Inequality -- Crisis or Scam

By Pat Buchanan

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

When President Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing in 1972, Chairman Mao Zedong -- with his Marxist revolution, Great Leap Forward and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution -- had achieved an equality unrivaled anywhere.

That is, until Pol Pot came along.

There seemed to be no private cars on Beijing's streets. In the stores, there was next to nothing on the shelves. The Chinese all seemed dressed in the same blue Mao jackets.

Today there are billionaires and millionaires in China, booming cities, a huge growing middle class and, yes, hundreds of millions of peasants still living on a few dollars a day.

Hence, there is far greater inequality in China today than in 1972.

Yet, is not the unequal China of today a far better place for the Chinese people than the Communist ant colony of Mao?

Lest we forget, it is freedom that produces inequality.

Even a partly free nation unleashes the natural and acquired abilities of peoples, and the more industrious and talented inevitably excel and rise and reap the greater rewards. "Inequality ... is rooted in the biological nature of man," said James Fenimore Cooper.

Yet for many people, from New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio to President Barack Obama to Pope Francis, income inequality is a curse in need of a cure, as there is today said to be an intolerable measure of such inequality.

But let us first inspect the measuring rod.

Though a family of four with $23,550 in cash income in 2013 qualified as living in poverty, this hardly tells the whole story.

Consider the leveling effect of the graduated income tax, about which Karl Marx wrote glowingly in his "Communist Manifesto."

The top 1 percent of U.S. earners pay nearly 40 percent of U.S. income taxes. The top 10 percent pay 70 percent. The top 50 percent pay more than 97 percent of income taxes. The poor pay nothing.

Surely, trillions of dollars siphoned annually off the incomes of the most productive Americans -- in federal, state and local income and payroll taxes -- closes the gap somewhat.

Secondly, though 15 percent of U.S. families qualify as poor, measured by cash income, this does not take into account the vast assortment of benefits they receive.

The poor have their children educated free in public schools, from Head Start to K-12 and then on to college with Pell Grants. Their medical needs are taken care of through Medicaid. They receive food stamps to feed the family. The kids can get two or three free meals a day at school.

Housing, too, is paid for or subsidized. The poor also receive welfare checks and Earned Income Tax Credits for added cash.

In the late 1940s, our family had no freezer, no dishwasher, no clothes washer or dryer, no microwave, no air conditioning. We watched the Notre Dame-Army game on a black-and-white 8-inch DuMont.

Among American families in poverty today, 1 in 4 have a freezer. Nearly half have automatic dishwashers. Almost 60 percent have a home computer. About 2 in 3 poor families have a clothes washer and dryer. Eighty percent have cellphones.

Ninety-three percent of the poor have a microwave; 96 percent a color TV, and 97 percent a gas or electric stove. Not exactly les miserables.

Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation added up the cost in 2012 of the means-tested federal and state programs for America's poor and low-income families. Price tag: $927 billion.

There are 79 federal programs, writes Rector, that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, social services, training and targeted education to poor and low-income Americans.

"If converted to cash, means-tested welfare spending is more than sufficient to bring the income of every lower-income American to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, roughly $44,000 per year for a family of four."

Then there are the contributions of churches, charities and foundations.

Where in history have the poor been treated better?

Certainly not in the USA in the 1950s or during the Depression. Why, then, all this sudden talk about reducing the gap between rich and poor?

A good society will take care of its poor. But envy that others have more, and coveting the goods of the more successful, used to constitute two of the seven capital sins in the Baltimore Catechism.

At Howard University in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared, "We seek not just ... equality as a right ... but equality as a fact and equality as a result."

Yet the only way to make people who are unequal in talents equal in rewards is to use governmental power to dispossess some and favor others.

Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming:

"The sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced ... to a single principle."

Get people to believe you are seeking the utopian goal of equality of all and there is no limit to the power you can amass.

Things We Know That Just Ain't So

By Mona Charen

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

2013 will be remembered as the year President Barack Obama's halo went askew. It deserves to be remembered for some other things.

It was the year Democrats killed the United States Senate. If you missed the story, it's not surprising. When Sen. Harry Reid eliminated the filibuster, it was billed as the Democrats' last-ditch response to Republican "obstructionism." We were invited to play tu quoque because Republicans had threatened to invoke the "nuclear option" themselves in 2005. Largely ignored was Reid's relentless assault on Senate traditions.

The body, most memorably described by George Washington as the "saucer" into which legislation was poured to cool, had been stripped of many of its traditions even before Reid pressed the nuclear button. "The amendment days are over," Reid proclaimed in 2012. Underlining the point, he filled the "amendment tree" of every important piece of legislation, offering Republicans no opportunity to suggest alternatives. Reid then demanded a cloture vote, often on the same day. The Reid reign is more Capone than Cicero: no debate, no amendments, no time even to read bills. Protecting minority rights and preserving the Senate's tradition of debate has always been a triumph of the American system. The year 2013 sounded a tocsin.

It was a bad year for those who think they understand and control vast, complicated systems. Yes, I'm thinking of Democrats and Obamacare, but also the sun. Climate activists have assured us with chilling urgency that the global temperature is rising and that turning the dial labeled carbon dioxide several clicks to the left will avert catastrophe. Except 1) it's nearly impossible to reduce CO2 (think China and India); 2) it's been 18 years since the atmosphere showed any warming despite increasing concentrations of CO2; and 3) money spent on reducing CO2 cannot be spent on other problems.

Now, another variable seems to be misbehaving. Apparently, the sun is weakening. "There is no scientist alive who has seen a solar cycle as weak as this one," Andres Munoz-Jaramillo, who studies the solar-magnetic cycle at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told The Wall Street Journal. More than half of solar scientists, according to the newspaper, speculate that the sun could be returning to a more quiescent phase after a burst of activity that began in the 1940s. Or not. The sun may be dimming a bit, but it may not affect global temperatures because we've been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. On the third hand, it's possible a more pronounced solar minimum could yield another glaciation. During the last one, an ice sheet one mile high covered most of North America.

A little humility about our capacity to predict something as complex as climate would be welcome. It isn't a matter of trusting science versus denying the scientific method. It's a matter of distrusting the herd mentality that can affect scientists as well as other mortals. I happen to think global warming may well be a serious problem for coastal regions in the future. This much having been said, there are serious flaws in the way science is conducted.

Consider cancer research. A rule of thumb among biomedical venture capitalists, The Economist reports, is that half of published research cannot be reproduced. A 2013 study by Amgen found that of 53 "landmark" cancer studies, only six could be replicated.

The pressure to publish is intense among academic researchers, yet scientific journals prefer newsworthy findings to refutations of older studies. A reported one-third of scientists confess to knowing of a colleague who cherry picked data or excluded "inconvenient" facts to tart up his or her research. Grants often flow to politically sexy topics like global warming, and scientific dissenters from orthodoxy suffer some of the same social and professional ostracism as heretics of an earlier time. The heart of the scientific method is disproof. Skepticism then, not unflagging belief in any particular theory of climate change, is the mark of the truly enlightened mind.

Speaking of things we know for sure that just ain't so (in the words of Mark Twain), 2013 was a year in which Mexico emerged as a promising startup. Our impoverished and corrupt neighbor, from whom we just knew we could expect an endless parade of illegal migrants year in and year out, is producing jobs at an enviable clip. Per capita gross domestic product, Pierpaola Barbier and Niall Ferguson write in The Wall Street Journal, is outpacing Brazil, and a series of free-market reforms may well revitalize Mexico's energy, telecom and education sectors.

So here's to a more open 2014: A senate more open to amendments, science more open to scientific method and economies more open to free markets.

Global Warming Researcher Gets Stuck in Ice

By Debra J. Saunders

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

A funny thing happened during Australian climate change professor Chris Turney's venture to retrace a 1912 research expedition in Antarctica and gauge how climate change has affected the continent: Two weeks into a five-week excursion, Turney's good ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy got trapped in ice. It turns out, global warming notwithstanding, that there's so much ice down under that two ice-breaking vessels sent to rescue the research team cannot reach the Australasian Antarctic Expedition.

Years ago, global warming believers renamed the phenomenon "climate change" -- probably because of pesky details such as unusually cold weather undercutting the warming argument. Now, just as advocates argue that earth is approaching a tipping point, there's so much ice floating in Antarctica during the Southern Hemisphere's summer that the Australasian Antarctic Expedition posted in a statement: "We're stuck in our own experiment."

Does this incident mean that climate change is an illusion or a hoax? Of course not. Even during its summer, Antarctica is subject to extreme weather. "Bad weather is the norm in Antarctica," climatologist Roy Spencer observed.

But it does show that like the rest of us chickens, scientists have feet of clay. Turney had told journalists that his expedition wanted to collect data that could be used to improve climate models. Too bad the folks who are supposed to predict climate decades into the future are guided by scientists who could not manage to avoid ice floes during a five-week trip.

"We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time," Turney told Fox News. He believes that the ship was stuck in old ice from a 75-mile-long iceberg that broke apart three years ago.

Fair enough. But there's still the issue of ice volume. Climate changers usually warn about Arctic ice, which has been receding over the past few decades, but rarely address the overall growth of ice in Antarctica.

"I'm sure some researchers can find a possible explanation where humans are causing both Arctic ice melting and Antarctic ice growth, but I'm skeptical of scientists who blame every change in nature on human activities. Nature routinely causes its own changes, without any help from us," quoth Spencer, himself a climate change contrarian.

"Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up," the Australasian Antarctic Expedition acknowledges. It's a conundrum. If warming is melting ice in the Northern Hemisphere, why isn't it melting ice in the Southern Hemisphere?

Believers seize on all manner of weather -- less Arctic ice, more Antarctic ice -- as proof of climate change, but as Spencer notes, there is no climate change without man-caused global warming.

Turney told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that his goal is to excite the public about science. As for climate change, "in the scientific community, it's remarkably solid." And "self-evident."

He pushes a framework of science being data-driven and free from politics. Yet it's hard to escape the suspicion that whatever the icebound researchers experience, they will frame it as proof that climate change is unassailable.

A New Year and Old Problems

By Thomas Sowell

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Whenever we stand on the threshold of a new year, we are tempted to forget the hazards of prophecy, and try to see what may lie on the other side of this arbitrary division of time.

Sometimes we are content to try to change ourselves with New Year's resolutions to do better in some respect. Changing ourselves is a much more reasonable undertaking than trying to change other people. It may or may not succeed, but it seldom creates the disasters that trying to change others can produce.

When we look beyond ourselves to the world around us, peering into the future can be a very sobering, if not depressing, experience.

ObamaCare looms large and menacing on our horizon. This is not just because of computer problems, or even because some people who think that they have enrolled may discover at their next visit to a doctor that they do not have any insurance coverage.

What ObamaCare has done, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts' Supreme Court decision, is reduce us all from free citizens to cowed subjects, whom the federal government can order around in our own personal lives, in defiance of the 10th Amendment and all the other protections of our freedom in the Constitution of the United States.

ObamaCare is more than a medical problem, though there are predictable medical problems -- and even catastrophes -- that will unfold in the course of 2014 and beyond. Our betters have now been empowered to run our lives, with whatever combination of arrogance and incompetence they may have, or however much they lie.

The challenges ahead are much clearer than what our responses will be. Perhaps the most hopeful sign is that increasing numbers of people seem to have finally -- after nearly five long years -- begun to see Barack Obama for what he is, rather than for what he seemed to be, when judged by his image and rhetoric.

What kind of man would blithely disrupt the medical care of millions of Americans, and then repeatedly lie to them with glib assurances that they could keep their doctors or health insurance if they wanted to?

What kind of man would set up a system in which people would be forced by law to risk their life savings, because they had to divulge their financial identification numbers to strangers who could turn out to be convicted felons?

With all the time that elapsed between the passage of ObamaCare and its going into effect, why were the so-called "navigators" who were to be handling other people's financial records never investigated for criminal convictions? What explanation could there be, other than that Obama didn't care?

Caring is not a matter of words. "By their fruits ye shall know them" -- not by their rhetoric, image or symbolism.

Those who have still not yet seen through Barack Obama will have many more opportunities to do so during the coming year, as the medical, financial and other painful human consequences of ObamaCare keep coming out in ways so clear that not even the mainstream media can ignore them or obscure them.

The question then is: What can be done about it? Nothing can be done about Obama himself. He has three more years in office and, as he pointed out to the Russians, he will no longer have to face the American voters.

ObamaCare, however, has no such immunity. It is always hard to repeal an elaborate program after it has gone into effect. But Prohibition was repealed, even though it was a Constitutional Amendment that required super-majorities in both houses of Congress and super-majorities of state legislatures to repeal.

In our two-party system, everything depends on whether the Republicans step up to the plate and act like responsible adults who understand that ObamaCare represents a historic crossroads that will determine what kind of people we are going to be, for this generation and generations yet unborn -- citizens or subjects.

This means that Republicans have to decide whether their top priority is internal strife among the different wings of the party -- another circular firing squad -- or whether either wing puts the country first.

A prediction on how that will turn out in the new year would be far too hazardous to attempt.

Hit Piece Journalism

By Thomas Sowell

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Front-page editorials, disguised as news stories, have become such familiar features of the New York Times that it should have been no surprise to discover in the December 28th issue a front-page story about a professor of finance at the University of Houston who has been a paid consultant to financial enterprises.

Since professors of all sorts have been paid consultants to organizations of all sorts, it is questionable why this was a story at all, much less one that covered an entire inside page, in addition to a central front-page opening, under the headline "Academics Who Defend Wall St. Reap Reward."

Do academics who attack Wall Street, as consultants to government agencies or other organizations, not get paid?

Like the corrupt French official in the movie classic "Casablanca," the New York Times is "shocked, shocked" to discover that consultants get paid defending the kinds of people that the New York Times attacks.

Where has the New York Times been all these years, as government agencies of all sorts spend the taxpayers' money not only to hire consultants but also to hand out research grants to professors, institutions and programs that promote the kinds of policies that serve the institutional interests of these agencies?

Back when I was an economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, many years ago, officials there spoke in reverential tones about Professor Richard A. Lester, an economist at Princeton University who sometimes came down to Washington to advise the Department.

Although many other economists argued that minimum wage laws increased unemployment, especially among young unskilled workers, Professor Lester had questioned whether minimum wages had the bad effects that other economists said they had.

His view was very congenial to the institutional interests of the Department of Labor, a substantial part of whose appropriations and employment was based on its administration of the minimum wage law.

In fairness to Professor Lester, there is no reason whatever to think that his views were based on the money he got from the government. His views were undoubtedly what they were, well before they came to the attention of the Labor Department, which then decided that he was someone whose services they wanted.

The real corruption comes from arming government agencies with the taxpayers' money to hire consultants and give research grants to academics and others whose views serve the interests of those particular government agencies, as distinguished from serving the interests of the public from whom these taxes are extracted.

Does anyone seriously believe that those government agencies that stand to see their powers and money increased if the "global warming" agenda prevails will be handing out research grants impartially to both those climate scientists who agree with that agenda and those who disagree?

As someone who used to do some consulting, I once encountered the attitude exhibited in the New York Times "news" story. In a case in which I was testifying against a government policy, the opposing attorney demanded to know how much I was being paid.

When I told her, her immediate and sarcastic response was: "Is that what the traffic will bear?"

"I certainly hope not," I said. "The whole point of charging what I do is to ration my time." I had undoubtedly been selected as a consultant because my previous writings showed which side of the issue I was on already.

The central target of the New York Times hit piece was Professor Craig Pirrong, whom it says "had financial ties to both sides" of a dispute over financial speculation. Despite this, the repeated insinuation was that he has a conflict of interest.

If both sides are willing to pay him for consulting, where is the conflict? No matter what side he takes on a particular issue, somebody is going to pay him -- as people who work in any capacity usually expect to get paid, even people who write hit pieces for the New York Times.

What is really corrupting is camouflaging an editorial as a "news" story -- and acting as if people who represent one side of a controversial issue are somehow less worthy than people who represent the opposite side that happens to be favored by the New York Times.