Bashing the rich as protective camouflage

Prominent Democrats are rich but talk as if the rich are other people. Loud redistributionist rhetoric offers the necessary vaccination shot that makes privileged leftists immune from any criticism of their privilege

In his first term President Obama was criticized for trash-talking the one-percenters while enjoying the aristocracy of Martha's Vineyard and the nation's most exclusive golf courses.

Obama never quite squared his accusations that "millionaires and billionaires" had not paid their fair share with his own obvious enjoyment of the perks of "corporate jet owners," "fat cat bankers" and Las Vegas junketeers.

Now, that paradox has continued right off the bat in the second term. In the State of the Union, Obama once more went after "the few," and "the wealthiest and the most powerful," whom he blasted as the "well-off and the well-connected" and the "billionaires with high-powered accountants."

Like clockwork, the president then jetted to West Palm Beach for yet another golfing vacation at one of the nation's priciest courses, replete with lessons from a $1,000-a-hour golf pro to improve the presidential putting.

The rest of the first family jetted off on their own skiing vacation to elite Aspen, Colo., where nobody accepts that at some point they've already "made enough money." Meanwhile, below the stratosphere, unemployment rose to 7.9 percent for January -- the 49th consecutive month it has been 7.8 percent or higher. The economy shrank in the last quarter of 2012, gas is back to almost $4 a gallon, and the government continues to borrow almost $4 billion a day.

Today, lots of liberal grandees attack the rich and yet do their best to act and live just like them.

Take financial speculator and leftist billionaire George Soros, who is back in the news. Soros is able to fund several progressive think tanks that go after the 1 percent because he is the most successful financial buccaneer of the age -- notorious as "the man who broke the Bank of England" and was convicted of insider trading in France. The Soros family investment firm's most recent speculating coup was betting against the Japanese yen. That made Soros $1.2 billion in just three months -- enough capitalist lucre to keep funding Media Matters and other attack-dog progressive groups for years to come.

Facebook co-founder and Obama campaign organizer Chris Hughes just bought the New Republic and has rebranded the magazine as an unapologetic progressive megaphone.

How odd that hip Facebook just confessed that it paid no federal or California state income taxes for 2012 on its $1.1 billion in pre-tax profits on its U.S. operations alone. Odder still, Facebook will probably receive a federal tax refund of about $429 million. Apparently Facebook's "well-connected" found some "high-powered accountants" to write off their stock options as a business expense.

Perhaps Treasury Secretary-designate Jack Lew should have a look at Facebook's tax contortions. He should be familiar with the big-money paper trail, given that Lew himself took a nearly $1 million bonus from Citigroup after it had received billions of dollars in federal funds to cover its gargantuan losses.

Lew, like his tax-dodging predecessor, Timothy Geithner, has a propensity for doing just the opposite of what the president used to preach against. Obama, remember, warned Wall Streeters not to take bonuses after their failing companies received federal money.

Obama also derided dubious offshore Cayman Islands tax shelters. Yet he apparently forgot to tell that to Lew, who invested in a fund registered to the same Potemkin Cayman Islands building that Obama had used as a campaign prop to bash the one-percenters.

One of the nation's best-known class warriors is former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. of Chicago, who for years has damned the wealthy for their ill-gotten gains. He is expected to plead guilty to fraud charges after he and his wife allegedly siphoned off $750,000 from their campaign accounts to pay for an assortment of one-percenter extravagances like a $43,000 Rolex watch.

Today's leftists like the high life as much as their demonized conservative rivals. The more they damn the bad "millionaires and billionaires," apparently the less guilt they feel about living it up in Palm Beach or Aspen, paying no taxes, offshoring their profits or wearing Rolex watches.

The vast growth of the federal government has splashed so much big money around New York and Washington that even muckraking progressives can't resist. Loud redistributionist rhetoric offers the necessary vaccination shot that makes privileged leftists immune from any criticism -- or guilt -- over indulging in tax avoidance, billion-dollar speculation or aristocratic tastes.

George Orwell long ago noticed the same thing, when in "Animal Farm" the pig elite loudly damned reactionary humans even as they sought to copy them by walking on two legs.

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If you're a taxpayer, you're with stupid

If President Obama, the Republican House and Democratic Senate cannot cut $85 billion from this year's $3.8 trillion budget without laying off first-responders, tying up airport security lines and furloughing food safety inspectors, what good are they?

The answer is: Not much. It turns out we elect lawmakers so they can hold our time and safety hostage. When Congress passed and the president signed the 2011 Budget Control Act, all parties agreed that the act's $1.2 trillion in "sequester" cuts over 10 years would be so terrible that a bipartisan supercommittee would be forced to present a better plan for deficit reduction.

But the committee failed. The "sequester" cuts were designed to be too terrible for taxpayers but not for Washington insiders embroiled in the blame game.

You see, the 2011 budget act didn't simply mandate $85 billion in cuts this year - $46 billion from the Pentagon, $39 billion in discretionary spending. The law also required that the cuts be administered under an across-the-board formula that imposes cuts, as one White House aide put it, "at a granular level." The Department of Agriculture cannot decide to balance its books simply by cutting farm subsidies or other forms of corporate welfare. No, the cuts have to shave every agency account.

Citizens Against Government Waste has compiled 691 recommendations to save taxpayers $391.9 billion in one year alone. The Budget Control Act deliberately ignores such recommendations. "How insane is that," asked the group's Leslie Paige, "that they can't even agree to getting rid of duplicative programs?"

In effect, the 2011 law was written to protect waste - so that if the sequester cuts happened, only the dumbest cuts would follow.

Does the president mind the loss of 750,000 jobs for ugly cuts? Well, he cared enough to go on TV and grouse on Tuesday.

Be it noted, Obama proposed the sequester during budget negotiations in 2011. A year ago, he pledged to veto any alternative cuts. Now that they are about to happen, he isn't pushing to make the sequester work, he is working all-out to blame Republicans for it.

He says that he wants a "balanced" solution, which means he can call for more tax increases, then blame Republicans for the cuts he proposed.

House Republicans passed two bills with alternative cuts. But those bills moved the cuts to discretionary programs - so the bills will die in the Senate.

Senate Democrats are playing with an alternative measure to raise taxes on the wealthy and impose smaller but targeted cuts to defense and discretionary spending. That package would not survive in the GOP House, and it's not even clear it could pass in the Senate.

This is the pressure-point moment when Washington usually decides that it cannot abide by the laws of mathematics, so, gosh darn, Congress will have to unite to delay the sequester cuts for another year.

Except some Republicans are hanging tough, because they know that if they cave on cuts now, they are doomed to give up on spending cuts ever after. Better bad cuts than no cuts.

Make no mistake about the reason these cuts are too terrible: Washington passed a law that precluded cutting the pork.


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Drugs and freedom

Drugs screw you up, it’s said. Take them, and you’ll become an addict. You’ll get spots. You’ll get AIDS. You’ll die in Cardboard City. You’ll be ‘undermining the stability of our country’ (M. Thatcher). Drugs are EVIL.  They are rightly banned.

A shame so many believe this - believe so firmly that doubt earns any reaction from laughter to violence. It is for the most part a pack of lies. Drugs aren’t anything like the great scourge that people imagine them. There’s certainly not the slightest justification for making laws against dealing in or using them.

Look at the more popular drugs. 50 years of well-funded research still haven’t proved cannabis, the market leader, more dangerous in the long run than equal amounts of tobacco. Since no one could smoke as much cannabis ~s tobacco without falling asleep, it probably carries less risk of lung cancer. It might also be good for delaying glaucoma blindness. It isn’t physically addictive. Nor, says Martindale’s Pharmacopoeia, is cocaine. Nor is LSD. Heroin, developed as a patent cough medicines remains a wonderful painkiller. Terminal cancer can be hell without it. Like the other opiates, it is addictive over time. But only a minority become addicts; and only a minority of addicts 1986, 235 deaths resulted from use of all illegal drugs. At the same time, they gave a lot of people ~ lot of pleasure. At the same time, perhaps 100,000 died from smoking tobacco, and another 6,500 from drinking alcohol.

While not in itself a valid argument, this does clear the way in some minds to considering one. Drug control is a violation of rights.

Freedom is doing with ourselves as we please, not what the powerful - think is good for us. What pleases us only we can know. It may be wealth, or devotion to the poor, or chancing the firing squad in some lost cause. There’s no accounting for taste. Some think there is~ and, watching choices made which don’t appeal to them, talk variously of ‘psychopathic personality disorders’ or ‘false consciousness’. But all this comes down to ~s an excuse for hijacking lives. If a person does something that others think odd, the proper question isn’t whether the act is ‘reasonable’, but whether the agent seems capable of knowing its likely effects. If note there are grounds for restraint. Where capacity can’t be presumed, the ultimate case for freedom - that it best promotes happiness - doesn’t apply. But where capacity is presumed, what someone does, no matter how destructive it may seem, isn’t another’s business. ‘I’ll die young’ said Lenny Bruce of heroin, ‘but it’s like kissing God’. His life. His preference.

Of course, third parties do matter. Freedom to destroy yourself is one thing. Taking others with you is something else. But it just isn’t so that free access to drugs is a public menace. Look at the drugs again. The cannaboids and opiates are relaxants. The number of violent crimes committed under their influence is so small that separate figures aren’t published. Cocaine, the psychedelic drugs and amphetamine do excite sometimes to violence. But numbers are again too small to notice.

Or look to the example of our own freer past. Until 1916, drug use here was uncontrolled. Never the vice of a small group, it was at times a national habit. Between 1827 and 1859 British opium consumption rose   from 17,0001b to 61,0001b. Workmen mixed it in their beer. Gladstone took it in his coffee before speaking. Scott wrote ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’ under its influence. Cocaine was put in soft drinks. Cannabis and heroin were openly on sale. 19th century England wasn’t a nation enfeebled by drugs to anywhere near the point of collapse. People didn’t run amok. Most deaths were individual accidents and even these were negligible 104 in 1868, and thereafter to 1901 an annual average of 95. When drugs were an integral part of English culture, use was regulated by custom and personal choice. Temperance fanatics aside - and their first and main hate was alcohol - few saw any serious third party problem.

And even if one did exist now, it still wouldn’t follow that laws were the solution. For a solution to be worth adopting it must show some prospect of working: and it really is glaringly obvious that nearly everything bad about drugs is an effect of trying to ban them.

Catching a drug dealer isn’t easy. There’s no victim to complain or for clues to be left on. The Police have to catch him in the act. Entrapment - tempting then arresting - is still frowned on here. But it’s quite lawful to be stopped in the street and searched on suspicion of carrying drugs. Sudden swoops and house to house searches, though not lawful, are common. As for punishment, since 1986 the drug dealer has risked life in prison if caught - life, simply for trading with others! Under the same law, his assets on conviction are presumed the profits of crime, and can be confiscated unless proven otherwise. For him, the normal burden of proof in criminal law is reversed. In the name of the ‘War on Drugs’ all sense of proportion is going. Vital common law safeguards are being torn down.

Yet the ‘War’ is being lost. Indeed, it’s unwinnable. Drugs can be synthesised in a garden shed. Imports can’t be kept out. In 1984, 36 million people entered this country. A woman can bring in £20,000 worth of heroin packed in her vagina. If drugs are wanted, they’ll be supplied. The law simply determines how.

The ordinary crimes - like mugging, and housebreaking, with the odd bank raid - don’t on the whole pay much. They don’t generate the kind of profits that bring mafias into being. These need a wholly different class of crime - something like ordinary business~ but from which ordinary businessmen are excluded. Illegal drugs are exactly this. During 70 years, use had for various reasons gone largely out of fashion here. Then~ between 1979 and 1984, convictions for possession or supply rose by 163%~ and have since gone higher. One guess is that £3 billion was spent on them in 1986 alone. This is big money. It’s more than the Ethiopian GNP. It’s ten times the cost of the Falklands war. It’s enough to make crime pay on a very big scale. Drugs are supplied. And because drugs are supplied by criminals, they are both expensive and dirty.

Consider: A Bolivian farmer sells 500kg of coca leaves for US$2,000. Refined into 1kg of cocaine, it sells to a local wholesaler for $7,000. To a Canadian wholesaler it’s worth $18,000. The street dealers buy it for $100,000. Its final selling price is $800,000 - a 40,000% mark up! There are two elements in this. First, without high prices, drugs wouldn’t be worth bringing to market. Technical transport inefficient, bribes, rewards of special entrepreneur Al risk, all cost money. Second, there’s the usual effect of coercive monopoly. If another dealer comes on their territory, the Yardies don’t sigh and cut their prices. They blow his legs off and keep market share that way.

Therefore petty crime. Maybe some users become thieves because of the company they have to keep. But dole cheques aren’t much with heroin at £50 a days and not everyone’s equally suited for prostitution. In America~ perhaps 55% of robberies are to finance buying drugs.

Therefore users turning to glue and lighter fuel. These are often dangerous, and don’t seem to give much in the way of pleasure. But they’re cheap and available. Use varies with the price of the higher preference drugs.

Consider again; When I buy a can of lager, if I read on it “8% alcohol by volume” I know this means 8% - not anything between 0.5% and 30%. I know that caustic soda isn’t what makes it fizzy. If I want it in a glass, I’m not given one in which someone else has just vomited. Put this down to clean food laws, or to free competition. Neither applies to the illegal drug market. Therefore frequent overdosing. Therefore poisonous additives. Therefore, in 1986, an estimated 85% of Edinburgh heroin mainliners infected with AIDS got off dirty needles. It wasn’t heroin screwed up these lives, and anyone who really thinks otherwise is a fool.

Is this claiming the right to sell drugs to children?  Presumed responsible beings, the answer is no. Read above. In any case, they are currently sold drugs. They’re a soft market because they don’t shop round or inform. Also, they make cheap and often legally immune couriers. When a New York law made this job risky to adults~ it was entirely taken over by children. The real danger to them is laws that stop drugs being swept off the streets, back into the retail pharmacies where they belong.

Libertarians are often called impractical fanatics. Defined as someone who tries following ideas wherever they lead, fanatics we are. Freedom includes the right to shoot dope. But impractical we aren’t. Drug control does everything but control drugs. This isn’t straining for paradox. It’s simply one more illustration of an old truth - that telling people their business usually produces in intended and unpleasant results.

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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 .  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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What Is Liberalism?

 John C. Goodman

President Obama is said to have made the case for a liberal public policy agenda in his State of the Union speech the other night. But what is liberalism?  The conventional view is that liberalism is an ideology. In fact it is a sociology.

An ideology is a set of ideas that cohere. Socialism is an ideology. So is libertarianism. Suppose I told you that socialists believe the government should nationalize the steel industry and the auto industry. You would have no difficulty inferring what their position is on nationalizing the airline industry. Right? Suppose I told you that libertarians believe in a free market for tinker toys and ham sandwiches. You would have no difficulty inferring that they also believe in a free market for Rubik's Cubes.

Sociologies are different. They represent a set of ideas that are often incoherent. These ideas are likely to come together not because of reason, but because of history or happenstance. Not only do the ideas not cohere, they may be completely contradictory.

Take the issue of preschool education — forcefully endorsed by the president the other night. As David Brooks explained, the issue is really about allowing poor children to escape from the anti-education atmosphere of their homes to a place that will at least give them a chance to learn. Given a person’s position on preschool education for four year olds, shouldn’t you be able to predict how he will think about allowing poor six- and seven-year-old children to escape from bad schools? As it turns out you can’t.

Brooks explains the preschool issue this way:

"This is rude to say, but here’s what this is about: Millions of parents don’t have the means, the skill or, in some cases, the interest in building their children’s future. Early childhood education is about building structures so both parents and children learn practical life skills. It’s about getting kids from disorganized homes into rooms with kids from organized homes so good habits will rub off. It’s about instilling achievement values where they are absent."

Okay, so how is that different from the situation faced by slightly older children trapped in lousy schools where teachers couldn't care less what they learn? It isn’t. Yet so many of those who favor preschool education (a new and expensive entitlement) are reliable opponents of vouchers, charter schools, firing bad teachers, closing bad schools or any other remedy that offends the teacher’s unions. And that includes President Obama.

Then there is the issue of the minimum wage. The minimum wage does almost nothing to relieve poverty. That’s because almost no one who is a head of household is earning the minimum wage for any length of time. However, I think it is fairly well-established that a higher minimum wage gives teenagers in above-average income households more pocket change, even as it closes off job opportunities for poor, minority teenagers. (Remember, the black teenage unemployment rate is about twice that of whites.) If you want to maximize job opportunities for low-income youngsters, as President Obama says he does, you certainly wouldn’t want a minimum wage standing between a minority youth and his first job. Yet creating that barrier and making it permanent is part of the Obama agenda for the labor market.

A related issue is public policy toward unions. There is no mystery about what a union is. It is an attempt to monopolize the supply of labor to employers. In most all cases, unions confer special (monopoly) status on workers who are solidly middle class, allowing them to seek above-market wages by closing off competition from those who earn less and have less. Yet encouraging labor unions is another core pillar of the Obama presidency.

Finally, our federal deficit is almost totally caused by entitlement spending on the elderly. Our government routinely sends Social Security checks to billionaires and pays their medical bills to boot — paid for in part by a 15.3% payroll tax imposed on the parents of the children to whom the president would like to provide preschool education.

The zip codes in America where people cash the largest Social Security checks are the very same zip codes where Medicare spends the most dollars on the average enrollee. And unlike the income tax, every worker pays the payroll tax — no matter how poor. Yet these are the programs that President Obama resists reforming.

Some readers will be quick to point out that the Democratic Party — dating back to the days of Franklin Roosevelt — consists of a coalition of interests and that winning elections requires satisfying each of those interests. Fair enough. But we are here talking about thinking, not winning elections.

Politicians will invariably search for some intellectual justification for what they do. Since their policies are incoherent, no ideology will serve their purpose. What they need is a sociology — a way of thinking about the world that defends the indefensible. They need intellectuals who will apologize for the mixed economy welfare state without any obvious sense of embarrassment. For the Obama administration, that sociology is liberalism. Its adherents once called themselves "liberals." Today, they are "progressives."

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Clarifying "rights"

 Steve Deace

Recently a discussion of this story about DC Comics being pressured by homosexual activists to fire one of its writers because he’s on the board of the National Organization of Marriage prompted vigorous debate on my Facebook wall. While perusing through the various comments, it was obvious there still exists much confusion in our country today about the term “rights.”

There are two types of rights: unalienable and contractual.

Sometimes referred to as a natural right (i.e. “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” reference from The Declaration of Independence), an unalienable right is a right that comes from God and thus can be accessed in your natural state without consent from another party because it existed before you were born, and will still exist in nature after you die. It’s inherent to being made in the image of God.

Should another party attempt to stop you from accessing your unalienable (or natural) rights they are guilty of a crime, oppression, tyranny, or all of the above. For example, I do not require anyone’s consent to breathe air for it is foundational to my natural state of being. However, should you attempt to stop me from breathing then you are guilty of assault, battery, manslaughter, or murder if you’re ultimately successful.

If it requires consent from another party to access it then it is not an unalienable (aka natural) right, because you have to impose upon someone else’s unalienable (aka natural) rights in the process. Taking someone else’s person or property without their consent is what we call a crime.

Nowadays some are claiming unalienable (or natural) rights that don’t exist.

For example, you do not have an unalienable (or natural) right to marry or have sex with whomever you want, because partaking of each of those activities requires consent from another party. We call people who believe they can have sex (aka “physical intimacy”) with whomever they want rapists and put them in prison whenever we can. We call people who believe they can marry whomever they want cult leaders, sultans, kings, and tyrants because they’re acquiring harems and concubines.

Likewise, you also don’t have a natural right to live where you want as I’ve heard some claim on issues like immigration. To believe that requires you to believe that private property doesn’t exist. You can’t have it both ways. If you believe I have the right to defend my own property (which our founders absolutely did), then you also have to believe that “we the people” have the right to defend our own property as well. In a “government by the consent of the governed” that property in this case are the borders and lands of these United States of America. We own them and they are our private property. Therefore, we have a right to possess and police them accordingly.

Rights that require the consent of another party are contractual rights.

A good example of contractual rights would be the U.S. Constitution, which begins with the words, “We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union.” Immediately the parties involved in the contract are established: the people, the states, and the federal government (or union). From there each party states in the contract the terms, jurisdictions, and liabilities each are responsible for and permitted to perform. Some of the rights in the Constitution are unalienable (natural) rights like the freedom of speech and the freedom of worship, because you don’t require consent to access them. That’s why the Constitution says “Congress shall make no law” prohibiting or establishing those things, because Congress has no power to either establish or take away that which “the Law of Nature and Nature’s God” alone bestows.

However, other rights in the Constitution are purely contractual, but where people get confused here is they fail to understand this language is intended to bind the government and not the individual. For example, the government consents to saying it has no right for “unlawful search and seizure” as other governments in human history have indulged. It is not saying you as a private person have a right to therefore store crack cocaine in your locker or illicit pictures of children on your computer. This is the government contracting with its citizens to limit its own means, not the other way around. In fact, that is the theme of the entire Bill of Rights. Just because the state promises not to exceed its authority over the individual does not give the individual the right to exceed his authority over “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”

That is always the highest authority.

For example, should the U.S. Federal Court hear a civil suit between two murderous drug cartels because one failed to deliver the promised narcotics to the other and thus violated the contract? Of course not, because their very activity violates “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” therefore the proper response is to arrest them as criminals instead.

Similarly, just because someone consents to having sex with you doesn’t mean that suddenly you have a contractual right to have sex with them. Is the person just a child and therefore unable to make a mature decision? Is that person mentally unstable or disabled, and thus unsure of what it is they’re really consenting to? Is that person married to someone else?

In conclusion it comes down to this, if our rights first and foremost come from “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” then anything we do to indulge or claim those rights that violates that law isn’t a right. It’s a transgression—even if the other party(s) consents to it. That simply means they’re just as guilty as you are.

You have no right to do that which God says is wrong. Never have, never will, and should an earthly authority contradict this and permit your fallen nature to manifest itself, the God the “father of the Constitution” James Madison referred to as “the Governor of the universe” will ultimately adjudicate your case in eternity.

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Leftism as an obsessive-compulsive disorder

 Ann-Marie Murrell

When I was almost 6 years old, my father died in a car crash.  It was the early 60’s, so back then people didn’t really worry about the effects of trauma on children.  “Children are resilient” and “They’ll bounce back” were the accepted sagacity of the day; so children, like me, were left to their own devices to try and make sense of things like life and death and loss of control.

Soon after my father's death, strange little obsessions started coming out of me.  The first was what I called “circle drawing” in which I would draw thousands of tiny circles on notebook paper—perfect little rows of ‘o’s’, front and back. I would then number each page and put them neatly away in a binder.  I never knew how many of those circles I “needed” to draw each day; I just kept going until my brain said, “Okay, you’re finished with your work” and then I could go outside and play like all the normal kids.

Along with the circle drawing, other habits started to emerge.  If I sneezed, I had to say, “bless me” over and over—sometimes dozens of times--until my brain told me I was blessed.  If I coughed, I had to say, “Excuse me” in the same manner.  Repetition was extremely important to me, as was organizing.  All my stuffed animals had a specific place in my room and had to be lined up perfectly at all times.  And I was the bossiest child you can imagine on the playground—that annoying kid who organized all the games, and made sure everyone’s Monopoly money was neatly stacked.

I drove my poor little sister insane…

When I shared these oddities with my family at the dinner table one night, everyone laughed.  No one back then knew anything about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (O.C.D.).  Instead, all of us—myself included--simply thought I was just a very, very strange little girl.

The reason I’m baring my soul like this is because lately I’ve been asked about my past affiliation with the Democrat Party.  Everything about liberalism goes against almost all of my core values and principles—so what was it that originally drew me over to the left?

And then I realized:  It was O.C.D-related.  The two things the Democrat Party has in droves (and of which the GOP still does not) are two of my favorite things:  organization and repetition.  When I was in college, the most organized political group on campus was the Democrat Party.   They had the simplest message (“We’re all about The People!”) and yes, they threw the best parties.  Then when I moved to Los Angeles, all the artists and actors I hung out with were Democrats who were unwavering in their ideology.  On TV, the Democrats created the most effective, repetitive political ads saying, "We Are The Best, They Are Not."  Bottom line, Democrats were never changing, never wavering, repetitive and organized--seemingly as clear and pure and uncomplicated as all my little 'o's'.

Fortunately, 9/11 cleared the fog of political O.C.D. from my head. Seeing the ruins of the Twin Towers, I realized that the Democrat Party was very much like my “circle drawings”—basically good for nothing.  When it came down to actually doing something important—such as protecting and defending our country—the Democrat Party was nothing but a bunch of very organized, very repetitive hot air.  And although both my circle drawing and liberalism seemed to bring a sense of “control” and “order” to my life when I needed it most, it was all misguided and a waste of time.  Neither served a purpose, other than making me “feel” as if I were doing something vitally important.

In today’s world, whether because of death, divorce or abuse, trauma exists in almost every family.  Too many children are left to their own devices—as I was--to “figure things out”.  As a result, throughout their lives, they yearn for and are searching for clear, unclouded messages.  They are looking for “heroes”, people who represent the mother or father figure they’re missing in their lives.  And the one political party that continually answers those cries for help by means of rhetoric, repetition and organization—manna for O.C.D./trauma sufferers --are the Democrats.

Today's progressives are geniuses at marketing and selling their message.  The difference is that their “message” is much like all those circles I drew as a little girl—meaningless, useless, nothingness.  If the GOP ever wants to truly get hold of the American public again, we have got to find better ways to organize and repeat our message as loudly and clearly as the left does so brilliantly—so that the “strange kids” like I once was will be able to hear that message over the useless din of the screaming, vapid liberals.

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ObamaCare’s marriage penalty

In almost every case under the Affordable Care Act, married couples will fare poorly compared to unmarried couples. The reason: subsidies in the newly created health insurance exchange will treat two singles better than a married couple.

Suppose you are earning 200 percent of the federal poverty level (currently $21,660). You will be required to pay a premium equal to 6.3 percent of your income in the exchange—or about $1,365 for a health plan that has an actual cost of, say, $5,000. Thus, you and a cohabitating partner who also earns 200 percent of the federal poverty level could both obtain health coverage for about $2,730. However, if you marry your partner, the two of you will be required to pay 9.5 percent of your income in premiums—or about $4,115. Being married will cost the two of you $1,385 a year.

In some cases, getting married may be worth the financial penalty, however. If you and your partner each earn 100 percent of the federal poverty level (currently $10,830), you would (individually) qualify for Medicaid and would not be allowed to purchase private coverage in the exchange. However, if you are married, your combined income would disqualify you for Medicaid. If you bought insurance in the exchange, you would be required to pay 4 percent of your household income (or $866). The ability to get out of Medicaid (which pays low doctor fees) and into a private plan (which may pay market rates) may be worth the extra premium you have to pay—especially if you value more ready access to care.

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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 .  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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Another Trip Into the Recesses of the Liberal Mind

 Neal Boortz

Sit down. I’m truly sorry about this, but we really need to take another trip into the dark recesses of the liberal mind. A dangerous journey to a world where it is greedy to want to keep your own money, but not to covet the money or property of others; a world where earning 17% of the income, but paying 38% of the income taxes means you’re not paying your fair share; a world where any expression of disagreement with any utterance, no matter how ignorant, from the mouth of someone-not-white makes you a racist.

We have to do this because you really do need to understand the extent of mindless irrationality that liberals present to us as a “thinking process”.

Our liberal du jour here is one Jennifer Brooks. She’s a member of some crowd called the Corporation for Enterprise Development. Look them up. It seems that their goal in life is to enrich the poor and the middle class at the expense of those who have been more responsible with their lives. An opinion piece by Brooks was published in yesterday’s Atlanta Journal Constitution. Here’s your link, if you need to catch up on your self-abuse regimen.

Brooks’ piece was titled: “A path to prosperity: allow more to save.” In her column Brooks says that more than half of Georgia’s residents don’t have enough money saved up to get them through a rough time. She thinks that the government needs to do something to help these people save money. And --- wouldn’t you know it? --- she thinks that the best way to help these people is to take money away from those who’ve earned it and give it to them.

Hold on … tunneling a little deeper into the liberal mind here.

First, the lovely Jennifer suggests that people who actually go to college, buy a home and save for retirement are able to do so because they either inherited money or their family supported them. Nowhere – not one word in her piece – does Brooks acknowledge that perhaps these people managed to go to college, buy a home and become successful through hard work and good decision-making. The liberal mind cannot acknowledge that possibility! These rich people either inherited their money, or some family member paid the tab! Here Brooks sets the class warfare table. How DARE these people not want to share their money with the less-fortunate! After all, it’s not like they worked for it! They inherited all that money! Someone gave it to them!

But then Ms. Brooks gets down to proposing solutions! Wow! This is starting to get exciting here, isn’t it? Jennifer Brooks to the rescue!

First idea! Georgia needs a “refundable” state Earned Income Tax Credit! She says these tax credit help families boost their income – even those without any tax liability!

Well duhhhhhhh. Of course it helps families boost their income! When you create a state EITC that simply takes money away from people who are paying their own way – and their own taxes – and gives it to people who haven’t worked as hard or as smart, it tends to boost their income! That word – “refundable” – simply means that you get a fat check from the government whether you actually pay any taxes or not. Welfare ... money for nothing ... money forcibly taken from someone else. Simple as that. The federal EITC is the number-one area for tax fraud! So let’s get the state on the same road!

Ms. Brooks’ second idea is for the state to stop what she clearly believes is the abusive and asinine policy of denying cash welfare benefits to people who have more than $1000 in liquid assets. She says that if these people can’t get their welfare checks they won’t be able to save any money.

Say what? I thought welfare was supposed to be (1) temporary, and (2) to help people cover the cost of life’s basic necessities. Now we learn that welfare is for people who simply need to open a savings account but don’t have the money! This amazing liberal thinks the state should seize money, by force, from the person who earned it, and then give it to someone who did not earn it so that they will have some money to save and maybe buy a house some day. You’ll just have to excuse me for a moment here … I mean I’m good at filtering through the rhetorical yak squeeze of the left to see what our proggies friends are up to, but this is really confounding me. Let’s see … you’re going to take money that I was going to put into my savings and give it to someone else so that they can put it into their savings. Really?

Ms. Brooks isn’t through with her fantasy raid on your wealth yet. She wants what she calls “individual Development Account programs. What’s that? Pretty simple. She wants the state to take even more money from you to give to other people to match, dollar-for-dollar, whatever they put aside on their own for a house, to start a business, or to go to college. “Hey! Government! I’ve saved $4000 for a house here, but I need an $8000 down payment! Could you please go take that money from someone else and give it to me so I can get this closing scheduled?” I wonder what Ms. Brooks would think about giving the person who was forced to make the matching contribution a share of the eventual equity in that home, of the profits of that business, or the earnings that come from the college education?

I trust that during the course of this day you will be able to cleanse your rational mind of the liberal effluent I’ve thrown your way. Just know this. In the world of the liberal you are not yours. You do not own yourself, nor do you own the fruits of your labors. The government owns you. The government will decide how the money you earned is distributed. You will be allowed to keep enough to keep you happy – to keep you working. The amount you are allowed to keep will be referred to in Washington as a “tax expenditure.” The rest of the money you have earned, which will be referred to as “your fair share,” will be spent to create more and more government dependency … more and more voters who will be automatically vote for their liberal benefactor.

OK, the reading’s over. When you get that taste out of your mouth you can resume normal behavior.

SOURCE

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Stop Demonizing Preppers:  There's more to this subculture than the media stereotypes suggest

With the poor official response to hurricane Sandy and other weather disasters, one would think that ALL Americans would be preppers.

My friend Ceredwyn Alexander lives on a homestead in the mountains of Vermont. She and her family raise a lot of their own food, from chickens to cabbage, and they heat their home with wood they chop themselves. (She won't live anywhere, she tells me, "without supplemental heat that operates without electricity.") They worry about peak oil. They try not to buy things on credit. They always keep a great deal of food and water and other supplies on hand. If everything goes to hell tomorrow, they want to be prepared.

People who say and do such things are often called preppers, and Ceredwyn willingly applies the term to herself: It's a decent label, she says, for people who try to be prepared for sudden, disruptive emergencies. If you've been absorbing the recent portraits of preppers in the press, where they've been depicted as doomsday-fearing right-wing paranoiacs stocking up on guns and canned goods, you may think you know all there is to know about Ceredwyn. But before you use your stock of stereotypes to fill in those blanks, here are a few more facts about her.

Her politics are liberal and feminist. Her family's firearm collection consists of a single shotgun, which they own in case a four-legged predator passes through. (As I said, she lives in rural Vermont.) She speaks disdainfully about survivalists who spend their time "waiting for the Mutant Zombie Bikers to come take their guns, drugs, and women away." Ask her about survival strategies, and she doesn't start spinning fantasies about a well-provisioned family fending off looters. "When the shit hit the fan during Irene," she says instead, "neighbors were everyone's best resource." Preparedness, she says, requires "learning skills and community involvement...not freeze dried food and razor wire." To those ends, she has joined the volunteer fire department and become the town service officer.

As far as the mass media are concerned, America's preeminent preppers are the Alabama kidnapper Jimmy Lee Dykes; Nancy Lanza, whose son raided her gun collection before he carried out the Sandy Hook massacre; and the people who appear on the National Geographic TV show Doomsday Preppers, who might charitably be described as "colorful." Dykes "is described by neighbors as 'very paranoid,' anti-government and possibly a 'Doomsday prepper,'" the New York Daily News reported. The London Independent called Lanza a "so-called 'prepper,' a part of the survivalist movement which urges individuals to prepare for the breakdown of society by training with weapons and hoarding food and other supplies." When the liberal historian Rick Perlstein wrote about preppers in The Nation this month, he headlined his essay "Nothing New Under the Wingnut Sun: 'Survivalism.'" After invoking Dykes and Lanza in his lead, he talked about the right-wing survivalists of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, linking them to the preppers of the present by describing the lot of them as "Americans who fear change, fear difference, fear you and me, fear everything falling apart. So much so that they organize their lives and politics around staving off the fear—which often entails taking political action that only makes America more fearful and dangerous for everyone; which destroy the trust and love it takes to sustain communities; and who reinforce one another in their fear to such a degree that the less crazy among them surely play a positive role in spurring the more crazy to the kind of awful acts we see around us now." (Speaking of fears that people who are different are making the world fall apart.)

In fact, the prepper community includes a lot of political and cultural variety. If there is right-wing survivalist DNA here, there is also the DNA of the Whole Earth Catalog and several generations of bohemian back-to-the-landers, plus a fair number of families whose inspiration isn't much larger than the Boy Scout motto, "Be Prepared." Tour the online prepper communities, and you may well run into people who have embraced the long-lived conspiracy yarn in which the Federal Emergency Management Agency is plotting to put us in concentration camps. You may also encounter FEMA itself, which currently has an advertisement on the front page of the American Preppers Network. The ad asks, "Do you meet President Obama's minimum Prepper Standards? Are you 'FEMA Ready'?" Talk about all-encompassing diversity.

There may be even more diversity in the scenarios these people are preparing for. Ceredwyn got her family on board with her prepperdom about 12 years ago, when an ice storm hit their then-home in Shreveport. "We were out of power for 10 days," she recalls. "No heat, no water, no stove, no phone. Couldn't leave the house for three days due to ice. Could have been completely awful, but we had everything we needed, including a propane heater and stove I bought." Her own interest in preparedness began earlier, when she was working for an abortion clinic: "Nothing like being the possible victim of terrorism to get the survivalist juices flowing," she recalls. Or maybe it was even earlier than that: In an essay for her blog, she writes about

the day I told my mom that my dad had a girlfriend. My mom's carefully wrought denial came crashing down around her ears. She then found out that my dad had drained the various savings accounts. She filed for divorce the next day....In short order, we went from the sort of people who gave to charity, to being the sort of people who had to choose between eating and paying the light bill.

We got through it, obviously, but my mother never enjoyed upper-middle-classdom again. I am left with a fear of empty cupboards and a clear understanding that, at any moment, the bottom could drop out of my world.

Disasters, she concludes, come in all shapes and sizes, and they strike people every day. "It's always interesting to me that people talk about collapse as though it's in the far off future, and as if it will hit everyone, everywhere, at the same moment," she writes in that essay. "Many, many people are already living in a state of collapse. It doesn't matter if the rest of the world is going merrily on when you've been evicted, your kids are hungry, you have an infected tooth you can't take care of, and you're trying not to let anyone know the family's been sleeping in the minivan." It's a class-conscious take on poverty, disabilities, and other issues that might not come up much on Doomsday Preppers but obviously aren't absent from preppers' minds. When the American Preppers Network lists problems to prepare for, it explicitly includes "the loss or major injury of a breadwinner, loss of a primary job, extended sickness, accidents and other personal calamities."

OK, you say, so preppers aren't all nuts. In the future, when I want to make fun of people holed up in a suburban fortress awaiting a zombie attack, I'll use a more specific term. But so what? Does it really matter if some of the stories I've seen in the last few months have been too sweeping?

Yes, it does. It's always worthwhile to push back when a subculture gets scapegoated, whether it's Goths after Columbine or preppers today. It's especially important when those attacks are embedded in our political debates, skewing the ways we see the world.

Consider one of those divisions within the prepper culture, the one that separates the people engaged with their local communities from the people preparing to go it alone against the lawless zombie hordes. (A member of the Zombie Eradication Response Team, a group that does survival training, told a reporter last year that "'zombie' is really just a palatable metaphor for some guy trying to take your stuff.") This division also exists, and is much more important, in the world of official disaster preparation. On one side there are emergency workers and social scientists who understand that looting and panic do not usually break out after a disaster, that spontaneous cooperation to solve problems is the norm, and that the real first responders, as the saying goes, are the calamity's victims themselves. On the other side there are officials whose first instinct in a natural disaster is to get ready for a riot and who think they need to withhold information to prevent panic. In other words, officials afraid of the lawless hordes. If they imagine a post-disaster world filled with trigger-happy survivalists, that's just going to reinforce their fear of the public.

Anti-prepper rhetoric is affecting the debate over gun laws in a similar way. There are those who perceive the people at the scene of a crime as informal first responders, and who thus see widespread gun ownership as a neighborly civic virtue, and there are people who are wary of any approach to crime control that doesn't depend on the police, and who thus see widespread gun ownership as a recipe for a Hobbesian nightmare. Now, the social science on gun ownership is more ambiguous than the research on how communities respond to disasters. If you rely on the National Self Defense Survey, you'll conclude that firearms are used defensively much more often than they are misused; if you follow the National Crime Victimization Survey, you'll say successful self-defense is less common; and of course there are scholars who think the truth sits somewhere in-between. With the data disputed, political imagery becomes all the more influential. And the image of the anti-social survivalist feeds the impression that gun owners, particularly gun owners interested in more than just sport shooting, are yet another lawless horde.

So the gun owner is envisioned as a prepper, and the prepper is envisioned as a frightened survivalist. Neither real-world gun owners nor real-world preppers are well-served by these stereotypes. And neither is anyone who isn't a gun owner or a prepper but who wants an accurate image of the world.

SOURCE

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Was Queen Victoria mad?

She was so grief-stricken by the death of her husband that she withdrew from public life for 5 years.  Her reign was however enormously influential and she  was highly esteemed by the public

THE grieving process is in danger of being branded a medical condition if a mourner feels sad for two weeks and consults a GP, according to an international authority on death and dying.

At present, mourners can feel sad for two months before being told they have a mental disorder, says Professor Dale Larson. Decades ago, a diagnosis could be made after a year.

In a keynote address at an Australian Psychological Society conference in Melbourne on Saturday, Prof Larson will express his anger about the American Psychiatric Association's new diagnostic manual, DSM 5, which is used in many countries including Australia and New Zealand.

The manual, to be published in May, allows a diagnosis of depression after two weeks of grieving.

According to Prof Larson, the manual undermines the legitimate feelings of the mourner and the help available from family, support groups, clerics and professional counsellors.

"We are essentially labelling grief a disorder. Now it becomes a target for drug development."

Prof Larson, head of Counselling Psychology at Santa Clara University in the US, is concerned GPs will be dishing out prescriptions for anti-depressants.

"Almost all bereaved people believe they are depressed. But grief is a normal healing process and it resolves itself in most cases.

"Bereavement-related depression is different from other kinds of depression," he told AAP on Friday.

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 .  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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Coral reefs

Today is my Sabbath so I would not normally be posting anything here but I thought it might be a good occasion to publicize my new special-purpose blog on coral reefs.  The blog gathers together the most recent "wisdom" on coral reefs and the way they are "threatened" by global warming.  Rebuttals of that "wisdom" are also included of course.

The idea of the blog is as a one-stop-shop for anybody who is talking about coral reefs and wants to use just one link to blow the Warmist nonsense out of the water.  Link to the above blog and tell any coral alarmist to "go do some reading"

Because articles about coral reefs do not come up daily, the posts to the blog will not be daily.  The blog is intended as a reference rather than as regular reading.

Childhood TV watching and crime

This study has excited both liberals and conservatives but it has been much overhyped.  See the comments following the report below

Children who watch excessive amounts of television are more likely to have criminal convictions and show aggressive personality traits as adults, a New Zealand study has found.

The University of Otago study tracked the viewing habits of about 1,000 children born in the early 1970s from when they were aged five to 15, then followed up when the subjects were 26 years old to assess potential impacts.

The research, published in the US journal "Pediatrics" this week, found a strong correlation between childhood exposure to television and anti-social behaviour in young adults.

"The risk of having a criminal conviction by early adulthood increased by about 30 percent with every hour that children spent watching television on an average weeknight," co-author Bob Hancox said.

The study also found excessive TV viewing was linked to aggressive personality traits and an increased tendency to experience negative emotions.

It said the links remained statistically significant even when issues such as intelligence, social status and parental control were factored in.

"While we're not saying that television causes all anti-social behaviour, our findings do suggest that reducing television viewing could go some way towards reducing rates of anti-social behaviour in society," Hancox said.

He said the findings supported the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation that children should watch no more than one to two hours of quality television programming a day.

The study said it was possible that children learned anti-social behaviour by watching it on TV, leading to emotional desensitisation and the development of aggressive behaviour.

But it said the content of what children were viewing was not the only factor, highlighting the social isolation experienced by those who spent hours watching the box.

"It is plausible that excessive television viewing contributes to anti-social behaviour in ways unrelated to violent content," it said.

"These mechanisms could include reduced social interaction with peers and parents, poorer educational achievement, and increased risk of unemployment."

Hancox said the study concentrated on children's viewing habits in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before the advent of personal computers, and further research was warranted into how such technology affected subsequent behaviour.

SOURCE

My immediate reaction to this report was that we are just seeing another social class effect here:  Working class children are more likey to come from criminally-inclined homes and also are more often left to be "minded" by the TV.

Such effects are well known, however, so the authors were unusually conscientious and controlled for them.  They used analysis of covariance to remove the effect of class variables.  And what did they find when they did that?  I quote: "After controlling for additional covariates, associations between viewing time and criminal conviction and antisocial personality disorder remained statistically significant, although the association between television viewing and violent convictions did not."

So I was pretty right. Watching a lot of TV as a kid does not of itself make you more likely to be a violent criminal but coming from a lower social class does. It is only non-violent criminality (presumably drug offences and the like) that is somewhat associated with childhood TV viewing.

The study is actually good evidence AGAINST the concerns of the TV haters. Reading the actual "Results" section of academic journal articles has long been a pesky habit of mine. Sorry to puncture any treasured bubbles

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE. I should have mentioned above that ALL of the correlations reported were trivially small. They were statistically significant only by virtue of the large sample size. By any criterion of real-life significance, TV viewing predicted NOTHING. To put that another way, TV viewing explained at best only around 2% of anything else

The name of the original study is "Childhood and Adolescent Television Viewing and Antisocial Behavior in Early Adulthood" (by Lindsay A. Robertson et al.) -- JR

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The lazy French

The boss of US tyremaker Titan has provoked outrage in France after mocking its workers for putting in only "three hours" a day and said his company would be "stupid" to take over an ailing French factory.

Maurice Taylor, chief executive of Titan, berated the French work ethic in response to a request for the US company to consider investing in a loss-making Goodyear plant in Amiens, northern France, in an attack which has infuriated unions.

"I have visited that factory a couple of times. The French workforce gets paid high wages but only works three hours," Mr Taylor wrote in a letter to Arnaud Montebourg, French Industrial Renewal Minister, dated February 8 and obtained by French business daily Les Echos.

"They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that's the French way!"

Goodyear said last month it planned on closing the plant, which employs 1,173 workers, following five years of failed talks with unions.

Mr Taylor said Titan had a long history of buying and turning around troubled factories but in this instance was not in any way interested.

"Sir, your letter states that you want Titan to start a discussion. How stupid do you think we are? Titan is the one with the money and the talent to produce tyres. What does the crazy union have? It has the French government," Mr Taylor wrote.

The Titan boss, who made an unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination in the 1996 presidential election, said France's industrial base was under threat from low productivity and cheap imports, including tyres from China that he said were made in subsidised factories.

"Titan is going to buy a Chinese tyre company or an Indian one, pay less than one euro per hour wage and ship all the tyres France needs. You can keep the so-called workers. Titan has no interest in the Amiens North factory," he wrote.

Mr Taylor's incendiary comments have drawn fury from French unions. Mickael Wamen, a representative for the major CGT union at the Goodyear factory, said they showed the Titan boss "belongs more in an insane asylum than at the head of a multinational corporation", and threatened to file legal action in the US against Goodyear and Titan over the closure of the plant.

However, the insults have received some assent in the Gallic nation.

Bernard Accoyer, an opposition politician, said that while Mr Taylor's assessment amounted to a "mocking caricature", it was "not completely unfounded", adding that the country's "serious competitiveness problem" was linked with the "extremist hardliner" views of some unions.

France's Socialist government, led by President Francois Hollande, is struggling to boost the productivity of its industries in the face of increasing global competition. French firms have announced thousands of job cuts in recent months as the economy stagnates.

The country's labour minister Michel Sapin stoked panic last month after describing France as "totally bankrupt" while being interviewed on radio, a gaffe hastily dismissed as "inappropriate" by finance minister Pierre Moscovici, who said: “France is a really solvent country. France is a really credible country, France is a country that is starting to recover.”

Mr Montebourg told reporters he would reply to Mr Taylor in writing, but declined to comment verbally.

SOURCE

The French minister responded that there is a high level of American invrestment into France anyway.  But he did not say how much of that investment has taken place since the socialists gained power.  Most of the investment probably took place under the previous conservative government

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An Agent of Intolerance Seeks to Stifle Debate

When you hear the name Southern Poverty Law Center, it immediately evokes images of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Freedom Rides... all iconic symbols of the civil rights movement. And rightly so, for these are the events that inspired it’s founding. Founded in 1971, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) made a name for itself by defending the poor and disenfranchised against organized forces of hate and bigotry in a society torn by racial tension. Unfortunately, as the years have passed, SPLC has allowed its work to become less about defending the constitutional rights of all Americans and more about prosecuting a far-left ideology in our courts of law and in the court of public opinion. In the process, it has become an agent of intolerance and an enemy of free conscience and religious liberty.

There has always been an inherent tension between individual liberties and the greater social good. The American people are always struggling to strike a balance between protecting the freedoms of speech and conscience and protecting those who might be harmed by the misuse of those freedoms. As time passes, new issues arise and new debates emerge. Most recently, our society has been engaged in a fierce debate over the issue of homosexuality and what place it should occupy in America's social and legal milieu.

The right of individuals to freely associate – in public and behind closed doors – has been an issue that has sparked controversy in all quarters. The question remains as to what level of acceptance society must accord homosexual behavior – conduct that is fraught with social, religious, moral, and medical implications. Those who treat homosexuality as normative behavior rooted in immutable characteristics find their view in conflict with those who subscribe to more orthodox views of sex, marriage, and family. SPLC has very strong views on where society should come down on this issue, and anyone who dares to disagree with its "progressive" worldview is branded hateful and bigoted and assaulted with all the vigor it can muster.

The Family Research Council (FRC) is Exhibit A to this proposition. For its work to preserve and advocate traditional values and morals, including the defense of a one man, one woman view of marriage, it has been branded as a "hate organization," by SPLC. No matter that the FRC's views are rooted in ancient, universally-recognized social and religious principles, or that a free society should welcome and encourage vigorous debate on this topic. SPLC fueled the fire of intolerance and hate and made the FRC a target for retribution. Is it any wonder, therefore, that an unstable, self-styled vigilante took it upon himself to "punish" FRC for the organization's "anti-gay" views?

But indicting organizations like FRC in the court of public opinion is not enough. SPLC apparently feels that the most effective way to silence debate on key moral issues is through the courts. Recently, SPLC has filed suit against Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing, or JONAH. According to its website, JONAH is a "faith-based, nonprofit organization that offers assistance to men and women seeking to resolve their sexual conflicts, including unwanted same sex attractions." SPLC asserts that homosexuality is fixed and immutable, and that because of this JONAH's work to help people overcome their same-sex desires amounts to consumer fraud. They further assert that JONAH's work is emotionally and psychologically harmful, and that it fosters “anti-gay bigotry.”

A victory for SPLC in this case would set a frightful legal precedent with broad-sweeping implications for the foundational constitutional freedoms of speech, conscience, religion, and association. As a private organization, JONAH has every right to offer reorientation or conversion counseling to willing clients. Individuals with unwanted same-sex attractions have every right to pursue resources to help them overcome these attractions. SPLC is seeking to silence the voices of faith and tradition in America by making it "hateful" and “fraudulent” to advocate for these causes. What's next? Suits against churches for preaching about a "nonexistent" God? Suits against Creationist research groups for advocating intelligent design? Suits against those who reject the theory of man-made global warming? Suits against Weight Watchers for suggesting that fat people can become thinner and healthier by changing their lifestyle choices? The possibilities are limitless.

SPLC appears to have no use for freedom of thought or freedom of speech. Its once noble mission has been perverted to radical ideological ends. It is unwilling to accept that life in a free society means that people will disagree on a host of issues, even issues that SPLC considers to be matters of "settled science." In light of this, it is more important than ever that people of faith and conscience be vigilant. If we assume that organizations like SPLC will never be successful in their campaign to legally hamstring our constitutional rights, we'll find ourselves shocked when the legal rug is pulled from beneath our feet. I, for one, am not prepared to cede my First Amendment liberties without a fight.

 SOURCE

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The terminal poison of the European 'liberal'

by Melanie Phillips

If anyone still doubts that European culture is suffering from a terminal sickness, and that the poison in its bloodstream is oozing out foully to pollute the atmosphere as it steadily disintegrates, what has happened to Lars Hedegaard stands as a graphic corrective.

Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society and The International Free Press Society, is the nearest thing to a quintessential European liberal. He is a heroic icon of the fight against tyranny. He believes in freedom of expression, life and liberty. He not only detests those who threaten to destroy those things, but has been prepared to stand up and be counted in the fight to defend them.

As such, he was reported speaking in his own home about child abuse and violence against women in Muslim culture. The day after these remarks were published, he stressed that his opinions were not intended to refer to all Muslims.

What then happened to him was the kind of nightmare associated with totalitarian regimes, and which I wrote about in 2011 here and here. He was put on trial in Denmark accused of hate speech and racism. He was unable to mount a defence, because under the Orwellian rules of the Danish legal system he was in effect convicted before his trial even took place. After a roller-coaster of a case in which verdicts went first one way and then the other, the Danish Supreme Court finally ruled that he was not guilty after all of hate speech and racism.

That, however, was not the end of the trials of Lars Hedegaard. Some two weeks ago, he answered his front door to a man in his twenties posing as a postman who fired a gun at his head and missed. Douglas Murray reported that 70-year old Hedegaard punched him in the head; the man dropped the gun, picked it up and fired again.  The gun then jammed and the man ran off. According to Hedegaard, he looked like a ‘typical Muslim immigrant’. Hedegaard has had to leave his home for an undisclosed location under police protection.

The attempted murder of Lars Hedegaard for speaking out against Islamist violence has received virtually no public attention – except in Sweden. As reported here, several Swedish newspapers published wicked distortions about him in order to portray him entirely falsely as an acknowledged racist.

Hedegaard’s Free Press Society campaigns for the rights of journalists and cartoonists to express themselves without fear of being murdered. Now an attempt has been made to murder Hedegaard himself, after he was dragged through the courts in an attempt to stifle his warnings about Islamic violence by labelling these protests ‘hate crime’.

Yet far from the uproar one might expect in any sane and decent society following these attempts to destroy both the reputation and the life of a man who fights for freedom from tyranny, Hedegaard finds himself now victimised three times over – by the Danish judicial system, a fanatical would-be assassin and a European liberal class for whom fighting Muslim extremism and violence constitutes ‘Islamophobia’ and must be stopped.

The message from this most chilling tale of our times is that in Sweden and other western ‘progressive’ circles, anyone who protests at the phenomenon of ‘honour violence’ that terrorises Muslim women and children is a racist; and if a supposed Islamic fanatic tries to murder that protester, well, that just proves what a racist the protester is.

Stalin would have approved.

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 .  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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Defense and the pensions racket

By THOMAS SOWELL

A nation's choice between spending on military defense and spending on civilian goods has often been posed as "guns versus butter." But understanding the choices of many nations' political leaders might be helped by examining the contrast between their runaway spending on pensions while skimping on military defense.

Huge pensions for retired government workers can be found from small municipalities to national governments on both sides of the Atlantic. There is a reason. For elected officials, pensions are virtually the ideal thing to spend money on, politically speaking.

Many kinds of spending of the taxpayers' money win votes from the recipients. But raising taxes to pay for this spending loses votes from the taxpayers. Pensions offer a way out of this dilemma for politicians.

Creating pensions that offer generous retirement benefits wins votes in the present by promising spending in the future. Promises cost nothing in the short run – and elections are held in the short run, long before the pensions are due.

By contrast, private insurance companies that sell annuities are forced by law to set aside enough assets to cover the cost of the annuities they have promised to pay. But nobody can force the government to do that – and most governments do not.

This means that it is only a matter of time before pensions are due to be paid and there is not enough money set aside to pay for them. This applies to Social Security and other government pensions here, as well as to all sorts of pensions in other countries overseas.

Eventually, the truth will come out that there is just not enough money in the till to pay what retirees were promised. But eventually can be a long time.

A politician can win quite a few elections between now and eventually – and be living in comfortable retirement by the time it is somebody else's problem to cope with the impossibility of paying retirees the pensions they were promised.

Inflating the currency and paying pensions in dollars that won't buy as much is just one of the ways for the government to seem to be keeping its promises, while in fact welshing on the deal.

The politics of military spending are just the opposite of the politics of pensions. In the short run, politicians can always cut military spending without any immediate harm being visible, however catastrophic the consequences may turn out to be down the road.

Despite the huge increase in government spending on domestic programs during Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration in the 1930s, FDR cut back on military spending. On the eve of the Second World War, the United States had the 16th largest army in the world, right behind Portugal.

Even this small military force was so inadequately supplied with equipment that its training was skimped. American soldiers went on maneuvers using trucks with "tank" painted on their sides, since there were not enough real tanks to go around.

American warplanes were not updated to match the latest warplanes of Nazi Germany or imperial Japan. After World War II broke out, American soldiers stationed in the Philippines were fighting for their lives using rifles left over from the Spanish-American war, decades earlier. The hand grenades they threw at the Japanese invaders were so old that they often failed to explode.

At the battle of Midway, of 82 Americans who flew into combat in obsolete torpedo planes, only 12 returned alive. In Europe, our best tanks were never as good as the Germans' best tanks, which destroyed several times as many American tanks as the Germans lost in tank battles.

Fortunately, the quality of American warplanes eventually caught up with and surpassed the best that the Germans and Japanese had. But a lot of American pilots lost their lives needlessly in outdated planes before that happened.

These were among the many prices paid for skimping on military spending in the years leading up to World War II. But, politically, the path of least resistance is to cut military spending in the short run and let the long run take care of itself.

In a nuclear age, we may not have time to recover from our short-sighted policies, as we did in World War II.

SOURCE

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Who owns us?

Leftists from Hegel on definitely think the State does

If the "rich" really do owe their wealth to the State then surely you would not claim that just one separate group of people (the hated rich) are owned, but logically we all also owe all we have to the State. If that is so, then logically it follows that if the State owns the rights to all we have produced, then in essence it owns us. Logically then, it also follows that if we agree the State owns us, it is then the right of the State to determine all aspects of every person's life, even ultimately to whether they live or die. That is the essence of Nationalism...Fascism.

When Republicans constantly talk about "National Interest" that is also what they mean, so the Democrats do not have a corner on support of Nationalism.

Ironically the two slightly different "flavors" of Nationalism meet. Of course the D's and R's think they are quite different from each other, but scratch the surface and both are based on the same philosophy of State ownership of the person. I have debated with many Democrats and Republicans who dismiss the very idea of self ownership and even ridicule it as a silly concept.

We libertarians, most Austrian economists, anarcho caps, are on the other side of the equation. We think that self ownership is the defining concept that is at the core of one's life view. Either we own ourselves or we are owned by others. Of course, the "State" is merely a concept. Ownership by the State actually means, quite simply, those few humans who control the State control and own those other humans over whom they have established control.

Probably the most recent terrible examples of Nationalism are Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, China and North Korea and many countries in Africa. But also "soft," more benign examples exist. Sadly, a little bit of tyranny cannot be content. Power is ever-hungry and morphs into larger power. A close examination of those "soft nationalistic" societies show many examples of the gradual move away from personal freedom in those people's lives. Over time, the State envelopes the people and their formerly soft totalitarianism also takes on aspects of the more horrific societies.

Interestingly, in this country the founders grasped part of the concept as they stated the idea of inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence. Later in the Constitution, the rights of the enslaved were sadly ignored.

The later insightful, ardent and consistent abolitionists developed the relationship and logic of freedom to self ownership. They intellectually challenged the absence of this idea of self ownership. They further tied it logically to one's ownership of his own labor. The next logical realization was the right to actually posses property with the personal earnings. Many abolitionists grasped that the ownership of any property was a vital element of freedom for all people, not just the slaves.

Of course, at the time the abolitionists were making their discoveries and writing about them, Lincoln was President and he hated this idea of self ownership. Probably the peaceful resolution of the slavery problem was thwarted by his animosity to the idea that black people had innate rights. This is contrary to current romanticizing of Lincoln, however a close examination of his writings and speeches and actual history (not movies) reveal his hostility to black people. Because he favored Nationalism and the ultimate State ownership of all "citizens," his totalitarian personality was not about to concede the abolitionist's insight. He gave no quarter to the idea of each person's self ownership, let alone to the blacks he scorned as less than human and wanted to deport.

The State (power hungry politicians and administrators) perhaps subconsciously, have not forgotten how much easier it was to accumulate power when the Black and Native American people were enslaved. As power accumulation is the default operation of the State, the State continues its agenda to keep them enslaved.

The various laws, regulations  and benefits, whether to individuals or entities, are the means the State uses to enslave all people but neither political camp, Democrats or Republicans, realize this. Instead each camp begs for more controls over the activities of which they disapprove. Foolish folks  cannot see that they are also empowering the entity that will take away the particular freedoms they personally value.

The sad truth is that people who see and grasp one aspect of enslavement, turn around and advocate for other types of control by the State. Ayn Rand was certainly not the first to see through this, but she saw through much of it, though not quite all. Would that she had been perfect, but alas, none of us are. The irony is that writers such as Hartman do not criticize her for her lack of consistency in a few areas but rather her ideas on individualism that are pro liberty.

Fortunately, the last 40 years have seen a rapidly growing body of libertarian literature and media, speakers, teachers and writers. They understand the enormous importance of the concept of self ownership. With the Internet the ideas of individualism, self ownership and self determination, are abundant. People can be awakened to the dangers of Nationalism (fascism).

The crux of the problem is the mistaken idea that we do not own ourselves but that we are owned by someone or some "thing" else.

The first important step is to grasp that the danger lies in giving more control and power to something outside ones self — the State, for example. This is, almost inevitably, the path to slavery.  

The measure of a person's value of liberty is not how much liberty one desires for oneself, but how much liberty one is willing to allow others.

SOURCE

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Thoughts on the Minimum-Wage

One of the arguments regarded by the cognoscenti as being too pedestrian to use against minimum-wage legislation goes like this: “Heck, if raising the minimum-wage from $7.25 to (say) $9.00 per hour will make unskilled workers better off, why not raise the minimum-wage to $90.00 per hour and make unskilled workers much better off?”

Minimum-wage proponents understand (correctly) that such a huge increase in the legislated minimum would indeed catastrophically reduce the (legal) employment options open many workers, and especially to workers further down the skills ladder.  These proponents grant, without any hesitation, that such a massive hike in the minimum-wage would cause unemployment to rise exactly as textbook supply-and-demand analysis predicts.

So why are these same minimum-wage proponents – some of whom, I’m embarrassed to say, are professional economists – so sanguine about smaller increases in the minimum-wage?  I can think of four possible reasons.  (Whether or not one or more of these reasons is held consciously by any particular minimum-wage proponent is irrelevant.)  I offer the following four reasons in order of what I believe to the the prevalence of the reason in the popular mind.

First, monopsony power among employers of unskilled labor really is rampant enough to justify minimum-wage legislation.  (Wonkee: In theory, monpsonist purchasers of labor will, under certain conditions, hire more labor if the wage those purchasers are obliged to pay is forcibly raised by legislation.)

The empirical absurdity of the monpsony-labor-market argument seems to me to be obvious.  But if unskilled labor really were bought and sold in a market infected by monopsony power, a relatively modest hike in the legislated minimum might well benefit workers while a huge hike would indeed harm them.

….

Second, while a hike in the legislated minimum-wage will indeed cause some regrettable unemployment of unskilled workers, the resulting losses to these out-of-work employees are more than made up for by the higher earnings taken home by those unskilled workers who remain employed at the higher minimum-wage.

Obviously, though, at some point the rise in the minimum-wage becomes so large that the gains to the few unskilled workers who do remain employed at the absurdly high minimum-age are too small to compensate the large losses of the many additional workers who are pushed into unemployment by such a high minimum-wage.

….

Third, employers of unskilled labor will indeed react predictably to a legislated hike in the minimum-wage, but that reaction is likely to take the form of employers extracting more value-per-hour from their workers rather than the form of hiring fewer workers (or, more precisely, hiring fewer hours of work from workers).  Employers of unskilled and low-skilled workers affected by the minimum-wage hike will work their employees harder: fewer breaks; less leniency regarding arriving at work late and leaving early; greater strictness in enforcing rules against using work time to attend to personal business; etc.  (We can toss into this second reason the reduction also of monetary non-wage benefits such as employer contributions to worker pensions and employer willingness to help cover part of their workers’ child-care expenses.)

Some employers no doubt do react in this way, to a degree, to increases in the legislate minimum-wage.  And such reactions, being substitutes for hiring fewer hours of labor, reduce the amount of unemployment that would otherwise be caused by the rise in the minimum-wage.  (Whether or not minimum-wage employees who keep their jobs because of such employer responses are made better off or worse off as a result is a separate question.)  Here, too, a modest rise in the minimum-wage might cause very little, or even no, increase in the unemployment of unskilled workers, while a substantial hike would indeed cause significant unemployment.  (Employers of unskilled workers might well be able to re-arrange work conditions so that each unskilled worker produces an extra, say, 20 percent more value for the employer per hour.  Re-arranging work conditions so that each unskilled workers produces an extra 200 percent more value for the employer per hour is far less likely.)

….

Fourth (and I suspect most commonly held), employers can “afford it.”  Employers can afford to absorb small, legislatively prompted increases in their wage bill.  Employers’ profits might fall a bit, of course, but not by enough to cause them to go out of business or even to scale back business significantly enough to reduce the number of hours of work that they hire.  Alternatively, employers can simply raise the prices they charge for their outputs, recovering in the (assumed) higher revenues the higher costs they incur by hiring workers.  [Note, by the way, that it does not work for minimum-wage opponents simply to retort with the rhetorical question "Well, why don't those employers raise the prices they charge anyway, without being prompted to do so by a hike in the minimum-wage?"  This retort, I believe, has much merit, but a great deal more explanation and explication of background assumptions must be offered for it to carry the day among people who know economics.  I leave it to the comments section for Cafe patrons to divine what I have in mind here.]

Relatively small hikes, therefore, in the minimum-wage are paid for by employers taking home a tad fewer profits or consumers paying a tad more for the products they purchase (or a combination of the two).  A large hike in the minimum-wage, in contrast, would indeed reduce profits, or raise product prices, far too much.  The effects of these large reductions employers’ profits would indeed cause significant unemployment of unskilled workers.

This fourth reason is a squirrel’s nest of economic misconceptions.  I content myself here, though, to mention just one – namely, even if it’s true that all, or the great majority, of employers of unskilled workers have enough lee-way in their profits and prices to enable them to absorb, without negative effects on their employees, modest legislated increases in their costs of operation, focusing on the modest effects of only one such legislated increase (the minimum-wage hike) is to mistakenly ignore many other such mandated ‘modest’ increases in costs of operation.

Taken together, the additional costs – whatever the corresponding benefits – of regulations such as a legislated minimum-wage surely are real and extend well beyond lower (presumably lower excess) profits for employers.

In short, given the plethora of existing regulations that artificially raise the costs of operating businesses and employing workers, it’s mistaken to believe that there will be no negative consequences – probably higher unemployment – inflicted upon unsuspecting unskilled workers by a higher legislated minimum-wage.

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 .  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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Who needs the facts when you've got theory?


Prof Crabtree at work

Would you be surprised to hear that the human race is slowly becoming dumber, and dumber? Despite our advancements over the last tens or even hundreds of years, some ‘experts’ believe that humans are losing cognitive capabilities and becoming more emotionally unstable. One Stanford University researcher and geneticist, Dr. Gerald Crabtree, believes that our intellectual decline as a race has much to do with adverse genetic mutations. But there is more to it than that.

According to Crabtree, our cognitive and emotional capabilities are fueled and determined by the combined effort of thousands of genes. If a mutation occurred in any of of these genes, which is quite likely, then intelligence or emotional stability can be negatively impacted.

    “I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas, and a clear-sighted view of important issues. Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues,” the geneticist began his article in the scientific journal Trends in Genetics."

Further, the geneticist explains that people with specific adverse genetic mutations are more likely than ever to survive and live amongst the ‘strong.’ Darwin’s theory of ‘survival of the fittest’ is less applicable in today’s society, therefore those with better genes will not necessarily dominate in society as they would have in the past.

SOURCE

The fact that all the studies show a substantial rise in IQ during the 20th century is beneath Prof. Crabtree's notice, apparently.  If you've got time to waste, his full essay is here

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Industrial renaissance in the US: miracle or mirage?

Throughout his presidential election campaign last year, Barack Obama talked up signs of the revival of US industry. Only to be expected from someone seeking re-election, you might think. But he did highlight something tangible that a lot of others outside his political circle have also been discussing: how after years of the outsourcing of American jobs to China and other emerging markets, businesses are now ‘insourcing’ and ‘bringing jobs back to America’.

The notion of the revival of US industry, and of US manufacturing in particular, has been growing for some time now. In the summer of 2011, the prestigious Boston Consulting Group popularised the idea of a ‘manufacturing renaissance’ in its seminal article, ‘Made in America, Again: Why Manufacturing Will Return to the US’. It argued that a ‘combination of economic forces is fast eroding China’s cost advantage as an export platform for the North American market’. Rising costs abroad and falling costs in the United States mean that America ‘is becoming more attractive as a place to manufacture many goods consumed on this continent.’

And it’s not just starry-eyed politicians and consultants hoping that things are on the economic mend. Business leaders have endorsed this prospect of expanding production in the US. Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of the outsourcing pioneer General Electric, who is also head of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, thinks outsourcing is now outdated as a viable business model. Taking advantage of low-wage Chinese workers at the end of the 1990s, when they earned about 50 cents an hour (about one thirtieth of an American worker’s salary), seemed to make a lot of sense. But now things are more complex (or perhaps they always were?). ‘Outsourcing that is based only on labour costs is yesterday’s model’, says Immelt. ‘Complex trade-offs have always been involved in location decisions, but as these trade-offs have shifted, around 2008, we came to the conclusion that outsourcing was quickly becoming mostly outdated as a business model for GE Appliances.’

Moreover, Immelt has been putting his money where his mouth is: last year GE brought back to Kentucky the production of water heaters and refrigerators that had been outsourced to China and Mexico. Immelt told the Harvard Business Review last March that his company is now ‘outsourcing less and producing more in the US, [and] created more than 7,000 American manufacturing jobs in 2010 and 2011’. At the end of last year the influential Atlantic magazine ran two articles giving many more examples of returning US companies, ranging from home appliance maker Whirlpool, lift maker Otis, and even the frisbee maker Wham-O. Since then, other huge global companies, including Apple and Lenovo, have announced plans to bring production facilities home from Asia.

A range of arguments are advanced to explain the reshoring trend. Most commonly, it’s pointed out that Chinese wages have been rising substantially year-on-year, so the gap in labour costs is now less pronounced. The Boston Consulting Group highlights how ‘wage and benefit increases of 15 to 20 per cent per year at the average Chinese factory will slash China’s labour-cost advantage over low-cost states in the US, from 55 per cent today to 39 per cent in 2015, when adjusted for the higher productivity of US workers. Because labor accounts for a small portion of a product’s manufacturing costs, the savings gained from outsourcing to China will drop to single digits for many products.’

Other champions of the inshoring trend point to a previous overestimation of the benefits of going abroad: outsourcing relationships aren’t that simple to manage, and more complex and expansive supply chains can go wrong, not least when disrupted by natural catastrophes like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the Japanese one of 2011.

And then there’s all that cheaper energy from booming US shale oil and gas encouraging the reshoring of manufacturing. Techniques such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, have transformed North America’s energy landscape, unlocking vast reserves of shale energy that were long thought uneconomic. The shale boom has fuelled a rise of almost one-fifth in US gas production over the past five years. About 30 per cent of America’s gas is now sourced from domestically produced shale gas, according to Goldman Sachs, up from one per cent in 2001. The consensus forecast is that US natural gas production will rise between 25 and 30 per cent from 2010 to 2030.

How has the US benefited from this ‘industrial renaissance’? Not much, so far, judging by the latest data. While America’s trade deficit in energy has improved from where it was a few years ago, it is still no better than it was during the 1980s and 1990s. (See chart below.) Of course, if shale energy production takes off in the way it could, the picture will change dramatically over the next few years.

However, the benefits of the industrial renaissance to the rest of the trade deficit are more difficult to discern. One would expect to be seeing at least signs of a narrowing of the non-energy trade deficit. Manufacturing exports did hit a new record in 2011, but so too did imports. More of the same is forecast for 2012 when the annual figures are published. The American Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation (MAPI) reports that the US trade deficit in manufactures actually increased by seven per cent in the first half of 2012, continuing the upward trend since the end of the 2009 global recession.

The broader merchandise trade deficit figures, excluding energy, show a continuing deterioration after the fading of the normal recession-induced improvement, when imports fall away in line with declining production and household consumption. (See charts below.) This suggests, contrary to expectations of an even embryonic industrial renaissance, that the US is becoming more reliant on overseas production, not less.

The trade body, the US Business and Industry Council, concluded that this record trade deficit ‘should put to rest widespread claims by the president and others that American manufacturing is in renaissance mode’. In a more recent study, Alan Tonelson, one of the council’s research fellows, reported that imports in 2011 captured a record share of US markets even for advanced manufactured goods, ranging from semiconductors to pharmaceuticals to ball bearings to machine tools and dozens of other capital- and technology-intensive sectors. And this is an area where the US is supposed to hold a relative competitive strength because of its higher levels of R&D and technology.

The import penetration rate exceeded 37 per cent in 2011, well up on the 25 per cent in the earliest data year of 1997, and slightly up on 2010, when the industrial renaissance supposedly was stirring. Tonelson concluded, ‘The analysis strongly indicates that, contrary to widespread optimism about an American industrial renaissance, domestic manufacturing’s highest value sectors keep falling behind foreign-based rivals.’

Far from economic recovery being driven by a domestic manufacturing revival, the rising trade deficit accompanying a return to even sluggish growth expresses how weak the US production machine continues to be. The fact that we’ve seen a continuing deterioration in the trade deficit, even with the competitiveness benefit to US industry of a fall in the dollar’s exchange rate of over 25 per cent since 2002, including nearly 10 per cent since the end of the recession in June 2009, reinforces how dire is the current state of US industry.

The recent revival of US manufacturing jobs doesn’t do much to justify the renaissance story either. As Obama has highlighted, about 500,000 factory jobs have been created over the last three years since their low of 11.5 million jobs in January 2010. This compares to the US peak manufacturing jobs in the summer of 1979 at 19.6 million. As the chart illustrates, manufacturing employment drifted down slowly and a little erratically for the next 20 years, and then more precipitously with almost 6 million more jobs being lost since the start of 2000.The return of some production to the US from abroad will have contributed some of the recent welcome half-million increase. However, this pick up over three years is less than a quarter of the 2.3 million jobs lost in the two-year period from the official start of the recession in December 2007.

More HERE

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An Icelandic lapse?

Over the last few years, Iceland has provided a bit of counter-narrative to the anarchist critique of political government.

Most western democracies declared their pieces of the international finance sector “too big to fail” and bailed them out at taxpayer expense after the 2008 bank collapse. Iceland took the opposite tack.

Voters in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, elected an anarchist mayor, and six members of that mayor’s “Best Party,” to the city’s 15-member municipal council in 2010.

Voters in Iceland’s South, Southwest, Reykjavik North and Reykjavik South districts sent members of “The Movement” to the Althing (Iceland’s parliament, the oldest on Earth). Of particular interest is Reykjavik South representative Birgitta Jonsdottir, a Wikileaks volunteer and press freedom activist whose Twitter records were subpoenaed by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (Iceland’s Interior Minister courageously refused to cooperate with the FBI’s harassment of Wikileaks).

Not bad, I have to admit, as states go.

Alas, something is rotten in Denmar … er, Iceland. That same Interior Minister, Ogmundur Jonasson, is pushing an Internet censorship agenda in the name of protecting children.

Halla Gunnarsdottir, one of Jonasson’s advisors, is out front with the usual bait-and-switch: “This move is not anti-sex,” she says. “It is anti-violence because young children are seeing porn and acting it out.” In fact, the initiative is neither anti-sex nor anti-violence: It’s just anti-freedom.

Thankfully, some heroes can be counted upon to remain heroic: Birgitta Jonsdottir opposes the scheme. She assesses its chances of passage as “near zero” and its chances of working if it did pass as even lower. Her only sign of weakness in the matter is that she sympathizes with Jonasson, musing that maybe he just doesn’t know any better.

Be all that as it may, Jonsdottir puts her finger on the big problem with political government, even in such an enlightened nation as Iceland: “The fact is that this bill has already made many companies think twice before hosting their business in Iceland — not because they support porn, but because they fear the country’s laws could transit into the kind of full-blown censorship commonly attributed to countries like China and Saudi Arabia.”

Jonasson’s scheme, in other words, produces regime uncertainty (per Robert Higgs, “a pervasive uncertainty among investors about the security of their property rights in their capital and its prospective returns”).

Regime uncertainty is the state’s version of herpes: Its eruptions are unpredictable, it makes people think twice about intimate contact with the carrier, and yes, it sometimes literally kills babies. Among states — even Iceland, as this episode establishes — the infection rate is 100%.

The only issue I take with Higgs’s definition is that he defines it in solely economic terms and with respect to investors. I see no reason why it would not apply just as well to — for example — same-sex couples considering vacations in Uganda.

As Gideon J. Tucker put it in 1866, “no man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.” Not even in Iceland.

SOURCE

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Book review: Heavens on Earth – How to Create Mass Prosperity

For those who, after five years of austerity (and rising deficit), despair about how to create growth, Heavens on Earth is indispensable bedtime and boardroom reading. In it, JP Floru investigates eight countries which have transformed their economies to create lasting high growth.  In different times and places the methods used to make the switch from scarcity to plenty have been remarkably similar. At times it is surprising: who would think that there are great correlations between the Industrial Revolution in Britain, 2013 Communist China, post-World War II America and Pinochet-era Chile?

“If Julius Caesar had met George Washington in 1760, he would have found the world barely changed. He would have been served food prepared by slaves in a stately home. The average age would have been twenty-eight to thirty-five. Just 250 years later he would have heard talk of missions to Mars...” So what happened? The book brings these arguments to life throughout with such insights.

Meet “Sideline Stan”, the New Zealand Minister of Labour who systematically refused to intervene in social conflicts. Meet Hong Kong’s John Cowperthwaite, who sent statisticians arrived from Whitehall on the first plane back: statistics would only be used to interfere and harm the economy. At the same time Heavens on Earth explains the main economic concepts which are relevant today: the Laffer Curve, Austrian economics, the wisdom of Adam Smith (no coincidence: JP Floru is a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute) and the workings of Keynesian economics (or rather: why they do not work).

Although well-known existing ideas and quotes are used, at times the book is highly original: “Regulatory Failure Spiral” is the common enough situation of governments trying to rectify failing regulations with more failing regulations. The “Holy Trinity of Profligate Government: taxing, printing and borrowing” is extensively identified and lambasted. As said before, the links between highly different economic cultures may seem surprising. Some may also be surprised to learn that concern for the poor permeates the book. Poverty is not just a state in which people exist, it has to be created: it is created by economic oppression and only free markets can free the poor.

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 .  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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