Flight Delay Rebuke:  Congress exposes the FAA's air-traffic furlough gambit

It isn't quite Ronald Reagan breaking the 1981 air-traffic controllers strike by firing 12,345 of them, banning them from government employment for life, and decertifying their union. But it's close enough for cheering. On Thursday night the Senate unanimously reversed the Federal Aviation Administration's sequester furloughs, and the House followed on Friday with a veto-proof majority, 361 to 41.

Remember when the sequester's spending cuts were going to incite mass uprisings for higher taxes? Instead, Senate Democrats and the White House blinked, not least because the FAA's transparent political strategy was to use incompetent government as a bludgeon on behalf of bigger government. The American public waiting in departure lounges figured this out, which is presumably why the political capitulation is so total.

The FAA's all-hands furloughs managed to convert a less than 4% FAA budget cut into a 10% air-traffic control cut that would delay 40% of flights. The 6,700 flights that the FAA threatened to force off schedule every day is twice as many delays as the single worst travel day of 2012.

Passengers with their baggage check in for a flight at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on Wednesday.
The Democratic surrender has non-elected liberals in full revolt, claiming Washington somehow bowed to wealthy business travellers-as if the 99% don't save for vacations and two million people aren't in the air every day. Their advice is that the White House should have let the delays mount until Congress also agreed to turn off the entire sequester for low-income housing grants, Meals on Wheels and everything else.

Let us hope for the sake of the poor that other bureaucracies are managing the modest sequester cuts more responsibly than the FAA. But the larger point is that from the beginning the FAA's delays were deliberate and avoidable. The FAA has ample legal discretion to protect core services but chose instead to maximize disruption. It is a sign of the FAA's institutional culture of failure that it can't even sabotage itself successfully.

The Senate bill clarifies that the FAA has the authority to cut waste and nonessential items before it lays off controllers-which the White House falsely claimed the sequester law prohibited it from doing. The six-page bill also specifically identifies $253 million in discretionary unspent airport grants that can be used for air control instead. That's among the $34 billion in so-called "unobligated funds" that the Department of Transportation has on hand this year despite sequestration.

Prior to its bipartisan humiliation, the FAA tried to promote the illusion that it was doing a good job until the sequester came along. While we're glad passengers will now endure fewer pointless delays, the FAA will be dysfunctional no matter how much money it gets and deserves to be punished for its recklessness with a more Reaganesque solution.

To wit, Congress ought to abolish the FAA and privatize the air navigation system the way that Canada and other developed countries have. A nonprofit corporation funded by user fees would make better cost-benefit decisions, tap capital markets, replace old-fashioned technology in a timely way and discipline high labor costs.

In addition to NavCanada, Germany, France, Australia and more than 50 others have made the transition to commercial airspaces. No less than Al Gore tried do this when he was Vice President, only to be routed by the unions. Republicans should try again as a plank of a platform to reform and modernize a government that serves itself before it serves America.

President Obama's latest sequestration gambit backfired for the same reason his previous attempts this year have flopped. The sequester cuts, while often dumb, aren't hollowing out the basic services that voters expect from their government. They are showing instead that government can safely and sensibly be cut if politicians are willing to set priorities and make choices.

SOURCE

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New study confirms economy was destroyed by Democrat policies

A new study from the widely respected National Bureau of Economic Research released this week has confirmed beyond question that the left's race-baiting attacks on the housing market (the Community Reinvestment Act--enacted under Carter, made shockingly more aggressive under Clinton) is directly responsible for imploding the housing market and destroying the economy.

The study painstakingly sorted through failed home loans that caused the housing market collapse and identified an overwhelming connection between them and CRA mortgages.

Again, let's review:

-President Bush went to Congress repeatedly for years warning them that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were going to destroy the economy (17 times in 2008 alone). Democrats continuously ignored him, shut down his proposals along party lines and continued raiding the institutions for campaign contributions on their way down.

-John McCain also co-sponsored urgently critical reforms that would have prevented the housing market collapse, but Democrats shut that down as well, along party lines, and even openly ridiculed anyone who suggested reforms were necessary...to protect their taxpayer-funded campaign contributions as the economy raced uncontrollably toward the cliff.

-No one was making bad loans to unqualified people until Democrats came along and threatened to drag banks into court and have them fined and branded as racists if they didn't go along with the left's Affirmative Action lending policies...all while federally insuring their losses. Even the New York Times warned in the late 1990s that Democrats continuing to force banks into lowering their standards would lead to this exact catastrophe.

-Obama himself is even on the record personally helping sue one lender (Citibank) into lowering its lending standards to include people from extremely poor and unstable areas, which even one of the left's favorite blatantly partisan "fact-checkers," Snopes, admits (while pretending to 'set the record straight').

-Even The New York Times admitted that there is "little evidence" of any connection between the "Republican" deregulation measures Obama blames, like the Gramm-Bleach-Liley Act (signed into law by a Democrat), and the collapse of the housing market.

But non-Fox media have spent years deliberately and relentlessly inoculating people against the facts, training them to mindlessly blame Bush for being in charge when Democrat policies destroyed the economy. So here we sit, to this day, still watching Obama excuse and shrug off endless economic failures, illegal government takeovers and utter national bankruptcy with zero accountability.

SOURCE

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Is Media Blacking Out Story of Pro-Life Catholic School Bus Fire-Bombing?

Our team here at LibertyNEWS.com is pretty much aware of everything crossing the wires throughout the day. Yesterday, from our view, the wires failed to include a particularly peculiar story about a school bus being fire-bombed in Illinois. The school bus belonged to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Academy and reports from local sources suggest the incident may have occurred as retaliation for the closing of an abortion facility in Rockford, IL.

Pro-Life Corner has more:

"A large school bus, owned by Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Academy, that is well known throughout Rockford for its beautiful pro-life pictures and words asking people to"pray to end abortion",  was fire bombed on Friday night.  The damage was extensive to the bus as windows were broken in on both sides and fire bombs were thrown inside to cause maximum damage.It has been speculated that this bombing of a pro-life Christian school bus is in retaliation for the closing of the Rockford abortion mill that is located not far from where the school bus was attacked."

Not only has the media largely ignored this story, the local media was engaged in propaganda against the pro-life agenda the very day the fire-bombing occurred:

"On the day this pro-life school bus was viciously attacked, the Rockford Register Star ran a story about an attack against a building made by a pro-lifer TWELVE YEARS AGO!
They brought up again the story of Fr. John Earl who damaged the Rockford abortion mill in 2000.  Fr. Earl paid his debt to society and has been a model citizen ever since for over a decade, but the Register Star brings up that 12 YEAR OLD STORY again, using Father Earl's reassignment to a new parish as an opportunity to rehash what should now be a thing of the past  and yet they ignored a current attack- the firebombing of a pro-life school bus."

Where is the media on this? How is it not news that a possible hate crime just took place against a Pro-Life Catholic academy?

SOURCE

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Welfare, lax immigration control and  "Celebrating Diversity" created two terrorist monsters

Not only were Tamerlan, the Boston terrorist currently burning in Hell, and Dzhokhar, the Boston terrorist soon to be burning in Hell, on welfare, but their whole family was on the government dole.

This isn't as much a case against welfare as it is a case against immigration reform. In their time in this country this family did nothing but take and added nothing but misery.

The famous plaque at the Statue of Liberty reading, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" is a not the call for every degenerate, miscreant and slacker to come suckle the government teat as liberals would have you believe. In fact, the whole poem is a beacon of hope saying anyone can come here and make of their life what they will.

It's the story of America. It's the hope and opportunity that your life will be as good as you can make it, unlike most of the rest of the world. We have no caste system, the only limits on your life are set by you and your abilities. It is declaring that we are the only nation where someone can do anything, where even the child of worthless, absentee parents who shirk their responsibility can grow up to be president.

Enter the Tsarnaevs.

They came to this country legally.and got on welfare. Why was a family that literally brought nothing to the table allowed to immigrate? I haven't seen an answer yet, but I suspect asking the question will be called "bigoted." As would asking why we should legalize millions of unskilled workers when we have too many of them already.

In the days since the Boston terrorist attack, we've learned the Tsarnaev family - except for Uncle Ruslan - is exactly the type of people a functional immigration system should be designed to keep out. It's not, and despite all the lip-service being paid by advocates, the "reform" making its way through the U.S. Senate won't do anything about it either.

That the Tsarnaev family, a group exhibiting behavior rarely seen outside of meth-infested trailer parks, came to this country and took, then left and left these children behind is a disgrace. That so many on the political left have even entertained the idea, now being pushed by Mama Tsarnaev, that America is somehow to blame for their radicalization is an even bigger one.

It started when The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder asked, "What is it about America that so alienates young men?" in the context of wondering about "the possibility that something about America is radicalizing people of all sorts." Others soon followed suit in suggesting America had a major share of the blame, including the woman from whose loins these creatures sprang.

Well, I'll take the bait.

Aside from what appears to be awful parenting, the Tsarnaev boys were immediately engulfed in a progressive ideology. Generous social services for all-comers is a staple of the left's Utopian philosophy. They lived in a progressive state, attended schools similar to those across the country where self-esteem was given, not earned, and still turned out to be monsters.well, you see where this is going.

The progressive philosophy is designed to make you "feel" good about yourself, but for merely existing, not doing anything. It's designed to "celebrate diversity," not assimilation. This line of thinking not only granted cover to the Tsarnaevs to care about their former homeland more than the one providing for them, but "alienated" them from this country more than anything else.

The United States has a history of self-segregation. Every major city has a "Little Italy," "Chinatown" and the like, but they've shrunk. They didn't shrink because outside forces overtook them, they were overtaken by outside forces because the goal was to assimilate. New immigrants moved there as a transition from their old home to their new one. They lived there while they learned the language, culture and the ability to move out. Progressives have reversed this trend.

This trend has been reversed to the point that the winner of the $338 million lottery winner in New Jersey, who immigrated to this country 26 years ago, needed a translator at his press conference to express his joy.

New immigrants are told they don't have to assimilate, that they shouldn't. Not that they have to give up their culture, but suggesting they might want to embrace the culture and language of their new homeland is now a bridge too far. Perhaps that was a factor in why immigrants who've lived here for nearly all of the impressionable part of their lives would identify more with a land that is nothing more than a distant memory than the one that welcomed them.

So if progressives seek to assign responsibility for why the terrorist now burning in Hell and the other terrorist who should soon join him in those flames felt alienated from society, they need look no further than the nearest reflective surface.

Of course blame for any terrorist attack lies firmly with the perpetrators. But since liberal progressives seek to assign blame elsewhere, have no delusions that if there is any extra to go around it is firmly on their hands.

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, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN 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 Alleged Hatred in the Heart of White America

Leftists see hate where there is none -- because hate fills their own hearts.  They judge others by themselves

It was cool and rainy Sunday morning when the bomb ripped through the building. At 10:22, a group of children was just heading into the basement to hear a sermon at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. According to a Washington Post account at the time: Dozens of survivors, their faces dripping blood from the glass that flew out of the church's stained glass windows, staggered around the building in a cloud of white dust raised by the explosion.

Four girls were killed. The head of one little girl was found far from her body. Twenty-two others were injured. Wandering through his devastated church, the Rev. John H. Cross found a megaphone and asked the enraged and stunned crowd to disperse. "The Lord is our shepherd," he sobbed, "we shall not want."

This week, Congress marked the 50th anniversary of that terror attack by posthumously awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley.

We Americans are not confused about the morality of what happened in Birmingham that September morning in 1963, nor during the Jim Crow era in America generally. We do not hesitate to condemn utterly the behavior and the beliefs of the Ku Klux Klan (the perpetrators of this bombing and others) and their white supremacist fellow travelers. We do not worry that reviling white supremacists and their grotesque deeds will somehow taint all white people.

But when it comes to other groups and other motives for the same kind of terrorism — we lose our moral focus. Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin have become honored members of the faculties at leading universities. Ayers is even the friend of the president of the United States. Regarding his own record of setting bombs that kill and dismember innocent people, Ayers told The New York Times on the ironic date of Sept. 11, 2001 that "I feel we didn't do enough ... (there's) a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance." So says a retired "distinguished professor" at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Today, American liberals are obsessed not with terrorism but with the color and ethnicity of terrorists. They can readily enough attribute violent tendencies to groups they dislike — the tea party, for example, which hasn't committed so much as a littering offense. But when it comes to Islamic terrorism, their voices falter.

Attorney General Eric Holder, asked whether three attacks on the United States (the underwear bomber, the Times Square bomber and Maj. Nidal Hassan) could be attributed to "Islamic" radicalism, refused to say so. Asked repeatedly whether religious motives played a role, Holder would say only, "there are a variety of reasons why people have taken these actions." Janet Napolitano has been quick to dismiss terror attempts as "one offs." Would Holder and Napolitano say the same about white supremacists? Each one had his own motivations and we can't surmise what those factors were?

There is a tendency among many on the left to temper their disgust and indignation at political violence (i.e. terror) if the terrorist is from the "correct" group. "Muslim ... means not being white" Peter Beinert writes in the Daily Beast.

Beinert and other liberals imagine that the U.S. is a cauldron of teeming racism with the lid barely kept down. At the first acknowledgment that Islamists (some, but by no means, all of whom are dark skinned) present a continuing threat, the lid will fly off and white American vigilantes, given permission, will start shooting black and brown people on the streets, burning their shops, and bombing mosques.

The hatred that Islamism preaches, lauds and inspires is a nuisance, liberals may concede. But the hatred in the heart of "white America" is the greater danger.

SOURCE

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Obama’s Labor Secretary nominee, Thomas Perez, is radical and unethical

by Hans Bader

A Senate committee will soon vote on Obama’s nomination of left-wing radical Thomas Perez as Labor Secretary. Perez, currently the assistant attorney general for civil rights, has been described by Cato Institute lawyer Ilya Shapiro as a man “who personifies … this administration’s flouting of the rule of law.”

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will decide on the Perez nomination. Shapiro provides this “recap of Perez’s nefarious dealings” (drawing on the work of journalist Quin Hillyer, who provides more detail at this link):

*    Interference with the Supreme Court case of Magner v. Gallagher, getting the City of St. Paul to dismiss its appeal to prevent what would’ve been a sharp rebuke to the federal government regarding its use of “disparate impact” racial theories in housing policy. [I discussed Perez's misuse of "disparate impact" law here]

*    Refusal to comply with subpoenas from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights [which I earlier discussed here];

*    Dismissal of the Justice Department’s already-won prosecution of the Black Panthers for voter intimidation during the 2008 election [which I previously discussed at this link];

*    Running a department dedicated to the proposition that voting rights and other civil rights law don’t protect white people [I discussed one such example here, and federal court rulings rejecting this false proposition];

*    Willfully misleading and lying to Congress under oath several times [for example, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton concluded that Perez made false claims about the Obama Justice Department's dismissal of the case against Black Panthers for voter intimidation];

*    Racial abuse of the New York fire department, to the detriment of public safety and qualified minority applicants;

*   Hiring for “career” (non-political appointee) slots only attorneys who have demonstrable left-wing credentials—making Alberto Gonzales’s politicized-hiring foibles look like the model of civil service administration [see examples here];

*    Trampling on religious liberties to the point the Supreme Court unanimously rejected his arguments in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC regarding the “ministerial exception” to employment laws;

*   Conducting government business from a personal email account as many as 1,200 times (!) and now refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas to release those emails. [Lawyers at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) have repeatedly uncovered such abuses, and the use of false-identity alias email addresses, by Obama administration officials, as you can see here and here].

CEI earlier discussed the Magner case and why the Obama Administration’s position in that case could undermine the stability of the financial system and cause future financial meltdowns. (CEI joined in an amicus brief opposing the Obama Administration’s position, in the Supreme Court). It also highlighted the Obama administration’s (and Perez’s) massive, ethically dubious payoff to the City of Saint Paul to drop the case.  CEI and legal commentators also chronicled the Obama Administration’s use of meritless discrimination lawsuits to pay off trial lawyers at taxpayers’ expense (culminating in a New York Times story today about massive fraud in the Pigford case).

Earlier, I discussed the Obama Administration’s extreme position in the Supreme Court’s Hosanna-Tabor case and how it would have undermined First Amendment freedoms, religious autonomy and the separation of church and state. I also chronicled the Justice Department’s politicized hiring during the Obama Administration.

SOURCE

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As health care gets more bureaucratic,  many  doctors will drop out

Jeffrey A. Singer

I am a general surgeon with more than three decades in private clinical practice. And I am fed up. Since the late 1970s, I have witnessed remarkable technological revolutions in medicine, from CT scans to robot-assisted surgery. But I have also watched as medicine slowly evolved into the domain of technicians, bookkeepers, and clerks.

Government interventions over the past four decades have yielded a cascade of perverse incentives, bureaucratic diktats, and economic pressures that together are forcing doctors to sacrifice their independent professional medical judgment, and their integrity. The consequence is clear: Many doctors from my generation are exiting the field. Others are seeing their private practices threatened with bankruptcy, or are giving up their autonomy for the life of a shift-working hospital employee. Governments and hospital administrators hold all the power, while doctors—and worse still, patients—hold none.

The Coding Revolution

At first, the decay was subtle. In the 1980s, Medicare imposed price controls upon physicians who treated anyone over 65. Any provider wishing to get compensated was required to use International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD) and Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes to describe the service when submitting a bill. The designers of these systems believed that standardized classifications would lead to more accurate adjudication of Medicare claims.

What it actually did was force doctors to wedge their patients and their services into predetermined, ill-fitting categories. This approach resembled the command-and-control models used in the Soviet bloc and the People’s Republic of China, models that were already failing spectacularly by the end of the 1980s.

Before long, these codes were attached to a fee schedule based upon the amount of time a medical professional had to devote to each patient, a concept perilously close to another Marxist relic: the labor theory of value. Named the Resource-Based Relative Value System (RBRVS), each procedure code was assigned a specific value, by a panel of experts, based supposedly upon the amount of time and labor it required. It didn’t matter if an operation was being performed by a renowned surgical expert—perhaps the inventor of the procedure—or by a doctor just out of residency doing the operation for the first time. They both got paid the same.

Hospitals’ reimbursements for their Medicare-patient treatments were based on another coding system: the Diagnosis Related Group (DRG). Each diagnostic code is assigned a specific monetary value, and the hospital is paid based on one or a combination of diagnostic codes used to describe the reason for a patient’s hospitalization. If, say, the diagnosis is pneumonia, then the hospital is given a flat amount for that diagnosis, regardless of the amount of equipment, staffing, and days used to treat a particular patient.

As a result, the hospital is incentivized to attach as many adjunct diagnostic codes as possible to try to increase the Medicare payday. It is common for hospital coders to contact the attending physicians and try to coax them into adding a few more diagnoses into the hospital record.

Medicare has used these two price-setting systems (RBRVS for doctors, DRG for hospitals) to maintain its price control system for more than 20 years. Doctors and their advocacy associations cooperated, trading their professional latitude for the lure of maintaining monopoly control of the ICD and CPT codes that determine their payday. The goal of setting their own prices has proved elusive, though—every year the industry’s biggest trade group, the American Medical Association, squabbles with various medical specialty associations and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) over fees.

As goes Medicare, so goes the private insurance industry. Insurers, starting in the late 1980s, began the practice of using the Medicare fee schedule to serve as the basis for negotiation of compensation with the doctors and hospitals on their preferred provider lists. An insurance company might offer a hospital 130 percent of Medicare’s reimbursement for a specific procedure code, for instance.

The coding system was supposed to improve the accuracy of adjudicating claims submitted by doctors and hospitals to Medicare, and later to non-Medicare insurance companies. Instead, it gave doctors and hospitals an incentive to find ways of describing procedures and services with the cluster of codes that would yield the biggest payment. Sometimes this required the assistance of consulting firms. A cottage industry of fee-maximizing advisors and seminars bloomed....

As the third party payment system led health care costs to escalate, the people footing the bill have attempted to rein in costs with yet more command-and-control solutions. In the 1990s, private insurance carriers did this through a form of health plan called a health maintenance organization, or HMO. Strict oversight, rationing, and practice protocols were imposed on both physicians and patients. Both groups protested loudly. Eventually, most of these top-down regulations were set aside, and many HMOs were watered down into little more than expensive prepaid health plans.

Then, as the 1990s gave way to the 21st century, demographic reality caught up with Medicare and Medicaid, the two principal drivers of federal health care spending.

Twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, protocols and regimentation were imposed on America’s physicians through a centralized bureaucracy. Using so-called “evidence-based medicine,” algorithms and protocols were based on statistically generalized, rather than individualized, outcomes in large population groups.

While all physicians appreciate the development of general approaches to the work-up and treatment of various illnesses and disorders, we also realize that everyone is an individual—that every protocol or algorithm is based on the average, typical case. We want to be able to use our knowledge, years of experience, and sometimes even our intuition to deal with each patient as a unique person while bearing in mind what the data and research reveal.

On more than one occasion I have seen patients develop dramatic postoperative bruising and bleeding because of protocol-mandated therapies aimed at preventing the development of blood clots in the legs after surgery. Had these therapies been left up to the clinical judgment of the surgeon, many of these patients might not have had the complication.

Operating room and endoscopy suites now must follow protocols developed by the global World Health Organization—an even more remote agency. There are protocols for cardiac catheterization, stenting, and respirator management, just to name a few.

Patients should worry about doctors trying to make symptoms fit into a standardized clinical model and ignoring the vital nuances of their complaints. Even more, they should be alarmed that the protocols being used don’t provide any measurable health benefits. Most were designed and implemented before any objective evidence existed as to their effectiveness.

One of my colleagues, a noted pulmonologist with over 30 years’ experience, fears that teaching young physicians to follow guidelines and practice protocols discourages creative medical thinking and may lead to a decrease in diagnostic and therapeutic excellence. He laments that “‘evidence-based’ means you are not interested in listening to anyone.”

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, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN 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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George W. Bush is smarter than you

 by Keith Hennessey

The new George W. Bush Presidential Center is being dedicated this week. This seems like a good time to bust a longstanding myth about our former President, my former boss.

I teach a class at Stanford Business School titled "Financial Crises in the U.S. and Europe." During one class session while explaining the events of September 2008, I kept referring to the efforts of the threesome of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, who were joined at the hip in dealing with firm-specific problems as they arose.

One of my students asked "How involved was President Bush with what was going on?" I smiled and responded, "What you really mean is, `Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,' right?"

The class went dead silent. Everyone knew that this was the true meaning of the question. Kudos to that student for asking the hard question and for framing it so politely. I had stripped away that decorum and exposed the raw nerve.

I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said "President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you."

More silence.  I could tell they were waiting for me to break the tension, laugh, and admit I was joking.

I did not. A few shifted in their seats, then I launched into a longer answer. While it was a while ago, here is an amalgam of that answer and others I have given in similar contexts.

*    "I am not kidding. You are quite an intelligent group. Don't take it personally, but President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you. Were he a student here today, he would consistently get "HP" (High Pass) grades without having to work hard, and he'd get an "H" (High, the top grade) in any class where he wanted to put in the effort.

*    For more than six years it was my job to help educate President Bush about complex economic policy issues and to get decisions from him on impossibly hard policy choices. In meetings and in the briefing materials we gave him in advance we covered issues in far more depth than I have been discussing with you this quarter because we needed to do so for him to make decisions.

*    President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He's highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting.

*    I use words like briefing and presentation to describe our policy meetings with him, but those are inaccurate. Every meeting was a dialogue, and you had to be ready at all times to be grilled by him and to defend both your analysis and your recommendation. That was scary.

*    We treat Presidential speeches as if they are written by speechwriters, then handed to the President for delivery. If I could show you one experience from my time working for President Bush, it would be an editing session in the Oval with him and his speechwriters. You think that me cold-calling you is nerve-wracking? Try defending a sentence you inserted into a draft speech, with President Bush pouncing on the slightest weakness in your argument or your word choice.

*    In addition to his analytical speed, what most impressed me were his memory and his substantive breadth. We would sometimes have to brief him on an issue that we had last discussed with him weeks or even months before. He would remember small facts and arguments from the prior briefing and get impatient with us when we were rehashing things we had told him long ago.

*    And while my job involved juggling a lot of balls, I only had to worry about economic issues. In addition to all of those, at any given point in time he was making enormous decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan, on hunting al Qaeda and keeping America safe. He was making choices not just on taxes and spending and trade and energy and climate and health care and agriculture and Social Security and Medicare, but also on education and immigration, on crime and justice issues, on environmental policy and social policy and politics. Being able to handle such substantive breadth and depth, on such huge decisions, in parallel, requires not just enormous strength of character but tremendous intellectual power. President Bush has both."

On one particularly thorny policy issue on which his advisors had strong and deep disagreements, over the course of two weeks we (his senior advisors) held a series of three 90-minute meetings with the President. Shortly after the third meeting we asked for his OK to do a fourth. He said, "How about rather than doing another meeting on this, I instead tell you now what each person will say." He then ran through half a dozen of his advisors by name and precisely detailed each one's arguments and pointed out their flaws. (Needless to say there was no fourth meeting.)

Every prominent politician has a public caricature, one drawn initially by late-night comedy joke writers and shaped heavily by the press and one's political opponents. The caricature of President Bush is that of a good ol' boy from Texas who is principled and tough, but just not that bright.

That caricature was reinforced by several factors:

*    The press and his opponents highlighted President Bush's occasional stumbles when giving a speech. President Obama's similar verbal miscues are ignored. Ask yourself: if every public statement you made were recorded and all your verbal fumbles were tweeted, how smart would you sound? Do you ever use the wrong word or phrase, or just botch a sentence for no good reason? I know I do.

*    President Bush intentionally aimed his public image at average Americans rather than at Cambridge or Upper East Side elites. Mitt Romney's campaign was predicated on "I am smart enough to fix a broken economy," while George W. Bush's campaigns stressed his values, character, and principles rather than boasting about his intellect. He never talked about graduating from Yale and Harvard Business School, and he liked to lower expectations by pretending he was just an average guy. Example: "My National Security Advisor Condi Rice is a Stanford professor, while I'm a C student. And look who's President. "

*    There is a bias in much of the mainstream press and commentariat that people from outside of NY-BOS-WAS-CHI-SEA-SF-LA are less intelligent, or at least well educated. Many public commenters harbor an anti-Texas (and anti-Southern, and anti-Midwestern) intellectual bias. They mistakenly treat John Kerry as smarter than George Bush because John Kerry talks like an Ivy League professor while George Bush talks like a Texan.

*   President Bush enjoys interacting with the men and women of our armed forces and with elite athletes. He loves to clear brush on his ranch. He loved interacting with the U.S. Olympic Team. He doesn't windsurf off Nantucket, he rides a 100K mountain bike ride outside of Waco with wounded warriors. He is an intense, competitive athlete and a "guy's guy." His hobbies and habits reinforce a caricature of a [dumb] jock, in contrast to cultural sophisticates who enjoy antiquing and opera. This reinforces the other biases against him.

I assume that some who read this will react automatically with disbelief and sarcasm. They think they know that President Bush is unintelligent because, after all, everyone knows that. They will assume that I am wrong, or blinded by loyalty, or lying. They are certain that they are smarter than George Bush.

I ask you simply to consider the possibility that I'm right, that he is smarter than you.

If you can, find someone who has interacted directly with him outside the public spotlight. Ask that person about President Bush's intellect. I am confident you will hear what I heard dozens of times from CEOs after they met with him: "Gosh, I had no idea he was that smart."

At a minimum I hope you will test your own assumptions and thinking about our former President. I offer a few questions to help that process.

*    Upon what do you base your view of President Bush's intellect? How much is it shaped by the conventional wisdom about him? How much by verbal miscues highlighted by the press?

*   Do you discount your estimate of his intellect because he's from Texas or because of his accent? Because he's an athlete and a ranch owner? Because he never advertises that he went to Yale and Harvard?

*    This is a hard one, for liberals only. Do you assume that he is unintelligent because he made policy choices with which you disagree? If so, your logic may be backwards. "I disagree with choice X that President Bush made. No intelligent person could conclude X, therefore President Bush is unintelligent." Might it be possible that an intelligent, thoughtful conservative with different values and priorities than your own might have reached a different conclusion than you?  Do you really think your policy views derive only from your intellect?

And finally, if you base your view of President Bush's intellect on a public image and caricature shaped by late night comedians, op-ed writers, TV pundits, and Twitter, is that a smart thing for you to do?

SOURCE

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Report from the old sod

The vast majority of the West lives in comfort unimaginable to people of the recent past. Our poor don’t suffer from starvation, they suffer from obesity. Supposedly impoverished youths rioting in London don’t steal bread, they steal iPods.

Decadence is nothing new to the West, but one country’s recent economic downturn serves as a fascinating look at the phenomenon in a modern context: Ireland. It is the land of my birth and where I have lived most of my life and it serves as a microcosm of greater Western malaise.

The Celtic Tiger boom that occurred in Ireland - beginning roughly in the late nineties and lasting until 2007 - was a period of economic growth unmatched by any other in the country’s history. Ireland was always an outlier in Western Europe, both geographically and figuratively. It was conservative, religious and poor. The boom changed all that and by 2005 The Economist ranked Ireland number one in the world for quality of life.

During all this, something strange happened. Throughout history the Irish had been a people who gazed out upon the world, emigrating in droves. But with the advent of prosperity they ceased to do so. They developed a myopia which seemingly prevented them taking notice of anything beyond Irish shores.

A massive growth in property prices accompanied the boom. Prices for even modest houses skyrocketed. Non-descript suburban homes sold for over half a million euro and a seven-bedroom red-brick in South Dublin sold for €58 million. Nobody asked why a three-bedroom semi-detached house in nowheresville cost more than similar properties in central Frankfurt or Helsinki. Nobody took the slightest notice of the property market collapse in Singapore. Ireland became so wealthy its people could afford to be completely oblivious to economic reality. The rest of the world became a place Irish people went on holiday, not a place to learn lessons from.

This infuriating ignorance hasn’t gone away. It simply manifests itself in different ways.

If one was to measure the success of a nation one would probably start by looking at markers like GDP per capita and the country’s United Nations Human Development Index rank, and so on. By these measurements Ireland comes near the top of the global pecking order. The country has the 11th highest average income in the world (World Bank, 2011) and is 7th in the world on the Human Development Index. Basic social welfare payments are among the among the most generous anywhere. The country is, by all accounts, an extremely wealthy corner of the planet.

You wouldn’t think this by talking to Irish people, though. The phrase ‘the country is on its knees’ is used with such frequency that you could be forgiven for thinking an angel gets its wings every time it’s uttered. Ireland’s sinking from the richest country in the world to a poverty-stricken 11th is apparently an affront to the dignity of the Irish. Some argue the tired line that during the good times the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, skewing the GDP statistic, but that is nonsense. Income inequality was reduced substantially in Ireland during the boom, actually bucking a global trend.

Quoting the abovementioned favourable rankings to the general populace will usually be met with inane cynicism. The essence of Irish political discourse is to negatively criticise politicians until losing sight of reality. Statesmen like WT Cosgrave who oversaw a peaceful handover of power while the nation was in its infancy trail behind the Left’s misguided figureheads in popularity contests.

There is no acknowledgement by the Left of the role neo-liberal free market principles had to play in making the country rich in the first place. In the Leftist’s political worldview, western prosperity and privilege is as natural as gravity or sunrise. In their alternative universe, an Ireland in 2005 under an anarcho-syndicalist government would have been as rich as it was under the centre-right coalition of Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats. The only difference is that under this hypothetical Leftist government Ireland would still be a utopia today.

Relatively speaking Ireland is going through a rough patch but the country is still fantastically wealthy. Newspapers report on families barely surviving on six-figure incomes. A university professor has been quoted as saying life was ‘a struggle’ on his salary of close to a quarter million euro per annum. The Irish Times published the story of a family unable to regularly put food on the table, despite the household’s annual income being a very healthy €65,000 a year.

It’s all about priorities. But nobody’s willing to give up recent gains, even if they lived just fine without them before.

When a person gets used to a certain quality of life they naturally become agitated when their level of comfort declines even slightly. It is human nature. The corporate boss on six figures a year would consider his lifestyle severely dented by a ten thousand a year salary cut. Paris Hilton would probably commit suicide were she to wake up one morning an average working woman making thirty thousand a year, her frivolous heiress existence nothing but a memory. Similarly, a ten euro per week cut to one of the highest unemployment benefits in the world is seen by the Left as a devastation of ‘ordinary people’ in the way something truly appalling like war was only a few decades before.

People’s expectations have risen high due to globalisation, capitalism and free markets. Almost every part of the world has improved on a decade-by-decade basis over the last fifty years, especially liberal democracies. Elsewhere, too. Any time you see a rural Indonesian or Bolivian on a cell phone it means they have enough money to eat and communicate with ease. Nobody who’s hungry spends their money on phonecalls.

The Left has seized on the idea that the failure of a few banks is a victory for their politics, but it is in fact a refutation: a genuinely free market government would never have ‘bailed out’ any banks. They would have been allowed to die. It was over-regulation and protectionism that ‘brought Ireland to its knees’ (ie 11th on the global rich list).

The Irish Left deride the general public as lazy because they complain incessantly but never take to the streets in numbers large enough to realise the Left’s juvenile revolutionary fantasies. This is yet more evidence that Ireland is a fine place to be. Despite our complaining there is simply no appetite for - or need for - major change, let alone revolution. It’s not that the people are lazy or that they are especially apathetic. They’re just too comfortable, still, five years into a recession.

Despite the subconscious national contentment that exists in Ireland, the moaning and solipsism continues. Just as it was during the Celtic Tiger, Irish people in recession time cannot see a bigger picture. That Ireland is still richer than almost everywhere else in the world is simply par for the course; the natural order of things. No, the country must be richer, its public servants paid more, unemployment non-existent. In the minds of the majority, our status as a highly developed nation with ever more welfare benefits and dirt-cheap world-class university education exists in perpetuity, despite the realities of a modern world where an industrialised Asia contains billions of people who work more hours for less money.

The only comparison people make is of how we stack up to the Ireland of 2005. Nobody can see past that. It’s simply too distant.

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, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN 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 motivations of the Boston bombers were both  Leftist and Islamic

Ever wondered why the 9/11 bombers and many other Muslim terrorists were Western-educated?  It's because the combination of the anti-Americanism they get from Western educators (including Leftist American educators) and the violence preached by Islam  make an explosive mix.  Read the Koran (start with Surah 9) if you think Islam is a religion of peace. The Koran is full of hatred towards non-Muslims and exhortations to kill or oppress them. So it was the same old same old with the Boston bombers.  Kent Clizbe sets out the evidence below

 The Boston Marathon massacre was carried out by two Caucasian Muslim brothers, one an American citizen, pot-smoking Obama voter, the other likely a green card holder. In the aftermath, the Politically Correct Progressive (PC-Prog) media and commentators are all flabbergasted. They wondered what could be the terrorists’ motivations. Over and over, the media reported, “Dzhokhor was a normal American kid.”  President Obama, our PC-Prog leader, said, "One thing we do know is that whatever hateful agenda drove these men to such heinous acts will not — cannot — prevail."

The media probably do not even realize how close they are to the truth—Dzhokhor is a normal American kid. Raised on anti-American messages from the media, from their high school, at their university, and from Hollywood, normal American kids are bombarded with a national self-loathing designed to destroy America’s exceptional culture and values.

Although my books, Willing Accomplices and Obliterating Exceptionalism detail the origins of this suicidal hatred of America, the Boston bombers are the clearest example yet of the power of this message to destroy the lives of Americans.

It seems likely that the older brother, Tamerlan, was the driving force behind the two Tsarnaev brothers’ terrorism. It appears that he was a follower of a Lebanese-Australian extremist cleric. This Muslim preacher’s messages of hatred for Western culture were prominent on Tamerlan’s Youtube playlists.

It appears that Tamerlan recently spent six months overseas. In Russia? Or did he travel elsewhere? Did he go to Chechnya? Did he spend time in what appears to be his homeland, Dagestan, where his father lives now? Who did he meet there? What did he do there?

Dagestan and Chechnya are hotbeds of Islamic terrorism. Chechen terrorists are active around the Middle East, Afghanistan, and North Africa. Wherever there is a jihadi war, it is likely you’ll find Chechens fighting there.

We do know that Tamerlan returned “from Russia,” in the summer of 2012. His brother would have been out of high school (more about that later) for about a year. His return was about nine months before the Marathon bombing.

If Tamerlan trained on bombing and attack techniques (a couple months of intensive training is the minimum for a mujahidin terrorist), he could have returned to Boston with the attack plan fully laid out. He would have the skills required to make the bombs. He would have likely already have identified the target. And he would have the techniques required to carry out the attacks. All that would be missing was the materials to make the bombs, and an accomplice.

So, in this scenario, we have a committed, trained Islamic terrorist ready to carry out his attack. What pool will he draw from to recruit his accomplice?

Why, his “average American” brother, Dzhokhor. With his American-accented English, the younger brother graduated from the celebrated (Matt Damon went here!) Boston high school, Cambridge Rindges and Latin School (CRLS), about the same time Tamerlan was probably contemplating terrorist training.

Now we get to the interesting part. A graduate of CRLS has had years of anti-American claptrap crammed down his throat. Instead of, “Why would a normal American kid do this?” a better question is, “Why don’t all CRLS graduates become anti-American terrorists?”

PC-Prog media widely quoted a retired CRLS history teacher, Larry Aaronson’s shocked reminiscences about Dzhokhor. Aaronson told The Boston Globe, “This is a progressive town, the People's Republic, and how could this be in our midst?" Larry Aaronson, a longtime Rindge and Latin teacher who knew Dzhokhor and who lives three doors down from the brothers on Norfolk Street. "I'm at a loss. I'm at a total and complete loss."

Well, Larry, let’s start with your own handiwork. Aaronson is an acolyte of the raving PC-Prog, traditional-America-hating deceased “revisionist historian,” Howard Zinn. Zinn was a PC-Prog darling. Zinn claimed that his eyes were opened to racist, imperialist horror that is America by the KGB covert influence agent, I.F. Stone.

Aaronson (third from left in the photo at left), who retired in 2007, used to brag to anyone who would listenthat he had taught Zinn’s textbook to CLRS students since the beginning of his career in 1981. In 2008, Aaronson started Social Justice Works! The Larry Aaronson Fund, in an evident attempt to cash in on his Zinn-Damon connections.

Aaronson proudly related how his students at CLRS had included Matt Damon and Damon’s brother. He proudly told how the Damon boys were taken with the anti-American history of Zinn. Larry, in an homage to Zinn on his death in 2008, started with this quote, “You wanna read a really good American History book? Read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. It will knock your socks off!” -Will Hunting (Matt Damon), Good Will Hunting

If you don’t know Zinn’s handiwork, here’s a sample of his writing in The Progressive. In detailing the idiocy of America’s belief that we are exceptional, Zinn’s contempt for America and its citizens fairly drips from each word, “The deeply ingrained belief--no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to "pledge allegiance" (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with "liberty and justice for all.

“And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the "Star-Spangled Banner," announcing that we are "the land of the free and the home of the brave." There is also the unofficial national anthem "God Bless America," and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation--just 5 percent of the world's population--for his or her blessing.”

Aaronson boasted that parents called him to say that their kids were talking about, “that “bastard Christopher Columbus… and his genocide, and how we have to question our history books and re-examine the evidence.” The CRLS teacher continued, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

With that back-story illuminated, let’s return to the PC-Prog media’s puzzling over “What could the Tsarnaev boys’ motive possibly be?”

After the Marathon massacre, the media quoted the Zinn-acolyte Aaronson in its stories about the terrorist mass murderer. Aaronson was “utterly shocked by the news.” The media reported that, “Aaronson taught social studies at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, where Dzhokhor was a student.” The media reports continued, “Dzhokhor also lives just about three houses down from Aaronson’s condo, so they would talk from time to time after Dzhokhor's graduation in 2011.

“I will say to you and to anyone who asks me,” Aaronson told WBUR’s David Boeri outside his home in Cambridge on Friday morning, “he had a heart of gold, he was a sweetheart, he was gracious, he was caring, he was compassionate.”  [That shows how good is the judgment of Mr. Leftist Aaronson]

 ABC, CBS, USA Today, NY Times, CNN all carried versions of Aaronson’s comments about “how normal” Dzhokhor, his neighbor and student was. None of the PC-Prog media provided any other background on Aaronson and his brainwashing of students at CRLS with Zinn’s history.

The Aaronson-Dzhokhor “reporting” by the PC-Prog media brings together the three PC-Prog transmission belts of American culture—education/academia, Hollywood, and the media. All three are dedicated to destroying traditional-American culture. The media reports studiously ignore the connection between Dzhokhor's anti-American lessons taught by a “social justice” weenie (Aaronson) from a book by a follower (Zinn) of a KGB covert influence agent (I.F. Stone) slyly celebrated in a Hollywood product (Matt Damon’s Good Will Hunting).

Islamic terrorism was the force that planted the bombs in Boston. PC-Progressive hatred of American exceptionalism was the motivation behind that force.

We need to let the media and Obama know: We know what hateful agenda drove Dzhokhor. It has infected our media, schools, and Hollywood for nearly 80 years. When it destroyed normal-American culture, the way was cleared for opportunistic infections to take advantage of our weakened national immune system. Islamic extremism is the most violent. But look at others gathering momentum in their destructive power—Militant environmentalists, militant homosexuals, militant anti-capitalists, militant Islamic Extremists, militant anti-war activists, militant race-baiters. All hate normal-America. All call for extreme changes to America.

This is the challenge. We conservatives must realize that PC-Progs are not “for” militant Islamic Extremists—they are simply for anything that is anti-normal-America. When the logical outcome of the PC-Prog’s constant anti-American messages throughout the culture occurs—violent acting out against normal-America, in this case marathon runners—the PC-Progs claim shock and surprise.

It’s time for the chickens to come home to roost. PC-Progs must accept the results of their decades of anti-American messages. We know Dzhokhor's motivations. I agree fully with Obama. This “hateful agenda…will not — cannot — prevail.” Now let’s rebuild our country.

SOURCE

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America doesn’t need a government-run postal service

by John Stossel

Even parts of government that look like a business never get run with the efficiency of a business. Just look at the post office.

They buy commercials and tout their services the way private businesses do. They offer a service that customers want.

But a real business can't get away with losing billions every year. (I guess in the era of bailouts, I should say shouldn't get away with it.) The post office lost $16 billion last year, despite having all sorts of advantages that most private businesses don't have.

They have a near monopoly on first-class mail delivery. You want to deliver something to someone? You better not put it in their mailbox -- that's illegal. The U.S. Postal Service doesn't pay sales tax or property tax. They don't even pay parking tickets.

With advantages like that, how do they lose money?

They are part of the government, under the thumb of Congress, and that invites calcified, inefficient behavior.

"We are expected to operate like a business, but Congress has not allowed us the flexibility to operate like a business," said Postal Service Board of Governors Chairman Mickey D. Barnett on my TV show. It's all "part of being a quasi-governmental entity. That's how the cookie crumbles." Barnett added that the post office has "union contracts that have no layoff provisions."

Reality is at odds with the proud claim on the post office's website that "Since Ben Franklin ... the Postal Service has grown and changed with America." But it's barely changed. You don't tend to see change in "quasi-governmental entities." You see stagnation.

This year the post office tried to limit Saturday delivery to save money. But Congress forbade the change. The politicians' constituents like getting their mail six days a week.

"They don't want a cut in Saturday delivery," Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., told me.

"The USPS does need reform," Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo., told the Kansas City Star. "However, reducing core services is not a long-term plan. I worry that reducing services will lead to other reductions like closing rural post offices."

But the post office should do both. The government maintains hundreds of tiny local post offices, each of which brings in less than $700 a month. Running those offices costs much more than that. Some are just one mile away from other post offices.

People like "universal service," which has been taken to mean that every American must get mail service, no matter how deep in the boondocks they live. The post office even hauls mail by mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

"The post office provides something that's extremely valuable and has to be maintained, and that's universal service," Grayson told me. "There are countries a lot poorer than the United States, including the Congo ... that try to provide universal mail service to everybody. ... People don't want post offices closed!"

On the floor of Congress, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., proclaimed that universal service is required, saying, "It's in the Constitution."

But it's not. The Constitution says, "Congress shall have the Power to ... establish Post Offices." But it doesn't have to use that power.

Cato Institute budget analyst Tad DeHaven argues, "People living in rural America aren't living there by force. ... Go back to history. Private carriers picked up the mail from the post office and took it the last mile, or people came to the post office and picked it up."

And private alternatives are much better today. We have e-mail. UPS delivers 300 packages a minute and makes a profit. Federal Express, UPS and others thrive by finding new ways to cut costs. They don't do it because they were born nicer people. They do it because of the pressure of competition. They make money -- while the post office loses $16 billion.

Why not just privatize it? No more special government protections, no limit on competitors offering similar services.

Then mail service would be even better than before. The market delivers.

SOURCE

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Discrimination against consumer-directed health care

Health Savings Accounts are the fastest growing product in the health insurance marketplace. Currently, about 25 million families are managing some of their own healthcare dollars as a result. Virtually every serious study has found that these plans lower costs without jeopardizing the quality of care people receive. In fact, most employers have decided that giving financial incentives to employees is the most reliable way to rein in spending.

Given that one of the main goals of health reform was to lower the rate of growth of healthcare spending, it would be truly ironic if the new law makes the most reliable way of achieving the goal unavailable to millions of people. But it appears that is about to happen.

Here’s the reason. HSA plans achieve their lower premiums by having patients take more control over healthcare dollars. People pay less to the third-party payer because they agree to take responsibility for more of the expenses. Yet under the new rules for the medical loss ratio (MLR), the out-of-pocket spending from an HSA is not counted in the MLR calculation—at least for individually owned insurance.[1] Specifically, if an insurer pays for a healthcare service for their insured, that counts as a medical expense in calculating the medical loss ratio. But if an individual pays for a healthcare service to meet her deductible, that expense does not count as a medical expense for purposes of MLR calculation.

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, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN 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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Genes and Racism

 Thomas Sowell

During decades of watching both collegiate and professional football, I have seen hundreds of touchdowns scored by black players -- but not one extra point kicked by a black player.
Is this because blacks are genetically incapable of kicking a football or because racists won't let blacks kick a football?

Most of us would consider either of these explanations ridiculous. Yet genes and discrimination were the predominant explanations of black-white differences offered by intellectuals in the 20th century.

It was genes that were the preferred explanation in the early decades of that century and discrimination in the later decades, as I show in my recent book, "Intellectuals and Race."

The intelligentsia did not simply offer these as possible explanations among others. On the contrary, each was offered as the predominant, if not exclusive, explanation. Anyone who said otherwise risked being dismissed as a "sentimentalist" in the early 20th century or denounced as a "racist" in later years.

Out of such dogmatic insistence on some one-size-fits-all theory came racial quotas and "disparate impact" lawsuits in our times, based on the presumption that racial differences in outcomes show that somebody did somebody else wrong.

In earlier times, the prevailing theory was that differences in outcomes show that some races are inferior to others. This led to such things as eugenics and ultimately to the Holocaust.

In both eras, the prevailing theory flattered the egos of the intellectuals -- first as saviors of their race, and later as rescuers of victims of racism.

Among the alternative explanations of group differences that were ignored were geography, demography and culture.

For example, people with the geographic handicap of living in isolated mountain valleys have seldom, if ever, produced world-class achievements that advanced science, technology or philosophy. On the contrary, people in such places have almost invariably lagged behind the progress in the rest of the world -- including people of the very same race living on the plains below. Mountaineers were long noted for their poverty and backwardness in countries around the world, especially in the millennia before modern transportation and communication eased their isolation.

People geographically isolated on islands far from the nearest mainland or people isolated by deserts or other geographic features have likewise seldom kept up with the progress of others. Again, this was especially so before modern transportation and communication put them more in touch with the rest of the world.

Conversely, urbanized peoples have often been in the vanguard of progress, producing far more of the historic advances of the human race than a similar number of people scattered out in the hinterlands -- even when both were of the same race.

Geography has been a factor in this as well, since not all geographic areas are equally suitable for building big cities. The overwhelming majority of cities have been built on navigable waterways, for example -- and not all regions have navigable waterways available.

Isolation can be man-made, as well as created by nature. Centuries ago, when China was the most advanced nation in the world, its leaders decided to isolate the country from other peoples, all of whom they regarded as barbarians. After a few centuries of isolation, China was shocked to find itself overtaken by others, and to some extent at the mercy of those others.

Demography is yet another reason why some groups have very different outcomes than others. Age differences between groups within a nation, or between whole nations, have often been a decade or even two decades. Peoples with decades of difference in experience are almost guaranteed to have different achievements, whether they belong to the same race or to different races.

There are many differences between races that have nothing to do with either genes or discrimination, but have much to do with their educational, economic or other outcomes. However, it is a much harder job to examine these many factors, and their complex interactions, than to seize upon whatever happens to be the prevailing theory of the day that may be both easier to grasp and more self-flattering.

SOURCE

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SNAP up some recreational food

The federal food stamp program—now called SNAP—is attracting a lot of media coverage. One reason for this is that the program’s costs have exploded—spending more than quadrupled during the Bush-Obama years to $82 billion in 2013 (see here and here p. 16). The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations all took steps to loosen the purse strings on food stamp eligibility, and those changes have led to the ballooning costs of recent years during the stagnant economy.

Aside from the rising costs, two other aspects of SNAP have garnered interest. One is food stamp fraud. The other is the program’s “Twinkie problem”: taxpayers are paying for billions of dollars of junk food, which seems like a huge waste of money to most people.

These two issues have come together in a high-profile effort by a group of media organizations that is demanding greater transparency in SNAP operations. The organizations—led by the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ)—have sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack (whose agency oversees SNAP) asking for full disclosure about where food stamps are being spent and what they are being spent on. The Daily Caller reports on the issue here.

Let’s look at the fraud issue. The government claims that the food stamp trafficking rate is just 1 percent and the general overpayment rate is just 4 percent. I suspect that the real rates are much higher, for three reasons: First, the overall costs of SNAP and the number of beneficiaries have skyrocketed. Second, SNAP is ideally suited for abuse: the USDA has few investigators to police the roughly 200,000 SNAP retailers, any of whom could be scamming the system. Third, overpayment rates on other federal subsidy programs are often around 10 percent. Medicare and Medicaid overpayments are in that range, for example, and overpayments have long been around 20 percent in the EITC program.

The AHCJ-led effort is asking the USDA to release data on food stamp purchases by retail outlet. This would be a very useful resource for investigators across the nation to help the government reduce waste and fraud. Are food stamps being cashed in at liquor stores? Which corner stores have unusually high food stamp usage? Let’s get detailed SNAP data on the Internet and allow journalists and the public to help answer these questions. After all, scandal after scandal illustrate that the federal government is lousy at policing programs itself.

The journalists are also asking the USDA to provide detailed breakdowns of the types of food being purchased with SNAP money. It’s remarkable that in an era of Bloomberg-style efforts to restrict private food choices, the government itself runs a giant $82 billion program that subsidizes junk food. How much junk food? We don’t know, and that’s what many journalists want to find out.

Food stamps can be used to purchase just about any edible item other than alcohol, hot food, restaurant meals, and live animals. The USDA explains the rules here and specifically notes that “soft drinks, candy, cookies, snack crackers, and ice cream” are allowed.

Many health experts would like to ban junk food purchases in the food stamp program because they want Americans to eat more nutritious food. I’m a libertarian, so I don’t want the government telling people what to eat. But I think banning junk food in SNAP would be a good step for a different reason: it would greatly reduce demand for the program and thus cut taxpayer costs. If we told the 48 million users of food stamps that they could only use their electronic subsidy cards to buy items like spinach and broccoli, a lot fewer people would use the program and they would buy less stuff.

Why has the USDA been stonewalling journalists on providing SNAP program data? I’m guessing that federal officials don’t want to be embarrassed about: 1) how much taxpayer money goes toward junk food, and 2) the endless series of stories about SNAP fraud that would likely be generated if journalists could explore the program’s operational details.

Optimally, SNAP should be terminated altogether and food subsidy activities left to the states—or better, to private charities. But until that reform happens, the current effort to pry open the workings of this giant hand-out program would be big step in the right direction.  

SOURCE

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EEOC: A Scofflaw That Poisons The Climate For Hiring

One way the current political climate discourages hiring is by turning problem employees into potential lawsuits for the employers who take the risk of hiring them. The legal climate has gotten much worse over the past several years due to the appointment of more left-wing, anti-employer judges by President Obama, and an increasingly out-of-control Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which sues employers for terminating bad employees who fall into “protected classes,” and for sensible hiring decisions that most judges would consider perfectly legal, since the plain language of federal civil-rights laws permits them. The EEOC even sues employers for using hiring criteria required by state law, such as health and safety codes.

The EEOC’s abusive, out-of-control behavior is a point of agreement among lawyers who agree on little else, liberal and conservative alike. The liberal lawyer “Loki,” writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, observes:

Without going into too much detail, I recently had the bizarre experience of the EEOC first arguing that the plain language of the statute didn’t matter. Then we dug up their own policy, which contradicted their stated litigation position. They argued that their own policy didn’t matter. The issue hadn’t been litigated much, but we found case law directly on point contradicting them (and for which they had been sanctioned). They argued that the case law didn’t matter. Then we found prior DOJ opinions on the issue- guess what? The EEOC said the DOJ opinions didn’t matter.

The judge? He thought it mattered.

I wish this was a one-off experience, but it’s not. Every single time I have dealt with the EEOC, it’s something similar. It’s gotten to the point where I fully expect them to be pissing on my leg so they can tell me it’s raining. And note that I’m not reflexively anti-government; I’ve dealt with the DOJ and SEC (among others) and have nary a bad word to say with the attorneys I’ve dealt with. . .I honestly don’t know what it is in the water at the EEOC. . . I had to do a lot of research on EEOC cases, and I found so many cases where the trial courts just got fed up with the EEOC it wasn’t funny.

Similarly, as the libertarian/conservative lawyer David M. Nieporent observes, the EEOC routinely disregards straightforward legal mandates imposed on it by law, such as the explicit statutory duty to engage in conciliation efforts before suing: “They have a statutory mandate to try to mediate employment disputes before filing suit, and they keep getting spanked by courts for failing to undertake this simple procedural step.”

The EEOC has pressured employers to hire felons as armed guards. It is going after G4S Secure Solutions for refusing to hire felons. That company provides guards for nuclear power plants, chemical plants, government buildings and other sensitive sites, and it is prohibited by state law from hiring people with felony convictions as security officers. As Jim Bovard notes in The Wall Street Journal, the EEOC brought proceedings “in 2010 against G4S Secure Solutions after the company refused to hire a twice-convicted Pennsylvania thief as a security guard.”  As he points out,

The EEOC’s new regime leaves businesses in a Catch-22. As Todd McCracken of the National Small Business Association recently warned: “State and federal courts will allow potentially devastating tort lawsuits against businesses that hire felons who commit crimes at the workplace or in customers’ homes. Yet the EEOC is threatening to launch lawsuits if they do not hire those same felons.” At the same time that the EEOC is practically rewriting the law to add “criminal offender” to the list of protected groups under civil-rights statutes, the agency refuses to disclose whether it uses criminal background checks for its own hiring. When EEOC Assistant Legal Counsel Carol Miaskoff was challenged on this point in a recent federal case in Maryland, the agency insisted that revealing its hiring policies would violate the “governmental deliberative process privilege.” The EEOC is confident that its guidance will boost minority hiring, but studies published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum and the Journal of Law and Economics have found that businesses are much less likely to hire minority applicants when background checks are banned. As the majority of black and Hispanic job applicants have clean legal records, the new EEOC mandate may harm the very groups it purports to help.

Ironically, the EEOC has a much worse record of labor and civil-rights violations than most corporations and agencies with a similar-size workforce.“The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, responsible for ensuring that the nation’s workers are treated fairly, has itself willfully violated the Fair Labor Standards Act on a nationwide basis with its own employees, an arbitrator has ruled.” The EEOC was found guilty of systematic, illegal, reverse discrimination (discrimination against white males) in Jurgens v. Thomas, 29 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 1561, 1982 WL 409 (N.D.Tex.1982), and continued to illegally engage in it later, long after it had been ordered to stop, as federal judges found. See, e.g., Terry v. Gallegos, 926 F.Supp. 679 (W.D. Tenn. 1996). The EEOC also has had a lot of sexual harassment lawsuits against it (and I am talking about real sexual harassment, not weak claims based on a couple of off-color jokes or overheard offensive speech, the sort of trivial thing the EEOC itself might unsuccessfully sue a private employer over). See, e.g., Spain v. Gallegos, 26 F.3d 439 (3rd Cir.1994). In short, as John Berlau once noted, the EEOC is like “the fox guarding the henhouse.”

The EEOC recently sued Pepsi for doing criminal background checks on job applicants, forcing it to pay $3.1 million to settle the lawsuit. The EEOC is also threatening employers who require high-school diplomas with lawsuits under the ADA.

Employers’ ability to hire and fire based on merit has effectively been curtailed by the EEOC, which has ordered employers to discard useful employment tests and accommodate incompetent employees. For example, a hotel chain was recently compelled to pay $132,500 for dismissing an autistic desk clerk who did not do his job properly, in order for it avoid a lawsuit by the EEOC that would have cost it much more than that to defend. The EEOC has sued companies that quite reasonably refuse to employ truck drivers with a history of heavy drinking, even though companies that hire them will be sued under state personal-injury laws when they have an accident. The EEOC used the threat of endless litigation for force a cafe owner to pay thousands of dollars for not selecting a hearing- and speech-impaired employee for a cashier’s position that the employee was unsuited for (even though the the employer was happy to retain the employee in a different position that did not require standard speech and hearing abilities). The EEOC’s aggressive anti-business interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) reflects its left-wing majority under the Obama administration, which has appointed anti-business extremists to the EEOC.

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, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN 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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Duplicative Government Programs Are a Symptom of the Problem

Best of all would be to close down all Federal departments that duplicate State depts.  Who needs an EPA, an OSHA, a DEA, a Dept. of Health or a Dept. of Education when all States have regulations and depts in those fields?  Americans may need government for many things but no American needs TWO governments for any of those things.  The savings from ditching just the depts. mentioned above would be enormous, to say nothing of the savings from eased regulatory burdens

The Government Accountability Office has released its third annual report on fragmented, overlapping, or duplicative federal programs and activities. Proponents of making the government more efficient view the findings as an opportunity to achieve cost savings. While there’s obviously nothing wrong with the government spending less money than it has to, the goal should be to permanently shut the trains down – not just try to get them to run on time.

Some examples:

The GAO says “Enhanced collaboration between the Small Business Administration and two other agencies could help to limit overlapping export-related services for small businesses.” The federal government shouldn’t be subsidizing export promotion for commercial interests, period. (See here and here.)

The GAO says “Federal agencies providing assistance for higher education should better coordinate to improve program administration and help reduce fragmentation.” The federal government should not be subsidizing higher education, period. (See here.)

The GAO says, “To achieve up to $1.2 billion per year in cost savings in the Federal Crop Insurance program, Congress could consider limiting the subsidy for premiums that an individual farmer can receive each year, reducing the subsidy for all or high-income farmers participating in the program, or some combination of limiting and reducing these subsidies.” Federal crop insurance subsidies and all farm subsidies should be abolished, period. (See here and here.)

The GAO says, “Federal support for wind and solar energy, biofuels, and other renewable energy sources, which has been estimated at several billion dollars per year, is fragmented because 23 agencies implemented hundreds of renewable energy initiatives in fiscal year 2010—the latest year for which GAO developed these original data.” The federal government shouldn’t subsidize renewable energy (or traditional sources of energy), period. (See here.)

There have been numerous attempts to “reinvent government,” “streamline the bureaucracy,” etc, over the decades as the government has expanded in size and scope. Perhaps the GAO report will spur another. But while the initiatives change, the result is always the same: we still end up stuck with a bloated Leviathan that continues to have its snotty nose in every facet of our lives.

As I often point out, waste always comes with government the same way a Happy Meal always comes with a toy and drink. There is duplication and waste in the federal government because it has become massive and there are virtually no limits on what politicians can spend money on.

I’m not suggesting that government waste should be ignored. Indeed, examples of waste should be held up as reasons to terminate entire government agencies and programs. But I believe that a myopic fixation on “eliminating duplication and waste” is itself a waste. That’s because duplication and waste are merely symptoms of the real problem of big government.

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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Front Porches Now Ground Zero in Property Rights Fight

From Minnesota to New Mexico, overreaching regulators are violating property rights

During five tours as a U.S. adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ethan Dean considered it part of his mission to model and promote basic democratic values in the war-torn nations. Ink-stained purple finger principles like free elections, universal education, and individual rights the rest of us often take for granted.

As did Dean, until he got a “Dear John” letter of sorts during his fourth deployment — not from a wife or girlfriend, but the City of Winona, Minnesota.

Authorities in the southeastern Minnesota city informed Dean that he was breaking a law he’d never heard of: Renting his house without a permit in contravention of an ordinance capping rental properties at 30 percent of homes per block.

“This property is on a block that is over 30 (percent) which would mean that it cannot be certified for rental,” the city’s “Dear John” letter stated. “IT IS A VIOLATION OF WINONA CITY CODE CHAPTER 33A TO ALLOW OCCUPANCY OF A RENTAL DWELLING WITHOUT OBTAINING A HOUSING LICENSE.”

Dean’s property rights became collateral damage when Winona implemented what’s believed to be the nation’s first comprehensive rental cap ordinance . The 2006 law restricts rentals to 30 percent of properties per block to curb “excessive on-street parking, anti-social behavior and deteriorating housing conditions” in the college community. In reality, however, 75 percent of Dean’s neighbors had rental licenses, grandfathered in when the ordinance took effect.

Suddenly, one of the bedrock democratic principles Dean was introducing overseas — property rights — was under fire, not in the war zone but back home in the Midwest.

“If they realize they can get away with taking these rights away, what are they going to do next? How far are they going to go until it’s not the good, old USA anymore?” Dean asked.

Dean’s campaign on the home front, now in the courts, illustrates a widening divide over the purpose and primacy of property rights. As copycat rental caps soon passed in three more Minnesota cities and beyond, homeowners’ front porches have become the front lines in what’s turning into a definitive local property rights dispute.

Dean bought the 1800s Victorian house in 2007 to start a nonprofit recovery home for returning troops, the Welcome Home of Winona. Ultimately, he rented out the residence during deployments to help meet his mortgage payments.

Via email from Al Asad-Anbar Province in Iraq, Dean begged the city to allow him to continue receiving his vital $1,050 monthly rental check.

“If I cannot rent my home, it will be extremely difficult financially to make the monthly mortgage, as well as maintaining the utilities and upkeep,” Dean wrote in a letter presented to the Winona City Council in May 2010.

Under the radar, Dean chafed over city interference in email correspondence with a reporter at the time.

“I am currently on my fourth mission in Iraq,” Dean wrote from his post with the U.S. Army Human Terrain Team 3-7 infantry. “It kills me to defend our freedoms, when my own home is subject to some 1944 Berlin Nazi BS…I don’t care what the city says, THEY do NOT own MY house…why the hell do I need THEIR permission?????”

Wary of a public relations minefield, the Winona City Council granted Dean a waiver, but only until he returned stateside. For his service, Dean was welcomed home in 2011 with an upside-down mortgage and no more breaks from the city. Besides the loss of thousands of dollars in rental income, without a license to attract buyers interested in rental investments the market value of Dean’s house plummeted by an estimated $25,000. He had a house that could neither be rented nor sold.

“It’s gotten to the point now that something really central to the use of our property rights, being able to rent out your home, is being taken away,” said Anthony Sanders, Dean’s attorney with the Institute for Justice. “I think we have a really good shot at fighting back because people understand this is just such a central component to owning property.”

Peter and Frankie Smith fit the part perfectly in a newly contested case in New Mexico. The Army Corps of Engineers accused the retired couple of violating the Clean Water Act in mid-2011, declaring their parched desert property a water of the United States based on aerial photos, maps, and surveillance from a neighbor’s yard. According to the feds, the Smiths owned the proverbial waterfront property, classifying dry land as wet.

“They never phoned me, knocked on the door or anything like that,” said Peter Smith, a 65-year-old retiree. “They just wrote me this letter basically saying ‘you’re guilty’ and that’s all there is to it.”

The Smiths built their retirement home on 20 acres of bone-dry scrub brush and sand south of Santa Fe. In the process of cleaning up the place, Peter cleared out hundreds of dead trees and trash littering a dry ditch the feds dubbed the Gallina Arroyo. Acting on an alleged complaint, the Army Corps shot off a violation notice warning against “conducting any additional work in any stream, arroyo or wetland” without federal permission, stunning and stopping Smith in his tractor tracks.

“Somebody’s got to stop these regulators from taking people’s rights away,” Smith said. “Sitting here looking out my window, I can see probably 15-20 little beds and banks all with dead trees and garbage sitting in them.”

A retired surveyor who made his living sizing up land, Smith says the arroyo is a drainage ditch that’s dry year-around except for the rare storm in which the precipitation evaporates or seeps into the dry sand almost instantaneously. To the Army Corps, however, it’s a tributary that theoretically drains into the Rio Grande River 25 miles away, threatening the silvery minnow, a fish on the endangered species list.

“It sure appears to me they’re just after control of land,” Smith said. “They’re using the excuse it’s a water of the United States. If I went to the real estate salesman and said, ‘OK, the government has now declared I have waterfront property’, they’d laugh at me!”

A year and a half into their ordeal, the Smiths finally turned to the Pacific Legal Foundation, filing a lawsuit against the Army Corps in December 2012. The case accused the Corps of acting as a national zoning board with unlimited control over Americans’ land use, aiming for nothing short of a nationwide precedent to curtail Clean Water Act regulators.

“If the Smith’s dry creek bed really is a water of the United States under the Clean Water Act, then so is the drain in your front yard and so is the ditch in my back yard. If this is under their authority, then so is every square inch of America and legally speaking, that is not what Congress intended,” said Jennifer Fry, the Smiths’ PLF attorney.

The Albuquerque office of Army Corps of Engineers did not respond to requests for comment. Yet soon after the Smiths case went public, the Army Corps claim came and went as abruptly as a desert derecho. In March the agency withdrew its classification of the Smiths’ property.

“This episode should put the federal government on notice,” Fry said. ”If they try this ploy again — if they try, in effect, to seize private property by conjuring up a mirage of water where there isn’t any — PLF is ready to fight them in court, anywhere in the country.”

Increasingly, the case can be made that like politics, all property rights are local, regardless of the level of government jurisdiction involved. No wonder that city, state, and federal authorities across the county are closely tracking a Minnesota court ruling expected soon on the constitutional challenge brought by Dean and two other homeowners in January.

Win or lose, Dean will never get back his foreclosed house or an estimated $50,000 he invested.
“I’ve lost my house, I’ve lost my equity, that can’t be reversed and I understand and realize that,” Dean said. “The lawsuit is to bring justice back to the citizens of Winona.”

SOURCE

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Ugliness from ugly ideas

The philistine statists who disgraced the streets of Britain with vulgar spasms of hate for Margaret Thatcher in the wake of her death on April 8 stunned decent people everywhere. Violence and bloodshed at so-called “death parties” erupted across the country. Walls and buildings were sprayed with the vilest of epithets. It was a sickening, even frightening, paroxysm from people who in their calmer “Kumbaya” moments talk incessantly of how much they care for others and want the government to be a helpful nanny in our lives.

They loathed Margaret Thatcher because she stood up to them, questioned their false compassion, and dared to expose statism as the senseless, dehumanizing cult that it is. She rhetorically ripped the velvet glove from the iron fist and spoke of welfare-state socialism as a wolf in sheep’s clothes. Those are things state worshipers cannot abide. Among the many debts decent people owe Margaret Thatcher is one that stands vastly magnified by her death: She coaxed out of hiding the intolerant, destructive essence of statism.

Americans might be asking themselves, “Ronald Reagan shared many of Maggie’s core beliefs, so when he died in 2004, why didn’t we see here the kind of ugly spectacles that have showed up since April 8 in Britain?” Don’t assume the Brits are a different, nastier lot. They’ve just gone a little further down the path on which we too are traveling. Think of the ugliness you saw this past week or so as a glimpse of what ugly ideas produce. It’s a taste of what’s in store for us if we do not come to our senses. If we keep hiring intellectual barbarians to teach in our schools and universities and if we continue electing their disciples to high office, then you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

If you want an American example of the statist wolf in sheep’s clothing, look no further than these comments from MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry. She deplores the notion that children belong to their actual parents. She thinks they really belong to every other parent (translation: they belong to those parents who have political power). On the surface, the message sounds “caring” and “thoughtful.” Do you think she means things like parental choice in schooling or diversity in opinion within the schools? Why do I get the feeling when I watch her that I’m listening to one of the academic Khmer Rouge in our midst?

“Violence,” wrote Isaac Asimov, “is the last refuge of the incompetent.” This thought may explain why the plans that statists like Harris-Perry cook up for other people's lives are rarely voluntary. Statism at its core is ugliness writ large. It is violence raised to the level of social philosophy.

How can I make such a sweeping statement? Because statism isn’t voluntary, and if it isn’t voluntary, it’s violent. Either we interact with others in peace and mutual respect, or we boss them around as nanny states always do. We must choose between the power of love or the love of power.

If you’ve ever met a true-blue statist (and these days, who hasn’t?), you know what I’m talking about when I describe him this way: He thinks he has a monopoly on compassion and good intentions. He thinks that non-statists are either evil or stupid. He’s often more eager to shut you up than to engage you in serious discussion. He’s impervious to reason, logic, economics, history, and evidence because his good intentions are more important than such things.

When he talks about the rich and the poor, he reeks of envy. As Thatcher herself so eloquently put it in parliamentary debate, he cares less for the poor than he cares that the rich be punished. He thinks his plans for other people are so superior that he’s not content to persuade you to accept them; he’s ready to call the cops to force you to comply. He’s up to his eyeballs in the tyranny of political correctness and will savage you if you dare question his assumptions.

If he’s an academic, he will profess devotion to “academic freedom” but then use his tenure and political power to intimidate and monopolize. If the university hires its first defender of Western civilization, he’ll see it as a takeover and vigorously protest.

He’s an end-justifies-the-means kind of guy: If he has to buy your vote with other people’s money, look askance when voter fraud steals an election for his side, live one way and preach another, and apply endless double standards that always work in favor of his perspective, he’ll gladly do it and chortle to his friends about it. He’s for government-run this or that whether it works or not because what’s most important to him is that the State is in charge. His definition of good intentions trumps whatever the outcome might be.

When such people take to the streets with ugly actions, they should get credit for one thing: For at least a moment, they’ve ceased the deception and shown themselves to be what they really are. They are what Ayn Rand would call the “destroyers” among us.

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, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN 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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