Thursday, April 10, 2014
DeMint: ‘Big Business Is No Friend of Conservatism’
Former Sen. Jim DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, writes in his new book—“Falling in Love With America Again”—about the cozy relationship between big business and big government.
“Almost all big corporations benefit from, advocate for, and downright like big government,” DeMint writes.
In an interview with CNSNews.com, DeMint explained his view that a corollary to this principle is that big business and conservatism are not on the same team.
His views on the matter are seasoned by the insights he gleaned from serving three self-limited terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, and from being elected twice to the U.S. Senate.
CNSNews.com asked DeMint about the partnership he discusses in his book between mega-corporations and the federal government: “How does that work and why does it work?”
“The large companies have lobbyists and people who work directly with the regulators, and many of the regulators like to be friendly with the big companies because the idea is they go to work for the big companies someday to help them with future legislators,” said DeMint. “And they make a lot more money as lobbyists or government-relations people, whatever you call them. But they become very friendly.
“These big companies like to write regulations that make it harder for the smaller companies to compete with them,” DeMint said. “The large companies can deal with a regulatory maze much better than the small companies can. Like the big tobacco companies wanted the FDA to regulate cigarettes because they knew the smaller companies could not get approval to ever introduce a new brand.”
CNSNews.com asked: “So, essentially, there’s this cooperation between big business and the government to create a regulatory barrier to entrepreneurs and small business people to compete with the big business?”
“In every category,” said DeMint. “It happens some at the state level too, licensing different industries and to make it harder for people to get in once those people have established it. I just want Americans to be aware of that, and this idea that the big government’s going to take care of you, it ain’t working.”
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Leftist Thought-Gangsters Strike Again
By David Limbaugh
Let me see whether I have this right. Brendan Eich was forced to step down as CEO of Mozilla because it became public that he opposed same-sex marriage, the same position that President Barack Obama, darling of the LGBT community, held prior to his phony conversion.
Why didn't the left demand that President Obama resign as president of the United States prior to the consummation of his "evolution" on the issue in favor of same-sex marriage? Was it because liberals knew he was never actually opposed to same-sex marriage and that his stated opposition was an opportunistic ruse to make him electable?
It wasn't that long ago when support of traditional marriage was the majority position in this country. I imagine that it still is in reality, though fewer and fewer people have the courage to stand up for their convictions these days, even to the extent of admitting their honest feelings in response to polling surveys.
This politically correct thought control is getting out of hand. For a disturbing percentage of people on the left, freedom doesn't matter, nor do tolerance, inclusiveness and compassion. If you don't have the correct views — e.g., if you believe that marriage should still be defined as being between one man and one woman — you are not entitled to respect or even to the same rights and freedoms as others. The rationale is that because of your "intolerance" and "hate," you are of a different class, a subspecies — vermin — and you forfeit the privilege of being tolerated and deserve to be treated with hate yourself.
But not all these Stalinists on the left are so open about their own bigotry. To be sure, they support the mistreatment of people like Brendan Eich, who committed the unpardonable sin of voting for California's Proposition 8, but they "nuance" their arguments to depict themselves as less tyrannical.
For example, a New York Times writer opined that it's a mistake to draw the conclusion that the forced resignation of Eich was "an instance of political correctness run amok" or that it is "a sign that Silicon Valley has become militantly (in)tolerant, unwilling to let executives express their personal viewpoints on issues unrelated to their jobs."
Why? Because "Mozilla is not a normal company. It is an activist organization" whose "primary mission isn't to make money but to spread open-source code across the globe in the eventual hope of promoting 'the development of the Internet as a public resource.'" According to the writer, many people at Mozilla didn't consider Eich's views on gay marriage completely irrelevant to his role as chief executive.
Some thought he was too "divisive" to be an effective leader.
How is this not bigotry, you ask? Well, because Mozilla is not an evil capitalistic company primarily out to make money but one involved in "a mission." "If his job was to motivate people, and he was instead causing people to question the community's ethic — well, at the least, you can say he wasn't doing a good job." Wow.
It's amazing how leftists can shape-shift arguments to rationalize their own intolerance. But the arguments of Matthew Riley MacPherson, a developer for Mozilla, are even worse.
According to MacPherson, Eich's fatal mistake wasn't his support of Proposition 8 several years ago. "Being on the losing side of history this one time is okay, because I've seen Eich be right about many things during just my tenure at Mozilla," wrote MacPherson. What made MacPherson realize Eich "was not ready to lead Mozilla — or any company — was his damage control (interview) on CNET."
In this interview, Eich did not cower, recant or acknowledge that he is the worst person in the world other than the Koch brothers. "Eich," wrote MacPherson, "was given the clear chance to publicly apologize on behalf of himself and Mozilla — something called for by many, including myself. When asked if he could do it all over and do it differently: the correct answer was 'yes'. But he didn't say he would do it differently. It was at that exact point in time that he failed as CEO. ... He failed to execute."
So these thought-gangsters would rather have as their CEO a mealy-mouthed coward who would disingenuously recant his position to conform to their demands than they would a leader who stands up for what he believes at the risk of incurring the left's unmitigated wrath and losing his job?
I don't know which are worse, the leftists who come right out and admit they won't tolerate an opposing viewpoint or those who delude themselves into believing that their own abysmal intolerance is actually just their sophisticated business judgment.
Both are outrageous and unacceptable.
The overarching issue in this sordid matter is not the propriety or advisability of same-sex marriage. It is freedom, the selective contempt many on the left have for it and their willingness to twist themselves into pretzels justifying the unjustifiable. Everyone should be alarmed about this.
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How to Assist Evil
By Walter E. Williams
"Engineering Evil" is a documentary recently shown on the Military History channel. It's a story of Nazi Germany's murder campaign before and during World War II. According to some estimates, 16 million Jews and other people died at the hands of Nazis
Though the Holocaust ranks high among the great human tragedies, most people never consider the most important question: How did Adolf Hitler and the Nazis gain the power that they needed to commit such horror? Focusing solely on the evil of the Holocaust won't get us very far toward the goal of the Jewish slogan "Never Again."
When Hitler came to power, he inherited decades of political consolidation by Otto von Bismarck and later the Weimar Republic that had weakened the political power of local jurisdictions. Through the Enabling Act (1933), whose formal name was "A Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich," Hitler gained the power to enact laws with neither the involvement nor the approval of the Reichstag, Germany's parliament. The Enabling Act destroyed any remaining local autonomy. The bottom line is that it was decent Germans who made Hitler's terror possible — Germans who would have never supported his territorial designs and atrocities.
The 20th century turned out to be mankind's most barbaric. Roughly 50 million to 60 million people died in international and civil wars. As tragic as that number is, it pales in comparison with the number of people who were killed at the hands of their own government. Recently deceased Rudolph J. Rummel, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii and author of "Death by Government," estimated that since the beginning of the 20th century, governments have killed 170 million of their own citizens.
Top government killers were the Soviet Union, which, between 1917 and 1987, killed 62 million of its own citizens, and the People's Republic of China, which, between 1949 and 1987, was responsible for the deaths of 35 million to 40 million of its citizens. In a distant third place were the Nazis, who murdered about 16 million Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and others deemed misfits, such as homosexuals and the mentally ill.
We might ask why the 20th century was so barbaric. Surely, there were barbarians during earlier ages. Part of the answer is that during earlier times, there wasn't the kind of concentration of power that emerged during the 20th century. Had Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Hitler been around in earlier times, they could not have engineered the slaughter of tens of millions of people. They wouldn't have had the authority. There was considerable dispersion of jealously guarded political power in the forms of heads of provincial governments and principalities and nobility and church leaders whose political power within their spheres was often just as strong as the monarch's.
Professor Rummel explained in the very first sentence of "Death by Government" that "Power kills; absolute Power kills absolutely. ... The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects." That's the long, tragic, ugly story of government: the elite's use of government to dupe and forcibly impose its will on the masses.
The masses are always duped by well-intentioned phrases. After all, what German could have been against "A Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich"? It's not just Germans who have fallen prey to well-intentioned phrases. After all, who can be against the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act"?
We Americans ought to keep in mind the fact that Hitler, Stalin and Mao would have had more success in their reign of terror if they had the kind of control and information about their citizens that agencies such as the NSA, the IRS and the ATF have about us. You might ask, "What are you saying, Williams?" Just put it this way: No German who died before 1930 would have believed the Holocaust possible.
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Taxing Life Away
John Stossel
It's tax time. I'm too scared to do my taxes. I'm sure I'll get something wrong and my enemies in government will persecute -- no, I mean prosecute -- me. So I hired Bob.
Bob's my accountant. I like Bob, but I don't like that I have to have an accountant. I don't want to spend time keeping records and talking to Bob about boring things I don't understand, and I really don't want to pay Bob. But I have to.
What a waste. Once, I calculated what I could do with the money I give Bob. I could have a fancy dinner out 200 times. I could buy a motorcycle. I could take a cruise ship all the way from New York to Venice, Italy, and back.
Better yet, I could do some good for the world. For the same money I waste on Bob, I could pay four kids' tuition at a Catholic high school.
The tax code is now complex enough that most Americans now hire Bob, or his equivalent. Instead of inventing things, doing charity work or just having fun, we waste weeks (and billions of dollars) on tax preparation.
And we change our lives to suit the wishes of politicians.
"What the tax code is doing is trying to choose our values for us," complains Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute. I think I choose my own values, but it's true that politicians use taxes to manipulate us. Million-dollar mortgage deductions steer us to buy bigger houses, and solar tax credits persuaded me to put solar panels on my roof. Brook objects to every manipulation in the code: "It's telling us charity is good!"
On my TV show, I respond: But charity is good! Brook retorts, "If you want to give to charity, great, (but) I might invest in a business that's more important."
That's possible, but since a charity will probably spend the money better than government will, isn't it good that the code encourages people to give? Steve Forbes argues that if taxes were flat and simple, Americans would give more . "Americans don't need to be bribed to give ... In the 1980s, when the top rate got cut from 70 down to 28 percent ... charitable giving went up . When people have more, they give more."
While freedom lovers complain about the byzantine complexity of the tax code, the politically connected tout their special breaks. The National Association of Realtors runs TV ads showing Uncle Sam offering first-time homebuyers an $8,000 tax break, while sleazily winking at the viewer.
The tax code oddity that may have the most destructive influence on America might be the fact that if you buy private health insurance, you pay more tax than if your employer buys you a plan.
It's why we ended up with a sluggish health care market unresponsive to individual desires -- leading to the insistence that we need a government-managed alternative like Obamacare.
The code is incomprehensible. You can get a deduction for feeding feral cats but not for having a watchdog, for clarinet lessons if your orthodontist thinks it'll cure your overbite but not for piano lessons a psychotherapist prescribes for relaxation. It seems so arbitrary.
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Wednesday, April 09, 2014
Uninstall Firefox
Dennis Prager
In 31 years of broadcasting, and 40 years of writing, I have never advocated a boycott of a product.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
During the 2012 presidential campaign, when the left attempted to destroy Chick-Fil-A for its owner's views on same-sex marriage, I suggested on my radio show that the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, stand in front of a Chick-Fil-A restaurant while enjoying some Ben and Jerry's ice cream. In that way, I argued, he could show one of the great moral differences between the right and the left. Though Ben and Jerry are leftists, we conservatives do not believe that company owners' views should matter to consumers. We believe that products should speak for themselves. If the ice cream is good, despite whatever repugnance we might feel regarding the views of the makers of that ice cream, we will still purchase it.
The left does not see things that way. The left is out to crush individuals and companies with whom it differs. This is especially so today on the issue of same-sex marriage.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of this took place last week. The governing board of the widely used browser, Firefox, forced the company's CEO, Brendan Eich, to resign. The Firefox board had learned that in 2008, Eich donated $1,000 to the Proposition 8 campaign in California. Proposition 8 amended the California Constitution to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. In classic Communist fashion, gay rights organizations demanded that Eich publicly recant. When Eich did not, gay rights and other leftist organizations called for a boycott of Firefox. Firefox immediately forced Eich out.
All these years, the left, after coining the term "McCarthyism" in order to disparage the right, had fooled most people into believing that it is the right that suppresses liberty. The truth, of course, has been the opposite. Worldwide, with the exception of Nazi Germany (which was a uniquely race-based totalitarianism, neither left nor right -- while it rejected Marxist class-based struggle, it supported socialism ("Nazism" was short for National Socialism), every genocidal totalitarian regime of the 20th century was leftist. And domestically, too, the left has much less interest in liberty than in forcing people to act in accord with its values. A totalitarian streak is part of the left's DNA. How you think matters and what you do away outside of work matters: More than 20 states prohibit judges from being leaders in the Boy Scouts -- because the left deems the Boy Scouts homophobic.
During the McCarthy era, the left (and not only the left) screamed when people were falsely charged with supporting Stalin and Communism, one of the greatest evils in human history. But the left also screamed when people who really did aid and abet Stalin were dismissed from their jobs. In other words, for those on the left who celebrate Eich's ouster, it was evil to deprive a man who supported Stalin of a job, but it is right to fire a man who supports the man-woman definition of marriage. Such is the left's moral compass.
It is important to further note that gay employees at Firefox acknowledge that Eich never discriminated against gays, whether in employment, benefits or any other way. But that doesn't matter to the left because a totalitarian streak is part of the left's DNA.
As Princeton Professor of Jurisprudence Robert George warned on my radio show, today the left fires employees for opposition to same-sex marriage. Tomorrow it will fire employees who are pro-life ("anti-woman"). And next it will be employees who support Israel (an "apartheid state").
The reason to boycott Firefox is not that it is run by leftists. Nor is the reason to support the man-woman definition of marriage. It is solely in order to preserve liberty in the land of liberty. If Firefox doesn't recant and rehire Eich as CEO, McCarthyism will have returned far more pervasively and perniciously than in its first incarnation. The message the gay left (such as the Orwellian-named Human Rights Campaign) and the left in general wish to send is that Americans who are in positions of power at any company should be forced to resign if they hold a position that the left strongly opposes.
And right now that position is opposition to same-sex marriage.
Think about that. In the United States of America today, the belief that marriage should remain defined as the union of a man and woman is portrayed as so vile by the left that anyone who holds it is unfit for employment.
A handful of those on the gay (and straight) left have spoken out against the forced resignation of Eich. If their words are to mean anything, they must join in the call to boycott Firefox. Otherwise, their protestations are meaningless, made solely to preserve their moral credibility.
The battle over Firefox is the most important battle in America at this particular moment. If you use Firefox, uninstall it. Instead use Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera, Safari, or try Pale Moon for Windows, which is based on the Firefox engine and will import all of your bookmarks. For mobile devices, you can try Puffin.
America can have liberty or it can have Firefox. Right now, it cannot have both.
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Race-Based Beating
Steven Utash, a 54-year-old Detroit tree trimmer, accidentally hit a boy with his truck. When he got out to check on the child, who had a broken leg, a dozen people immediately attacked Utash and beat him unconscious while robbing him of his wallet and phone. He's now in a medically induced coma, and his son says, “I am surprised that he is alive.” Utash is white and, according to witnesses, his attackers were black. Police haven't yet made any arrests, however. We're waiting on Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to weigh in and for Barack Obama to hold a press conference to proclaim that, if he had a son, he would look like the assailants.
Update: “Two Detroit teenagers were arrested Saturday in an attack on a suburban man who was brutally beaten by a mob after accidentally striking a boy with his pickup truck,” Fox News reports.
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Krauthammer Nails Jeb Bush
Commentator Charles Krauthammer responded to Jeb Bush's outrageous assertion that coming to the U.S. illegally in order to provide for one's family is “an act of love” and shouldn't be punished quite so much. Krauthammer said, “I grant him the complete sincerity and honesty of his view, he's always had that kind of approach. But that's leading with your chin.
After all, I mean there are millions of people around the world equally compassionate about the future of their children who are waiting patiently and legally in line and who love their children no less, and yet there is supposed to be this special compassion for those who jump the fence and break the law.
Secondly, there's a question if it were just one person … or one family who jumped the fence, it wouldn't be a national issue, but it's 11 million, and then it becomes a national issue, an issue of sovereignty and the president has to make a statement that an elementary principle of sovereignty is we control who comes into the country.” Jeb Bush may want to think twice about any presidential bid.
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Data Proves that Voter Fraud Is Rampant!
I no longer only suspect that Barack Obama stole the election… the more time passes, the more certain I become of it!
The Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program is set up to allow states to upload their voter rolls and voting records to a separate system and be able to crosscheck their registered voters with other states. The goal, obviously, is to find instances where the same individual is registered in multiple states, or even voted multiple times across the country.
North Carolina has recently come under lot of criticism for its voter ID requirement. Critics say that there is no “sizeable” evidence of voter fraud in North Carolina that could possibly warrant voter ID requirements. Well, this year’s findings from the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program prove that not only is Voter ID a good idea in North Carolina, but it is absolutely essential to protect the integrity of our elections!
The crosscheck revealed that in 2012, a whopping 35,750 people with the same first name, last name, and date of birth, were found to have voted in North Carolina AND another state. The preliminary findings suggest that there could be 35,750 cases of people voting twice (once in North Carolina, once in another state). Additionally, the program found that 81 people in North Carolina had cast ballots after their death.
In all, the Crosscheck Program recognized a total of 155,692 North Carolina voters whose first and last names, dates of birth and last four digits of their Social Security number matched those of voters registered in other states!
In North Carolina alone, not only is voter fraud happening, but the potential for even more fraud is so much higher! However, currently only 28 states are participating in this Interstate Crosscheck Program. That leaves another 22 states where we have absolutely no idea how much voter fraud is taking place. Not surprisingly, not a single Northeast state participated in the program.
Imagine the fraud and abuse we would find if participation in the Interstate Crosscheck Program was mandatory, rather than optional as it is now! Imagine the fraud and abuse we would find if states like California and New York were forced to actually check their voter rolls! Congress must mandate participation in this program before illegal voters are able to steal another election!
I say steal another election because there is no doubt in my mind that voter fraud contributed to Barack Obama’s wins in 2008 and 2012. This isn’t some tinfoil hat conspiracy, either…
Barack Obama won North Carolina by only 13,692 votes. That’s what it took to win back in 2008.
What part did voter fraud play in that? We’ll never know for sure. But what we do know is that four years later, up to 35,750 people illegally cast ballots in the election. With over 155,000 people registered to vote in North Carolina AND other states, the potential for fraud is astronomical!
If you live in Illinois, there are potentially 211,023 registered voters who are also registered to vote in other states. With 7,292,639 registered voters in the state, that means that 2.8% of all Illinois registered voters are registered to vote in multiple states.
In Michigan, there are 164,837 potential duplicate voters (2.2% of all registered voters).
In Colorado, the program found 136,542 “residents” who were registered to vote in other states – a whopping 5.5% of all registered voters!
And in Arizona, where the Obama Administration has fought tooth and nail to stop the state from protecting the integrity of the vote, there are potentially 108,077 residents who are registered to vote in multiple states (3.4% of all registered voters).
This is what happens when 28 out of 50 states work together and compare their voter rolls to find duplicates. The program is literally finding hundreds of thousands of potential duplicate voters.
Not surprisingly, organizations on the Left are calling the Crosscheck Program “racist” because it is finding evidence supporting the need for voter ID requirements and stricter voter registration requirements.
If this widespread fraud and double voting is happening in traditionally Red states, what do you think the Crosscheck Program would find if it started combing through the voter rolls in states like California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania? The technology is there and most importantly, it doesn’t cost anything! Congress must force every state to participate in this program!
The North Carolina findings show that when every single vote counts in an election, when the difference between liberty and tyranny is determined by just a few thousand votes, you can rest assured knowing that there are people voting in multiple states which are tipping the balance.
How many times has this influenced an election? How many times have candidates been put into office by relying on illegal votes to edge past their opponent?
We must take every step possible to protect the integrity of the vote! Yes, that mean forcing registered voters to show photo ID on Election Day… but it also required us to shore up the voter registration process.
Submitting the voter rolls to the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program is a good first step in identifying whether someone is registered to vote in more than one state. However, almost half the states still haven’t uploaded their voter rolls and voter records to the program.
It doesn’t cost anything… these states just don’t want to know what the cross check would find!
Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act in 1993, and one of the law’s provisions calls for Congress to “ensure that accurate and current voter registration rolls are maintained.” We are at the point where the technology makes identifying voter fraud instantaneous, and yet 22 out of 50 states are allowed to ignore this technology and pretend that nothing is wrong.
Congress must honor its responsibility and make sure that EVERY state is checking for voter fraud and duplicate voter registrations. It only took 13,692 votes for Obama to win North Carolina and there could have been tens of thousands of people illegally casting North Carolina ballots! This is happening everywhere!
SOURCE
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Tuesday, April 08, 2014
The afterlife -- Old Testament versus New
The hope for a life after death among the ancient Hebrews was very down to earth. There were many religions in the ancient Near East which were much more fancy -- religions that said we live on as spirit beings after the death of our bodies. The ancient Hebrews rejected that. Their hope was for a resurrection of themselves in their original bodies at the time of the coming of the Messiah -- when the earth would be returned to its original Edenic condition. They envisaged living in a new Eden.
Their scorn for belief in an immediate life after death is eloquently expressed in Ecclesiastes 9: 5-7, 10.
5 For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.
6 Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.
10 Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest
That's pretty final. Only a miracle can offer something after that.
Isaiah 45: 18
For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited
Isaiah 65 17
For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.
Isaiah 65:20ff
21 And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.
22 They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
23 They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with them.
24 And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.
25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent's meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.
So, a pretty terrestrial hope for the future.
And, surprisingly, the New Testament recorded that hope too:
James 4:13-14
For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away."
And have you ever thought what you are saying when you pray as Jesus taught:
Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done ON EARTH, as it is in Heaven
Again the hope is for a future Edenic Kingdom on earth, not some airy-fairy life in heaven.
St Paul, however, rather upsets the applecart by preaching a version of the old Eastern beliefs that he knew well from his pre-conversion life.
1 Corinthians 15: 6
6 After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.
1 Corinthians 15: 42-44
42 So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption:
43 It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power:
44 It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.
1 Corinthians 15: 50-53
50 Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.
51 Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
53 For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
But Paul was still not preaching an immediate spiritual life. As a good Jew, he looked forward to the day of judgment as the day on which resurrection takes place. Note in verse 6 he speaks of Christ's followers who have died as "asleep". They are not enjoying a new life in Heaven.
What Paul appears to have added is the idea that the Christians of his day were special. They only would undergo a spiritual transformation on the last day. And he expected that day imminently. Some early Christians would need to be resurrected and some would still be alive. So those alive would be transformed rather than resurrected.
But you still believe that you have got a soul inside you which is immortal and flits straight off into the spirit realm when your body dies? That's a pagan doctrine, I am afraid. I could quote text after text but in both the OT and the NT the soul is quite mortal:
Ezekiel 22:27
27 Her princes in the midst thereof are like wolves ravening the prey, to shed blood, and to destroy souls, to get dishonest gain.
Matthew 16:26
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
Psalms 146: 3, 4
3 Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
4 His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.
As John 3:16 says, eternal life has to be earned (by believing). It is not automatic. The alternative is death pure and simple.
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
See you at the Resurrection?
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Francis: No, I am Not a Communist
In the months since Pope Francis released his 2013 apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Guadium, critics of his pontificate have seized upon remarks he made regarding trickledown economics. In his view, he wrote, the successful implementation of such theories “have never been confirmed by the facts.” Of course, many conservatives scoffed at this assertion, some of whom accused him outright of being a socialist or a communist.
But what Pope Francis was getting at, I think, is how a “new idolatry of money” has taken root -- and ahold -- of many of us. This leads inevitably to what Pope Francis describes as a “throw away” culture. Individuals too often place material success, wealth, and money above the needs of human beings in a capitalist system. Such self-centeredness "deadens us," he argues; we become indifferent and callous to those who suffer. So while this is a rather sharp criticism of unfettered capitalism and capitalism in general, it is hardly a clarion call for Marxist revolution, either.
Earlier in the week Pope Francis gave a meeting with a number of communications students from Belgium. During the interview he specifically addressed charges that he was a communist. He said he wasn’t, of course, explaining instead where his passion for the poor comes from:
In a March 31 interview with communications students, Pope Francis responded to previous accusations of being a communist, explaining that his preference for the poor is in fact based in the Gospel.
“I heard two months ago that a person referred to my preference for speaking about the poor, saying: 'This Pope is a communist, no?' And no, this is the banner of the Gospel, not of communism, of the Gospel,” the Pope explained during the encounter.
Given to three Belgian youth who are studying communications sciences, the interview was broadcast on the evening of April 3 on the Belgium website deredactie.be., and was later picked up by Italian news agency ReppublicaTV.
During the interview, one student asked the Pope where his preference for the poor and most needy comes from, to which the pontiff responded: “Because this is the heart of the Gospel, and I am a believer, I believe in God, I believe in Christ, I believe in the Gospel, and the heart of the Gospel is the poor.”
“And because of this I believe that the poor are the center of the Gospel of Jesus. This is clear if we read it,” he affirmed.
One need not be a communist to care passionately for the poor. In the same way that one need not be a communist to criticize certain elements of an economic system that can at times lead to inequities and social exclusion.
SOURCE
**************************
GM corruption and Toyota
Here's another reason government should never own a business.
In February 2010, the Obama administration's transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, told America, without a shred of evidence, that Toyota automobiles were dangerous to drive. LaHood offered the remarks in front of the House subcommittee that was investigating reports of unintended-acceleration crashes. “My advice is, if anybody owns one of these vehicles, stop driving it,” he said, sending the company's stock into a nose dive.
Even at the time, LaHood's comments were reckless at best. Assailing the competition reeks of political opportunism and cronyism. It also illustrates one of the unavoidable predicaments of the state's owning a corporation in a competitive marketplace. And when we put LaHood's comment into perspective today, it's actually a lot worse. The Obama administration not only had the power and ideological motive to damage the largely nonunionized competition but also was busy propping up a company that was causing preventable deaths.
No one is innocent, of course, but not everyone is bailed out. So Toyota, after recalling millions of cars and changing parts and floor mats even before LaHood's outburst – and after years of being hounded by the administration – recently agreed to pay a steep fine for its role in the acceleration flap. This, despite the fact that in 2012, Department of Transportation engineers determined that no mechanical failure was present that would cause applying the brakes to initiate acceleration. The DOT conducted tests that determined that the brakes could maintain a stationary car or bring one to a full stop even with the engine racing. It looked at 58 vehicles that were supposedly involved in unintended acceleration and found no evidence of brake failure or throttle malfunction.
Attorney General Eric Holder kept at it, though, and Toyota finally agreed to a $1.2 billion settlement (it has about $60 billion in reserves) to make it go away. Though it looks as if the company doesn't think the fight is worthwhile, for all I know, it's guilty. I'm certain, though, that General Motors is. It announced this week that it was recalling over a million vehicles that had sudden loss of electric power steering. This, after recalling nearly 3 million vehicles for ignition switch problems that the company had known about since 2001 and are now linked to 13 deaths.
GM has apologized. But does anyone believe that the Obama administration took as hard a look at GM as it did Toyota? As early as 2007, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration knew that there may be problems with air bags but never launched a formal investigation. The NHTSA's acting chief, David Friedman, testified that GM never told the agency that faulty switches were at the root of the air bag problem. Fine. Before plowing billions of tax dollars into saving the United Automobile Workers, did the car czar or any other Obama officials take extra care to review DOT records to ensure that taxpayers would not be funding the preventable deaths of American citizens? Would DOT and Holder exhibit the same zealousness for safety with GM as they did when it came to Toyota? In the midst of the bailout debate and subsequent “turnaround,” news of a cover-up and major recall would have been a political disaster.
So it's difficult to understand why this isn't a huge scandal. If every obtuse utterance by an obscure Republican congressman gets the media juices flowing, surely the possibility of this kind of negligence is worth a look. Can anyone with access to the administration ask some of these questions? Because if you take credit for “saving” a company (actually, an “industry,” as no one would have ever driven again if Obama hadn't saved the day), you also get credit for “saving” the real-life unscrupulous version of the company. “I placed my bet on the American worker,” Obama told union workers in 2012. “And I'll make that bet any day of the week. And now, three years later, that bet is paying off.” Betting $80 billion of someone else's money to prop up sympathetic labor unions isn't exactly fraught with political risk. Unless it turns out that your administration is less concerned about the safety defects of the company you own than it is about the company you dislike. That would be corruption.
SOURCE
*****************************
For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
******************************
Monday, April 07, 2014
Amazing! Scientists find that conservatives are more cautious
The findings below can all be summarized as showing conservatives to be more cautious, which is hardly news. But there is a bit more to it than that. It shows that conservative caution is inbuilt -- in that conservatives show quicker and stronger responses to things that require caution
Thomas Jefferson was a smart dude. And in one of his letters to John Adams, dated June 27, 1813, Jefferson made an observation about the nature of politics that science is only now, two centuries later, beginning to confirm. "The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time," wrote Jefferson. "The terms of Whig and Tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history," he later added. "They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals."
Tories were the British conservatives of Jefferson's day, and Whigs were the British liberals. What Jefferson was saying, then, was that whether you call yourself a Whig or a Tory has as much to do with your psychology or disposition as it has to do with your ideas. At the same time, Jefferson was also suggesting that there's something pretty fundamental and basic about Whigs (liberals) and Tories (conservatives), such that the two basic political factions seem to appear again and again in the world, and have for "all time."
Jefferson didn't have access to today's scientific machinery—eye tracker devices, skin conductance sensors, and so on. Yet these very technologies are now being used to reaffirm his insight. At the center of the research are many scholars working at the intersection of psychology, biology, and politics, but one leader in the field is John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln whose "Political Physiology Laboratory" has been producing some pretty stunning results.
"We know that liberals and conservatives are really deeply different on a variety of things," Hibbing explains on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast (stream above). "It runs from their tastes, to their cognitive patterns—how they think about things, what they pay attention to—to their physical reactions. We can measure their sympathetic nervous systems, which is the fight-or-flight system. And liberals and conservatives tend to respond very differently."
This is not fringe science: One of Hibbing's pioneering papers on the physiology of ideology was published in none other than the top-tier journal Science in 2008. It found that political partisans on the left and the right differ significantly in their bodily responses to threatening stimuli. For example, startle reflexes after hearing a loud noise were stronger in conservatives. And after being shown a variety of threatening images ("a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," according to the study), conservatives also exhibited greater skin conductance—a moistening of the sweat glands that indicates arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, which manages the body's fight-or-flight response.
It all adds up, according to Hibbing, to what he calls a "negativity bias" on the right. Conservatives, Hibbing's research suggests, go through the world more attentive to negative, threatening, and disgusting stimuli—and then they adopt tough, defensive, and aversive ideologies to match that perceived reality.
In a 2012 study, Hibbing and his colleagues showed as much through the use of eye-tracking devices like the one shown above. Liberals and conservatives were fitted with devices that tracked their gaze, and were shown a series of four-image collages containing pictures that were either "appetitive" (e.g., something happy or positive) or "aversive" (showing something threatening, scary, or disgusting). The eye-tracking device allowed the researchers to measure where the research subjects first fixed their gaze, how long it took them to do so, and then how long they tended to dwell on different images.
Here's an example of an aversive, disgust-evoking image, one that just happens to also feature Hibbing himself. He says worms are actually "quite tasty." (This picture wasn't actually used in the study, but a very similar one was.)
And you can see an example of a four-image collage used in the study here. One of the images is adorable, the rest are varying degrees of disgusting and aversive. Which image does your eye go to first, and how long did you focus on it?
The results of Hibbing's study were clear: The conservatives tended to focus their eyes much more rapidly on the negative or aversive images, and also to dwell on them for a lot longer. The authors therefore concluded that based on results like these, "those on the political right and those on the political left may simply experience the world differently."
"Maybe you've had this experience, watching a political debate with somebody who disagrees with you," says Hibbing. "And you discuss it afterwards. And it's like, 'Did we watch the same debate?' And in some respects, you didn't. And I think that's what this research indicates."
One of the biggest differences clearly involves the emotion of disgust. Hibbing isn't the only one to have found a relationship between conservatism and stronger disgust sensitivity—this result is also a mainstay of the very influential research of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who studies how deep-seated moral emotions divide the left and the right (see here). In one study, Hibbing and his colleagues showed that a higher level of disgust sensitivity is predictive not only of political conservatism but also disapproval of gay marriage. It is important to underscore that your disgust sensitivity is involuntary; it is not something under your control. It is a primal, gut emotion.
That word, "primal," helps us begin to understand what Hibbing and his colleagues now think ideology actually is. They think that humans have core preferences for how societies ought to be structured: Some of us are more hierarchical, as opposed to egalitarian; some of us prefer harsher punishments for rule breakers, whereas some of us would be more inclined to forgive; some of us find outsiders or out-groups intriguing and enticing, whereas others find them threatening. Hibbing and his team have even found that preferences on such matters appear to have a genetic basis.
Thus, the idea seems to be that our physiology, who we are in our bodies, may lead us to experience the world in such a way that basic preferences about how to run society emerge naturally from more basic dispositions and habits of perception. So, if you have a negativity bias, and you focus more on the aversive and disgusting, then the world seems more threatening to you. And thus, policies like supporting a stronger military, or being tougher on immigration, might feel very natural.
And when you combine Hibbing's research on the physiology of ideology with waves of other studies showing that liberals and conservatives appear to differ when it comes to genetics, hormones, moral emotions, personalities, and even brain structures, the case for politics being tied to biology seems pretty strong indeed.
So how do we then live with the other side—with those who disagree with us, for reasons over which they may not have full control? Hibbing believes that understanding that you don't fully control your political orientation, any more than you do your sexual orientation or your left-hand/right-hand orientation, promotes political tolerance. "My dad was left-handed," says Hibbing, "and he got beat on the hand with a ruler when he was a kid." Nowadays, Hibbing continues, that would never happen—we've grown much more tolerant because we recognize that left-handed is just the way some people are.
So maybe the same can happen for politics. "We have this silly and naive hope, maybe it's more than that," says Hibbing, "that if we could get people to see politics in the same light [as left-handedness], then maybe we would be a little bit more tolerant, and there will be a greater opportunity for compromise."
SOURCE
****************************
France shows what not to do
Tax-and-spend politics has driven Paris to the brink
While commentators remain captivated by the bleak saga of such Eurozone basket cases as Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, another European Union member is quietly slipping into economic despair. After years of fiscal mismanagement, France is in a bad, bad place.
France spends more of its GDP on government-57 percent-than any other country in the Eurozone. The country's unemployment rate is at a 16-year high of 11 percent, and a startling number of richer and younger French people are leaving for more hospitable economic environments abroad.
It has gotten so bad that France's crisis-wracked neighbors might be catching up: A November 2013 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development report warned that Paris is "falling behind southern European countries that have cut labor costs and become leaner and meaner."
The data is even more striking when compared to Germany. With an unemployment rate of 5 percent and a private savings rate of 12.1 percent, Germany has been growing at 1 percent annually while France sputters along at 0 percent.
It is tempting to blame this on the 2007 recession, but the reality is that France hasn't been doing well in years. Since the creation of the Eurozone in 1999, France has only managed a 0.8 percent annual growth rate. Germany, by contrast, has grown three times faster over those 15 years.
Across all available indexes of national economic freedom, France scores very poorly for a developed nation. The 2013 Economic Freedom of the World Index, published by the Fraser Institute and Cato Institute, aggregates and weighs national data on five broad categories-size of government, rule of law and property rights protection, sound money, freedom of international trade, and regulation. How does France rank? An unimpressive 40th, down from 25th in 1980.
This effect is echoed in a similar but more qualitative survey from The Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation. Their Index of Economic Freedom for 2013 ranks France 62nd in the world, right between Thailand and Rwanda. And the trendlines in both studies are similar: The country's good or average scores in the areas of rule of law, regulation, and free trade are dragged down by bloated government and high taxes. Economic freedom is a good indicator of prosperity, and France's is sorely lacking.
Unfortunately, the French government's response to anemic growth and higher unemployment has been to tack toward less economic freedom, not more. Loyal to his promises on the campaign trail, President Francois Hollande of the Socialist Party has refused to trim France's social-welfare spending-the highest of all developed economies-and has chosen instead to chip away at the country's huge deficit by raising taxes.
Hollande's more right-wing predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, was only slightly better on taxes. In fact, data compiled by tax-watchdog groups and the media in 2012 show that during Sarkozy's rule, from 2007 to 2012, taxpayers were subjected to 205 separate increases, including excise taxes on televisions, tobacco, and diet sodas, multiple increases in capital taxation, and a wealth-tax hike. Sarkozy is also responsible for increasing the top marginal income tax rate from 40 to 41 percent in 2010, and again to 45 percent in 2012.
Analyzing data from the Ministry of Finance since 2009, the center-left newspaper Le Monde published a special report in September 2013 showing that 84 new taxes have been instated under both presidents. The article also noted that Sarkozy increased tax revenue by €16.2 billion in 2011 and €11.7 billion in 2012, while Hollande added another €7.6 billion shortly after his election and planned to raise an additional €20 billion in 2013. That's €55.5 billion in new tax revenue in four years, with more than half of the total collected from businesses.
France's tax haul stands at more than 45 percent of GDP-one of the highest in the Eurozone. Sarkozy did implement some small but beneficial pension reforms, which Hollande promptly overturned and replaced with a measly and insufficient increase in the pension contribution period. Not only is the new president unconcerned with the sustainability of the French pension system, but he refuses to follow the example of Europe's periphery by liberalizing French labor and product markets.
Hollande's commitment to big government hasn't won him any friends. The French rank him as the least popular president of the Fifth Republic, and young people are voting with their feet. According to the data from French consulates in London and Edinburgh, the number of French people living in London is probably somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000. That's more than the number of French people living in Bordeaux, Nantes, or Strasbourg.
In a stunning display of hubris, Hollande responded to this tax flight not by implementing beneficial reforms but by beefing up the exit tax that Sarkozy created in 2012. Sarkozy's penalty taxes capital gains at the rate of 19 percent, plus a 15.5 percent payroll-tax-like penalty, payable when exiles sell their assets any time within eight years after leaving the country. Under Hollande, that period is now being expanded up to 15 years.
For cockeyed optimists, there are still slivers of hope. During his New Year address, Hollande turned into a rhetorical supply-sider, making the case for cutting taxes and public spending, improving competitiveness, and creating a more investor-friendly climate. He also promised French businesses a "responsibility pact" to cut labor-force restrictions and thus promote increased hiring.
While free market economists don't believe a word of this, it is worth noting that France has reformed successfully before. Both the 1980s and the '90s saw large waves of privatization, marginal tax cuts, and slighter spending increases. To secure robust prosperity for new French generations, leaders should extend the lessons of these brief shining moments by seriously tackling government spending and reining in destructive tax rates.
Is it possible? Maybe. Many of the countries that have managed to engage in true reforms were led by left-leaning parties at the time. In Canada, the Liberal Party reduced the debt-to-GDP ratio from 67 percent to 29 percent in a few years by cutting spending in absolute terms and engaging in serious structural reforms. And while it's not exactly the same, President Bill Clinton kept the size of government in check in a way Republicans didn't when they were in control. He signed welfare reform, too.
If we're lucky, Hollande will want to make history by being the Socialist who turned France around. If not, the next Greece may well speak French.
SOURCE
******************************
For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
******************************
The findings below can all be summarized as showing conservatives to be more cautious, which is hardly news. But there is a bit more to it than that. It shows that conservative caution is inbuilt -- in that conservatives show quicker and stronger responses to things that require caution
Thomas Jefferson was a smart dude. And in one of his letters to John Adams, dated June 27, 1813, Jefferson made an observation about the nature of politics that science is only now, two centuries later, beginning to confirm. "The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time," wrote Jefferson. "The terms of Whig and Tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history," he later added. "They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals."
Tories were the British conservatives of Jefferson's day, and Whigs were the British liberals. What Jefferson was saying, then, was that whether you call yourself a Whig or a Tory has as much to do with your psychology or disposition as it has to do with your ideas. At the same time, Jefferson was also suggesting that there's something pretty fundamental and basic about Whigs (liberals) and Tories (conservatives), such that the two basic political factions seem to appear again and again in the world, and have for "all time."
Jefferson didn't have access to today's scientific machinery—eye tracker devices, skin conductance sensors, and so on. Yet these very technologies are now being used to reaffirm his insight. At the center of the research are many scholars working at the intersection of psychology, biology, and politics, but one leader in the field is John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln whose "Political Physiology Laboratory" has been producing some pretty stunning results.
"We know that liberals and conservatives are really deeply different on a variety of things," Hibbing explains on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast (stream above). "It runs from their tastes, to their cognitive patterns—how they think about things, what they pay attention to—to their physical reactions. We can measure their sympathetic nervous systems, which is the fight-or-flight system. And liberals and conservatives tend to respond very differently."
This is not fringe science: One of Hibbing's pioneering papers on the physiology of ideology was published in none other than the top-tier journal Science in 2008. It found that political partisans on the left and the right differ significantly in their bodily responses to threatening stimuli. For example, startle reflexes after hearing a loud noise were stronger in conservatives. And after being shown a variety of threatening images ("a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," according to the study), conservatives also exhibited greater skin conductance—a moistening of the sweat glands that indicates arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, which manages the body's fight-or-flight response.
It all adds up, according to Hibbing, to what he calls a "negativity bias" on the right. Conservatives, Hibbing's research suggests, go through the world more attentive to negative, threatening, and disgusting stimuli—and then they adopt tough, defensive, and aversive ideologies to match that perceived reality.
In a 2012 study, Hibbing and his colleagues showed as much through the use of eye-tracking devices like the one shown above. Liberals and conservatives were fitted with devices that tracked their gaze, and were shown a series of four-image collages containing pictures that were either "appetitive" (e.g., something happy or positive) or "aversive" (showing something threatening, scary, or disgusting). The eye-tracking device allowed the researchers to measure where the research subjects first fixed their gaze, how long it took them to do so, and then how long they tended to dwell on different images.
Here's an example of an aversive, disgust-evoking image, one that just happens to also feature Hibbing himself. He says worms are actually "quite tasty." (This picture wasn't actually used in the study, but a very similar one was.)
And you can see an example of a four-image collage used in the study here. One of the images is adorable, the rest are varying degrees of disgusting and aversive. Which image does your eye go to first, and how long did you focus on it?
The results of Hibbing's study were clear: The conservatives tended to focus their eyes much more rapidly on the negative or aversive images, and also to dwell on them for a lot longer. The authors therefore concluded that based on results like these, "those on the political right and those on the political left may simply experience the world differently."
"Maybe you've had this experience, watching a political debate with somebody who disagrees with you," says Hibbing. "And you discuss it afterwards. And it's like, 'Did we watch the same debate?' And in some respects, you didn't. And I think that's what this research indicates."
One of the biggest differences clearly involves the emotion of disgust. Hibbing isn't the only one to have found a relationship between conservatism and stronger disgust sensitivity—this result is also a mainstay of the very influential research of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who studies how deep-seated moral emotions divide the left and the right (see here). In one study, Hibbing and his colleagues showed that a higher level of disgust sensitivity is predictive not only of political conservatism but also disapproval of gay marriage. It is important to underscore that your disgust sensitivity is involuntary; it is not something under your control. It is a primal, gut emotion.
That word, "primal," helps us begin to understand what Hibbing and his colleagues now think ideology actually is. They think that humans have core preferences for how societies ought to be structured: Some of us are more hierarchical, as opposed to egalitarian; some of us prefer harsher punishments for rule breakers, whereas some of us would be more inclined to forgive; some of us find outsiders or out-groups intriguing and enticing, whereas others find them threatening. Hibbing and his team have even found that preferences on such matters appear to have a genetic basis.
Thus, the idea seems to be that our physiology, who we are in our bodies, may lead us to experience the world in such a way that basic preferences about how to run society emerge naturally from more basic dispositions and habits of perception. So, if you have a negativity bias, and you focus more on the aversive and disgusting, then the world seems more threatening to you. And thus, policies like supporting a stronger military, or being tougher on immigration, might feel very natural.
And when you combine Hibbing's research on the physiology of ideology with waves of other studies showing that liberals and conservatives appear to differ when it comes to genetics, hormones, moral emotions, personalities, and even brain structures, the case for politics being tied to biology seems pretty strong indeed.
So how do we then live with the other side—with those who disagree with us, for reasons over which they may not have full control? Hibbing believes that understanding that you don't fully control your political orientation, any more than you do your sexual orientation or your left-hand/right-hand orientation, promotes political tolerance. "My dad was left-handed," says Hibbing, "and he got beat on the hand with a ruler when he was a kid." Nowadays, Hibbing continues, that would never happen—we've grown much more tolerant because we recognize that left-handed is just the way some people are.
So maybe the same can happen for politics. "We have this silly and naive hope, maybe it's more than that," says Hibbing, "that if we could get people to see politics in the same light [as left-handedness], then maybe we would be a little bit more tolerant, and there will be a greater opportunity for compromise."
SOURCE
****************************
France shows what not to do
Tax-and-spend politics has driven Paris to the brink
While commentators remain captivated by the bleak saga of such Eurozone basket cases as Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, another European Union member is quietly slipping into economic despair. After years of fiscal mismanagement, France is in a bad, bad place.
France spends more of its GDP on government-57 percent-than any other country in the Eurozone. The country's unemployment rate is at a 16-year high of 11 percent, and a startling number of richer and younger French people are leaving for more hospitable economic environments abroad.
It has gotten so bad that France's crisis-wracked neighbors might be catching up: A November 2013 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development report warned that Paris is "falling behind southern European countries that have cut labor costs and become leaner and meaner."
The data is even more striking when compared to Germany. With an unemployment rate of 5 percent and a private savings rate of 12.1 percent, Germany has been growing at 1 percent annually while France sputters along at 0 percent.
It is tempting to blame this on the 2007 recession, but the reality is that France hasn't been doing well in years. Since the creation of the Eurozone in 1999, France has only managed a 0.8 percent annual growth rate. Germany, by contrast, has grown three times faster over those 15 years.
Across all available indexes of national economic freedom, France scores very poorly for a developed nation. The 2013 Economic Freedom of the World Index, published by the Fraser Institute and Cato Institute, aggregates and weighs national data on five broad categories-size of government, rule of law and property rights protection, sound money, freedom of international trade, and regulation. How does France rank? An unimpressive 40th, down from 25th in 1980.
This effect is echoed in a similar but more qualitative survey from The Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation. Their Index of Economic Freedom for 2013 ranks France 62nd in the world, right between Thailand and Rwanda. And the trendlines in both studies are similar: The country's good or average scores in the areas of rule of law, regulation, and free trade are dragged down by bloated government and high taxes. Economic freedom is a good indicator of prosperity, and France's is sorely lacking.
Unfortunately, the French government's response to anemic growth and higher unemployment has been to tack toward less economic freedom, not more. Loyal to his promises on the campaign trail, President Francois Hollande of the Socialist Party has refused to trim France's social-welfare spending-the highest of all developed economies-and has chosen instead to chip away at the country's huge deficit by raising taxes.
Hollande's more right-wing predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, was only slightly better on taxes. In fact, data compiled by tax-watchdog groups and the media in 2012 show that during Sarkozy's rule, from 2007 to 2012, taxpayers were subjected to 205 separate increases, including excise taxes on televisions, tobacco, and diet sodas, multiple increases in capital taxation, and a wealth-tax hike. Sarkozy is also responsible for increasing the top marginal income tax rate from 40 to 41 percent in 2010, and again to 45 percent in 2012.
Analyzing data from the Ministry of Finance since 2009, the center-left newspaper Le Monde published a special report in September 2013 showing that 84 new taxes have been instated under both presidents. The article also noted that Sarkozy increased tax revenue by €16.2 billion in 2011 and €11.7 billion in 2012, while Hollande added another €7.6 billion shortly after his election and planned to raise an additional €20 billion in 2013. That's €55.5 billion in new tax revenue in four years, with more than half of the total collected from businesses.
France's tax haul stands at more than 45 percent of GDP-one of the highest in the Eurozone. Sarkozy did implement some small but beneficial pension reforms, which Hollande promptly overturned and replaced with a measly and insufficient increase in the pension contribution period. Not only is the new president unconcerned with the sustainability of the French pension system, but he refuses to follow the example of Europe's periphery by liberalizing French labor and product markets.
Hollande's commitment to big government hasn't won him any friends. The French rank him as the least popular president of the Fifth Republic, and young people are voting with their feet. According to the data from French consulates in London and Edinburgh, the number of French people living in London is probably somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000. That's more than the number of French people living in Bordeaux, Nantes, or Strasbourg.
In a stunning display of hubris, Hollande responded to this tax flight not by implementing beneficial reforms but by beefing up the exit tax that Sarkozy created in 2012. Sarkozy's penalty taxes capital gains at the rate of 19 percent, plus a 15.5 percent payroll-tax-like penalty, payable when exiles sell their assets any time within eight years after leaving the country. Under Hollande, that period is now being expanded up to 15 years.
For cockeyed optimists, there are still slivers of hope. During his New Year address, Hollande turned into a rhetorical supply-sider, making the case for cutting taxes and public spending, improving competitiveness, and creating a more investor-friendly climate. He also promised French businesses a "responsibility pact" to cut labor-force restrictions and thus promote increased hiring.
While free market economists don't believe a word of this, it is worth noting that France has reformed successfully before. Both the 1980s and the '90s saw large waves of privatization, marginal tax cuts, and slighter spending increases. To secure robust prosperity for new French generations, leaders should extend the lessons of these brief shining moments by seriously tackling government spending and reining in destructive tax rates.
Is it possible? Maybe. Many of the countries that have managed to engage in true reforms were led by left-leaning parties at the time. In Canada, the Liberal Party reduced the debt-to-GDP ratio from 67 percent to 29 percent in a few years by cutting spending in absolute terms and engaging in serious structural reforms. And while it's not exactly the same, President Bill Clinton kept the size of government in check in a way Republicans didn't when they were in control. He signed welfare reform, too.
If we're lucky, Hollande will want to make history by being the Socialist who turned France around. If not, the next Greece may well speak French.
SOURCE
******************************
For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
******************************
Sunday, April 06, 2014
Saturday, April 05, 2014
Whose Side Is God on Now? Putin?
Pat Buchanan speaks some unpopular truths below, as usual. I must say I find myself much more at ease with Mr. Putin than with the Western Left. That could change if some of the dire prophecies about him come true but so far I see a man who proceeds with great caution. I see nothing wrong with Russian patriotism. The Russians are a great people -- JR
In his Kremlin defense of Russia's annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin, even before he began listing the battles where Russian blood had been shed on Crimean soil, spoke of an older deeper bond.
Crimea, said Putin, "is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptized. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus."
Russia is a Christian country, Putin was saying.
This speech recalls last December's address where the former KGB chief spoke of Russia as standing against a decadent West:
"Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values. Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation."
Heard any Western leader, say, Barack Obama, talk like that lately?
Indicting the "Bolsheviks" who gave away Crimea to Ukraine, Putin declared, "May God judge them."
What is going on here? With Marxism-Leninism a dead faith, Putin is saying the new ideological struggle is between a debauched West led by the United States and a traditionalist world Russia would be proud to lead.
In the new war of beliefs, Putin is saying, it is Russia that is on God's side. The West is Gomorrah.
Western leaders who compare Putin's annexation of Crimea to Hitler's Anschluss with Austria, who dismiss him as a "KGB thug," who call him "the alleged thief, liar and murderer who rules Russia," as the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins did, believe Putin's claim to stand on higher moral ground is beyond blasphemous.
But Vladimir Putin knows exactly what he is doing, and his new claim has a venerable lineage. The ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers who exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, was, at the time of his death in 1964, writing a book on "The Third Rome."
The first Rome was the Holy City and seat of Christianity that fell to Odoacer and his barbarians in 476 A.D. The second Rome was Constantinople, Byzantium, (today's Istanbul), which fell to the Turks in 1453. The successor city to Byzantium, the Third Rome, the last Rome to the old believers, was -- Moscow.
Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.
Putin is plugging into some of the modern world's most powerful currents. Not only in his defiance of what much of the world sees as America's arrogant drive for global hegemony. Not only in his tribal defense of lost Russians left behind when the USSR disintegrated.
He is also tapping into the worldwide revulsion of and resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social revolution coming out of the West.
In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia's flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity. His recent speeches carry echoes of John Paul II whose Evangelium Vitae in 1995 excoriated the West for its embrace of a "culture of death."
What did Pope John Paul mean by moral crimes?
The West's capitulation to a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide -- the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values.
Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum writes that she was stunned when in Tbilisi to hear a Georgian lawyer declare of the former pro-Western regime of Mikhail Saakashvili, "They were LGBT."
"It was an eye-opening moment," wrote Applebaum. Fear and loathing of the same-sex-marriage pandemic has gone global. In Paris, a million-man Moral Majority marched in angry protest.
Author Martha Gessen, who has written a book on Putin, says of his last two years, "Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world."
But the war to be waged with the West is not with rockets. It is a cultural, social, moral war where Russia's role, in Putin's words, is to "prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state."
Would that be the "chaotic darkness" and "primitive state" of mankind, before the Light came into the world?
This writer was startled to read in the Jan-Feb. newsletter from the social conservative World Council of Families in Rockford, Ill., that, of the "ten best trends" in the world in 2013, number one was "Russia Emerges as Pro-Family Leader."
In 2013, the Kremlin imposed a ban on homosexual propaganda, a ban on abortion advertising, a ban on abortions after 12 weeks and a ban on sacrilegious insults to religious believers.
"While the other super-powers march to a pagan world-view," writes WCF's Allan Carlson, "Russia is defending Judeo-Christian values. During the Soviet era, Western communists flocked to Moscow. This year, World Congress of Families VII will be held in Moscow, Sept. 10-12."
Will Vladimir Putin give the keynote? In the new ideological Cold War, whose side is God on now?
SOURCE
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Noah COULD have floated his boat, say scientists: Ark really could have coped with two of every animal
The story of a man building a giant wooden boat to help his family and the entire animal kingdom survive a terrifying flood is one of the more contentious parts of the Bible.
But research by physics students suggests that a structure on the scale of Noah's ark as described in the ancient text could have been built. And what's more, they say it would have been buoyant even with two of every animal on Earth on board.
However, while the ark would have stayed afloat they're not sure if every animal would have fit inside.
In the book of Genesis, Chapter 6:13-22, Noah is commanded to build an ark to survive a flood.
- The dimensions for the ark were provided in cubits in the Bible, an archaic measure based on the distance between the elbow and the tip of the middle finger.
- Noah was commanded to make the boat out of ‘gopher wood’ and in order to calculate the weight of the empty ark they needed to know the density of the material the boat was constructed out of, but there is no modern-day equivalent of gopher wood.
- English translations of the Bible refer to cypress wood instead, so this was the material that the students used.
- In order to calculate the overall downward force of the ark, the students needed to know the mass of the animals on board; previous research has suggested that the average mass of an animal is approximately equal to that of one sheep, 23.47kg, which was the figure used.
- 'Our conclusions were that the ark would support the weight of 2.15 million sheep without sinking and that should be enough to support all of the species that were around at the time.'
Noah was provided with exact dimensions for the boat which should be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high.
It was built to hold Noah, his family, and at least two of every species of animal for the duration of the flood.
Using these dimensions and suitable approximations, University of Leicester physics students Oliver Youle, Katie Raymer, Benjamin Jordan and Thomas Morris tested the instructions and were surprised with their results.
Student Thomas Morris, 22, from Chelmsford, said: 'You don’t think of the Bible necessarily as a scientifically accurate source of information, so I guess we were quite surprised when we discovered it would work. 'We’re not proving that it’s true, but the concept would definitely work.'
The students based their calculations on a book by Dr Morris and Dr Whitbomb called The Genesis Flood, which suggested that Noah would have needed to save approximately 35,000 species to repopulate Earth.
This enabled the students to conclude that the dimensions given in the Bible would have allowed Noah to build an ark that would float with all of the animals on board.
They added that it was a separate matter whether all of the animals would fit inside an ark of these dimensions – the physics students were simply calculating the buoyancy of the ark.
SOURCE
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We'll Probably End Up Just Dumping Obamacare's Employer Mandate
As you read this, keep in mind that Robert Gibbs isn't some marginal figure. He is as close to Barack Obama's inner circle as anyone in America, and served as the administration's official mouthpiece for years. So when he starts talking about significant changes to Obamacare, people should sit up and listen. These remarks could reasonably be considered White House-planted trial balloons:
“I don’t think the employer mandate will go into effect. It’s a small part of the law. I think it will be one of the first things to go,” he said to a notably surprised audience. The employer mandate has been delayed twice, he noted. The vast majority of employers with 100 or more employees offer health insurance, and there aren’t many employers who fall into the mandate window, he said. Killing the employer mandate would be one way to improve the law — and there are a handful of other “common sense” improvements needed as well, he said...And, most importantly, Gibbs said “health care has to add an additional layer of coverage cheaper than the plans already offered.”
A few points: (1) Yes, the employer mandate has already been delayed twice, tacit admissions that the law is bad for business. Will the administration keep punting it, or will they simply declare it dead? The mandate is built into the law. The White House's postponements of this provision are legally dubious at best; they absolutely do not have the authority to excise entire sections of the law permanently. Will Congress act? I'd also imagine that many employers would dispute Gibbs' characterization of this mandate as "small." (2) How would the demise of the employer mandate impact the mechanics of the law? Its existence has been baked into CBO estimates on revenues and coverage. If a portion of the law designed to ensure coverage for millions, which obviously impacts revenues, goes away, what then? CBO already projects that 31 million Americans will remain uninsured under Obamacare.
(3) Absent a federal mandate to provide coverage, and facing rising costs, many businesses could be incentivized to just dump employees into Obamacare's exchanges. A 2012 Deloitte survey indicated that one in ten American businesses were already planning to stop providing coverage -- and that was with the mandate fully intact. Such a move would add countless Americans to the roster of those burned by Democrats' "keep your plan" lie, and could heap major additional costs onto taxpayers (who fund the law's subsidies). It would also rapidly expand the individual healthcare market, which is where the sharpest cost increases are taking place. And are Democrats prepared to cancel a mandate on corporations while keeping the individual mandate tax in place for families?
(4) To that end, Gibbs floats the idea of eventually adding a cheaper coverage level into the exchange mix, below the "bronze" level -- which has proven unaffordable for many people. This, like the administration's expansive "hardship waivers," is a concession that the "Affordable" Care Act is no such thing for many Americans. It would also re-establish an group of bare-bones plans that Obamacare defenders have dismissed as "sub-standard" or "junk" coverage. Healthcare expert Bob Laszewski has been advocating this change, which he argues must be implemented immediately, despite the risk of "anti-selection." Significant premium increases are expected in 2015 and beyond.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Minimum Wedge: "Raising the minimum wage is a key Democrat election issue this year, and they're waging class warfare around the nation. They seek to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 -- a 40% hike that could kill 500,000 jobs. Democrats are subtly signaling, however, that they'd be willing to settle for a smaller increase just to pass one. They need all the help they can get this election year, after all. So naturally, Barack Obama stepped in to add his conciliatory message. "You would think this would be a no-brainer," the president said of raising it. But "Republicans in Congress don't want to vote to raise it all. In fact, some just want to scrap the minimum wage." That's right, because it destroys jobs. "Next think you know," he jabbed, "they'll say, 'Get off my lawn.'" And next thing we know, he'll be quoting taunts from Monty Python.
Numbers Games: "An unpublished RAND Corporation study on ObamaCare enrollment has been kept under wraps and it's not hard to see why. While the White House trumpeted meeting its goal of 7.1 million enrollees this week, RAND says the number actually enrolled -- having paid their premium -- could be as few as 858,000. Just 23% of enrollees were previously uninsured. Even if the true number is somewhere in the middle, Democrats running for election in November will rue the day 7.1 million was mentioned. And how did the administration get its numbers so fast anyway? A couple of months ago Jay Carney stonewalled, saying, "I'm not going to cherry-pick numbers," meaning, tell you any. Now he says they know to the decimal point because "our system has gotten a lot better." Color us skeptical.
How did people find out that Mozilla’s CEO donated to support Prop 8?: "Rumors are floating around Twitter that proof of Brendan Eich’s donation was illegally leaked by people in government sympathetic to the cause of gay marriage. Not so. I’d forgotten about it, but friends reminded me that the LA Times obtained a list of people who gave, for and against, to the fight over the Prop 8 referendum in 2008. They put the whole database online and made it searchable. Search it today and, sure enough, there’s Eich with a $1,000 donation in favor. Under California law, that disclosure is perfectly legal: The state is authorized to provide certain personal information about anyone who donates more than $100 to a ballot measure. Why the state is allowed to do that, I’m not sure.
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Friday, April 04, 2014
"Alles muss anders sein"
Everyone I know sees things in the world about them that they would like to see changed. So the idea that conservatives are opposed to change is ludicrous. The changes they oppose are the hate-driven changes that the Left want, not change in general.
And the changes that the Left want are extreme. The depths of Leftist discontent are to my mind best encapsulated in a saying from prewar Germany: Alles muss anders sein. Hitler used that slogan and so did most of the German Left of the 1920s and 30s
So what does it mean? It is a very simple statement but it needs some thought to get the full impact of it in English. My translation: "Everything must be changed". Everything. You can't get more discontented than that. A Leftist really does have the fires of Hell burning inside him. No wonder Leftist behaviour is so reckless and beyond reason.
Obama's wish to "fundamentally transform" America is saying the same thing using more formal words.
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British tax cut pays off
The amount of tax paid by the best-off has soared since George Osborne slashed the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p, according to a new analysis.
New figures from HM Revenue & Customs show the total income tax collected on earnings over £150,000 has shot up from £40 billion last year to £49 billion this year.
Former Conservative Cabinet minister John Redwood, who produced the figures, said it appeared the Chancellor’s tax cut was having dramatic results in what would be a ‘shock to many of the conventional pundits’ who criticised the measure.
‘Total income tax collected from people earning more than £150,000 has surged from £40bn to £49bn this year compared to last.
'It has more than made up for the loss of tax revenue from lower earners following the big increase in tax thresholds,’ Mr Redwood said.
He said the 50p rate introduced by Labour in its final weeks in power was clearly ‘costly’.
Britain lost high earners overseas, and saw the richest use tax loopholes to declare less income when the rate was high.
‘The rareified group of people earning more than £2m declared income of £12.2bn in 2012-13, but paid tax on £26bn of income the following year with the lower rate.
‘This small group of people alone more than paid for the rise in threshold to take many lower earners out of tax altogether.
‘The top one per cent of earners now earn 13 per cent of the income but pay 28 per cent of the total income tax. The top five per cent earn one quarter of the income but pay around half the total income tax.
‘This progressive structure works as long as the government does not get too greedy, setting a higher rate which means the rich pay less because they either go or they earn and declare less.
‘I wonder how much more revenue the Treasury would enjoy if the top rate were set at a more competitive rate? 'I suspect that too would see a further surge in revenue, money the state clearly needs to end the deficit.’
A Tory spokesman said: ‘The Government is clear that in clearing up Labour’s economic mess those with broadest shoulders should bear the biggest burden.’
David Cameron will today hail the Government’s tax changes taking effect this week as the most radical for two decades.
On Tuesday, corporation tax came down to 21 per cent, the tax-free annual investment allowance for businesses was doubled, business rates [property taxes] were capped at two per cent and fuel duty was frozen.
From Sunday, over one million businesses will benefit from up to £2,000 ‘cashback’ on their National Insurance contributions.
The personal income tax allowance will be raised this weekend from £9,440 to £10,000, cutting tax for the typical basic rate taxpayer by £705 this year.
SOURCE
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Millionaires Need Your Help!
Ann Coulter
Last Sunday, The New York Times published a front-page article about the heartfelt need of California farmers for more illegal aliens.
The first tip-off that heinous public policy ideas were coming was that the Times introduced farmer Chuck Herrin, owner of a farm-labor contracting company, as a "lifelong Republican." That's Times-speak for "liberal."
Herrin admitted that he employs a lot of illegal aliens and bitterly complained that they lived in fear of "Border Patrol and deportations." (But, apparently, he doesn't live in fear of admitting he's violating our immigration laws.)
Sorry that running a country inconveniences you, Chuck.
He said his illegal alien employees deserved amnesty because if "we keep them here and not do anything for them once they get old, that's really extortion."
As the punch line goes, "What's this 'we,' paleface?"
Taxpayers have been subsidizing Chuck Herrin's underpayment of his illegal labor force for decades, with skyrocketing taxes to pay for schools, roads, bridges, food stamps, health care and so on. Now Herrin thinks "we" are supposed to support his illegal employees in their old age, too.
Here's another idea: How about a federal law mandating that employers of illegal aliens take responsibility for the people they hire? Why is the taxpayer on the hook for illegal aliens' food, housing and medical care, when Chuck Herrin got 100 percent of the profit from their cheap labor?
We don't allow chemical companies to dump pollutants in rivers, walk away and then say, "If we dump chemicals in rivers and we don't clean them once the plant is gone, that's really criminal."
No, you dumped the chemicals -- not "we." And you, Chuck Herrin, got the cheap labor -- not "we."
"We" got hospital emergency rooms jammed with illegal aliens when we came in with heart attacks. "We" got the crime, drunk-driving and drug trafficking associated with illegal aliens. "We" got the overcrowded schools filled with kids whose illegal alien parents don't pay property taxes. "We" got to press "one" for English.
This is even worse than the Wall Street bailouts -- another example of fat cats pocketing 100 percent of the profits when business is good, but demanding a taxpayer handout when their investments go south. At least the Wall Street bailouts didn't alter the country forever by giving the Democrats 30 million new voters.
According to the California Hospital Association, health care for illegal aliens is costing state taxpayers well over $1 billion a year.. Eighty-four hospitals across California have already been forced to close because of unpaid bills by illegal aliens.
Last year alone, California taxpayers paid $32 million for indigents' health care at hospitals located in Fresno County-- which happens to be where Chuck Herrin's company is based. How about submitting a portion of that cost to Herrin?
Not only should employers of illegal aliens be responsible for their employees' becoming public charges, but they ought to be legally responsible for any crimes their illegal workers commit, just as parents can be for the crimes of their minor children, and bars can be for the behavior of their over-served customers.
Why should employers of illegal aliens be allowed to externalize their costs, while keeping 100 percent of the profits?
The very fact that the American taxpayer is required to subsidize illegal alien farm labor -- to say nothing of anti-competitive marketing orders, tariffs and subsidies given to farmers -- proves that we're propping up an industry the country doesn't need.
If Mexican farm labor is so much cheaper, maybe we should be growing our fruits and vegetables in Mexico. There's absolutely no reason to import Mexicans to do something they could do at home and then sell to us. I believe this is what economists call "competitive advantage."
The Times quotes a report by two pro-amnesty farmers groups, Partnership for a New American Economy and the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, complaining that American consumption of foreign-grown produce has increased by 80 percent since the late 1990s.
I see why rich farmers are alarmed by that, but why should Americans care? If food can be grown cheaper in other countries, isn't it the very essence of libertarian free trade principles to buy it from them?
No. Apparently, we're required to wreck the country by bringing in millions upon millions more poor people so we can save the buggy whip industry.
We didn't do that with oil. We didn't do it with steel. We must be "Fortress America" only when it comes to asparagus!
Hey! Where's the Cato Institute on this? Busy drafting another philippic against our drug laws?
I care more about my fellow Americans who can't get well-paying jobs than I do about multimillionaire farmers, demanding that the rest of us pay to support an industry that claims it can't compete without taxpayer-subsidized illegal alien labor.
SOURCE
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One California for Me, Another for Thee
Victor Davis Hanson
No place on the planet is as beautiful and as naturally rich as California. And few places have become as absurd.
Currently, three California state senators are either under felony indictment or already have been convicted.
State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) made a political career out of demanding harsher state gun-control laws. Now he is facing several felony charges for attempting to facilitate gun-running. One count alleges that Lee sought to provide banned heavy automatic weapons to Philippines-based Islamic terrorist groups.
State Sen. Ron Calderon (D-Montebello), who had succeeded one brother, Thomas, in the state Assembly and was succeeded by another brother, Charles, now faces felony charges of wire fraud, bribery, money laundering and falsification of tax returns.
State Sen. Roderick Wright (D-Inglewood), originally entered politics as a champion of social justice. Not long ago, the Democratic leaders of the California Senate in secretive fashion paid $120,000 in taxpayer funds to settle a sexual-harassment suit against Wright. But this time around, not even his fellow senators could save Wright, who was convicted earlier this year on eight felony counts of perjury and voter fraud.
What is the common denominator with all three California senators -- aside from the fact that they are still receiving their salaries?
One, they are abject hypocrites who campaigned against old-boy insider influence-peddling so they could get elected to indulge in it.
Two, they assumed that their progressive politics shielded them from the sort of public scrutiny and consequences that usually deter such deplorable behavior.
Criminal activity is the extreme manifestation of California's institutionalized progressive hypocrisy. Milder expressions of double standards explain why California has become such a bizarre place.
The state suffers from the highest combined taxes in the nation and nearly the worst roads and schools. It is home to more American billionaires than any other state, but also more impoverished residents. California is more naturally endowed with a combination of gas, oil, timber and minerals than any other state -- with the highest electricity prices and gas taxes in the nation.
To understand these paradoxes, keep in mind one common principle. To the degree a Californian is politically influential, wealthy or well-connected -- and loudly progressive -- the more he is immune from the downside of his own ideology.
Big money is supposed to be bad for politics. But no money plays a bigger role in influencing policy than California's progressive cash, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley. Billionaire hedge-fund operator Tom Steyer is canonized, but he is on track to rival the oft-demonized Koch brothers in the amount of money spent on influencing policymakers and getting his type of politicians elected.
Nowhere are there more Mercedes and BMWs per capita than in California's tony coastal enclaves. And nowhere will you find more anti-carbon activism or more restrictive laws against new oil production that ensure the highest gasoline prices in the continental United States for the less well off.
California's reserves of natural gas exceed those of nearly every other state. And in California, electricity prices are the highest in the nation. The cost falls on those in the interior and Sierra who suffer either from scorching summertime temperatures or bitterly cold winters. Those who set energy policies mostly live in the balmy coastal corridor where there is no need for expensive air conditioning or constant home heating.
In drought-stricken California, building new Sierra Nevada dams and reservoirs was long ago considered passé, but not the idea of diverting precious stored water from agricultural use to help out fish.
Yet the waters of the Sierra Nevada Hetch Hetchy reservoir are exempt from such fish diversions, apparently because they supply 80 percent of San Francisco's daily water supply. Those who wish to either stop more dam construction or divert dammed reservoir water from its original intended use draw the line on restricting their own quite unnatural water sources.
High-speed rail is billed as the transportation of the future in California. But its progressive coastal boosters believe that it should first be tried out on farmers in sparsely settled rural areas rather than in their own precious high-density Bay Area or Los Angeles.
In California, open borders and non-enforcement of existing immigration law are also popular progressive causes. But the immediate impact of illegal immigration on public schools is circumvented for the elite by the growing number of private prep schools along the coast.
Professing that you are progressive can be wise California politics. It means you sound too caring ever to do bad things, while the costly consequences of your ideology usually fall on someone else. And that someone is usually less hip, less wealthy and less powerful.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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