Why income inequality is really very good for us indeed

Written by Tim Worstall

It's much the thing to be talking about these days. How income inequality is rising, wealth inequality is going ballistic and it's all a jolly bad thing. However, let us ponder this point of wisdom from Don Boudreaux:

Would you prefer to live in a society in which people compete for high status by earning lots of money through the creation, production, and sale of better mousetraps, or in a society in which people compete for high status by being indifferent to money but focused intently on conquering foreign territories or accumulating terrifying amounts of political power?

Assume, as we must, that human beings are status seeking animals. Most certainly for the male of the species this has always been true: higher status males have more children which is the point and aim of the entire game. And in various different societies status has been gained in many different ways.

As best we know, from the study of the remnant hunter gatherer groups, for most of our existence status has been gained by being a good hunter: both of prey and of other adult males. Yes, as far as we can tell, in socieities like that of the Yamomani murderers have more children than non-murderers. And in some such societies we've recorded murder as cause of death for as much as 40% of the male population.

We've also assigned status to people in other ways over the millenia of recorded history. Who was your Mum (and presumably there being a connection between that and who was your father) has often been popular. We've never quite done it but plenty of other places (the Fascists and communists come to mind) assigned status according to ideological purity: the Soviets even to the second or third generations.

We in Britain have seen religious fanaticism used as a mark of status: difficult to understand the Commonwealth without that. The feudal period nominally ran on bloodlines but in reality on the male skill at crushing the skulls of the enemy.

And class and status have never, in Britian, been entirely about money. Even today they're not. But given the alternative sets of status markers that have been used over the centuries, aristocracy, theocracy, race (useful in discussing the Saxons, Danes and Celts) wouldn't we all start to prefer that they were?

That one can gain status by having proven that you are producing something that a lot of others would like to have? For that's what this capitalism lark is at root about. You can only accumulate if you're performing a community service. Which sounds like a pretty good method of assigning social status to us.

Of course, we might always hope that humans will stop seeking status. But then at that point we'd not be describing the actions of the same species that we're currently studying, would we?

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Do Patients Have a “Right to Try” New Medicines Before the FDA Approves Them?

Earlier this month, Colorado governor John Hickenlooper signed the nation’s first “right to try” law. The law allows a patient suffering from a disease, for which no medicine has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), to try an experimental new medicine before the agency approves it. The law allows, but does not force, drug-makers to provide their experimental drugs to patients. Other states, such as Louisiana and Missouri, are set to follow.

These patients are in dire straits. They suffer from diseases for which there is no other known treatment, and they have short life expectancies. Most of us cannot imagine being in their position: In their search for a cure, they are willing to take far greater risks than most would accept.

Although the FDA has an exemption for “compassionate use,” that exemption requires jumping through too many bureaucratic hoops to be useful. So, scholars at the Goldwater Institute developed the idea of state “right to try” laws that would enable residents to use experimental new drugs without agency approval.

My first reaction when learning about the Goldwater Institute’s successes in moving this legislation through state legislatures was that the FDA would surely assert pre-emption based on the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. The Goldwater Institute is the home of impressive legal thinking and activism, so they have surely developed a legal strategy, if they need one.

However, maybe the federal government will not react. After all, Colorado allows not only the medicinal use of marijuana, but also the purchase and possession of small amounts of marijuana for so-called “recreational” use. The Obama Justice Department does not litigate against state laws liberalizing marijuana use.

It would reflect a very perverse sense of justice for the U.S. government to act against a state law allowing desperately ill patients to try promising, experimental new medicines, while allowing Colorado’s marijuana market to thrive unmolested.

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Thomas Piketty wants to keep billions of people poor to stop a few from becoming rich

French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an almost 700-page book written by an academic economist, filled with historical statistics and theoretical discussions of “Cobb-Douglas production functions.”

And yet, it somehow was the #1 bestselling book on Amazon. What the heck is going on here?

The answer is the conclusion Piketty draws: He wants the governments of the world to coordinate their efforts, sharing financial information among themselves so that no human being on Earth can hide from confiscatory taxes on both wealth and income. It is because today’s self-described “progressives” share Piketty’s hatred for economic inequality that they celebrate his book. Indeed, even his fans admit that Piketty’s analysis suffers from fundamental problems—I’ll document just a few in this review.

But none of that matters, because the memo has gone out: The progressive interventionists are going to focus hard on “inequality,” and Piketty’s book serves as a useful rallying banner for their agenda.

Destructive Envy

The most obvious problem with Piketty’s book is that he wants to make workers poorer, just so long as it will hurt rich capitalists even more. No economist denies that as the stockpile of “capital”—which Piketty broadly defines to include real estate and all forms of non-human wealth—expands, that the absolute wages of the workers will rise. After all, if workers have more tools, machines, and equipment augmenting their labor, they are going to be more physically productive per hour, and hence will be paid more.

Yet the continual increase in the workers’ standard of living is not enough to placate Piketty and his fans. Indeed, Nobel laureate Robert Solow admits that capital accumulation will make the workers better off in absolute terms, but worries that they might be worse off relative to the capitalists.

If Piketty and Solow saw a vision of the future that looked like The Jetsons, they wouldn’t marvel at the unbelievable convenience and luxury that the family enjoys, all provided by George’s two hours of labor per week. No, instead of thanking capitalism for providing flying cars to the average family, instead Piketty and Solow would be complaining about how unfair it was that a short bald guy got to own Spacely Sprockets all by himself.

Blunders, Both Serious and Petty

According to Paul Krugman, those who oppose Piketty’s call for confiscating the wealth of the super-rich can only resort to name-calling. Yet Krugman is as reliable on this topic as he is on VA health care. Piketty’s book is riddled with so many errors that it was difficult for me to choose which ones to highlight in this review.

For starters, a bombshell report just came out in the FT, where Chris Giles alleged that Piketty’s historical data series on wealth concentration are filled with inaccuracies that upset his whole case. We’ll have to wait for the dust to settle on this particular charge. Yet there are a host of other problems.

This is a book about the rate of return capital generates for its owners—the famous “r” that Piketty claims will persistently exceed “g,” the growth in total output. You would think, then, that Piketty would understand the basics of how modern economic theory explains the determination of interest rates and the earnings of capitalists, and that in his 3-page description of a famous professional debate on the issue, that Piketty would manage to tell his readers the debate’s central issue.

Alas, Piketty’s book is bereft of even the simplest understanding of these issues, as both his ideological foes and friends agree.

Because Piketty doesn’t know what drives interest rates, and because he switches from viewing “capital” as a collection of physical things versus a sum of money (even Piketty’s fan Brad DeLong admits both points), Piketty and his readers will end up drawing the wrong conclusions from history.

For example, Mother Jones loved this chart showing income inequality soaring in the late 1920s and in the mid-2000s: Look everyone, if we let the 1% earn too much, it sets the world up for a giant financial crash! But actually what happened is that loose monetary policy drove down interest rates, thereby fueling asset price booms, which showed up as huge income (in the form of capital gains) accruing disproportionately in the hands of the wealthy. It’s not surprising that these Fed-fueled asset bubbles eventually collapsed, leading to the Great Depression and Great Recession. To prevent a repeat, the government doesn’t need to confiscate property from the super-rich; instead the Fed needs to stop inflating asset bubbles.

Another devastating flaw is that Piketty has misread the empirical literature. Piketty needs a certain parameter—“the elasticity of substitution” between capital and labor—to be greater than one, in order to predict that the capitalists will earn a larger and larger proportion of annual income. Yet as Piketty’s fan Larry Summers points out, Piketty ignored depreciation. Once you correct for this simple mistake, Piketty’s whole case goes out the window: Piketty’s framework predicts that workers will see their incomes rise both in absolute terms and relative to the income of the capitalists.

Putting aside these theoretical issues, Piketty is praised chiefly for his historical work. Beyond the bombshell FT allegations mentioned above, we have more mundane (and boneheaded) mistakes: Piketty can’t even correctly tell his readers the presidential administrations during which tax rates were raised or the minimum wage was hiked.

Further, these two mistakes very coincidentally serve Piketty’s political narrative.

Conclusion

After all of the above, you might be tempted to excuse Piketty’s numerous, fatal errors because after all, his goal is to help poor people. Yet as I document elsewhere, the book is filled with shocking quotations making it perfectly clear that Piketty’s proposed taxes are not designed to raise revenue, but instead are designed to prevent people from creating large wealth and incomes in the first place.

I must admit, I learned a lot from reading Piketty’s book. Specifically, I learned how many self-styled progressives today are willing to sacrifice the standard of living of billions of poor people, in order to prevent a few people from becoming really rich.

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Guilty of giving

The 2002 McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Act, which dictates what and when one may speak about candidates for office, ought to have been struck down by the Supreme Court the moment the first suit about its constitutionality was filed. Instead, the Court has simply crippled it with the Citizens United v. FEC case.

Dinesh D'Souza, a prominent conservative writer and filmmaker, and unabashed critic of Obama and his policies, was charged with violating the Federal Election Commission's rules on donor limits.

Paul Bond, in his Hollywood Reporter article of May 20th, "Dinesh D'Souza Pleads Guilty to Making Illegal Campaign Contribution," wrote:

In exchange for D'Souza's plea, prosecutors are expected to drop the more serious charge of making false statements to the Federal Election Commission, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

D'Souza was indicted in January for asking some friends to donate money to the campaign of Wendy Long, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully against Democratic incumbent Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in New York in 2012, and allegedly promising to reimburse them for their donations.

Bond noted:

From the beginning, attorney Benjamin Brafman characterized his client's alleged transgression as "an act of misguided friendship," and he and others have said federal authorities were engaging in payback for D'Souza's movie 2016: Obama's America, a hit documentary that portrayed President Barack Obama in a negative light. "

It's a remarkably selective prosecution, considering Obama raised millions of dollars under similar circumstances and donors merely faced civil fines while D'Souza is charged with felony violation of federal law," Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told The Hollywood Reporter in February.

If D'Souza had not pleaded guilty, a trial would have been necessary, and on the "illegal" contribution charge alone, if found guilty, he could have been sentenced to a maximum of two years in prison.

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

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

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The Free Market Ignores the Poor?

It ignores the rich too

Once an activity has been socialized for a spell, nearly everyone will concede that that’s the way it should be.

Without socialized education, how would the poor get their schooling? Without the socialized post office, how would farmers receive their mail except at great expense? Without Social Security, the aged would end their years in poverty! If power and light were not socialized, consider the plight of the poor families in the Tennessee Valley!

Agreement with the idea of state absolutism follows socialization, appallingly. Why? One does not have to dig very deep for the answer.

Once an activity has been socialized, it is impossible to point out, by concrete example, how men in a free market could better conduct it. How, for instance, can one compare a socialized post office with private postal delivery when the latter has been outlawed? It’s something like trying to explain to a people accustomed only to darkness how things would appear were there light. One can only resort to imaginative construction.

To illustrate the dilemma: During recent years, men and women in free and willing exchange (the free market) have discovered how to deliver the human voice around the earth in one twenty-seventh of a second; how to deliver an event, like a ball game, into everyone’s living room, in color and in motion, at the time it is going on; how to deliver 115 people from Los Angeles to Baltimore in three hours and 19 minutes; how to deliver gas from a hole in Texas to a range in New York at low cost and without subsidy; how to deliver 64 ounces of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—more than half-way around the earth—for less money than government will deliver a one-ounce letter across the street in one’s home town. Yet, such commonplace free market phenomena as these, in the field of delivery, fail to convince most people that “the post” could be left to free market delivery without causing people to suffer.

Now, then, resort to imagination: Imagine that our federal government, at its very inception, had issued an edict to the effect that all boys and girls, from birth to adulthood, were to receive shoes and socks from the federal government “for free.” Next, imagine that this practice of “free shoes and socks” had been going on for lo, these 173 years! Lastly, imagine one of our contemporaries—one with a faith in the wonders of what can be wrought when people are free—saying, “I do not believe that shoes and socks for kids should be a government responsibility. Properly, that is a responsibility of the family. This activity should never have been socialized. It is appropriately a free market activity.”

What, under these circumstances, would be the response to such a stated belief? Based on what we hear on every hand, once an activity has been socialized for even a short time, the common chant would go like this, “Ah, but you would let the poor children go unshod!”

However, in this instance, where the activity has not yet been socialized, we are able to point out that the poor children are better shod in countries where shoes and socks are a family responsibility than in countries where they are a government responsibility. We’re able to demonstrate that the poor children are better shod in countries that are more  free than in countries that are less free.

True, the free market ignores the poor precisely as it does not recognize the wealthy—it is “no respecter of persons.” It is an organizational way of doing things featuring openness, which enables millions of people to cooperate and compete without demanding a preliminary clearance of pedigree, nationality, color, race, religion, or wealth. It demands only that each person abide by voluntary principles, that is, by fair play. The free market means willing exchange; it is impersonal justice in the economic sphere and excludes coercion, plunder, theft, protectionism, subsidies, special favors from those wielding power, and other anti-free market methods by which goods and services change hands. It opens the way for mortals to act morally because they are free to act morally.

Admittedly, human nature is defective, and its imperfections will be reflected in the market (though arguably, no more so than in government). But the free market opens the way for men to operate at their moral best, and all observation confirms that the poor fare better under these circumstances than when the way is closed, as it is under socialism.

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An obsolete Indian car as a model for the U.S. Post Office

Thomas Sowell

At one time, people in India had to get on a waiting list to buy Hindustan Motors' Ambassador automobile, even though it was an obvious copy of Britain's Morris Oxford of some decades earlier. The reason was simple: the Indian government would not allow cars to be imported to compete with it.

The fact that the Ambassador was a copy is hardly an automatic reason for condemnation. The first Nikon camera was an obvious copy of a German camera called the Contax, and the first Canon was an obvious copy of the Leica. The difference is that, over the years, Nikons and Canons rose to become state of the art, during both the era of film and in the new digital age.

Not so the Ambassador car. It was notorious for poor finish and poor handling. But, since it was the only game in town -- and "town" was all of India, people were on waiting lists for it for months, and sometimes even years.

By contrast, Nikon and Canons were good cameras from day one and they just got better as the companies that produced them gained more experience. With a highly competitive international market for cameras, they had no choice if they wanted to survive.

But the Hindustan Ambassador had no such problem. Only those who bought them had problems.

Toward the end of the 20th century, India began to loosen up some of its jungle of rules and regulations that were strangling India's businesses. Though India is still a long way from a free market, just the relaxing of some of its economic restrictions was enough to promote a higher rate of growth and a substantial reduction in poverty.

They even allowed a Japanese car maker to build cars in India. This resulted in a car called the Maruti, which quickly shot to the top as the most popular car in India. Even more remarkable, it led to some improvements in the Ambassador. A British newspaper said that the Ambassador now had "perceptible acceleration."

Now that there was competition, the distinguished British magazine "The Economist" announced, "Marutis too are improving, in anticipation of the next invaders."

Perhaps the last chapter in the story of the Ambassador has now been written. Hindustan Motors recently announced that it was closing -- indefinitely -- the factory where the Ambassador was built.

According to the Wall Street Journal, "The company cited low productivity, 'a critical shortage of funds' and a lack of demand for its core product, the Ambassador."

Doesn't that sound a little like our post office?

Our post office, like the Hindustan Ambassador, has had a long run as a government protected monopoly. But just a partial erosion of that monopoly, with the appearance of United Parcel Service and Federal Express, has threatened the viability of the post office.

As for "a critical shortage of funds," that has truly gotten critical as the post office has seen its $15 billion line of credit at the U.S. Treasury shrink to the vanishing point. For years that line of credit allowed the post office's defenders to tell the big lie that it got no subsidy and was costing the taxpayers nothing.

I don't know who they thought put that money in the Treasury that the post office has been "borrowing" all these years, with no one foolish enough to think that they would ever be either willing or able to pay it back.

We could all use a line of credit from which we could get a few billion dollars, here and there, to cover our losses from time to time. But we are not all the post office.

Ironically, India has partially privatized its post office by letting private companies deliver mail. The government post office's deliveries of mail dropped from 16 billion to less than 8 billion in just six years, even though the population of India was growing.

You can always keep anything old, clunky and inefficient still in business, if you are willing to pour unlimited amounts of the taxpayers' money down a bottomless pit.

Hindustan Motors had to shut their doors when they ran out of money. How long will we continue to keep our own version of the Hindustan Ambassador on life support at the expense of the taxpayers, and of captive customers who are not even allowed by law to decide who can put mail in the boxes that the customers bought?

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Liberal Austin homeowners surprised to find they have to pay all the taxes they voted for

“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchen Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8,500 this year.

“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.”

I’m really just bringing this to your attention for this quote alone. Voting and paying are different endeavors entirely. Often, when one has to pay for the things one has voted to fund, that decision becomes less flippant. This is a comment, less on the specifics of Texas’ or Austin’s tax system than the blaring disconnect between liberals in Austin who are voting for higher taxes and the actual paying of the taxes. Which, as it turns out, is painful, discouraging, and can be a detriment to the fabric of the city.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation offers this on the complexity and salience of Texas property taxes:

In Texas, there are more than 3,900 localities that impose property taxes, including school districts, counties, and special districts. Texas’ property tax burden has grown from approximately 1 percent of value in the early 1980s to nearly 3 percent today.

The rising burden from property tax is worse for the housing-rich but income-poor elderly homeowners. For example, elderly homeowners tend to move more often to reduce their property tax burden, which is an additional cost of owning a home for those who can least afford to move.

Interestingly, another reason voters hate property taxes is because they are more “salient.” A salient tax means that the burden is transparent, easy to understand, and hard to avoid. If paid directly, property taxes are found to be more salient compared with sales taxes applied at checkout or income taxes withheld from a paycheck.

In 2012, the free-market think tank suggested swapping the local property tax for a sales tax:

New research suggests that if Texas eliminates its local property tax system, ranked as the 14th most oppressive in the nation, and instead replaces those lost revenues with an adjusted sales tax, then the ensuing flood of capital investment and business activity could ignite the Texas economy for years to come.

That’s right, just by changing how Texas governments collect public dollars—but not how much they spend—the Legislature can give the economy and people’s wallets a major boost.

By how much, you ask? Our estimates suggest quite a bit.
Either way, I don’t think Gretchen Gardner is ever going to make the connection between her voting pattern and her bill.

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The Slow Erosion of the Fourth Amendment

WarrantThe Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unlawful and unreasonable search and seizure. Yet that protection is being slowly eroded away. Thanks to the “War of Drugs” and the “War on Terror” government, at the state and federal level, has worked alongside the courts to gradually diminish the range and force of the protections that were meant to be inviolable rights of all citizens.

This year has seen two serious blows to the constitutionally-protected freedoms of the Fourth Amendment. The first was a ruling by the US Supreme Court in February that makes it easier for police to enter and search private homes without warrants. Previous interpretations by the court had held that in cases of disagreement between residents on whether to admit police to search a residence without a warrant, one resident’s permission was sufficient to prevent the search. Under the new ruling, one resident is sufficient to admit police, even over the protest of another resident.

This ruling inherently dilutes the right of individuals to their own private domicile and to be protected from police searching their property without their permission. This outrageous decision will no doubt further damage the guarantees and protections promised by the Constitution.

The second assault on protections against search and seizure happened in Pennsylvania this month. Pennsylvania has for many years been more resistant than other states to the destruction of Fourth Amendment rights. The constitution of the commonwealth has traditionally been interpreted as going even further than the Fourth Amendment, extending protections to property such as motor vehicles. In fact, police officers had to call a judge in order to obtain permission to search a car.

That protection has now been overturned by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Now police can search cars on their own initiative, as they can in most states. The commonwealth was one of the last hold-outs on this issue. Without it, the norm of searching citizens’ vehicles at police discretion is unchallenged in statutes of the state and federal governments.

These attacks at the federal and state levels on a core constitutional right have angered people across the political spectrum. Even the usually left-leaning Huffington Post has reported angrily on the rulings.

The US Supreme Court ruling in particular is demonstrative of the problems that can arise when the political leadership of both parties holds a convergent view of policy that does not align with the desires of the broader polity. In a duopolistic political system, the political agenda can be almost impossible to challenge when such convergences occur. If the major political agents agree to act in a way that is contrary to that of the people, the system often denies any redress.

The only way to challenge the system, as it stands now, would be to mount primary challenges. The Republican Party is being convulsed by such a process now, but the Democrats remain largely unperturbed. Citizens who value their rights cannot permit the political actors who represent them to ossify policies directly antithetical to their express will. It remains to be seen whether Americans can successfully band together to protect their rights from government encroachment. On this issue, with sufficient anger from both left and right, there is reason to hope.

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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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Don’t Argue With Liberals – It Only Encourages Them

Non-lawyers often ask me, “What is the best way to argue with a liberal?” This is silly, because there is no best way to argue with a liberal. They're beyond argument. You might as well argue with your terrier. Take it from someone who argues with his hideous terrier all the time.

But if you do choose to argue with a liberal, understand that your purpose should never be to change the liberal’s mind. You're not going to change the liberal’s mind. Instead, if you choose to argue with a liberal, you should do it for one of two reasons – to either win over people who have not yet made up their minds, or to support people who already have begun to understand the truth.

The truth is that conservatism is an ideology that is in accord with natural law and basic human decency, while liberalism is merely the summit of a slippery slope leading down to the hellish depths of collectivist misery.

Liberals aren’t going to like to hear this manifest and demonstrable truth. So you’re going to get called “racist,” “sexist” and “homophobic,” even if you’re a conservative black lesbian.

What you are not going to get is an argument. An argument is a collected series of statements designed to establish a definite proposition. Arguments involve the presentation of facts and evidence from which one draws a conclusion. Implied within the concept of an argument is the potential that one might change his conclusion. But liberals start with the conclusion.

They don’t change their conclusions based on the facts and evidence; they change the facts and evidence based on the conclusion they want. This is why a 105 degree day is irrefutable proof of global warming, while a 60 degree day is irrefutable proof of global warming. As is a -20 degree day.

Liberals are only concerned with argument, or what superficially appears to be argument, as a rhetorical bludgeon designed to beat you into submission. They aren’t trying to change your mind. They don’t expect you to agree with them. They don’t even care whether or not you grow to love Big Brother.

They just want you to shut up and let them run rampant. If you understand that, you'll be fine.

There are two basic tactics to choose from when responding to a liberal pseudo-argument, defense and counterattack. Without getting too detailed and infantry-nerdy on you, think of defense as simply preventing a loss. You're holding your ground. The counterattack, however, lashes out to seize the initiative and defeat your enemy.

Both have their uses. When you defend, you are generally responding to the pseudo-argument the liberal is making. A liberal will start advocating some nonsense and you reply to what he says. You may choose to use examples of liberalism's many failures to illustrate how collectivism is a prescription for disaster. For example, some pinko starts crowing about how eight million suckers signed up for Obamacare. A good defense might involve raising the question of how many of those eight million have actually paid for it.

But the problem with defense is that it treats a liberal "argument” with a respect it doesn't deserve. You dignify liberal silliness with a response when all it deserves is mockery and contempt.

This is why I prefer to counterattack. When you counterattack, you ignore the proposition offered by the liberal and refuse to respond on the liberal’s preferred terms. In fact, you don’t even need to address the same subject the liberal is talking about. Your goal is not to undercut the liberal’s assertion. You're going to counterattack to undercut the liberal himself.

There are many good reasons to choose the approach of treating the liberal like he is a terrible person with terrible ideas who seeks to impose a quasi-fascist police state upon America, including the fact that it's all true.

Let’s try a counterattack battle drill. Some doofus with a “Capitalism Is a Patriarchal, Cisnormative Hate Crime” t-shirt starts babbling about “privilege.” The undecideds start listening, their jaws drooping slightly. Some of the more conservative ones are silent, not wanting to be labeled racist by some geek whose grandfather came from Oslo. You need to act. So you causally inject the question, “Hey, why are you an eager and active member of a political party that made a KKK kleagle a beloved Senate Majority Leader?”

Then you mention that you’re a member of the party that fought slavery and didn’t turn hoses on civil rights marchers. Then you finish by announcing, “Well, I’m going to stand with Dr. King and judge people by the content of their character.” It’s optional whether you then get up, scream that the liberal should have issued you a trigger warning about his racism, and leave.

But be careful – the liberal may totally spit in the next latte he sells you.

Some people might question whether this kind of Alinsky-esque tactic means we are stooping to the liberals’ level. Except the liberals’ level is six feet underground, where the victims of collectivism lie buried. Anyone not willing to take the fight to them simply empowers their liberal fascist fantasies.

If you're trying to win an Oxford Union debate with a liberal, you’ve missed the point. This isn't about the Marquess of Queensberry’s fussy little rules. This isn't about some sort of extended-pinky exchange of ideas over a fine glass of port. This is about fighting for our way of life and our fundamental rights against the intellectual heirs of Stalin, Mao and Hitler.

Attack. This is about winning. First prize is freedom. Second prize is tyranny.

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Forget About the Fed – Let’s End the Reign of Liberalism Instead

Despite the fact that the Federal Reserve has been pumping trillions of dollars into the economy with their Quantitative Easing program, our nation has seen anemic economic growth. In real dollars, the Fed (mostly under the leadership of Ben “easy money” Bernanke) has injected about $2 trillion into financial markets. This money (according to people who read Keynes as if he penned the economic gospel) was supposed to increase liquidity in the system and multiply, thereby creating jobs and prosperity. According to the theory of that guy who once said “we’re all dead in the long run”, the free Fed cash was supposed to result in massive job creation, and intense credit growth…

Of course, this hasn’t happened. In fact, despite the $2 trillion of “free” Fed monies, our ailing economy only managed to grow about $1.1 trillion in that same time span… So, to be clear: The Fed printed up $2 trillion worth of cash, and handed it to Wall Street. Stocks climbed steadily, and the economy only grew by half as much as the Fed had printed… This is apparently what happens when Liberals run the government.

Which brings us to the main point (I know, I know… “Finally”, right?):

Sure… End the Fed. But before we tackle that challenge, maybe we should end the reign of Obamanomics? After all, it seems that the Federal Reserve has pretty much exhausted every trick in the book to inflate the economy, and the economy still isn’t growing. Go ahead and give Wall Street more Fed dollars, but it’s a pretty big chore to get the economy going when policies from DC are killing jobs, and Eric Holder is making a killing out of suing banks.

Our biggest problems, today, aren’t monetary. They’re fiscal. The real problem with today’s “recovery” isn’t a lack of money or consumer demand… The real problem seems to be the guy living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and most of the 535 “leaders” who help craft fiscal policy at the US Capitol.

All the free Fed money in the world won’t change the fact that Eric Holder is suing banks left and right, while his Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is making mortgages a nightmare for the average lender. Barack Obama’s FDA isn’t exactly making energy any more affordable, and Obamacare is basically giving businesses a very legitimate reason not to hire people. Besides, if we truly live in a consumer-driven economy, it seems like the biggest thing we’re missing in this “recovery” is job creation.

So while the Federal Reserve has pumped trillions of dollars into the markets, the US economy has limped along. The fact that trillions in “free money” has been so ineffective at priming economic growth should tell us something: Lack of capital is not the issue.

Unreasonably loose monetary policy is no substitute for a congressional budget, or an informed fiscal policy. America is ready for an explosion of economic prosperity; but as long as the government continues to tax, regulate (oh good… more carbon regulations are being announced today), and infringe on the sovereignty of business, things are unlikely to get much better.

Whatever possible benefit the Federal Reserve could have had on the economy has been largely offset by the disastrous Obama policies of regulation and micromanagement. The truth is, the economy can only handle so much progressivism before it collapses under the weight of bureaucrats. So while I’m completely in favor of “ending the Fed”, the long run can wait. The real solution to today’s economic woes can be found at the ballot box this November.

 SOURCE

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Scandal Exhaustion

By Alan Caruba

Listening to President Obama respond on May 21 to the latest scandal regarding something about which he knew and did nothing—the mess at the Veterans Administration—was such a familiar event that I have reached a point of exhaustion trying to keep up with everything that has been so wrong about his six years in office. As he always does, he said was really angry about it.

Writing in the May 20 Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin said, “Forget ideology for a moment. Whether you are liberal or conservative, the Obama presidency’s parade of miscues is jaw-dropping.”

Stacked against the list of Obama scandals and failures, Rubin could only cite the Bush administration’s 2005 handling of Hurricane Katrina, the seventh most intense ever, and, as anyone familiar with that event will tell you, the failure of FEMA’s response was matched by the failures of Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and the New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. Bush had declared a national emergency two days before it hit the Gulf coast.

Rubin concluded that the Obama administration scandals “reflect the most widespread failure of executive leadership since the Harding administration”, adding “The presidency is an executive job. We hire neophytes at our peril. When there is an atmosphere in which accountability is not stressed you get more scandals and fiascos.”

Obama spent his entire first term blaming all such things on his predecessor, George W. Bush, until it became a joke.

One has to wonder about the effect of the endless succession of scandals and fiascos have had on Americans as individuals and the nation as a whole.

While it is easier to lay all the blame on Obama, the fact is that much of the blame is the result of a federal government that is so big no President could possibly know about the countless programs being undertaken within its departments and agencies, and all the Presidents dating back to Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive initiatives have played a role in growing the government.

It is, however, the President who selects the cabinet members responsible to manage the departments as well as those appointed to manage the various agencies. Kathleen Sebelius, the recently resigned former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for the implementation of Obamacare, comes to mind. She had solicited donations—against the law—from the companies HHS regulates to help her sign up uninsured Americans for Obamacare and signed off on the millions spent on HealthCare.gov and other expenses leading up to its start.

There are lists of the Obama scandals you can Google. One that continues to fester is the attack on September 11, 2012—the anniversary of 9/11—that killed an American ambassador and three security personnel in Benghazi, Libya. It has been and continues to be investigated, mostly because of the lies told by Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of “What difference at this point does it make?” fame. Clinton was asked what she had accomplished in her four years as Secretary and was unable to name anything.

Eric Holder, our Attorney General, continues in office despite having been held in contempt of Congress, professing that he knew nothing about “Fast and Furious”, the earliest scandal involving a gun-running scheme to Mexican drug cartels by the ATF presumably to track them, but they lost track and many were used in crimes including the killing of a Border Patrol agent.

Holder also told Congress that he was not associated with the “potential prosecution” of a journalist even though he had signed the affidavit that named Fox News reporter, James Rosen. as a potential criminal. Holder was also in charge when the Justice Department culled the phone records of Associated Press reporters to find out who they deemed was leaking information.

Keeping track of the solar power and other “renewable” and “Green” energy companies like Solyndra that received millions in grants and then rather swiftly went bankrupt became a fulltime effort and, of course, there was the “stimulus” that wasted billions without generating any “shovel ready jobs” qualifies as a fiasco.

In the midst of the recession that was triggered by the 2008 financial crisis various elements of the Obama administration continued to spend money in ways that suggested their indifference. In 2010 the General Services Administration held a $823,000 training conference in Las Vegas, complete with a clown and mind readers.

An Agriculture Department program to compensate black farmers who allegedly had been discriminated against by the agency turned into a gravy train that delivered several billion dollars to thousands of recipients, some of whom probably had not encountered discrimination.

The Veterans Affairs agency made news when it spent more than $6 million on two conferences in Orlando, Florida, and is back in the news for revelations about alleged falsified records concerning the waiting times veterans faced amidst assertions that many died while waiting for treatment surfaced. This was a problem of which the then-Senator Obama was already aware, but six years into his presidency it still existed despite his early promises to fix it.

Obama has been the biggest of Big Government Presidents since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, and Obamacare put the federal government in control of one sixth of the nation’s economy while putting the government in charge of the care Americans expect to receive. Obamacare will dwarf the problems associated with the Veterans agency.

Meanwhile, we have been living with a President who is so indifferent to working with Congress that he has gained fame for his use of executive orders such as the decision to not deport illegal immigrants. His aides have promised more executive orders.

All this over the course of the last six years has left Americans exhausted by the incompetence and wastefulness of an administration that now presides over the highest national debt in the history of the nation and the first ever downgrade of our credit rating.

It has also left them angry if they were conservatives and disillusioned if they were Obama supporters. The Veterans Administration scandal is likely a tipping point for the independent voters and even for longtime Democrats who will want a change.

It is increasingly likely that the November midterm elections give the Republican Party control over the Senate as well as the House and then to hope that it will begin to rein in the spending and save the nation from a financial collapse that will rival the one in 2008.

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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Obama's Conservative Foreign Policy

I pointed out yesterday that Americans are basically isolationists  -- believing that the rest of the world should be left to sort out its own problems.  Obama's very hands-off foreign policy accords with that -- JR

Conservatives generally agree on a few propositions. The federal government should avoid spending money unnecessarily. It shouldn't exceed its basic constitutional duties. It should encourage self-reliance rather than dependency. It should accept that some problems are beyond its ability to solve.

Barack Obama, they may be surprised to learn, agrees with much of this formula. He just applies it in a realm where conservatives often don't: foreign relations and national security. The Obama doctrine, as outlined in his policies and his speech at West Point Wednesday, is one of comparatively limited government.

Limited government, however, is not something many conservatives champion when it comes to matters military. They may question whether Washington should spend billions to bring prosperity and order to Detroit or New Orleans. But they had no objection to spending billions to bring prosperity and order to Baghdad and Kabul.

In the domestic realm, they believe the federal government's powers are few and mostly modest. Beyond the water's edge, it's a different story. When George W. Bush embarked on an extravagant project to "help the Iraqi people build a lasting democracy in the heart of the Middle East," Republicans granted him all the leeway he could want.

The Constitution says the government should "provide for the common defense." But Bush translated "defense" to mean going to war far from our shores against a country that had not attacked us.

His idea of self-restraint was saying, "The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats" (emphasis added). But he insisted that "the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather." Any potential danger, anywhere, anytime was grounds for an American attack.

A more sensible view is that the U.S. can indeed remain idle while alleged dangers gather, because most of them won't materialize. The immortal philosopher Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." Many conservatives believe in hurrying out to meet all 10 just in case.

Obama noted that in recent decades, "some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences." Substitute "government programs" for "military adventures," and he could be quoting Paul Ryan.

"I would betray my duty to you, and to the country we love, if I sent you into harm's way simply because I saw a problem somewhere in the world that needed to be fixed," he told the cadets. The attitude he cautions against is one that he and his fellow Democrats do not routinely apply to domestic matters. But it's a sound one.

Critics charge that Obama's foreign policy shows an unwillingness to lead, or weakness, or uncertain purposes. The same complaint, of course, could be made about conservative policies on poverty, health care, urban blight, access to housing and more. "Don't you care?" indignant liberals ask.

But sometimes ambitious government undertakings are too expensive to justify, sometimes they fail to solve problems, and sometimes they make things worse. In those instances, declining to act -- and explaining why -- is the most authentic form of leadership. That's just as true in the international realm as it is in the domestic one.

If Obama has yet to come up with a bumper-sticker slogan for his approach, the elements are fairly clear: Don't use military force until other means are exhausted -- and maybe not then. Don't use ground troops when you can use bombers or drones. Don't act alone when you can enlist allies. Don't take the lead role when someone else will do so.

Don't do for other countries what they could do for themselves. Don't confuse desirable outcomes with vital interests. Keep in mind that very few things are more costly and harmful to American interests than an unnecessary, unsuccessful war.

The president has followed these guidelines with reasonable consistency, which is one reason he could tell the cadets, "You are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan" -- and not because they'll be deploying to fight somewhere else.

There will always be people who demand that the U.S. government do more and spend whatever it takes to solve an array of problems without any assurance of accomplishing its goals. Abroad, at least, Obama is not one of them

SOURCE

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The VA Health System Is a Tragic Warning Against Government-Run Health Care

Liberals love the now-scandalized veterans health program, but even at its best, it's not worth copying

A damning report released by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Inspector General will likely leave Democrats and their liberal allies clamoring for reforms to the government run health system for those who have served in the military. The report found that workers in the Phoenix VA network systematically manipulated wait time data, leaving thousands of military veterans waiting for medical appointments, and some 1,700 stuck in limbo after being left off the waiting list entirely. According to the report, the average initial wait time for a primary care appointment in the Phoenix VA system was 115 days—a far cry from both the system's 14-day goal and the 24 days Phoenix officials had reported.

Until recently, Democrats have not been particularly shy about expressing their feelings about the VA health care system. For years they have been telling us that it’s great—a model system from which the rest of the nation’s health care systems could learn a thing or two.

In 2011, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the program a "huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform." A few years earlier, he lauded it as a "real live case of impressive cost control." Writing in Slate in 2005, journalist Timothy Noah dubbed the program a "triumph of socialized medicine."

It’s not just liberal advocates. Democratic politicians have made their fondness for the program known as well. In the lead-up to the passage of Obamacare, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) praised the Veterans Administration, and all government health care, as a "godsend"—and then mocked a Republican Senator for imagining a future "government [health] plan where care is denied, delayed, and rationed." That future, Durbin said, was "fictitious."

Around the same time, Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio), gave a statement describing the "government health care" provided by the VA as "among the very best health care in the world." In another speech, Sen. Durbin piled on, insisting that veterans reliance on the "quality care" offered by the VA proved critics of government health care wrong. The White House got into the game too, posting a "health insurance reform reality check" declaring veterans’ health care to be "safe and sound."*

The ongoing VA scandal over falsified records, and the deadly long wait times for care that appear to have been the result, seems to suggest otherwise: Veterans are not safe and sound within the fully government-run system, its quality control leaves much to be desired, and its lengthy wait times are not a fictitious prediction but an all-too-grim reality.

In other words, it’s hardly a triumphant, model system. But even if there were no scandal at all, the VA wouldn’t be a system worth emulating.

West Point - The U.S. Military Academy (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)West Point - The U.S. Military Academy (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

When Obamacare passed, we dodged getting a provision that was supposed to emulate the VA. The outbreak of Democratic praise over the program noted above revolved mostly around the possibility of a "public option" in the president’s health care overhaul—a government-run health insurance plan intended to compete with private sector alternatives. The idea was scrapped, and Obamacare became law without it.

So what happens when the federal government actually makes an attempt to take an idea long used by the VA and apply it to the rest of the system? For that, we can look at recent efforts to spur adoption of electronic health records.

In health policy wonk circles, the VA has an electronic records system that is legendarily good. Yes, it’s comparatively expensive, judged against other types of health records systems, but studies have found that the expense pays off with even greater savings. And it helped coordinate better health care too. "The VA’s investment in the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture is associated with significant value through reductions in unnecessary and redundant care, process efficiencies, and improvements in care quality," wrote a team of health IT researchers in a 2010 study for Health Affairs.

When the federal government earmarked about $20 billion (to start with) to help encourage health providers to install health IT systems in 2009, as part of the stimulus, it was hoping for a similar payoff. Just a few years earlier, researchers at RAND had published a report estimating that widespread adoption of electronic health records could eventually save $80 billion annually. The stimulus boost was a down payment on the potential for massive future savings.

The stimulus money was sent out to hospitals all over the country, and, with federal funding and a slew of incentives to act, new electronic records systems were rapidly installed. But the hoped-for savings never arrived. In fact, the health IT push may have helped drive federal health spending upwards, by making it easier and more efficient for hospitals to send bigger bills to Medicare.

The system-wide efficiency improvements never appeared either, because too many of the new health records systems couldn’t communicate with each other. The federal government’s health IT investment was supposed to make health care better and cheaper. Instead, it made it more expensive and worse.

The operating theory of most health policy wonks often seems to be that if something works somewhere, it will work everywhere. But the history of health care administration is littered with failed attempts to replicate small successes on a larger scale. All we really know is that if something works somewhere, it will work somewhere.

The point is that even when and where the VA works well it’s not necessarily a system to emulate. That goes for the VA’s vaunted cost control methods too. Paul Krugman is right when he says that the system offers a real-life example of cost control; it really is cheaper than many competitors. But that’s only part of the story. It’s also necessary to account for how the system achieves its savings.

And one of the chief methods the VA uses to control spending is to organize its beneficiaries into eight "priority groups" that determine who gets the most care. The sickest and the poorest are at the top of the list, but everyone else gets shuffled into lower priority groups. And not all types of care are covered, which means veterans in most of the priority groups get the majority of their care outside the system. In 2007, the Congressional Budget Office reported that none of the eight priority groups received more than 50 percent of its care from the program. In 2010, the VA reported that just two of the priority groups—the two groups that have the highest cost per enrollee—had barely crept above 50 percent usage.

It’s not a full-featured system designed to handle the complete health care needs of the population it covers. But it is an example of how government controls costs in health care: through strictly defined prioritization systems and limitations on treatments.

And that's how the system is supposed to work. Add the systematic lies and manipulations that the recent scandal has brought to light, and you have an accurate enough picture of how government health care works in practice.

That’s the government system that Democrats and liberal advocates say they like, and that we should learn from. The scandal shows how bad a government-run system can get, but even the best-case scenario mostly provides lessons in what not to do.

SOURCE

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Big Labor's VA Choke Hold

How Democrats put their union allies before the well-being of veterans.

We know with certainty that there is at least one person the Department of Veterans Affairs is serving well. That would be the president of local lodge 1798 of the National Federation of Federal Employees.

The Federal Labor Relations Authority, the agency that mediates federal labor disputes, earlier this month ruled in favor of this union president, in a dispute over whether she need bother to show up at her workplace—the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Martinsburg, W.Va. According to FLRA documents, this particular VA employee is 100% "official time"—D.C. parlance for federal employees who work every hour of every work day for their union, at the taxpayer's expense.

In April 2012, this, ahem, VA "employee" broke her ankle and declared that she now wanted to do her nonwork for the VA entirely from the comfort of her home. Veterans Affairs attempted a compromise: Perhaps she could, pretty please, come in two days a week? She refused, and complained to the FLRA that the VA was interfering with her right to act as a union official. The VA failed to respond to the complaint in the required time (perhaps too busy caring for actual veterans) and so the union boss summarily won her case.

The VA battle is only just starting, but any real reform inevitably ends with a fight over organized labor. Think of it as the federal version of Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and other states where elected officials have attempted to rein in the public-sector unions that have hijacked government agencies for their own purpose. Fixing the VA requires first breaking labor's grip, and the unions are already girding for that fight.

Federal labor unions are generally weak by comparison to state public-sector unions, though the VA might be an exception. The VA boasts one of the largest federal workforces and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki bragged in 2010 that two-thirds of it is unionized. That's a whopping 200,000 union members, represented by the likes of the American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union. And this is government-run health care—something unions know a lot about from organizing health workers in the private sector. Compared with most D.C. unions (which organize for better parking spots) the VA houses a serious union shop.

The Bush administration worked to keep federal union excesses in check; Obama administration officials have viewed contract "negotiations" as a way to reward union allies. Federal unions can't bargain for wages or benefits, but the White House has made it up to them.

Manhattan Institute scholar Diana Furchtgott-Roth recently detailed Office of Personnel Management numbers obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Rep. Phil Gingrey (R., Ga.). On May 25, Ms. Furchtgott-Roth reported on MarketWatch that the VA in 2012 paid 258 employees to be 100% "full-time," receiving full pay and benefits to do only union work. Seventeen had six-figure salaries, up to $132,000. According to the Office of Personnel Management, the VA paid for 988,000 hours of "official" time in fiscal 2011, a 23% increase from 2010.

Moreover, as Sens. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) noted in a 2013 letter to Mr. Shinseki, the vast majority of these "official" timers were nurses, instrument technicians pharmacists, dental assistants and therapists, who were being paid to do union work even as the VA tried to fill hundreds of jobs and paid overtime to other staff.

As for patient-case backlogs, the unions have helped in their creation. Contract-negotiated work rules over job classifications and duties and seniorities are central to the "bureaucracy" that fails veterans. More damaging has been the union hostility to any VA attempt to give veterans access to alternative sources of care—which the unions consider a direct job threat. The American Federation of Government Employees puts out regular press releases blasting any "outsourcing" of VA work to non-VA-union members.

The VA scandal is now putting an excruciating spotlight on the most politically sensitive agency in D.C., and the unions are worried about where this is headed. They watched in alarm as an overwhelming 390 House members—including 160 Democrats—voted on May 21 to give the VA more power to fire senior executives, a shot over the rank-and-file's bow. They watched in greater alarm as Mr. Shinseki said the VA would be letting more veterans seek care at private facilities in areas where the department's capacity is limited.

This is a first step toward a reform being drafted by Sens. Coburn, John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Richard Burr (R., N.C.), which would give veterans a card allowing them health services at facilities of their choosing. The union fear is that Democrats, in a tough election year, will be pressured toward reforms that break labor's VA stronghold.

Not surprisingly, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D., Vt.), chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, has promised his own "reform." Odds are it will echo the unions' call to simply throw more money at the problem. Any such bill should be viewed as Democrats once again putting the interests of their union allies ahead of veterans.

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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Do democracies start wars?

It is often said that democracies do not wage war on one-another.  The idea is that populations as a whole are justly wary of war  -- because it is they who die in them --  so a democratic government can only get popular consent to a war if the country is attacked by an external enemy -- presumably a despot of some kind.

Students of ancient history will immediately recall the Athenian attack on Syracuse as a counter-example but Athens was not much like democracies as we know them today (only a minority of Athenians had a vote, for instance) so that does not take us very far.

I have recently come across what could be seen as a confirmation of the usual claim:  The Austro-Hungarian democracy at the onset of WWI.  The Austro-Hungarian empire (Germany's great Southern ally) WAS a democracy but it was a greatly decayed democracy.  The Austrian Reichsrat (parliament) had degenerated to complete unworkability.  Filibusters were common and disruptions by deliberate noise were routine.  Parties that were not getting their way would shout, blow whistles, blow toy trumpets, bang drums and generally deploy so much noise that speeches could not be heard and very little work could be done.

It was such a spectacle that ordinary Viennese  -- including Hitler -- would go to the vistor's gallery overlooking parliament just for the entertainment.  Hitler started out with a considerable respect for democracy, particularly British democracy,  but his observations of the Reichsrat considerably eroded that.

So Austria entered the war solely in the power of the bureaucracy, the military and the Emperor.  It is conceivable that a mature democracy might have produced a leader who told the emperor firmly that a dead Archduke was insufficient to justify hostilities with Serbia.  So WWI could  perhaps have been avoided if Austria had been a functioning democracy.

As it happens, even the German Kaiser thought that war with Serbia was unnecessary -- but Austria had declared war before the Kaiser had got to make his views known.  But once war had been declared, treaty obligations ruled subsequent events.

But the big hole in the conventional case is Imperial Germany.  The German empire was thoroughly democratic and the formal powers of the Kaiser were little different from the powers of the British monarch.  The Kaiser was certainly influential for a time and often expressed views that were widely held in Germany but nothing much could be done without parliamentary consent.

Wikipedia has a reasonable short summary of the German parliament of the time:  "The Reichstag had no formal right to appoint or dismiss governments, but by contemporary standards it was considered a highly modern and progressive parliament. All German men over 25 years of age were eligible to vote, and members of the Reichstag were elected by general, universal and secret suffrage. Members were elected in single-member constituencies by majority vote."

And Germany's predecessor State, Prussia, is an interesting example of the role of the German parliament:  The King could not get the Prussian parliament to vote him the funds he wanted for his army so he commissioned Chancellor Bismarck to bypass parliament and rule solely in the King's name.  Bismarck carried it off with the aid of an obedient Prussian bureaucracy and parliament was ignored for four years.  But parliament did not flinch and, after four years, Bismarck had to apologize to the parliament and reinstate it authority.  So even in Prussia, parliament was the ultimate authority.

And in  Germany of the Edwardian era, it was parliament's power of the purse that regulated and limited what the Kaiser and his ministers could do.  So it is no good blaming the Kaiser for WWI.  He was largely a figurehead for the will of the German people as expressed in their Reichstag.  It was essentially the whole of the German democracy that went into WWI.

And the U.S. democracy has its own history of initiating war. Robert Kagan of the Brookings institution has an extensive historical survey which shows both that the America people are isolationist and that American leaders repeatedly talk them out of that.  On some occasions, where America has been attacked, as with the 9/11 atrocity, retaliation is completely reasonable but on others the pretext used to initiate war was very thin.  For starters, the alleged attack in 1898 on the battleship "Maine" in Havana harbour was a very thin reason for the invasion of Cuba by TR and his cohorts.  To this day there is no clarity on what sank the "Maine".

But even the "Maine" episode shows that American declarations of war have to be dressed up as defensive or retaliatory.  But finding such garb has not been difficult for at least the Democrat side of American politics.  Isolationism was from the earliest days the stance of American conservatives but with their insatiable lust for meddling in other people's affairs, liberals have been very keen to involve America in wars abroad.  It may be noted that TR was the founder of the "Progressive" party (popularly known as the "Bull Moose" party) when the Republicans became too wishy washy for him.

So when WWI broke out it was a great frustration for Democrat President Wilson that he was not part of the councils of war.  So peace-minded were the American people that it actually took him years to find a pretext for declaring war  -- the main pretext being the "Lusitania" sinking.  The loss of the liner and her people was an undoubted tragedy but Germany had posted warning advertisements in NY newspapers prior to the sailing which warned people not to sail on the "Lusitania".  It was thought to be carrying munitions to Britain -- which it was  -- making it a prime target.  So accusations of German perfidy or barbarity were simply wrong.



And FDR in WWII was just as bad.  His sanctions against Japan had pushed Japan into economic crisis and desperate Japanese attempts to open negotiations were repeatedly rebuffed.  So, against much of their own expert advice, the Pearl Harbor attack was planned by the Japanese leadership to break through American opposition.  That was essentially what FDR wanted and he made no attempt to stop it.  Both Britain and the U.S. had cracked the Japanese naval code so Japanese ship movements were known.  But not a whisper of any of the intelligence concerned was transmitted to Pearl Harbor.  FDR did however make sure that his carriers were not in port when the Japanese attacked.

And so FDR got his "date that will live in infamy".  "A date that will live in hypocrisy" would be more apt.  Robert Kagan  is also of the view that FDR was itching for war.

And as for Bill Clinton's attack on the Christian Serbs on behalf of Muslims....

So democracies do start wars  -- but they usually have to be a bit sneaky about it

UPDATE  -- A point of clarification about WWI:

It could be argued that I have undermined my own argument by pointing to Austria as undemocratic.  It could be argued that the war was started by Austria's attack on Serbia and since Austria was a failed democracy, the events there show that democracies do not start wars.

My main point was however the role of Germany.  If Germany had not mobilized there would have been no WWI.  The Austrians were not much concerned by the prospect of a Russian invasion and they were probably right about that.  Given the backward and chaotic Russian military and the large modern forces available to Austria, only a minor punch-up would probably have resulted from the Tsar's actions.  Austria might even have gained some territory.

So it was Germany's move that started the big war.  And Germany was democratic.  So why did Germany get involved?  Because they wanted to.  And there were several reasons why.  See here

UPDATE 2  -- about the Lusitania

A reader has pointed out that my graphic above is a collage. The Lusitania sailing details and the embassy warning did not originally occur side-by-side.  So why did I say that passengers on the Lusitania specifically were warned?  Because the Lusitania was the ONLY liner left on that route.  Other liners had been grabbed by the British government for war use.

I can't resist mentioning WHY the government did not use the Lusitania:  Because as a large fast ship it would use heaps of coal -- and the admiralty wanted to conserve its stocks! -- JR

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Economic Growth, Texas Style

With a record 92 million Americans out of the work force and the labor force participation rate under 63% – matching a 36-year low – at least one state is actually seeing a jobs boom. The Lone Star State, which has always marched to its own drumbeat, is now bucking the trend in the downward growth spiral. And the reason is a lesson the rest of the Union could learn.

But first, the facts. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas' preliminary unemployment rate for April 2014 was 5.2%, notably below the national 6.3% headline unemployment rate. Of course, these numbers can easily hide the true story. More important – and more impressive – is that Texas' labor force participation rate for April was 65.1%, significantly above the national average.

Additionally, comparing red-state Texas with blue-dyed California, economist Stephen Moore notes that over the last 20 years, Texas has had four times the job growth of California, has an unemployment rate far lower than California’s, has income growth greater than California’s, and regularly ranks in the top five states for business climate while California consistently lands in the bottom 10.

Is it any wonder that people are fleeing states like California and moving to Texas? For example, Toyota recently announced relocation of its U.S. headquarters, along with some 3,000 jobs, from Torrance, California, to Plano, Texas.

But what’s behind the good news? Several things – none of which you’ll find in California.

First, the oil and gas boom. While Washington regulators are spouting energy independence with one breath and trying to regulate the growth out of the oil and gas industry with the other, Texas is, well, drilling away. The Heritage Foundation notes that already in 2014, year-over-year drilling has doubled, with 10,000 new wells being drilled this year alone. (North Dakota, the other ‘oil boom’ state, is also seeing tremendous job and population growth – coincidence?). And when it comes to dishing out dough, Texas doesn’t do much to subsidize solar and wind energy, which are invariably more expensive and less reliable than oil and gas. California, meanwhile, has a Hollywood love affair with subsidy sprees.

Additionally, Texas actually welcomes business growth, charging no state income tax and avoiding many excessive regulations.

Of course, this isn’t to say Texas is the new Promised Land. As the Texas Public Policy Foundation noted in a recent report, the state’s economic development programs allow local governments to use taxpayer money to support “private interests,” meaning private business. That practice of cronyism has rightly drawn criticism from both sides of the aisle.

Yet, looking at the larger economic and regulatory landscape, it’s impossible not to notice the land of the Alamo is making a stand for Liberty, while the Left coast of solar utopia simply isn’t.

SOURCE

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The vaunted 'competence' of Barack Obama

by Jeff Jacoby

AS A candidate for president in 1988, Michael Dukakis famously proclaimed: "This election is not about ideology; it's about competence."

It wasn't a winning argument. Dukakis had run as the architect of the so-called "Massachusetts Miracle," the state's mid-1980s economic boom. But the miracle was turning into a fiscal meltdown, and as it did Dukakis's once-commanding lead went down the drain. On Election Day, he lost to George H. W. Bush in a 40-state landslide.

Dukakis played down ideology because he didn't want to be tagged as a liberal, and he played up competence because that's what all candidates do. Twenty years later, Barack Obama did the same thing, but with far greater success. Running to succeed the deeply polarizing George W. Bush, Obama held himself out not just as a leader who would never "pit red America against blue America," but as a natural-born manager whose hallmark was smarts and competence.

Voters — encouraged by newspaper endorsements that saw in Obama's campaign "a marvel of sound management" (The Boston Globe) and backed him because he "offered more competence than drama" (Los Angeles Times) — ate it up. An astonishing 76 percent of respondents in a CNN/ORC poll shortly after the 2008 election agreed that Obama could "manage the government effectively."

Five years of Obama's presidency have certainly shattered that delusion.

The scandal now boiling over at the Veterans Administration, where at least 40 patients have died while numerous VA hospitals reportedly falsified data to hide unconscionable delays in medical care, is only the latest in a long series of government shambles under a president whose managerial prowess turned out to be a mirage.

Abuses at the VA have been a problem for years. As a candidate back in 2007, Obama claimed that 400,000 veterans were "stuck on a waiting list," and he promised "a new sense of urgency" to "make sure that our disabled vets receive the benefits they deserve." But that urgency never materialized. In a letter to Obama a year ago, the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee detailed some of the "serious and significant patient care issues" in the VA system, imploring him to address the worsening problems before even more veterans died. Yet nothing happened. The president showed no interest in the matter, and seemed to have no grasp of the scandal's lethal magnitude, until he learned about it on the news.

Obama came to the White House with a carefully cultivated image for almost preternatural competence — an image no one esteemed more highly than he did. "I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters," he had told campaign staff. "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that . . . I'm a better political director than my political director."

He may still believe it, but most Americans no longer do. When respondents in a CNN/ORC poll this spring were asked once again about the president's ability to "manage the government effectively," a solid majority — 57 percent — said that description does not apply to Obama. Other surveys get similar results. In four Quinnipiac University polls taken since November 2013, respondents have been asked: "Do you think that in general the Obama administration has been competent in running the government?" Each time, a majority has said no. Asked whether the president is "paying attention to what his administration is doing," only 45 percent say he is. None of those polls reflects recent coverage of the VA; presumably the numbers would be even harsher if they did.

Every presidency has its scandals and messes. George W. Bush's included the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, the calamitous post-Saddam administration of Iraq, and the misbegotten policies that stoked the subprime mortgage crisis. But Obama went out of his way to contrast himself with the supposedly bumbling and hapless Bush. He put effectiveness and smart governance at the very core of what Americans could expect if they elected him.

It hasn't worked out that way, or even come close. The Obama administration hasn't been distinguished by cool, cerebral, sure-footed professionalism, but by something closer to amateur hour. From the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act to the bloody aftermath of the intervention in Libya, from enabling political witch-hunts at the IRS to being repeatedly outmaneuvered by Russia's Vladimir Putin, from swelling the debt he was going to reduce to embittering the politics he promised to detoxify, Obama's performance has been a lurching series of screw-ups and disappointments.

The 44th president — who once said that his accomplishments could compare favorably with those of any of his predecessors with the "possible exceptions" of Lyndon Johnson, FDR, and Abraham Lincoln — has always had a huge opinion of his executive gifts. The American people no longer share it. As a political creature, Obama's talents are undeniable. When it comes to competent governance, they turned out to be anything but.

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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Was Elliot Rodger a schizophrenic?

Ann Coulter says so below but I am not so sure.  Delusions are the hallmark of the schizophrenic and we see no evidence of that.  I am more inclined to say that he had a personality disorder.  But that he was severely psychologically disturbed is clear

Mass murder at a sunny college campus in a beach town would normally be considered "newsy," but Elliot Rodger's massacre at the University of California-Santa Barbara last Friday is getting surprisingly little press.

This is not a good case for liberals: The killer was an immigrant, a person of color, and the majority of his casualties resulted from attacks with a car or knife. It makes as much sense to rant about the NRA as to blame the Auto Club of America or the National Knife Collectors Association.

Rather, what we have is yet another mass murder committed by a schizophrenic -- just like those of Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Loughner, James Holmes and Adam Lanza.

Yes, they all used guns. Also, they were all males. They were all college-aged. They all had hair. Those are not distinctive characteristics.

When the last five mass murderers share something that only 1 percent of the population has, I think we've found the relevant common denominator.

Rodger had been seeing therapists since he was 8 years old. Just last year, his psychiatrist, Dr. Charles Sophy, prescribed him Risperidone, an anti-psychotic. But after looking up what Risperidone was for -- schizophrenia -- Rodger decided "it was the absolute wrong thing for me to take" and never did.

See, that's the thing about schizophrenics -- they don't think they're sick. They think the lava lamp that's talking to them is sick.

Rodger's "manifesto" reads like Nikolai Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" -- generally recognized as the first description of schizophrenia, except it's a little repetitive and not well-written, no matter what that "tech guru" says.

I'm one of the few who have read all 141 pages. It is a tale of increasing delusions, paranoia, hallucinations and wild, grandiose self-assessments. In other words, it is a slightly less whiny version of Obama's first inaugural address. (How many pages does your manifesto have to be before we can force you to take your medication?)

Rodger says of himself:

-- "I saw myself as a highly intelligent and magnificent person who is meant for great things."

-- "Becoming a multimillionaire at a young age is what I am meant for."

-- "I am like a god."

-- "This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal."

(No -- wait ... Last one was Obama.)

Rodger saw every female as a "tall, hot blonde" -- and, this being California, that's at a campus that's only 50 percent white. He viewed all couples as his sworn enemies causing his suffering.

Although Rodger loved driving his car, he "soon learned the hard way" not to drive on Friday and Saturday nights, where he "frequently saw bands of teenagers roaming the streets." They "had pretty girls beside them," probably on their way to "get drunk and have sex and do all sorts of fun pleasurable things that I've never had the chance to do. Damn them all!"

At Santa Barbara City College, he dropped his sociology class on the first day of school "because there was this extremely hot blonde girl in the class with her brute of a boyfriend." Rodger couldn't even sit through the whole first class with them, merely for being a couple.

Santa Monica Pier was out for him, too: "I saw young couples everywhere. ... Life was too unfair to me." On a trip to England, he refused to leave his hotel room so he wouldn't have to see men walking with their girlfriends.

The "cruelty" of women apparently consisted of the failure of any "tall, hot blondes" to approach Rodger and ask for sex. He would walk around for hours "in the desperate hope that I might possibly cross paths with some pretty girl who would be attracted to me."

But only once, in the entire 141-page manifesto, does Rodger attempt to speak to a girl himself. She's a total stranger walking past him on a bridge, and he musters up the courage to say "hi." He claims she "kept on walking" and said nothing. She probably didn't hear him. But he called her a "foul bitch" and went to a bathroom to cry for an hour.

Although Rodger repeatedly denounces the world and everyone in it for "cruelty and injustice," he was the bully more often than the bullied, especially as time went on, and his rage increased.

He sees an Asian guy talking to a white girl at a party, decides he'd been "insulted enough," and roughly bumped the Asian aside."How could an ugly Asian attract the attention of a white girl, while a beautiful Eurasian like myself never had any attention from them? I thought with rage."

Even after this unprovoked assault, the couple was nice to him, telling him he was drunk and should have some water. He stormed out of the party, but returned to "spitefully insult" the Asian.

Then he climbed up on a balcony at the party, and when some college kids joined him, he began insulting them and tried to push the girls off a 10-foot ledge.

He hectors his mother to marry "any wealthy man" because it would "be a way out of my miserable and insignificant life." He tells her "she should sacrifice her well-being for the sake of my happiness."

When flying first class, he says, "I took great satisfaction as I passed by all of the other people who flew economy, giving all of the younger passengers a cocky little smirk whenever they looked at me."

Meanwhile, in 141 pages, the worst thing anyone ever did to him was not say "hi" back.

His claims that couples all over were "making out" or "passionately kissing" are probably hallucinatory. In the Starbucks line? At family dinners? They were probably holding hands and Rodger hallucinated something resembling a live sex act.

Thus, he writes that a couple in a Starbucks line were "kissing passionately ... rubbing their bodies together and tongue kissing in front of everyone." Livid, Rodger followed them to their car and threw his hot coffee on them. Utterly self-pitying, he says: "I cursed the world for condemning me to such suffering." Then he spent five days alone in his room.

Another couple Rodger says were kissing "passionately" in the food court outside Domino's pizza enraged him so much he followed them in his car and "splashed my iced tea all over them" -- to fight "against the injustice."

But the story that sounds the most like Gogol's Poprishchin hearing two dogs talking in Russian is Rodger's allegation that his stepmother bragged to him that his stepbrother, Jazz -- her own 6-year-old son! -- "would be a success with girls and probably lose his virginity early."

I know Moroccan cultural mores are different, but I'm calling "auditory hallucination" on that one.

A family friend, Simon Astaire, described Rodger's flat affect, common to schizophrenics, saying he "couldn't look at you straight in the eye and looked at your feet. It was unbearable."

It's hard to feel sorry for a mass murderer, but it was cruel to Elliot Rodger to allow him to refuse medication and turn himself into a monster. It was beyond cruel to his innocent victims -- as well as the other victims of psychopathic killers. But liberals are more worried about "stigmatizing" the mentally ill than the occasional mass murder.

SOURCE

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The social influences on Elliot Rodger

Jessica Valenti of the Guardian wants to head the idea of individual responsibility off at the pass, writing “According to his family, Rodger was seeking psychiatric treatment. But to dismiss this as a case of a lone "madman" would be a mistake.”

Why? Well, she continues, “It not only stigmatizes the mentally ill – who are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it – but glosses over the role that misogyny and gun culture play (and just how foreseeable violence like this is) in a sexist society. After all, while it is unclear what role Rodger's reportedly poor mental health played in the alleged crime, the role of misogyny is obvious.”

Obvious, is it?

Yes, the mentally ill are a high percentage of the victims of violence. But when it comes perpetrators of mass killings, they’re pretty much it. Not too many well-adjusted, friendly, functioning people committing them. It’s the equivalent of the kindergarten-level progressive claim that it’s Islamophibic to point out the fact that while very few Muslims are terrorists, most suicide bombers are believers in Islam. (Say that too loudly and Arianna Huffington’s head implodes.) It’s an inconvenient fact to progressives, who would rather spend their time drawing moral equivalence between history’s greatest monsters and the Tea Party, but their dislike of a fact doesn’t make it any less of one.

She continues, “Rodger, like most young American men, was taught that he was entitled to sex and female attention… He believed this so fully that he described women's apathy toward him as an "injustice" and a "crime".

The fact that 4 of his 6 victims were male, and the general insanity of his 107,000 word “manifesto” touched on any number of subjects aside, notice the words she put in quotation marks? Couple them with Rodger’s own words from one his YouTube videos, “College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure, but in those years I've had to rot in loneliness, it's not fair … I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me but I will punish you all for it.” (Emphasis added.)

Elliot Rodger saw himself as a victim of “injustice,” of a “crime.” His life, which was one of privilege, was “not fair.” These are his words, his thoughts. Where have we heard them before?

The concept of life being unfair and the need to seek “justice” to fix it is the very heart of progressivism. Nothing is your fault, it’s society’s. You’re just a victim.

We are raising a generation of participation trophy winning, everyone is special believing, all thoughts are valid, there are no wrong answers, high self-esteem having, if it feels good do it, you can’t judge monsters. These monsters have never been told there are lines you do not cross, you don’t always get your way, someone will be better than you even at the things you are great at, and you’re going to have to bust your ass to get what you want, and then only maybe will you.

Many of the generation coming of age now are simply not equipped to deal with failure, be it in not getting a job or a date, or anything in between. They don’t know how to deal with even small failures because they’ve been insulated from reality by the progressive Lake Wobegon-esque “everyone is special” philosophy that has people looking for an explanation of their shortcomings externally.

It creates a large pool of voters for them – people seeking external relief from government for their problems and the problems of others – but it also spawns monsters ill-suited to the realities of adulthood. That some on the edge snap when faced with what used to be routine growing pains, rites of passage, should not come as a surprise.

Progressives aren’t interested in the consequences of their actions, they don’t reflect on results, all that matters is intentions. The “War on Poverty” has made poverty worse, and nearly inescapable, but they meant well. The VA provides “free health care” to veterans, just as long as they don’t have serious health issues, then they die waiting. They are spending more than every before on education because they care, but fewer and fewer children are learning the basics.

Everyone is special, above average, a perfect little snowflake just as capable of anything as everyone else is. Only we’re not. People are individuals with different skills and abilities and, most importantly, motivation. You could be the smartest person in the world, but if your plan for life involves waiting tables until someone comes along, recognizes that fact and offers to pay you a lot of money to simply be brilliant, you’re going to be an old waiter.

Life is as much what you do as it is what happens to you. To think otherwise, to be taught otherwise, is a disservice to humanity. It’s also very progressive.

That’s what I would point out to those looking to advance a political agenda on the graves of the 6 victims of Elliot Rodger.

SOURCE

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Non-profit stands up to Obamacare

Thanks to Obamacare, the Media Research Center is being threatened with outrageous fines totaling $4.5 million per year, starting this May. That is more than $12,500 every day! These fines will put us out of business.

Our offense? We oppose the federal government's move to functionally revoke our Constitutional right of religious liberty demanding that we subsidize contraception, abortifacients, and sterilizations.

We have carefully explored our options and determined that we only have one viable alternative: legal action.  We have filed suit in federal court to force the government to certify our exemption from Obamacare's unethical and unconstitutional mandates.

The initial hearing in our lawsuit against the Obama Administration's Health and Human Services department is scheduled for June 6.

The MRC is leading the way: we are the first non-profit organization to take this type of action. This will be a seminal case in the fight against this legislative overreach.

This lawsuit comes with known risks. We will be forced to incur significant legal expenses to defend ourselves—estimated at $150,000—but after exhausting our alternatives, our choice is clear: we must stand for liberty.

We only get one chance at this. A victory for us will be a victory for all who value religious liberty.

More here

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

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

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