By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, October 28, 2011
There's only one way the Occupy Wall Street movement can become like the tea parties, and that's for Barack Obama to lose in 2012. Why? Because Obama is the most divisive figure in American politics today.
I suspect that sentence reads funny to some people because in the mainstream press, "divisive" is usually a term reserved for "conservatives we disagree with." But as a factual matter it can apply to anybody who is, well, divisive.
Obviously, Obama divides the right and left. That's not all that interesting or relevant (even if it does represent a failure to live up to his "one America" rhetoric from 2008). But Obama also divides everyone else. Independents, whom he desperately needs to win re-election, are split over Obama, with the bulk siding with Republicans.
Even more significant, the left is deeply divided over Obama. According to reports, the Occupy Wall Street movement is torn over whether to support the incumbent president. Polling of the protestors is sketchy at best, but so far it's pretty clear that most of the protestors liked Obama in 2008, and now roughly half of them are disillusioned by, disappointed in, or opposed to Obama.
That should only make sense, right? If Occupy Wall Street is a sincere, organic, grassroots movement for radical change and overturning the status quo, it can't be 100 percent behind the guy who's been running the country for the last three years.
Moreover, Democrats had near total control of the government for Obama's first two years. Together, Obama and congressional Democrats already got their Wall Street and student-loan reforms, their health-care overhaul and a huge stimulus. And yet Occupy Wall Street is still furious with the political status quo. Does anyone believe Obama can both run on his record and co-opt the Occupy Wall Streeters?
A "political hip-hop artist" who goes by the name "Immortal Technique" summarizes the view of many OWSers. "We're willing to put [Obama's] second term on the altar of democracy and sacrifice it if we need to," I.T. told Rawstory.com, "to send a message to the rest of the world saying, 'If you promise us change, and then you deliver nothing but the same, if you do these little superficial changes to pacify the people, to placate people, then you expose yourself.'"
Of course, Occupy Wall Street is just one facet of Obama's larger problem. Why is he running as a left-leaning populist these days? Because he has to unify and energize his mopey and dispirited base, and hope that he can woo back independents later.
This is where comparisons to the tea parties are instructive. As I've long argued, a major motivating passion of the tea party movement was a long-delayed backlash against George W. Bush and his big-government conservatism. The Bush-Obama bailouts and ObamaCare were the perfect excuse for a disaffected conservative base (as well as some independents and libertarians) to vent frustration about ballooning deficits, expanded entitlements and other elements of Bush's "compassionate conservatism."
An iron law of politics is that parties out of power are more unified than parties in power. That's because when you control the government, members of the ruling coalition squabble over who gets what. When you don't control government, everyone can at least agree that the top priority is to win back control.
A corollary to that law is that it's ideologically empowering to be out of power. When you don't have responsibility for anything, you can afford the luxury of purity.
The tea parties had an easy time of it in 2009 because there was no one in power to defend and no compromises required. If the financial crisis had hit in 2006, the emergence of anything like the tea party would have torn the GOP apart. But in 2009, with Bush gone, Democrats running the show, and Obama championing a program that made George W. Bush look like Calvin Coolidge (praise be upon him), there was nothing holding back the tea parties.
For Occupy Wall Street to enjoy similar freedom, it can't be hobbled by having to defend the most powerful and important politician in America. You can't declare war with the status quo and support the chief author of the status quo at the same time. Similarly, you can't run for re-election and be joined at the hip with fringe revolutionaries.
If it were possible to buy stock in Occupy Wall Street, shareholders would be doing everything they could for a Republican victory in 2012. Only then will you see Democratic leaders and Immortal Technique fans alike, locked arm in arm, in united opposition to the Powers that Be.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
The Liberal Mind
By John C. Goodman
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Have you ever noticed that people on the left hold the public sector and the private sector to a different set of standards? If a public official and a private citizen commit the exact same wrongful act, the private citizen will be judged much more harshly.
Consider this revelation in the news the other day:
• Arizona…plans to limit adult Medicaid recipients to 25 days of hospital coverage a year, starting as soon as the end of October.
• Hawaii plans to cut Medicaid coverage to 10 days a year in April.
• Other states have already limited hospital stays under Medicaid: the limit is 45 days in Florida, 30 in Mississippi, 24 in Arkansas and 16 in Alabama.
What if you are in Hawaii and you need 15 days of hospital care instead of 10? Apparently you must pay out of your own pocket or forgo needed care.
What was the reaction to this news in the left wing press? Virtual silence. It was ignored by the editorial page of The New York Times, which ordinarily has an opinion on almost everything. Ditto for The Washington Post and The New Republic. Can you imagine the outrage that would have ensued if BlueCross had done the same thing?
Two provisions in the health reform act (ObamaCare) make this apparent double standard even more surprising. First, private insurers will not be allowed to have any annual or lifetime caps whatsoever on the amount they will spend on an enrollee under the new law. At the same time, half of the newly insured under the act will be enrolled in Medicaid — where the limits will apparently border on the unconscionable!
The inability to judge private and public programs by the same set of ethical norms has long affected left-of-center thinking.
If a private insurance company denies a breast cancer patient a bone marrow transplant, that’s considered a moral outrage — even if the procedure is experimental and is later shown not to work anyway. If the Arizona Medicaid program denies people organ transplants that do work and save lives, that is considered an unfortunate budget issue.
If 25,000 British cancer patients die every year because the National Health Service won’t buy the drugs that would have prolonged their lives and they cannot afford to pay for those drugs out of their own pockets, that is considered, again, an unfortunate budget problem. But if even one uninsured American dies prematurely because he or she cannot afford those very same drugs, that is ethically unacceptable.
Many people in health policy viscerally dislike the idea of private Medicare Advantage plans. They instead would like to see everyone in conventional Medicare — a public plan. You would be amazed at how many otherwise knowledgeable people are completely unaware of the fact that Medicare is not actually run by the federal government. It’s run by private contractors, including such private insurers as Cigna and BlueCross.
The view that public Medicare is good and private Medicare is bad really amounts to saying that when BlueCross is called “Medicare” it is good and altruistic, but when the same company is called “private insurer” it is bad and selfish. It makes no sense, but there are a lot of people on the left who think exactly that way.
If I can indulge in a bit of psychoanalysis, I believe most people on the left care much more about process than they care about results.
Take the Canadian health care system. I’ve engaged in many, many debates through the years over whether it’s better than our own. On such occasions I point out that (a) the U.S. system is more egalitarian than the Canadian system (and more egalitarian than the health systems of most other developed countries as well!), (b) uninsured Americans get as much or more preventive care than insured Canadians (as many or more mammograms, PSA tests, colonoscopies, etc.), (c) low-income whites in the United States are in better health than low-income whites in Canada, (d) although minorities do less well in both countries, we treat our minority populations better than the Canadians do, and (d) even though thousands of people in both countries go to hospital emergency rooms for care they can’t get anywhere else, people in our emergency rooms get treated quicker and better than they do in Canadian emergency rooms. [Interested readers can find all of this and more at my blog.]
Now I know what you are wondering. Have I ever convinced anyone to change his mind with such arguments? Not on your life. Not when the opponent was a real, true blue collectivist. What I discovered after many frustrating conversations with people who seemed perfectly rational throughout was that those who like the way health care is organized in Canada do not like it because of any particular result it achieves. They like it because they like the process.
In Canada, what care you receive, where you receive it and how you receive it is not determined by individual choice and the marketplace. It is determined collectively. For collectivists, that’s an end in itself.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Have you ever noticed that people on the left hold the public sector and the private sector to a different set of standards? If a public official and a private citizen commit the exact same wrongful act, the private citizen will be judged much more harshly.
Consider this revelation in the news the other day:
• Arizona…plans to limit adult Medicaid recipients to 25 days of hospital coverage a year, starting as soon as the end of October.
• Hawaii plans to cut Medicaid coverage to 10 days a year in April.
• Other states have already limited hospital stays under Medicaid: the limit is 45 days in Florida, 30 in Mississippi, 24 in Arkansas and 16 in Alabama.
What if you are in Hawaii and you need 15 days of hospital care instead of 10? Apparently you must pay out of your own pocket or forgo needed care.
What was the reaction to this news in the left wing press? Virtual silence. It was ignored by the editorial page of The New York Times, which ordinarily has an opinion on almost everything. Ditto for The Washington Post and The New Republic. Can you imagine the outrage that would have ensued if BlueCross had done the same thing?
Two provisions in the health reform act (ObamaCare) make this apparent double standard even more surprising. First, private insurers will not be allowed to have any annual or lifetime caps whatsoever on the amount they will spend on an enrollee under the new law. At the same time, half of the newly insured under the act will be enrolled in Medicaid — where the limits will apparently border on the unconscionable!
The inability to judge private and public programs by the same set of ethical norms has long affected left-of-center thinking.
If a private insurance company denies a breast cancer patient a bone marrow transplant, that’s considered a moral outrage — even if the procedure is experimental and is later shown not to work anyway. If the Arizona Medicaid program denies people organ transplants that do work and save lives, that is considered an unfortunate budget issue.
If 25,000 British cancer patients die every year because the National Health Service won’t buy the drugs that would have prolonged their lives and they cannot afford to pay for those drugs out of their own pockets, that is considered, again, an unfortunate budget problem. But if even one uninsured American dies prematurely because he or she cannot afford those very same drugs, that is ethically unacceptable.
Many people in health policy viscerally dislike the idea of private Medicare Advantage plans. They instead would like to see everyone in conventional Medicare — a public plan. You would be amazed at how many otherwise knowledgeable people are completely unaware of the fact that Medicare is not actually run by the federal government. It’s run by private contractors, including such private insurers as Cigna and BlueCross.
The view that public Medicare is good and private Medicare is bad really amounts to saying that when BlueCross is called “Medicare” it is good and altruistic, but when the same company is called “private insurer” it is bad and selfish. It makes no sense, but there are a lot of people on the left who think exactly that way.
If I can indulge in a bit of psychoanalysis, I believe most people on the left care much more about process than they care about results.
Take the Canadian health care system. I’ve engaged in many, many debates through the years over whether it’s better than our own. On such occasions I point out that (a) the U.S. system is more egalitarian than the Canadian system (and more egalitarian than the health systems of most other developed countries as well!), (b) uninsured Americans get as much or more preventive care than insured Canadians (as many or more mammograms, PSA tests, colonoscopies, etc.), (c) low-income whites in the United States are in better health than low-income whites in Canada, (d) although minorities do less well in both countries, we treat our minority populations better than the Canadians do, and (d) even though thousands of people in both countries go to hospital emergency rooms for care they can’t get anywhere else, people in our emergency rooms get treated quicker and better than they do in Canadian emergency rooms. [Interested readers can find all of this and more at my blog.]
Now I know what you are wondering. Have I ever convinced anyone to change his mind with such arguments? Not on your life. Not when the opponent was a real, true blue collectivist. What I discovered after many frustrating conversations with people who seemed perfectly rational throughout was that those who like the way health care is organized in Canada do not like it because of any particular result it achieves. They like it because they like the process.
In Canada, what care you receive, where you receive it and how you receive it is not determined by individual choice and the marketplace. It is determined collectively. For collectivists, that’s an end in itself.
Death to Tenure
By Mike Adams
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Julio Pino is a genocidal anti-Semite who uses his university email account to boast of sodomizing the mothers of his political opponents. But he has the protection of tenure. And he also has the protection of a cowardly administration, which fails to sufficiently condemn the behavior of a man who is probably too effeminate to act on his threats of violence and intimidation.
Pino, the unhinged Kent State University history professor, recently shouted "Death to Israel" during a speech by a former Israeli diplomat. The university’s president, Lester Lefton, now says that statementwas “deplorable.” Lefton issued a statement saying Julio Pino had a right to shout "Death to Israel” and disrupt someone else’s speech. That’s good to know because I plan to barge into Julio Pino’s history class next week and shout “Death to Julio Pino!” If the president doesn’t write a letter supporting my right to do so, I plan to barge into his office and shout “Death to President Lefton!”
I can do all this because we all know that shouting other people down and drowning out their protected free speech with threats of violence is also protected free speech. It’s what the Founding Fathers intended. Death to Jefferson! Death to Madison! Kill them all!
President Lefton surprised me when he wrote "We value critical thinking at this university and encourage students to engage with ideas that they find difficult or make them uncomfortable.” Well that’s just great! That must mean that Kent State has no university speech code. And that means we can engage in a little experimentation.
First, I say we go the Kent State diversity center and shout “Death to Africa!” and “Death to San Francisco!” If we have time after lunch, then we can go to the Kent State Women’s Center and shout “Death to Feminism!” If the point is lost on them, then we can ask a more serious question: Why have you not condemned Julio Pino for claiming – with his university email address - that he forcibly sodomized a woman who is a senior citizen?
For the record, President Lefton (see http://www.kent.edu/president/index.cfm), said this about Julio Pino’s most recent outburst: "We hope that our faculty will always model how best to combine passion for one's position with respect for those with whom we disagree. Calling for the destruction of the state from which our guest comes (as do some of our students, faculty and community members) is a grotesque failure to model these values."
Note that Lefton was talking about the “Death to Israel” remarks. Pino’s claims that he forcibly sodomized a senior citizen have yet to be condemned. Kent State officials are still trying to determine whether Pino’s email account was hacked as he claims. By the way, the investigation seems to have been lingering for about 18 months with no conclusion. Maybe that means Pino’s computer wasn’t hacked. Maybe he’s just a sociopath. Maybe Kent State University is just a den of spineless cowards.
The irony of the entire “Death to Israel” episode is that it came after Pino asked the Israeli speaker how he and his government could justify providing aid to countries with “blood money” he says came from the deaths of Palestinian children and babies. The speaker tried to move on after the absurd question. Pino started shouting and then left. He left many wondering “Was this the same Julio Pino who wrote an editorial to the Kent State student newspaper urging Palestinian children to strap bombs to their bodies to kill innocent Jews?” Okay, it really wasn’t irony. It was just blatant hypocrisy from a self-righteous racist.
Pino did not respond last Wednesday when I wrote to him about the “Death to Israel” incident. Maybe someone hacked his email account. Or maybe he was just out forcibly sodomizing a senior citizen. Sounds about right, since there’s no evidence his email has even been hacked.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently noted that Julio Pino was also caught up in a controversy in 2007 when he was cited on websites as being linked to an extremist Islamic website that espoused jihad and published bomb-making instructions. The Plain Dealer notes that “Kent State officials at the time said the extremist site had no connection to Pino or to the university.”
What the Plain Dealer does not note is that Pino and his former department chair have since admitted his connection to the terrorist website. Add the Plain Dealer to the list of cowards protecting a tenured terrorist who sucks the blood of the over-burdened taxpayer.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Julio Pino is a genocidal anti-Semite who uses his university email account to boast of sodomizing the mothers of his political opponents. But he has the protection of tenure. And he also has the protection of a cowardly administration, which fails to sufficiently condemn the behavior of a man who is probably too effeminate to act on his threats of violence and intimidation.
Pino, the unhinged Kent State University history professor, recently shouted "Death to Israel" during a speech by a former Israeli diplomat. The university’s president, Lester Lefton, now says that statementwas “deplorable.” Lefton issued a statement saying Julio Pino had a right to shout "Death to Israel” and disrupt someone else’s speech. That’s good to know because I plan to barge into Julio Pino’s history class next week and shout “Death to Julio Pino!” If the president doesn’t write a letter supporting my right to do so, I plan to barge into his office and shout “Death to President Lefton!”
I can do all this because we all know that shouting other people down and drowning out their protected free speech with threats of violence is also protected free speech. It’s what the Founding Fathers intended. Death to Jefferson! Death to Madison! Kill them all!
President Lefton surprised me when he wrote "We value critical thinking at this university and encourage students to engage with ideas that they find difficult or make them uncomfortable.” Well that’s just great! That must mean that Kent State has no university speech code. And that means we can engage in a little experimentation.
First, I say we go the Kent State diversity center and shout “Death to Africa!” and “Death to San Francisco!” If we have time after lunch, then we can go to the Kent State Women’s Center and shout “Death to Feminism!” If the point is lost on them, then we can ask a more serious question: Why have you not condemned Julio Pino for claiming – with his university email address - that he forcibly sodomized a woman who is a senior citizen?
For the record, President Lefton (see http://www.kent.edu/president/index.cfm), said this about Julio Pino’s most recent outburst: "We hope that our faculty will always model how best to combine passion for one's position with respect for those with whom we disagree. Calling for the destruction of the state from which our guest comes (as do some of our students, faculty and community members) is a grotesque failure to model these values."
Note that Lefton was talking about the “Death to Israel” remarks. Pino’s claims that he forcibly sodomized a senior citizen have yet to be condemned. Kent State officials are still trying to determine whether Pino’s email account was hacked as he claims. By the way, the investigation seems to have been lingering for about 18 months with no conclusion. Maybe that means Pino’s computer wasn’t hacked. Maybe he’s just a sociopath. Maybe Kent State University is just a den of spineless cowards.
The irony of the entire “Death to Israel” episode is that it came after Pino asked the Israeli speaker how he and his government could justify providing aid to countries with “blood money” he says came from the deaths of Palestinian children and babies. The speaker tried to move on after the absurd question. Pino started shouting and then left. He left many wondering “Was this the same Julio Pino who wrote an editorial to the Kent State student newspaper urging Palestinian children to strap bombs to their bodies to kill innocent Jews?” Okay, it really wasn’t irony. It was just blatant hypocrisy from a self-righteous racist.
Pino did not respond last Wednesday when I wrote to him about the “Death to Israel” incident. Maybe someone hacked his email account. Or maybe he was just out forcibly sodomizing a senior citizen. Sounds about right, since there’s no evidence his email has even been hacked.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently noted that Julio Pino was also caught up in a controversy in 2007 when he was cited on websites as being linked to an extremist Islamic website that espoused jihad and published bomb-making instructions. The Plain Dealer notes that “Kent State officials at the time said the extremist site had no connection to Pino or to the university.”
What the Plain Dealer does not note is that Pino and his former department chair have since admitted his connection to the terrorist website. Add the Plain Dealer to the list of cowards protecting a tenured terrorist who sucks the blood of the over-burdened taxpayer.
Blame the Sexual Revolution, Not Men
By Mona Charen
Friday, October 28, 2011
Kate Bolick stares out at the world from the cover of The Atlantic magazine. She's wearing a black lace evening dress. "What, Me Marry?" asks the headline. She isn't smiling.
In fact, she isn't smiling in any of the photos that accompany her several thousand-word essay on singleness, marriage and the changing nature of dating and mating in America today. Bolick, 38, is groping toward accepting the idea that she may never marry. She badly wants to convince herself -- and us -- that older ideas about "unhappy" spinsters are silly cultural baggage best dropped off at the curb. And yet, there are those glamour shots -- Bolick behind the wheel wearing a fetching red dress; Bolick in a gold evening gown holding a glass of champagne; Bolick in a black cocktail dress -- but her expressions range from pensive to sad -- never happy.
Bolick seems genuinely conflicted about marriage. The daughter of a committed feminist, she marched off to third grade "in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE." She recalls that when she was cuddling in the back seat of the family car with her high school boyfriend, her mother turned around and asked, "Isn't it time you two started seeing other people?" She took it for granted, she writes, "that (I) would marry, and that there would always be men (I) wanted to marry."
So sure was she of the limitless romantic opportunities available that at the age of 28, she broke up with a wonderful boyfriend. They had been together for three years. He was "an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind." Why did she discard him? "Something was missing."
Ten years later, she writes somewhat (though not entirely) ruefully "If dating and mating is in fact a marketplace . . . today we're contending with a new 'dating gap,' where marriage-minded women are increasingly confronted with either deadbeats or players."
There is a great deal of interesting data in this piece. According to the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of Millennials and 43 percent of Gen Xers think marriage is becoming obsolete. As of 2010, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, compared with 26 percent in 1980. Women account for the lion's share of bachelors and masters degrees, and make up a majority of the work force. Three quarters of the jobs lost during the recession were lost by men. "One recent study found a 40 percent increase in the number of men who are shorter than their wives." Fully 50 percent of the adult population is single, compared with 33 percent in 1950.
But these trends, however interesting, shed only an oblique light on the problem of the decline in marriageable males. Bolick edges closer to the truth in her discussion of sex.
"The early 1990s," she writes, "witnessed the dawn of the '"hookup culture"' at universities, as colleges stopped acting in loco parentis (actually they relinquished that role in the 1970s) and undergraduates . . . started throwing themselves into a frenzy of one-night-stands." Some young women, she notes, felt "forced into a promiscuity they didn't ask for," whereas young men "couldn't be happier."
According to economist Robert H. Frank, "when available women significantly outnumber men . . . courtship behavior changes in the direction of what men want." And vice versa. If there's a shortage of women, the females have more power to demand what they want, which tends to be (surprise!) monogamy. On college campuses, women outnumber men by 57 to 43 percent.
But economic analysis can take you only so far. Men's capacity to insist upon promiscuity rests completely on female cooperation. And women have been foolishly compliant for decades.
They've conspired in their own disempowerment, not because they love their sexual freedom (though a few may), but because people like Gloria Steinem and Ms. Bolick's mother convinced them that the old sexual mores, along with marriage and children, were oppressive to women.
The resulting decline of marriage has been a disaster for children, a deep disappointment to reluctantly single women and unhealthy for single men, who are less happy, shorter-lived and less wealthy than married men. The sexual revolution has left a trail of destruction in its wake, even when its victims don't recognize the perpetrator.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Kate Bolick stares out at the world from the cover of The Atlantic magazine. She's wearing a black lace evening dress. "What, Me Marry?" asks the headline. She isn't smiling.
In fact, she isn't smiling in any of the photos that accompany her several thousand-word essay on singleness, marriage and the changing nature of dating and mating in America today. Bolick, 38, is groping toward accepting the idea that she may never marry. She badly wants to convince herself -- and us -- that older ideas about "unhappy" spinsters are silly cultural baggage best dropped off at the curb. And yet, there are those glamour shots -- Bolick behind the wheel wearing a fetching red dress; Bolick in a gold evening gown holding a glass of champagne; Bolick in a black cocktail dress -- but her expressions range from pensive to sad -- never happy.
Bolick seems genuinely conflicted about marriage. The daughter of a committed feminist, she marched off to third grade "in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE." She recalls that when she was cuddling in the back seat of the family car with her high school boyfriend, her mother turned around and asked, "Isn't it time you two started seeing other people?" She took it for granted, she writes, "that (I) would marry, and that there would always be men (I) wanted to marry."
So sure was she of the limitless romantic opportunities available that at the age of 28, she broke up with a wonderful boyfriend. They had been together for three years. He was "an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind." Why did she discard him? "Something was missing."
Ten years later, she writes somewhat (though not entirely) ruefully "If dating and mating is in fact a marketplace . . . today we're contending with a new 'dating gap,' where marriage-minded women are increasingly confronted with either deadbeats or players."
There is a great deal of interesting data in this piece. According to the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of Millennials and 43 percent of Gen Xers think marriage is becoming obsolete. As of 2010, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, compared with 26 percent in 1980. Women account for the lion's share of bachelors and masters degrees, and make up a majority of the work force. Three quarters of the jobs lost during the recession were lost by men. "One recent study found a 40 percent increase in the number of men who are shorter than their wives." Fully 50 percent of the adult population is single, compared with 33 percent in 1950.
But these trends, however interesting, shed only an oblique light on the problem of the decline in marriageable males. Bolick edges closer to the truth in her discussion of sex.
"The early 1990s," she writes, "witnessed the dawn of the '"hookup culture"' at universities, as colleges stopped acting in loco parentis (actually they relinquished that role in the 1970s) and undergraduates . . . started throwing themselves into a frenzy of one-night-stands." Some young women, she notes, felt "forced into a promiscuity they didn't ask for," whereas young men "couldn't be happier."
According to economist Robert H. Frank, "when available women significantly outnumber men . . . courtship behavior changes in the direction of what men want." And vice versa. If there's a shortage of women, the females have more power to demand what they want, which tends to be (surprise!) monogamy. On college campuses, women outnumber men by 57 to 43 percent.
But economic analysis can take you only so far. Men's capacity to insist upon promiscuity rests completely on female cooperation. And women have been foolishly compliant for decades.
They've conspired in their own disempowerment, not because they love their sexual freedom (though a few may), but because people like Gloria Steinem and Ms. Bolick's mother convinced them that the old sexual mores, along with marriage and children, were oppressive to women.
The resulting decline of marriage has been a disaster for children, a deep disappointment to reluctantly single women and unhealthy for single men, who are less happy, shorter-lived and less wealthy than married men. The sexual revolution has left a trail of destruction in its wake, even when its victims don't recognize the perpetrator.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Global Warming -- RIP
By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Not long ago, candidate Obama promised to cool the planet and lower the rising seas. Indeed, he campaigned on passing "cap-and-trade" legislation, a radical, costly effort to reduce America's traditional carbon energy use.
The theory was that new taxes and greater regulations would make Americans pay more for fossil-fuel energy -- a good thing if it reduced our burning of coal, oil and gas. Obama was not shy in admitting that under his green plans, electricity prices would "necessarily skyrocket." His energy secretary, Steven Chu, at one point had even said, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe" -- that is, about $8-$10 per gallon. Fairly or not, the warming movement seemed to cast a tiny elite imposing costs on a poorer and supposedly less informed middle class.
But despite a Democrat-controlled House and Senate in 2009-2010, President Obama never passed into law any global warming legislation. Now the issue is deader than a doornail -- despite the efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency to enact new regulations that would never pass Congress.
So what happened to the global warming craze?
Corruption within the climate-change industry explains some of the sudden turnoff. "Climategate" -- the unauthorized 2009 release of private emails from the Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom -- revealed that many of the world's top climate scientists were knee-deep in manipulating scientific evidence to support preconceived conclusions and personal agendas. Shrill warnings about everything from melting Himalayan glaciers to shrinking polar bear populations turned out not always to be supported by scientific facts.
Unfortunately, "green" during the last three years has also become synonymous with Solyndra-style crony capitalism. Common-sense ideas like more windmills, solar panels, retrofitted houses and electric cars have all been in the news lately. But the common themes were depressingly similar: few jobs created and little competitively priced energy produced, but plenty of political donors who landed hundreds of millions of dollars in low-interest loans from the government.
Of course, it didn't help that the world's most prominent green spokesman, Nobel laureate Al Gore, made tens of millions of dollars from his own advocacy. And he adopted a lifestyle of jet travel and energy-hungry homes at odds with his pleas for everyone else to cut back.
But even without the corruption and hypocrisy, sincere advocates of man-made global warming themselves overreached. At news that the planet had not heated up at all during the last 10 years, "global warming" gave way to "climate change" -- as if to warn the public that unseasonable cold or wet weather was just as man-caused as were the old specters of drought and scorching temperatures.
Then, when "climate change" was not still enough to frighten the public into action, yet a third term followed: "climate chaos." Suddenly some "green experts" claimed that even more terrifying disasters -- from periodic hurricanes and tornadoes to volcanoes and earthquakes -- could for the first time be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. At that point, serially changing the name of the problem suggested to many that there might not be such a problem after all.
Current hard times also explain the demise of global warming advocacy. With high unemployment and near nonexistent economic growth, Americans do not want to shut down generating plants or pay new surcharges on their power bills. Most people worry first about having any car that runs -- not whether it's a more expensive green hybrid model.
Over the last half-century, Americans have agreed that smoky plants and polluting industries needed to be cleaned up. But when the green movement began to classify clean-burning heat as a pollutant, it began to lose the cash-strapped public.
While the Obama administration was subsidizing failed or inefficient green industries, radical breakthroughs in domestic fossil-fuel exploration and recovery -- especially horizontal drilling and fracking -- have vastly increased the known American reserves of gas and oil. Modern efficient engines have meant that both can be consumed with little, if any, pollution -- at a time when a struggling U.S. economy is paying nearly half a trillion dollars for imported fossil fuels. The public apparently would prefer developing more of our own gas, oil, shale, tar sands and coal as an alternative to going broke by either importing more fuels from abroad or subsidizing more inefficient windmills and solar panels at home.
We simply don't know positively whether recent human activity has caused the planet to warm up to dangerous levels. But we do know that those who insist it does are sometimes disingenuous, often profit-minded, and nearly always impractical.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Not long ago, candidate Obama promised to cool the planet and lower the rising seas. Indeed, he campaigned on passing "cap-and-trade" legislation, a radical, costly effort to reduce America's traditional carbon energy use.
The theory was that new taxes and greater regulations would make Americans pay more for fossil-fuel energy -- a good thing if it reduced our burning of coal, oil and gas. Obama was not shy in admitting that under his green plans, electricity prices would "necessarily skyrocket." His energy secretary, Steven Chu, at one point had even said, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe" -- that is, about $8-$10 per gallon. Fairly or not, the warming movement seemed to cast a tiny elite imposing costs on a poorer and supposedly less informed middle class.
But despite a Democrat-controlled House and Senate in 2009-2010, President Obama never passed into law any global warming legislation. Now the issue is deader than a doornail -- despite the efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency to enact new regulations that would never pass Congress.
So what happened to the global warming craze?
Corruption within the climate-change industry explains some of the sudden turnoff. "Climategate" -- the unauthorized 2009 release of private emails from the Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom -- revealed that many of the world's top climate scientists were knee-deep in manipulating scientific evidence to support preconceived conclusions and personal agendas. Shrill warnings about everything from melting Himalayan glaciers to shrinking polar bear populations turned out not always to be supported by scientific facts.
Unfortunately, "green" during the last three years has also become synonymous with Solyndra-style crony capitalism. Common-sense ideas like more windmills, solar panels, retrofitted houses and electric cars have all been in the news lately. But the common themes were depressingly similar: few jobs created and little competitively priced energy produced, but plenty of political donors who landed hundreds of millions of dollars in low-interest loans from the government.
Of course, it didn't help that the world's most prominent green spokesman, Nobel laureate Al Gore, made tens of millions of dollars from his own advocacy. And he adopted a lifestyle of jet travel and energy-hungry homes at odds with his pleas for everyone else to cut back.
But even without the corruption and hypocrisy, sincere advocates of man-made global warming themselves overreached. At news that the planet had not heated up at all during the last 10 years, "global warming" gave way to "climate change" -- as if to warn the public that unseasonable cold or wet weather was just as man-caused as were the old specters of drought and scorching temperatures.
Then, when "climate change" was not still enough to frighten the public into action, yet a third term followed: "climate chaos." Suddenly some "green experts" claimed that even more terrifying disasters -- from periodic hurricanes and tornadoes to volcanoes and earthquakes -- could for the first time be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. At that point, serially changing the name of the problem suggested to many that there might not be such a problem after all.
Current hard times also explain the demise of global warming advocacy. With high unemployment and near nonexistent economic growth, Americans do not want to shut down generating plants or pay new surcharges on their power bills. Most people worry first about having any car that runs -- not whether it's a more expensive green hybrid model.
Over the last half-century, Americans have agreed that smoky plants and polluting industries needed to be cleaned up. But when the green movement began to classify clean-burning heat as a pollutant, it began to lose the cash-strapped public.
While the Obama administration was subsidizing failed or inefficient green industries, radical breakthroughs in domestic fossil-fuel exploration and recovery -- especially horizontal drilling and fracking -- have vastly increased the known American reserves of gas and oil. Modern efficient engines have meant that both can be consumed with little, if any, pollution -- at a time when a struggling U.S. economy is paying nearly half a trillion dollars for imported fossil fuels. The public apparently would prefer developing more of our own gas, oil, shale, tar sands and coal as an alternative to going broke by either importing more fuels from abroad or subsidizing more inefficient windmills and solar panels at home.
We simply don't know positively whether recent human activity has caused the planet to warm up to dangerous levels. But we do know that those who insist it does are sometimes disingenuous, often profit-minded, and nearly always impractical.
Occupy Wall Street Demands Life Without Hardship
By Larry Elder
Thursday, October 27, 2011
"Don't touch me!" the man in the wheelchair shouted to stop me from placing my hand on what used to be his left arm.
"I'm sorry -- I was just -- "
"I know what you were doing," he said calmly. "You were showing me you care. I get it. But you have no idea how much pain I'm in. Don't feel bad. People are always touching me -- and because my left arm is gone and most people are right-handed, well ... Doctors, believe it or not, are the worst -- always touching me there. You'd think they of all people would know better. But they don't." He laughed.
A few minutes earlier, I walked into this pharmacy to fill a prescription, annoyed at having to go. But my dentist said I had a gum infection and that I needed an antibacterial mouthwash. Damn, I thought, of all the things I needed to do today, now this.
The place was small, and this wheelchair-bound double amputee sat parked in front of a row of empty chairs. I decided to stand rather than navigate my way through the narrow space between the chairs, some people sitting near me and the guy in the wheelchair.
"Sir," he said, motioning with his head to an empty seat, "You can sit here."
In yet another addition to the growing list of brain-dead, things-I-wish-I-could-take-back-but-somehow-managed-to-escape-my-mouth, I responded half-truthfully: "No, thanks. I've been sitting all day."
Jeez!
Did I just say to a guy sitting in a wheelchair that I'd rather stand because "I've been sitting all day?" Yes, I did. Now what? Well, at that point, I said to myself, I'm all in. I doubled down.
"But," I added, "I suppose you've been sitting all day, too -- so I think I will."
To my great relief, he laughed -- a real, down-home, full-throated laugh. The pharmacist watching the exchange laughed, too, as did the handful of customers waiting to have their prescriptions filled.
I sat down, and the man -- whose name, I learned, was Michael -- and I started talking.
"Did you have an accident?" I carefully asked.
The story was beyond tragic. Sixteen years earlier, he was riding his motorcycle when "an old lady fell asleep" and ran head-on into him. He lost his right leg and his left arm. More than a dozen surgeries later, he remains in constant pain. He was sucking on something that resembled a Tootsie Pop.
"It slowly releases a medication that gives me enough relief to handle the pain."
He sued the old lady. But she had neither insurance nor assets, and there was nothing to recover.
"Do you have health insurance?" I asked the 40-something-year-old bearded man.
He did, but his deductible left him owing $3.5 million -- and counting.
"Do you have $3.5 million?" I asked.
"Does it look like it?" he laughed.
Before the accident, he was "quite the athlete."
"Not on any team. I was in college when this happened, played lots of intramural sports. You name it -- baseball, basketball, water sports, I did it. Loved sports."
"Are you able to work?"
"Probably. But if I do, then my benefits get cut off."
He was on government assistance, but the conditions -- at least for maximum benefits -- excluded work and placed other restrictions.
"The moment I get married, everything changes. My benefits get reduced. F---ed up, but that's the system." He laughed again.
"Are you in a relationship?"
He'd had been dating about a year before the accident, and he and his girlfriend were still together.
"She manned up," I said.
"Got that right. Not part of the 99 percent."
"Ninety-nine percent?"
"Ninety-nine percent of the time the relationship ends over something like this," he said. "Look, I understand. This is a tough deal for a wife, let along a girlfriend. But God gave me a good one. Believe me. I've got a good one."
He excused himself to go outdoors for a cigarette. The pharmacist, a young woman who had been watching and listening to our conversation, said: "Michael's a good man. You made him laugh."
"He seems happy," I said.
"He is. Never complains. Never feels sorry for himself. Sometimes he comes in here just to talk. But I've never seen him laugh like that."
That night, to prepare the next day's radio broadcast, I watched cable news. The lead story was about Occupy Wall Street -- a group that seems to consist of mostly young, able-bodied, able-minded people with their well-honed sense of entitlement "protesting" against a country that much of the world would lie, cheat, steal and kill to enter. They finally issued their list of 13 demands. These included, but were not limited to, a "guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment." Such a life would provide the Occupy folks plenty of time to think up more demands -- while sitting around all day.
Was Michael watching, I wondered. Not likely, I decided. He was probably somewhere appreciating the outdoors with his girlfriend -- smoking a cigarette. And laughing.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
"Don't touch me!" the man in the wheelchair shouted to stop me from placing my hand on what used to be his left arm.
"I'm sorry -- I was just -- "
"I know what you were doing," he said calmly. "You were showing me you care. I get it. But you have no idea how much pain I'm in. Don't feel bad. People are always touching me -- and because my left arm is gone and most people are right-handed, well ... Doctors, believe it or not, are the worst -- always touching me there. You'd think they of all people would know better. But they don't." He laughed.
A few minutes earlier, I walked into this pharmacy to fill a prescription, annoyed at having to go. But my dentist said I had a gum infection and that I needed an antibacterial mouthwash. Damn, I thought, of all the things I needed to do today, now this.
The place was small, and this wheelchair-bound double amputee sat parked in front of a row of empty chairs. I decided to stand rather than navigate my way through the narrow space between the chairs, some people sitting near me and the guy in the wheelchair.
"Sir," he said, motioning with his head to an empty seat, "You can sit here."
In yet another addition to the growing list of brain-dead, things-I-wish-I-could-take-back-but-somehow-managed-to-escape-my-mouth, I responded half-truthfully: "No, thanks. I've been sitting all day."
Jeez!
Did I just say to a guy sitting in a wheelchair that I'd rather stand because "I've been sitting all day?" Yes, I did. Now what? Well, at that point, I said to myself, I'm all in. I doubled down.
"But," I added, "I suppose you've been sitting all day, too -- so I think I will."
To my great relief, he laughed -- a real, down-home, full-throated laugh. The pharmacist watching the exchange laughed, too, as did the handful of customers waiting to have their prescriptions filled.
I sat down, and the man -- whose name, I learned, was Michael -- and I started talking.
"Did you have an accident?" I carefully asked.
The story was beyond tragic. Sixteen years earlier, he was riding his motorcycle when "an old lady fell asleep" and ran head-on into him. He lost his right leg and his left arm. More than a dozen surgeries later, he remains in constant pain. He was sucking on something that resembled a Tootsie Pop.
"It slowly releases a medication that gives me enough relief to handle the pain."
He sued the old lady. But she had neither insurance nor assets, and there was nothing to recover.
"Do you have health insurance?" I asked the 40-something-year-old bearded man.
He did, but his deductible left him owing $3.5 million -- and counting.
"Do you have $3.5 million?" I asked.
"Does it look like it?" he laughed.
Before the accident, he was "quite the athlete."
"Not on any team. I was in college when this happened, played lots of intramural sports. You name it -- baseball, basketball, water sports, I did it. Loved sports."
"Are you able to work?"
"Probably. But if I do, then my benefits get cut off."
He was on government assistance, but the conditions -- at least for maximum benefits -- excluded work and placed other restrictions.
"The moment I get married, everything changes. My benefits get reduced. F---ed up, but that's the system." He laughed again.
"Are you in a relationship?"
He'd had been dating about a year before the accident, and he and his girlfriend were still together.
"She manned up," I said.
"Got that right. Not part of the 99 percent."
"Ninety-nine percent?"
"Ninety-nine percent of the time the relationship ends over something like this," he said. "Look, I understand. This is a tough deal for a wife, let along a girlfriend. But God gave me a good one. Believe me. I've got a good one."
He excused himself to go outdoors for a cigarette. The pharmacist, a young woman who had been watching and listening to our conversation, said: "Michael's a good man. You made him laugh."
"He seems happy," I said.
"He is. Never complains. Never feels sorry for himself. Sometimes he comes in here just to talk. But I've never seen him laugh like that."
That night, to prepare the next day's radio broadcast, I watched cable news. The lead story was about Occupy Wall Street -- a group that seems to consist of mostly young, able-bodied, able-minded people with their well-honed sense of entitlement "protesting" against a country that much of the world would lie, cheat, steal and kill to enter. They finally issued their list of 13 demands. These included, but were not limited to, a "guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment." Such a life would provide the Occupy folks plenty of time to think up more demands -- while sitting around all day.
Was Michael watching, I wondered. Not likely, I decided. He was probably somewhere appreciating the outdoors with his girlfriend -- smoking a cigarette. And laughing.
If I Were a Liberal
By Ann Coulter
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
If I were a liberal, I would have spent the last week in shock that a Democratic audience in Flint, Mich., cheered Vice President Joe Biden's description of a policeman being killed. (And if I were a liberal desperately striving to keep my job on MSNBC, I'd say the Democrats looked "hot and horny" for dead cops -- as Chris Matthews said of a Republican audience that cheered for the death penalty.)
Biden's audience whooped and applauded last week in Flint when he said that without Obama's jobs bill, police will be "outgunned and outmanned." (Wild applause!)
I suppose liberals would claim they were applauding because they believe Obama's jobs bill will prevent these murders. Which reminds me: Republicans believe the death penalty prevents murders!
Which belief bears more relationship to reality?
In a case I have previously mentioned, Kenneth McDuff was released from death row soon after the Supreme Court overturned the death penalty in 1972 and went on to murder more than a dozen people.
William Jordan and Anthony Prevatte were sentenced to death in 1974 for abducting a teacher, murdering him and stealing his car. They came under suspicion when they were caught throwing the murder weapon from the stolen vehicle in a high-speed car chase with the cops and because they were in possession of the dead man's wallet, briefcase and watch.
The Georgia Supreme Court overturned their capital sentences in an opinion by Robert H. Hall, who was appointed by Gov. Jimmy Carter.
Hall said that the death sentences had to be set aside on the idiotic grounds that the jurors had overheard the prosecutor say that the judge and state supreme court would have the opportunity to review a death sentence, which might have caused them to take their sentencing role less seriously.
(If the facts had been the reverse, the court would have overturned the death sentences on the grounds that the jurors did not take their sentencing decision seriously, under the misapprehension that no judge or court would second-guess them.)
Prevatte was later released from "life in prison" and proceeded to murder his girlfriend. Jordan escaped and has never been found.
As president, Carter appointed Hall to a federal district court.
Darryl Kemp was sentenced to death in California in 1960 for the rape and murder of Marjorie Hipperson and also convicted for raping two other women. But he sat on death row long enough -- 12 years -- for the death penalty to be declared unconstitutional. He was paroled five years later and, within four months, had raped and murdered Armida Wiltsey, a 40-year-old wife and mother.
Kemp wasn't caught at the time, so he spent the next quarter-century raping (and probably murdering) a string of women. In 2002, his DNA was matched to blood found on the fingernails of Wiltsey's dead body. Although Kemp was serving a "life sentence" for rape in a Texas prison, he was months away from being paroled when he was brought back to California for the murder of Wiltsey.
His attorney argued that he was too old for the death penalty. He lost that argument, and in 2009, Kemp was again given a capital sentence. He now sits on death row, perhaps long enough for the death penalty to be declared unconstitutional again, so he can be released to commit more rapes and murders.
Dozens and dozens of prisoners released from death row have gone on to murder again. No one knows exactly how many, but it's a lot more than the number of innocent men who have been executed in America, which, at least since 1950, is zero.
What is liberals' evidence that there will be more rapes and murders if Obama's jobs bill doesn't pass? Biden claims that, without it, there won't be enough cops to interrupt a woman being raped in her own home -- which would be an amazing bit of police work/psychic talent, if it had ever happened. (That's why Americans like guns, liberals.)
Obama's jobs bill tackles the problem of rape and murder by giving the states $30 billion ... for public school teachers.
Only $5 billion is even allotted to the police, but all we keep hearing about are the rapes and murders that Democrats are suddenly against (as long as being "against" rape and murder means funding public school teachers and not imprisoning or executing rapists and murderers).
Finally, did Flint use any money from Obama's last trillion-dollar stimulus bill to hire more police in order to prevent rape and murder? No, Flint spent its $2.2 million from the first stimulus bill on buying two electric buses.
Even if what Flint really needed was buses and not cops, for $2.2 million, the city could have bought seven brand-new diesel buses and had $100,000 left over for streetlights.
Rather than reducing the rate of rape and murder, blowing money on "green" buses is likely to increase crime, since people will be forced to spend a lot more time waiting at bus stops for those two buses.
It's going to be a long wait: The "green" buses were never delivered because the company went out of business -- despite a $1.6 million loan from the American taxpayer.
But if I were a liberal, I wouldn't acknowledge these facts, or any facts. I would close my eyes, cover my ears, demand that MSNBC fire Pat Buchanan and the FCC pull the plug on Fox, and pretend to believe that taxpayer-funded "green" projects and an ever-increasing supply of public school teachers were the only things that separated us from Armageddon.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
If I were a liberal, I would have spent the last week in shock that a Democratic audience in Flint, Mich., cheered Vice President Joe Biden's description of a policeman being killed. (And if I were a liberal desperately striving to keep my job on MSNBC, I'd say the Democrats looked "hot and horny" for dead cops -- as Chris Matthews said of a Republican audience that cheered for the death penalty.)
Biden's audience whooped and applauded last week in Flint when he said that without Obama's jobs bill, police will be "outgunned and outmanned." (Wild applause!)
I suppose liberals would claim they were applauding because they believe Obama's jobs bill will prevent these murders. Which reminds me: Republicans believe the death penalty prevents murders!
Which belief bears more relationship to reality?
In a case I have previously mentioned, Kenneth McDuff was released from death row soon after the Supreme Court overturned the death penalty in 1972 and went on to murder more than a dozen people.
William Jordan and Anthony Prevatte were sentenced to death in 1974 for abducting a teacher, murdering him and stealing his car. They came under suspicion when they were caught throwing the murder weapon from the stolen vehicle in a high-speed car chase with the cops and because they were in possession of the dead man's wallet, briefcase and watch.
The Georgia Supreme Court overturned their capital sentences in an opinion by Robert H. Hall, who was appointed by Gov. Jimmy Carter.
Hall said that the death sentences had to be set aside on the idiotic grounds that the jurors had overheard the prosecutor say that the judge and state supreme court would have the opportunity to review a death sentence, which might have caused them to take their sentencing role less seriously.
(If the facts had been the reverse, the court would have overturned the death sentences on the grounds that the jurors did not take their sentencing decision seriously, under the misapprehension that no judge or court would second-guess them.)
Prevatte was later released from "life in prison" and proceeded to murder his girlfriend. Jordan escaped and has never been found.
As president, Carter appointed Hall to a federal district court.
Darryl Kemp was sentenced to death in California in 1960 for the rape and murder of Marjorie Hipperson and also convicted for raping two other women. But he sat on death row long enough -- 12 years -- for the death penalty to be declared unconstitutional. He was paroled five years later and, within four months, had raped and murdered Armida Wiltsey, a 40-year-old wife and mother.
Kemp wasn't caught at the time, so he spent the next quarter-century raping (and probably murdering) a string of women. In 2002, his DNA was matched to blood found on the fingernails of Wiltsey's dead body. Although Kemp was serving a "life sentence" for rape in a Texas prison, he was months away from being paroled when he was brought back to California for the murder of Wiltsey.
His attorney argued that he was too old for the death penalty. He lost that argument, and in 2009, Kemp was again given a capital sentence. He now sits on death row, perhaps long enough for the death penalty to be declared unconstitutional again, so he can be released to commit more rapes and murders.
Dozens and dozens of prisoners released from death row have gone on to murder again. No one knows exactly how many, but it's a lot more than the number of innocent men who have been executed in America, which, at least since 1950, is zero.
What is liberals' evidence that there will be more rapes and murders if Obama's jobs bill doesn't pass? Biden claims that, without it, there won't be enough cops to interrupt a woman being raped in her own home -- which would be an amazing bit of police work/psychic talent, if it had ever happened. (That's why Americans like guns, liberals.)
Obama's jobs bill tackles the problem of rape and murder by giving the states $30 billion ... for public school teachers.
Only $5 billion is even allotted to the police, but all we keep hearing about are the rapes and murders that Democrats are suddenly against (as long as being "against" rape and murder means funding public school teachers and not imprisoning or executing rapists and murderers).
Finally, did Flint use any money from Obama's last trillion-dollar stimulus bill to hire more police in order to prevent rape and murder? No, Flint spent its $2.2 million from the first stimulus bill on buying two electric buses.
Even if what Flint really needed was buses and not cops, for $2.2 million, the city could have bought seven brand-new diesel buses and had $100,000 left over for streetlights.
Rather than reducing the rate of rape and murder, blowing money on "green" buses is likely to increase crime, since people will be forced to spend a lot more time waiting at bus stops for those two buses.
It's going to be a long wait: The "green" buses were never delivered because the company went out of business -- despite a $1.6 million loan from the American taxpayer.
But if I were a liberal, I wouldn't acknowledge these facts, or any facts. I would close my eyes, cover my ears, demand that MSNBC fire Pat Buchanan and the FCC pull the plug on Fox, and pretend to believe that taxpayer-funded "green" projects and an ever-increasing supply of public school teachers were the only things that separated us from Armageddon.
Hope for Peace in the Mideast?
The exhausted parties may choose to face reality.
Conrad Black
Thursday, October 27, 2011
The recent exchange of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for a thousand Palestinian prisoners in Israeli hands is regarded as a cautiously hopeful sign even by Israeli hawks, as it appears the only possible de-escalation from the absolute collapse of the peace process that was almost implicit in the Palestinian bid for full membership as a state in the United Nations. The Israeli Right was fiercely opposed to Palestinian statehood from 1948 until relatively recently, when it realized that the Palestinians could not be induced to leave territory Israel occupied after the 1967 war; could not be physically expelled, because neither domestic nor international opinion would tolerate such an outrage; and could not be assimilated, both because of natural Arab resistance, and because of the danger of Israel’s ceasing to be a Jewish state and homeland, which has always been its only raison d’être. (There were Israeli bi-nationalists, jolly progressives who wanted to share; Canaanites, i.e. complete secularists; and territorialists who had wispy dreams of settling in Uganda or Ethiopia — but none of them ever had any grasp of reality.)
The Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat played the land-for-peace shell game for many years until — when offered all of Gaza, almost all of the West Bank, and a chunk of Jerusalem in an autonomous state, by Ehud Barak in 2000 — Arafat demanded the right of return (i.e., demographically to overwhelm the Jews within Israel with millions of supposedly returning Palestinians) and declared the second Intifada. Barak lost power to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Left (“Peace Now”) perished, Sharon crushed the new Intifada, the bigotry of most of the Western media was exposed with the myth of the Jenin Massacre, Arafat died, Hamas gained control of Gaza (thanks to George W. Bush’s undiscriminating love of free elections, and the PLO’s corruption), so there was a three-state non-solution: two Palestines as well as Israel. Sharon made a settlement arrangement with the United States and vacated Gaza, uprooting Jewish settlers, and Gaza became a splendid launching ground for rockets killing Israeli civilians.
In seeking United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state, Arafat’s heir in Fatah and the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas, is pretending that he can obtain sovereignty without the agreement of Israel, the United Nations having offered statehood to both Israel and Palestine in 1948 and been rebuffed by the Arabs. We have come full circle, as the PLO seeks what its forebears rejected, and the Israeli Right seeks what its forebears rejected but the now-defunct Israeli Left (led at the time by David Ben-Gurion) accepted. The PLO purports to have given up on negotiating with Israel, and Israel is now negotiating with Hamas, which both parties long refused to do. The United Nations has effectively accepted the largely European counter-proposal (to U.N. recognition of Palestine) for fast-track, unconditional talks for a resolution of all issues. This is what the present Israeli government has been seeking. In Arab-Israeli matters, this incomprehensible roundel justifies some optimism.
In 1917, in the desperate days of World War I, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour promised “a Jewish homeland” in what was called, resurrecting Roman terminology, Palestine. In the same declaration, it was assured that this would not compromise the rights of the Muslim and Christian Arabs in the same and adjoining territory. As Britain was selling the same real estate to two different and hostile parties, before it was itself in possession of it, there was never going to be a solution that didn’t divide it in two. Nor has there been.
Every admission of Jewish settlers between the wars was strenuously contested by the Arabs, who were much less tolerant of the Jews than the Turks had been. Between 50,000 and 75,000 British troops were necessary for most of the inter-war period to assure comparative calm in Palestine, after the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, invented the kingdom of Trans-Jordan (or Jordan), on, in his words, “a sunny Sunday afternoon” in 1921.
As the terrible atrocities against the Jews continued through the Thirties, Britain fixed limits on admission of Jews to settlements in Palestine, which limits were designed to contain Arab unrest. But they neither stilled the unrest, nor in the least accommodated the numbers of horribly persecuted Jews in Europe who sought to emigrate there.
After the war, when the world contemplated in horror the Nazi murder of half the world population of Jews, Israel was unambiguously created by the United Nations as a Jewish state, in a process that conferred on Israel a far greater level of legitimacy than all other countries that were merely admitted to the U.N., rather than being created by it, on a unanimous vote of the permanent members of the Security Council.
Palestine declined statehood in 1948 and accepted the assurance of the Arab powers that they would annihilate Israel. Most Palestinians fled or were driven from what became Israel, and almost all Jews in Arab countries (except Morocco) were forced out of those countries. The Arab states have ever since used the Palestinians, in teeming and disease-ridden camps the U.N. has refused to upgrade despite Israeli and Western urging, as a breeding ground of terrorists; and they have maintained the Palestinian cause as a red herring with which to distract the Arab masses from generations of misrule. They are doing it still in Egypt, as the world awaits the ignominious demise of the Arab Spring in that important country.
Apart from Anwar Sadat and the kings of Morocco and a few relatively enlightened people in the Persian Gulf, no Arab leader has really accepted the legitimacy of the Jewish state, despite promises at Oslo and elsewhere, and this was confirmed by Mahmoud Abbas in his address to the U.N. a few weeks ago. Every agreement except the Sinai-Suez Camp David agreement with Sadat (who was rewarded with assassination by the Muslim Brotherhood, now contending with the military for control in Egypt) has been designed to exploit Israel’s desire for peace with promises of what amounted to a truce, in exchange for concessions on the ground by Israel. And a vast swath of world opinion, partly thirsting for Arab oil, has cravenly accepted this protracted Arab confidence trick: land for a truce that is cancelable without notice.
The European efforts in the Middle East since the Balfour Declaration have not achieved anything useful except the repulse of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and for decades have consisted of nothing except to await American proposals and then make suggestions more favorable to the Arabs. The Obama administration (which tried to pretend the Bush-Sharon settlements agreement was not binding), is part of the problem and not of the solution. Israel has demonstrated, in the Sinai and in Gaza, that it will give up settlements for real peace (though it did not achieve it on the latter occasion).
Israel should not make any more tangibly unrequited concessions, no matter what happens in Egypt, and whatever the histrionics of the Turkish government. The Turks could actually be useful, as they are always more reasonable than the Arabs, and have historically been well disposed to the Jews. Israel should refrain from interdicting the West Bank’s strong economic-growth rate, which it has wisely facilitated. When the Palestinians become prosperous, as is starting to happen, they will become more interested in resolving the problem, if the useful (to the aspiring Arab genocidists) idiots among the Western powers stop being so credulous.
It is the possibility that Hamas will deal with Israel and that all sides realize that Israel really can’t be pushed any further (despite a defeatist mainstream media), that the West can’t or won’t try to push it any further, and that Palestinian statehood will be vetoed at the U.N. by the U.S. despite Obama’s flirtations with the Muslims, that creates hope that unconditional talks may finally proceed. The outline agreement has been there for at least a decade: a narrower West Bank with a secure connection to a deeper Gaza, a sensible division of Jerusalem, and two states at last with Palestinians free to return to Palestine.
Peace will come when both parties who were promised a homeland in the same place have one, and the Palestinians have something to lose if they continue to be cannon fodder for their cynical Arab brothers.
Conrad Black
Thursday, October 27, 2011
The recent exchange of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for a thousand Palestinian prisoners in Israeli hands is regarded as a cautiously hopeful sign even by Israeli hawks, as it appears the only possible de-escalation from the absolute collapse of the peace process that was almost implicit in the Palestinian bid for full membership as a state in the United Nations. The Israeli Right was fiercely opposed to Palestinian statehood from 1948 until relatively recently, when it realized that the Palestinians could not be induced to leave territory Israel occupied after the 1967 war; could not be physically expelled, because neither domestic nor international opinion would tolerate such an outrage; and could not be assimilated, both because of natural Arab resistance, and because of the danger of Israel’s ceasing to be a Jewish state and homeland, which has always been its only raison d’être. (There were Israeli bi-nationalists, jolly progressives who wanted to share; Canaanites, i.e. complete secularists; and territorialists who had wispy dreams of settling in Uganda or Ethiopia — but none of them ever had any grasp of reality.)
The Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat played the land-for-peace shell game for many years until — when offered all of Gaza, almost all of the West Bank, and a chunk of Jerusalem in an autonomous state, by Ehud Barak in 2000 — Arafat demanded the right of return (i.e., demographically to overwhelm the Jews within Israel with millions of supposedly returning Palestinians) and declared the second Intifada. Barak lost power to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Left (“Peace Now”) perished, Sharon crushed the new Intifada, the bigotry of most of the Western media was exposed with the myth of the Jenin Massacre, Arafat died, Hamas gained control of Gaza (thanks to George W. Bush’s undiscriminating love of free elections, and the PLO’s corruption), so there was a three-state non-solution: two Palestines as well as Israel. Sharon made a settlement arrangement with the United States and vacated Gaza, uprooting Jewish settlers, and Gaza became a splendid launching ground for rockets killing Israeli civilians.
In seeking United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state, Arafat’s heir in Fatah and the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas, is pretending that he can obtain sovereignty without the agreement of Israel, the United Nations having offered statehood to both Israel and Palestine in 1948 and been rebuffed by the Arabs. We have come full circle, as the PLO seeks what its forebears rejected, and the Israeli Right seeks what its forebears rejected but the now-defunct Israeli Left (led at the time by David Ben-Gurion) accepted. The PLO purports to have given up on negotiating with Israel, and Israel is now negotiating with Hamas, which both parties long refused to do. The United Nations has effectively accepted the largely European counter-proposal (to U.N. recognition of Palestine) for fast-track, unconditional talks for a resolution of all issues. This is what the present Israeli government has been seeking. In Arab-Israeli matters, this incomprehensible roundel justifies some optimism.
In 1917, in the desperate days of World War I, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour promised “a Jewish homeland” in what was called, resurrecting Roman terminology, Palestine. In the same declaration, it was assured that this would not compromise the rights of the Muslim and Christian Arabs in the same and adjoining territory. As Britain was selling the same real estate to two different and hostile parties, before it was itself in possession of it, there was never going to be a solution that didn’t divide it in two. Nor has there been.
Every admission of Jewish settlers between the wars was strenuously contested by the Arabs, who were much less tolerant of the Jews than the Turks had been. Between 50,000 and 75,000 British troops were necessary for most of the inter-war period to assure comparative calm in Palestine, after the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, invented the kingdom of Trans-Jordan (or Jordan), on, in his words, “a sunny Sunday afternoon” in 1921.
As the terrible atrocities against the Jews continued through the Thirties, Britain fixed limits on admission of Jews to settlements in Palestine, which limits were designed to contain Arab unrest. But they neither stilled the unrest, nor in the least accommodated the numbers of horribly persecuted Jews in Europe who sought to emigrate there.
After the war, when the world contemplated in horror the Nazi murder of half the world population of Jews, Israel was unambiguously created by the United Nations as a Jewish state, in a process that conferred on Israel a far greater level of legitimacy than all other countries that were merely admitted to the U.N., rather than being created by it, on a unanimous vote of the permanent members of the Security Council.
Palestine declined statehood in 1948 and accepted the assurance of the Arab powers that they would annihilate Israel. Most Palestinians fled or were driven from what became Israel, and almost all Jews in Arab countries (except Morocco) were forced out of those countries. The Arab states have ever since used the Palestinians, in teeming and disease-ridden camps the U.N. has refused to upgrade despite Israeli and Western urging, as a breeding ground of terrorists; and they have maintained the Palestinian cause as a red herring with which to distract the Arab masses from generations of misrule. They are doing it still in Egypt, as the world awaits the ignominious demise of the Arab Spring in that important country.
Apart from Anwar Sadat and the kings of Morocco and a few relatively enlightened people in the Persian Gulf, no Arab leader has really accepted the legitimacy of the Jewish state, despite promises at Oslo and elsewhere, and this was confirmed by Mahmoud Abbas in his address to the U.N. a few weeks ago. Every agreement except the Sinai-Suez Camp David agreement with Sadat (who was rewarded with assassination by the Muslim Brotherhood, now contending with the military for control in Egypt) has been designed to exploit Israel’s desire for peace with promises of what amounted to a truce, in exchange for concessions on the ground by Israel. And a vast swath of world opinion, partly thirsting for Arab oil, has cravenly accepted this protracted Arab confidence trick: land for a truce that is cancelable without notice.
The European efforts in the Middle East since the Balfour Declaration have not achieved anything useful except the repulse of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and for decades have consisted of nothing except to await American proposals and then make suggestions more favorable to the Arabs. The Obama administration (which tried to pretend the Bush-Sharon settlements agreement was not binding), is part of the problem and not of the solution. Israel has demonstrated, in the Sinai and in Gaza, that it will give up settlements for real peace (though it did not achieve it on the latter occasion).
Israel should not make any more tangibly unrequited concessions, no matter what happens in Egypt, and whatever the histrionics of the Turkish government. The Turks could actually be useful, as they are always more reasonable than the Arabs, and have historically been well disposed to the Jews. Israel should refrain from interdicting the West Bank’s strong economic-growth rate, which it has wisely facilitated. When the Palestinians become prosperous, as is starting to happen, they will become more interested in resolving the problem, if the useful (to the aspiring Arab genocidists) idiots among the Western powers stop being so credulous.
It is the possibility that Hamas will deal with Israel and that all sides realize that Israel really can’t be pushed any further (despite a defeatist mainstream media), that the West can’t or won’t try to push it any further, and that Palestinian statehood will be vetoed at the U.N. by the U.S. despite Obama’s flirtations with the Muslims, that creates hope that unconditional talks may finally proceed. The outline agreement has been there for at least a decade: a narrower West Bank with a secure connection to a deeper Gaza, a sensible division of Jerusalem, and two states at last with Palestinians free to return to Palestine.
Peace will come when both parties who were promised a homeland in the same place have one, and the Palestinians have something to lose if they continue to be cannon fodder for their cynical Arab brothers.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
The Shocking Trend In U.S. Individual Income Inequality 1994-2010
By Political Calculations
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Perhaps the most common measure of income inequality in a nation is the Gini Coefficient (aka the "Gini Ratio"), which ranks the amount of inequality there is in a country on a scale from 0, which represents perfect equality, where everyone would have an equal share of the nation's income, to a value of 1, which represents perfect inequality, where one person would have all the income, but everyone else has none.
So now, thanks to so much media attention being focused on the Occupy Wall Street "movement" (aka "politically-oriented publicity stunt"), where many activists (aka "not-too-bright people") appear to be upset at "the Top 1%" (aka "really high income earners"), who they claim have "gotten too rich" (aka "earned a high income by doing things that satisfy other people's needs"), we thought we'd use the "Gini coefficient" (aka "a well-established mathematically-based method for measuring inequality") to find out how out of whack things have become in the United States over the years.
Or more specifically, the years from 1994 through 2010, for which the U.S. Census has published detailed data related to the incomes earned by Americans based on their annual surveys of the U.S. population. Our chart showing the trend in income inequality for all individuals as measured by the Gini ratio for these years is below:
We were shocked to see the overall trend from 1994 through 2010 take the path it has, because it's so completely contrary to what we keep hearing in the news.
We only ask that someone ask the media for their reaction to this disturbing data!
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Perhaps the most common measure of income inequality in a nation is the Gini Coefficient (aka the "Gini Ratio"), which ranks the amount of inequality there is in a country on a scale from 0, which represents perfect equality, where everyone would have an equal share of the nation's income, to a value of 1, which represents perfect inequality, where one person would have all the income, but everyone else has none.
So now, thanks to so much media attention being focused on the Occupy Wall Street "movement" (aka "politically-oriented publicity stunt"), where many activists (aka "not-too-bright people") appear to be upset at "the Top 1%" (aka "really high income earners"), who they claim have "gotten too rich" (aka "earned a high income by doing things that satisfy other people's needs"), we thought we'd use the "Gini coefficient" (aka "a well-established mathematically-based method for measuring inequality") to find out how out of whack things have become in the United States over the years.
Or more specifically, the years from 1994 through 2010, for which the U.S. Census has published detailed data related to the incomes earned by Americans based on their annual surveys of the U.S. population. Our chart showing the trend in income inequality for all individuals as measured by the Gini ratio for these years is below:
We were shocked to see the overall trend from 1994 through 2010 take the path it has, because it's so completely contrary to what we keep hearing in the news.
We only ask that someone ask the media for their reaction to this disturbing data!
American Imperialism... Please
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
And so it ends. The United States is leaving Iraq.
I'm solidly in the camp that sees this as a strategic blunder. Iraqi democracy is fragile and Iran's desire to undermine it is strong. Also, announcing our withdrawal is a weird way to respond to a foiled Iranian plot to commit an act of war in the U.S. capital. Obviously, I hope I'm wrong and President Obama's not frittering away our enormous sacrifices in Iraq out of domestic political concerns and diplomatic ineptitude.
Still, there's an upside. Obama's decision to leave Iraq should deal a staggering blow to America's critics at home and abroad.
After all, what kind of empire does this sort of thing?
Critics of U.S. foreign policy have long caterwauled about American "empire." The term is used as an epithet by both the isolationist left and right, as a more coldly descriptive term by such mainstream thinkers as Niall Ferguson and Lawrence Kaplan, and with celebratory enthusiasm by some foreign policy neoconservatives like Max Boot.
The charge in recent times has centered on the Middle East, specifically Iraq.
The problem is, contemporary America isn't an empire, at least not in any conventional or traditional sense.
Your typical empire invades countries to seize their resources, impose political control and levy taxes. That was true of every empire from the ancient Romans to the Brits and the Soviets.
That was never the case with Iraq. For all the blood-for-oil nonsense, if America wanted Iraq's oil it could have saved a lot of blood and simply bought it. Saddam Hussein would have been happy to cut a deal if we only lifted our sanctions. Indeed, the U.S. oil industry never lobbied for an invasion, but it did lobby for an end to sanctions. We never levied taxes in Iraq either. Indeed, we're left holding the tab for the liberation.
And we most certainly are not in political control of Iraq. If we were, we wouldn't have acquiesced to the Iraqi government's desire for us to leave. Did Caesar ever cave to the popular will of Gaul?
Some partisans will undoubtedly say that the key difference is that Barack H. Obama, and not George W. Bush, is president.
But this lame objection leaves out the fact that Obama acceded to a timeline drafted by the Bush administration. Moreover, Obama has moved closer to Bush than anybody could have predicted.
Consider Libya. Obama pursued exactly the same policy goal -- forcible regime change -- that critics of the Iraq war routinely denounced as the heart of American imperialism. There are significant differences between the two adventures, to be sure, but at the conceptual level there's little difference at all, and neither has much to do with imperialism.
More important, for the imperialism charge to mean anything it needs to describe something larger than mere partisan policy difference. If our imperialism can be turned off and on like a light switch with the mere change of parties, then how imperialistic could we have been in the first place?
The word "regime" has been defined down in recent years to mean nothing more than presidential administrations. "What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States," Sen. John Kerry said in 2003.
Regime actually describes an entire system of government. And if the American regime is imperial only when Republicans are in power, then it's not a serious claim, it's just a convenient and partisan slander.
In many quarters of the Middle East, the war on terror is cast as a religiously inspired front for crusader-imperialism. This nonsense overlooks the fact that America has gone to war to save Muslim lives more often than any modern Muslim country has. Under Democrats and Republicans we've fought to help Muslims in Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya. We've sought the conversion of no one and -- with the exception of Kuwait -- we've never presented a bill. When asked to leave, we've done so.
To say we did these things simply for plunder and power is an insult to all Americans, particularly those who gave their lives in the process.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
And so it ends. The United States is leaving Iraq.
I'm solidly in the camp that sees this as a strategic blunder. Iraqi democracy is fragile and Iran's desire to undermine it is strong. Also, announcing our withdrawal is a weird way to respond to a foiled Iranian plot to commit an act of war in the U.S. capital. Obviously, I hope I'm wrong and President Obama's not frittering away our enormous sacrifices in Iraq out of domestic political concerns and diplomatic ineptitude.
Still, there's an upside. Obama's decision to leave Iraq should deal a staggering blow to America's critics at home and abroad.
After all, what kind of empire does this sort of thing?
Critics of U.S. foreign policy have long caterwauled about American "empire." The term is used as an epithet by both the isolationist left and right, as a more coldly descriptive term by such mainstream thinkers as Niall Ferguson and Lawrence Kaplan, and with celebratory enthusiasm by some foreign policy neoconservatives like Max Boot.
The charge in recent times has centered on the Middle East, specifically Iraq.
The problem is, contemporary America isn't an empire, at least not in any conventional or traditional sense.
Your typical empire invades countries to seize their resources, impose political control and levy taxes. That was true of every empire from the ancient Romans to the Brits and the Soviets.
That was never the case with Iraq. For all the blood-for-oil nonsense, if America wanted Iraq's oil it could have saved a lot of blood and simply bought it. Saddam Hussein would have been happy to cut a deal if we only lifted our sanctions. Indeed, the U.S. oil industry never lobbied for an invasion, but it did lobby for an end to sanctions. We never levied taxes in Iraq either. Indeed, we're left holding the tab for the liberation.
And we most certainly are not in political control of Iraq. If we were, we wouldn't have acquiesced to the Iraqi government's desire for us to leave. Did Caesar ever cave to the popular will of Gaul?
Some partisans will undoubtedly say that the key difference is that Barack H. Obama, and not George W. Bush, is president.
But this lame objection leaves out the fact that Obama acceded to a timeline drafted by the Bush administration. Moreover, Obama has moved closer to Bush than anybody could have predicted.
Consider Libya. Obama pursued exactly the same policy goal -- forcible regime change -- that critics of the Iraq war routinely denounced as the heart of American imperialism. There are significant differences between the two adventures, to be sure, but at the conceptual level there's little difference at all, and neither has much to do with imperialism.
More important, for the imperialism charge to mean anything it needs to describe something larger than mere partisan policy difference. If our imperialism can be turned off and on like a light switch with the mere change of parties, then how imperialistic could we have been in the first place?
The word "regime" has been defined down in recent years to mean nothing more than presidential administrations. "What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States," Sen. John Kerry said in 2003.
Regime actually describes an entire system of government. And if the American regime is imperial only when Republicans are in power, then it's not a serious claim, it's just a convenient and partisan slander.
In many quarters of the Middle East, the war on terror is cast as a religiously inspired front for crusader-imperialism. This nonsense overlooks the fact that America has gone to war to save Muslim lives more often than any modern Muslim country has. Under Democrats and Republicans we've fought to help Muslims in Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya. We've sought the conversion of no one and -- with the exception of Kuwait -- we've never presented a bill. When asked to leave, we've done so.
To say we did these things simply for plunder and power is an insult to all Americans, particularly those who gave their lives in the process.
What a One-World Government Looks Like
By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
"Imagine there's no countries," John Lennon warbled in his inane song "Imagine." "It isn't hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for ... Imagine all the people / Living life in peace / You may say that I'm a dreamer / But I'm not the only one / I hope someday you'll join us / And the world will be as one."
They believed in those pathetic dreams in Europe. In the aftermath of World War II, facing the prospect of Soviet domination and wanting to keep the defeated Germans from completing a World War trilogy, the European community, aided by the United States, created the European Coal and Steel Community. A federal Europe was the goal; the original plans included a European Defense Community and a European Political Community, both of which fell through. Eventually, this grew into the European Economic Community.
The European Union was the successor to the EEC, formed in 1993. The current EU members include Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, German, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
There was only one problem with this notion: These states had little in common. They did not share a common language; they didn't share common customs (other than, perhaps, a deep-rooted history of anti-Semitism); they didn't even share basic economic principles. This created potential for tremendous conflict within the Union.
The most obvious success for the EU, however, was the Euro -- the official currency for Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain. It is the second largest reserve currency on the planet, after the dollar.
With the integrated economic community, however, came a serious problem: If any of the member states spent beyond their capacities, the others would have to pick up the slack. And that's precisely what happened. Greece is bankrupt. So is Spain. So is Ireland. The bleed-over is corrupting the economies of the other Euro members.
This week, the Euro members got together to attempt to solve the crisis. Many of the members are no longer interested in bailing out Greece -- they are sick of the redistributive socialism of the eurozone. They don't want to have to create slush funds for the different countries to raid based on how much they feel like spending. The grand Lennon-esque experiment is failing. As the Financial Times reported, "officials described mounting concerns that the summit will fall well short of market expectations."
The Dutch government will fall unless the crisis is solved. So will the Italian government. So will the entire EU, according to Alan Greenspan. "At the outset of the creation of the euro in 1999," Greenspan said, "it was expected that the southern eurozone economies would behave like those in the north; the Italians would behave like Germans. They didn't. Instead, northern Europe fell into subsidizing southern Europe's excess consumption, that is, its current account deficits." In short, said Greenspan, the countries comprising the EU are incompatible. "The effect of the divergent cultures in the eurozone has been grossly underestimated."
Lennon's one-world concept was a communist one. "Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger / A brotherhood of man / Imagine all the people / Sharing all the world." Lennon got his wish in soft form in the creation of the European Union. The result: class warfare in the extreme -- a racial powder keg ready to blow -- and full-scale bankruptcy. Now the EU will revert to what it has always been: a loose agglomeration of nations, often in conflict with one another. That's the way the world works. That's the way the world will always work. And that is not a bad thing. Better that some nations stand for individualism, freedom and entrepreneurialism than that we all stand for redistributionism and the spineless multiculturalism that results in destruction of standards.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
"Imagine there's no countries," John Lennon warbled in his inane song "Imagine." "It isn't hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for ... Imagine all the people / Living life in peace / You may say that I'm a dreamer / But I'm not the only one / I hope someday you'll join us / And the world will be as one."
They believed in those pathetic dreams in Europe. In the aftermath of World War II, facing the prospect of Soviet domination and wanting to keep the defeated Germans from completing a World War trilogy, the European community, aided by the United States, created the European Coal and Steel Community. A federal Europe was the goal; the original plans included a European Defense Community and a European Political Community, both of which fell through. Eventually, this grew into the European Economic Community.
The European Union was the successor to the EEC, formed in 1993. The current EU members include Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, German, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
There was only one problem with this notion: These states had little in common. They did not share a common language; they didn't share common customs (other than, perhaps, a deep-rooted history of anti-Semitism); they didn't even share basic economic principles. This created potential for tremendous conflict within the Union.
The most obvious success for the EU, however, was the Euro -- the official currency for Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain. It is the second largest reserve currency on the planet, after the dollar.
With the integrated economic community, however, came a serious problem: If any of the member states spent beyond their capacities, the others would have to pick up the slack. And that's precisely what happened. Greece is bankrupt. So is Spain. So is Ireland. The bleed-over is corrupting the economies of the other Euro members.
This week, the Euro members got together to attempt to solve the crisis. Many of the members are no longer interested in bailing out Greece -- they are sick of the redistributive socialism of the eurozone. They don't want to have to create slush funds for the different countries to raid based on how much they feel like spending. The grand Lennon-esque experiment is failing. As the Financial Times reported, "officials described mounting concerns that the summit will fall well short of market expectations."
The Dutch government will fall unless the crisis is solved. So will the Italian government. So will the entire EU, according to Alan Greenspan. "At the outset of the creation of the euro in 1999," Greenspan said, "it was expected that the southern eurozone economies would behave like those in the north; the Italians would behave like Germans. They didn't. Instead, northern Europe fell into subsidizing southern Europe's excess consumption, that is, its current account deficits." In short, said Greenspan, the countries comprising the EU are incompatible. "The effect of the divergent cultures in the eurozone has been grossly underestimated."
Lennon's one-world concept was a communist one. "Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger / A brotherhood of man / Imagine all the people / Sharing all the world." Lennon got his wish in soft form in the creation of the European Union. The result: class warfare in the extreme -- a racial powder keg ready to blow -- and full-scale bankruptcy. Now the EU will revert to what it has always been: a loose agglomeration of nations, often in conflict with one another. That's the way the world works. That's the way the world will always work. And that is not a bad thing. Better that some nations stand for individualism, freedom and entrepreneurialism than that we all stand for redistributionism and the spineless multiculturalism that results in destruction of standards.
Profits Are for People
By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are demanding "people before profits" -- as if profit motivation were the source of mankind's troubles -- when it's often the absence of profit motivation that's the true villain.
First, let's get both the definition and magnitude of profits out of the way. Profits represent the residual claim earned by entrepreneurs. They're what are left after other production costs -- such as wages, rent and interest -- have been paid. Profits are the payment for risk taking, innovation and decision-making. As such, they are a cost of business just as are wages, rent and interest. If those payments are not made, labor, land and capital will not offer their services. Similarly, if profit is not paid, entrepreneurs won't offer theirs. Historically, corporate profits range between 5 and 8 cents of each dollar, and wages range between 50 and 60 cents of each dollar.
Far more important than simple statistics about the magnitude of profits is the role played by profits, namely that of forcing producers to cater to the wants and desires of the common man. When's the last time we've heard widespread complaints about our clothing stores, supermarkets, computer stores or appliance stores? We are far likelier to hear people complaining about services they receive from the post office, motor vehicle and police departments, boards of education and other government agencies. The fundamental difference between the areas of general satisfaction and dissatisfaction is the pursuit of profits is present in one and not the other.
The pursuit of profits forces producers to be attentive to the will of their customers, simply because the customer of, say, a supermarket can fire it on the spot by taking his business elsewhere. If a state motor vehicle department or post office provides unsatisfactory services, it's not so easy for dissatisfied customers to take action against it. If a private business had as many dissatisfied customers as our government schools have, it would have long ago been out of business.
Free market capitalism is unforgiving. Producers please customers, in a cost-minimizing fashion, and make a profit, or they face losses or go bankrupt. It's this market discipline that some businesses seek to avoid. That's why they descend upon Washington calling for crony capitalism -- government bailouts, subsidies and special privileges. They wish to reduce the power of consumers and stockholders, who hold little sympathy for blunders and will give them the ax on a moment's notice.
Having Congress on their side means business can be less attentive to the will of consumers. Congress can keep them afloat with bailouts, as it did in the cases of General Motors and Chrysler, with the justification that such companies are "too big to fail." Nonsense! If General Motors and Chrysler had been allowed to go bankrupt, it wouldn't have meant that their productive assets, such as assembly lines and tools, would have gone poof and disappeared into thin air. Bankruptcy would have led to a change in ownership of those assets by someone who might have managed them better. The bailout enabled them to avoid the full consequences of their blunders.
By the way, we often hear people say, with a tone of saintliness, "We're a nonprofit organization," as if that alone translates into decency, objectivity and selflessness. They want us to think they're in it for the good of society and not for those "evil" profits. If we gave it just a little thought and asked what kind of organization throughout mankind's history has accounted for his greatest grief, the answer wouldn't be a free market, private, profit-making enterprise; it would be government, the largest nonprofit organization.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters are following the path predicted by the great philosopher-economist Frederic Bastiat, who said in "The Law" that "instead of rooting out the injustices found in society, they make these injustices general." In other words, the protesters don't want to end crony capitalism, with its handouts and government favoritism; they want to participate in it.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are demanding "people before profits" -- as if profit motivation were the source of mankind's troubles -- when it's often the absence of profit motivation that's the true villain.
First, let's get both the definition and magnitude of profits out of the way. Profits represent the residual claim earned by entrepreneurs. They're what are left after other production costs -- such as wages, rent and interest -- have been paid. Profits are the payment for risk taking, innovation and decision-making. As such, they are a cost of business just as are wages, rent and interest. If those payments are not made, labor, land and capital will not offer their services. Similarly, if profit is not paid, entrepreneurs won't offer theirs. Historically, corporate profits range between 5 and 8 cents of each dollar, and wages range between 50 and 60 cents of each dollar.
Far more important than simple statistics about the magnitude of profits is the role played by profits, namely that of forcing producers to cater to the wants and desires of the common man. When's the last time we've heard widespread complaints about our clothing stores, supermarkets, computer stores or appliance stores? We are far likelier to hear people complaining about services they receive from the post office, motor vehicle and police departments, boards of education and other government agencies. The fundamental difference between the areas of general satisfaction and dissatisfaction is the pursuit of profits is present in one and not the other.
The pursuit of profits forces producers to be attentive to the will of their customers, simply because the customer of, say, a supermarket can fire it on the spot by taking his business elsewhere. If a state motor vehicle department or post office provides unsatisfactory services, it's not so easy for dissatisfied customers to take action against it. If a private business had as many dissatisfied customers as our government schools have, it would have long ago been out of business.
Free market capitalism is unforgiving. Producers please customers, in a cost-minimizing fashion, and make a profit, or they face losses or go bankrupt. It's this market discipline that some businesses seek to avoid. That's why they descend upon Washington calling for crony capitalism -- government bailouts, subsidies and special privileges. They wish to reduce the power of consumers and stockholders, who hold little sympathy for blunders and will give them the ax on a moment's notice.
Having Congress on their side means business can be less attentive to the will of consumers. Congress can keep them afloat with bailouts, as it did in the cases of General Motors and Chrysler, with the justification that such companies are "too big to fail." Nonsense! If General Motors and Chrysler had been allowed to go bankrupt, it wouldn't have meant that their productive assets, such as assembly lines and tools, would have gone poof and disappeared into thin air. Bankruptcy would have led to a change in ownership of those assets by someone who might have managed them better. The bailout enabled them to avoid the full consequences of their blunders.
By the way, we often hear people say, with a tone of saintliness, "We're a nonprofit organization," as if that alone translates into decency, objectivity and selflessness. They want us to think they're in it for the good of society and not for those "evil" profits. If we gave it just a little thought and asked what kind of organization throughout mankind's history has accounted for his greatest grief, the answer wouldn't be a free market, private, profit-making enterprise; it would be government, the largest nonprofit organization.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters are following the path predicted by the great philosopher-economist Frederic Bastiat, who said in "The Law" that "instead of rooting out the injustices found in society, they make these injustices general." In other words, the protesters don't want to end crony capitalism, with its handouts and government favoritism; they want to participate in it.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Tea Party and OWS -- No Comparison
By Tony Katz
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Steve Annear has an article on Metro.US about the new safety team circulating the Tent City Square, a.k.a. Occupy Boston, a satellite of the original Occupy Wall Street. According to Annear, a team of eight people - armed with neon vests and walkie-talkies - patrol the make-shift town to keep the "residents" safe.
Why is this necessary? According to the article:
On the heels of an incident last Sunday night, when a heroin addict allegedly pulled a knife on protesters and urinated on a tent....One guard donning a neon vest, who declined to give his name, said they are trying to keep the peace by “rounding up junkies and trying to kick them out,” adding that the so-called junkies have continually been a problem.
I have organized, hosted and spoken at Tea Party events around the country, and we never - ever! - have had to organize a safety team. Tea Party participants, who've gathered in cities and towns all across the country, have never had to worry about their safety from within the movement - - only from without. (see: SEIU) Never once has there been a report of a "heroin addict" urinating on tents....then again, there have been no tents! After each event, Tea Partiers return to their families, work/job search, school, etc. Heroin addicts don't seem to be attracted to the Tea Party. And we make sure to have our rallies near public restrooms (usually associated with the properly-permitted spaces) or provide port-o-potties.
There is a difference in the participants, because there is a difference in the cause. The Tea Party is based on what I call "The Four Basics" - - The Constitution, Capitalism, Fiscal Responsibility and Smaller Government. In a broader sense, it is based on shared ideals for the country. The Tea Party advocates smaller, leaner, more pragmatic government; equality of opportunity. We do, all of us in the Tea Party, "...hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
People are made equal. What they do with their lives is up to them! The Occupiers are promoting anti-Semitism, the return of the guillotine (while "maybe" a joke at first, many think it is a good idea, and that I should be under it!), a hodge-podge of hate, vitriol and false truths.
The people of OWS don't look to the future, to a better America, to a free and prosperous people unencumbered by government overreach to pursue their dreams, wants and desires. OWS is long removed from its proposed (legitimate?) objective - exposing and objecting to the federal government picking winners and losers on Wall Street and the too-close relationship often engaged between - and is now focused on, well, nothing. They are promoting Communism, a failed system of failed people predicated on a impossible, inchoate proposition that all people can be forced into equality.
The Tea Party promotes a better future, based on the prodigy of our Founding Fathers. OWS promotes lies, based on the abject failure of the Marxist thesis. Their once (potentially?) worthwhile message has been, unfortunately, hijacked by proud socialists and Marxists, the Democratic party, the unions, and a smattering of Hollywood - the latter three all hoping that OWS can be the Left's version of the Tea Party, thus giving them something positive to look to in this upcoming election season.
The article continued, with one of the "guards" explaining the situation:
“People wander in here high and drunk and try and get in tents...You’re always going to have drunk a—holes, wherever you go,” he said. “The safety team is pretty efficient. It’s not like this is a junkie haven.”
The reality is, you don't have drunk "a—holes" wherever you go. It actually depends on where you go. The Tea Party went towards a more prosperous America, rooted in the Constitution that allows people to live to the moment of their happiness. OWS went towards "eat the rich," urinating on tents, threatening reporters, blaming the Jews and sexual harassment.
There is no comparison.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Steve Annear has an article on Metro.US about the new safety team circulating the Tent City Square, a.k.a. Occupy Boston, a satellite of the original Occupy Wall Street. According to Annear, a team of eight people - armed with neon vests and walkie-talkies - patrol the make-shift town to keep the "residents" safe.
Why is this necessary? According to the article:
On the heels of an incident last Sunday night, when a heroin addict allegedly pulled a knife on protesters and urinated on a tent....One guard donning a neon vest, who declined to give his name, said they are trying to keep the peace by “rounding up junkies and trying to kick them out,” adding that the so-called junkies have continually been a problem.
I have organized, hosted and spoken at Tea Party events around the country, and we never - ever! - have had to organize a safety team. Tea Party participants, who've gathered in cities and towns all across the country, have never had to worry about their safety from within the movement - - only from without. (see: SEIU) Never once has there been a report of a "heroin addict" urinating on tents....then again, there have been no tents! After each event, Tea Partiers return to their families, work/job search, school, etc. Heroin addicts don't seem to be attracted to the Tea Party. And we make sure to have our rallies near public restrooms (usually associated with the properly-permitted spaces) or provide port-o-potties.
There is a difference in the participants, because there is a difference in the cause. The Tea Party is based on what I call "The Four Basics" - - The Constitution, Capitalism, Fiscal Responsibility and Smaller Government. In a broader sense, it is based on shared ideals for the country. The Tea Party advocates smaller, leaner, more pragmatic government; equality of opportunity. We do, all of us in the Tea Party, "...hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
People are made equal. What they do with their lives is up to them! The Occupiers are promoting anti-Semitism, the return of the guillotine (while "maybe" a joke at first, many think it is a good idea, and that I should be under it!), a hodge-podge of hate, vitriol and false truths.
The people of OWS don't look to the future, to a better America, to a free and prosperous people unencumbered by government overreach to pursue their dreams, wants and desires. OWS is long removed from its proposed (legitimate?) objective - exposing and objecting to the federal government picking winners and losers on Wall Street and the too-close relationship often engaged between - and is now focused on, well, nothing. They are promoting Communism, a failed system of failed people predicated on a impossible, inchoate proposition that all people can be forced into equality.
The Tea Party promotes a better future, based on the prodigy of our Founding Fathers. OWS promotes lies, based on the abject failure of the Marxist thesis. Their once (potentially?) worthwhile message has been, unfortunately, hijacked by proud socialists and Marxists, the Democratic party, the unions, and a smattering of Hollywood - the latter three all hoping that OWS can be the Left's version of the Tea Party, thus giving them something positive to look to in this upcoming election season.
The article continued, with one of the "guards" explaining the situation:
“People wander in here high and drunk and try and get in tents...You’re always going to have drunk a—holes, wherever you go,” he said. “The safety team is pretty efficient. It’s not like this is a junkie haven.”
The reality is, you don't have drunk "a—holes" wherever you go. It actually depends on where you go. The Tea Party went towards a more prosperous America, rooted in the Constitution that allows people to live to the moment of their happiness. OWS went towards "eat the rich," urinating on tents, threatening reporters, blaming the Jews and sexual harassment.
There is no comparison.
The Media and 'Bullying'
By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Back in the 1920s, the intelligentsia on both sides of the Atlantic were loudly protesting the execution of political radicals Sacco and Vanzetti, after what they claimed was an unfair trial. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to his young leftist friend Harold Laski, pointing out that there were "a thousand-fold worse cases" involving black defendants, "but the world does not worry over them."
Holmes said: "I cannot but ask myself why this so much greater interest in red than black."
To put it bluntly, it was a question of whose ox was gored. That is, what groups were in vogue at the moment among the intelligentsia. Blacks clearly were not.
The current media and political crusade against "bullying" in schools seems likewise to be based on what groups are in vogue at the moment. For years, there have been local newspaper stories about black kids in schools in New York and Philadelphia beating up Asian classmates, some beaten so badly as to require medical treatment.
But the national media hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil. Asian Americans are not in vogue today, just as blacks were not in vogue in the 1920s.
Meanwhile, the media are focused on bullying directed against youngsters who are homosexual. Gays are in vogue.
Most of the stories about the bullying of gays in schools are about words directed against them, not about their suffering the violence that has long been directed against Asian youngsters or about the failure of the authorities to do anything serious to stop black kids from beating up Asian kids.
Where youngsters are victims of violence, whether for being gay or whatever, that is where the authorities need to step in. No decent person wants to see kids hounded, whether by words or deeds, and whether the kids are gay, Asian or whatever.
But there is still a difference between words and deeds -- and it is a difference we do not need to let ourselves be stampeded into ignoring. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of speech -- and, like any other freedom, it can be abused.
If we are going to take away every Constitutional right that has been abused by somebody, we are going to end up with no Constitutional rights.
Already, on too many college campuses, there are vaguely worded speech codes that can punish students for words that may hurt somebody's feelings -- but only the feelings of groups that are in vogue.
Women can say anything they want to men, or blacks to whites, with impunity. But strong words in the other direction can bring down on students the wrath of the campus thought police -- as well as punishments that can extend to suspension or expulsion.
Is this what we want in our public schools?
The school authorities can ignore the beating up of Asian kids but homosexual organizations have enough political clout that they cannot be ignored. Moreover, there are enough avowed homosexuals among journalists that they have their own National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association -- so continuing media publicity will ensure that the authorities will have to "do something."
But political pressures to "do something" have been behind many counterproductive and even dangerous policies.
A grand jury report about bullying in the schools of San Mateo County, California, brought all sorts of expressions of concern from school authorities -- but no definition of "bullying" nor any specifics about just what they plan to do about it.
Meanwhile, a law has been passed in California that mandates teaching about the achievements of gays in the public schools. Whether this will do anything to stop either verbal or physical abuse of gay kids is very doubtful.
But it will advance the agenda of homosexual organizations and can turn homosexuality into yet another of the subjects on which words on only one side are permitted. Our schools are already too lacking in the basics of education to squander even more time on propaganda for politically correct causes that are in vogue. We do not need to create special privileges in the name of equal rights.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Back in the 1920s, the intelligentsia on both sides of the Atlantic were loudly protesting the execution of political radicals Sacco and Vanzetti, after what they claimed was an unfair trial. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to his young leftist friend Harold Laski, pointing out that there were "a thousand-fold worse cases" involving black defendants, "but the world does not worry over them."
Holmes said: "I cannot but ask myself why this so much greater interest in red than black."
To put it bluntly, it was a question of whose ox was gored. That is, what groups were in vogue at the moment among the intelligentsia. Blacks clearly were not.
The current media and political crusade against "bullying" in schools seems likewise to be based on what groups are in vogue at the moment. For years, there have been local newspaper stories about black kids in schools in New York and Philadelphia beating up Asian classmates, some beaten so badly as to require medical treatment.
But the national media hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil. Asian Americans are not in vogue today, just as blacks were not in vogue in the 1920s.
Meanwhile, the media are focused on bullying directed against youngsters who are homosexual. Gays are in vogue.
Most of the stories about the bullying of gays in schools are about words directed against them, not about their suffering the violence that has long been directed against Asian youngsters or about the failure of the authorities to do anything serious to stop black kids from beating up Asian kids.
Where youngsters are victims of violence, whether for being gay or whatever, that is where the authorities need to step in. No decent person wants to see kids hounded, whether by words or deeds, and whether the kids are gay, Asian or whatever.
But there is still a difference between words and deeds -- and it is a difference we do not need to let ourselves be stampeded into ignoring. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of speech -- and, like any other freedom, it can be abused.
If we are going to take away every Constitutional right that has been abused by somebody, we are going to end up with no Constitutional rights.
Already, on too many college campuses, there are vaguely worded speech codes that can punish students for words that may hurt somebody's feelings -- but only the feelings of groups that are in vogue.
Women can say anything they want to men, or blacks to whites, with impunity. But strong words in the other direction can bring down on students the wrath of the campus thought police -- as well as punishments that can extend to suspension or expulsion.
Is this what we want in our public schools?
The school authorities can ignore the beating up of Asian kids but homosexual organizations have enough political clout that they cannot be ignored. Moreover, there are enough avowed homosexuals among journalists that they have their own National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association -- so continuing media publicity will ensure that the authorities will have to "do something."
But political pressures to "do something" have been behind many counterproductive and even dangerous policies.
A grand jury report about bullying in the schools of San Mateo County, California, brought all sorts of expressions of concern from school authorities -- but no definition of "bullying" nor any specifics about just what they plan to do about it.
Meanwhile, a law has been passed in California that mandates teaching about the achievements of gays in the public schools. Whether this will do anything to stop either verbal or physical abuse of gay kids is very doubtful.
But it will advance the agenda of homosexual organizations and can turn homosexuality into yet another of the subjects on which words on only one side are permitted. Our schools are already too lacking in the basics of education to squander even more time on propaganda for politically correct causes that are in vogue. We do not need to create special privileges in the name of equal rights.
Alphabet Soup for the Conservative Soul
By Mike Adams
Monday, October 24, 2011
It isn’t always fun being a conservative activist. There are some days I want to throw in the towel and find an easier job – like selling flannel shirts at Indigo Girls concerts or booking campus speeches for Noam Chomsky. Just a few weeks ago, I had one of those days.
It all started when I took a long road trip to try and resolve a First Amendment issue with a university attorney. That was a big mistake. I not only failed to resolve the issue but had to sit and endure personal insults from someone bent on defending the indefensible, simply because he knows the burden of losing the case will be shouldered by the taxpayers. University officials are like that. They do stupid things because they are shielded from the consequences of their stupidity.
To make matters worse, I started itching unbearably during my “discussion” with the statist employee – Oops! I meant the “state” employee. I wasn’t sure what that was all about until I got home and changed clothes – only to discover I was covered with rashes. I had gotten into poison ivy again. Just another reason I should have joined the Boy Scouts instead of picking up that third sport in grammar school.
So, instead of going to bed at a decent hour, I was headed to the Medac to beg for a steroid shot. Steroids have never made me huge. In my experience, they’ve only made me into an insomniac. I knew it was going to be a sleepless, itchy night. I was completely miserable and dejected about the future of our constitutional republic, too. That’s a pretty bad combination. So I decided to take some advice I had given my readers a few years before. Living in accordance with your own teachings is a good way to avoid being called a hypocrite by liberals who can’t be hypocrites because they don’t believe in anything.
The advice I followed was simply to make a list of things for which I should be grateful. Actually, my advice required making a list of 26 things for which I should be grateful – one for each letter of the alphabet. I got started on “A” because that’s the first letter in the alphabet. I only know that because I went to public school in Texas. My list looked something like this:
A: I thank God I was born in America where I have the right to criticize public officials who can only insult me because they can’t send me to summer camp in Siberia during the middle of the winter.
B: I thank God for Glenn Beck who flew me to New York City to let me criticize hippies who broadcast anti-corporate musings on their I-pads. Oops, sorry, they had I-pad 2s. That’s the cool thing about America, though. Stupid people also have a right to speak. And that gives the smart and humble people something to talk about on Glenn Beck TV.
C: Back in the 1990s, Coral Ridge Ministries used to broadcast anti-ACLU sermons by Dr. James Kennedy. When I was an atheist, I used to watch Dr. Kennedy on TV – swearing and shouting at the TV screen every Sunday morning. Dr. Kennedy later helped found the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). After I converted to the right side, literally and figuratively speaking, my employer tried to strip my weekly opinion column of First Amendment protection. I appealed and won a unanimous decision before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. I was represented by none other than the ADF – co-founded by the pastor I used to curse on Sunday mornings. What a blessing to be reconciled with the Truth. I was also blessed when Dr. Kennedy’s former ministry flew a film crew up from Florida to interview me on the topic of anti-Christian bias in higher education. I understand the phenomenon well. I used to be Saul for it. Now, I find it a Pauling.
D: David French is a good friend and a great First Amendment attorney. That victory in front of the 4th Circuit never could have happened without him. David Noble, president of Summit Ministries, is another great David who slays Goliaths. He changed my life when he asked me to join the Summit faculty in 2008. Of course, there’s also my Dad. He gave me my passion for refusing to accept non-sense and refusing to tolerate foolishness. Plus, he gave me all my wild hand gestures that help distract the audience whenever I lose my train of thought in a speech. What was I just saying?
***
S: I’ve found that when you get to the Wheel of Fortune part of the alphabet, counting your blessings gets pretty easy. I’ll take an “S”, please. And I’ll take time to thank God for my American Vintage 1962 Fender Stratocaster. Enough said.
T: I am also thankful for my American Vintage 1952 Fender Telecaster. Enough said. I really mean it this time. The people over at Gibson Guitars might take exception.
***
Z: I almost had to thank God for ZZ Top but I was fast asleep with pen and paper in hand before I finished my exercise in gratitude. It was fitting that the exercise really did end with ZZs – badly needed sleep for which I could be grateful.
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: Gratitude and self-pity make for bad neighbors. When they move into your neighborhood they are never content with their initial property lines. They both have a tendency to grow like confederate jasmine. They consume everything in sight. They cannot coexist so we have to choose between one and the other.
Every now and then we must also catch ourselves and make sure we recognize our blessings instead of mistakenly labeling them as curses. No man can win a culture war all by himself. But that is actually good news. It also reminds us that no man is strong enough to subvert God’s will for another man’s life. That includes your own.
Our great constitutional experiment may occasionally be plagued by setbacks. But freedom is a process, not a result. It wouldn’t be worth defending without the prospect of losing. Just being a part of the fight is among life’s greatest blessings.
Monday, October 24, 2011
It isn’t always fun being a conservative activist. There are some days I want to throw in the towel and find an easier job – like selling flannel shirts at Indigo Girls concerts or booking campus speeches for Noam Chomsky. Just a few weeks ago, I had one of those days.
It all started when I took a long road trip to try and resolve a First Amendment issue with a university attorney. That was a big mistake. I not only failed to resolve the issue but had to sit and endure personal insults from someone bent on defending the indefensible, simply because he knows the burden of losing the case will be shouldered by the taxpayers. University officials are like that. They do stupid things because they are shielded from the consequences of their stupidity.
To make matters worse, I started itching unbearably during my “discussion” with the statist employee – Oops! I meant the “state” employee. I wasn’t sure what that was all about until I got home and changed clothes – only to discover I was covered with rashes. I had gotten into poison ivy again. Just another reason I should have joined the Boy Scouts instead of picking up that third sport in grammar school.
So, instead of going to bed at a decent hour, I was headed to the Medac to beg for a steroid shot. Steroids have never made me huge. In my experience, they’ve only made me into an insomniac. I knew it was going to be a sleepless, itchy night. I was completely miserable and dejected about the future of our constitutional republic, too. That’s a pretty bad combination. So I decided to take some advice I had given my readers a few years before. Living in accordance with your own teachings is a good way to avoid being called a hypocrite by liberals who can’t be hypocrites because they don’t believe in anything.
The advice I followed was simply to make a list of things for which I should be grateful. Actually, my advice required making a list of 26 things for which I should be grateful – one for each letter of the alphabet. I got started on “A” because that’s the first letter in the alphabet. I only know that because I went to public school in Texas. My list looked something like this:
A: I thank God I was born in America where I have the right to criticize public officials who can only insult me because they can’t send me to summer camp in Siberia during the middle of the winter.
B: I thank God for Glenn Beck who flew me to New York City to let me criticize hippies who broadcast anti-corporate musings on their I-pads. Oops, sorry, they had I-pad 2s. That’s the cool thing about America, though. Stupid people also have a right to speak. And that gives the smart and humble people something to talk about on Glenn Beck TV.
C: Back in the 1990s, Coral Ridge Ministries used to broadcast anti-ACLU sermons by Dr. James Kennedy. When I was an atheist, I used to watch Dr. Kennedy on TV – swearing and shouting at the TV screen every Sunday morning. Dr. Kennedy later helped found the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). After I converted to the right side, literally and figuratively speaking, my employer tried to strip my weekly opinion column of First Amendment protection. I appealed and won a unanimous decision before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. I was represented by none other than the ADF – co-founded by the pastor I used to curse on Sunday mornings. What a blessing to be reconciled with the Truth. I was also blessed when Dr. Kennedy’s former ministry flew a film crew up from Florida to interview me on the topic of anti-Christian bias in higher education. I understand the phenomenon well. I used to be Saul for it. Now, I find it a Pauling.
D: David French is a good friend and a great First Amendment attorney. That victory in front of the 4th Circuit never could have happened without him. David Noble, president of Summit Ministries, is another great David who slays Goliaths. He changed my life when he asked me to join the Summit faculty in 2008. Of course, there’s also my Dad. He gave me my passion for refusing to accept non-sense and refusing to tolerate foolishness. Plus, he gave me all my wild hand gestures that help distract the audience whenever I lose my train of thought in a speech. What was I just saying?
***
S: I’ve found that when you get to the Wheel of Fortune part of the alphabet, counting your blessings gets pretty easy. I’ll take an “S”, please. And I’ll take time to thank God for my American Vintage 1962 Fender Stratocaster. Enough said.
T: I am also thankful for my American Vintage 1952 Fender Telecaster. Enough said. I really mean it this time. The people over at Gibson Guitars might take exception.
***
Z: I almost had to thank God for ZZ Top but I was fast asleep with pen and paper in hand before I finished my exercise in gratitude. It was fitting that the exercise really did end with ZZs – badly needed sleep for which I could be grateful.
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: Gratitude and self-pity make for bad neighbors. When they move into your neighborhood they are never content with their initial property lines. They both have a tendency to grow like confederate jasmine. They consume everything in sight. They cannot coexist so we have to choose between one and the other.
Every now and then we must also catch ourselves and make sure we recognize our blessings instead of mistakenly labeling them as curses. No man can win a culture war all by himself. But that is actually good news. It also reminds us that no man is strong enough to subvert God’s will for another man’s life. That includes your own.
Our great constitutional experiment may occasionally be plagued by setbacks. But freedom is a process, not a result. It wouldn’t be worth defending without the prospect of losing. Just being a part of the fight is among life’s greatest blessings.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Cult of Global Warming Is Losing Influence
The world is losing faith in environmental dogma.
Michael Barone
Monday, October 24, 2011
Religious faith is a source of strength in many people’s lives. But religious faith when taken too far can prove ludicrous — or disastrous.
On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered “the great disappointment” when it didn’t happen.
In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children’s Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn’t, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery.
In 1898, the cavalrymen of the Mahdi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords, believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren’t, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.
A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global-warming alarmists.
They have an unshakeable faith that man-made carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate, causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will come to pass is based not on science — which is never fully settled, witness the recent experiments that may undermine Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity — but on something very much like religious faith.
All the trappings of religion are there.
Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.
The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.
Ritual: from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.
Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet-fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.
Corporate elitists, like General Electric’s Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not to. And if you’re clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.
Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara, and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.
But like the Millerites, the global-warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom — and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.
If carbon emissions were the only thing affecting climate, the global-warming alarmists would be right. But it’s obvious that climate is affected by many things, many not yet fully understood, and it is implausible that SUVs will affect it more than variations in the enormous energy produced by the sun.
Skepticism has been increased by the actions of believers. Passage of the House cap-and-trade bill in June 2009 focused politicians and voters on the costs of the global-warming religion. And disclosure of the Climategate e-mails in November 2009 showed how the clerisy was willing to distort evidence and suppress dissenting views in the interest of propagation of the faith.
We have seen how the United Nations agency whose authority we are supposed to respect took an item from an environmental activist group predicting that the Himalayan glaciers would melt in 2350 and predicted that the melting would take place in 2035. No sensible society would stake its economic future on the word of folks capable of such an error.
In recent years, we have seen how negative to 2 percent growth hurts many, many people, as compared to what happens with 3 to 7 percent growth. So we’re much less willing to adopt policies that will slow down growth not just for a few years but for the indefinite future.
Media, university, and corporate elites still profess belief in global-warming alarmism, but moves toward policies limiting carbon emissions have fizzled out, here and abroad. It looks like we’ll dodge the fate of the Millerites, the children’s crusaders, and the Mahdi’s cavalrymen.
Michael Barone
Monday, October 24, 2011
Religious faith is a source of strength in many people’s lives. But religious faith when taken too far can prove ludicrous — or disastrous.
On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered “the great disappointment” when it didn’t happen.
In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children’s Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn’t, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery.
In 1898, the cavalrymen of the Mahdi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords, believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren’t, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.
A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global-warming alarmists.
They have an unshakeable faith that man-made carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate, causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will come to pass is based not on science — which is never fully settled, witness the recent experiments that may undermine Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity — but on something very much like religious faith.
All the trappings of religion are there.
Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.
The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.
Ritual: from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.
Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet-fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.
Corporate elitists, like General Electric’s Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not to. And if you’re clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.
Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara, and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.
But like the Millerites, the global-warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom — and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.
If carbon emissions were the only thing affecting climate, the global-warming alarmists would be right. But it’s obvious that climate is affected by many things, many not yet fully understood, and it is implausible that SUVs will affect it more than variations in the enormous energy produced by the sun.
Skepticism has been increased by the actions of believers. Passage of the House cap-and-trade bill in June 2009 focused politicians and voters on the costs of the global-warming religion. And disclosure of the Climategate e-mails in November 2009 showed how the clerisy was willing to distort evidence and suppress dissenting views in the interest of propagation of the faith.
We have seen how the United Nations agency whose authority we are supposed to respect took an item from an environmental activist group predicting that the Himalayan glaciers would melt in 2350 and predicted that the melting would take place in 2035. No sensible society would stake its economic future on the word of folks capable of such an error.
In recent years, we have seen how negative to 2 percent growth hurts many, many people, as compared to what happens with 3 to 7 percent growth. So we’re much less willing to adopt policies that will slow down growth not just for a few years but for the indefinite future.
Media, university, and corporate elites still profess belief in global-warming alarmism, but moves toward policies limiting carbon emissions have fizzled out, here and abroad. It looks like we’ll dodge the fate of the Millerites, the children’s crusaders, and the Mahdi’s cavalrymen.
What About Fannie Mae Millionaires?
Democrats push housing benefits for the wealthy.
John Berlau
Monday, October 24, 2011
‘They are . . . not interested in asking millionaires and billionaires to pay a half a penny on the dollar for the sake of the future of our children and communities.”
That was the reaction of Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) upon the defeat Thursday evening of the bill he sponsored that paired an element of President Obama’s jobs plan — funding for the hiring of some first responders and hundreds of thousands of unionized teachers — with a surtax on those earning more than $1 million.
Yet that same evening, Menendez and his fellow Democrats — as well as self-proclaimed socialist senator Bernie Sanders — voted unanimously to protect subsidies for millionaires’ mortgages. In fact it was another measure Menendez himself sponsored: an amendment to an appropriations bill that will allow Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration to back home loans as large as $729,750. With help from a handful of Republicans, his measure cleared the Senate 60–38.
This “conforming loan limit,” the maximum for mortgages Fannie and Freddie can buy and the Federal Housing Administration can insure, had expired at the end of September and reverted to $625,500. But Menendez proclaimed that Congress must raise the limit back to almost three-quarters of a million dollars in order to save the “middle class.” Not raising the limit “makes it harder for middle class homebuyers to get credit when credit is tight,” Menendez said.
But this definition of middle class is pretty, shall we say, rich. As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted, “the average sales price for existing homes in September was $212,700.” And even in Menendez’s home state of New Jersey, the median sale price of homes was only $303,100 in August, as calculated by Zillow.com, a prominent real-estate website. This amount is less than half of the $729,750 limit Menendez and the other Democrats said was necessary to protect the “middle class.”
If this increased loan limit becomes law, it would mean that purchasers of these expensive homes — millionaires and near-millionaires almost by definition — could save thousands of dollars from below-market interest rates thanks to government guarantees. Yet so far, there have been few if any condemnations of this government privilege for the wealthy from groups involved in the supposedly populist Occupy Wall Street. And this — as well as the movement’s general silence on the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie and Freddie’s outsized role in the financial crisis — exposes the stink of hypocrisy (on top of the many other reported scents) from much of the OWS movement.
Just after Menendez and the ostensibly conservative Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.) introduced the measure last Wednesday, I held out an olive branch to OWS. I wrote on the Corner that since both OWS and the Tea Party claim to despise “corporate welfare and bailouts that benefit the very wealthy . . . both movements should rally strongly” to oppose the Menendez-Isakson amendment.
By and large, Senate Republicans remembered the tea-party message. Only seven joined Isakson in backing the higher limits. Those GOP guys and gals — Isakson, his Georgia colleague Saxby Chambliss, Roy Blunt (Mo.), Scott Brown (Mass.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Dean Heller (Nev.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and Olympia Snowe (Maine) — have certainly earned a spot on the Corporate Welfare and Crony Capitalism Wall of Shame. (And Isakson, Chambliss, Brown, Graham, and Snowe already have a spot on the wall from their support of Dodd-Frank’s Durbin Amendment price controls, which benefit big retailers and shift costs to consumers in the form of new bank fees.)
But this group of eight represents less than one-sixth of the GOP caucus of 47 senators. By contrast, all Democrats on the Senate floor voted for these subsidies to the rich. (See vote tally on page S6483 of the congressional record.) In a February white paper, the Obama administration had commendably recommended letting the loan limit expire so “larger loans for more expensive homes will once again be funded only through the private market.” But the White House apparently made little effort to persuade its own party in the Senate.
What about independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who proudly calls himself a socialist and proclaims his solidarity with Occupy Wall Street? He voted to support these subsidies for those at the top, at the expense of the 99 percent.
So far, Sanders’s hypocrisy is similar to that of much of OWS on the government-sponsored enterprises. “I wish they would occupy Fannie and Freddie,” said CNBC reporter Michelle Caruso-Cabrera on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
In New York and Washington, D.C., the occupiers have been everywhere from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. But there have been few if any signs, let alone tents, in front of the palatial-like headquarters of Fannie in D.C. or at Freddie’s sprawling office in the tony suburb of McLean, Va. When it comes to the hundreds of billions Fannie and Freddie still owe to U.S. taxpayers, as opposed to the TARP money largely paid back by the Wall Street financial firms, there is a drum beat of deafening silence from OWS.
This is despite voluminous new data showing that Fannie and Freddie led, rather than followed, in the creation of reckless mortgages and mortgage instruments. In their new book, Reckless Endangerment, New York Times financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson and market analyst Joshua Rosner write that Fannie “led both the private and public sectors down a path that led directly to the financial crisis of 2008.”
In the Times, Morgenson has written that Fannie and Freddie were the “biggest and most steadfast collaborators” of the notorious Countrywide Financial. Fannie “assiduously . . . pursued Mr. Mozilo and 14 of his lieutenants to make sure the company continued to shovel loans its way,” according to Morgenson. In 2004, Countrywide “sold 26 percent of the loans Fannie bought,” she reported.
At the end of their book, liberals Morgenson and Rosnernote note with dismay, as have many conservative critics, that the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” doesn’t lay a glove on Fannie and Freddie. Sooner or later, OWS will have to address two financial elephants in Zuccotti Park. If they don’t, they might as well be occupying a cloud.
John Berlau
Monday, October 24, 2011
‘They are . . . not interested in asking millionaires and billionaires to pay a half a penny on the dollar for the sake of the future of our children and communities.”
That was the reaction of Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) upon the defeat Thursday evening of the bill he sponsored that paired an element of President Obama’s jobs plan — funding for the hiring of some first responders and hundreds of thousands of unionized teachers — with a surtax on those earning more than $1 million.
Yet that same evening, Menendez and his fellow Democrats — as well as self-proclaimed socialist senator Bernie Sanders — voted unanimously to protect subsidies for millionaires’ mortgages. In fact it was another measure Menendez himself sponsored: an amendment to an appropriations bill that will allow Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration to back home loans as large as $729,750. With help from a handful of Republicans, his measure cleared the Senate 60–38.
This “conforming loan limit,” the maximum for mortgages Fannie and Freddie can buy and the Federal Housing Administration can insure, had expired at the end of September and reverted to $625,500. But Menendez proclaimed that Congress must raise the limit back to almost three-quarters of a million dollars in order to save the “middle class.” Not raising the limit “makes it harder for middle class homebuyers to get credit when credit is tight,” Menendez said.
But this definition of middle class is pretty, shall we say, rich. As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted, “the average sales price for existing homes in September was $212,700.” And even in Menendez’s home state of New Jersey, the median sale price of homes was only $303,100 in August, as calculated by Zillow.com, a prominent real-estate website. This amount is less than half of the $729,750 limit Menendez and the other Democrats said was necessary to protect the “middle class.”
If this increased loan limit becomes law, it would mean that purchasers of these expensive homes — millionaires and near-millionaires almost by definition — could save thousands of dollars from below-market interest rates thanks to government guarantees. Yet so far, there have been few if any condemnations of this government privilege for the wealthy from groups involved in the supposedly populist Occupy Wall Street. And this — as well as the movement’s general silence on the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie and Freddie’s outsized role in the financial crisis — exposes the stink of hypocrisy (on top of the many other reported scents) from much of the OWS movement.
Just after Menendez and the ostensibly conservative Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.) introduced the measure last Wednesday, I held out an olive branch to OWS. I wrote on the Corner that since both OWS and the Tea Party claim to despise “corporate welfare and bailouts that benefit the very wealthy . . . both movements should rally strongly” to oppose the Menendez-Isakson amendment.
By and large, Senate Republicans remembered the tea-party message. Only seven joined Isakson in backing the higher limits. Those GOP guys and gals — Isakson, his Georgia colleague Saxby Chambliss, Roy Blunt (Mo.), Scott Brown (Mass.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Dean Heller (Nev.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and Olympia Snowe (Maine) — have certainly earned a spot on the Corporate Welfare and Crony Capitalism Wall of Shame. (And Isakson, Chambliss, Brown, Graham, and Snowe already have a spot on the wall from their support of Dodd-Frank’s Durbin Amendment price controls, which benefit big retailers and shift costs to consumers in the form of new bank fees.)
But this group of eight represents less than one-sixth of the GOP caucus of 47 senators. By contrast, all Democrats on the Senate floor voted for these subsidies to the rich. (See vote tally on page S6483 of the congressional record.) In a February white paper, the Obama administration had commendably recommended letting the loan limit expire so “larger loans for more expensive homes will once again be funded only through the private market.” But the White House apparently made little effort to persuade its own party in the Senate.
What about independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who proudly calls himself a socialist and proclaims his solidarity with Occupy Wall Street? He voted to support these subsidies for those at the top, at the expense of the 99 percent.
So far, Sanders’s hypocrisy is similar to that of much of OWS on the government-sponsored enterprises. “I wish they would occupy Fannie and Freddie,” said CNBC reporter Michelle Caruso-Cabrera on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
In New York and Washington, D.C., the occupiers have been everywhere from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. But there have been few if any signs, let alone tents, in front of the palatial-like headquarters of Fannie in D.C. or at Freddie’s sprawling office in the tony suburb of McLean, Va. When it comes to the hundreds of billions Fannie and Freddie still owe to U.S. taxpayers, as opposed to the TARP money largely paid back by the Wall Street financial firms, there is a drum beat of deafening silence from OWS.
This is despite voluminous new data showing that Fannie and Freddie led, rather than followed, in the creation of reckless mortgages and mortgage instruments. In their new book, Reckless Endangerment, New York Times financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson and market analyst Joshua Rosner write that Fannie “led both the private and public sectors down a path that led directly to the financial crisis of 2008.”
In the Times, Morgenson has written that Fannie and Freddie were the “biggest and most steadfast collaborators” of the notorious Countrywide Financial. Fannie “assiduously . . . pursued Mr. Mozilo and 14 of his lieutenants to make sure the company continued to shovel loans its way,” according to Morgenson. In 2004, Countrywide “sold 26 percent of the loans Fannie bought,” she reported.
At the end of their book, liberals Morgenson and Rosnernote note with dismay, as have many conservative critics, that the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” doesn’t lay a glove on Fannie and Freddie. Sooner or later, OWS will have to address two financial elephants in Zuccotti Park. If they don’t, they might as well be occupying a cloud.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Biden’s Fourth-Grade Economics
How to justify unaffordable and inefficient stimulus
Mark Steyn
Saturday, October 22, 2011
In one of those inspired innovations designed to keep American classrooms on the cutting edge of educational excellence, the administration has been sending Joe Biden out to talk to schoolchildren. Last week, it was the fourth grade at Alexander B. Goode Elementary School in York, Pa., that found itself on the receiving end of the vice president’s wisdom:
So let’s see if I follow the vice president’s thinking:
The school laid off these teachers because “there’s no money for them in the city.” That’s true. York City School District is broke. It has a $14 million budget deficit.
So instead Washington, D.C., is going to “give you some money” to hire these teachers back.
So, unlike York, Pa., presumably Washington, D.C., has “money for them”?
No, not technically. Washington, D.C., is also broke — way broker than York City School District. In fact, the government of the United States is broker than any entity has ever been in the history of the planet. Officially, Washington has to return 15,000,000,000,000 dollars just to get back to having nothing at all. And that 15,000,000,000,000 dollars is a very lowball figure that conveniently ignores another $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities that the government, unlike private businesses, is able to keep off the books.
So how come the Brokest Jurisdiction in History is able to “give you some money” to hire back those teachers that had to be laid off?
No problem, says the vice president. We’re going to “ask” people who have “a lot of money” to “pay just a little bit more” in taxes.
Where are these people? Evidently, not in York, Pa. But they’re out there somewhere. Who has “a lot of money”? According to President Obama, if your combined household income is over $250,000 a year you have “a lot of money.” Back in March, my National Review colleague Kevin Williamson pointed out that, in order to balance the budget of the United States, you would have to increase the taxes of people earning more than $250,000 a year by $500,000 a year.
Okay, okay, maybe that 250K definition of “bloated plutocrat” is a bit off. After all, the quarter-mil-a-year category includes not only bankers and other mustache-twirling robber barons, but also at least 50 school superintendents in the State of New York and many other mustache-twirling selfless public servants.
So how about people earning a million dollars a year? That’s “a lot of money” by anybody’s definition. As Kevin Williamson also pointed out, to balance the budget of the United States on the backs of millionaires you would have to increase the taxes of those earning more than 1 million a year by 6 million a year.
Not only is there “no money in the city” of York, Pa., and no money in Washington, D.C., there’s no money anywhere else in America — not for spending on the Obama/Biden scale. Come to that, there’s no money anywhere on the planet: Last year, John Kitchen of the U.S. Treasury and Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin published a study called “Financing U.S. Debt: Is There Enough Money in the World — and At What Cost?”
Don’t worry, it’s a book with a happy ending! U.S.-government spending is sustainable as long as by 2020 the rest of the planet is willing to sink 19 percent of its GDP into U.S. Treasury debt. And why wouldn’t they? After all, if you’re a Chinese politburo member or a Saudi prince or a Russian kleptocrat or a Somali pirate and you switched on CNN International and chanced to catch Joe Biden’s Fourth Grade Economics class, why wouldn’t you cheerily dump a fifth of your GDP into a business model with such a bright future?
Since 1970, public-school employment has increased ten times faster than public-school enrollment. In 2008, the United States spent more per student on K–12 education than any other developed nation except Switzerland — and at least the Swiss have something to show for it. In 2008, York City School District spent $12,691 per pupil — or about a third more than the Swiss. Slovakia’s total per-student cost is less than York City’s current per-student deficit — and the Slovak kids beat the United States at mathematics, which may explain why their budget arithmetic still has a passing acquaintanceship with reality. As in so many other areas of American life, the problem is not the lack of money but the fact that so much of the money is utterly wasted.
But that’s no reason not to waste even more! So the president spent last week touring around in his weaponized Canadian bus telling Americans that Republicans were blocking plans to “put teachers back in the classroom.” Well, where are they now? Not every schoolmarm is down at the Occupy Wall Street drum circle, is she? No, indeed. And in that respect York City is a most instructive example: Five years ago (the most recent breakdown I have), the district had 440 teachers but 295 administrative and support staff. If you’re thinking that sounds a little out of whack, that just shows what a dummy you are: For every three teachers we “put back in the classroom,” we need to hire two bureaucrats to put back in the bureaucracy to fill in the paperwork to access the federal funds to put teachers back in the classroom. One day it will be three educrats for every two teachers, and the system will operate even more effectively.
It’s just about possible to foresee, say, Iceland or Ireland getting its spending under control. But, when a nation of 300 million people presumes to determine grade-school hiring and almost everything else through an ever more centralized bureaucracy, you’re setting yourself up for waste on a scale unknown to history. For example, under the Obama “stimulus,” U.S. taxpayers gave a $529 million loan guarantee to the company Fisker to build their Karma electric car. At a factory in Finland.
If you’re wondering how giving half a billion dollars to a Finnish factory stimulates the U.S. economy, well, what’s a lousy half-bil in a multi-trillion-dollar sinkhole? Besides, in the 2009 global rankings, Finnish schoolkids placed sixth in math, third in reading, and second in science, while suffering under the burden of a per-student budget half that of York City. By comparison, America placed 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31st in math. So the good news is that, by using U.S.-government money to fund a factory in Finland, Fisker may be able to hire workers smart enough to figure out how to build an unwanted electric car that doesn’t lose its entire U.S.-taxpayer investment.
In a sane world, Joe Biden’s remarks would be greeted by derisive laughter, even by fourth graders. Certainly by Finnish fourth graders.
Mark Steyn
Saturday, October 22, 2011
In one of those inspired innovations designed to keep American classrooms on the cutting edge of educational excellence, the administration has been sending Joe Biden out to talk to schoolchildren. Last week, it was the fourth grade at Alexander B. Goode Elementary School in York, Pa., that found itself on the receiving end of the vice president’s wisdom:
Here in this school, your school, you’ve had a lot of teachers who used to work here, but because there’s no money for them in the city, they’re not working. And so what happens is, when that occurs, each of the teachers that stays have more kids to teach. And they don’t get to spend as much time with you as they did when your classes were smaller. We think the federal government in Washington, D.C., should say to the cities and states, look, we’re going to give you some money so that you can hire back all those people. And the way we’re going to do it, we’re going to ask people who have a lot of money to pay just a little bit more in taxes.Who knew it was that easy?
So let’s see if I follow the vice president’s thinking:
The school laid off these teachers because “there’s no money for them in the city.” That’s true. York City School District is broke. It has a $14 million budget deficit.
So instead Washington, D.C., is going to “give you some money” to hire these teachers back.
So, unlike York, Pa., presumably Washington, D.C., has “money for them”?
No, not technically. Washington, D.C., is also broke — way broker than York City School District. In fact, the government of the United States is broker than any entity has ever been in the history of the planet. Officially, Washington has to return 15,000,000,000,000 dollars just to get back to having nothing at all. And that 15,000,000,000,000 dollars is a very lowball figure that conveniently ignores another $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities that the government, unlike private businesses, is able to keep off the books.
So how come the Brokest Jurisdiction in History is able to “give you some money” to hire back those teachers that had to be laid off?
No problem, says the vice president. We’re going to “ask” people who have “a lot of money” to “pay just a little bit more” in taxes.
Where are these people? Evidently, not in York, Pa. But they’re out there somewhere. Who has “a lot of money”? According to President Obama, if your combined household income is over $250,000 a year you have “a lot of money.” Back in March, my National Review colleague Kevin Williamson pointed out that, in order to balance the budget of the United States, you would have to increase the taxes of people earning more than $250,000 a year by $500,000 a year.
Okay, okay, maybe that 250K definition of “bloated plutocrat” is a bit off. After all, the quarter-mil-a-year category includes not only bankers and other mustache-twirling robber barons, but also at least 50 school superintendents in the State of New York and many other mustache-twirling selfless public servants.
So how about people earning a million dollars a year? That’s “a lot of money” by anybody’s definition. As Kevin Williamson also pointed out, to balance the budget of the United States on the backs of millionaires you would have to increase the taxes of those earning more than 1 million a year by 6 million a year.
Not only is there “no money in the city” of York, Pa., and no money in Washington, D.C., there’s no money anywhere else in America — not for spending on the Obama/Biden scale. Come to that, there’s no money anywhere on the planet: Last year, John Kitchen of the U.S. Treasury and Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin published a study called “Financing U.S. Debt: Is There Enough Money in the World — and At What Cost?”
Don’t worry, it’s a book with a happy ending! U.S.-government spending is sustainable as long as by 2020 the rest of the planet is willing to sink 19 percent of its GDP into U.S. Treasury debt. And why wouldn’t they? After all, if you’re a Chinese politburo member or a Saudi prince or a Russian kleptocrat or a Somali pirate and you switched on CNN International and chanced to catch Joe Biden’s Fourth Grade Economics class, why wouldn’t you cheerily dump a fifth of your GDP into a business model with such a bright future?
Since 1970, public-school employment has increased ten times faster than public-school enrollment. In 2008, the United States spent more per student on K–12 education than any other developed nation except Switzerland — and at least the Swiss have something to show for it. In 2008, York City School District spent $12,691 per pupil — or about a third more than the Swiss. Slovakia’s total per-student cost is less than York City’s current per-student deficit — and the Slovak kids beat the United States at mathematics, which may explain why their budget arithmetic still has a passing acquaintanceship with reality. As in so many other areas of American life, the problem is not the lack of money but the fact that so much of the money is utterly wasted.
But that’s no reason not to waste even more! So the president spent last week touring around in his weaponized Canadian bus telling Americans that Republicans were blocking plans to “put teachers back in the classroom.” Well, where are they now? Not every schoolmarm is down at the Occupy Wall Street drum circle, is she? No, indeed. And in that respect York City is a most instructive example: Five years ago (the most recent breakdown I have), the district had 440 teachers but 295 administrative and support staff. If you’re thinking that sounds a little out of whack, that just shows what a dummy you are: For every three teachers we “put back in the classroom,” we need to hire two bureaucrats to put back in the bureaucracy to fill in the paperwork to access the federal funds to put teachers back in the classroom. One day it will be three educrats for every two teachers, and the system will operate even more effectively.
It’s just about possible to foresee, say, Iceland or Ireland getting its spending under control. But, when a nation of 300 million people presumes to determine grade-school hiring and almost everything else through an ever more centralized bureaucracy, you’re setting yourself up for waste on a scale unknown to history. For example, under the Obama “stimulus,” U.S. taxpayers gave a $529 million loan guarantee to the company Fisker to build their Karma electric car. At a factory in Finland.
If you’re wondering how giving half a billion dollars to a Finnish factory stimulates the U.S. economy, well, what’s a lousy half-bil in a multi-trillion-dollar sinkhole? Besides, in the 2009 global rankings, Finnish schoolkids placed sixth in math, third in reading, and second in science, while suffering under the burden of a per-student budget half that of York City. By comparison, America placed 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31st in math. So the good news is that, by using U.S.-government money to fund a factory in Finland, Fisker may be able to hire workers smart enough to figure out how to build an unwanted electric car that doesn’t lose its entire U.S.-taxpayer investment.
In a sane world, Joe Biden’s remarks would be greeted by derisive laughter, even by fourth graders. Certainly by Finnish fourth graders.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Demonstrations, Riots & Wars
By Rich Galen
Friday, October 21, 2011
As I have told you before, I watch CNBC in the morning because I know about as much about politics as most of the guests on the morning cable news programs who talk about politics, but I know nearly nothing about finance so I watch the guests on CNBC who talk about finance.
Last Friday I was listening to CNBC on my Sirius radio as I drove to Ohio and heard Jim Cramer talking about the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Even though he made a very large pile of money as a trader and investor, he said that in his youth he was pretty far to the left of his colleagues.
When he was asked whether, if he were in his early 20s today, he would be camping out with the demonstrators, he paused and said he probably would.
But, that's not what caught my ear. He went on to say (and this is a pretty close approximation, but not guaranteed to be a direct quote:
There were real villains in [the Wall Street collapse of 2008]. I wish the people camping out on Wall Street were demonstrating against the people who did bad; not the people who did well.
There are demonstrations going on just about everywhere. In Athens, Greece this morning pending a vote of the Parliament on a new round of austerity measures (which passed by ten votes - 154-144) 70,000 Greeks demonstrated outside.
The demonstration turned violent when the Anarchists decided to do battle against the Communists. I know that sounds like a scene from "The Big Lebowski:"
Donny: Are these the Nazis, Walter?
Walter Sobchak: No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of …
Nihilists! I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
But, it's what was going on in Athens yesterday.
All these demonstrations are about the people who are (or claim to be) the "have nots" wanting to "have more" by taking it from those whom they believe "have too much."
My guess is, where you fall depends on whether you're standing in the unemployment line, or riding on the gravy train.
It is not just Anarchists v Communists; or Occupy Wall Streeters v Wall Streeters. It is nation v nation.
The United States is still the largest economy in the world. We are the Earth's richest country. Some other countries begrudge us that, but because we also own the world's biggest military (including everything from mess kits to aircraft carriers) the "have not" countries have no good way to take anything - much less everything - we have.
That may not be the case amoung the Europeans. The two big economies are the French and the Germans who have, as you know if you have watched any more than 37 seconds of the Military Channel, not always gotten along.
It seems that the Northern Europeans are growing wearing of bailing out the Southern Europeans which include Greece, Italy, and Spain.
Greece, Italy and Spain are among the "have nots" in this version of current economic mini-series; France and Germany are the "haves." Switzerland, although not a member of the EU and does not use the Euro as its official currency, is also one of the "haves" because … just because.
One person with a sign is a protest. A crowd of protestors is a demonstration. A crowd of demonstrators turned violent is a riot. A massive riot turned inward is a rebellion. A successful rebellion is a revolution. A nationwide revolution turned outward is ... a war.
Stay tuned.
Friday, October 21, 2011
As I have told you before, I watch CNBC in the morning because I know about as much about politics as most of the guests on the morning cable news programs who talk about politics, but I know nearly nothing about finance so I watch the guests on CNBC who talk about finance.
Last Friday I was listening to CNBC on my Sirius radio as I drove to Ohio and heard Jim Cramer talking about the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Even though he made a very large pile of money as a trader and investor, he said that in his youth he was pretty far to the left of his colleagues.
When he was asked whether, if he were in his early 20s today, he would be camping out with the demonstrators, he paused and said he probably would.
But, that's not what caught my ear. He went on to say (and this is a pretty close approximation, but not guaranteed to be a direct quote:
There were real villains in [the Wall Street collapse of 2008]. I wish the people camping out on Wall Street were demonstrating against the people who did bad; not the people who did well.
There are demonstrations going on just about everywhere. In Athens, Greece this morning pending a vote of the Parliament on a new round of austerity measures (which passed by ten votes - 154-144) 70,000 Greeks demonstrated outside.
The demonstration turned violent when the Anarchists decided to do battle against the Communists. I know that sounds like a scene from "The Big Lebowski:"
Donny: Are these the Nazis, Walter?
Walter Sobchak: No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of …
Nihilists! I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
But, it's what was going on in Athens yesterday.
All these demonstrations are about the people who are (or claim to be) the "have nots" wanting to "have more" by taking it from those whom they believe "have too much."
My guess is, where you fall depends on whether you're standing in the unemployment line, or riding on the gravy train.
It is not just Anarchists v Communists; or Occupy Wall Streeters v Wall Streeters. It is nation v nation.
The United States is still the largest economy in the world. We are the Earth's richest country. Some other countries begrudge us that, but because we also own the world's biggest military (including everything from mess kits to aircraft carriers) the "have not" countries have no good way to take anything - much less everything - we have.
That may not be the case amoung the Europeans. The two big economies are the French and the Germans who have, as you know if you have watched any more than 37 seconds of the Military Channel, not always gotten along.
It seems that the Northern Europeans are growing wearing of bailing out the Southern Europeans which include Greece, Italy, and Spain.
Greece, Italy and Spain are among the "have nots" in this version of current economic mini-series; France and Germany are the "haves." Switzerland, although not a member of the EU and does not use the Euro as its official currency, is also one of the "haves" because … just because.
One person with a sign is a protest. A crowd of protestors is a demonstration. A crowd of demonstrators turned violent is a riot. A massive riot turned inward is a rebellion. A successful rebellion is a revolution. A nationwide revolution turned outward is ... a war.
Stay tuned.
Keeping Poor People Poor
By John C. Goodman
Saturday, October 22, 2011
If you live in a middle-class household, you generally expect your needs to be met through the marketplace. You buy or rent housing in the real estate market. When you aren't driving your own car, you catch a taxicab or maybe even hire a limo. You or your employer buy health insurance, and you choose your doctor in the medical marketplace.
For most poor families, the experience is very different. Regulations designed to protect entrenched special interests have succeeded in raising the costs of basic services so much that low-income families have been priced out of the market for many essential services. Middle-class and poor communities differ not just by income. For the middle class, basic needs are met by markets and they benefit from the customer-pleasing innovations that competition produces. All too often, the poor must turn to public programs with all of the customer-pleasing attributes of the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Take housing, for example. The cheapest form of housing is small, prefabricated homes for zero-lot developments. However, zoning regulations in most cities outlaw them — an act that effectively doubles the price of the cheapest housing. There are also other expensive restrictions on new housing, such as forcing builders to build on bigger lots and mandating specific types of materials and construction methods. Regulations vary widely across the United States. In Houston, a less restrictive city, regulatory costs add about $13,200 to the price of an average home. In San Diego, a multitude of regulations add $240,000. These cost-increasing regulations have essentially priced many low-income residents out of the market for a private home, forcing them to turn to public housing instead.
Then there is transportation. Did you know that people in the bottom fifth of income distribution take more taxicab rides than middle-income families? The reason: a lot of poor people don’t own automobiles. Taxi fares are far higher than they need to be, however, because local governments tightly control entry into the taxi market. There is no reason in principle why someone with a van couldn’t pick up workers in a low-income neighborhood and transport them to a jobsite, charging each passenger a few bucks. The problem: Most cities make this activity against the law.
When low-income families are priced out of the market for private transportation, they must turn to public transportation. Since only a few cities have subways, that means turning to buses. Yet, even a simple trip to work or a supermarket can be a logistical nightmare if you have to follow city bus schedules.
And consider health care. Sad to say, but the paramedics who treat our soldiers on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan are not allowed to provide the same services back home for people who can’t afford, and perhaps don’t need, the attention of a physician. Although the restrictions differ from state to state, laws everywhere “protect” patients from care delivered by anyone other than a physician. This is despite studies showing that non-physician clinicians can competently provide from 60 percent to 90 percent of all primary care.
In some parts of the country, walk-in clinics in shopping malls allow nurses to give flu shots, take temperatures, prescribe antibiotics and deliver other timely, inexpensive care. But even these innovative services are often saddled with burdensome regulations. For example, in Massachusetts, regulations for clinics have such cost-increasing requirements as a separate entrance for patients, minimum size requirements for exam rooms, and a separate reception desk. When low-income families find they cannot afford private care, what’s the alternative? Community health centers and the emergency rooms of safety net hospitals. Yet these care sites often involve crowding and waiting, which limits access to care.
Child care is another basic service needed by many low-income families. In fact, low-income families spend about a third of their income on child care, as much as a typical middle-income family might spend on a home. In recent years, state and local governments have been making child care ever more costly, however. All manner of regulations are emerging, including the licensing of day care workers. Did you know that in most places, it’s illegal for a neighbor down the street to oversee children from the neighborhood for pay? Again, what’s the alternative? Low-income mothers must seriously consider abandoning the labor market altogether and rely solely on the welfare state.
Even a basic activity like keeping the neighborhood safe runs into regulatory barriers. In response to inadequate public police protection, an increasingly popular alternative is private police. In the United States, private security guards actually outnumber public police officers by a ratio of three to one; and they can perform most, if not all, of the necessary law enforcement tasks. Yet, government regulation has created substantial barriers for would-be security firms, including criminal background checks, examinations, training requirements, and insurance and bonding minimums.
A task force report produced by the National Center for Policy analysis calls for an end to these senseless policies, and advocates allowing our lowest-income citizens access to the benefits of the free market. I’ll write about it in a future column.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
If you live in a middle-class household, you generally expect your needs to be met through the marketplace. You buy or rent housing in the real estate market. When you aren't driving your own car, you catch a taxicab or maybe even hire a limo. You or your employer buy health insurance, and you choose your doctor in the medical marketplace.
For most poor families, the experience is very different. Regulations designed to protect entrenched special interests have succeeded in raising the costs of basic services so much that low-income families have been priced out of the market for many essential services. Middle-class and poor communities differ not just by income. For the middle class, basic needs are met by markets and they benefit from the customer-pleasing innovations that competition produces. All too often, the poor must turn to public programs with all of the customer-pleasing attributes of the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Take housing, for example. The cheapest form of housing is small, prefabricated homes for zero-lot developments. However, zoning regulations in most cities outlaw them — an act that effectively doubles the price of the cheapest housing. There are also other expensive restrictions on new housing, such as forcing builders to build on bigger lots and mandating specific types of materials and construction methods. Regulations vary widely across the United States. In Houston, a less restrictive city, regulatory costs add about $13,200 to the price of an average home. In San Diego, a multitude of regulations add $240,000. These cost-increasing regulations have essentially priced many low-income residents out of the market for a private home, forcing them to turn to public housing instead.
Then there is transportation. Did you know that people in the bottom fifth of income distribution take more taxicab rides than middle-income families? The reason: a lot of poor people don’t own automobiles. Taxi fares are far higher than they need to be, however, because local governments tightly control entry into the taxi market. There is no reason in principle why someone with a van couldn’t pick up workers in a low-income neighborhood and transport them to a jobsite, charging each passenger a few bucks. The problem: Most cities make this activity against the law.
When low-income families are priced out of the market for private transportation, they must turn to public transportation. Since only a few cities have subways, that means turning to buses. Yet, even a simple trip to work or a supermarket can be a logistical nightmare if you have to follow city bus schedules.
And consider health care. Sad to say, but the paramedics who treat our soldiers on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan are not allowed to provide the same services back home for people who can’t afford, and perhaps don’t need, the attention of a physician. Although the restrictions differ from state to state, laws everywhere “protect” patients from care delivered by anyone other than a physician. This is despite studies showing that non-physician clinicians can competently provide from 60 percent to 90 percent of all primary care.
In some parts of the country, walk-in clinics in shopping malls allow nurses to give flu shots, take temperatures, prescribe antibiotics and deliver other timely, inexpensive care. But even these innovative services are often saddled with burdensome regulations. For example, in Massachusetts, regulations for clinics have such cost-increasing requirements as a separate entrance for patients, minimum size requirements for exam rooms, and a separate reception desk. When low-income families find they cannot afford private care, what’s the alternative? Community health centers and the emergency rooms of safety net hospitals. Yet these care sites often involve crowding and waiting, which limits access to care.
Child care is another basic service needed by many low-income families. In fact, low-income families spend about a third of their income on child care, as much as a typical middle-income family might spend on a home. In recent years, state and local governments have been making child care ever more costly, however. All manner of regulations are emerging, including the licensing of day care workers. Did you know that in most places, it’s illegal for a neighbor down the street to oversee children from the neighborhood for pay? Again, what’s the alternative? Low-income mothers must seriously consider abandoning the labor market altogether and rely solely on the welfare state.
Even a basic activity like keeping the neighborhood safe runs into regulatory barriers. In response to inadequate public police protection, an increasingly popular alternative is private police. In the United States, private security guards actually outnumber public police officers by a ratio of three to one; and they can perform most, if not all, of the necessary law enforcement tasks. Yet, government regulation has created substantial barriers for would-be security firms, including criminal background checks, examinations, training requirements, and insurance and bonding minimums.
A task force report produced by the National Center for Policy analysis calls for an end to these senseless policies, and advocates allowing our lowest-income citizens access to the benefits of the free market. I’ll write about it in a future column.
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