Big Business Gets the Hollywood Treatment

Jonah Goldberg

Jack Andraka, a 15-year-old kid from Maryland, just won the world's largest high school science competition by creating a new test for pancreatic cancer, one of the nastiest and most lethal forms of the disease.

According to various news reports, the winning submission at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair is "28 times cheaper" than existing tests and far, far more accurate. Andraka received $75,000 for his efforts, and he's applied for a patent as well. That will probably earn him far more in the years to come.

This comes on the heels of another teen wunderkind. In December, Angela Zhang, 17, won the Siemens Science Competition for inventing a new way of finding and attacking cancer cells. Some people think it might actually lead to a cure for cancer some day.

Zhang and Andraka can probably spend the rest of their high school careers playing video games in the basement, given that their college search is going to be pretty stress-free from here on out.

But that's the real world for you. Impressive kids -- or grown-ups -- invent fantastic things, potentially benefitting millions of people, if not all of mankind. The inventors are rewarded, consumers benefit, and the economy grows. Woo-hoo!

Of course, the real world isn't the world many people imagine it to be. In the Hollywood version of this tale, Zhang would have disappeared when rumors of her invention hit the boardrooms and star chambers of Big Pharma. Bruce Willis would have to come out of retirement as the rogue agent willing to put his life on the line to keep Andraka safe from the goon-squad ninjas of Bristol-Myers Squibb or the wet work teams from Pfizer.

After all, cures and cheaper tests hurt the bottom line of those evil corporations, and we all know profit is all they care about. I mean, haven't you read or seen "The Constant Gardener," the John le Carré book and movie about evil corporations testing drugs on Africans and offing the whistle-blowers at every turn?

That's what corporations do, right? At least that's what my kid is taught. In "Beethoven," the evil munitions industry shoots Saint Bernards to test bullets. In "The Lorax," businesses hate trees. In "The Muppets," they hate Muppets (and love oil). I think that in nearly every movie involving cute woodland creatures ("Furry Vengeance," "Yogi Bear," et al.), businesses are always the bad guys.

When kids get older, they learn from John Grisham movies that big businesses kill people in order to get what they want. In "Aliens," the company wants to smuggle space critters that will likely wipe out all humanity, in the slim hope they'll eke out a bit more profit. In "Avatar," the Halliburton of the future slaughters intelligent aliens and rapes their planet just to make a buck.

At Cannes, where anti-capitalist movies are always a hit, Brad Pitt's newest venture, "Killing Them Softly," is touted as a seething indictment of the American system. "America isn't a country -- it's a business" is apparently the film's central insight. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, the film was reportedly financed by Megan Ellison, daughter of billionaire businessman Larry Ellison.

No wonder that when these kids grow up, some of them make documentaries about how vast conspiracies keep the electric car and, no doubt, the Everlasting Gobstopper off the market. Even more of them uncritically accept this stuff. After all, everyone knows big businessmen are evil.

So the ones getting involved in politics, at least Republican politics, must be the sorts of bad guys we've all seen in the movies.

Warren Buffett and George Soros can't be greedy; after all, they're simply trying to "give something back."

Now, truth be told, I'm no lover of big corporations, but not because I think they want to poison their customers or shoot my dog for target practice. My problem isn't that they're too rapaciously capitalistic.

Rather, it's that they're too opportunistic, too eager to abandon the free market and work with the government under the false flag of the greater good.

In a free market, businesses are in a relentless competition to improve products and satisfy the needs of the consumer. "A new test for pancreatic cancer? Great! Let's be the first to get it to market."

In the cozy world of government-business collusion, the state counts on the status quo existing far out into the future, for that's the only way to preserve and plan out "the system."

There's got to be a good a movie plot in there somewhere.

SOURCE

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New Study from U.K. Think Tank Shows How Big Government Undermines Prosperity

Daniel J. Mitchell

It seems I was put on the planet to educate people about the negative economic impact of excessive government. Though I must be doing a bad job because the burden of the public sector keeps rising.

But hope springs eternal. To help make the case, I’ve cited research from international bureaucracies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and European Central Bank. And since most of those organizations lean to the left, these results should be particularly persuasive.

I’ve also cited the work of academic scholars from all over the world, including the United States, Australia, and Sweden. The evidence is very persuasive that big government is associated with weaker economic performance.

Now we have some new research from the United Kingdom. The Centre for Policy Studies has released a new study, authored by Ryan Bourne and Thomas Oechsle, examining the relationship between economic growth and the size of the public sector.

The chart compares growth rates for nations with big governments and small governments over the past two decades. The difference is significant, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The most important findings of the report are the estimates showing how more spending and more taxes are associated with weaker performance.

Here are some key passages from the study.

Using tax to GDP and spending to GDP ratios as a proxy for size of government, regression analysis can be used to estimate the effect of government size on GDP growth in a set of countries defined as advanced by the IMF between 1965 and 2010.

…As supply-side economists would expect, the coefficients on the tax revenue to GDP and government spending to GDP ratios are negative and statistically significant. This suggests that, ceteris paribus, a larger tax burden results in a slower annual growth of real GDP per capita. Though it is unlikely that this effect would be linear (we might expect the effect to be larger for countries with huge tax burdens), the regressions suggest that an increase in the tax revenue to GDP ratio by 10 percentage points will, if the other variables do not change, lead to a decrease in the rate of economic growth per capita by 1.2 percentage points.

The result is very similar for government outlays to GDP, where an increase by 10 percentage points is associated with a fall in the economic growth rate of 1.1 percentage points. This is in line with other findings in the academic literature.

…The two small government economies with the lowest marginal tax rates, Singapore and Hong Kong, were also those which experienced the fastest average real GDP growth.

The folks at CPS also put together a short video to describe the results. It’s very well done, though I’m not a big fan of the argument near then end that faster growth is a good thing because it generates more tax revenue to finance more government. Since I’m a big proponent of the Laffer Curve, I don’t disagree with the premise, but I would argue that additional revenues should be used to finance lower tax rates.

Since I’m nit-picking, I’ll also say that the study should have emphasized that government spending is bad for growth because it inevitably and necessarily leads to the inefficient allocation of resources, and that would be true even if revenues magically floated down from heaven and there was no need for punitive tax rates.

More HERE (See the original for links and graphics)

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Barack Obama is facing his Jimmy Carter moment

As Mitt Romney closes the gap, it is 1980 all over again for the man in the Oval Office

Until recently, Barack Obama’s re-election was regarded as inevitable – in the same way that summer follows spring. The president’s poll lead over Mitt Romney was strong, while the Republican’s character was assassinated by a primary fight that permanently spoiled the reputation of his party. To court the GOP’s conservative base, Romney was forced to adopt positions on abortion, contraception, health care and welfare that are thought to be unpopular among moderate swing voters. Obama, by contrast, is the man who killed bin Laden and toppled Gaddafi. A choice between Obama the moderate statesman and Romney the craven conservative is surely no contest at all.

But in the last two weeks, things have changed. Obama’s re-election is no longer guaranteed; some pollsters think it is unlikely. Day by day, the odds are improving that Mitt Romney will be the next President of the United States.

What changed? For a start, voters are getting gloomier about the economy. Joblessness remains high and debt is out of control. According to one poll released this week, only 33 per cent of Americans expect the economy to improve in the coming months and only 43 per cent approve of the way that the president has handled it. Voters think Obama has made the debt situation and health care worse. The man who conducted the poll – Democrat Peter Hart – concluded that “Obama’s chances for re-election… are no better than 50-50.”

The president has tried to distract from America’s economic misery by playing up the so-called culture war. Earlier in the year he decided that he would force Catholic employers to provide contraception to their employees through their insurance plans, and he followed that swipe at social traditionalism by endorsing gay marriage. This embrace of Sixties liberalism has backfired. While contraception and gay marriage often receive popular support in national polls, Americans are far more conservative in the voting booth. Thirty-two states have voted on gay marriage and all 32 have voted to outlaw it – even liberal California. Nor has the culture war rallied his party’s base. In presidential primaries held on Tuesday, 39 per cent of Arkansas Democrats and 42 per cent of Kentuckian Democrats rejected Obama’s re-nomination. In West Virginia, 41 per cent of the state’s Democrats voted for an imprisoned criminal rather than the president.

The result is that pollsters find Obama and Romney edging towards one another. Rasmussen puts Obama only one point ahead; Gallup calls it a tie. With Romney doing better than the president in key swing states North Carolina and Florida, Gallup has publicly stated that Obama now has a higher chance of losing rather than winning.

But it isn’t just Obama’s flaws that are making this race interesting. Mitt Romney might not be the most charismatic candidate, but that’s a hidden strength in an election that’s all about competence and getting back to the basics of what once made America work so well. This week, the pro-Obama journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote that with his wealth, good looks and apple-pie conservatism, Romney is like “a focus-group tested model president from 1965”. Sullivan obviously doesn’t realise how popular the TV show Mad Men is. Who wouldn’t warm to a candidate that represents an age marked by low unemployment, stable families and a laissez-faire attitude towards drinking at work?

In fact, the grey Mr Romney is repeating the same formula that won him the governorship of Massachusetts, an ordinarily Democrat state, in 2002. He pulled that off by motivating large numbers of Republicans to vote for him, breaking into the working-class vote and keeping turnout among Democrats fairly low. The unique genius of Romney was his ability to say very conservative things but in a manner that convinced many centrists that he didn’t really mean them. That’s happening again in 2012, as polls indicate that far more Americans think Obama is too Left-wing than believe Romney is too Right-wing.

Of course, Romney has his weaknesses. But they are fewer than Obama’s, whose charisma disguises a multitude of problems so great that it’s hard to imagine him overcoming them. Gallup makes the following observation: “Comparing today’s economic and political ratings with those from previous years when presidents sought re-election reveals that today’s climate is more similar to years when incumbents lost than when they won.” I would go one step further: Obama’s situation is actually worse than that of some of the incumbents who have lost in the past.

In 1980, Democratic president Jimmy Carter faced an uphill struggle for re-election. Yet, despite an index of inflation and unemployment far higher than Obama’s, he was actually doing slightly better in the polls. In March of that year, Carter led his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan, by around 25 per cent. By May, Gallup gave him a lead of 49 to 41 per cent – higher than Obama’s today. Carter’s advantage evaporated in the months that followed, but he regained ground in October and by the last week he was running even.

None the less, Carter eventually suffered a landslide defeat. The scale of his humiliation was hidden by the fact that people were unwilling to commit themselves to the conservative Ronald Reagan until the very last minute. It was only when they went into the polling booth and weighed up all the hurt and humiliation of the past four years that they cast their vote against the president. It looks like Barack Obama will be the Jimmy Carter of 2012.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Reason-Rupe Poll on Wisconsin Recall: Walker Leads Barrett 50-42: "Gov. Scott Walker leads Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett 50-42 among those likely to vote in Wisconsin’s June 5 recall election, according to a new Reason-Rupe poll of 708 Wisconsin adults on cell phones and landlines. The Reason-Rupe poll finds voters overwhelmingly support many of the key changes Gov. Walker and the legislature implemented on public sector pensions and health care last year. Reason-Rupe finds 72 percent favor the change requiring public sector workers to increase their pension contributions from less than 1 percent to 6 percent of their salaries. And 71 percent favor making government employees pay 12 percent of their own health care premiums instead of the previous 6 percent.

When Government Privileges Trump the Rights of Citizens: "Democrats and Republicans in the California Legislature have once again broadcast this troubling fact: They are far more concerned about the ever-expanding demands of a relatively small group of public sector union members than they are about the public welfare of the citizens of our state. On May 17, the state Assembly voted 68-0 to support the most despicable piece of legislation that’s come through the halls in a while, which is saying a lot given the foolhardy proposals routinely on display in Sacramento. (It still requires approval by the Senate and the governor.) The bill, AB 2299, allows a broad swath of public officials—police, judges, and various public safety officials—to hide their names from public property records."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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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BOOK REVIEW: The politically incorrect guide to the Bible by Robert J. Hutchinson

A book has to be pretty good for me to read it, let alone review it but this book makes the grade. Perhaps a little surprisingly, it is not an evangelizing book. It is instead a work of solid scholarship. It wears down criticisms of the Bible, fact by fact, point by point.

Hutchinson uses his vast knowledge of Bible and church history to show how shallow are the points made by atheist critics such as Dawkins and Hitchens. He patiently goes through their criticisms and applies to them the full weight of Bible scholarship through the ages. When critics seem to think they are clever for having thought of some original criticism, Hutchinson sometimes quotes by way of reply something written a thousand years ago. He knows what the points of contention are and knows what the reply to each is.

I found his chapter on slavery particularly interesting. Leftists tend to say that the Bible encourages slavery -- quite ignoring that the people who ultimately destroyed slavery in the West were devout Christians such as Wilberforce. The Bible was of course written when slavery was a univrersal feature of human society but Hutchinson shows that what was called slavery varied a great deal from time to time and place to place and that the Bible has substantial prohibitions about its worst abuses in the OLd Testament and completely forbad it in the New Testament. The thing that most approximated slavery in our modern sense among the Hebrews was in fact punishment for crime. In the absence of prisons, punishment was "outsourced" to individuals.

The book does of course bring us up to date with archaelogical evidence for the accuracy of the Bible accounts and it is rather amusing that many things dismissed by scholars as obviously untrue every now and again turn up as archaelogically verified.

For Christians who enter into disputes with unbelievers, this book offers a host of good replies to almost all likely challenges. A very valuable aid in a skeptical world -- JR

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Religious liberty is the beginning of all liberties

Confronted with a "train wreck," the new archbishop of Baltimore implores us to "pray diligently as communities, as families and as individuals."

Coming from a man of the cloth, this wouldn't be breaking news, except the train in question is driven by President Obama and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. As part of the health-care overhaul, the administration is bent on forcing American employers to offer health-care coverage that includes contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs, regardless of any moral objections.

And so Archbishop William Lori's prayer is for religious liberty.

It's an ecumenical prayer that requires ecumenical labor. During a speech at a conference on religious freedom, Lori made clear that this religious liberty talk "is not about the Catholic Church wanting to force anybody to do anything; it is instead about the federal government forcing the church -- consisting of its faithful and all but a few of its institutions -- to act against church teachings."

We are confronted at this moment with a question of integrity, a question that goes right to the heart of the ethical and religious principles that shape us as a nation: Are we as committed to liberty as we say we are?

This question of integrity is why Georgetown University wins this year's competition for most audacious commencement ceremony: Having Sebelius speak on campus was a dereliction of moral duty, sending a message of complacency at a time that demands action from any American who values freedom. We have long been the place where people come to flee tyranny. But are we comfortable with it at home? It's not just another left-right squabble, this health-care fight -- it strikes at the core of who we are.

Drastic measures are being taken: Numerous institutions have filed lawsuits against HHS. More alarmingly, the Franciscan University of Steubenville announced that it would no longer provide student health plans. That the Ohio Catholic college found itself forced into this position is, as a letter protesting the Obama administration's actions put it, "unacceptable."

"It is simply a matter of integrity that what we teach in the classroom, advance in our student life and preach in the chapel is consistent with how we use our limited resources in regard to health care," says Michael Hernon, vice president of advancement at Franciscan.

"The question is whether, under Obamacare, students who want to attend an authentically Catholic university will be able to do so without being disadvantaged," is how Thomas Messner of the Heritage Foundation explains it on the organization's blog. He further points out that these predicaments about conscience "should lead those who care about religious freedom to ponder more deeply the ways that religious freedom goes hand in hand with the condition of freedom more generally."

He adds that the health-care legislation itself "represents an enormous intrusion by government into freedom of private choice and decision-making more generally." That the law "has already triggered" the deepest imposition on religious freedom our nation has known should come as "no surprise" given the nature of the beast. Messner isn't speaking as a good conservative think tank fixture hitting ideological talking points but as someone concerned about the future of civil society, noting: "A society that abandons its moral and political commitment to freedom in general will become less willing and indeed even hostile to protecting religious freedom in particular instances."

This is why Archbishop Lori, in his speech, said: "The HHS lawsuits, if successful, would only provide a Band-Aid solution to the greater problem of radical secularism that we face in this country."

It's a faulty foundation that the president is offering for a vote in November. We stand on this new platform at our peril.

SOURCE

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Figures Don't Lie: Democrats Do

Ann Coulter

It's been breaking news all over MSNBC, liberal blogs, newspapers and even The Wall Street Journal: "Federal spending under Obama at historic lows ... It's clear that Obama has been the most fiscally moderate president we've had in 60 years." There's even a chart!

I'll pause here to give you a moment to mop up the coffee on your keyboard. Good? OK, moving on ...

This shocker led to around-the-clock smirk fests on MSNBC. As with all bogus social science from the left, liberals hide the numbers and proclaim: It's "science"! This is black and white, inarguable, and why do Republicans refuse to believe facts?

Ed Schultz claimed the chart exposed "the big myth" about Obama's spending: "This chart -- the truth -- very clearly shows the truth undoubtedly." And the truth was, the "growth in spending under President Obama is the slowest out of the last five presidents."

Note that Schultz also said that the "part of the chart representing President Obama's term includes a stimulus package, too." As we shall see, that is a big, fat lie.

Schultz's guest, Reuters columnist David Cay Johnston confirmed: "And clearly, Obama has been incredibly tight-fisted as a president."

Everybody's keyboard OK?

On her show, Rachel Maddow proclaimed: "Factually speaking, spending has leveled off under President Obama. Spending is not skyrocketing under President Obama. Spending is flattening out under President Obama."

In response, three writers from "The Daily Show" said, "We'll never top that line," and quit.

Inasmuch as this is obviously preposterous, I checked with John Lott, one of the nation's premier economists and author of the magnificent new book with Grover Norquist: Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future.

It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, i>attributes all spending during Obama's entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.

That's not a joke. That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill, proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in ... Bush's column. (And if we attribute all of Bush's spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and No Child Left Behind to William Howard Taft, Bush didn't spend much either.)

Nutting's "analysis" is so dishonest, even The New York Times has ignored it. He includes only the $140 billion of stimulus money spent after Oct. 1, 2009, as Obama's spending. And he's testy about that, grudgingly admitting that Obama "is responsible (along with the Congress) for about $140 billion in extra spending in the 2009 fiscal year from the stimulus bill."

Nutting acts as if it's the height of magnanimity to "attribute that $140 billion in stimulus to Obama and not to Bush ..."

On what possible theory would that be Bush's spending? Hey -- we just found out that Obamacare's going to cost triple the estimate. Let's blame it on Calvin Coolidge!

Nutting's "and not to Bush" line is just a sleight of hand. He's hoping you won't notice that he said "$140 billion" and not "$825 billion," and will be fooled into thinking that he's counting the entire stimulus bill as Obama's spending. (He fooled Ed Schultz!)

The theory is that a new president is stuck with the budget of his predecessor, so the entire 2009 fiscal year should be attributed to Bush.

But Obama didn't come in and live with the budget Bush had approved. He immediately signed off on enormous spending programs that had been specifically rejected by Bush. This included a $410 billion spending bill that Bush had refused to sign before he left office. Obama signed it on March 10, 2009. Bush had been chopping brush in Texas for two months at that point. Marketwatch's Nutting says that's Bush's spending.

Obama also spent the second half of the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP). These were discretionary funds meant to prevent a market meltdown after Lehman Brothers collapsed. By the end of 2008, it was clear the panic had passed, and Bush announced that he wouldn't need to spend the second half of the TARP money.

But on Jan. 12, 2009, Obama asked Bush to release the remaining TARP funds for Obama to spend as soon as he took office. By Oct. 1, Obama had spent another $200 billion in TARP money. That, too, gets credited to Bush, according to the creative accounting of Rex Nutting.

There are other spending bills that Obama signed in the first quarter of his presidency, bills that would be considered massive under any other president -- such as the $40 billion child health care bill, which extended coverage to immigrants as well as millions of additional Americans. These, too, are called Bush's spending.

Frustrated that he can't shift all of Obama's spending to Bush, Nutting also lowballs the spending estimates during the later Obama years. For example, although he claims to be using the White House's numbers, the White House's estimate for 2012 spending is $3.795 trillion. Nutting helpfully knocks that down to $3.63 trillion.

But all those errors pale in comparison to Nutting's counting Obama's nine-month spending binge as Bush's spending.

If liberals will attribute Obama's trillion-dollar stimulus bill to Bush, what won't they do?

SOURCE

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Cocooned Liberals Are Unprepared for Political Debate

It's comfortable living in a cocoon -- associating only with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only reinforces them, avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide.

Liberals have been doing this for a long time. In 1972, the movie critic Pauline Kael said it was odd that Richard Nixon was winning the election, because everyone she knew was for George McGovern.

Kael wasn't clueless about the rest of America. She was just observing that her own social circle was politically parochial.

The rest of us have increasingly sought out comfortable cocoons, too. Journalist Bill Bishop, who lives in an Austin, Texas, neighborhood whose politics resemble Kael's, started looking at national data.

It inspired him to write his 2009 book "The Big Sort," which describes how Americans since the 1970s have increasingly sorted themselves out, moving to places where almost everybody shares their cultural orientation and political preference -- and the others keep quiet about theirs.

Thus professionals with a choice of where to make their livings head for the San Francisco Bay Area if they're liberal and for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (they really do call it that) if they're conservative. Over the years the Bay Area becomes more liberal and the Metroplex more conservative.

But cocooning has an asymmetrical effect on liberals and conservatives. Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama administration.

They're made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own responses.

Liberals can protect themselves better against assaults from outside their cocoon. They can stay out of megachurches and make sure their remote controls never click on Fox News. They can stay off the AM radio dial so they will never hear Rush Limbaugh.

The problem is that this leaves them unprepared to make the best case for their side in public debate. They are too often not aware of holes in arguments that sound plausible when bandied between confreres entirely disposed to agree.

We have seen how this works on some issues this year.

Take the arguments developed by professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown Law that Obamacare's mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional. Some liberal scholars like Jack Balkin of Yale have addressed them with counterarguments of their own.

But liberal politicians and Eric Holder's Justice Department remained clueless about them. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked whether Obamacare was unconstitutional, could only gasp: "Are you serious? Are you serious?"

In March, after the Supreme Court heard extended oral argument on the case, CNN's Jeffrey Toobin was clearly flabbergasted that a majority of justices seemed to take the case against Obamacare's constitutionality very seriously indeed.

Liberals better informed about the other side's case might have drafted the legislation in a way to avoid this controversy. But nothing they heard in their cocoon alerted them to the danger.

Another case in point is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's law restricting the bargaining powers of public employee unions. The unions and the crowds in Madison, which is both the state capital and a university town and which with surrounding Dane County voted 73 to 26 percent for Barack Obama, egged each other on with cries that this would destroy the working class. No one they knew found this implausible.

The unions had an economic motive to oppose the laws and seek to recall first Republican legislators and then Walker himself. The law ended the automatic checkoff of union dues, which operated as an involuntary transfer of money from taxpayers to union leaders.

But voters declined to recall enough Republicans to give Democrats a majority in the Senate, and Walker currently leads Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in polls on the June 5 recall election.

The Madison mob seemed unaware that there were attractive arguments on Walker's side.

Why should public employee union members pay less for health insurance and get fatter pensions than the taxpayers who pay their salaries? Why is it a bad thing for property taxes to be held down and for school districts to cut perks for union members enough to hire more teachers?

Beyond the Madison cocoon, in Wisconsin's other 71 counties, which voted 55 to 44 percent for Walker in 2010, such arguments are evidently proving persuasive. Maybe liberals should listen to Rush every so often.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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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Note

I am off to hospital again later today -- for what I hope will be the last time for a while.

How much if anything I will be able to blog for a few days is uncertain.

Bain Capitalism 101

How does a rapacious company get repeat business?

Watching Obama campaign ads or MSNBC, one could easily come to the conclusion that Bain Capital makes money by destroying the companies it owns. So for voters unsure about the business that Mitt Romney founded but still reluctant to trust the financial analysis offered by community organizers, some perspective might be helpful.

The basic Obama-liberal critique goes like this: Bain buys a company, loads it with debt and then sucks out cash before foisting the wounded business upon an unsuspecting buyer or a bankruptcy court. In the risk-taking world of private equity such a scenario can certainly happen, and it's true that Bain likes management fees and dividends as much as the next partnership.

But then how to explain the history of Bain Capital? Mr. Romney started the business in 1984. The company has since bought and sold many businesses and executed thousands of financing transactions.

If Bain's standard operating procedure were to hand the next owner of one of its companies a ticking bankruptcy package, how is Bain still finding buyers nearly three decades later? And who would agree to lend money to a company backed by Bain? Wouldn't word have gotten around by, say, 1987 that Bain's portfolio companies weren't creditworthy?

The liberal critique of private equity assumes that the financial industry is full of saps who have been eager to lose money across the table from Bain for 28 years. This is the same financial industry that the same liberal critics say is full of greedy schemers when it comes to padding their own pay or ripping off consumers. But financiers can't be both knaves and diabolical geniuses at the same time.

Learning about Bain successes like Staples or Gartner or Steel Dynamics confirms the logical conclusion that Bain had to be creating value along the way—for investors, for lenders, and that means for workers too.

SOURCE

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Judge halts enforcement of indefinite detention provisions of National Defense Authorization Act

A few months back, NetRightDaily reported on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and how it threatens to dramatically impact the lives of citizens and non-citizens alike. If you are suspected of terrorist activity in any capacity, you can be detained indefinitely until the matter is decided.

Once this law was passed, it sent a shockwave of concern throughout the nation. It seemed as if this crazy law was put in place as an override switch for the Fifth Amendment in the event that the powers that be conjure a need to go around it. Although Obama claimed that the act was only a way to add stability to the Authorization for Use of Military Force for Terrorists Act (AUMF), the country wasn’t too sure.

As you can imagine, the thought of being captured and jailed indefinitely by your own government, in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” just doesn’t sit well with most Americans.

Judge Katherine Forrest, from the Southern District Court of New York, made impressive headway in the fight for freedom when she temporarily stopped the implementation of the law.

Plaintiffs in the case have alleged that the NDAA violates “both their free speech and associational rights guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution,” wrote Forrest in her decision enjoining enforcement of Section 1021 of the law.

Her decision deposed the government’s three main arguments in support of immediately enforcing the heinous bill. One of the arguments made by the government is that because none of the plaintiffs had ever been detained because of the law, that they had no standing to contest it.

Plaintiffs countered, however, that the law was having a chilling effect on activities otherwise protected by the First Amendment. They prevailed.

Forrest wrote that the plaintiffs had “shown an actual fear that their expressive and associational activities” might result in being indefinitely detained, as “each of them has put forward uncontroverted evidence of concrete — non-hypothetical — ways in which the presence of the legislation has already impacted those expressive and associational activities”.

After all, whether or not someone has felt the full force of a law, it may still affect the way they live their lives. The long arm of the law has been a guideline for behavior as long as laws have existed. Their entire purpose is to streamline the attitude of citizens to conform to society’s norms. The reason that most people don’t steal, drive drunk, or take drugs is because those activities are against the law and people fear the repercussions that come with breaking the law.

When asked about this issue, Americans for Limited Government president Bill Wilson commented that, “The Bill of Rights was designed to work under all circumstances, including wartime, and as such the authorization to use force in Afghanistan cannot supersede constitutional protections to due process.”

He added, “Nor can the government target citizens for activities otherwise protected by the First Amendment as violations of law or threats to national security.”

Although Obama’s administration maintains that the NDAA is only a reinforcement of the AUMF, Judge Forrest found that indeed the NDAA may expand the government’s power, and now will expose the law to full and complete scrutiny over whether it is constitutional. Let’s hope that this law gets thrown out in court. Judge Forrest’s initial actions are a good step in the right direction.

SOURCE

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An iron curtain coming for Americans?

Call it the return of the Reichsfluchtsteuer. The president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, did not use the term. But that is what Mr. Norquist was talking about when he spoke to The Hill newspaper about the legislation proposed by Senator Schumer, the Democrat of New York, to tax at a 30 percent rate the $2 billion capital gains of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who renounced his American citizenship before Facebook’s initial public offering.

"I think Schumer can probably find the legislation to do this. It existed in Germany in the 1930s and Rhodesia in the ’70s and in South Africa as well,” Mr. Norquist said. “He probably just plagiarized it and translated it from the original German."

The Reichsfluchsteuer, or Reich flight tax, that the Nazis imposed on Jews trying to flee in the 1930s was 25 percent; Mr. Schumer and his Senate colleague Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, want 30 percent. Give Mr. Schumer some credit for creativity, Mr. Norquist; the New Yorker did not just translate, he also raised the rate.

Mr. Schumer is an easy target, but the blame for this one is bipartisan, as is so often the case in Washington. The speaker of the House, John Boehner, a Republican, told ABC News’ “This Week” program that Mr. Saverin’s exit from America was “outrageous” and that he would support Mr. Schumer’s legislation if it is necessary to prevent people from leaving America to avoid taxes. The law that imposed the exit tax Mr. Saverin was trying to avoid, the Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2008, was signed into law by a Republican president, George W. Bush, after being passed in the Senate by unanimous consent and in the House by a vote of 403 to 0.

Mr. Schumer would surely bridle at having his exit-tax policy compared to that of the Nazis, as would Mr. Boehner, so let me be clear: The Reichsfluchsteuer was originally imposed not by the Nazis, but, rather, on December 8, 1931, by the pre-Hitler, centrist government of Heinrich Brüning, who had a doctoral degree in economics.

As Howard Ellis wrote in Exchange Control In Central Europe, published in 1941 by Harvard University Press, “it is worth remarking that the National Socialists inherited it from Social Democrat supported coalition governments after nearly two years of elaboration.”

Others have observed that it is not the only parallel that can be drawn between today’s era and the Weimar Republic, which featured high unemployment, deficits, and the threat of inflation.

Ellis writes that the exchange control policy remained in place “because it was an instrument par excellence of political power,” and concludes, “the political predecessors of Hitler nurtured an institution which paved the way for totalitarianism.”

SOURCE

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Shameless Bias by Omission

You'd think the largest legal action in American history in defense of religious liberty would be a major news story. But ABC, CBS and NBC don't judge news events by their inherent importance as relates to the future of our freedoms. They deliver the news according to a simple formula: Does it or doesn't it advance the re-election of Barack Obama? If it doesn't, it isn't news.

On May 21, 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations sued the Obama administration over its ridiculously narrow idea of how a "religious institution" can be defined under the Obamacare law. Never has the Catholic Church -- or any order, for that matter -- undertaken something of this magnitude. It's truly jaw-dropping that ABC and NBC completely ignored this action on their evening newscasts, while "CBS Evening News" devoted just 19 seconds to this historic event.

No, let's be blunt: They spiked the news.

This is the worst example of shameless bias by omission I have seen in the quarter-century history of the Media Research Center. We recall the Chinese Communists withholding from its citizenry for 20 years the news that the U.S. had landed on the moon because it reflected poorly on their government. Never, never would the U.S. "news" media behave thusly -- they just did.

This is not an honest mistake. It was not an editorial oversight by the broadcast networks. It did not occur too late for the evening deadline. This was a deliberate and insidious withholding of national news to protect the "Chosen One" who ABC, CBS and NBC have worked so hard to elect and for whom they are now abusing their journalistic influence. Even when CBS mentioned the suit -- ever so briefly -- like so many others, they deliberately distorted the issue by framing it as a contraception lawsuit when it is a much broader religious freedom issue -- and they know it.

This should be seen as a very dark cloud on Obama's political horizon. The Catholic Church, with 60 million Americans describing themselves as Catholic, has unleashed legal Armageddon on the administration, promising "we will not comply" with a health law that strips Catholics of their religious liberty. If this isn't "news," then there's no such thing as news.

This should be leading newscasts and the subject of special, in-depth reports. So what trumped this story? ABC led their evening broadcast and devoted an incredible 3 minutes and 30 seconds to the sentencing of the Rutgers student who spied on his gay roommate with a web camera. NBC aired an entire story on a lunar eclipse. Both CBS and NBC devoted their first 3 minutes and 30 seconds to prostate-cancer screening.

Catholic taxpayers who help fund National Public Radio were also ignored on the evening newscast with that sad joke of a title -- "All Things Considered."

If only some deceased priest had been accused to sexual improprieties in 1953 ... then Catholics would be seen as newsworthy. These "news" operations can't argue these are more important stories than the loss of religious freedom in America.

The print press isn't much better. For the Washington Post, there was a little one-column story buried on page A6. That fish wrap known as USA Today had a really tiny headline and 128-word item at the very bottom of A2. The New York Times had a perfunctory 419-word dispatch on page A17.

Two pages later, the Times defined as "news" what it prefers to report on Catholics: "2 Philadelphia Priests Punished in Sexual Abuse Cases." The paper noted one priest has been suspended from ministry for two years and the other had been placed on leave in December based on abuse that occurred about 40 years ago. This wasn't really "news" as a current matter, but this is always and everywhere the bigoted narrative the Times prefers to perpetuate.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops used the word "horror" to describe what Team Obama is mandating. On the only broadcast show to give him coverage, CBS "This Morning" anchor Charlie Rose asked Dolan if the White House misled him on this issue. Dolan began by saying he hesitated to question the president's sincerity -- even though anyone who heard Obama's 2009 commencement speech at Notre Dame about "honoring the conscience" of his opponents on abortion has proven he is completely insincere.

The cardinal said, "I worry, Charlie, that members of his administration might not particularly understand our horror at the restrictive nature of this exemption that they're giving us, that for the first time that we can remember, a bureau of the federal government seems to be radically intruding into the internal definition of what a church is. We can't seem to get that across."

He's not finding much help getting anything across from those supposed "mediators" of the national press corps.

SOURCE

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Stopping Vote Fraud the Kansas Way

The most encouraging news out of Kansas is that the state is taking the lead in cleaning up registration rolls so that people won’t vote in two states or after they’ve died, which is alarming news for Chicago and other cities where the dead vote early and often.

The architect of what is called the Kansas Project, or the Interstate Cross Check Project, is Kris W. Kobach, the Republican Secretary of State who was elected in 2010. Mr. Kobach has set up a database with 14 other states: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Tennessee. Six more states are considering joining. More information on ballot integrity is at ProtectYourVote.us.

“Double voting is a real common form of voter fraud,” Mr. Kobach told me in a phone interview. “But it’s easy to discover and to prosecute. You have a rock-solid legal case that the crime was committed.”

He noted that Arizona recently found 500 voters still on Arizona’s rolls who are also registered in one of the other 14 states. Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler used the cooperative agreement to turn up several people who had voted in both Colorado and Kansas in 2010.

Vote fraud has been around since elections began, but has been a more persistent vice in America since Bill Clinton in 1993 signed the National Voter Registration Act (“Motor Voter Law”), which requires states to offer voter registration to people when they obtain driver’s licenses or apply for welfare or unemployment benefits. States must purge people who died, moved out of state, are convicted of crimes or listed more than once, but two federal election cycles must pass before a name is removed.

“Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” writes John Fund in his book Stealing Elections. “States also had to permit mail-in voter registration, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official.”

In 2002, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) tightened vote counting systems and spawned statewide databases. The latter are a gold mine for researchers such as those at the Pew Center on the States, which recently reported that 1.8 million dead people remain on voter rolls. As usual, Democrats are hysterically attacking any anti-fraud reforms.

More HERE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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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Is Calvin a Democrat?



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Government Propaganda Comes to America: What Took So Long?

By Oleg, a former Soviet citizen

The long-awaited Progressive World of Next Tuesday has just gotten closer with the passage of an amendment in Congress that legalizes government propaganda. What could possibly go wrong with that? It worked so well in the USSR!

Drawing simplified, two-dimensional people on a propaganda poster is the same as flattening individuals under an ideological press, squeezing out and discarding their humanity and leaving some single common trait - class, gender, race, profession, ethnicity - in order to establish a simplified, two-dimensional vision of the world in the minds of target audiences.

Complex, multi-dimensional ideas are not likely to spur large groups of perfect strangers to unite in a swift, coordinated action. That can only be accomplished with a simplified message that isolates a single common characteristic in different people and exaggerates it to the point of existential importance, while suppressing more essential individual characteristics. As the secondary characteristics become primary and vice versa - voila - the individual is being sacrificed to the collective.

As an added benefit, this amendment will feed all the progressive artists congregating at the NEA trough. It just so happens that, as a former Soviet citizen, I used to create motivational visual agitation posters for the Communist Party committee in Siberia. May I apply for a grant?

Here, I just created a few posters on spec. Let's see if the American public is down with such a self-image. Feel free to contribute!





More HERE (See the original for links)

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The looting of savers

Have you got money in the bank? You're going to be a patsy

By economic historian Martin Hutchinson

The French and Greek elections have made the “austerity” programs favored by Angela Merkel and other sensible policymakers seem politically highly unattractive (never mind that the spending cuts proposed by the austere have almost universally not happened, while tax increases have been onerous.) Consequently, Keynesians worldwide are recommending further bouts of government spending combined with partial repudiation of debt. Like the disgraceful monetary policies also peddled by these people, these recommendations amount to the wholesale looting of savers in favor of profligate borrowers and bloated public sectors. It’s worth reminding ourselves of the long-term consequences of such folly.

One of John Maynard Keynes’ principal crimes against sound economics was his demonization of savers. Calling for the “euthanasia of the rentier” he proposed the paradox of thrift, whereby savers in a recession are supposed to damage the ability for the economy to recover by depressing aggregate demand. Like Keynes’ equally spurious calls for increased government spending as a stimulus, this demonization of savers has been used by intellectually dishonest politicians of the left and squishy center to justify policies that have the effect of robbing savers, whether through inflation, excessive taxation or repudiation of government debt.

In reality, saving is the essential precondition for capital investment, and therefore for economic growth. Societies with inadequate savings cannot generally pull themselves out of poverty, however abundant their natural resources. You only have to look at the track record over the last half century of Asian societies, which mostly have a high cultural propensity to save, compared with Latin American societies that do not. Whereas countries like Argentina or Brazil were richer than Korea and Taiwan, little poorer than Singapore or Japan and far richer than China in 1960, today the comparison has reversed.

One of my major objections to the activities of the World Bank and the IMF is their downgrading of the importance of saving. Those institutions frequently propose high taxes on investment returns, and seem to be under the impression that the only way to start a new company is with a government grant or an investment by a major international private equity fund, such the World Bank’s offshoot the International Finance Corporation. As the Solyndra example in the United States showed, the government is an exceptionally bad venture capitalist. In addition, it can be stated with considerable confidence that enterprises that require $500 million up-front investments before having made a profit or even significant revenue are very unlikely to succeed in the long term.

Middle class saving is the key to enterprise formation in any society. Even when venture capital companies exist, as in the United States, they rapidly get drawn away from genuine venture capital towards the much easier money available in leveraged buyouts. Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, for example, began by providing genuine venture capital to Tom Stemberg’s Staples, but rapidly discovered that most such investments were too small and the returns too slow, and switched to leveraged buyouts. The vast majority of new ventures, innovative or not, depend on the savings of their founders and their founders’ network of relatives, friends and business contacts, to get going before institutional venture capitalists will look at them.

Nurturing middle class savings is thus the most important task of government. John Locke said “Government has no other end, but the preservation of property” and he didn’t overstate the position by much. Quite my most gratifying banking experience was designing a simple bond law for the Republic of Macedonia, which allowed 800,000 Macedonian savers, whose savings had been expropriated ten years earlier by the former Yugoslavia, to get most of their savings back immediately. The country’s improvement in economic performance following the implementation of that law has been marked, and extremely pleasing.

Worldwide monetary policies, in place now for almost 4 years, are uniquely unkind to savers. By forcing interest rates, both short-term and long-term below the rate of inflation, they force savers to receive a negative real return or take large risks to achieve a positive one. That’s the reason for the success of speculative bubbles like that in Facebook shares, which have created a market capitalization larger than General Motors off a stream of advertising revenue only 4% the size of the company’s market capitalization. One commentator described the Facebook IPO as the largest “pump and dump” in stock market history. It has a lot of company for that distinction (when normed by contemporary Gross Domestic Product.) Certainly the South Sea Company and the Mississippi Company, those twin British and French bubbles of 1719-20, had more commercial reality to them. After all Robert Knight, the South Sea Company cashier, who absconded to Antwerp with the company’s records, appeared before potential investors in a well-powdered periwig, not a hoodie!

The latest Keynesian solution to the unwillingness of debt markets to finance further bouts of government spending is to spend yet more money, but to finance it by monetary expansion and partial repudiation of debt. This would get debt levels down, but would close the markets to further debt issues, since investors are not so foolish as to lend to borrowers who have already defaulted on their obligations. Even Argentina, which has enjoyed a remarkable economic boom since defaulting on its debt in 2005, has not been able to return to the capital markets, much to the surprise of its leaders. Thus this approach, if undertaken directly, is unlikely to lead to success.

There is however an alternative approach, which currently appears more and more attractive to distraught Keynesians, and that is financial repression. Under this technique, which was most successfully applied by the British government to work down its excessive debt level at the end of World War II, regulations are used to prevent domestic savers from moving their money into international assets. Monetary authorities are then encouraged to promote inflation, to the extent that domestic interest rates are kept below the rate of inflation. Using this technique, governments can run deficits for a generation or more, while the value of their debts is reduced by inflation. Add in a stiff income tax, to penalize further the nominal interest returns of savers foolish enough to buy government debt, and the government’s debt position can be retrieved quite nicely over a 20-30 period – at the cost of the nation’s savings and the rest of the economy. Needless to say savers, especially those fool enough to believe in the government’s promises to maintain a sound currency, were robbed blind and ended their lives impoverished.

Repression is clearly in the sights of the left at this time – after all, savers generally tend to vote for the right. The idea of looting their political opponents to increase public spending, while having that looting proceed invisibly, so that their fingers are not on the weapon, is attractive to leftist politicians everywhere – it is in a sense THE central flaw of democracy. Of course, the most blame should attach to those politicians like Harold Macmillan, Richard Nixon and, it increasingly seems likely, David Cameron, who rely on savers’ votes to get elected and then betray their own supporters.

Fiscal austerity is needed, but as France and Greece have shown, it is unlikely to win its proponents much electoral support. That is particularly the case if, as in Britain the austerity consists primarily of tax increases, so that the economy declines while the deficit remains unaffected by the apparent austerity. In any case fiscal austerity alone is not enough. If it is not combined with sound monetary policy, savings rates will decline and the savings pool itself will be drained by negative real interest rates. In the long term, that can only lead to impoverishment; in a globalized world, the skills of Western employees are not so superior to those in emerging markets that they can expect to retain higher living standards without a healthy pool of capital to accompany them.

The need now is thus for a revolution in monetary policy, that raises the risk-free interest rate well above the rate of inflation, and allows savers at last to receive a real return on their money without investing in the likes of Facebook. It probably won’t happen until inflation gets seriously out of hand, so my advice to savers is this: make sure a substantial percentage of your money is in gold, in order that you will survive the painful burst of inflation that is needed before global monetary authorities are brought to their senses.

SOURCE

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What Should You Believe? Government Stats or Your Own Eyes?

Price inflation is running at an annualized rate of 4.8 percent, according to official data released Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That is more than double the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent annual inflation. And as millions of Americans have come to learn since the government 40 years ago began playing games with this and other economic statistics to make things look better than they really are, there is good reason to take this latest report with a shaker or two of salt. Even if we accept the figure at face value, there are good reasons to scoff.

For instance, at the American Institute for Economic Research, the economists strip out seldom-purchased big-ticket items that the Bureau of Labor Statistics leaves in its calculations. The AIER’s Everyday Price Index studies the prices of things people buy daily, weekly, or monthly, such as groceries, prescription medicine, telephone and cable services, etc. That’s the inflation rate that most directly affects people.

The Everyday Price Index shows inflation climbing 8.1 percent over the last year. At an 8.1 percent rate of inflation, the purchasing power of the dollar falls by half in nine years.

More HERE

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Red Ink drowns economies rather than grow them

Headlines blared over the weekend that Obama was winning his way by convincing the G-8 countries (U.S., Germany, Japan, United Kingdom, Italy, France, Canada and Russia) to pursue a policy of “growth” rather than “austerity” in dealing with the crushing sovereign debt crisis in Europe and around the world.

In the Orwellian world we live in, “growth” means more spending, and “austerity” means painful cuts which destroy economies.

One would think that a simple survey of the U.S. economic shambles would put an end to the government spending = growth myth. CBS News reports that Obama has accumulated almost $5 trillion in new debt, exceeding the total of his predecessor’s eight years in office in just over three.

If growth followed massive government spending, then the U.S. economy should be humming along rather than the current anemic 2.2 percent in the first quarter of 2012. When adjusted for inflation in commodities, the real GDP for the first quarter stood at 1.7 percent, a far cry from the Obama predicted 3 percent rate for the year.

Our economy has an 8.1 percent unemployment rate that has dropped not due to job creation, but due to people dropping out of the workforce. In fact, 319,000 fewer Americans are employed today than when Obama took office — quite a record of growth for Europe to follow.

Obama’s “growth” agenda has been fueled by about $3 trillion in stimulus including the failed $800 billion fiscal stimulus and more than $2.5 trillion in monetary stimulus courtesy of Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve Bank.

Now, Obama is working on the European leaders to push them toward policies that would push down the accelerator on sovereign debt creation which has been proven to only make the overall debt crisis worse.

Ironically, the so-called “austerity” alternative that Obama is urging to be rejected has not even been tried as countries like Greece have not made the choice to cut their budgets enough to staunch the flow of red ink, so there is no baseline in the current crisis to show that budget balancing doesn’t generate growth.

The sad fact is that those who cling to the failed socialist policies of the past will not give up the illusion that Keynesian economics is anything more than a theory designed to gradually slip free people into the bondage of ever growing government debt.

As the world watches these leaders of the largest “democracies” on the planet engage in meetings designed to save the crumbling European socialist infrastructure and the banks that lent the money to enable it, we see the clash of national histories and cultures.

Germany, with its collective memory of the hyperinflationary despair caused by massive deficit spending after WWI which led to the rise of Adolph Hitler, chooses the route of fiscal responsibility. Even with this history, the German debt to gross domestic product has risen from 58.8 percent in 2002 to 81.2 percent in 2012.

The United States under Obama, has embraced fiscal recklessness under the mantle of “growth” and has seen our debt to GDP increase from 64.4 percent in 2008 to crashing the 100 percent mark in 2012.

Just so the U.S. doesn’t feel too lonely having our national debt exceed our total annual economic production, fellow G-8 member Italy has a GDP to debt ratio of 120 percent. Of course, Italy is considered a prime candidate for needing a bailout to prevent them from defaulting on their debts, so one wonders how wise it is to include them in the room when discussing whether the prudent economic policy is politically difficult budget cuts or an Alice in Wonderland spending spree. Not to be outdone, Japan has beaten everyone in the race toward fiscal insanity having blown past the 200 percent threshold and having twenty years of economic stagnation.

So, now Obama wants to try to sell the world on the concept of additional spending being the key to future economic prosperity. Hopefully, the rest of the world treats his economic prescriptions with the same respect that the U.S. Senate treated his budget and just says no.

No matter how hard Obama and the world’s creditors try to redefine the meaning of growth and turn common sense on its head, more government deficit spending can only further stagnate economic growth. After all, if deficit spending created economic growth, the U.S. debt to GDP would be shrinking in response to our unprecedented deficits, and not even Obama can argue that red ink is actually black.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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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Big Lies in Politics

Thomas Sowell

The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy them, and only in the short run. The current outbreaks of riots in Europe show what happens when the truth catches up with both the politicians and the people in the long run.

Among the biggest lies of the welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic is the notion that the government can supply the people with things they want but cannot afford. Since the government gets its resources from the people, if the people as a whole cannot afford something, neither can the government.

There is, of course, the perennial fallacy that the government can simply raise taxes on "the rich" and use that additional revenue to pay for things that most people cannot afford. What is amazing is the implicit assumption that "the rich" are all such complete fools that they will do nothing to prevent their money from being taxed away. History shows otherwise.

After the Constitution of the United States was amended to permit a federal income tax, in 1916, the number of people reporting taxable incomes of $300,000 a year or more fell from well over a thousand to fewer than three hundred by 1921.

Were the rich all getting poorer? Not at all. They were investing huge sums of money in tax-exempt securities. The amount of money invested in tax-exempt securities was larger than the federal budget, and nearly half as large as the national debt.

This was not unique to the United States or to that era. After the British government raised their income tax on the top income earners in 2010, they discovered that they collected less tax revenue than before. Other countries have had similar experiences. Apparently the rich are not all fools, after all.

In today's globalized world economy, the rich can simply invest their money in countries where tax rates are lower.

So, if you cannot rely on "the rich" to pick up the slack, what can you rely on? Lies.

Nothing is easier for a politician than promising government benefits that cannot be delivered. Pensions such as Social Security are perfect for this role. The promises that are made are for money to be paid many years from now -- and somebody else will be in power then, left with the job of figuring out what to say and do when the money runs out and the riots start.

There are all sorts of ways of postponing the day of reckoning. The government can refuse to pay what it costs to get things done. Cutting what doctors are paid for treating Medicare patients is one obvious example.

That of course leads some doctors to refuse to take on new Medicare patients. But this process takes time to really make its full impact felt -- and elections are held in the short run. This is another growing problem that can be left for someone else to try to cope with in future years.

Increasing amounts of paperwork for doctors in welfare states with government-run medical care, and reduced payments to those doctors, in order to stave off the day of bankruptcy, mean that the medical profession is likely to attract fewer of the brightest young people who have other occupations available to them -- paying more money and having fewer hassles. But this too is a long-run problem -- and elections are still held in the short run.

Eventually, all these long-run problems can catch up with the wonderful-sounding lies that are the lifeblood of welfare state politics. But there can be a lot of elections between now and eventually -- and those who are good at political lies can win a lot of those elections.

As the day of reckoning approaches, there are a number of ways of seeming to overcome the crisis. If the government is running out of money, it can print more money. That does not make the country any richer, but it quietly transfers part of the value of existing money from people's savings and income to the government, whose newly printed money is worth just as much as the money that people worked for and saved.

Printing more money means inflation -- and inflation is a quiet lie, by which a government can keep its promises on paper, but with money worth much less than when the promises were made.

Is it so surprising voters with unrealistic hopes elect politicians who lie about being able to fulfill those hopes?

SOURCE

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Domestic propaganda OK?

An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill….

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.

The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.
The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.

In a little noticed press release earlier in the week — buried beneath the other high-profile issues in the $642 billion defense bill, including indefinite detention and a prohibition on gay marriage at military installations — Thornberry warned that in the Internet age, the current law “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.”

The bill’s supporters say the informational material used overseas to influence foreign audiences is too good to not use at home, and that new techniques are needed to help fight Al-Qaeda, a borderless enemy whose own propaganda reaches Americans online.

Critics of the bill say there are ways to keep America safe without turning the massive information operations apparatus within the federal government against American citizens.

SOURCE

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Should we obey all laws?

By Walter E. Williams

Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Let's think about whether all acts of Congress deserve our respect and obedience. Suppose Congress enacted a law -- and the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional -- requiring American families to attend church services at least three times a month. Should we obey such a law? Suppose Congress, acting under the Constitution's commerce clause, enacted a law requiring motorists to get eight hours of sleep before driving on interstate highways. Its justification might be that drowsy motorists risk highway accidents and accidents affect interstate commerce. Suppose you were a jury member during the 1850s and a free person were on trial for assisting a runaway slave, in clear violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. Would you vote to convict and punish?

A moral person would find each one of those laws either morally repugnant or to be a clear violation of our Constitution. You say, "Williams, you're wrong this time. In 1859, in Ableman v. Booth, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 constitutional." That court decision, as well as some others in our past, makes my case. Moral people can't rely solely on the courts to establish what's right or wrong. Slavery is immoral; therefore, any laws that support slavery are also immoral. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, "to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions (is) a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."

Soon, the Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of Obamacare, euphemistically titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. There is absolutely no constitutional authority for Congress to force any American to enter into a contract to buy any good or service. But if the court rules that Obamacare is constitutional, what should we do?

State governors and legislators ought to summon up the courage of our Founding Fathers in response to the 5th Congress' Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Led by Jefferson and James Madison, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 were drafted where legislatures took the position that the Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional. They said, "Resolved, That the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government ... (and) whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force." The 10th Amendment to our Constitution supports that vision: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

In a word, if the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare is constitutional, citizens should press their state governors and legislatures to nullify the law. You say, "Williams, the last time states got into this nullification business, it led to a war that cost 600,000 lives." Two things are different this time. First, most Americans are against Obamacare, and secondly, I don't believe that you could find a U.S. soldier who would follow a presidential order to descend on a state to round up or shoot down fellow Americans because they refuse to follow a congressional order to buy health insurance.

Congress has already gone far beyond the powers delegated to it by the Constitution. In Federalist No. 45, Madison explained: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." That vision has been turned on its head; it's the federal government whose powers are numerous and indefinite, and those of the state are now few and defined.

Former slave Frederick Douglass advised: "Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. ... The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

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Obama: Promises Broken, Promises Kept

President Obama has broken many of his promises aimed at the general public and jobless Americans, but he has kept promises to his left-wing base that involved divisive wedge issues.

He promised to create 7 million new jobs on seven different occasions in 2008. But these jobs have not materialized: “just 16 states have seen job growth since President Obama took office,” overwhelmingly conservative states like Texas that have rejected liberal economic policies. “The remaining states have lost a combined 1.4 million jobs since January 2009.” Unemployment has risen, despite the fact that many people have given up looking for a job, concealing increases in joblessness. (The broadest measure of real unemployment is 15.6 percent.)

President Obama promised to cut the deficit at least six times. He also promised a “net spending cut.” These promises were swiftly broken. In 2009, the president broke them in a big way with his very first proposed budget. It mandated such large increases in spending that budget deficits would rise by $4.8 trillion under it to $9.3 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

He has broken at least ten other campaign promises, including seven promises in signing the $800 billion stimulus package (which will shrink the economy in the “long run”), and one promise in signing the Lilly Ledbetter law and the SCHIP tax increase.


On the other hand, President Obama kept his pledge to federalize hate crimes, which were already prohibited by state laws, by signing into law a broad federal hate crimes law in 2009. (Obama promised to “place the weight of (his) administration behind the enactment of the Matthew Shepard Act to (federally) outlaw hate crimes.”) Since violent crimes were already prohibited by state law, and most states already had laws increasing penalties for crimes motivated by race or sexual orientation, the principal effect of the 2009 federal hate crimes law was to allow federal prosecutors to reprosecute people had previously been acquitted and found not guilty of a crime in state court, or were never prosecuted in state court because state prosecutors viewed the evidence against them as weak.

And, indeed, one of the purposes of the federal hate crimes law was to take advantage of a loophole in constitutional protections against double jeopardy. As interpreted by the Supreme Court, constitutional protections against double jeopardy prevent a state from reprosecuting a person who has been found not guilty in state court, but do not, owing to the loophole, prevent federal prosecutors from reprosecuting someone after they have been found innocent of the same crime in state court. This loophole is known as the “dual sovereignty” doctrine. The Obama administration may make use of this loophole in a recent high-profile, racially-charged case in Florida. The specter of such reprosecutions led the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and civil-libertarians like Nat Hentoff to oppose the federal hate-crimes law.

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Corruption from a Left-leaning court

Well the dust up about the million dollar meeting in Maui has finally registered with the judges planning on spending some quality meeting time in a tropical paradise. Here's what the court has to say:

As part of the Third Branch of government, the Ninth Circuit is fully aware of its responsibilities as a steward of public funds. The conference is authorized by law "for the purpose of considering the business of the courts and advising means of improving the administration of justice within the circuit." [§ 28 U.S.C. Sec. 333] The conference fully adheres to these goals, providing an exceptional educational program and the opportunity to conduct numerous business meetings that further circuit governance. Judges and other attendees take seriously their obligation to participate fully in the conference. Costs for lodging and air travel to attend the conference are comparative to those found at mainland venues. Any sporting and recreational activities are paid for by individuals and are not reimbursable.

Considering that attendees traveling on government funds will have around $200 a day to spare for meals an incidental expenses (as part of their per diem) which require no direct accounting, the last sentence, while technically true is a bit of misdirection.

But enough with the boring accounting details, let's get to an examination of the schedule. Below is an abbreviated listing of some of the advertised activities:

Saturday, August 11
12:00 p.m. - Conference Registration desk opens

Sunday, August 12
5:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. - Sport Fishing
12:00 p.m. - Golf Tournament

Monday, August 13
9:00 a.m. - Yoga
9:00 a.m. - Surfing Lessons
9:00 a.m. - Stand-up Paddle Board Lessons
12:00 p.m. - Welcome Luncheon & Book Review for Spouses & Guests
2:00 p.m. - Zumba
4:30 p.m. - Opening Program
6:00 p.m. - No-host Cocktail Reception
7:00 p.m. - Maui Dine Around

Tuesday, August 14
9:00 a.m. - Yoga
9:00 a.m. - Surfing Lessons
9:00 a.m. - Stand-up Paddle Board Lessons
1:00 p.m. - Tennis Tournament
2:00 p.m. - Floral Design Workshop (includes flowers & supplies)
7:00 p.m. - District Dinners

Wednesday, August 15
9:00 a.m. - Yoga
9:00 a.m. - Surfing Lessons
9:00 a.m. - Stand-up Paddle Board Lessons
9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. - Day Trip and Tour of Upcountry Maui
11:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. - Gemini Catamaran Snorkel Trip (includes gear & lunch)
2:45 p.m. - A special treat! Ice Cream Social
6:00 p.m. - The Aloha Experience

Thursday, August 16
9:00 a.m. - Yoga
9:00 a.m. - Stand-up Paddle Board Lessons

Oh sure the judges could attend boring meetings and lectures, but it looks like they've got those who want to play hooky covered as well...

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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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America's welfare mess

Every so often, an article crosses your desk that makes you feel like you’ve been hit between the eyes with a sledgehammer. Even if you have a solid understanding of the topic, and you notice that the facts at hand match your previous suspicions, somehow you still have to keep a grip on yourself because it is so staggering. That is what happened to me while reading Michael Tanner’s recent report for the Cato Institute on the American welfare system.

Tanner is a recognized expert on our welfare system, having written two books on the subject during the 1990’s, when people were actually making an effort to restructure the welfare state. In fact, his work helped form the philosophical basis for the landmark welfare reform enacted in 1996. Since then, Tanner has been studying other areas of public policy, but he recently returned to look at the current welfare structure. Tanner told me that even he was shocked at what he found.

To be fair, Mr. Tanner admits that some of the recent increases in welfare expenditures are due to the recession. But he also observes that the escalation in welfare spending has been far greater during the current recession than the previous ones. Furthermore, people have hung on to their welfare participation for a much longer period of time. That being said, our Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, was recently on Meet the Press and blamed the cause of the deficit on guess who -- the Bush Administration. Not according to Tanner’s study.

There are currently 126 separate federal anti-poverty (welfare) programs. That stupefying figure includes 33 separate housing programs run by four cabinet departments, 21 programs providing food or food assistance in three cabinet departments and one federal agency, eight health care programs in five different agencies within Health and Human Services, and, to top it off, 27 cash or general assistance programs spread throughout seven cabinet departments and six agencies. Tanner concluded that for at least the past 10 years, we’ve had more than 100 federal anti-poverty programs!

If you’re not already confused, let me fix that: the players change so often that ultimately you need a scorecard. In 2011, four obscure programs – Vista, Even Start, the Senior Companion Program (which used to be called grandchildren), and the Foster Grandparent Program – were eliminated. But of course, new ones were created. We now have the Capacity Building for Sustainable Communities Fund, the Emergency Homeowners Loan Program, and the Choice Neighborhood Planning Grants. (I probably qualify for this one because I’ve got some pretty choice neighbors.)

How much are we spending on all this? Well, pull up your socks. Tanner calculates that the federal government lays out $44,544 for a “poor” family of three, and that state and local governments throw in another $20,610 (some of which, I assume, comes from federal block grants). This means that a family of three can, in theory, get $67,154 from the government in housing, health care, food, and cash assistance. So here’s the big question: why bother working?

Then there’s the other big question: with all these handouts, why hasn’t poverty been eliminated? A family of three is considered below the poverty line when their income is less than $18,530, so how can anyone still be living in poverty in America when we’re paying out benefits equivalent to almost four times that amount? Certainly, a lot of the money goes to overhead. With 33 federal housing programs – not to mention the ones at the state and local level – there’s an army of middle-class government employees getting their pockets lined. Unfortunately, because of the complexity of the budget process (or lack of budget since the Senate has not passed one in three years), Tanner can’t quite nail down that overhead figure. But he does comment in his report on the people who profit from these programs, writing: “Anti-poverty programs are usually more concerned with protecting the prerogatives of the bureaucracy than with actually fighting poverty.”

What are we getting for our $668 billion a year? It’s certainly not a reduction in poverty. Combine the federal largesse with the $284 billion spent by state and local governments and we are handing out almost $1 trillion a year. Since the beginning of the Great Society in 1965, we’ve increased our combined anti-poverty spending threefold as a percentage of GDP, yet the overall poverty rate has stayed constant with only a modest dip during the mid-1990’s as a result of the welfare reform bill.

Because of the bizarre maze of federal and state programs, it’s nearly impossible to analyze due to the diffusion of the efforts through the multitude of programs. When Mitt Romney talks about reorganizing government, he should emphasize this chaotic situation as an example of how to streamline government and save billions. Massive elimination and consolidation of these programs would not only conserve precious tax dollars, but better serve the recipients of these programs. The tangled mass of programs – along with the lack of co-coordinated oversight – leads only to confusion and fraud, neither of which helps anyone (except the criminals.)

This report demonstrates (yet again) the inefficient disaster of our federal government. Mr. Tanner should be hired to advise the Romney campaign, because we all know that Mr. Obama will never effectively spearhead any change to this morass. And change we need or we will drown.

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Government waste

Most of my work on government stimulus focuses on economic theory and evidence. But every so often it’s a good idea to remind ourselves of the ridiculous ways that government wastes money. Here are some details from a boondoggle in West Virginia.

Nobody told Hurricane librarian Rebecca Elliot that the $22,600 Internet router in the branch library’s storage closet was powerful enough to serve an entire college campus. Nobody told Elliot how much the router cost or who paid for it. Workers just showed up and installed the device. They left behind no instructions, no user manual. The high-end router serves four public computer terminals at the small library in Putnam County. …The state of West Virginia is using $24 million in federal economic stimulus money to put high-powered Internet computer routers in small libraries, elementary schools and health clinics, even though the pricey equipment is designed to serve major research universities, medical centers and large corporations, a Gazette-Mail investigation has found. …The Cisco 3945 series routers, which cost $22,600 each, are built to serve “tens of thousands” of users or device connections, according to a Cisco sales agent. The routers are designed to serve a minimum of 500 users. Yet state broadband project officials directed the installation of the stimulus-funded Cisco routers in West Virginia schools with fewer than a dozen computers and libraries that have only a single terminal for patrons.

Sounds like the government could have bought every user a laptop and squandered less money.

It’s important to realize that this type of boondoggle is the rule, not the exception. Every so often, we see stories about absurd waste, such as the $423,000 study to find out that men don’t like to wear condoms, the Pentagon spending $900 on a $7 control switch, or a $100,000 library grant to a city without a library.

We should get upset about these examples. But remember that the cartoon below is exactly right. The waste, fraud, and pork that we find out about is dwarfed by what remains hidden.



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How Do You Compromise with a Progressive?

I forced myself to watch Bill Maher this Friday as I was trying to chart out this column. Thankfully I hadn’t just eaten.

It was sickening to listen as cerebral dwarves Maher and some not-so-bright jackass from the fascist rag The Nation talked about how Republicans and the Tea Party are evil and the cause of all our economic problems while Rhodes Scholar and former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J. sat there smirking like a broken Muppet. The world in which progressives live makes the world J.K. Rowling created for Harry Potter seem normal.

And it wasn’t just the economy conservatives had wrecked. This august panel also blamed conservatives and the Tea Party for what they determined was the rebirth of racism in this country. More than that, they believe racism is worse now that at any time in recent history. The evidence of this, as is often the case with progressives, is their say-so. There’s nothing like being lectured by three wealthy white progressives about the plight of minorities in the world.

Maher’s show is the hollowed-out tree for intellectual elves on the political left to gather and make themselves feel good about their failed ideas… outside of MSNBC, naturally. As such, these elfin academics took a moment to lament the primary loss of Sen. Richard Lugar, R-ish-Ind., to Richard Mourdock because Mourdock doesn’t support “compromise.” That got me wondering – How do you compromise with people like this?

Many progressives scoffed at the concept of a “War on Terrorism.” Many more equated the United States to the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Still others subscribed to the stupidity that if only we’d talk with our attackers, find out what they want and negotiate with them we could avoid attacks in the future.

Putting aside the fact that these are the same people who demand terrorists at Gitmo get a presumption of innocence and due process yet simultaneously call for the head of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case, how do you negotiate with a terrorist?

Turns out it’s strikingly similar to negotiating with a progressive. You don’t. Not at all.

Chief amongst the desires of al Qaeda is us dead and Israel destroyed. Assuming your position is not wanting to be dead and not having Israel destroyed, which can be a lot to ask of far too many progressives these days, what do you compromise on? Allow them to murder some of us and destroy part of Israel?

Progressives’ goal is to raise taxes, spend more, grow government and make an ever-growing number of people dependent on government services, so those people will vote continually to keep them in power. Conservatives, though not necessarily Republicans, seek to bind the government to the Constitution, that pesky document that progressives all too often treat as a small speed bump on their way to their tyrannical Utopia.

Conservatives want less government involvement in people’s lives, smaller, constitutionally limited government and lower taxes for everyone. When two sides are pitted against one another, one side wanting higher taxes and more spending while the other wants lower taxes, or at least no increase, and less spending (or even just a decrease in the rate of increase) how do they compromise? Where is the middle ground?

It’s always the side that wants a bigger, more intrusive, ever-expanding government who wins in that compromise, no matter how much “compromise” there is, because they get more. And the goal is always “more.”

Progressives are like heroin addicts, only less honest. They both want “just one last fix” before they’ve finally had enough and will get serious about quitting. But a junkie will ask you for money for that next fix; progressives simply will deem a need for more of your money and then vote to take it. Neither is ever really done, and “just one more” is never enough with either.

The simple fact is there is no negotiating with terrorists or junkies just as there is no negotiating with progressives. “Compromise” might as well have six fewer letters when it comes to protecting individual liberty because there is simply no room for it anymore. We’ve already given away too much of our founding soul to give away any more and remain the nation, the people, we are meant to be.

There’s a reason all the people of the world who seek freedom and opportunity always try to come here. For them, and for our future, we can not allow politicians to negotiate that away any further in the name of compromise.

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What Air India tells us about state run and monopoly companies

A nice little story here about Air India. It illustrates the dangers of having either state run or monopolistic companies.

Some of the airline’s staggering losses are rooted in exceptionally generous staff benefits. Investigators discovered pilots insisted in staying in five star hotels in New York, Chicago and Mumbai during stop-overs instead of spending the night at cheaper airport hotels.

Significant losses in revenues are due to serving and retired pilots and crew taking business class seats ahead of paying customers. The practice was restricted in 2009 when its chief executive appealed to staff to co-operate and stressed there was no shame in traveling economy.

Despite the restrictions on staff using business class tickets, paying passengers were rejected to make way for Air India staff who were upgraded from economy seats. At one point, Air India’s business class ticket holders were shunted onto rival airlines — at Air India’s cost — because their own staff had occupied the seats.

The temptation for any group of insiders is to make use of that insiderdom to gain privileges. This is as true of CEOs as it is of airline pilots, as true of politicians as it is of scribblers for think tanks. It's simply human nature: when we talk about bureaucrats we call it public choice economics and when we talk about everyone else we call it the blindingly obvious.

The only cure we've got for this is competition: everyone needs to be put in fear of their livelihood about the success of the organisation. To consider that a business class airfare not paid by a customer makes that job more insecure: that the claim of a gargantuan pay deal for inhabiting the corner office makes losing that job more likely. And this really only can be done when the players in the marketplace are indeed playing in a market. One where such behaviour really does bring down a company and thus impose discipline on all others.

Which does pose problems with the politicians. For we've tried having competing governments in the Wars of the Roses and didn't like the result much. Perhaps we'll just have to revert to terminal violence in this difficult case?

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Hopeless Change for the Young

In 2008, Obama inspired legions of young Americans who bought into his "Change you can believe in" campaign message. According to the Pew Research Center, voters under the age of 30 supported Obama over John McCain 66:31 – by far the largest disparity between young voters and other age groups in any presidential election since exit polling began in 1972.

Sadly, three years later, it is more like Hopeless Change that millions of young Americans face. In exchange for that 2:1 vote of confidence they gave Obama in 2008, the 18-29 year-olds are feeling the brunt of the economic stagnation – often by twice the degree of all other age groups. According to the Wall Street Journal, "The U.S. labor market is in a malaise, but young adults are in crisis."

Unfortunately, what has happened is persistent unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment, depressed wages and purchasing power, massive depreciation of home values, doubling of gas prices, rapid increase in food and health care costs, and nearly stagnant economic growth. Virtually everyone and every sector have been negatively impacted, but young Americans just entering the workforce are suffering the most.

A new economic report by Gallup says 32% of 18-29 year-olds in the U.S. workforce were underemployed in April. That number is greater than the previous month of March (30.1%) and also higher than a year ago (30.7%), so nearly three years after the recovery supposedly began the trend is still worsening. Unemployment among this age group (13.6%) is nearly twice as high as any other age group, according to Gallup. Another 18.4% are working part-time, "but wanting to work full time." This trend is also worse than in March as well as April, 2011.

"Today's slow economic growth is a disaster for those unemployed and underemployed as they look for jobs when so few new jobs are being created. For younger Americans as a group, this is a particularly acute issue," summarized Gallup.

More HERE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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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