An iconoclastic analysis of Europe's problems
By economic historian Martin Hutchinson
The 1957 Treaty of Rome bound the members of the EU’s forerunner to an “ever closer” union. Last week’s political developments and the previous disturbances in the market for Eurozone government bonds suggest that this aim may be a mirage, ever receding and never to be attained. Apart from considering Britain’s own position, it’s worth thinking about where the EU itself may end up.
Contrary to much euroskeptic opinion, the euro itself has not been a disaster. If the EU leadership had been wise enough to forbid Greece from entering the euro on false data (helpfully manipulated by the odious Goldman Sachs) it’s likely no “Eurozone crisis” would ever have occurred. Even had the leadership possessed the simple common sense to expel Greece from the euro in spring 2010, when it had become obvious that Greek public accounts were a tissue of lies and that the Greek people were paid about twice what they should be, it’s likely that no broader crisis would have occurred.
In reality, Ireland’s problem was one purely of obligations deriving from its banking crisis, now well on the way to being solved. Portugal and Spain had got in trouble because of years of dozy socialist governments, both now replaced. Only Italy presented a real problem, because of the debt accumulated in its sloppy socialist deficit years of 1970-96. However Italy until a month ago was competently if eccentrically run, by a government that had retained most of its popular standing, and without the atmosphere of Eurozone crisis brought about by the Greeks would probably have done just fine.
The EU authorities’ attempts to deal with the Eurozone crisis, and their proposed solution to it last week, demonstrates the real problem with EU governance. Far from examining a market-based solution to the crisis, they replaced not one but two democratically elected heads of government, in Greece and Italy. They then proposed a new treaty that, without proper legal basis (because it will not be signed by all 27 EU members) will impose another central bureaucracy on the unfortunate European people, taking yet more decision-making authority from anyone who has been elected by a democratic process.
The EU’s central problem is that its solution to everything is to impose an extra layer of government, generally unaccountable to the European people except in the most theoretical sense. It cannot be necessary to have two EU chiefs, neither of them properly elected: Jose Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission and Herman van Rompuy, the President of the European Council. Similarly, the diplomatic bureaucracy set up by High Representative Cathy Ashton duplicates not only the existing bureaucracies of the 27 EU governments, but also an existing EU diplomatic corps.
The downside of this approach were set out in a paper last month, “Economic Performance and Government Size” by none other than the European Central Bank. This finds a statistically significant negative correlation between government size and economic growth. If governments are grouped according to their institutional quality, then the negative correlation between government size and economic growth is greater for governments of low quality. In other words, it does not matter too much whether Scandinavian governments, efficient and non-corrupt, are oversized, but government bloat matters a great deal in places like Italy, Greece and the Balkans.
The negative correlation between government size and economic growth correlates with some less sophisticated analysis I did a few years ago using OECD data, in which I found that slightly over half the variance between annual growth rates was explained by two factors: the size of government and its rate of growth – so that governments that were large and growing rapidly usually plunged their people into a pit of stagnation or even prolonged economic decline. Still, it’s nice to have my work confirmed by so august an institution as the ECB, especially as the ECB’s masters are themselves one of the world’s most intractable oversized bureaucracies.
We can draw two conclusions from the ECB research. First, the EU bureaucracy has especially bad institutional quality, compared to other governments. Its top officials are duplicated three or four times, it has almost no democratic accountability, and its decision-making is both corrupt and ideological, with very little attempt to serve the interests of its citizens. Hence the inexorable growth of EU government can be expected to have an especially large negative effect on European economic performance.
Second, and this is a more positive point, the belief of the EU leadership and most commentators in “stimulus” is cockeyed. The 2009 worldwide burst of government stimulus spending achieved almost nothing other than destabilizing the finances of many world governments; by enlarging government at the expense of the private sector it retarded rather than accelerated growth. Conversely the reversal of stimulus by fiscal tightening will be generally beneficial to economic growth, provided that tightening takes the form of reducing public expenditure. This is why the Irish fiscal tightening appears to be working, as is that in Portugal, while the fiscal tightening in Britain, which so far has taken the form mostly of tax increases, has had a detrimental effect. In Spain, the advent of a center-right government, together with presence of easy fiscal tightening targets in the spending excesses and costly environmental boondoggles of the previous government, should allow fiscal health to be restored fairly easily, given time and freedom from Brussels meddling.
Had Silvio Berlusconi been allowed to remain in power in Italy, fiscal tightening would also have taken the form primarily of reduction in public spending. Under the center-left career bureaucrat Mario Monti, it is taking the form primarily of tax surcharges on millionaires, both on income and on capital, Naturally, the principal effect of these will be capital flight and economic decline. That’s why apart from the hopeless Greece, Italy is now the country in most danger of default.
The bottom line on all this clear. Most of the peoples of Europe genuinely support the European ideal (this is less true in Britain.) However as Europe’s union has grown “ever closer” the Brussels bureaucracy has metastasized, duplicating its functions and becoming ever more Byzantine, corrupt and unaccountable. This in turn has put an ever growing burden on European economies, not simply from the cost of the bureaucrats themselves, but from the wasteful and economically counterproductive programs and regulations they devise. The EU public, asked to pay more and more in taxes to support a bureaucracy that is more and more corrupt and unaccountable and less and less in touch with their wishes, is nearing the point of open rebellion.
The new legislation, which will increase central bureaucratic control over budgets, taxation and fiscal policy and reduce still further the ability of European electorates to remove governments whose policies have failed or are contrary to their wishes, will cause unrest and dissension in most EU countries. Those with referendum provisions will attempt to circumvent those provisions, while those with parliamentary ratification procedures will find ratification of anything substantial very difficult, because of popular opposition. Already two governments, in Greece and Italy, have been removed by the EU bureaucracy and a third, the admirable Radičova government in Slovakia, has been destroyed by the need to fund the Greek bailout. That casualty list will be much longer before meaningful legislation providing for EU budgetary control is in place. Needless to say, it’s unlikely that markets will wait around for the snail-like pace of the EU legislative process, accompanied as it will be by successive government collapses throughout the EU.
In the months and years to come therefore, Britain, far from being isolated, may well find that the European Union, far from drawing “ever closer” is being pulled inexorably apart by the disconnect between an expansive bureaucratic Leviathan and the natural wishes of the European people to live in reasonable local autonomy, without excessive taxation and regulation. The EU was sold to its members as bringing prosperity, but in its current form it brings only economic decline. If we are lucky, Britain will find itself leading a pan-European movement to liberate the peoples of Europe from an EU bureaucracy grown monstrous. If we are not, the monster will win, and Europe will subside into a decline similar to that of the last years of the Soviet Union, with the magnificent economies of Germany and Scandinavia dragged down by endless cross-subsidization of a failure elsewhere that was not inevitable and by a bureaucratic monster whose appetite can never be assuaged.
For Britain, apart from encouraging fissiparous and anti-bureaucrat tendencies elsewhere in the EU, the main objective should be to tiptoe non-confrontationally towards membership of the European Economic Area (currently comprising Norway, Liechtenstein, Iceland and unofficially Switzerland). In such a status, Britain, while remaining in the Single European Market, would be bound by legislation over which it had no influence – but experience has surely by now shown that it has very little influence over EU legislation anyway. However EU control over British domestic institutions would be greatly lessened and the costs of membership reduced. Such a status would also give Britain flexibility. If the remaining countries of the EU succeeded in throwing off the Brussels bureaucracy, Britain would remain a member of an un-bureaucratic, low-cost Single Market. If on the other hand bureaucrat control tightened and the remaining EU become protectionist, impoverished and hostile, Britain could seek other relationships [NAFTA!] and would be not be dragged down by European failure.
The new EU treaty process, and the attempt to assert central fiscal control, has crystallized the position of both Britain and the EU as a whole. We should devoutly wish for its failure, and hope that both Britain and its EU friends and neighbors can gain greater freedom and prosperity thereby.
SOURCE
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The profundity of Leftist ignorance
If Americans listen to Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, and once thing is clear--he is a man who is extraordinarily ignorant of basic economics, how jobs are created, and he abhors the free market. Reid has just reminded Americans just how little he knows (and baneful Reid has become) when, on Monday, Reid announced on the floor of the Senate that “Millionaire job creators are like unicorns,”, “They’re impossible to find, and they don’t exist.”
How silly! How delusional! How dunderheaded! How absolutely wrong!
Thousands upon thousands of jobs have been created by business owners across the United States and, while not all entrepreneurs are so fortunate, many become the "millionaires" that Harry Reid says he can't find. Having a great idea, forming a small business, working hard and watching it grow are, sadly, not part of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s knowledge base.
Reid simply doesn’t believe entrepreneurs exist. Worse yet, he goes out of his way to belittle and ridicule the very entrepreneurial spirit that has built America and made our nation so prosperous that he and his Democrat friends have ample opportunities to loot the wealth that others have created.
Reid's ignorance certainly explains why he and his fellow Democrats are so openly hostile to the business community and why they think only the government can create jobs. Yet, the real tragedy here is that Reid’s “unicorn” speech went largely unnoticed.
Small business owners create 3 out of every 4 jobs in this country. But, even after achieving success, the growth doesn't stop there. Business owners and entrepreneurs are responsible for helping others achieve business success through venture capital investing and Angel startup investing in thousands of small businesses across the country.
Ted Leonsis is a good example of a unicorn, a man who first worked and made millions (with AOL) then, re-invested those funds in new businesses (such as the Washington Wizards and Washington Capitals sports franchises), then re-invested the fruits of those successes in countless small business technology startups, such as Groupon, Zipcar and Living Social. He created thousands of jobs in the process. Nor is Leonsis alone, for there are thousands of other unicorns just like him.
America is blessed with a vast network of , most of whom are wealthy people that are willing to provide an entrepreneur, the capital needed to help launch a business, build a product or service, and get it to market. Over 60,000 new businesses are launched each year in this way, creating millions of jobs in the process and serving as the engine to the American economy.
So why doesn't Harry Reid know this?
Why doesn't Harry Reid understand that what we are talking about is nothing other than the American dream?
It's a dream that has drawn countless millions to this country for centuries and is the reason why countless millions more desperately want to come to this country. It's a dream that with hard work, some tough days, weeks, months, maybe even years, with ingenuity and persistence, any good idea can become a business success.
True, this dream is not for everyone. Not everyone is willing to take risks. Not everyone is willing to sacrifice their time, their treasure, their youth to fulfilling the dream. Not everyone is willing to work fourteen hour days, seven days a week. Because, sometimes, that's what the dream takes. Nor is success guaranteed. And, there are many who try and fail. That's okay too, because the American Dream is simply the opportunity to try for the brass ring. No handouts. No guarantees. But still, Harry Reid thinks the American Dream is a myth.
So what does that tell you?
Yes, Harry Reid seems jaded and is willfully blind to the facts concerning small businesses, entrepreneurs and job creation. Reid is clearly ignorant of all the hundred of thousands of man hours that innovators and business owners have spent growing businesses that create the $14.5 trillion dollars of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for this country annually. And, it is the fruits of these "mythical" businesses that he, President Obama and others routinely shakedown for donations, and threaten, by passing arcane legislation, often in the middle of the night without much thought or debate, to make the job creator’s task even more difficult.
So what does that tell you?
First, that Americans should be concerned that someone so colossally ignorant and dangerous could rise so high in the Senate. Second, Reid's ridiculously obtuse statement shows that he is far more closely aligned with President Obama, and Democrat Marxist meanderings, because Obama doesn't believe in the American Dream either, and ridicules those who do.
Harry Reid believes that only government can create jobs and spur the economy. I know that he is wrong. And "yes, Virginia", you can thank your lucky stars that there are most certainly unicorns in America.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
NE: Judge rules for railroad in drug dispute: "U.S. border officials exceeded their authority when they imposed multimillion-dollar fines against Union Pacific Corp. for failing to discover illegal drugs in railcars that crossed into the country from Mexico, a federal judge ruled Monday. U.S. District Judge Joseph Bataillon ordered the Department of Homeland Security to halt its fines against the Omaha-based railroad and stop seizing railroad equipment in drug smuggling that the company says was beyond its control."
Japan to buy US F-35 fighters for air force: "Japan's government on Tuesday selected the Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter to bolster its aging air force, announcing it will buy a total of 42 aircraft under a multiyear deal. Japan has budgeted the cost of four fighters next fiscal year, which starts in April, said Noriyuki Shikata, deputy Cabinet secretary for public relations"
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity: "There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money. Well, who isn’t? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he’ll do good with his own money -- if a gun is held to his head."
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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Monday, December 19, 2011
A need for a new conservatism?
Some excerpts below from an article with which I disagree. There is a long history in conservative thought of respect for the individual and respect for individual liberty and that seems to me an ample foundation for opposing the Fascist instincts of Leftism and building a civil society. There has never been much of a conservative "philosophy" because none is needed. Cautious, humane and constructive instincts are all that is needed
The writer below also thinks that Leftists have a coherent guiding philosophy. He must not know much history. Fom Marx up until WWII, Leftists were enthusiastic antisemites, racists and eugenicists. Such views may still be in them deep down but it is far from what they now preach. Their only consistency is hunger for power over others
Modern conservatism grew up less as a return to first principles than as a reaction to the New Deal, the rise of Communism and an uneasy sense that a destructive social evolution was afoot driven by liberal intellectuals resident in increasingly powerful urban centers. Initially animated by fears over communist expansion, conservatism brought together free market economists, social traditionalists, state’s rights advocates, libertarians, anti-communists and others concerned that the original idea that was America was being lost in the headlong rush toward the implementation of the liberal schema through a vastly empowered federal government seeking control of the levers of American life.
It began to come into focus in the writings of William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk and several others as they gave voice to those whose inchoate discomfort was beginning to turn into a real fear for the loss of the American ideal. But it was mainly reaction characterized aptly by Buckley’s formulation that it was conservatism’s purpose is to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop”.
It is simply not enough to define a political project by what it is against. It must be distinguished by what it proposes. Otherwise, it is amorphous and rudderless; its effort ad hoc and issue driven to no particular end. Because conservatives defined their ideology primarily in opposition rather than in affirmation, they missed the opportunity to develop an affirmative program geared toward reaching a goal instead of one whose mission was to dismantle that of its great adversary. This matters because if conservatives are only reactionary, they do not propose an organized program aimed at establishing something. Conservatism must not merely be a revanchist project.
The Left moves relentlessly toward a defined goal while the Right, when it has the electoral opportunity, merely stops the rate of Progressive change. But it does not legislate toward a goal because it has not adequately defined one. It is not enough to say one wants “smaller government” or “lower taxes” or “less regulation”. That does not define what government conservatives want, only what they do not want. They must describe their theory of government as government that “is”, not government that “isn’t”. They need to define a political philosophy as an affirmative project that sets forth the basis for government; its legitimate functions, its purposes and its scope.
More HERE
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Government price fixing: health care edition
There's a very interesting recent paper which shows that the US health care system expensive as it is, is expensive because of government price fixing:
But something quite different seems to have happened. A big part of the story is that providers can choose from a number of different cardiac treatments, some of which are more expensive than others. PPS encouraged them to focus on the treatments where the marginal cost — the cost of providing one more treatment, in this case — fell below the average cost, even if there are more cost-effective treatments available. Kim suggests that PPS may account for one of the most distinctive aspects of the U.S. health system — our extraordinary overreliance on costly treatments.
In short, the bureaucrats fixed the prices for a specific treatment but left the doctors and hospitals free to choose an expensive specific treatment over a cheap one. With the obvious effect that everyone now gets the most expensive possible treatment for whatever condition it is that they have.
Now one could argue that having the wise, those in government (it is to laugh again!), fixing the prices right this time would beat that problem. That is, in part, a bet that your average drone at the UK Department of Health is cleverer than your average drone at the US equivalent: good luck with that one.
But the real answer to that is that it isn't in fact possible to calculate, in the absence of a market, what is the correct price. For as Hayek pointed out, the whole thing is just too complex for that: the market is what we have to use to calculate the correct price. Thus it is impossible for the wise governors (titter) to ever get the price right: which is why we don't want them setting prices.
I'm perfectly happy for there to be government involvement in health care. I can see a valid place for social insurance, I'm entirely fine with tax-financed health care of some kind. But in order to get the right amount of the best of it we're going to have to let the idiocy of the interaction of the marketplace replace all those very clever people in offices setting the prices for us.
SOURCE
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Obama’s NIH Stimulus Program: $390,000 Per Job ‘Created Or Saved’
The stimulus gave about $8.2 billion to the National Institutes of Health to be used for grants to universities and other research institutions.
The Government Accountability Office released a report today examining “the number of full-time equivalent (FTEs) jobs supported by NIH Recovery Act funds.” By June 2011, about 21,000 FTEs were supported by the funds. Divide $8.2 billion by 21,000, and that comes to about $390,000 per job.
And these figures don’t just reflect jobs created. They also include jobs that were “saved.”
The GAO also conducted a select sample of 50 grantees. Of those, only 29% said the funds “supported jobs that did not exist prior to receiving NIH funding.” 54% replied that the funds “supported jobs that existed prior to receiving NIH funding.” (The other 17% did not respond to that question.)
Those 50 grantees received about $911 million in stimulus funds and “created or saved” 2,365 jobs. Doing the division reveals that to be about $385,000 per job.
So, who says that the clean-energy sector is inefficient? As a prior Capital Hill analysis pointed out, the Obama Administration’s grants for green jobs came to only $135,294 per job!
On the other hand, the NIH’s heftier price tag might be worth it. So far, no Solyndra-like scandal has emerged from these grants. So far ...
SOURCE
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Economics Reporter from New York Times Has Accidental Encounter with Reality, Learns Nothing
Earlier this year, I wrote about how the person Obama put in charge of Medicare made some very interesting observations about prices, competition, and markets, but then drew exactly the wrong conclusion about what was needed to solve the third-party payer problem in health care.
We now have another example of someone producing very good information and then failing to learn the obvious lesson. Catherine Rampell of the New York Times wrote about how politicians used to be much more willing to increases taxes.
She obviously wants readers to conclude that bad, mean, wicked Republicans are being too dogmatic because they won’t agree to big tax hikes. But the chart she prepared tells a completely different story. The only budget agreement that actually produced a balanced budget was the 1997 deal, and that deal contained tax cuts rather than tax increases!
But don’t believe me. Look at her chart.
I suppose I also should say that her chart is misleading because it accepts the dishonest Washington definition that a “spending cut” occurs any time politicians increase spending by less than previously planned.
And even if one uses that dishonest definition, the make-believe spending cuts usually evaporate very rapidly. The tax increases, unfortunately, are far more durable. And the net result is higher spending and oftentimes more red ink.
But even with those two big methodological shortcomings, her chart is a strong argument that tax increases don’t work.
SOURCE
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Regulations FROM Dummies
Quick question: What is the most obvious thing keeping us from an economic recovery led by job creation? If you answered the increasingly burdensome mountain regulatory red tape from the government, you’d be in the heavy majority of the country who thinks that way as well. If you were to ask the current White House the same question, you’d get a completely different answer (and a list of excuses, blames, and finger pointing).
In a fantastic article this week in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Regulation for Dummies”, the Journal takes a look at the evidence of whether costly, job killing regulations have indeed increased during this Administration or not. (Hint: The answer is YES!)
This is not a shock or surprise to small business owners like myself or the millions of others around the country. Small businesses are the backbone of the economy and historically have been where most job creation happens, when we are crushed by over regulation we can’t afford to expand or hire more people. To quote from the Journal:
If you only listened to the President or his top staff give speeches or media interviews, you would walk away convinced that they all understand that you can’t have a serious jobs recovery when Big Government is in the way. But if you follow the news stories out of the NLRB, EPA, HHS, Commerce Dept. or any other part of the Administration, you would see job-crushing regulations emanating at a unprecedented pace. As the Journal eloquently puts it, “Mr. Obama can claim he is the progressive second coming of Teddy Roosevelt as he did in Kansas last week, or he can claim to be a regulatory minimalist, but not both. The facts show he's the former.”
The President can reference Teddy Roosevelt all he wants in his speeches, but to quote Teddy Roosevelt, “Actions speak louder than words.” If this Administration were serious about real jobs recovery and real economic growth, they would be acting to decrease regulations, cut spending, and offering small business friendly reforms.
Final question: Why does the Administration talk one way and act another? The answer is unfortunately bought and paid for by Big Labor. The President’s re-election hopes hinge on convincing the public he is in agreement with them on the problems, while satisfying the demands of Big Labor to keep their money coming in.
SOURCE
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U.S. to leave Iraqi airspace clear for strategic Israeli route to Iran
The U.S. military’s fast-approaching Dec. 31 exit from Iraq, which has no way to defend its airspace, puts Israel in a better place strategically to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Iraq has yet to assemble a force of jet fighters, and since the shortest route for Israeli strike fighters to Iran is through Iraqi airspace, observers conclude that the U.S. exit makes the Jewish state’s mission planning a lot easier.
Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said the Iraqi military will maintain radars to monitor the country’s airspace, but it has not taken possession of American F-16s to guard that space.
“The country has a capable and improving capability to see the airspace, a viable system to provide command and control, but no system to defeat incoming air threats until it gets either the F-16s or ground-based systems or, optimally, some of both,” Gen. Buchanan told The Washington Times.
Iraq made the first payment in September for 18 F-16s that will not arrive until next fall at the earliest. This means Israel would have a theoretical window of about 12 months if it wants to fly over Iraq unimpeded by the Iraqi air force.
Retired Air ForceGen. Thomas McInerney, who advocates a U.S. strategic bombing raid to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites, agreed that Iraq’s open airspace would make it easier for an Israeli mission.
“Yes, it will be,” he said. “However, it will be much easier for Iranian forces to get to Israel through Iraq via land and air.”
Gen. McInerney said he thinks there is a good chance that Iran, stretched economically by Western sanctions and fearing threats from Israel, will launch a war against the Jewish state through Iraq.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Do we need big government?: "Federal-government spending now consumes roughly a quarter of all the goods and services produced in this country over the course of a year. Throw in state- and local-government spending, and it’s more than a third. And, according the Congressional Budget Office, unless there is a drastic change in our current policies, we are on course for government to consume nearly 60 percent of GDP by mid-century. And President Obama believes that government is still too small?"
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. 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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Some excerpts below from an article with which I disagree. There is a long history in conservative thought of respect for the individual and respect for individual liberty and that seems to me an ample foundation for opposing the Fascist instincts of Leftism and building a civil society. There has never been much of a conservative "philosophy" because none is needed. Cautious, humane and constructive instincts are all that is needed
The writer below also thinks that Leftists have a coherent guiding philosophy. He must not know much history. Fom Marx up until WWII, Leftists were enthusiastic antisemites, racists and eugenicists. Such views may still be in them deep down but it is far from what they now preach. Their only consistency is hunger for power over others
Modern conservatism grew up less as a return to first principles than as a reaction to the New Deal, the rise of Communism and an uneasy sense that a destructive social evolution was afoot driven by liberal intellectuals resident in increasingly powerful urban centers. Initially animated by fears over communist expansion, conservatism brought together free market economists, social traditionalists, state’s rights advocates, libertarians, anti-communists and others concerned that the original idea that was America was being lost in the headlong rush toward the implementation of the liberal schema through a vastly empowered federal government seeking control of the levers of American life.
It began to come into focus in the writings of William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk and several others as they gave voice to those whose inchoate discomfort was beginning to turn into a real fear for the loss of the American ideal. But it was mainly reaction characterized aptly by Buckley’s formulation that it was conservatism’s purpose is to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop”.
It is simply not enough to define a political project by what it is against. It must be distinguished by what it proposes. Otherwise, it is amorphous and rudderless; its effort ad hoc and issue driven to no particular end. Because conservatives defined their ideology primarily in opposition rather than in affirmation, they missed the opportunity to develop an affirmative program geared toward reaching a goal instead of one whose mission was to dismantle that of its great adversary. This matters because if conservatives are only reactionary, they do not propose an organized program aimed at establishing something. Conservatism must not merely be a revanchist project.
The Left moves relentlessly toward a defined goal while the Right, when it has the electoral opportunity, merely stops the rate of Progressive change. But it does not legislate toward a goal because it has not adequately defined one. It is not enough to say one wants “smaller government” or “lower taxes” or “less regulation”. That does not define what government conservatives want, only what they do not want. They must describe their theory of government as government that “is”, not government that “isn’t”. They need to define a political philosophy as an affirmative project that sets forth the basis for government; its legitimate functions, its purposes and its scope.
More HERE
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Government price fixing: health care edition
There's a very interesting recent paper which shows that the US health care system expensive as it is, is expensive because of government price fixing:
This raises the question of what exactly changed in the 1980s. Daeho Kim, a graduate student at Brown University, offers a provocative hypothesis in a new working paper. As Kim explains, a 1983 Medicare reform created the prospective payment system, or PPS, which offered fixed reimbursements for the use of a medical technology. If a physician decides to use bypass surgery as a cardiac treatment, she won’t be paid on the basis of what it cost her to perform the surgery. Instead, she’ll be paid the national average cost. This way, there is a strong incentive to beat the national average cost of performing bypass surgeries, thus lowering, in theory, systemwide costs.
But something quite different seems to have happened. A big part of the story is that providers can choose from a number of different cardiac treatments, some of which are more expensive than others. PPS encouraged them to focus on the treatments where the marginal cost — the cost of providing one more treatment, in this case — fell below the average cost, even if there are more cost-effective treatments available. Kim suggests that PPS may account for one of the most distinctive aspects of the U.S. health system — our extraordinary overreliance on costly treatments.
In short, the bureaucrats fixed the prices for a specific treatment but left the doctors and hospitals free to choose an expensive specific treatment over a cheap one. With the obvious effect that everyone now gets the most expensive possible treatment for whatever condition it is that they have.
Now one could argue that having the wise, those in government (it is to laugh again!), fixing the prices right this time would beat that problem. That is, in part, a bet that your average drone at the UK Department of Health is cleverer than your average drone at the US equivalent: good luck with that one.
But the real answer to that is that it isn't in fact possible to calculate, in the absence of a market, what is the correct price. For as Hayek pointed out, the whole thing is just too complex for that: the market is what we have to use to calculate the correct price. Thus it is impossible for the wise governors (titter) to ever get the price right: which is why we don't want them setting prices.
I'm perfectly happy for there to be government involvement in health care. I can see a valid place for social insurance, I'm entirely fine with tax-financed health care of some kind. But in order to get the right amount of the best of it we're going to have to let the idiocy of the interaction of the marketplace replace all those very clever people in offices setting the prices for us.
SOURCE
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Obama’s NIH Stimulus Program: $390,000 Per Job ‘Created Or Saved’
The stimulus gave about $8.2 billion to the National Institutes of Health to be used for grants to universities and other research institutions.
The Government Accountability Office released a report today examining “the number of full-time equivalent (FTEs) jobs supported by NIH Recovery Act funds.” By June 2011, about 21,000 FTEs were supported by the funds. Divide $8.2 billion by 21,000, and that comes to about $390,000 per job.
And these figures don’t just reflect jobs created. They also include jobs that were “saved.”
The GAO also conducted a select sample of 50 grantees. Of those, only 29% said the funds “supported jobs that did not exist prior to receiving NIH funding.” 54% replied that the funds “supported jobs that existed prior to receiving NIH funding.” (The other 17% did not respond to that question.)
Those 50 grantees received about $911 million in stimulus funds and “created or saved” 2,365 jobs. Doing the division reveals that to be about $385,000 per job.
So, who says that the clean-energy sector is inefficient? As a prior Capital Hill analysis pointed out, the Obama Administration’s grants for green jobs came to only $135,294 per job!
On the other hand, the NIH’s heftier price tag might be worth it. So far, no Solyndra-like scandal has emerged from these grants. So far ...
SOURCE
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Economics Reporter from New York Times Has Accidental Encounter with Reality, Learns Nothing
Earlier this year, I wrote about how the person Obama put in charge of Medicare made some very interesting observations about prices, competition, and markets, but then drew exactly the wrong conclusion about what was needed to solve the third-party payer problem in health care.
We now have another example of someone producing very good information and then failing to learn the obvious lesson. Catherine Rampell of the New York Times wrote about how politicians used to be much more willing to increases taxes.
She obviously wants readers to conclude that bad, mean, wicked Republicans are being too dogmatic because they won’t agree to big tax hikes. But the chart she prepared tells a completely different story. The only budget agreement that actually produced a balanced budget was the 1997 deal, and that deal contained tax cuts rather than tax increases!
But don’t believe me. Look at her chart.
I suppose I also should say that her chart is misleading because it accepts the dishonest Washington definition that a “spending cut” occurs any time politicians increase spending by less than previously planned.
And even if one uses that dishonest definition, the make-believe spending cuts usually evaporate very rapidly. The tax increases, unfortunately, are far more durable. And the net result is higher spending and oftentimes more red ink.
But even with those two big methodological shortcomings, her chart is a strong argument that tax increases don’t work.
SOURCE
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Regulations FROM Dummies
Quick question: What is the most obvious thing keeping us from an economic recovery led by job creation? If you answered the increasingly burdensome mountain regulatory red tape from the government, you’d be in the heavy majority of the country who thinks that way as well. If you were to ask the current White House the same question, you’d get a completely different answer (and a list of excuses, blames, and finger pointing).
In a fantastic article this week in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Regulation for Dummies”, the Journal takes a look at the evidence of whether costly, job killing regulations have indeed increased during this Administration or not. (Hint: The answer is YES!)
This is not a shock or surprise to small business owners like myself or the millions of others around the country. Small businesses are the backbone of the economy and historically have been where most job creation happens, when we are crushed by over regulation we can’t afford to expand or hire more people. To quote from the Journal:
The evidence is overwhelming that the Obama regulatory surge is one reason the current economic recovery has been so lackluster by historical standards. Rather than nurture an economy trying to rebuild confidence after a financial heart attack, the Administration pushed through its now-famous blitz of liberal policies on health care, financial services, energy, housing, education and student loans, telecom, labor relations, transportation and probably some other industries we've forgotten. Anyone who thinks this has only minimal impact on business has never been in business.
If you only listened to the President or his top staff give speeches or media interviews, you would walk away convinced that they all understand that you can’t have a serious jobs recovery when Big Government is in the way. But if you follow the news stories out of the NLRB, EPA, HHS, Commerce Dept. or any other part of the Administration, you would see job-crushing regulations emanating at a unprecedented pace. As the Journal eloquently puts it, “Mr. Obama can claim he is the progressive second coming of Teddy Roosevelt as he did in Kansas last week, or he can claim to be a regulatory minimalist, but not both. The facts show he's the former.”
The President can reference Teddy Roosevelt all he wants in his speeches, but to quote Teddy Roosevelt, “Actions speak louder than words.” If this Administration were serious about real jobs recovery and real economic growth, they would be acting to decrease regulations, cut spending, and offering small business friendly reforms.
Final question: Why does the Administration talk one way and act another? The answer is unfortunately bought and paid for by Big Labor. The President’s re-election hopes hinge on convincing the public he is in agreement with them on the problems, while satisfying the demands of Big Labor to keep their money coming in.
SOURCE
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U.S. to leave Iraqi airspace clear for strategic Israeli route to Iran
The U.S. military’s fast-approaching Dec. 31 exit from Iraq, which has no way to defend its airspace, puts Israel in a better place strategically to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Iraq has yet to assemble a force of jet fighters, and since the shortest route for Israeli strike fighters to Iran is through Iraqi airspace, observers conclude that the U.S. exit makes the Jewish state’s mission planning a lot easier.
Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said the Iraqi military will maintain radars to monitor the country’s airspace, but it has not taken possession of American F-16s to guard that space.
“The country has a capable and improving capability to see the airspace, a viable system to provide command and control, but no system to defeat incoming air threats until it gets either the F-16s or ground-based systems or, optimally, some of both,” Gen. Buchanan told The Washington Times.
Iraq made the first payment in September for 18 F-16s that will not arrive until next fall at the earliest. This means Israel would have a theoretical window of about 12 months if it wants to fly over Iraq unimpeded by the Iraqi air force.
Retired Air ForceGen. Thomas McInerney, who advocates a U.S. strategic bombing raid to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites, agreed that Iraq’s open airspace would make it easier for an Israeli mission.
“Yes, it will be,” he said. “However, it will be much easier for Iranian forces to get to Israel through Iraq via land and air.”
Gen. McInerney said he thinks there is a good chance that Iran, stretched economically by Western sanctions and fearing threats from Israel, will launch a war against the Jewish state through Iraq.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Do we need big government?: "Federal-government spending now consumes roughly a quarter of all the goods and services produced in this country over the course of a year. Throw in state- and local-government spending, and it’s more than a third. And, according the Congressional Budget Office, unless there is a drastic change in our current policies, we are on course for government to consume nearly 60 percent of GDP by mid-century. And President Obama believes that government is still too small?"
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. 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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Sunday, December 18, 2011
Is Liberalism a Religion?
When people make statements that are completely at variance with reality and they continue to repeat them and you know they are not crazy, it’s only natural to wonder, what’s going on?
I’ve concluded that for some people on the left, political beliefs are like a false religion in which the parishioners become unable to distinguish myth from reality.
How else can you explain the statements of Donald Berwick, President Obama’s recess appointee to run Medicare and Medicaid, on his way out of office the other day? For starters, he claimed that the Affordable Care Act (what some people call ObamaCare) “is making health care a basic human right.” Then he went on to say that because of the new law, “we are a nation headed for justice, for fairness and justice in access to care.”
Now I can’t claim to have read everything in the 2,700-page law, but I can assure you that “making health care a right” just isn’t in there. Nor is there anything in the new law that makes the role of government more “just” or “fair.”
To the contrary, a lot of knowledgeable people (not just conservative critics) are predicting that access to care is going to be more difficult for our most vulnerable populations. That appears to have been the experience in Massachusetts, which Obama cites as the model for the new federal reforms. It’s not that Massachusetts tried and failed to expand access to care. It didn’t even try.
True enough, Massachusetts cut the number of uninsured in that state in half through Governor Romney’s health reform. But it didn’t create any new doctors. The state expanded the demand for care, but it did nothing to expand supply. More people than ever are trying to get care, but because there was no increase in medical services, it has become more difficult than ever to actually see a doctor.
And far from fair, the new federal health law will give some people health insurance subsidies that are as much as $20,000 more than the subsidies available to other people at the same level of income. In fact, the new system of health insurance subsidies is about as arbitrary as it can be.
Berwick isn’t alone in making bizarre statements about health reform. Right after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, administration health advisors Robert Kocher, Ezekiel Emanuel and Nancy-Ann DeParle announced that the new health reform law “guarantees access to health care for all Americans.”
In fact, nothing in the act guarantees access to care for any America, let alone all Americans. Far from it. Again, take Massachusetts as the precedent. The waiting time to see a new family practice doctor in Boston (63 days) is longer than in any other major U.S. city. In a sense, a new patient seeking care in Boston has less access to care than in just about every other U.S. city!
The disconnect between belief and reality is not unique to our country. With the enactment of the British National Health Service after World War II, the reformers claimed that they too had made health care a “right.” The same claim was made in Canada after that country established its “single-payer” Medicare scheme.
Yet in reality, neither country has made health care a right. They didn’t even come close. Neither British nor Canadian citizens have a right to any particular health care. A patient with a mysterious lump on her breast has no right to an MRI scan in either country. A cancer patient has no right to the latest cancer drug. A cardiac patient has no right to open heart surgery. They may get the care they need. Or they may not. Sadly, all too often they do not.
The British and the Canadians not only have no legally enforceable right to any particular type of care, they don’t even have a right to a place in line. For example, a patient who is 100th on the waiting list for heart surgery is not entitled to the 100th surgery. Other patients (including cash paying patients from the United States!) may jump the queue and get their surgery first.
Imagine a preacher, a priest or a rabbi who gets up in front of the congregation and gets a lot of things wrong. Say he misstates facts, distorts reality, or says other things you know are not true. Do you jump up from the pew and yell, “That’s a lie”? Of course not. But if those same misstatements were made by someone else during the work week you might well respond with considerable harshness. What’s the difference? I think there are two different thought processes that many people engage in. Let’s call them “Sunday morning” thinking and “Monday morning” thinking. We tolerate things on Sunday that we would never tolerate on Monday. And there is probably nothing wrong with that, unless people get their days mixed up.
In my professional career I have been to hundreds of health policy conferences, discussions, get-togethers, etc., where it seemed as though people were completely failing to connect with each other. One day it dawned on me that we were having two different conversations. Some people were engaged in Monday morning thinking, while everyone else was engaged in Sunday morning thinking.
Here’s the problem. Whether the beliefs are true or false, if people didn’t come to their religious convictions by means of reason, then reason isn’t going to convince them to change their minds.
This same principle applies to collectivism and health care. If people didn’t come to the false religion of collectivism by means of reason, you are not going to talk them out of it by means of reason. If you remember this principle, you will save yourself the agony of many, many pointless conversations.
SOURCE
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GOP must stop apologizing
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident..." What truths? What has happened to our passion for liberty? I am concerned that we conservatives, instead of making our case as fearless champions of liberty, are too often on the defensive, preoccupied with trying to prove we aren't the demons the left says we are.
In the GOP primary contest, you'll hear one candidate scolding the others for lacking compassion, another demagoguing a rival for advocating essential entitlement reform, and another shaming an opponent for being too wealthy.
Shouldn't our side do a better job of proudly proclaiming our case for what we believe in rather than have our tails tucked between our legs, apologizing for conservatism and all too often neglecting our first principles?
Because we face an existential threat to the nation in our exploding discretionary and entitlement spending, we rightly aim our rhetoric against the deficits and the debt. That's critically important, but in the process, do we forget to explain that we favor smaller government also as a matter of principle? Do we make the case that we oppose a bigger and more intrusive government because a) it is incompatible with what we stand for -- robust political liberty -- and b) other than metastasizing and swallowing up the private sector and our individual liberties, government does only a few things well?
Likewise, do we connect the dots between our confiscatory tax policies and the diminution of our liberties, demonstrating a nexus between oppressive taxes and serfdom? Do we protest that we are already overtaxed and that an onerous tax system, enforced by a menacing federal agency, devours our political liberty?
To the contrary, instead of communicating our passion for liberty -- the bedrock principle upon which the nation was founded, lest we forget -- we spend too much time defending against the false charge that we are evil elitists protecting a tax structure that is tilted in favor of the wealthy. It's not.
We say we can't support tax cuts during tough economic times, but are we tacitly conceding that it will be just fine to tax ourselves further into oblivion once the economy turns around? How about saying, "We are taxed too much at every level, and our government's financial problems are a result of overspending, not of under-taxation, and they will be solved not by increasing liberty-choking taxes, but by cutting spending"?
We conservatives constantly complain -- and rightly so -- about the chilling effect overregulation has on the economy. But do we emphasize that this frightening explosion of power in mostly independent and largely unreviewable federal agencies represents a grave threat to our individual liberties?
Do we conservatives inspire the American people to reach for the sky, saying that a rising tide lifts all boats and that they should aspire to be the best they can be? Or do we spend too much time apologizing for inequitable distributions of the wealth?
Do we affirmatively champion the virtues of the free market and point out that greater liberty produces greater prosperity and greater prosperity means greater liberty?
When the left incites covetousness and greed by demonizing the "rich" and scoffing at capitalism's allegedly false promise that the prosperity will "trickle down," we should remind these socialists that a) it is absurd that we measure material prosperity based on how much more the other guy has instead of how much we have in absolute terms, b) a free market system, by definition, means some will do better than others, c) the idea isn't for meat scraps to trickle down from the more affluent in a zero-sum economy, but to expand the economic pie with more people producing and succeeding on their own, free of dependence on the government and retaining their dignity, d) our capitalistic system, undergirded by the Constitution and the rule of law, has produced the most prosperous society in world history, and e) the coercive command-control system they champion in the name of equalizing outcomes is antithetical to liberty and thus to America's founding principles and inevitably leads to less for everyone except for the ruling class and its cronies.
Have we gotten to the point that we can no longer preach the work ethic? Rugged individualism? Thrift? Individual responsibility?
Let's passionately attest that America is the only nation in the history of the world founded on a set of principles -- the most important of which is that we have God-given, inalienable rights centered in political liberty -- that the preservation of our liberty is not on autopilot, and that if we abandon our commitment to liberty, liberty will just as surely abandon us?
SOURCE
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Obama EEOC Wipes Out Jobs By Making Hiring More Difficult
Obama appointees to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) are killing jobs by making hiring decisions riskier and more costly. As I explain below, employers’ ability to hire based on merit has increasingly come under assault by the EEOC, as it has ordered employers to discard useful employment tests and put up with incompetent employees. It is not worthwhile setting up a business if all your sensible hiring decisions are second-guessed or vetoed by the EEOC.
When reporters write stories about the cost of regulations, they only focus on regulations found in formal codes. But most regulations aren’t formal rules, but rather agency interpretations of statutes. Typically, such agency interpretations expand the reach of a statute the agency administers, such as a statute that authorizes lawsuits by job-applicants, employees, tenants, or customers against businesses that allegedly violate the statute’s provisions. For example, the EEOC’s interpretations of anti-discrimination laws and disabilities-rights laws are not formal rules, as the Supreme Court has noted, but the courts often defer to the EEOC’s interpretations anyway. So the EEOC can dramatically increase the ability of employees, or the EEOC itself, to sue businesses under those laws, just by coming up with expansive interpretations of those laws (thus expanding its own power). The result is an increase in costly lawsuits that imposes economic burdens on employers, and discourages people from setting up small businesses or hiring new employees to work in existing businesses.
The EEOC has sued, and threatened to sue, employers who hire and fire based on merit. For example, a hotel chain was recently compelled to pay $132,500 for dismissing an autistic desk clerk who did not do his job properly, in order for it avoid a lawsuit by the EEOC that would have cost it much more than that to defend. “The EEOC says Comfort Suites dismissed the clerk when it should instead have accepted the services of a state-paid ‘job coach’ who might have ‘helped the clerk learn to master his job by using autism-specific training techniques.’” Based on a 1979 Supreme Court decision, it used to be thought that employers did not have to alter essential job requirements to accommodate the disabled, or incur more than modest expense, to comply with disabilities-rights laws; but the EEOC has progressively expanded the reach of the disabilities-rights laws since then, through ever-broader and more onerous agency interpretations of those statutes.
The EEOC has sued employers who sensibly refuse to hire as truckers people with a history of heavy drinking and alcoholism. It has done so even though if employers do hire alcoholics for such safety-sensitive positions, they will be sued under state tort laws when the alcoholic driver has an accident. The EEOC’s demand that such employers disregard histories of alcoholism is based on an extremely expansive, and dubious, interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The EEOC is suing employers over the use of criminal histories in hiring, and harassing employers who conduct criminal background checks, even though employers who hire criminals end up getting sued when those employees commit crimes while on the employer’s payroll. The EEOC’s demands thus place employers in an impossible dilemma where they can be sued no matter what they do.
The EEOC is also suing employers who don’t bend sensible workplace rules to accommodate the obese, claiming that obesity is a disability. And it is suing employers who take into account bad credit and financial histories in hiring, even though failure to take that into account can lead to lawsuits against banks and property managers by customers.
All of these burdensome mandates, and the threat of lawsuits, discourage people from setting up a business, just as regulations making it almost impossible to fire people in places like Portugal and Italy have contributed to those countries’ slow economic growth by discouraging the formation of new businesses and the hiring of additional employees. (Researchers like the RAND Institute have found that more employment-related regulation and litigation are associated with increased unemployment rates.)
The EEOC’s aggressive new stance reflects its new left-wing majority under the Obama administration, which has appointed anti-business extremists to the EEOC.
The Obama administration’s demand that businesses make risky hiring decisions reflects its general antipathy to business, which is discouraging job creation. A liberal Yale professor recounts being told by a businessman that he would not hire more employees despite having a “successful business” due to the current political and regulatory climate. “How can I hire new workers today, when I don’t know how much they will cost me tomorrow?,” asked the businessman, “referring not to wages, but to regulation: He has no way of telling what new rules will go into effect when. His business . . . operates on low margins. He can’t afford to take the chance of losing what little profit there is to the next round of regulatory changes. And so he’s hiring nobody until he has some certainty about cost.”
Boston business owner Terry Catchpole noted in The New York Times that economic uncertainty due to Obama administration policies has wiped out jobs at companies like his:
"Two years ago our executive communications company had 17 employees. Today it has seven . . . like many small businesses, we are dependent on big businesses as customers. And the big businesses that we would ordinarily depend on to become clients are sitting on their cash, because they are deathly afraid of an Obama administration that has been hostile to business . . . They have no idea where the administration’s next attack is coming from, and how much it is going to cost them to defend. So businesses do not spend money; they do not hire my company; and we cannot hire back those 10 good people we had to let go."
Democratic businessman Steve Wynn called Obama “the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime,” saying that “the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.”
Obamacare’s burdens on employers may eventually wipe out as many as 800,000 jobs.
SOURCE
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)
****************************
When people make statements that are completely at variance with reality and they continue to repeat them and you know they are not crazy, it’s only natural to wonder, what’s going on?
I’ve concluded that for some people on the left, political beliefs are like a false religion in which the parishioners become unable to distinguish myth from reality.
How else can you explain the statements of Donald Berwick, President Obama’s recess appointee to run Medicare and Medicaid, on his way out of office the other day? For starters, he claimed that the Affordable Care Act (what some people call ObamaCare) “is making health care a basic human right.” Then he went on to say that because of the new law, “we are a nation headed for justice, for fairness and justice in access to care.”
Now I can’t claim to have read everything in the 2,700-page law, but I can assure you that “making health care a right” just isn’t in there. Nor is there anything in the new law that makes the role of government more “just” or “fair.”
To the contrary, a lot of knowledgeable people (not just conservative critics) are predicting that access to care is going to be more difficult for our most vulnerable populations. That appears to have been the experience in Massachusetts, which Obama cites as the model for the new federal reforms. It’s not that Massachusetts tried and failed to expand access to care. It didn’t even try.
True enough, Massachusetts cut the number of uninsured in that state in half through Governor Romney’s health reform. But it didn’t create any new doctors. The state expanded the demand for care, but it did nothing to expand supply. More people than ever are trying to get care, but because there was no increase in medical services, it has become more difficult than ever to actually see a doctor.
And far from fair, the new federal health law will give some people health insurance subsidies that are as much as $20,000 more than the subsidies available to other people at the same level of income. In fact, the new system of health insurance subsidies is about as arbitrary as it can be.
Berwick isn’t alone in making bizarre statements about health reform. Right after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, administration health advisors Robert Kocher, Ezekiel Emanuel and Nancy-Ann DeParle announced that the new health reform law “guarantees access to health care for all Americans.”
In fact, nothing in the act guarantees access to care for any America, let alone all Americans. Far from it. Again, take Massachusetts as the precedent. The waiting time to see a new family practice doctor in Boston (63 days) is longer than in any other major U.S. city. In a sense, a new patient seeking care in Boston has less access to care than in just about every other U.S. city!
The disconnect between belief and reality is not unique to our country. With the enactment of the British National Health Service after World War II, the reformers claimed that they too had made health care a “right.” The same claim was made in Canada after that country established its “single-payer” Medicare scheme.
Yet in reality, neither country has made health care a right. They didn’t even come close. Neither British nor Canadian citizens have a right to any particular health care. A patient with a mysterious lump on her breast has no right to an MRI scan in either country. A cancer patient has no right to the latest cancer drug. A cardiac patient has no right to open heart surgery. They may get the care they need. Or they may not. Sadly, all too often they do not.
The British and the Canadians not only have no legally enforceable right to any particular type of care, they don’t even have a right to a place in line. For example, a patient who is 100th on the waiting list for heart surgery is not entitled to the 100th surgery. Other patients (including cash paying patients from the United States!) may jump the queue and get their surgery first.
Imagine a preacher, a priest or a rabbi who gets up in front of the congregation and gets a lot of things wrong. Say he misstates facts, distorts reality, or says other things you know are not true. Do you jump up from the pew and yell, “That’s a lie”? Of course not. But if those same misstatements were made by someone else during the work week you might well respond with considerable harshness. What’s the difference? I think there are two different thought processes that many people engage in. Let’s call them “Sunday morning” thinking and “Monday morning” thinking. We tolerate things on Sunday that we would never tolerate on Monday. And there is probably nothing wrong with that, unless people get their days mixed up.
In my professional career I have been to hundreds of health policy conferences, discussions, get-togethers, etc., where it seemed as though people were completely failing to connect with each other. One day it dawned on me that we were having two different conversations. Some people were engaged in Monday morning thinking, while everyone else was engaged in Sunday morning thinking.
Here’s the problem. Whether the beliefs are true or false, if people didn’t come to their religious convictions by means of reason, then reason isn’t going to convince them to change their minds.
This same principle applies to collectivism and health care. If people didn’t come to the false religion of collectivism by means of reason, you are not going to talk them out of it by means of reason. If you remember this principle, you will save yourself the agony of many, many pointless conversations.
SOURCE
****************************
GOP must stop apologizing
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident..." What truths? What has happened to our passion for liberty? I am concerned that we conservatives, instead of making our case as fearless champions of liberty, are too often on the defensive, preoccupied with trying to prove we aren't the demons the left says we are.
In the GOP primary contest, you'll hear one candidate scolding the others for lacking compassion, another demagoguing a rival for advocating essential entitlement reform, and another shaming an opponent for being too wealthy.
Shouldn't our side do a better job of proudly proclaiming our case for what we believe in rather than have our tails tucked between our legs, apologizing for conservatism and all too often neglecting our first principles?
Because we face an existential threat to the nation in our exploding discretionary and entitlement spending, we rightly aim our rhetoric against the deficits and the debt. That's critically important, but in the process, do we forget to explain that we favor smaller government also as a matter of principle? Do we make the case that we oppose a bigger and more intrusive government because a) it is incompatible with what we stand for -- robust political liberty -- and b) other than metastasizing and swallowing up the private sector and our individual liberties, government does only a few things well?
Likewise, do we connect the dots between our confiscatory tax policies and the diminution of our liberties, demonstrating a nexus between oppressive taxes and serfdom? Do we protest that we are already overtaxed and that an onerous tax system, enforced by a menacing federal agency, devours our political liberty?
To the contrary, instead of communicating our passion for liberty -- the bedrock principle upon which the nation was founded, lest we forget -- we spend too much time defending against the false charge that we are evil elitists protecting a tax structure that is tilted in favor of the wealthy. It's not.
We say we can't support tax cuts during tough economic times, but are we tacitly conceding that it will be just fine to tax ourselves further into oblivion once the economy turns around? How about saying, "We are taxed too much at every level, and our government's financial problems are a result of overspending, not of under-taxation, and they will be solved not by increasing liberty-choking taxes, but by cutting spending"?
We conservatives constantly complain -- and rightly so -- about the chilling effect overregulation has on the economy. But do we emphasize that this frightening explosion of power in mostly independent and largely unreviewable federal agencies represents a grave threat to our individual liberties?
Do we conservatives inspire the American people to reach for the sky, saying that a rising tide lifts all boats and that they should aspire to be the best they can be? Or do we spend too much time apologizing for inequitable distributions of the wealth?
Do we affirmatively champion the virtues of the free market and point out that greater liberty produces greater prosperity and greater prosperity means greater liberty?
When the left incites covetousness and greed by demonizing the "rich" and scoffing at capitalism's allegedly false promise that the prosperity will "trickle down," we should remind these socialists that a) it is absurd that we measure material prosperity based on how much more the other guy has instead of how much we have in absolute terms, b) a free market system, by definition, means some will do better than others, c) the idea isn't for meat scraps to trickle down from the more affluent in a zero-sum economy, but to expand the economic pie with more people producing and succeeding on their own, free of dependence on the government and retaining their dignity, d) our capitalistic system, undergirded by the Constitution and the rule of law, has produced the most prosperous society in world history, and e) the coercive command-control system they champion in the name of equalizing outcomes is antithetical to liberty and thus to America's founding principles and inevitably leads to less for everyone except for the ruling class and its cronies.
Have we gotten to the point that we can no longer preach the work ethic? Rugged individualism? Thrift? Individual responsibility?
Let's passionately attest that America is the only nation in the history of the world founded on a set of principles -- the most important of which is that we have God-given, inalienable rights centered in political liberty -- that the preservation of our liberty is not on autopilot, and that if we abandon our commitment to liberty, liberty will just as surely abandon us?
SOURCE
*************************
Obama EEOC Wipes Out Jobs By Making Hiring More Difficult
Obama appointees to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) are killing jobs by making hiring decisions riskier and more costly. As I explain below, employers’ ability to hire based on merit has increasingly come under assault by the EEOC, as it has ordered employers to discard useful employment tests and put up with incompetent employees. It is not worthwhile setting up a business if all your sensible hiring decisions are second-guessed or vetoed by the EEOC.
When reporters write stories about the cost of regulations, they only focus on regulations found in formal codes. But most regulations aren’t formal rules, but rather agency interpretations of statutes. Typically, such agency interpretations expand the reach of a statute the agency administers, such as a statute that authorizes lawsuits by job-applicants, employees, tenants, or customers against businesses that allegedly violate the statute’s provisions. For example, the EEOC’s interpretations of anti-discrimination laws and disabilities-rights laws are not formal rules, as the Supreme Court has noted, but the courts often defer to the EEOC’s interpretations anyway. So the EEOC can dramatically increase the ability of employees, or the EEOC itself, to sue businesses under those laws, just by coming up with expansive interpretations of those laws (thus expanding its own power). The result is an increase in costly lawsuits that imposes economic burdens on employers, and discourages people from setting up small businesses or hiring new employees to work in existing businesses.
The EEOC has sued, and threatened to sue, employers who hire and fire based on merit. For example, a hotel chain was recently compelled to pay $132,500 for dismissing an autistic desk clerk who did not do his job properly, in order for it avoid a lawsuit by the EEOC that would have cost it much more than that to defend. “The EEOC says Comfort Suites dismissed the clerk when it should instead have accepted the services of a state-paid ‘job coach’ who might have ‘helped the clerk learn to master his job by using autism-specific training techniques.’” Based on a 1979 Supreme Court decision, it used to be thought that employers did not have to alter essential job requirements to accommodate the disabled, or incur more than modest expense, to comply with disabilities-rights laws; but the EEOC has progressively expanded the reach of the disabilities-rights laws since then, through ever-broader and more onerous agency interpretations of those statutes.
The EEOC has sued employers who sensibly refuse to hire as truckers people with a history of heavy drinking and alcoholism. It has done so even though if employers do hire alcoholics for such safety-sensitive positions, they will be sued under state tort laws when the alcoholic driver has an accident. The EEOC’s demand that such employers disregard histories of alcoholism is based on an extremely expansive, and dubious, interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The EEOC is suing employers over the use of criminal histories in hiring, and harassing employers who conduct criminal background checks, even though employers who hire criminals end up getting sued when those employees commit crimes while on the employer’s payroll. The EEOC’s demands thus place employers in an impossible dilemma where they can be sued no matter what they do.
The EEOC is also suing employers who don’t bend sensible workplace rules to accommodate the obese, claiming that obesity is a disability. And it is suing employers who take into account bad credit and financial histories in hiring, even though failure to take that into account can lead to lawsuits against banks and property managers by customers.
All of these burdensome mandates, and the threat of lawsuits, discourage people from setting up a business, just as regulations making it almost impossible to fire people in places like Portugal and Italy have contributed to those countries’ slow economic growth by discouraging the formation of new businesses and the hiring of additional employees. (Researchers like the RAND Institute have found that more employment-related regulation and litigation are associated with increased unemployment rates.)
The EEOC’s aggressive new stance reflects its new left-wing majority under the Obama administration, which has appointed anti-business extremists to the EEOC.
The Obama administration’s demand that businesses make risky hiring decisions reflects its general antipathy to business, which is discouraging job creation. A liberal Yale professor recounts being told by a businessman that he would not hire more employees despite having a “successful business” due to the current political and regulatory climate. “How can I hire new workers today, when I don’t know how much they will cost me tomorrow?,” asked the businessman, “referring not to wages, but to regulation: He has no way of telling what new rules will go into effect when. His business . . . operates on low margins. He can’t afford to take the chance of losing what little profit there is to the next round of regulatory changes. And so he’s hiring nobody until he has some certainty about cost.”
Boston business owner Terry Catchpole noted in The New York Times that economic uncertainty due to Obama administration policies has wiped out jobs at companies like his:
"Two years ago our executive communications company had 17 employees. Today it has seven . . . like many small businesses, we are dependent on big businesses as customers. And the big businesses that we would ordinarily depend on to become clients are sitting on their cash, because they are deathly afraid of an Obama administration that has been hostile to business . . . They have no idea where the administration’s next attack is coming from, and how much it is going to cost them to defend. So businesses do not spend money; they do not hire my company; and we cannot hire back those 10 good people we had to let go."
Democratic businessman Steve Wynn called Obama “the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime,” saying that “the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.”
Obamacare’s burdens on employers may eventually wipe out as many as 800,000 jobs.
SOURCE
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)
****************************
Saturday, December 17, 2011
De mortuis nil nisi bonum?
I am afraid I am going to disregard that bit of Roman wisdom. The recently deceased Christopher Hitchens has been rather eulogized in the press and elsewhere so I think the other side needs to be put.
His virulent outpouring of hate towards Christians deprives him of any right to respect in my view. If I were a Christian, I think I would see the hand of the Lord in moving him prematurely to his final destination.
Since I am an atheist, however, I note that his death from esophageal cancer was almost certainly the result of his lifelong heavy drinking and smoking. And if he had had the comfort of religion he might not have needed such props to his mood.
His brother Peter, who is very close to him in age and appearance, appears to have no particular health problems but Peter is a committed communicant of the Church of England
Peter also abandoned Leftism much sooner and more completely than Christopher. Chistopher moved towards conservatism on many issues in his later years but that inner fountain of Leftist hate never left him and he vented it on Christians. In my view atheism makes religion a matter of no concern but if you are a Leftist atheist, it seems to be grabbed as an opportunity for hate.
Despite their many differences, Peter has written a generous tribute to his brother here. I think it shows that Peter lacks the hate that drove his brother.
********************
Should it be Newt?
His past policy positions render most conservatives unenthusiastic about Gingrich so I thought the following endorsement of him by Dick McDonald might be of interest
Let’s face it the 2012 presidential race is going to be brutal. The GOP candidate will have to be magician to overcome the resistance to massive benefit cuts in the 185 Federal welfare programs. As so many in America presently enjoy those benefits the prospect of losing them will be a major pocketbook issue. The Democrats and their pillow boys in the media will scare everyone silly with their billion-dollar ad campaign focused on “heartless” Republicans.
The GOP essentially has two potential presidential candidates - Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Both men are famously successful; Romney in the private sector as a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager at Bain Capital, savior of the Salt Lake Olympics and Governor of Massachusetts; Gingrich in the public sector as the leader of the Republican resurgence in 1994, welfare reformer, cost cutter and creator of surpluses.
The question the voters will have to answer is which man can beat Obama and then fix the economy. It is pointless to rehash their negatives – they both have too many. Therefore let’s concentrate on the two important issues.
Who Can Beat Obama?
As we are learning in the present GOP debates the people are really responding to both style and content. The people are desperately looking for the one who can be believed, presents evidence of past success in major governmental accomplishments and measures up to Obama’s level of oratory.
Although I believe Romney has improved in the debates I still find him stiff and defensive underneath his controlled demeanor. When push comes to shove I believe he would be a stiff Nixon type to Obama’s Kennedy. He doesn’t settle in for the fight and enjoy it like the historian Gingrich does. Edge to Gingrich.
Fix the Economy
Unfortunately for Romney he can’t hold a candle to Newt’s success in 1994-1988. Although he was working with a Democrat legislature and vetoed 500 bills Romney still ushered in the precursor to Obama care. Newt on the other hand was working against an immensely popular Democrat President. Romney’s popularity with moderates and independents bespeaks of a compromiser. He often speaks of sitting down with Democrats to save Social Security by extending the age of retirement and applying means testing. In my opinion the last thing the GOP needs is a compromiser to fix the economy. The problem is much bigger than one that can be reached by compromise.
Newt proved in 1994 to 1998 that he was the real deal. He was a gunslinger that faced down his opponents and did really big things – things like we face today. Many say this election is a seminal event in America. They fear that America will slide into a European nanny state unless we stop the Alinski, Cloward and Piven-train in its tracks. I agree that we have to stop it; if not now then soon. Edge to Gingrich
I believe Newt is the gun we should hire. His promise to follow up within four hours every whistle stop speech Obama makes with an opposition response until Obama agrees to Lincoln-Douglas type debates is priceless. Every time I hear Obama speak I want to go right through the TV set too. In this day of social networking this tactic will destroy Obama until he lays down on Newt’s operating table for dissection just like Douglas did for Lincoln.
The American people demand confrontation just like they do in sports. They want to see the players battle it out in front of them. The in-pocket media won’t be able to stop this tactic – they can’t cede this affair to the web.
I don’t think the final battle will go to the unsuccessful street organizer but to the historian. A historian who knows what is at stake. He will temper his demeanor, actions and proposals to create his own history of success. To do that he must make it our success first.
Via email
***********************
Congress Approves watered-down Defense Bill
The civil rights protections are a bit nebulous but they should provide a basis for appeal against any abuses. I have highlighted that part in red
Congress passed a massive $662 billion defense bill Thursday after months of wrangling over how to handle captured terrorist suspects without violating Americans' constitutional rights.
A last-minute compromise produced a truce but lawmakers said the fight's not over.
The Senate voted 86-13 for the measure and will send it to President Obama for his signature. The bill would authorize money for military personnel, weapons systems, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and national security programs in the Energy Department for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.
Two provisions have created the most controversy.
One would require military custody for foreign terrorist suspects linked to Al-Qaeda or its affiliates and involved in plotting or attacking the United States. The suspects could be transferred to civilian custody for trial, and the president would have final say on determining how the transfer would occur. Under pressure from Obama and his national security team, lawmakers added language that says nothing in the bill may be "construed to affect the existing criminal enforcement and national security authorities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or any other domestic law enforcement agency with regard to a covered person, regardless whether such covered person is held in military custody."
The attorney general, in consultation with the defense secretary, would decide on whether to try the individual in federal court or by military tribunal. The president could waive the entire requirement based on national security.
The second provision would deny suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens seized within the nation's borders, the right to trial and subject them to indefinite detention. It reaffirms the post-Sept. 11 authorization for the use of military force that allows indefinite detention of enemy combatants.
The provision includes a Senate-passed compromise that says nothing in the legislation may be "construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States."
Conservative Republicans, Democrats and civil rights groups have warned that the provision would allow the government to hold U.S. citizens indefinitely.
"If these provisions deny American citizens their due process rights under a new, nebulous set of directives, it not only would make us less safe, but it will serve as an unprecedented threat to our constitutional liberties," said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she and several other lawmakers, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vt., would introduce legislation to ensure that no U.S. citizen is held indefinitely without trial.
More HERE
***********************
Government Already Blocking Internet Access
By Robert Romano — Since being introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, the so-called “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) has drawn strong opposition from Internet companies large and small, as well as civil libertarians and grassroots organizations. One of the major criticisms is that the legislation would give the government power to restrict access to websites that are deemed to be engaged in Internet piracy or other forms of copyright infringement.
But one thing that the American people may not be aware of is that the government, under existing forfeiture laws, is already blocking access to domestic websites in the name of protecting copyright. And in some cases they are being seized prior to any trial or even a hearing taking place.
That’s what happened to www.dajaz1.com, a popular music blog that was seized by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency for over a year, only to be returned just this month without any criminal charges being filed. ICE had to admit there was never any probable cause for the seizure in the first place.
And despite turning off the website for over a year, www.dajaz1.com has not received any compensation as a result, even though the Fifth Amendment provides for such payment.
The allegation apparently originated from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) itself, even though it turned out in the end that the allegedly infringing material had, the website says, been pre-released by music artists and record labels themselves.
Now, Congress wants to take this show on the road, and force search engines, social networks, file-sharing sites, and other Internet service providers to block access to sites overseas that it says would otherwise qualify for seizure under existing domestic forfeiture laws. Again, without any trial, a hearing, or even any notice.
In fact, the provisions of SOPA, even with the manager’s amendment, provide even less of an opportunity to challenge the decision than even the numerous domain seizures executed by ICE to date. They pivot off a mere court order without any hearing, and then result in a string of actions being taken, including blocking the website, targeting payment and ad services for the site, and removing the site from search engines.
Service providers are supposed to simply take the word of the Attorney General, and the judge who rubber-stamped the court order, that the material on the site is in fact infringing — even though it has not been proven in a court of law. Nor will it ever be proven in the case of foreign websites, since in most cases they will lack access to U.S. courts. The site overseas is simply supposed to take it in the shorts.
But, as in the case of www.dajaz1.com, what if the Attorney General gets it wrong?
The application of forfeiture laws to the seizure of Internet domain names is a fairly new practice, and was not intended under the original construction of the laws. It may not be the best first step to take.
For example, why not simply require a cease-and-desist takedown notice to the owner of a website from the intellectual property holder himself prior to civil or criminal actions being taken, or property being seized? In the case of social networks or any website that allows users to upload content, the owner of a website may not even be aware that infringing content is being posted.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) already provides safe harbor provisions for websites that provide easy takedown procedures. But even those are apparently being abused, as in the case of Megaupload, which posted a video on YouTube promoting its site, only to have Universal Media Group order it removed — even though Megaupload says the video, “The Mega Song,” the artwork, and the music contained therein were all original, and the celebrity endorsers all provided signed agreements to have their likenesses used.
Megaupload has now sued in federal district court in the Northern District of California to affirm its rights to the video and to restrain Universal from issuing any more takedown orders. For its part, Megaupload has joined the fight against SOPA.
Said Megaupload CEO David Robb, “After this demonstration of the abuse of power by UMG, we are certain that such an instrument of Internet censorship should not be put into the hands of corporations.”
If intellectual property holders are already abusing DMCA takedown procedures and federal forfeiture laws, what will stop them from abusing SOPA? Nobody likes Internet piracy, but censoring activities otherwise protected by the First Amendment in the name of copyright is a travesty.
SOURCE
**************************
ELSEWHERE
CA: Chuck E. Cheese’s fined … for child-labor violations: "Nine Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurants -- known for their motto 'where a kid can be a kid' -- have been fined by the U.S. Department of Labor for allowing young workers to operate dangerous equipment, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Nine Bay Area branches were fined a total of $28,000 for violating federal child labor laws. The restaurants allowed minors to operate trash compactors and run dough-mixing machines, a breach of the Fair Labor Standards Act." [Note: These "children" are in their late teens, in order to be allowed to work there at all. It sounds more about union work-rules than protecting kids!]
Muslim grenade attack kills five, injures 119 in Belgium: "A grenade and gun attack in this eastern Belgian city [Liege] left five people dead, including the attacker, and 119 wounded Tuesday, authorities said. ... [Nordine] Amrani was on an elevated walkway above the square when he began throwing grenades down into the crowd and then firing, before shooting himself in the head with his revolver, the source said."
Engineer: Iran hijacked US drone: "Iran guided the CIA's 'lost' stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone's systems inside Iran. ... Western military experts and a number of published papers on GPS spoofing indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is plausible."
France: Chirac convicted of corruption: "In a landmark decision, a French court convicted former president Jacques Chirac on Thursday of embezzling government money while he was mayor of Paris and handed him a two-year suspended sentence. The ruling against Chirac, at 79 a grandfatherly figure who is widely admired in the polls, stained a long record of political service that started under Charles de Gaulle and included two terms as president, from 1995 to 2007."
FDR’s noble lie: "Most historians when pressed on the matter now grudgingly concede that Roosevelt lied when he told the American people that he would never send their boys to fight into foreign wars, but they excuse his treachery as a 'noble lie,' a deception perpetrated against the public by the political elite to achieve a supposed greater good."
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)
****************************
I am afraid I am going to disregard that bit of Roman wisdom. The recently deceased Christopher Hitchens has been rather eulogized in the press and elsewhere so I think the other side needs to be put.
His virulent outpouring of hate towards Christians deprives him of any right to respect in my view. If I were a Christian, I think I would see the hand of the Lord in moving him prematurely to his final destination.
Since I am an atheist, however, I note that his death from esophageal cancer was almost certainly the result of his lifelong heavy drinking and smoking. And if he had had the comfort of religion he might not have needed such props to his mood.
His brother Peter, who is very close to him in age and appearance, appears to have no particular health problems but Peter is a committed communicant of the Church of England
Peter also abandoned Leftism much sooner and more completely than Christopher. Chistopher moved towards conservatism on many issues in his later years but that inner fountain of Leftist hate never left him and he vented it on Christians. In my view atheism makes religion a matter of no concern but if you are a Leftist atheist, it seems to be grabbed as an opportunity for hate.
Despite their many differences, Peter has written a generous tribute to his brother here. I think it shows that Peter lacks the hate that drove his brother.
********************
Should it be Newt?
His past policy positions render most conservatives unenthusiastic about Gingrich so I thought the following endorsement of him by Dick McDonald might be of interest
Let’s face it the 2012 presidential race is going to be brutal. The GOP candidate will have to be magician to overcome the resistance to massive benefit cuts in the 185 Federal welfare programs. As so many in America presently enjoy those benefits the prospect of losing them will be a major pocketbook issue. The Democrats and their pillow boys in the media will scare everyone silly with their billion-dollar ad campaign focused on “heartless” Republicans.
The GOP essentially has two potential presidential candidates - Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Both men are famously successful; Romney in the private sector as a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager at Bain Capital, savior of the Salt Lake Olympics and Governor of Massachusetts; Gingrich in the public sector as the leader of the Republican resurgence in 1994, welfare reformer, cost cutter and creator of surpluses.
The question the voters will have to answer is which man can beat Obama and then fix the economy. It is pointless to rehash their negatives – they both have too many. Therefore let’s concentrate on the two important issues.
Who Can Beat Obama?
As we are learning in the present GOP debates the people are really responding to both style and content. The people are desperately looking for the one who can be believed, presents evidence of past success in major governmental accomplishments and measures up to Obama’s level of oratory.
Although I believe Romney has improved in the debates I still find him stiff and defensive underneath his controlled demeanor. When push comes to shove I believe he would be a stiff Nixon type to Obama’s Kennedy. He doesn’t settle in for the fight and enjoy it like the historian Gingrich does. Edge to Gingrich.
Fix the Economy
Unfortunately for Romney he can’t hold a candle to Newt’s success in 1994-1988. Although he was working with a Democrat legislature and vetoed 500 bills Romney still ushered in the precursor to Obama care. Newt on the other hand was working against an immensely popular Democrat President. Romney’s popularity with moderates and independents bespeaks of a compromiser. He often speaks of sitting down with Democrats to save Social Security by extending the age of retirement and applying means testing. In my opinion the last thing the GOP needs is a compromiser to fix the economy. The problem is much bigger than one that can be reached by compromise.
Newt proved in 1994 to 1998 that he was the real deal. He was a gunslinger that faced down his opponents and did really big things – things like we face today. Many say this election is a seminal event in America. They fear that America will slide into a European nanny state unless we stop the Alinski, Cloward and Piven-train in its tracks. I agree that we have to stop it; if not now then soon. Edge to Gingrich
I believe Newt is the gun we should hire. His promise to follow up within four hours every whistle stop speech Obama makes with an opposition response until Obama agrees to Lincoln-Douglas type debates is priceless. Every time I hear Obama speak I want to go right through the TV set too. In this day of social networking this tactic will destroy Obama until he lays down on Newt’s operating table for dissection just like Douglas did for Lincoln.
The American people demand confrontation just like they do in sports. They want to see the players battle it out in front of them. The in-pocket media won’t be able to stop this tactic – they can’t cede this affair to the web.
I don’t think the final battle will go to the unsuccessful street organizer but to the historian. A historian who knows what is at stake. He will temper his demeanor, actions and proposals to create his own history of success. To do that he must make it our success first.
Via email
***********************
Congress Approves watered-down Defense Bill
The civil rights protections are a bit nebulous but they should provide a basis for appeal against any abuses. I have highlighted that part in red
Congress passed a massive $662 billion defense bill Thursday after months of wrangling over how to handle captured terrorist suspects without violating Americans' constitutional rights.
A last-minute compromise produced a truce but lawmakers said the fight's not over.
The Senate voted 86-13 for the measure and will send it to President Obama for his signature. The bill would authorize money for military personnel, weapons systems, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and national security programs in the Energy Department for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.
Two provisions have created the most controversy.
One would require military custody for foreign terrorist suspects linked to Al-Qaeda or its affiliates and involved in plotting or attacking the United States. The suspects could be transferred to civilian custody for trial, and the president would have final say on determining how the transfer would occur. Under pressure from Obama and his national security team, lawmakers added language that says nothing in the bill may be "construed to affect the existing criminal enforcement and national security authorities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or any other domestic law enforcement agency with regard to a covered person, regardless whether such covered person is held in military custody."
The attorney general, in consultation with the defense secretary, would decide on whether to try the individual in federal court or by military tribunal. The president could waive the entire requirement based on national security.
The second provision would deny suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens seized within the nation's borders, the right to trial and subject them to indefinite detention. It reaffirms the post-Sept. 11 authorization for the use of military force that allows indefinite detention of enemy combatants.
The provision includes a Senate-passed compromise that says nothing in the legislation may be "construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States."
Conservative Republicans, Democrats and civil rights groups have warned that the provision would allow the government to hold U.S. citizens indefinitely.
"If these provisions deny American citizens their due process rights under a new, nebulous set of directives, it not only would make us less safe, but it will serve as an unprecedented threat to our constitutional liberties," said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she and several other lawmakers, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vt., would introduce legislation to ensure that no U.S. citizen is held indefinitely without trial.
More HERE
***********************
Government Already Blocking Internet Access
By Robert Romano — Since being introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, the so-called “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) has drawn strong opposition from Internet companies large and small, as well as civil libertarians and grassroots organizations. One of the major criticisms is that the legislation would give the government power to restrict access to websites that are deemed to be engaged in Internet piracy or other forms of copyright infringement.
But one thing that the American people may not be aware of is that the government, under existing forfeiture laws, is already blocking access to domestic websites in the name of protecting copyright. And in some cases they are being seized prior to any trial or even a hearing taking place.
That’s what happened to www.dajaz1.com, a popular music blog that was seized by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency for over a year, only to be returned just this month without any criminal charges being filed. ICE had to admit there was never any probable cause for the seizure in the first place.
And despite turning off the website for over a year, www.dajaz1.com has not received any compensation as a result, even though the Fifth Amendment provides for such payment.
The allegation apparently originated from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) itself, even though it turned out in the end that the allegedly infringing material had, the website says, been pre-released by music artists and record labels themselves.
Now, Congress wants to take this show on the road, and force search engines, social networks, file-sharing sites, and other Internet service providers to block access to sites overseas that it says would otherwise qualify for seizure under existing domestic forfeiture laws. Again, without any trial, a hearing, or even any notice.
In fact, the provisions of SOPA, even with the manager’s amendment, provide even less of an opportunity to challenge the decision than even the numerous domain seizures executed by ICE to date. They pivot off a mere court order without any hearing, and then result in a string of actions being taken, including blocking the website, targeting payment and ad services for the site, and removing the site from search engines.
Service providers are supposed to simply take the word of the Attorney General, and the judge who rubber-stamped the court order, that the material on the site is in fact infringing — even though it has not been proven in a court of law. Nor will it ever be proven in the case of foreign websites, since in most cases they will lack access to U.S. courts. The site overseas is simply supposed to take it in the shorts.
But, as in the case of www.dajaz1.com, what if the Attorney General gets it wrong?
The application of forfeiture laws to the seizure of Internet domain names is a fairly new practice, and was not intended under the original construction of the laws. It may not be the best first step to take.
For example, why not simply require a cease-and-desist takedown notice to the owner of a website from the intellectual property holder himself prior to civil or criminal actions being taken, or property being seized? In the case of social networks or any website that allows users to upload content, the owner of a website may not even be aware that infringing content is being posted.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) already provides safe harbor provisions for websites that provide easy takedown procedures. But even those are apparently being abused, as in the case of Megaupload, which posted a video on YouTube promoting its site, only to have Universal Media Group order it removed — even though Megaupload says the video, “The Mega Song,” the artwork, and the music contained therein were all original, and the celebrity endorsers all provided signed agreements to have their likenesses used.
Megaupload has now sued in federal district court in the Northern District of California to affirm its rights to the video and to restrain Universal from issuing any more takedown orders. For its part, Megaupload has joined the fight against SOPA.
Said Megaupload CEO David Robb, “After this demonstration of the abuse of power by UMG, we are certain that such an instrument of Internet censorship should not be put into the hands of corporations.”
If intellectual property holders are already abusing DMCA takedown procedures and federal forfeiture laws, what will stop them from abusing SOPA? Nobody likes Internet piracy, but censoring activities otherwise protected by the First Amendment in the name of copyright is a travesty.
SOURCE
**************************
ELSEWHERE
CA: Chuck E. Cheese’s fined … for child-labor violations: "Nine Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurants -- known for their motto 'where a kid can be a kid' -- have been fined by the U.S. Department of Labor for allowing young workers to operate dangerous equipment, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Nine Bay Area branches were fined a total of $28,000 for violating federal child labor laws. The restaurants allowed minors to operate trash compactors and run dough-mixing machines, a breach of the Fair Labor Standards Act." [Note: These "children" are in their late teens, in order to be allowed to work there at all. It sounds more about union work-rules than protecting kids!]
Muslim grenade attack kills five, injures 119 in Belgium: "A grenade and gun attack in this eastern Belgian city [Liege] left five people dead, including the attacker, and 119 wounded Tuesday, authorities said. ... [Nordine] Amrani was on an elevated walkway above the square when he began throwing grenades down into the crowd and then firing, before shooting himself in the head with his revolver, the source said."
Engineer: Iran hijacked US drone: "Iran guided the CIA's 'lost' stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone's systems inside Iran. ... Western military experts and a number of published papers on GPS spoofing indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is plausible."
France: Chirac convicted of corruption: "In a landmark decision, a French court convicted former president Jacques Chirac on Thursday of embezzling government money while he was mayor of Paris and handed him a two-year suspended sentence. The ruling against Chirac, at 79 a grandfatherly figure who is widely admired in the polls, stained a long record of political service that started under Charles de Gaulle and included two terms as president, from 1995 to 2007."
FDR’s noble lie: "Most historians when pressed on the matter now grudgingly concede that Roosevelt lied when he told the American people that he would never send their boys to fight into foreign wars, but they excuse his treachery as a 'noble lie,' a deception perpetrated against the public by the political elite to achieve a supposed greater good."
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)
****************************
Friday, December 16, 2011
Israel, Isaac and the Return of Human Sacrifice
Why have liberal Westerners turned their backs on the Jewish state?
By DAVID MAMET
As Iran races toward the bomb, many observers seem to think the greater threat is the possibility that Israel might act against its nuclear program. Which raises the question: What should it mean if, God forbid, militant Islam through force of arms, and with the supine permission of the West, succeeds in the destruction of the Jewish State?
1) That the Jewish People would no longer have their ancestral home;
2) That they should have no home.
At the Versailles Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson stated as an evident moral proposition that each people should have the right to national self-determination. The West, thereafter, fought not for empire, nor national expansion, but in self-defense, or in defense of this proposition. But, for the Jewish State, the Liberal West puts the proposition aside.
Since its foundation Israel has turned the other cheek. Eric Hoffer wrote that Israel is the only country the world expects to act like Christians. Some Jews say that the Arabs have a better public relations apparatus. They do not need one. For the Liberal West does not need convincing. It is thrilled merely to accept an excuse to rescind what it regards as a colossal error.
The Liberal West has, for decades, indulged itself in an orgy of self-flagellation. We have enjoyed comfort and security, but these, in the absence of gratitude and patriotism, cause insecurity. This attempted cure for insecurity can be seen in protestations of our worthlessness, and the indictment of private property.
But no one in the affluent West and no one among the various protesters of various supposed injustices is prepared to act in accordance with his protestations. The opponent of "The Corporation" is still going to use the iPhone which permits him to mass with his like. The celebrities acting out at Occupy meetings will still invest their surplus capital, and the supposed champion of the dispossessed in the Levant will not only scoff at American Indian claims to land he has come to understand as his—he will lobby the City Council to have the homeless shelter built anywhere but on his block.
The brave preceptors who would like to end Poverty, War, Exploitation, Colonialism, Inequality and so on, stop at the proclamation. How may they synchronize their wise fervor with their inaction?
How may they still the resultant anxiety? The Left's answer is the oldest in the world: by appeal to The Gods. But how may The Gods be appeased? The immemorial answer is: By human sacrifice.
What is the essence of the Torah? It is not the Ten Commandments, these were known, and the practice of most aspired to by every civilization. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner teaches they are merely a Calling Card; to wit: "remember me . . . ?"
The essence of the Torah is the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. The God of Hosts spoke to Abraham, as the various desert gods had spoken to the nomads for thousands of years: "If you wish me to relieve your anxiety, give me the most precious thing you have."
So God's call to Abraham was neither unusual nor, perhaps, unexpected. God had told Abraham to leave his people and his home, and go to the place which God would point out to him. And God told Abraham to take his son up the mountain and kill him, as humans had done for tens of thousands of years.
Now, however, for the first time in history, the narrative changed. The sacrifice, Isaac, spoke back. He asked his father, "Where is the Goat we are to sacrifice?" This was the voice of conscience, and Abraham's hand, as it descended with the knife, was stayed. This was the Birth of the West, and the birth of the West's burden, which is conscience.
Previously the anxiety and fear attendant upon all human life was understood as Fear of the Gods, and dealt with by propitiation, which is to say by sacrifice. Now, however, the human burden was not to give The Gods what one imagined, in one's fear, that they might want, but do, in conscience, those things one understood God to require.
In abandonment of the state of Israel, the West reverts to pagan sacrifice, once again, making a burnt offering not of that which one possesses, but of that which is another's. As Realpolitik, the Liberal West's anti-Semitism can be understood as like Chamberlain's offering of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, a sop thrown to terrorism. On the level of conscience, it is a renewal of the debate on human sacrifice.
SOURCE
*****************************
The fifth horseman of the apocalypse
Spengler's gloom below stems from an assumption that present population trends will continue. He could be right. But such straight-line extrapolations are usually wrong
Population decline is the elephant in the world's living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98% over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates - indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere - in the Muslim world. The world's population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the 21st century, by far the worst decline in human history.
The world faces a danger more terrible than the worst Green imaginings. The European environmentalist who wants to shrink the world's population to reduce carbon emissions will spend her declining years in misery, for there will not be enough Europeans alive a generation from now to pay for her pension and medical care. For the first time in world history, the birth rate of the whole developed world is well below replacement, and a significant part of it has passed the demographic point of no return.
But Islamic society is even more fragile. As Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe's catastrophically low fertility as if in time-lapse photography. The average 30-year-old Iranian woman comes from a family of six children, but she will bear only one or two children during her lifetime. Turkey and Algeria are just behind Iran on the way down, and most of the other Muslim countries are catching up quickly. By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe. The Islamic world will have the same proportion of dependent elderly as the industrial countries - but one-tenth the productivity. A time bomb that cannot be defused is ticking in the Muslim world.
Imminent population collapse makes radical Islam more dangerous, not less so. For in their despair, radical Muslims who can already taste the ruin of their culture believe that they have nothing to lose.
Conventional geopolitical theory, which is dominated by material factors such as territory, natural resources, and command of technology, does not address how peoples will behave under existential threat. Geopolitical models fail to resemble the real world in which we live, where the crucial issue is the willingness or unwillingness of a people inhabiting a given territory to bring a new generation into the world.
Population decline, the decisive issue of the 21st century, will cause violent upheavals in the world order. Countries facing fertility dearth, such as Iran, are responding with aggression. Nations confronting their own mortality may choose to go down in a blaze of glory. Conflicts may be prolonged beyond the point at which there is any rational hope of achieving strategic aims - until all who wish to fight to the death have taken the opportunity to do so.
Why do individuals, groups, and nations act irrationally, often at the risk of self-destruction? Part of the problem lies in our definition of rationality. Under normal circumstances we think it irrational for a middle-aged man to cash in his insurance policy and spend money as fast as possible. But if the person in question has a terminal illness and no heirs, we think it quite reasonable to spend it all quickly, like Otto Kringelein in Grand Hotel or his updated equivalent, Queen Latifah's character in The Last Holiday. And if we know that we shall presently die of rabies, what is to prevent us from biting everyone we dislike? Countries sometimes suffer the equivalent of terminal illness. What seems suicidal to Americans may appear rational to an existentially challenged people confronting its imminent mortality.
Self-immolation of endangered peoples is sadly common. Stone-age cultures often disintegrate upon contact with the outside world. Their culture breaks down, and suicides skyrocket. An Australian researcher writes about "suicide contagion or cluster deaths - the phenomenon of indigenous people, particularly men from the same community taking their own lives at an alarming rate". Canada's Aboriginal Health Foundation reports, "The overall suicide rate among First Nation communities is about twice that of the total Canadian population; the rate among Inuit is still higher - 6 to 11 times higher than the general population." Suicide is epidemic among Amazon tribes.
But are these dying remnants of primitive societies really so different from the rest of us? Mortality stalks most of the peoples of the world - not this year or next, but within the horizon of human reckoning. A good deal of the world seems to have lost the taste for life. Fertility has fallen so far in parts of the industrial world that languages such as Ukrainian and Estonian will be endangered within a century and German, Japanese, and Italian within two.
The repudiation of life among advanced countries living in prosperity and peace has no historical precedent, except perhaps in the anomie of Greece in its post-Alexandrian decline and Rome during the first centuries of the Common Era. But Greece fell to Rome, and Rome to the barbarians. In the past, nations that foresaw their own demise fell to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Plague, Famine, and Death. Riding point for the old quartet in today's more civilized world is a Fifth Horseman: loss of faith. Today's cultures are dying of apathy, not by the swords of their enemies.
The Arab suicide bomber is the spiritual cousin of the despondent aboriginal of the Amazon rain forest. And European apathy is the opposite side of the coin of Islamic extremism. Both apathetic Europeans and radical Muslims have lost their connection to the past and their confidence in the future. There is not a great deal of daylight between European resignation to cultural extinction at the hundred-year horizon, and the Islamist boast, "You love life, and we love death." Which brings us to Spengler's Universal Law #2: When the nations of the world see their demise not as a distant prospect over the horizon, but as a foreseeable outcome, they perish of despair. Like the terminally ill patient cashing in his insurance money, a culture that anticipates its own extinction has a different standard of rationality than does conventional political science.
Situations of this sort have arisen frequently in history, but never as frequently as today, when so many of the world's cultures are not expected to survive the next two centuries. A people facing cultural extinction may well choose war, if war offers even a slim chance of survival. That is just how radical Islamists view the predicament of traditional Muslim society in the face of modernity. The Islamists fear that if they fail, their religion and culture will disappear into the maelstrom of the modern world. Many of them rather would die fighting.
More HERE
**************************
Class Consciousness Is Back
It's very rare for me to reproduce something from a Leftist source but what is said below is factual -- as all academic students of social class (of whom I am one) will attest.
The difference is that the writer below probably thinks something can be done about it. I do not. As Jesus said: "The poor ye always have with you". Most of the factors producing poverty are hereditary. From Bismarck and Disraeli on, however, conservatives have always supported some measures to alleviate the burdens of poverty
Class position affects everything: access to healthcare, education, where you live, careers, income, tax breaks, who you marry (and when), who fights and dies for our country, and on and on.
Multiple times and on multiple days, my local NPR station actually used the “c” word on the air. No, not that “c” word–it was “class.” Yes, that most unmentionable of topics: socio-economic class and how it determines the fate of millions of Americans.
Our vernacular obscures the country’s very real class divisions, with crippling–even lethal–consequences. The term “middle class” is used capaciously in the United States to include almost everyone, while the term “working class” is eschewed (it sounds way too Marxist). Even the “99%” signs and chants of Occupy protesters occlude the multiple and often stark divisions within that 99%.
Class position, of course, affects everything: access to healthcare, education, where you live, what restaurants you eat in, nutrition, careers, income, tax breaks, how much credit costs you, who you marry (and when), who fights and dies for our country, and on and on. But with our media’s national obsessions about gender, race and ethnicity, class may be the most under-covered feature of structural inequality in the country. In November, NPR-affiliate Michigan Radio aired an 11-part series called “Culture of Class,” which rolled back the stone, showing what lurks in America’s cave of inequities.
Let’s start with the legal system. “There, perhaps, is no moment in life when the difference in class is more apparent than when you are accused of a crime,” reporter Lester Graham notes in his piece on class and the courts. If you’re upper-middle class, or even truly middle class, you hire a lawyer, and the richer you are, the more choices you have.
But if you’re a low-income person and are assigned a public defender, you are especially screwed in Michigan: The state ranks 44th in public defense funding. The report also noted that in Detroit, five part-time public defenders handle caseloads up to seven times the national average for full-time public defenders; they get to spend an average of 32 minutes on each case. Graham then put a public face on these statistics: David Tucker, whose public defender was totally unprepared for court. The result? Tucker lost four years of his life in jail before his conviction was finally overturned.
In the Michigan Radio installment on military service, we were reminded (and we need to be) that we’ve been at war for the last decade. People sign up for the military, of course, out of patriotism, but many also do so because they can’t find work, especially in Michigan. And once they get out? The unemployment rate for veterans is just over 13 percent, and higher for post-9/11 vets.
We also like to think that debtor’s prison is a relic of the 19th century. Not so for the down and out. Let’s say you’ve become disabled, or lost your job, and owe child support that you can’t pay. A mother in Michigan who found herself in that situation was thrown in jail for 43 days until the Michigan Innocence Project and the ACLU got her out.
Exposés about racial segregation in housing, and especially about redlining–banks refusing to lend money to residents of low-income, primarily African-American neighborhoods–made that practice illegal (although it still persists). But segregation based on class? Perfectly legal and widely practiced. It is low-income people who have to live next to odor and pollution-spewing factories, incinerators and garbage dumps, with the often-deadly health costs that accompany living near heavy industry. One woman living in southwest Detroit counted 17 neighbors who have died of cancer.
Indeed, the report noted that while racial segregation in housing is on the decline, between the rise of walled communities on one end of the spectrum and foreclosures on the other, class segregation is increasing. Another effect? As the series noted, “These days in many areas people end up only seeing and talking to people who make the kind of money they do, live in the size of house they do, have the cares and concerns of people just like them. They don’t interact with people of other classes. With no interaction, there’s no basis for empathy for those ‘others.’”
SOURCE
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)
****************************
Why have liberal Westerners turned their backs on the Jewish state?
By DAVID MAMET
As Iran races toward the bomb, many observers seem to think the greater threat is the possibility that Israel might act against its nuclear program. Which raises the question: What should it mean if, God forbid, militant Islam through force of arms, and with the supine permission of the West, succeeds in the destruction of the Jewish State?
1) That the Jewish People would no longer have their ancestral home;
2) That they should have no home.
At the Versailles Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson stated as an evident moral proposition that each people should have the right to national self-determination. The West, thereafter, fought not for empire, nor national expansion, but in self-defense, or in defense of this proposition. But, for the Jewish State, the Liberal West puts the proposition aside.
Since its foundation Israel has turned the other cheek. Eric Hoffer wrote that Israel is the only country the world expects to act like Christians. Some Jews say that the Arabs have a better public relations apparatus. They do not need one. For the Liberal West does not need convincing. It is thrilled merely to accept an excuse to rescind what it regards as a colossal error.
The Liberal West has, for decades, indulged itself in an orgy of self-flagellation. We have enjoyed comfort and security, but these, in the absence of gratitude and patriotism, cause insecurity. This attempted cure for insecurity can be seen in protestations of our worthlessness, and the indictment of private property.
But no one in the affluent West and no one among the various protesters of various supposed injustices is prepared to act in accordance with his protestations. The opponent of "The Corporation" is still going to use the iPhone which permits him to mass with his like. The celebrities acting out at Occupy meetings will still invest their surplus capital, and the supposed champion of the dispossessed in the Levant will not only scoff at American Indian claims to land he has come to understand as his—he will lobby the City Council to have the homeless shelter built anywhere but on his block.
The brave preceptors who would like to end Poverty, War, Exploitation, Colonialism, Inequality and so on, stop at the proclamation. How may they synchronize their wise fervor with their inaction?
How may they still the resultant anxiety? The Left's answer is the oldest in the world: by appeal to The Gods. But how may The Gods be appeased? The immemorial answer is: By human sacrifice.
What is the essence of the Torah? It is not the Ten Commandments, these were known, and the practice of most aspired to by every civilization. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner teaches they are merely a Calling Card; to wit: "remember me . . . ?"
The essence of the Torah is the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. The God of Hosts spoke to Abraham, as the various desert gods had spoken to the nomads for thousands of years: "If you wish me to relieve your anxiety, give me the most precious thing you have."
So God's call to Abraham was neither unusual nor, perhaps, unexpected. God had told Abraham to leave his people and his home, and go to the place which God would point out to him. And God told Abraham to take his son up the mountain and kill him, as humans had done for tens of thousands of years.
Now, however, for the first time in history, the narrative changed. The sacrifice, Isaac, spoke back. He asked his father, "Where is the Goat we are to sacrifice?" This was the voice of conscience, and Abraham's hand, as it descended with the knife, was stayed. This was the Birth of the West, and the birth of the West's burden, which is conscience.
Previously the anxiety and fear attendant upon all human life was understood as Fear of the Gods, and dealt with by propitiation, which is to say by sacrifice. Now, however, the human burden was not to give The Gods what one imagined, in one's fear, that they might want, but do, in conscience, those things one understood God to require.
In abandonment of the state of Israel, the West reverts to pagan sacrifice, once again, making a burnt offering not of that which one possesses, but of that which is another's. As Realpolitik, the Liberal West's anti-Semitism can be understood as like Chamberlain's offering of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, a sop thrown to terrorism. On the level of conscience, it is a renewal of the debate on human sacrifice.
SOURCE
*****************************
The fifth horseman of the apocalypse
Spengler's gloom below stems from an assumption that present population trends will continue. He could be right. But such straight-line extrapolations are usually wrong
Population decline is the elephant in the world's living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98% over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates - indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere - in the Muslim world. The world's population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the 21st century, by far the worst decline in human history.
The world faces a danger more terrible than the worst Green imaginings. The European environmentalist who wants to shrink the world's population to reduce carbon emissions will spend her declining years in misery, for there will not be enough Europeans alive a generation from now to pay for her pension and medical care. For the first time in world history, the birth rate of the whole developed world is well below replacement, and a significant part of it has passed the demographic point of no return.
But Islamic society is even more fragile. As Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe's catastrophically low fertility as if in time-lapse photography. The average 30-year-old Iranian woman comes from a family of six children, but she will bear only one or two children during her lifetime. Turkey and Algeria are just behind Iran on the way down, and most of the other Muslim countries are catching up quickly. By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe. The Islamic world will have the same proportion of dependent elderly as the industrial countries - but one-tenth the productivity. A time bomb that cannot be defused is ticking in the Muslim world.
Imminent population collapse makes radical Islam more dangerous, not less so. For in their despair, radical Muslims who can already taste the ruin of their culture believe that they have nothing to lose.
Conventional geopolitical theory, which is dominated by material factors such as territory, natural resources, and command of technology, does not address how peoples will behave under existential threat. Geopolitical models fail to resemble the real world in which we live, where the crucial issue is the willingness or unwillingness of a people inhabiting a given territory to bring a new generation into the world.
Population decline, the decisive issue of the 21st century, will cause violent upheavals in the world order. Countries facing fertility dearth, such as Iran, are responding with aggression. Nations confronting their own mortality may choose to go down in a blaze of glory. Conflicts may be prolonged beyond the point at which there is any rational hope of achieving strategic aims - until all who wish to fight to the death have taken the opportunity to do so.
Why do individuals, groups, and nations act irrationally, often at the risk of self-destruction? Part of the problem lies in our definition of rationality. Under normal circumstances we think it irrational for a middle-aged man to cash in his insurance policy and spend money as fast as possible. But if the person in question has a terminal illness and no heirs, we think it quite reasonable to spend it all quickly, like Otto Kringelein in Grand Hotel or his updated equivalent, Queen Latifah's character in The Last Holiday. And if we know that we shall presently die of rabies, what is to prevent us from biting everyone we dislike? Countries sometimes suffer the equivalent of terminal illness. What seems suicidal to Americans may appear rational to an existentially challenged people confronting its imminent mortality.
Self-immolation of endangered peoples is sadly common. Stone-age cultures often disintegrate upon contact with the outside world. Their culture breaks down, and suicides skyrocket. An Australian researcher writes about "suicide contagion or cluster deaths - the phenomenon of indigenous people, particularly men from the same community taking their own lives at an alarming rate". Canada's Aboriginal Health Foundation reports, "The overall suicide rate among First Nation communities is about twice that of the total Canadian population; the rate among Inuit is still higher - 6 to 11 times higher than the general population." Suicide is epidemic among Amazon tribes.
But are these dying remnants of primitive societies really so different from the rest of us? Mortality stalks most of the peoples of the world - not this year or next, but within the horizon of human reckoning. A good deal of the world seems to have lost the taste for life. Fertility has fallen so far in parts of the industrial world that languages such as Ukrainian and Estonian will be endangered within a century and German, Japanese, and Italian within two.
The repudiation of life among advanced countries living in prosperity and peace has no historical precedent, except perhaps in the anomie of Greece in its post-Alexandrian decline and Rome during the first centuries of the Common Era. But Greece fell to Rome, and Rome to the barbarians. In the past, nations that foresaw their own demise fell to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Plague, Famine, and Death. Riding point for the old quartet in today's more civilized world is a Fifth Horseman: loss of faith. Today's cultures are dying of apathy, not by the swords of their enemies.
The Arab suicide bomber is the spiritual cousin of the despondent aboriginal of the Amazon rain forest. And European apathy is the opposite side of the coin of Islamic extremism. Both apathetic Europeans and radical Muslims have lost their connection to the past and their confidence in the future. There is not a great deal of daylight between European resignation to cultural extinction at the hundred-year horizon, and the Islamist boast, "You love life, and we love death." Which brings us to Spengler's Universal Law #2: When the nations of the world see their demise not as a distant prospect over the horizon, but as a foreseeable outcome, they perish of despair. Like the terminally ill patient cashing in his insurance money, a culture that anticipates its own extinction has a different standard of rationality than does conventional political science.
Situations of this sort have arisen frequently in history, but never as frequently as today, when so many of the world's cultures are not expected to survive the next two centuries. A people facing cultural extinction may well choose war, if war offers even a slim chance of survival. That is just how radical Islamists view the predicament of traditional Muslim society in the face of modernity. The Islamists fear that if they fail, their religion and culture will disappear into the maelstrom of the modern world. Many of them rather would die fighting.
More HERE
**************************
Class Consciousness Is Back
It's very rare for me to reproduce something from a Leftist source but what is said below is factual -- as all academic students of social class (of whom I am one) will attest.
The difference is that the writer below probably thinks something can be done about it. I do not. As Jesus said: "The poor ye always have with you". Most of the factors producing poverty are hereditary. From Bismarck and Disraeli on, however, conservatives have always supported some measures to alleviate the burdens of poverty
Class position affects everything: access to healthcare, education, where you live, careers, income, tax breaks, who you marry (and when), who fights and dies for our country, and on and on.
Multiple times and on multiple days, my local NPR station actually used the “c” word on the air. No, not that “c” word–it was “class.” Yes, that most unmentionable of topics: socio-economic class and how it determines the fate of millions of Americans.
Our vernacular obscures the country’s very real class divisions, with crippling–even lethal–consequences. The term “middle class” is used capaciously in the United States to include almost everyone, while the term “working class” is eschewed (it sounds way too Marxist). Even the “99%” signs and chants of Occupy protesters occlude the multiple and often stark divisions within that 99%.
Class position, of course, affects everything: access to healthcare, education, where you live, what restaurants you eat in, nutrition, careers, income, tax breaks, how much credit costs you, who you marry (and when), who fights and dies for our country, and on and on. But with our media’s national obsessions about gender, race and ethnicity, class may be the most under-covered feature of structural inequality in the country. In November, NPR-affiliate Michigan Radio aired an 11-part series called “Culture of Class,” which rolled back the stone, showing what lurks in America’s cave of inequities.
Let’s start with the legal system. “There, perhaps, is no moment in life when the difference in class is more apparent than when you are accused of a crime,” reporter Lester Graham notes in his piece on class and the courts. If you’re upper-middle class, or even truly middle class, you hire a lawyer, and the richer you are, the more choices you have.
But if you’re a low-income person and are assigned a public defender, you are especially screwed in Michigan: The state ranks 44th in public defense funding. The report also noted that in Detroit, five part-time public defenders handle caseloads up to seven times the national average for full-time public defenders; they get to spend an average of 32 minutes on each case. Graham then put a public face on these statistics: David Tucker, whose public defender was totally unprepared for court. The result? Tucker lost four years of his life in jail before his conviction was finally overturned.
In the Michigan Radio installment on military service, we were reminded (and we need to be) that we’ve been at war for the last decade. People sign up for the military, of course, out of patriotism, but many also do so because they can’t find work, especially in Michigan. And once they get out? The unemployment rate for veterans is just over 13 percent, and higher for post-9/11 vets.
We also like to think that debtor’s prison is a relic of the 19th century. Not so for the down and out. Let’s say you’ve become disabled, or lost your job, and owe child support that you can’t pay. A mother in Michigan who found herself in that situation was thrown in jail for 43 days until the Michigan Innocence Project and the ACLU got her out.
Exposés about racial segregation in housing, and especially about redlining–banks refusing to lend money to residents of low-income, primarily African-American neighborhoods–made that practice illegal (although it still persists). But segregation based on class? Perfectly legal and widely practiced. It is low-income people who have to live next to odor and pollution-spewing factories, incinerators and garbage dumps, with the often-deadly health costs that accompany living near heavy industry. One woman living in southwest Detroit counted 17 neighbors who have died of cancer.
Indeed, the report noted that while racial segregation in housing is on the decline, between the rise of walled communities on one end of the spectrum and foreclosures on the other, class segregation is increasing. Another effect? As the series noted, “These days in many areas people end up only seeing and talking to people who make the kind of money they do, live in the size of house they do, have the cares and concerns of people just like them. They don’t interact with people of other classes. With no interaction, there’s no basis for empathy for those ‘others.’”
SOURCE
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)
****************************
Senators Who Love the Government But Hate America
Within days after my article on due process and presumption of innocence, the U.S. Senate voted to empower the U.S. military to apprehend and detain indefinitely anyone in America, based on the whim of the soldier or military commander, and it will probably eventually include any armed agent of government including local police. As Jacob Hornberger noted, this new provision will codify the U.S. as just another one of many dictatorships throughout world history.
But, even though al Qaeda is virtually non-existent, the Washington imbeciles want to expand and extend the "War on Terror" anyway and include the entire U.S. territory as a "battlefield." How can we explain this? As Justin Raimondo speculated, the real reason for this new dictatorial power may be because these senators know that America is headed for economic collapse and civil unrest. But as I pointed out in my article on martial law, whether there are terrorists or not, or whether there is a prosperous or collapsing economy, all human beings have inalienable rights, among them the right to presumption of innocence and due process. Any government violations of those rights are crimes against the people, pure and simple.
Sen. Lindsey Graham commented that, "If you’re an American citizen and you betray your country, you’re not going to be given a lawyer," in his un-American opposition to due process and his approval of apprehending and detaining innocent civilians indefinitely. But, as I asked in my earlier article: Who will determine whether or not one has "betrayed one’s country"? Graham and the other pro-dictatorship government bureaucrats do not seem able to distinguish between someone who actually has acted (or been found guilty of acting) against one’s fellow Americans and someone who is accused of doing so.
Graham wants to empower all military personnel (and probably any armed government official) to detain indefinitely those who are merely accused of doing something, without evidence brought forward, without having a lawyer, without access to their families, no due process whatsoever. This is a banana republic dictatorship, and it is thoroughly un-American, thoroughly anti-liberty.
Additionally, Graham hinted at curtailing political expression as protected by the First Amendment, and thus, given past examples of government censorship since 9/11, Americans who criticize the U.S. government’s "war on terror" could be declared as "enemy combatants," and apprehended and detained without charges or trial. If these senators have their way, merely questioning the government’s actions and questioning the legitimacy of these wars would be considered "terrorism."
The senators are now turning the military against the American people. That is treasonous, according to the U.S. Constitution, as turning the military against the people would be the federal government’s "levying war" against the "United States," that is, the various states of the union, and thus against the people of the states. I have noted before that such treasonous acts have already occurred in America.
SOURCE
**********************
Poverty Doesn't Make Thieves -- Liberalism Does
Ben Shapiro
This week, the Los Angeles Times reported a wave of theft plaguing area high schools. The objects at stake? Tubas. According to South Gate High School music teacher Ruben Gonzalez Jr., thieves broke into the band room and stole nothing but tubas. A few weeks before, thieves took eight sousaphones from a Compton high school. Either the original cast of "The Music Man" is criminally eager for a revival, or these thieves are selling the horns on the black market.
Now the left loves to claim that crime waves like this are caused by poverty. If you're poor, the logic goes, you'll have to steal a loaf of bread -- or a trombone -- to feed your child. Criminality thus becomes a moral act.
There's only one problem with this logic: It's absolutely wrong.
During the Great Depression, levels of crime actually dropped. During the 1920s, when life was free and easy, so was crime. During the 1930s, when the entire American economy fell into a government-owned alligator moat, crime was nearly non-existent. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was excellent, crime rose again.
In Britain, where the social safety net is more like a social swaddling cloth, crime rates other than murder are significantly higher than in the United States. Actually, the highest rate of car theft in the world is in peaceful, socialist, unicorn-riding Switzerland. Next comes New Zealand. Then Britain, Sweden, Australia, Denmark, Scotland, Italy, Canada and Norway. That's right -- the U.S. isn't even in the top ten.
Why is that? It's not that these other countries are impoverished -- far from it. It's not that their poor are Dickensian urchins following the advice of newfangled Fagins. It's that these countries have bred generations of people who think they are entitled to the property of others.
That mentality predominates in poor areas more than rich ones. There's a reason for that: Those who succeed economically in a free market system do so based on the notion that they don't deserve anyone else's property unless they work for it. They don't sit back waiting for someone to take care of them. They don't wait for welfare checks. They go out into the world and earn their way forward.
In poor areas, the opposite is true. Spend five minutes with many poor inner city kids and the sense of entitlement drips from them. Many of these folks are refugee thugs from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre": "Work? We ain't got no work. We don't need no work! I don't have to show you no stinkin' work!" And, by the way, they don't need no stinkin' badges, either -- because the people with the badges work for them, teaching them that sense of entitlement, impoverishing hard workers on behalf of those who think they're owed something by the world.
Persistent poverty, in short, is more often than not a moral problem, not an economic one -- stealing springs from that same moral failing. That is why affordable housing, provided for free by the government, is usually covered in graffiti, trashed and burned out. You'll never see a private, single-family home treated like that by its owner.
There's a basic rule in business: If you tell people that a product is free, they treat it like it has no value. We've spent the last 70 years in this country telling our poor that money and property are free. Of course, they don't attribute any value to money or property, then. Of course, they treat others' property as though it's valueless, to be stolen or taken at whim.
The liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson and President Obama hasn't turned thieves into sudden lovers of big-band swing. It's turned more and more Americans into thieves. Don't blame poverty. Blame morality. And blame a government and a society that have abandoned the notion of responsibility for juvenile delinquency.
SOURCE
***************************
Job Creators Fighting Back
John Stossel
Some politicians claim that politicians create jobs. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says, "My job is to create jobs."
What hubris! Government has no money of its own. All it does is take from some people and give to others. That may create some jobs, but only by leaving less money in the private sector for job creation.
Actually, it's worse than that. Since government commandeers scarce resources by force and doesn't have to peddle its so-called services on the market to consenting buyers, there's no feedback mechanism to indicate if those services are worth more to people than what they were forced to go without.
The only people who create real, sustainable jobs are in private businesses -- if they're unsubsidized.
Some CEOs are upset that people don't appreciate what they do. So they formed a group called the Job Creators Alliance.
Brad Anderson, former CEO of Best Buy, joined because he wants to counter the image of businesspeople as evil. When he was young, Anderson himself thought they were evil. But then he "stumbled into a business career" by going to work in a stereo store.
"I watched what happens in building a business. (My store,) The Sound of Music, which became Best Buy, was 11 years (old) before I made a dollar of profit." In 36 years, he turned that store into a $50 billion company.
Tom Stemberg, founder of Staples, got involved with the Job Creators Alliance because he's annoyed that the government makes a tough job much tougher.
He complains that government mostly creates jobs -- that kill jobs. "They're creating $300 million worth of jobs in the new consumer financial protection bureau," Stemberg said, "which I don't think is going to do much for productivity in America. We're creating all kinds of jobs trying to live up to Dodd-Frank ... and those jobs don't create much productivity.
Now, Stemberg runs a venture capital business. "I helped create over 100,000 jobs myself," he said. "Pinkberry and City Sports and J. McLaughlin are growing and adding employment."
To do that, he had to overcome hurdles placed in the way by government. "All that we get is grief and more hoops to jump through and more forms to fill out and more regulations to comply with," complained Stemberg. "Fastest-growing investment segment in venture capitalism: compliance software."
Compliance is the big word in business today. Every business has to have a compliance department. But resources are scarce, so these departments suck away creativity. It's one reason that these successful businesspeople don't think they could do today what they did in the past.
Mike Whalen, CEO of Heart of America Group, said he got started with loans from banks that took a chance on an unknown: "It is not an underwriting standard that can be dictated by Dodd-Frank with 55 pages. It's kind of a gut instinct."
But John Allison, who built BB&T Corp. into the 12th biggest bank in America, says that "gut instinct" is now illegal. "It would be very difficult to do what we did then today. It was semi-venture capital thing. The government regulations (today) are so tight, including setting credit standards, particularly since the so-called financial crisis and since they ... changed the credit standards in the banking industry, making it very hard for the banks to finance small businesses."
These successful businessmen realize that in one way, they profit from the regulatory burden. They can absorb the costs. That gives them an advantage over smaller competitors.
"Somebody who wants to compete with us can't because we can afford to hire the guys that can read this stuff and to keep us in compliance with the law. They can't," Anderson said.
Politicians rarely understand this. One who learned it too late was Sen. George McGovern. After he left office, he started a small bed-and-breakfast and hit the regulatory wall he helped create. Later, he wrote, "I wish during the years I was in public office I had this firsthand experience about the difficulties businesspeople face. ... We are choking off business opportunity."
Wish they learned that before leaving office.
SOURCE
****************************
Port Whine: Big Labor's Occu-Punks
Michelle Malkin
Scruffy progressive protesters locked themselves together across railroad tracks, blocked traffic and shouted profanities at police on Tuesday in a coordinated "West Coast Port Shutdown." Truckers lost wages. Shippers lost business. This is what the Occupy Wall Street movement calls "victory."
Aging Big Labor bosses toasted one another from the sidelines as they declared the "rebirth of the labor movement." What's really going on? It's an old-school power grab by a decrepit union wrapped in self-deluded social media do-goodism.
Peace-loving agitators wielding guitars and iPhones may earnestly believe they stood up to corruption and stood up for workers this week. A socialist website promoted the port shutdown as an expression of "solidarity" for the workers' "struggle." One Oakland, Calif., agitator decried "exploitation by capitalism" as the shiftless busily divided their work blockages into what they called -- chortle -- "shifts."
In reality, it's the young Occupiers who are being exploited as human shields for the economy-strangling agenda of the violence-prone International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). These ignorant punks are putting the "front" in "waterfront."
Few remember now that the left's three-month-long "Day of Rage" festivities kicked off in September at the Port of Longview, Wash. -- a far cry from Goldman Sachs and the rest of New York's financial district. Unionized longshoremen stormed the port there and took a half-dozen guards hostage. They damaged railroad cars, dumped grain, smashed windows, cut rail brake lines and blocked a train for hours while the ILWU and AFL-CIO cheered them on.
The violence followed a similar outburst in July, when longshoremen tore down a chain link fence on EGT's private property and blocked railroad tracks to prevent a grain delivery -- a clear violation of the 1946 Hobbs Act, which makes it a crime to employ robbery or extortion to impede interstate commerce.
Despite breaking federal law, violating a judicial restraining order and committing systematically planned sabotage and trespassing, most of the union thugs got away with wrist slaps. The ILWU received a $250,000 fine to cover damages from the vandalism -- a fine that will be paid with rank-and-file workers' hard-earned dues money.
So, what's their beef? No, it's not about the "right" of unions to "organize." It's not about the welfare of the "99 percent." It's about one union losing its seven-decade-old grip on West Coast port operations. It's about six-figure-salaried union suits at the ILWU, established by bloody radical Marxist Harry Bridges, throwing a lawless tantrum against economic efficiency and technological progress.
The ILWU is trying to break the will of EGT Development, a multinational agribusiness that recently built a $200 million grain terminal in Longview. It's a state-of-the-art facility with unprecedented automation features that will speed unloading, increase shipping capacity and bring in tens of millions of dollars in lease and tax payments alone to the region.
EGT needs a nimble 21st-century workforce. The entitled overlords of the ILWU, who have ruled West Coast ports since the 1930s, are demanding a monopoly on the company's master control system, control over the work hour structure, excessive mandatory breaks and extortionist man-hour "premiums" to bail out the union's underfunded pension. "We've worked these elevators since 1934, and we've always been in that master console," local ILWU President Dan Coffman told public radio.
EGT refused and instead brought in an outside contractor with a different union to fill about 50 jobs. But the ILWU water-carriers in the Occupy movement don't care about those workers. Or the American farmers who have been hurt by the port saboteurs. Or the independent non-union truckers who were forced to forgo work in the name of worker empowerment. Trucker Hai Ngo of San Leandro, Calif., told the San Francisco Chronicle: "The Occupy people handed out flyers to us, but never asked what we thought before they planned this. I will lose about $350, and at holiday time that hurts. It's just a waste of our time and money, and won't accomplish anything."
Unfortunately, Ngo and blue-collar workers like him are collateral damage in the ILWU's ruthless battle for Big Labor survival. Coffman, who has stoked violence for months, vowed earlier this year that "we will fight to the end to secure what is rightfully our turf."
And now the gasping longshoremen's union has a whole new set of Occu-tools to do the dirty work for them.
SOURCE
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)
****************************
Within days after my article on due process and presumption of innocence, the U.S. Senate voted to empower the U.S. military to apprehend and detain indefinitely anyone in America, based on the whim of the soldier or military commander, and it will probably eventually include any armed agent of government including local police. As Jacob Hornberger noted, this new provision will codify the U.S. as just another one of many dictatorships throughout world history.
But, even though al Qaeda is virtually non-existent, the Washington imbeciles want to expand and extend the "War on Terror" anyway and include the entire U.S. territory as a "battlefield." How can we explain this? As Justin Raimondo speculated, the real reason for this new dictatorial power may be because these senators know that America is headed for economic collapse and civil unrest. But as I pointed out in my article on martial law, whether there are terrorists or not, or whether there is a prosperous or collapsing economy, all human beings have inalienable rights, among them the right to presumption of innocence and due process. Any government violations of those rights are crimes against the people, pure and simple.
Sen. Lindsey Graham commented that, "If you’re an American citizen and you betray your country, you’re not going to be given a lawyer," in his un-American opposition to due process and his approval of apprehending and detaining innocent civilians indefinitely. But, as I asked in my earlier article: Who will determine whether or not one has "betrayed one’s country"? Graham and the other pro-dictatorship government bureaucrats do not seem able to distinguish between someone who actually has acted (or been found guilty of acting) against one’s fellow Americans and someone who is accused of doing so.
Graham wants to empower all military personnel (and probably any armed government official) to detain indefinitely those who are merely accused of doing something, without evidence brought forward, without having a lawyer, without access to their families, no due process whatsoever. This is a banana republic dictatorship, and it is thoroughly un-American, thoroughly anti-liberty.
Additionally, Graham hinted at curtailing political expression as protected by the First Amendment, and thus, given past examples of government censorship since 9/11, Americans who criticize the U.S. government’s "war on terror" could be declared as "enemy combatants," and apprehended and detained without charges or trial. If these senators have their way, merely questioning the government’s actions and questioning the legitimacy of these wars would be considered "terrorism."
The senators are now turning the military against the American people. That is treasonous, according to the U.S. Constitution, as turning the military against the people would be the federal government’s "levying war" against the "United States," that is, the various states of the union, and thus against the people of the states. I have noted before that such treasonous acts have already occurred in America.
SOURCE
**********************
Poverty Doesn't Make Thieves -- Liberalism Does
Ben Shapiro
This week, the Los Angeles Times reported a wave of theft plaguing area high schools. The objects at stake? Tubas. According to South Gate High School music teacher Ruben Gonzalez Jr., thieves broke into the band room and stole nothing but tubas. A few weeks before, thieves took eight sousaphones from a Compton high school. Either the original cast of "The Music Man" is criminally eager for a revival, or these thieves are selling the horns on the black market.
Now the left loves to claim that crime waves like this are caused by poverty. If you're poor, the logic goes, you'll have to steal a loaf of bread -- or a trombone -- to feed your child. Criminality thus becomes a moral act.
There's only one problem with this logic: It's absolutely wrong.
During the Great Depression, levels of crime actually dropped. During the 1920s, when life was free and easy, so was crime. During the 1930s, when the entire American economy fell into a government-owned alligator moat, crime was nearly non-existent. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was excellent, crime rose again.
In Britain, where the social safety net is more like a social swaddling cloth, crime rates other than murder are significantly higher than in the United States. Actually, the highest rate of car theft in the world is in peaceful, socialist, unicorn-riding Switzerland. Next comes New Zealand. Then Britain, Sweden, Australia, Denmark, Scotland, Italy, Canada and Norway. That's right -- the U.S. isn't even in the top ten.
Why is that? It's not that these other countries are impoverished -- far from it. It's not that their poor are Dickensian urchins following the advice of newfangled Fagins. It's that these countries have bred generations of people who think they are entitled to the property of others.
That mentality predominates in poor areas more than rich ones. There's a reason for that: Those who succeed economically in a free market system do so based on the notion that they don't deserve anyone else's property unless they work for it. They don't sit back waiting for someone to take care of them. They don't wait for welfare checks. They go out into the world and earn their way forward.
In poor areas, the opposite is true. Spend five minutes with many poor inner city kids and the sense of entitlement drips from them. Many of these folks are refugee thugs from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre": "Work? We ain't got no work. We don't need no work! I don't have to show you no stinkin' work!" And, by the way, they don't need no stinkin' badges, either -- because the people with the badges work for them, teaching them that sense of entitlement, impoverishing hard workers on behalf of those who think they're owed something by the world.
Persistent poverty, in short, is more often than not a moral problem, not an economic one -- stealing springs from that same moral failing. That is why affordable housing, provided for free by the government, is usually covered in graffiti, trashed and burned out. You'll never see a private, single-family home treated like that by its owner.
There's a basic rule in business: If you tell people that a product is free, they treat it like it has no value. We've spent the last 70 years in this country telling our poor that money and property are free. Of course, they don't attribute any value to money or property, then. Of course, they treat others' property as though it's valueless, to be stolen or taken at whim.
The liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson and President Obama hasn't turned thieves into sudden lovers of big-band swing. It's turned more and more Americans into thieves. Don't blame poverty. Blame morality. And blame a government and a society that have abandoned the notion of responsibility for juvenile delinquency.
SOURCE
***************************
Job Creators Fighting Back
John Stossel
Some politicians claim that politicians create jobs. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says, "My job is to create jobs."
What hubris! Government has no money of its own. All it does is take from some people and give to others. That may create some jobs, but only by leaving less money in the private sector for job creation.
Actually, it's worse than that. Since government commandeers scarce resources by force and doesn't have to peddle its so-called services on the market to consenting buyers, there's no feedback mechanism to indicate if those services are worth more to people than what they were forced to go without.
The only people who create real, sustainable jobs are in private businesses -- if they're unsubsidized.
Some CEOs are upset that people don't appreciate what they do. So they formed a group called the Job Creators Alliance.
Brad Anderson, former CEO of Best Buy, joined because he wants to counter the image of businesspeople as evil. When he was young, Anderson himself thought they were evil. But then he "stumbled into a business career" by going to work in a stereo store.
"I watched what happens in building a business. (My store,) The Sound of Music, which became Best Buy, was 11 years (old) before I made a dollar of profit." In 36 years, he turned that store into a $50 billion company.
Tom Stemberg, founder of Staples, got involved with the Job Creators Alliance because he's annoyed that the government makes a tough job much tougher.
He complains that government mostly creates jobs -- that kill jobs. "They're creating $300 million worth of jobs in the new consumer financial protection bureau," Stemberg said, "which I don't think is going to do much for productivity in America. We're creating all kinds of jobs trying to live up to Dodd-Frank ... and those jobs don't create much productivity.
Now, Stemberg runs a venture capital business. "I helped create over 100,000 jobs myself," he said. "Pinkberry and City Sports and J. McLaughlin are growing and adding employment."
To do that, he had to overcome hurdles placed in the way by government. "All that we get is grief and more hoops to jump through and more forms to fill out and more regulations to comply with," complained Stemberg. "Fastest-growing investment segment in venture capitalism: compliance software."
Compliance is the big word in business today. Every business has to have a compliance department. But resources are scarce, so these departments suck away creativity. It's one reason that these successful businesspeople don't think they could do today what they did in the past.
Mike Whalen, CEO of Heart of America Group, said he got started with loans from banks that took a chance on an unknown: "It is not an underwriting standard that can be dictated by Dodd-Frank with 55 pages. It's kind of a gut instinct."
But John Allison, who built BB&T Corp. into the 12th biggest bank in America, says that "gut instinct" is now illegal. "It would be very difficult to do what we did then today. It was semi-venture capital thing. The government regulations (today) are so tight, including setting credit standards, particularly since the so-called financial crisis and since they ... changed the credit standards in the banking industry, making it very hard for the banks to finance small businesses."
These successful businessmen realize that in one way, they profit from the regulatory burden. They can absorb the costs. That gives them an advantage over smaller competitors.
"Somebody who wants to compete with us can't because we can afford to hire the guys that can read this stuff and to keep us in compliance with the law. They can't," Anderson said.
Politicians rarely understand this. One who learned it too late was Sen. George McGovern. After he left office, he started a small bed-and-breakfast and hit the regulatory wall he helped create. Later, he wrote, "I wish during the years I was in public office I had this firsthand experience about the difficulties businesspeople face. ... We are choking off business opportunity."
Wish they learned that before leaving office.
SOURCE
****************************
Port Whine: Big Labor's Occu-Punks
Michelle Malkin
Scruffy progressive protesters locked themselves together across railroad tracks, blocked traffic and shouted profanities at police on Tuesday in a coordinated "West Coast Port Shutdown." Truckers lost wages. Shippers lost business. This is what the Occupy Wall Street movement calls "victory."
Aging Big Labor bosses toasted one another from the sidelines as they declared the "rebirth of the labor movement." What's really going on? It's an old-school power grab by a decrepit union wrapped in self-deluded social media do-goodism.
Peace-loving agitators wielding guitars and iPhones may earnestly believe they stood up to corruption and stood up for workers this week. A socialist website promoted the port shutdown as an expression of "solidarity" for the workers' "struggle." One Oakland, Calif., agitator decried "exploitation by capitalism" as the shiftless busily divided their work blockages into what they called -- chortle -- "shifts."
In reality, it's the young Occupiers who are being exploited as human shields for the economy-strangling agenda of the violence-prone International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). These ignorant punks are putting the "front" in "waterfront."
Few remember now that the left's three-month-long "Day of Rage" festivities kicked off in September at the Port of Longview, Wash. -- a far cry from Goldman Sachs and the rest of New York's financial district. Unionized longshoremen stormed the port there and took a half-dozen guards hostage. They damaged railroad cars, dumped grain, smashed windows, cut rail brake lines and blocked a train for hours while the ILWU and AFL-CIO cheered them on.
The violence followed a similar outburst in July, when longshoremen tore down a chain link fence on EGT's private property and blocked railroad tracks to prevent a grain delivery -- a clear violation of the 1946 Hobbs Act, which makes it a crime to employ robbery or extortion to impede interstate commerce.
Despite breaking federal law, violating a judicial restraining order and committing systematically planned sabotage and trespassing, most of the union thugs got away with wrist slaps. The ILWU received a $250,000 fine to cover damages from the vandalism -- a fine that will be paid with rank-and-file workers' hard-earned dues money.
So, what's their beef? No, it's not about the "right" of unions to "organize." It's not about the welfare of the "99 percent." It's about one union losing its seven-decade-old grip on West Coast port operations. It's about six-figure-salaried union suits at the ILWU, established by bloody radical Marxist Harry Bridges, throwing a lawless tantrum against economic efficiency and technological progress.
The ILWU is trying to break the will of EGT Development, a multinational agribusiness that recently built a $200 million grain terminal in Longview. It's a state-of-the-art facility with unprecedented automation features that will speed unloading, increase shipping capacity and bring in tens of millions of dollars in lease and tax payments alone to the region.
EGT needs a nimble 21st-century workforce. The entitled overlords of the ILWU, who have ruled West Coast ports since the 1930s, are demanding a monopoly on the company's master control system, control over the work hour structure, excessive mandatory breaks and extortionist man-hour "premiums" to bail out the union's underfunded pension. "We've worked these elevators since 1934, and we've always been in that master console," local ILWU President Dan Coffman told public radio.
EGT refused and instead brought in an outside contractor with a different union to fill about 50 jobs. But the ILWU water-carriers in the Occupy movement don't care about those workers. Or the American farmers who have been hurt by the port saboteurs. Or the independent non-union truckers who were forced to forgo work in the name of worker empowerment. Trucker Hai Ngo of San Leandro, Calif., told the San Francisco Chronicle: "The Occupy people handed out flyers to us, but never asked what we thought before they planned this. I will lose about $350, and at holiday time that hurts. It's just a waste of our time and money, and won't accomplish anything."
Unfortunately, Ngo and blue-collar workers like him are collateral damage in the ILWU's ruthless battle for Big Labor survival. Coffman, who has stoked violence for months, vowed earlier this year that "we will fight to the end to secure what is rightfully our turf."
And now the gasping longshoremen's union has a whole new set of Occu-tools to do the dirty work for them.
SOURCE
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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