Monday, March 15, 2010

ELITISM IS BETTERISM

FROM WILL DURANT IN THE 1920's: “Moreover, the study of psychology indicated that variety and inequality are rooted in the needs and method of evolution as a survival of advantageous differences in the struggle for existence. ... All men are unequal, even at birth, in physical qualities and mental capacities; and congenital superiorities combine with environmental differences in developing acquired inequalities, In every society the majority of abilities lies in a minority of men; so, in every society, some concentration of wealth is natural, and grows with the complexity of te economy and the unequal value, to the community, of diverse talents in its individuals. In light of these ABC’s it became clear to my budding brain that the communist ideal of equal rewards and a classless society was biologically impossible, and that socialism would have to reconcile itself to a considerable inequality of possessions and power. The natural concentration of wealth could be checked, now and then, by remedial legislation or disruptive revolution, but after every interruption it would soon be renewed.“

BUT THIS SHOWS LEFTIES NEVER LEARN: The grip on the “media” and “Hollywood” and “academia” mirrors this very phenomenon. Deeply entrenched leftist media would rather bleed red ink until death, than to accept truths about the warts, blemishes and ugliness within the leftist well.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

YOUR BETTERS KNOW BETTER

1. We are one step away from a vote in Congress that will begin to nationalize health care in America. And what does that mean to Nancy Pelosi? Contrary to what Pelosi would have us believe, her's is not the path to economic freedom. Not for the masses, anyway.
"Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance."
We owe, not only our modern living standards, but our political freedom to capitalism. In order for Pelosi's misguided dream to take place, there must be a servile class. If the world were to run off to create mostly bad art, who is it that will be running the engine to subsidize it?

2. Will Durant's quote of "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within”.

3. Be heard, or be herded. There are no other choices. This is the time. And if you don't speak out, it may well be the last.

4. Sarah Palin is a convenient hate fetish for increasingly nervous and confused Left, because she embodies the qualities of the red-state America they loathe… and serves as a voodoo doll for uncomfortable criticisms of Obama, which they project onto her.”

5. GOD HELP US: Norway's Ministry of Children, Equality, and Social Inclusion. (And yes, having a ministry with such a silly title is itself a problem.)

Friday, March 12, 2010

REASON AS UNREASON

1. George Will wisely warns against reason unreasonably applied (“ As a progressive, Obama hews to the Wilsonian tradition,” March 11). Pres. Obama and his ilk are guided by an irrational faith that human reason is so potent and encompassing that it permits the Best and the Brightest to consciously design society, or at least to successfully rearrange significant parts of society (such as the health-care industry).
This hubris is dangerous.
F.A. Hayek, defending reason reasonably applied, wrote more than 60 years ago that “the fundamental attitude of true individualism is one of humility toward the processes by which mankind has achieved things which have not been designed or understood by any individual and are indeed greater than individual minds. The great question at this moment is whether man’s mind will be allowed to continue to grow as part of this process or whether human reason is to place itself in chains of its own making. What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciously controlled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, as Edmund Burke warned us, ‘be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.’”

2. MEGAN MCARDLE: “Green jobs have become the ginseng of progressive politics: a sort of broad-spectrum snake oil that cures whatever happens to ail you. They are the antidote to economic malaise, an underskilled labor force, the inherent unwillingness of the public to suffer any significant economic and personal dislocation in order to save the environment. They enhance nationalistic vigor. (If we don’t act now, the Chinese will steal all of our green jobs!) They stave off aging of stale political platforms. And I’m pretty sure they’re good for bunions, too.”

3. REGARDING GOVERNMENT: The only thing worse than having someone standing on your neck, is paying them to stand on your neck.

4. LORD MONCKTON: After all, the biofuel scam that is one of many disfiguring spin-offs from the “global warming” scare — driven by the poisonous clique of mad scientists whom Nature so uncritically defends — has taken millions of acres of farmland away from growing food for people who need it and towards growing biofuels for clunkers that don’t. Result: a doubling of world food prices, mass starvation, and death, leading to food riots in a dozen major regions of the globe

Thursday, March 11, 2010

GOVERNMENT & YOU

1. Unfortunately, while private investment is the engine of economic growth, government spending (despite what generations of Keynesian economists have asserted) is the brake. To understand this negative relationship, we need only scrutinize how the federal government’s spending is determined: namely, by political processes devoid of economic rationality.
In this light, we can appreciate that enhanced government spending does not bulk up the economy, nor merely crowd out worthwhile private activity. Instead, it undercuts, penalizes and distorts everything that private parties attempt to do to create wealth. Ham-fisted government regulations and additional taxes are known killers of economic growth.
The investors’ famine and the government’s feast therefore are not merely coincidental, but causally connected.
Making matters worse, the explosion of the federal government’s size, scope and power since mid-2008 has created enormous uncertainties among investors.

2. BETTER LIVING THROUGH LOOTING: Six of the ten richest counties in America are in the D.C area.Obviously, we should move Congress to Detroit

3. Trust government: “Investment decisions were made in part according to political benefit for the Comptroller, rather than exclusively in the best interests of the people”. Oh yeah it was only $129 billion of New York States’ pension fund.

4. SAREWITZ: “Has anyone noticed that after 20 years and $25 billion in government-sponsored research on climate change, the political controversy over global warming is actually more intractable and bitter today than it has ever been in the past? Of course there are good reasons, such as the failure of the recent U.N.-sponsored Copenhagen climate conference, stubborn partisanship in the U.S. Congress, and recently discovered mistakes and distortions in the supposedly authoritative 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But these, like the tumors in a cancer patient, are symptoms of a mortal pathology, not its cause”.
And, to put it plainly, there is tyranny afoot and it must be confronted and defeated with confidence, determination and passion. The confrontation is not about health care or any other piece of legislation. It is not about politicians, politics or parties.
The confrontation is about process. The confrontation is about fidelity to the Constitution.

5. House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter says she is "prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill." She continued, explaining how House passage of a separate bill containing "changes" to the Senate version would lead House leadership to "deem" the actual Senate HealthCare Bill passed - without a direct vote.
This is not simply tyrannical in nature, it is absolute political cowardice.

6. One year ago Barack Obama was the Golden Child. His minions believed that his mere presence in the White House would cause all of the world’s problems to disappear. They honestly believed that he possessed some kind of mystical power. It’s quite ironic, really. The left ridicules Christians who believe that certain preachers have the power to heal the sick and infirm. The MSM does everything in its power to destroy the credibility of televangelists. Yet here they were, grovelling at the feet of the most outrageously fraudulent televangelist of them all.
The left thought that it was getting a New Age Bodhisattva. What they got instead was another Jimmy Swaggart.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

GOVERNMENT KNOWS BEST

The slightly better version of this argument, which is that voters will like ObamaCare better once it's passed and they get used to it,isn't very convincing either.

Albert Camus said: "The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants." Prohibition is force. I prefer persuasion. Government force has nasty unintended consequences.

NANNY WINS AGAIN: Because parents are not smart enough “ a camera sensor built into the television’s bottom bezel detects if a child comes within one meter or about 40". After a couple of seconds, an alarm is triggered and the screen will go dark, displaying a message telling the child to back away.”


Consider the Possibility That Congress Isn't Very Smart"--headline, The American Prospect Web site, March 8

Sunday, March 07, 2010

WHEN ILLOGIC WINS
Albert Camus said: "The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants." Prohibition is force. I prefer persuasion. Government force has nasty unintended consequences.

WHATEVER HAPPENED 1. to crazy? “Lasch’s insight about the connection between culpability and competence, and the way in which ‘therapeutic morality’ undermines self-sufficiency by negating personal responsibility, is essential to understanding the impact of a culture that fosters narcissistic personality traits. . . . Attempting to comfort people by flattering their sense of blamelessness — ‘It’s not your fault’ — therapeutic morality ultimately undermines the vital sense of agency, in effect telling people that they are neither culpable nor competent. It promotes the notion of innocent victimhood, the blameless self, and encourages people to avoid responsibility for their failures by wallowing in self-pitying rationalizations.”

2. ALSO WHAT HAPPENED TO SIN as the psychiatrist Menninger asks in “What Became of Sin?”. Beside ‘crazy’ people there are also ‘evil’ people.

3. HAYEK SPEAKS :The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends.

Friday, March 05, 2010

STUPID CONSTITUENTS
1. Put it this way: Leftism fails as a coherent philosophy on its own terms. We shouldn’t try to wring significance from the delusional outburst of someone who just happened to be leftist. There are plenty of ways to logically disembowel Marxism and its numerous noxious contemporary offspring without having to resort to an unnecessary round of political “gotcha!”

2. Is liberalism just a mental disorder?
3. Herb London, president of the Hudson Institute, said:
In my judgment President Obama has not yet learned the lesson of overreaching. It is apparent that he is intent on fundamentally reshaping the national character by extending and formalizing the influence of government. What he does not seem to realize is that the United States is ostensibly a center-right nation suspicious of government and resolute in its determination to maintain individual liberty. The accumulation of debt, the insinuation of government into private sector activities (insurance, banking, automobiles) and the persistent desire to nationalize healthcare have awakened an impulse to rebel among many Americans. The Tea Partiers are merely one manifestation of this unrest. In my judgment the president would be wise to resist his ideological temptations and cogitate about next steps. Being less assertive and more contemplative would suit his long term interests far better

Glenn Reynolds, 1. Instapundit blogger, said:
Yes, Obama is weak. When he brought in Rahm Emanuel, I hoped that it was to have someone tough to resist the impulses of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. But when it comes to congressional pork, Obama has been enabler-in-chief. Though he blusters and bullies from time to time, when push comes to shove he is not acting, but acted upon. Turning over leadership to the worst Congress in my lifetime is likely to prove a disastrous mistake for His Presidency, even if — as seems unlikely — he somehow manages to sneak this healthcare bill through.

Joe Madison, host of The Black Eagle radio show, said:
President Obama is thoughtful, intelligent and insightful. These are traits of a strong president, not a weak one. He cannot be led around by the nose and the smell of public opinion. We forget that during Bush's two terms in office, most Americans questioned who was running government, the president or the vice president. Remember what former President Harry Truman said: "The buck stops here." President Obama is not the cowboy Bush was. Thank God. Don't confuse intelligence with weakness.
4. DEMOCRAT ANALYSIS ON HEALTHCARE: “Stupid constituents.”

Thursday, March 04, 2010

CONGRESS CRITTERS ARE SMARTER THAN US

1. Remember that Congress estimated Medicare’s cost at $12 billion for 1990 (adjusted for inflation) when the program kicked off in 1965. Medicare cost $107 billion in 1990 and is quickly approaching $500 billion.

2. As H.L. Mencken observed
The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.*
In contrast, idiotic ideas have nothing going for them. Most people who voluntarily adopt idiotic ideas in their private lives soon abandon them if these ideas hamper their ability to thrive in the real world. The only way to implement an idiotic idea widely and surely is through force – which is the root of Obamacare.

3. REIHL: That this inexperienced travesty of a chief executive, Obama, more a byproduct of timing and media collaboration, than his own worth, or accomplishment, is personally advocating for the so-called nuclear option is the final straw.
Reconcile this, you distasteful, malevolent little quisling punk - a timely reminder of some words I never thought would have such import during my lifetime.
Only a fool with no clear appreciation of, or for, America past and present, would dare undertake what this pustule in the White House is attempting to do. It is contingent upon the Republican Party to undertake every step, every maneuver it can to bring this government to a halt.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

YOUR GOVERNMENT WOULD NEVER LIE TO YOU


1. In the end, the call for a systemic-risk regulator is yet another futile expression of faith in the power of government to outthink the markets. It is another foolish bet on bureaucrats and politicians in a tightly regulated economy being more likely to bring prosperity than free businessmen, investors and consumers in a free market. It is the biggest sucker bet in history: a bet on tyranny over liberty.

2. AND THE HOAX CONTINUES: As candidate and president, on eight separate occasions Barack Obama instructed Americans to “think about what’s happening in countries like Spain [and] Germany” if they wanted to know what successful “green jobs” policies look like, and if they wanted to know what we should expect here in the U.S. from his agenda.
Some European economists took a look. In March, a research team from Madrid’s King Juan Carlos University produced a detailed, substantive, heavily sourced, two-method paper: “Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources.” The paper concluded that Spain’s “green jobs” program was an economic failure, in fact costing Spain many jobs.
The president of Spain’s renewable energy association — along with a Communist Party affiliated trade federation — decried the paper’s lead author as being unpatriotic.
The former wrote in Spain’s leading paper, El Mundo, slamming the research paper. However, he did not critique the paper itself — he agreed with its conclusion. He was furious only that the study was publicized. By revealing the truth about Spain’s increasingly mythologized “green jobs” and renewable energy experience, the revealed study threatened the prospects for Spain’s companies to be bailed out by the U.S. repeating these mistakes.
Incidentally, this became a common refrain. After the Spanish study embarrassed the White House, prompting substantial media attention and even questioning at a press conference, Obama swapped out Denmark for Spain for later references to an enacted “green jobs” program.
Soon, Denmark produced a study (“Wind Energy: The Case of Denmark“) through the think-tank CEPOS. This paper also revealed tremendous costs, and that Obama’s claim about Denmark’s “renewables” experience was also steeped in mythology.
The response from windmill advocates in Denmark was similar: such studies threaten Danish industry by reducing the chances that the U.S. will serve as the hoped-for massive new market to make inefficient energy sources profitable for their foreign manufacturers (Danish Radio TV News, Thursday, February 25, 2010).

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

POLITICIANS AND MISINFORMATION

1. The decline in manufacturing employment is no more troublesome than was the decline in agricultural employment. Do you think that we’d be wealthier today had past generations panicked over falling agricultural employment and acted to obstruct the forces that enabled tens of millions of Americans to escape farms and move to cities, and all the while enjoy ever-fuller bellies? If not, then why do you lament tens of millions of today’s Americans escaping from factories into jobs that generally pay better and are more interesting?

2. Mark Steyn’s “Our Own Greek Tragedy” is a masterpiece of prose and wisdom. To whet your appetite:
We hard-hearted, small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government. Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest. He’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.

3. GOVERNMENTS ROLE: The answer is, nothing. We can, and should, ease the pain of those who lose jobs. But the government can't find you a job any more than it can find you a spouse or a hobby. The process of matching individuals to employers can only be done by individuals.

4. I think it’s safe to say that in America, everyone loves freedom. Liberals, conservatives — we all love freedom. We just often have different ideas about what that is. Liberals, for the most part, favor the child concept of freedom, and conservatives lean more towards the adult concept of freedom — and each looks on the other’s ideas as scary and oppressive.
The liberals wonder, if you don’t have health care or food or a place to live — and if some privately held company can fire you at any moment and remove your livelihood — how can you be free? And they wonder why we would let ourselves be oppressed by such worries when we have the means and the government to take care of them. Conservatives, on the other hand, look at liberal ideas with great fear, knowing such guarantees by the government will come with restrictions, and if the government fails to deliver what it promises or does it poorly, there’s nothing to be done about it, because there are no other options. How can you be free if the government controls so much of your life and limits the choices available to you?

5. Liberal freedom is freedom from responsibility. Conservative freedom is guaranteed by responsibility.

6. Liberals may love their freedom – but they’re not so crazy about yours.

7. Liberalism: like being parented by Michael Jackson, and The Great Santini. No matter what it looks like on the outside, it is strange and abusive behind the closed doors of the committee rooms.

Monday, March 01, 2010

WE ARE IN GOOD HANDS

1. Now that we know Al Gore is a hoaxer, can we please get back to drilling for oil and gas? We have huge supplies of oil and gas under our control, but our oil companies--which by international standards are tiny in terms of the quantity of petroleum to which they have access--are legally prevented from developing it and, in some cases, even exploring for it. (Congress doesn't want the American people to understand how much wealth and how many jobs we are forgoing by being the only country in the world that perversely refuses to develop its own energy resources.) Here, Chevron's Vice President for Exploration, Bobby Ryan, explains the need to explore the Outer Continental Shelf, where unknown but no doubt vast reserves of energy are to be found.

2. Obama has assured us that he is no Harry Reid or Barbara Boxer, but rather a “no more blue/red state” “healer.” The wages of hypocrisy are usually more costly than mindless partisanship. And the more Obama talks of bipartisanship and reaching out, the more the law professor seems to go out of his way to be petulant and trenchantly “my way or the highway.”

3. The “Bush did it” and “Race Card” have been beaten into glue-factory status.

4. People are now having to face the harsh reality of spending into oblivion and beyond. We have examples world-wide and in our own beloved country as to what happens when socialism eventually (as always) collapses and fails miserably.

5. Style: Obama has worn so thin so quickly because he is not, in reality, a great orator. As a teacher of college speech, he would have rated no more than a C in my classes. He speaks with little vocal variety, dramatically dropping pitch, volume, speed and consonants at the ends of sentences. He speaks at length but says little, and his use of deception, misdirection, straw men, outright lies, anecdotal evidence to the exclusion of all other evidence, and an affected, pseudo evangelical style may fool those who want to be fooled, but not others. Don’t even get me started on the teleprompter.

6. REGARDING OBAMA: So what does this anecdote from the Great Communicator tells us? Well, itmight tell us he is as dumb as a bag of rocks for not understanding the difference between liability and collision insurance.

7. In 1927, a writer about Russia’s October 1917 revolution asked, “How often has it happened in the past - it will probably happen again - that a small and relatively insignificant proportion of a population swept out an honest and irresolute majority by appealing nakedly to primitive instincts and elemental passions?