, the Fed has, allegedly within the scope of the law, assumed a broader mandate to provide another way to finance government spending – printing money.
Like police with a responsibility for protecting property but also with a license to steal, the latter will eclipse the former. The Fed either is going to protect the value of our money or it is going to print it to pay for spending. Unfortunately, it has chosen the latter.
Like everything else in our country, money has become relative and politicized. When the dollar was tied to gold, the official price was $35 per ounce. Since we severed this link in 1971 and totally politicized our money, it now takes over $1500 to buy an ounce of gold.
Our taxes get raised indirectly through higher prices and the eroded value of our savings.
Politicization of the Federal Reserve and our money is a particularly dangerous development in a trend that is ruining America - the erosion of law and the distortion of the role of government.
There is no way around the fact that freedom and prosperity only exist when government protects property, and this includes our money.
SOURCE
*******************
And America's Orwellian State is still expanding
The crash of the financial and housing markets in 2007-08 brought cries for reform from many quarters. Still, there was bitter debate throughout 2009-10 on the approach and substance of any prospective reform. Ultimately, Congress passed – on a party-line vote – the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, whose authors were Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank, two of the most questionable characters in recent Congressional history.
Many Americans are concerned that whenever Congress launches a crusade for “consumer protection,” somehow that’s not what we end up with. When the Dodd-Frank bill contained a Trojan Horse – the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) – a lot of people became alarmed. When President Obama wanted to nominate Elizabeth Warren to run the CFPB, flashing lights and sirens started going off.
Ms. Warren had never worked in financial services – in fact, she had never held a job in any financial industry – but as a Harvard law professor, she had written a variety of articles and books. To the Obama crowd, this made her the perfect candidate to set new rules to control our lives. While Ms. Warren’s particular expertise is the struggle of middle-class families in which both parents must work just to stay even, she hasn’t yet figured out that it’s the massive growth of regulation and taxes at all levels of government – principally promulgated by her elitist comrades – that is the core of the problem.
Ms. Warren is the embodiment of the Totalitarian Liberal. Her “we know better” viewpoint endeared her to Obama, who gleefully appointed her to an extra-governmental position after it became clear that there was no hope she would obtain Congressional approval to be Chair of CFPB. Obama give her a fancy title and she has been running the CFPB – without oversight – ever since. When she appeared before Congressional committees, she exercised her best lawyer skills, repeatedly making grossly misleading statements. When asked pointed questions by committee members, she sounded like a parakeet, squawking “We need a cop on the beat!” over and over again. And, of course, what better cop could exist than Ms. Warren?
What Ms. Warren does not want is a cop on her beat, which is why she designed the structure of the bureau as it was laid out in the Dodd-Frank bill – with virtually no oversight. Funding for the CFPB is taken from the earnings of the Federal Reserve System, which means that Congress has no voice in its operation. In fact, other than approving the director, Congress has essentially no control over the bureau. This is utterly unlike any other federal agency and will probably be tested in court. After all, if Congress doesn’t manage the purse strings, what effective control do they have over Ms. Warren?
This new entity has been assigned broad oversight of financial entities, much of which overlaps responsibilities of the existing agencies. It oversees all banks and credit unions with more than S10 billion in assets, and can write regulations for all payday lenders, debt collectors, and mortgage brokers. It also reviews all entities making mortgage loans, which means virtually every bank in the country. This is the reason for her recent charm offensive with community banks: to gain their support for her nomination as Director.
She has shrewdly been placing allies into key positions in the bureau. Though some appear to have industry background, you can rest assured that they’ve been hired either because of political leanings or as window dressing to enhance her continuing effort to be appointed Director.
Under Ms. Warren’s direction, the CFPB will be requiring “greater levels of disclosure” by all parties in its purview. But financial professionals point out that extensive disclosure has been required for years for mortgages and car loans, and none of it is worth a Confederate dollar if people don’t read or understand the documents. And if there’s one thing that all the professionals agree on, it’s that most American consumers have at best a minimal understanding of even the simplest financial matters.
As a totalitarian liberal, Ms. Warren won’t try to make the consumers more knowledgeable, but instead will employ her infinite wisdom and compassion to protect them from themselves. This is confirmed by her first real venture – joining some left-wing Attorneys General to threaten lenders over their foreclosure practices. In the best tradition of Tony Soprano, they are using extortion and other threats to extract $20 billon from the lenders, despite the fact that even with some improperly-processed paperwork, there have been virtually no homeowners evicted prematurely or improperly. Almost every one of these people has been living rent-free for nine to eighteen months, with the American people picking up the tab. Now Ms. Warren wants us to fork over even more money for these follies – in higher fees and fewer services at our banks – to compensate for the $20 billion. In addition, further delays in the foreclosure process just forestall the ability of the market to cleanse itself and recover.
Because Ms. Warren has virtually no experience or true understanding of the financial markets, she will do untold harm to the people she is trying to protect. In a previous column, I described how the Dodd-Frank bill set new rules for credit cards in order to “protect consumers,” only to find that the credit that they previously had access to is now unavailable. The regulations that Ms. Warren and her cronies will create will have exactly the same effect on mortgage loans, payday loans, and whatever else they touch.
Disclosure is a very good thing when it comes to financial matters, but if consumers don’t have the education or training to understand how they’re being protected, they will ultimately be penalized by fewer products, less competition, and higher government-mandated costs. The only winners will be people like Elizabeth Warren, who know better than we do and are on a crusade to protect us from ourselves. The loser is our freedom.
SOURCE
*******************************
Diagnosing ObamaCare
Dr. Peter Weiss summarizes a new book by Dr. Milton Wolf: "First Do No Harm"
For the past two years I have publicly debated the pros and cons of our health care system. I have debated against the implementation of ObamaCare — to no avail.
I have been on too many health care panels to remember. I have met with senators, congressmen, governors, and more. The debates feel like the reenactment of the trench warfare of the First World War, with neither side making any headway in battle.
"First Do No Harm" reviews how government involved itself in health care from 1929 to 2003, with all well-meaning actions resulting in increasing costs. Dr. Wolf astutely points out how health care became very political in the 1980s. State mandates “re-routed health care dollars not to the most necessary and innovative treatments, but instead to whomever had the best lobbyists.” This was the start of our current health care downfall.
Remember HillaryCare? Dr. Wolf rightly has no kind words for President Bush either. Medicare prescription coverage of 2003 was a political move to garner senior votes.
The bottom line of First Do No Harm is this: “At the very core of ObamaCare is a flawed belief that government can spend your money more effectively than you can yourself.” There is an ideological divide between those in favor of the plan and those opposed.
I admire the Tea Party greatly. Health care should not be a political line-item agenda — just as I can not tell a patient of mine what he or she must do. I can only give advice and recommendations. I can not force my patients to stop smoking or drinking, or to lose weight. Nor can President Obama mandate health.
To be fair, First Do No Harm does state that ObamaCare promises some nice things, such as no denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, coverage for “children” up to age 26, and no lifetime limit on benefits. These all sound great, and on paper they are.
I would also like the government to buy me a home, give me a car (nothing less than 6 cylinder), and put food on my table. In a Utopian world, we all live forever and will have world peace. One critical aspect of a good physician is being honest even when the news is bad. Dr. Wolf is a good physician. He gives a very strong argument against ObamaCare in a concise, easy-to-follow manner. He offers some solutions, but still a lot more are needed to address the current situation. Those he does offer are well worth entertaining and are well thought out. I, of course, like many other physicians, have solutions, too, some of which I have expressed in these pages before.
I equate Dr. Wolf with a good doctor who is able to explain to a patient and his or her family what is wrong. He then takes the time to listen and gives his opinion as to what you should do. This is a doctor you feel you can trust. Under the Obama system, that doctor will be a thing of the past. Your new physician will be spending half of his or her time doing data entry at point of service, checking off boxes on the state-mandated questionnaire before inputting the data to determine what medication the system will allow. Never mind you only want to talk about your headaches.
Most physicians take either the oath of Hippocrates or the oath of Maimonides. With these two time-honored oaths, we promise to be our individual patients’ champion and, above all, to do no harm. Under ObamaCare, the physician’s oath will be “to the health of the state” — and to the individual patient no longer.
SOURCE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
Dallas TSA molests beauty queen: "Dallas has found itself in the eye of a storm of negative publicity thanks to a former beauty queen's accusation of TSA molestation in a YouTube video posted Wednesday that has already gone viral. Susie Castillo, actress and former Miss USA, accused a female TSA agent of sexually violating her at DFW airport when she opted for a pat down rather than going through the full body scanner because of the health risks of repeated radiation exposure."
The forgotten patriot: "As Rhode Island prepares to celebrate the 350th anniversary of an extraordinary American document, its author remains all but forgotten. In the summer of 1663, against seemingly insurmountable odds, an improbable patriot living in an unlikely place changed the course of world civilization. Through Rhode Island’s King Charles II Charter, Dr. John Clarke convinced the king to grant religious toleration and separation of church and state to a political entity, the diminutive Colony of Rhode Island. For the first time in world history, religious freedom became fundamental to democracy."
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Osama bin Laden was a hero to Muslims worldwide. Will his killing stop jihadism? It might have a temporary depressing effect but the adverse effect of Islam on the intelligence of its followers will remain. After Osama's little 9/11 caper, the U.S. government took out two hostile Islamic regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan yet not even that convinced the jihadis that they were losers. Islam just deprives Muslims of any ability to make rational calculations, apparently. Any rational calculation would not lead to a conviction that a few bearded nobodies could impose Islam on the West.
The kindness of a civilizatin originating from Christian thinking indulges them for the moment but if ever they start to do serious harm they will be squashed, as bin Laden eventually was.
It's a pity he was not taken alive, though. Crushing his balls to squeeze information out of him could have been very productive. Just the threat would probably have made him very talkative.
*********************
America's Orwellian present
It might help getting our minds around what is so wrong in America today by thinking about the local police force.
It’s not hard to understand that the job of the police is to protect lives and property.
Suppose we decided to broaden their mandate. Suppose each municipality decided that the job of the police was not just protection but to make every community more fair and just and to improve the quality of life.
To do this, we’d have to let them decide what is fair and just and give them authority to implement their sense of these things.
They could force families they thought had too much money, or who earned their money in a way they thought not fair, to turn some of their resources over to others who the police concluded more deserving.
Or, if they happened to hear parents yelling at their child, they could enter the house and instruct them how they should be raising their children.
It seems pretty absurd. But it’s exactly what is going on in Washington and why things are such a mess. The very entity – our government - that is supposedly there to protect us now has incredibly wide latitude to invade our lives and property.
Even worse, not only is there considerable latitude to do this openly, but it can occur insidiously in ways where citizens don’t even realize it’s happening to them.
In the former instance, at least Congress openly votes to pay for expanded programs and spending by raising taxes.
But even with a license to steal, government power brokers know they can just take this so far. Spending may provide a path to political popularity for some, but paying for it all through taxes is a path to popularity for few.
Over the last couple years, we’ve had a vast expansion of government spending to bail out banks, automobile companies, those with mortgages they can’t afford, expand unemployment insurance, create all kinds of projects under the headline of “economic stimulus,” etc.
If government is spending a trillion and half dollars more than it is taking in through taxes, which is the case with a deficit of the size that we have now, where’s the money coming from?
We can turn to Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, who this past week held the very first press conference ever held by a Federal Reserve chief.
This reflects the fact the Federal Reserve has been transformed into a political entity. The Fed should, in principle, be a special kind of police force. Their job should be to protect one very unique aspect of our property – our money.
But instead, the Fed has, allegedly within the scope of the law, assumed a broader mandate to provide another way to finance government spending – printing money.
Like police with a responsibility for protecting property but also with a license to steal, the latter will eclipse the former. The Fed either is going to protect the value of our money or it is going to print it to pay for spending. Unfortunately, it has chosen the latter.
Like everything else in our country, money has become relative and politicized. When the dollar was tied to gold, the official price was $35 per ounce. Since we severed this link in 1971 and totally politicized our money, it now takes over $1500 to buy an ounce of gold.
Our taxes get raised indirectly through higher prices and the eroded value of our savings.
Politicization of the Federal Reserve and our money is a particularly dangerous development in a trend that is ruining America - the erosion of law and the distortion of the role of government.
There is no way around the fact that freedom and prosperity only exist when government protects property, and this includes our money.
SOURCE
*******************
And America's Orwellian State is still expanding
The crash of the financial and housing markets in 2007-08 brought cries for reform from many quarters. Still, there was bitter debate throughout 2009-10 on the approach and substance of any prospective reform. Ultimately, Congress passed – on a party-line vote – the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, whose authors were Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank, two of the most questionable characters in recent Congressional history.
Many Americans are concerned that whenever Congress launches a crusade for “consumer protection,” somehow that’s not what we end up with. When the Dodd-Frank bill contained a Trojan Horse – the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) – a lot of people became alarmed. When President Obama wanted to nominate Elizabeth Warren to run the CFPB, flashing lights and sirens started going off.
Ms. Warren had never worked in financial services – in fact, she had never held a job in any financial industry – but as a Harvard law professor, she had written a variety of articles and books. To the Obama crowd, this made her the perfect candidate to set new rules to control our lives. While Ms. Warren’s particular expertise is the struggle of middle-class families in which both parents must work just to stay even, she hasn’t yet figured out that it’s the massive growth of regulation and taxes at all levels of government – principally promulgated by her elitist comrades – that is the core of the problem.
Ms. Warren is the embodiment of the Totalitarian Liberal. Her “we know better” viewpoint endeared her to Obama, who gleefully appointed her to an extra-governmental position after it became clear that there was no hope she would obtain Congressional approval to be Chair of CFPB. Obama give her a fancy title and she has been running the CFPB – without oversight – ever since. When she appeared before Congressional committees, she exercised her best lawyer skills, repeatedly making grossly misleading statements. When asked pointed questions by committee members, she sounded like a parakeet, squawking “We need a cop on the beat!” over and over again. And, of course, what better cop could exist than Ms. Warren?
What Ms. Warren does not want is a cop on her beat, which is why she designed the structure of the bureau as it was laid out in the Dodd-Frank bill – with virtually no oversight. Funding for the CFPB is taken from the earnings of the Federal Reserve System, which means that Congress has no voice in its operation. In fact, other than approving the director, Congress has essentially no control over the bureau. This is utterly unlike any other federal agency and will probably be tested in court. After all, if Congress doesn’t manage the purse strings, what effective control do they have over Ms. Warren?
This new entity has been assigned broad oversight of financial entities, much of which overlaps responsibilities of the existing agencies. It oversees all banks and credit unions with more than S10 billion in assets, and can write regulations for all payday lenders, debt collectors, and mortgage brokers. It also reviews all entities making mortgage loans, which means virtually every bank in the country. This is the reason for her recent charm offensive with community banks: to gain their support for her nomination as Director.
She has shrewdly been placing allies into key positions in the bureau. Though some appear to have industry background, you can rest assured that they’ve been hired either because of political leanings or as window dressing to enhance her continuing effort to be appointed Director.
Under Ms. Warren’s direction, the CFPB will be requiring “greater levels of disclosure” by all parties in its purview. But financial professionals point out that extensive disclosure has been required for years for mortgages and car loans, and none of it is worth a Confederate dollar if people don’t read or understand the documents. And if there’s one thing that all the professionals agree on, it’s that most American consumers have at best a minimal understanding of even the simplest financial matters.
As a totalitarian liberal, Ms. Warren won’t try to make the consumers more knowledgeable, but instead will employ her infinite wisdom and compassion to protect them from themselves. This is confirmed by her first real venture – joining some left-wing Attorneys General to threaten lenders over their foreclosure practices. In the best tradition of Tony Soprano, they are using extortion and other threats to extract $20 billon from the lenders, despite the fact that even with some improperly-processed paperwork, there have been virtually no homeowners evicted prematurely or improperly. Almost every one of these people has been living rent-free for nine to eighteen months, with the American people picking up the tab. Now Ms. Warren wants us to fork over even more money for these follies – in higher fees and fewer services at our banks – to compensate for the $20 billion. In addition, further delays in the foreclosure process just forestall the ability of the market to cleanse itself and recover.
Because Ms. Warren has virtually no experience or true understanding of the financial markets, she will do untold harm to the people she is trying to protect. In a previous column, I described how the Dodd-Frank bill set new rules for credit cards in order to “protect consumers,” only to find that the credit that they previously had access to is now unavailable. The regulations that Ms. Warren and her cronies will create will have exactly the same effect on mortgage loans, payday loans, and whatever else they touch.
Disclosure is a very good thing when it comes to financial matters, but if consumers don’t have the education or training to understand how they’re being protected, they will ultimately be penalized by fewer products, less competition, and higher government-mandated costs. The only winners will be people like Elizabeth Warren, who know better than we do and are on a crusade to protect us from ourselves. The loser is our freedom.
SOURCE
*******************************
Diagnosing ObamaCare
Dr. Peter Weiss summarizes a new book by Dr. Milton Wolf: "First Do No Harm"
For the past two years I have publicly debated the pros and cons of our health care system. I have debated against the implementation of ObamaCare — to no avail.
I have been on too many health care panels to remember. I have met with senators, congressmen, governors, and more. The debates feel like the reenactment of the trench warfare of the First World War, with neither side making any headway in battle.
"First Do No Harm" reviews how government involved itself in health care from 1929 to 2003, with all well-meaning actions resulting in increasing costs. Dr. Wolf astutely points out how health care became very political in the 1980s. State mandates “re-routed health care dollars not to the most necessary and innovative treatments, but instead to whomever had the best lobbyists.” This was the start of our current health care downfall.
Remember HillaryCare? Dr. Wolf rightly has no kind words for President Bush either. Medicare prescription coverage of 2003 was a political move to garner senior votes.
The bottom line of First Do No Harm is this: “At the very core of ObamaCare is a flawed belief that government can spend your money more effectively than you can yourself.” There is an ideological divide between those in favor of the plan and those opposed.
I admire the Tea Party greatly. Health care should not be a political line-item agenda — just as I can not tell a patient of mine what he or she must do. I can only give advice and recommendations. I can not force my patients to stop smoking or drinking, or to lose weight. Nor can President Obama mandate health.
To be fair, First Do No Harm does state that ObamaCare promises some nice things, such as no denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, coverage for “children” up to age 26, and no lifetime limit on benefits. These all sound great, and on paper they are.
I would also like the government to buy me a home, give me a car (nothing less than 6 cylinder), and put food on my table. In a Utopian world, we all live forever and will have world peace. One critical aspect of a good physician is being honest even when the news is bad. Dr. Wolf is a good physician. He gives a very strong argument against ObamaCare in a concise, easy-to-follow manner. He offers some solutions, but still a lot more are needed to address the current situation. Those he does offer are well worth entertaining and are well thought out. I, of course, like many other physicians, have solutions, too, some of which I have expressed in these pages before.
I equate Dr. Wolf with a good doctor who is able to explain to a patient and his or her family what is wrong. He then takes the time to listen and gives his opinion as to what you should do. This is a doctor you feel you can trust. Under the Obama system, that doctor will be a thing of the past. Your new physician will be spending half of his or her time doing data entry at point of service, checking off boxes on the state-mandated questionnaire before inputting the data to determine what medication the system will allow. Never mind you only want to talk about your headaches.
Most physicians take either the oath of Hippocrates or the oath of Maimonides. With these two time-honored oaths, we promise to be our individual patients’ champion and, above all, to do no harm. Under ObamaCare, the physician’s oath will be “to the health of the state” — and to the individual patient no longer.
SOURCE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
Dallas TSA molests beauty queen: "Dallas has found itself in the eye of a storm of negative publicity thanks to a former beauty queen's accusation of TSA molestation in a YouTube video posted Wednesday that has already gone viral. Susie Castillo, actress and former Miss USA, accused a female TSA agent of sexually violating her at DFW airport when she opted for a pat down rather than going through the full body scanner because of the health risks of repeated radiation exposure."
The forgotten patriot: "As Rhode Island prepares to celebrate the 350th anniversary of an extraordinary American document, its author remains all but forgotten. In the summer of 1663, against seemingly insurmountable odds, an improbable patriot living in an unlikely place changed the course of world civilization. Through Rhode Island’s King Charles II Charter, Dr. John Clarke convinced the king to grant religious toleration and separation of church and state to a political entity, the diminutive Colony of Rhode Island. For the first time in world history, religious freedom became fundamental to democracy."
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Sunday, May 01, 2011
Poll reveals regular internet users are less likely to respect the law
But who are those "regular internet users"? Easy. Leftist blogs tend to have huge readerships compared to conservative ones. Leftists need a lot of propping up for their counterfactual beliefs so are more likely to go online and visit sites that tell them what they want to hear.
So it immediately becomes clear why frequent internet users are less likely to respect the law or do volunteer work. Leftists hate the society the live in and they are "all heart" in words only. So they "felt it was very important to help those worse off than themselves" but were not in fact more likely to do so. An interesting picture of contemporary Leftism
FREQUENT internet users are less likely to respect the law, serve on a jury or do volunteer work, a study has found.
An Australian National University poll discovered that while regular web surfers were more politically engaged, they also had less deference for traditional societal values.
Only 38 per cent of respondents who logged on at least once a day felt it was important to obey laws and regulations, compared with 51 per cent of less regular cyberspace visitors.
“Frequent internet users were less willing than infrequent internet users to accept that traditional norms of citizenship such as obeying laws and regulations, serving on a jury if called and being active in voluntary organisations are very important in order to be a good citizen,” the report said.
Still, report researcher Juliet Pietsch said the internet wasn't causing people to withdraw from society. “In fact our research shows the opposite,” she said at the report launch today.
She cited a finding showing 70 per cent of regular web surfers felt it was very important to help those worse off than themselves. However, people who seldom visited the internet were just as likely to help the needy.
The internet was also found to be sparking political engagement, with one in four respondents visiting the websites of political parties and candidates. “Those who use the internet more frequently actually know more about politics in general,” Dr Pietsch said.
Almost nine in 10 respondents had internet access at home, with 82 per cent of people having broadband access. Some 68 per cent of poll participants used the internet at least once a day.
The Internet and Civil Society report was compiled in December 2010.
SOURCE
**************************
Obama's Pain at the Pump
Once again, oil and gasoline prices are on the march upwards, and conveniently, Barack Obama is waving the "speculators" card, promising to investigate nefarious investors he alleges are behind it all.
With average gasoline per gallon prices nationally at over $3.80 and rising rapidly, American motorists are taking note of the increases - and are asking why they're paying more.
"[A] lot of what's driving oil prices up right now is not the lack of supply. There's enough supply. There's enough oil out there for world demand," Obama said.
Pretty much, that part is true. Since 2009, global oil consumption has increased from 84.133 million barrels a day to 86.7 million in 2010, a 3 percent increase, according to the Energy Information Agency (EIA). Furthermore, the EIA projects a further consumption increase of 1.5 million barrels a day in 2011, bringing the total consumption rise from 2009 to 2011 to a total 4.8 percent increase.
Yet, prices have increased far more dramatically. Brent oil in January 2009 was trading at a low of about $40 a barrel, and Light Sweet Crude was at low of about $35 a barrel, to now over $120 a barrel and $110 a barrel, respectively. That's 200 percent and 214 percent increases each in price.
Oil supply is not the problem, because production has been relatively stable, increasing as consumption has increased without significant disruption each year.
Obama explained his view that "The problem is . speculators and people make various bets, and they say, you know what, we think that maybe there's a 20 percent chance that something might happen in the Middle East that might disrupt oil supply, so we're going to bet that oil is going to go up real high. And that spikes up prices significantly."
Certainly oil prices, like other commodities, are extremely volatile, meaning they are extremely susceptible to supply shocks. Except, today, as Obama notes, and is confirmed by Saudi Arabia - which is now cutting back production because of a lack of buyers - there is no actual supply shortage.
Instead, Obama attests that there is fear of a supply shortage because of conflict in the Middle East. Let's test the claim.
The Libyan conflict began in late February. By then, Brent crude had already surpassed $101 barrel, a 152 percent off its 2009 low, and Light Sweet Crude was about $87 a barrel, 148 percent above its low.
Even if one wanted to consider the revolution in Egypt, which climaxed on February 11 when Hosni Mubarak stepped down, and go back in time to before the tensions erupted there in late January, Brent was at about $97 a barrel and Light Sweet Crude was $87 a barrel, still 142 percent and 148 percent each off their lows.
Therefore, since 2009, even without the new wars in the Middle East, prices have still more than doubled. So, with no actual supply disruption and only a modest increase in demand, what else could be weighing on investors' minds?
Probably, inflation. And the sinking dollar. You see, besides supply shocks, the other thing the prices of commodities like oil are extremely susceptible to are dramatic monetary expansions and contractions.
After all, gold too has spiked, from a low of about $820 an ounce at that time to over $1,500 now, an 83 percent increase. So, perhaps a broader range of commodity price spikes indicates another problem unrelated to the oil market.
Since the last price shock, the oil bubble in 2008, which found both Brent oil and Light Sweet Crude peaking at about $145 a barrel in July 2008, the nation's monetary policy has been out of control. The Federal Reserve, the nation's central bank, has increased its balance sheet from about $947 billion to over $2.73 trillion.
That was mostly to bail out the banks by buying $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities and prop up the U.S. Treasury with nearly $1 trillion in new loans to back up the gargantuan levels of government spending.
The Fed's net balance sheet expansion was a whopping 188 percent increase in the essential money supply since the last time oil prices spiked. Then, as now, politicians cried "speculators!" Of course, these same elected officials were nowhere to be found when the bubble popped and after prices crashed in a very short period of time.
As the financial crisis unfolded, and deleveraging ravaged institutional investors, money fled the markets - including the commodities markets - finally crashing at the end of 2008.
Since then, as noted above, both Brent and Light Sweet Crude have increased 200 and 214 percent off their lows. That's roughly the range of the Fed's 188 percent increase in the supply of dollars since July 2008. Importantly, since the dollar is the world's reserve currency, and global commodity markets trade in dollars, such a dramatic increase in the supply dollars will have a very predictable result.
In fact, it was predicted. In January 2009, I wrote, "the prediction is not for instant inflation, but that once market-based thawing does apparently begin to ensue, and all the excessive liquidity finds its way into the marketplace, demand will spike in one area or another and thus so will prices. There will be another asset bubble."
Can't say we didn't warn the politicians what would happen.
The late, great Milton Friedman once taught us that "[i]nflation is the result of too many dollars chasing too few goods." So, there is a supply problem. Just not with oil. There's too many dollars chasing the same amount of oil.
If there is to be any investigation, it should be into the government's inflationary spending and monetary policies. House Republicans ought to use their majority status to shed light on this growing inflation crisis.
So, when the American people head to pump in the coming months, with gasoline nearing $4 a gallon nationally, headed to $5, they ought to remember who to really thank for the pain at the pump. It's not the "speculators," whoever they may be. It is Fed head Ben Bernanke, and of course, the spender-in-chief, Barack Obama.
SOURCE
************************
ObamaCare: When Patients Really Pay On The Back End
ObamaCare is supposed to force insurers and Medicare to provide preventive services at no charge to the patient. Colonoscopy is considered a preventive service, thus there should be no out-of-pocket costs for getting one. Turns out, though, that ObamaCare is having some unintended consequences:
Talk about paying on the back end. As IBD pointed out back in March:
ObamaCare makes this worse by preventing insurers and Medicare from requiring any out-of-pocket costs for preventive care. In the case of colonoscopies, the effect is the cost-sharing is now being required of those people with polyps — i.e., those people most in need of colonoscopy.
The March blog post examined how some Medicare Advantage plans were reacting to the new laws on preventive care by charging co-pays for people under-going cancer treatment. The conclusion of that post, though, is just as relevant to colonoscopies:
SOURCE
******************
Intolerant Left Strikes Again
On April 25, gay-rights advocates -- led by the Human Rights Campaign -- scored a victory after the HRC applied pressure on a law firm hired to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union between a man and woman and denies federal benefits to same-sex partners. The firm fired its client. There are two reasons you should be outraged, no matter what your position is on DOMA.
One: Lawyers aren't supposed to dump cases -- it's called abandonment -- especially because of political pressure.
Attorney Paul Clement, who was solicitor general under President George W. Bush, resigned from King & Spalding over its decision so that he could continue to defend the 1996 law. In his resignation letter, Clement cited his "firmly-held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client's legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters. Defending unpopular positions is what lawyers do."
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley has been a harsh critic of DOMA -- and he doesn't like what happened. "The irony is, you wouldn't want a lawyer whom you could pressure to drop a client," Turley told me.
In a statement, K&S Chairman Robert Hays had explained the firm's decision to ditch the case as the result of "inadequate" vetting of the contract.
UC Berkeley School of Law professor Jesse Choper finds that troubling. "If they didn't like the case, they shouldn't have taken it," Choper observed. But having taken the case, the firm had "a lawyer's obligation" to stick with it.
Two: In this country, everyone -- accused murderers, terrorists, you name it -- is entitled to representation in court. Unless, it now appears, you don't agree with the Human Rights Campaign.
When the news of the K&S contract came out, HRC boasted that it would send "informational letters" to K&S clients and to "top law schools informing them of K&S's decision to promote discrimination." The group's communications director, Fred Sainz, described the effort as an "educational" campaign in response to K&S's "business decision."
He was especially outraged because K&S had solicited a rating from the HRC for its record on LGBT issues. It's 95 out of 100 -- and still up on the K&S website. Sainz added that his group never expressed a judgment on the legal ethics of dropping a client, held "no hope" that its efforts would alter the firm's judgment and when the firm dropped the case, "it was a complete and total surprise to us."
Choper faulted gay-rights advocates for saying that opponents "don't have a right to litigate properly."
Sainz denies that charge. Yet he effectively admitted as much when he told me, "At the end of the day, I am fairly positive that law firms in the future will think twice before taking on these kinds of engagements because they know that we'll be watching."
Case closed. This is intimidation. This is intolerance.
It is important to understand why a private law firm took the case. In February, after defending the law for two years, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder decided that the law was unconstitutional. In a blog, they explained that homosexuals are a "politically powerless" minority. Hence, the Department of Justice no longer would defend the law against legal challenges.
Now Holder doesn't want to defend it. It doesn't matter that, like a majority of senators and House members, Vice President Joe Biden voted for the bill. Or that Holder's old boss Bill Clinton signed it. Or that Holder himself defended DOMA for two years.
Congress then had the option of defending the law. Over the objections of some Democrats, Committee on House Administration Chairman Dan Lungren, R-Calif., signed a contract with Clement and his firm.
Thus began a campaign to discredit the deal as, in the words of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill, a "legal boondoggle" that spends "half a million dollars of taxpayer money to defend discrimination." Now you know what Pelosi deems to be a waste of taxpayer money -- defending a law passed by the body she once represented as speaker.
Gay rights activists argue that DOMA is unconstitutional. If they're so sure, why are they trying to prevent good lawyers from defending the 1996 law?
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
But who are those "regular internet users"? Easy. Leftist blogs tend to have huge readerships compared to conservative ones. Leftists need a lot of propping up for their counterfactual beliefs so are more likely to go online and visit sites that tell them what they want to hear.
So it immediately becomes clear why frequent internet users are less likely to respect the law or do volunteer work. Leftists hate the society the live in and they are "all heart" in words only. So they "felt it was very important to help those worse off than themselves" but were not in fact more likely to do so. An interesting picture of contemporary Leftism
FREQUENT internet users are less likely to respect the law, serve on a jury or do volunteer work, a study has found.
An Australian National University poll discovered that while regular web surfers were more politically engaged, they also had less deference for traditional societal values.
Only 38 per cent of respondents who logged on at least once a day felt it was important to obey laws and regulations, compared with 51 per cent of less regular cyberspace visitors.
“Frequent internet users were less willing than infrequent internet users to accept that traditional norms of citizenship such as obeying laws and regulations, serving on a jury if called and being active in voluntary organisations are very important in order to be a good citizen,” the report said.
Still, report researcher Juliet Pietsch said the internet wasn't causing people to withdraw from society. “In fact our research shows the opposite,” she said at the report launch today.
She cited a finding showing 70 per cent of regular web surfers felt it was very important to help those worse off than themselves. However, people who seldom visited the internet were just as likely to help the needy.
The internet was also found to be sparking political engagement, with one in four respondents visiting the websites of political parties and candidates. “Those who use the internet more frequently actually know more about politics in general,” Dr Pietsch said.
Almost nine in 10 respondents had internet access at home, with 82 per cent of people having broadband access. Some 68 per cent of poll participants used the internet at least once a day.
The Internet and Civil Society report was compiled in December 2010.
SOURCE
**************************
Obama's Pain at the Pump
Once again, oil and gasoline prices are on the march upwards, and conveniently, Barack Obama is waving the "speculators" card, promising to investigate nefarious investors he alleges are behind it all.
With average gasoline per gallon prices nationally at over $3.80 and rising rapidly, American motorists are taking note of the increases - and are asking why they're paying more.
"[A] lot of what's driving oil prices up right now is not the lack of supply. There's enough supply. There's enough oil out there for world demand," Obama said.
Pretty much, that part is true. Since 2009, global oil consumption has increased from 84.133 million barrels a day to 86.7 million in 2010, a 3 percent increase, according to the Energy Information Agency (EIA). Furthermore, the EIA projects a further consumption increase of 1.5 million barrels a day in 2011, bringing the total consumption rise from 2009 to 2011 to a total 4.8 percent increase.
Yet, prices have increased far more dramatically. Brent oil in January 2009 was trading at a low of about $40 a barrel, and Light Sweet Crude was at low of about $35 a barrel, to now over $120 a barrel and $110 a barrel, respectively. That's 200 percent and 214 percent increases each in price.
Oil supply is not the problem, because production has been relatively stable, increasing as consumption has increased without significant disruption each year.
Obama explained his view that "The problem is . speculators and people make various bets, and they say, you know what, we think that maybe there's a 20 percent chance that something might happen in the Middle East that might disrupt oil supply, so we're going to bet that oil is going to go up real high. And that spikes up prices significantly."
Certainly oil prices, like other commodities, are extremely volatile, meaning they are extremely susceptible to supply shocks. Except, today, as Obama notes, and is confirmed by Saudi Arabia - which is now cutting back production because of a lack of buyers - there is no actual supply shortage.
Instead, Obama attests that there is fear of a supply shortage because of conflict in the Middle East. Let's test the claim.
The Libyan conflict began in late February. By then, Brent crude had already surpassed $101 barrel, a 152 percent off its 2009 low, and Light Sweet Crude was about $87 a barrel, 148 percent above its low.
Even if one wanted to consider the revolution in Egypt, which climaxed on February 11 when Hosni Mubarak stepped down, and go back in time to before the tensions erupted there in late January, Brent was at about $97 a barrel and Light Sweet Crude was $87 a barrel, still 142 percent and 148 percent each off their lows.
Therefore, since 2009, even without the new wars in the Middle East, prices have still more than doubled. So, with no actual supply disruption and only a modest increase in demand, what else could be weighing on investors' minds?
Probably, inflation. And the sinking dollar. You see, besides supply shocks, the other thing the prices of commodities like oil are extremely susceptible to are dramatic monetary expansions and contractions.
After all, gold too has spiked, from a low of about $820 an ounce at that time to over $1,500 now, an 83 percent increase. So, perhaps a broader range of commodity price spikes indicates another problem unrelated to the oil market.
Since the last price shock, the oil bubble in 2008, which found both Brent oil and Light Sweet Crude peaking at about $145 a barrel in July 2008, the nation's monetary policy has been out of control. The Federal Reserve, the nation's central bank, has increased its balance sheet from about $947 billion to over $2.73 trillion.
That was mostly to bail out the banks by buying $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities and prop up the U.S. Treasury with nearly $1 trillion in new loans to back up the gargantuan levels of government spending.
The Fed's net balance sheet expansion was a whopping 188 percent increase in the essential money supply since the last time oil prices spiked. Then, as now, politicians cried "speculators!" Of course, these same elected officials were nowhere to be found when the bubble popped and after prices crashed in a very short period of time.
As the financial crisis unfolded, and deleveraging ravaged institutional investors, money fled the markets - including the commodities markets - finally crashing at the end of 2008.
Since then, as noted above, both Brent and Light Sweet Crude have increased 200 and 214 percent off their lows. That's roughly the range of the Fed's 188 percent increase in the supply of dollars since July 2008. Importantly, since the dollar is the world's reserve currency, and global commodity markets trade in dollars, such a dramatic increase in the supply dollars will have a very predictable result.
In fact, it was predicted. In January 2009, I wrote, "the prediction is not for instant inflation, but that once market-based thawing does apparently begin to ensue, and all the excessive liquidity finds its way into the marketplace, demand will spike in one area or another and thus so will prices. There will be another asset bubble."
Can't say we didn't warn the politicians what would happen.
The late, great Milton Friedman once taught us that "[i]nflation is the result of too many dollars chasing too few goods." So, there is a supply problem. Just not with oil. There's too many dollars chasing the same amount of oil.
If there is to be any investigation, it should be into the government's inflationary spending and monetary policies. House Republicans ought to use their majority status to shed light on this growing inflation crisis.
So, when the American people head to pump in the coming months, with gasoline nearing $4 a gallon nationally, headed to $5, they ought to remember who to really thank for the pain at the pump. It's not the "speculators," whoever they may be. It is Fed head Ben Bernanke, and of course, the spender-in-chief, Barack Obama.
SOURCE
************************
ObamaCare: When Patients Really Pay On The Back End
ObamaCare is supposed to force insurers and Medicare to provide preventive services at no charge to the patient. Colonoscopy is considered a preventive service, thus there should be no out-of-pocket costs for getting one. Turns out, though, that ObamaCare is having some unintended consequences:
(T)here’s a wrinkle in the highly touted benefit. If doctors find and remove a polyp, which can be cancerous, some private insurers and Medicare hit the patient with a surprise: charges that could run several hundred dollars. That’s because once the doctor takes action, the colonoscopy morphs from a preventive test into a treatment procedure.
Talk about paying on the back end. As IBD pointed out back in March:
This is what happens when insurance pays for a lot of the up-front costs that we should be paying for out-of-pocket, such as physician visits, and minor procedures and tests. Thanks to the employer-based tax exclusion for health insurance and benefit mandates imposed by most state governments, insurance has paid for more and more up-front costs. But to make revenues meet expenses, insurers cut costs somewhere. That somewhere is on the back end, when patients are often the sickest and where politicians are less likely to focus legislative protections.
ObamaCare makes this worse by preventing insurers and Medicare from requiring any out-of-pocket costs for preventive care. In the case of colonoscopies, the effect is the cost-sharing is now being required of those people with polyps — i.e., those people most in need of colonoscopy.
The March blog post examined how some Medicare Advantage plans were reacting to the new laws on preventive care by charging co-pays for people under-going cancer treatment. The conclusion of that post, though, is just as relevant to colonoscopies:
The truly insidious thing about it is that politicians will be able to blame others for the problems they have created. They will get on their high horse and excoriate the heartless and cruel insurers . .. Politicians excel at obfuscation, making it difficult, as Thomas Sowell says, to trace their fingerprints back to the murder weapon.
But as long as ObamaCare remains law, get used to less and poorer-quality care for the sickest. The number of people who get seriously ill each year represent a sliver of voters compared to those who have minor illnesses or no illness at all and would just like a checkup or other test. Which group do you think politicians will cater to when it comes to health care policy?
SOURCE
******************
Intolerant Left Strikes Again
On April 25, gay-rights advocates -- led by the Human Rights Campaign -- scored a victory after the HRC applied pressure on a law firm hired to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union between a man and woman and denies federal benefits to same-sex partners. The firm fired its client. There are two reasons you should be outraged, no matter what your position is on DOMA.
One: Lawyers aren't supposed to dump cases -- it's called abandonment -- especially because of political pressure.
Attorney Paul Clement, who was solicitor general under President George W. Bush, resigned from King & Spalding over its decision so that he could continue to defend the 1996 law. In his resignation letter, Clement cited his "firmly-held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client's legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters. Defending unpopular positions is what lawyers do."
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley has been a harsh critic of DOMA -- and he doesn't like what happened. "The irony is, you wouldn't want a lawyer whom you could pressure to drop a client," Turley told me.
In a statement, K&S Chairman Robert Hays had explained the firm's decision to ditch the case as the result of "inadequate" vetting of the contract.
UC Berkeley School of Law professor Jesse Choper finds that troubling. "If they didn't like the case, they shouldn't have taken it," Choper observed. But having taken the case, the firm had "a lawyer's obligation" to stick with it.
Two: In this country, everyone -- accused murderers, terrorists, you name it -- is entitled to representation in court. Unless, it now appears, you don't agree with the Human Rights Campaign.
When the news of the K&S contract came out, HRC boasted that it would send "informational letters" to K&S clients and to "top law schools informing them of K&S's decision to promote discrimination." The group's communications director, Fred Sainz, described the effort as an "educational" campaign in response to K&S's "business decision."
He was especially outraged because K&S had solicited a rating from the HRC for its record on LGBT issues. It's 95 out of 100 -- and still up on the K&S website. Sainz added that his group never expressed a judgment on the legal ethics of dropping a client, held "no hope" that its efforts would alter the firm's judgment and when the firm dropped the case, "it was a complete and total surprise to us."
Choper faulted gay-rights advocates for saying that opponents "don't have a right to litigate properly."
Sainz denies that charge. Yet he effectively admitted as much when he told me, "At the end of the day, I am fairly positive that law firms in the future will think twice before taking on these kinds of engagements because they know that we'll be watching."
Case closed. This is intimidation. This is intolerance.
It is important to understand why a private law firm took the case. In February, after defending the law for two years, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder decided that the law was unconstitutional. In a blog, they explained that homosexuals are a "politically powerless" minority. Hence, the Department of Justice no longer would defend the law against legal challenges.
Now Holder doesn't want to defend it. It doesn't matter that, like a majority of senators and House members, Vice President Joe Biden voted for the bill. Or that Holder's old boss Bill Clinton signed it. Or that Holder himself defended DOMA for two years.
Congress then had the option of defending the law. Over the objections of some Democrats, Committee on House Administration Chairman Dan Lungren, R-Calif., signed a contract with Clement and his firm.
Thus began a campaign to discredit the deal as, in the words of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill, a "legal boondoggle" that spends "half a million dollars of taxpayer money to defend discrimination." Now you know what Pelosi deems to be a waste of taxpayer money -- defending a law passed by the body she once represented as speaker.
Gay rights activists argue that DOMA is unconstitutional. If they're so sure, why are they trying to prevent good lawyers from defending the 1996 law?
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Saturday, April 30, 2011
A great Royal occasion
Detractors often speak of the fragility of the British monarchy and predict its demise but on every great Royal occasion we see the falsity of that. The huge enthusiasm with which Prince William and his bride were greeted by a million onlookers in London would surely be the envy of any politician.
Winston Churchill once said: "Not for a thousand years has Britain seen the campfires of an invader". One consequence is that the British army has retained its traditions. And the splendid uniforms are part of that. We see in the picture above the particularly splendid dress uniform of the Blues & Royals worn by Prince Harry.
It might almost be a comic opera uniform but there is nothing comic about the regiment concerned. It sees active service in war zones and in fact traces its origins all the way back to Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army. And Prince Harry is no chocolate soldier. Both he and William are members of the British armed forces and Harry is particularly devoted to the army. He loved his posting to the dirt and dust of Afghanistan. And the Blues and Royals is the regiment he joined when he enlisted in the British army.
Prince William, heir in due course to the throne of 16 countries, also enlisted initially in the Blues and Royals but now serves in the Royal Air Force. In the picture above he wears the uniform of the Irish Guards, of which he is honorary Colonel. By wearing that uniform he honours the regiment concerned. Guardsmen will be proud to see THEIR Colonel so prominently honoured.
And also above we see the rather splendid 1902 State Landau in which the couple left Westminster Abbey. I gather that it is not the most comfortable of rides but it gives admirers a good view of those in the carriage and enables them to be clearly seen when they wave back.
It all does my old monarchist heart good. And I was pleased to see the Queen looking well after her recent minor health scare -- JR.
**********************
The Entrepreneurs' Princess
From across the pond, I have watched with interest the debate and speculation on the significance of Prince William's wedding to longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton.
Much has been made of the fact that Kate is a "commoner"; her mother and father started out their careers working as a flight attendant and flight dispatcher for British Airways, respectively. Yet she has known many of the privileges of aristocracy, because her parents built a multimillion-dollar business that supported elite educations for her siblings and her.
Some have asked if Kate will be a "people's princess," in the mold of Prince William's late mother, Diana. But Kate and her family actually embody a noble, if relatively modern, tradition of their own, a tradition of bettering oneself and one's family while improving the lot of society at the same time.
The tradition that Kate and her parents and siblings embody so well is that of entrepreneurship. For centuries in Britain, commercial activities were looked down upon by many in the aristocracy, whose wealth lay in landownership and who would not deign to dabble in trade. This week's wedding can be seen as the culmination of a long process of elevating the social status of entrepreneurship itself.
The story of the Middletons' rise to wealth has been told, but its significance and its implications for British culture and public policy have been little explored.
When Kate was five, her mother, like many aspiring entrepreneurs, saw a niche that could be filled to help others in her situation. As described on the website of the family business, PartyPieces.co.uk, "Carole Middleton founded Party Pieces in 1987 after finding it difficult to source fun, simple party products for her children's parties."
Somewhat like successful American firms from Microsoft to Google that had their beginnings in residential garages, Party Pieces started out in a shed in the Middletons' garden. There, mail orders were taken for boxes with pre-selected party favors to fit a certain theme.
The Middleton's business really took off with the advent of the Internet, and today, one can go on the web site and order plates, cups and napkins themed from Barbie to the Transformers. If one of the royal duties is to ensure the happiness of subjects, Kate's family has given her a head start by bringing joy to so many British parents and children.
And happiness through individual initiative is something Kate could encourage once she joins the royal family, by pointing to her family's entrepreneurial background and championing Britain's innovative firms, many of which have origins similar to that of Party Pieces. Margaret Thatcher has written that "however pervasive an enterprise culture is, most people are not born entrepreneurs." But the Middletons, through the story of their success before Kate even met William, will serve as a constant reminder of what enterprising men and women can achieve.
Over the three decades that span the lifetimes of Kate and Prince William, the commercial classes have attained newfound respect in British culture. The idea of ordinary people building successful businesses—a concept often called the "American Dream"—is now idealized in British programs such as BBC's "Dragons' Den."
If the royal family were to utilize Kate's background to help encourage and spread this culture of entrepreneurship, the effects in Britain—and possibly much of the world—could be incredible. The people of the United Kingdom would be much richer, and not just in material terms. "Earned success gives people a sense of meaning about their lives," writes the social scientist Arthur Brooks, who is president of the American Enterprise Institute think tank.
Indeed, studies show that in both the U.S. and U.K., many blue- and white-collar workers prefer to have the opportunity to advance, even if this means a less equal income distribution. A study of thousands of British employees by Andrew Clark, associate chair of the Paris School of Economics, found that measures of these workers' happiness actually rose as their demographic group's average income increased relative to their own.
These findings suggests that as people see members of their peer group gain wealth—even surpassing them—it gives them hope that they can improve their lot as well. As Mr. Clark put it in his study of British workers, "income inequality . . . need not be harmful for economic growth" if it "contains an aspect of opportunity."
The Middletons symbolize the opportunity that exists in a free-market system for those who take advantage of it. It is worth noting that they founded Party Pieces during the Thatcher era, when the Conservative government focused on lifting barriers to entrepreneurs through lower taxation, less regulation and privatization. Coincidentally or not, the year Kate's parents started their business, 1987, was also the year that their longtime employer British Airways was sold off, with shares of stock going to its workers.
Even though Kate's family has long been in the spotlight due to her relationship with Prince William, recent comments by Carole Middleton show that she still sympathizes with the small entrepreneur. In an interview on the Party Pieces website, she says: "I still work through to the early hours to hit a deadline and never take our success for granted."
The union of Prince William and Kate has been called a modern royal marriage, and in many ways it is. But it will also fulfill the traditional function of merger of families in a new way. When this couple says their "I dos," the royal family will officially be wed to the dreams and aspirations of millions of entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom and throughout the world.
SOURCE
**************************
Americans depend more on federal aid than ever
Americans depended more on government assistance in 2010 than at any other time in the nation's history, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds. The trend shows few signs of easing, even though the economic recovery is nearly 2 years old.
A record 18.3% of the nation's total personal income was a payment from the government for Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment benefits and other programs in 2010. Wages accounted for the lowest share of income — 51.0% — since the government began keeping track in 1929.
The income data show how fragile and government-dependent the recovery is after a recession that officially ended in June 2009.
The wage decline has continued this year. Wages slipped to another historic low of 50.5% of personal income in February. Another government effort — the Social Security payroll tax cut — has lifted income in 2011. The temporary tax cut puts more money in workers' pockets and counts as an income boost, even when wages stay the same.
From 1980 to 2000, government aid was roughly constant at 12.5%. The sharp increase since then — especially since the start of 2008 — reflects several changes: the expansion of health care and federal programs generally, the aging population and lingering economic problems.
Total benefit payments are holding steady so far this year at a $2.3 trillion annual rate. A drop in unemployment benefits has been offset by rises in retirement and health care programs.
"What's frightening is the Baby Boomers haven't really started to retire," says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes of the 77 million people born from 1946 through 1964 whose oldest wave turns 65 this year. "That's when the cost of Medicare will start to explode."
Accounting for 80% of safety-net spending in 2010: Social Security, Medicare (health insurance for seniors), Medicaid (health insurance for the poor) and unemployment insurance.
SOURCE
***************************
"Progressives" are Reactionaries
Tibor R. Machan
The simple answer to why progressives are reactionaries is that they tend to want to empower governments to solve all of the problems that face people in their social lives and that is just the authority that kings, tsars, pharaohs, and other rulers have claimed for themselves throughout history.
The literally progressive position is that no one gets to rule anyone else without that other’s permission. So a football coach or physician or orchestra conductor may rule only because he or she is permitted by those being ruled. But no one else has such authority without such consent. Today’s pseudo-progressives, however, want to assign such authority to governments without anyone consenting to being ruled about a great many matters that their favored governments want imposed on the citizenry.
More generally, governments that rule people have been the norm throughout human political history. Here and there and now and then this practice hasn’t prevailed but mostly it has. In contemporary times the term “ruler” is still used in, say, Libya and Dubai. It was the American Founders, or the majority of them, who demoted the English king and along with him all monarchs–no longer were they deemed the sovereign but a servant of the citizenry.
It is true that American conservatives, often associated with traditional values, have embraced much of what the Founders installed here and this may make it appear that what the Founders believed was itself conservative or traditional. Not so. In American it is the distinctive tradition to champion limited government and not the bloated state. So that is why American conservatives are really more radical than their modern liberal, welfare statists opponents.
The confusion is understandable but foes of the fully free society like to engage in discrediting what they do not like instead of arguing about it. In any argument there is no question that the political vision of the American founders wins hands down. It is a superior system to all those that went before which have all been more or less statist, gripped by the governmental habit. It is just this habit that modern liberals have reaffirmed, what with their wish to make government the caretaker of society, the nanny and ruler of us all. That is the old idea of politics and there is nothing truly progressive about it at all. Let’s just get this straight.
Sure the statism embraced by contemporary liberals, socialists, fascists and the like is somewhat different from the older kind, from mercantilism, from monarchism, from the rule of Caesars and tsars. Not all statists are the same. But what is crucial about all of them is that they are statists. They do not favor certain particular version of statism such as monarchism that had been demoted, overturned by way of the American revolution.
The Founders were nearly libertarians except for some matters they probably didn’t know how to handle without some coercive laws, such as the funding of law enforcement and maintenance via taxation. But taxation is the feudal kin of serfdom–the treatment of those in a society as if they and their resources belonged to the government.
That idea is not knew at all, nothing progressive about it whatever. It is however the idea that is close to socialism in which system all the major means of production are publicly owned, belonging to government (which goes by the euphemism of “the public”). And what does socialism see as the major means of production in a society? Human labor. So human labor–which is to say every human being–is owned by the state. The hallmark of serfdom and slavery.
Progressive my foot. This is thoroughly reactionary, taking contemporary politics back to an era that was prominent before the American revolution challenged it good and hard. This is crucial not just for purposes of political rhetoric, which can delude people who are not all that well versed in political history, but also for dealing competently with public policy. Any such policy that treats the citizen as a subject–subject to the will of the government, that is–must be rejected without any compromise.
SOURCE
************************
ELSEWHERE
MA: Curb on use of welfare cash okayed: "House lawmakers voted unanimously last night to ban welfare recipients from spending their cash benefits on alcohol, tobacco, and lottery tickets, reigniting an issue that flared during Governor Deval Patrick’s reelection campaign last year. The House approved the ban, as part of a larger amendment to the state budget, on a 155-0 vote. The measure not only targets welfare recipients, it also bans store owners from accepting welfare debit cards for purchases of alcohol, tobacco, and lottery tickets."
Obamaflation arrives: "President Obama will not be re-elected. Period. Why? Obamaflation has arrived, and this is what it looks like: Milk. A gallon of skim. At the local Giant in Central Pennsylvania: January 11, 2011: $3.20; February 28, 2011: $3.24; March 6, 2011: $3.34; April 23. 2011: $3.48. That would be a 28 cent rise in a mere 102 days, from January to April of this year. The third year of the Obama misadventure. Then there's the celery. Same sized bag. Same store. January 11, 2011: $1.99 a bag; March 6, 2011: $2.49 a bag."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Detractors often speak of the fragility of the British monarchy and predict its demise but on every great Royal occasion we see the falsity of that. The huge enthusiasm with which Prince William and his bride were greeted by a million onlookers in London would surely be the envy of any politician.
Winston Churchill once said: "Not for a thousand years has Britain seen the campfires of an invader". One consequence is that the British army has retained its traditions. And the splendid uniforms are part of that. We see in the picture above the particularly splendid dress uniform of the Blues & Royals worn by Prince Harry.
It might almost be a comic opera uniform but there is nothing comic about the regiment concerned. It sees active service in war zones and in fact traces its origins all the way back to Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army. And Prince Harry is no chocolate soldier. Both he and William are members of the British armed forces and Harry is particularly devoted to the army. He loved his posting to the dirt and dust of Afghanistan. And the Blues and Royals is the regiment he joined when he enlisted in the British army.
Prince William, heir in due course to the throne of 16 countries, also enlisted initially in the Blues and Royals but now serves in the Royal Air Force. In the picture above he wears the uniform of the Irish Guards, of which he is honorary Colonel. By wearing that uniform he honours the regiment concerned. Guardsmen will be proud to see THEIR Colonel so prominently honoured.
And also above we see the rather splendid 1902 State Landau in which the couple left Westminster Abbey. I gather that it is not the most comfortable of rides but it gives admirers a good view of those in the carriage and enables them to be clearly seen when they wave back.
It all does my old monarchist heart good. And I was pleased to see the Queen looking well after her recent minor health scare -- JR.
**********************
The Entrepreneurs' Princess
From across the pond, I have watched with interest the debate and speculation on the significance of Prince William's wedding to longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton.
Much has been made of the fact that Kate is a "commoner"; her mother and father started out their careers working as a flight attendant and flight dispatcher for British Airways, respectively. Yet she has known many of the privileges of aristocracy, because her parents built a multimillion-dollar business that supported elite educations for her siblings and her.
Some have asked if Kate will be a "people's princess," in the mold of Prince William's late mother, Diana. But Kate and her family actually embody a noble, if relatively modern, tradition of their own, a tradition of bettering oneself and one's family while improving the lot of society at the same time.
The tradition that Kate and her parents and siblings embody so well is that of entrepreneurship. For centuries in Britain, commercial activities were looked down upon by many in the aristocracy, whose wealth lay in landownership and who would not deign to dabble in trade. This week's wedding can be seen as the culmination of a long process of elevating the social status of entrepreneurship itself.
The story of the Middletons' rise to wealth has been told, but its significance and its implications for British culture and public policy have been little explored.
When Kate was five, her mother, like many aspiring entrepreneurs, saw a niche that could be filled to help others in her situation. As described on the website of the family business, PartyPieces.co.uk, "Carole Middleton founded Party Pieces in 1987 after finding it difficult to source fun, simple party products for her children's parties."
Somewhat like successful American firms from Microsoft to Google that had their beginnings in residential garages, Party Pieces started out in a shed in the Middletons' garden. There, mail orders were taken for boxes with pre-selected party favors to fit a certain theme.
The Middleton's business really took off with the advent of the Internet, and today, one can go on the web site and order plates, cups and napkins themed from Barbie to the Transformers. If one of the royal duties is to ensure the happiness of subjects, Kate's family has given her a head start by bringing joy to so many British parents and children.
And happiness through individual initiative is something Kate could encourage once she joins the royal family, by pointing to her family's entrepreneurial background and championing Britain's innovative firms, many of which have origins similar to that of Party Pieces. Margaret Thatcher has written that "however pervasive an enterprise culture is, most people are not born entrepreneurs." But the Middletons, through the story of their success before Kate even met William, will serve as a constant reminder of what enterprising men and women can achieve.
Over the three decades that span the lifetimes of Kate and Prince William, the commercial classes have attained newfound respect in British culture. The idea of ordinary people building successful businesses—a concept often called the "American Dream"—is now idealized in British programs such as BBC's "Dragons' Den."
If the royal family were to utilize Kate's background to help encourage and spread this culture of entrepreneurship, the effects in Britain—and possibly much of the world—could be incredible. The people of the United Kingdom would be much richer, and not just in material terms. "Earned success gives people a sense of meaning about their lives," writes the social scientist Arthur Brooks, who is president of the American Enterprise Institute think tank.
Indeed, studies show that in both the U.S. and U.K., many blue- and white-collar workers prefer to have the opportunity to advance, even if this means a less equal income distribution. A study of thousands of British employees by Andrew Clark, associate chair of the Paris School of Economics, found that measures of these workers' happiness actually rose as their demographic group's average income increased relative to their own.
These findings suggests that as people see members of their peer group gain wealth—even surpassing them—it gives them hope that they can improve their lot as well. As Mr. Clark put it in his study of British workers, "income inequality . . . need not be harmful for economic growth" if it "contains an aspect of opportunity."
The Middletons symbolize the opportunity that exists in a free-market system for those who take advantage of it. It is worth noting that they founded Party Pieces during the Thatcher era, when the Conservative government focused on lifting barriers to entrepreneurs through lower taxation, less regulation and privatization. Coincidentally or not, the year Kate's parents started their business, 1987, was also the year that their longtime employer British Airways was sold off, with shares of stock going to its workers.
Even though Kate's family has long been in the spotlight due to her relationship with Prince William, recent comments by Carole Middleton show that she still sympathizes with the small entrepreneur. In an interview on the Party Pieces website, she says: "I still work through to the early hours to hit a deadline and never take our success for granted."
The union of Prince William and Kate has been called a modern royal marriage, and in many ways it is. But it will also fulfill the traditional function of merger of families in a new way. When this couple says their "I dos," the royal family will officially be wed to the dreams and aspirations of millions of entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom and throughout the world.
SOURCE
**************************
Americans depend more on federal aid than ever
Americans depended more on government assistance in 2010 than at any other time in the nation's history, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds. The trend shows few signs of easing, even though the economic recovery is nearly 2 years old.
A record 18.3% of the nation's total personal income was a payment from the government for Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment benefits and other programs in 2010. Wages accounted for the lowest share of income — 51.0% — since the government began keeping track in 1929.
The income data show how fragile and government-dependent the recovery is after a recession that officially ended in June 2009.
The wage decline has continued this year. Wages slipped to another historic low of 50.5% of personal income in February. Another government effort — the Social Security payroll tax cut — has lifted income in 2011. The temporary tax cut puts more money in workers' pockets and counts as an income boost, even when wages stay the same.
From 1980 to 2000, government aid was roughly constant at 12.5%. The sharp increase since then — especially since the start of 2008 — reflects several changes: the expansion of health care and federal programs generally, the aging population and lingering economic problems.
Total benefit payments are holding steady so far this year at a $2.3 trillion annual rate. A drop in unemployment benefits has been offset by rises in retirement and health care programs.
"What's frightening is the Baby Boomers haven't really started to retire," says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes of the 77 million people born from 1946 through 1964 whose oldest wave turns 65 this year. "That's when the cost of Medicare will start to explode."
Accounting for 80% of safety-net spending in 2010: Social Security, Medicare (health insurance for seniors), Medicaid (health insurance for the poor) and unemployment insurance.
SOURCE
***************************
"Progressives" are Reactionaries
Tibor R. Machan
The simple answer to why progressives are reactionaries is that they tend to want to empower governments to solve all of the problems that face people in their social lives and that is just the authority that kings, tsars, pharaohs, and other rulers have claimed for themselves throughout history.
The literally progressive position is that no one gets to rule anyone else without that other’s permission. So a football coach or physician or orchestra conductor may rule only because he or she is permitted by those being ruled. But no one else has such authority without such consent. Today’s pseudo-progressives, however, want to assign such authority to governments without anyone consenting to being ruled about a great many matters that their favored governments want imposed on the citizenry.
More generally, governments that rule people have been the norm throughout human political history. Here and there and now and then this practice hasn’t prevailed but mostly it has. In contemporary times the term “ruler” is still used in, say, Libya and Dubai. It was the American Founders, or the majority of them, who demoted the English king and along with him all monarchs–no longer were they deemed the sovereign but a servant of the citizenry.
It is true that American conservatives, often associated with traditional values, have embraced much of what the Founders installed here and this may make it appear that what the Founders believed was itself conservative or traditional. Not so. In American it is the distinctive tradition to champion limited government and not the bloated state. So that is why American conservatives are really more radical than their modern liberal, welfare statists opponents.
The confusion is understandable but foes of the fully free society like to engage in discrediting what they do not like instead of arguing about it. In any argument there is no question that the political vision of the American founders wins hands down. It is a superior system to all those that went before which have all been more or less statist, gripped by the governmental habit. It is just this habit that modern liberals have reaffirmed, what with their wish to make government the caretaker of society, the nanny and ruler of us all. That is the old idea of politics and there is nothing truly progressive about it at all. Let’s just get this straight.
Sure the statism embraced by contemporary liberals, socialists, fascists and the like is somewhat different from the older kind, from mercantilism, from monarchism, from the rule of Caesars and tsars. Not all statists are the same. But what is crucial about all of them is that they are statists. They do not favor certain particular version of statism such as monarchism that had been demoted, overturned by way of the American revolution.
The Founders were nearly libertarians except for some matters they probably didn’t know how to handle without some coercive laws, such as the funding of law enforcement and maintenance via taxation. But taxation is the feudal kin of serfdom–the treatment of those in a society as if they and their resources belonged to the government.
That idea is not knew at all, nothing progressive about it whatever. It is however the idea that is close to socialism in which system all the major means of production are publicly owned, belonging to government (which goes by the euphemism of “the public”). And what does socialism see as the major means of production in a society? Human labor. So human labor–which is to say every human being–is owned by the state. The hallmark of serfdom and slavery.
Progressive my foot. This is thoroughly reactionary, taking contemporary politics back to an era that was prominent before the American revolution challenged it good and hard. This is crucial not just for purposes of political rhetoric, which can delude people who are not all that well versed in political history, but also for dealing competently with public policy. Any such policy that treats the citizen as a subject–subject to the will of the government, that is–must be rejected without any compromise.
SOURCE
************************
ELSEWHERE
MA: Curb on use of welfare cash okayed: "House lawmakers voted unanimously last night to ban welfare recipients from spending their cash benefits on alcohol, tobacco, and lottery tickets, reigniting an issue that flared during Governor Deval Patrick’s reelection campaign last year. The House approved the ban, as part of a larger amendment to the state budget, on a 155-0 vote. The measure not only targets welfare recipients, it also bans store owners from accepting welfare debit cards for purchases of alcohol, tobacco, and lottery tickets."
Obamaflation arrives: "President Obama will not be re-elected. Period. Why? Obamaflation has arrived, and this is what it looks like: Milk. A gallon of skim. At the local Giant in Central Pennsylvania: January 11, 2011: $3.20; February 28, 2011: $3.24; March 6, 2011: $3.34; April 23. 2011: $3.48. That would be a 28 cent rise in a mere 102 days, from January to April of this year. The third year of the Obama misadventure. Then there's the celery. Same sized bag. Same store. January 11, 2011: $1.99 a bag; March 6, 2011: $2.49 a bag."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
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