We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
By now, you've all heard the good news. It's been on the news everywhere, and the market jumped dramatically. This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that job growth exceeded everyone's wildest expectations. 243,000 jobs were added, far more than the expectation of 140,000. More importantly, 257,000 private sector jobs were added, while 14,000 government jobs were lost. Unemployment dipped from 8.5% to 8.3%. All of this is very good news. Even those who oppose the president and his methods of handling the economy will not serve themselves to disparage this growth. I certainly won't. What I will say is that the general media is great at reporting headlines, but not digging into the numbers or providing historical context.
The media won't dig in, but others have in order to see what the numbers behind the numbers say, particularly since the CBO's report earlier this week was so lackluster.
The first bit of perspective comes from the Democrats, who spent most of the early 2000's disparaging the job growth of the Bush years as "McJobs". I notice none of them are speaking right now. Which is odd, because while we added about 90,000 very good paying jobs, over 113,000 of the jobs added were clearly "McJobs", or low wage labor. Any job growth is good, so I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I just want to know why "McJobs" were bad 9 years ago, but good now? If any Democrats would like to comment on this, they are more than welcome.
Another bit of news that went overlooked was the surge in part-time and temp work. Again, any job growth is good. I have nothing but good feeling for people who have been out of work but have managed to wrangle a paycheck. But if Obama's goal is "An Economy That Works", I'm sure he didn't mean "Works Temporarily and Part-Time"
A third, though somewhat justified question, is why the BLS has actually increased job growth estimates by a very large amount over the course of 2011. It's possible preliminary numbers were low, but by 23%? Revisions are always needed - by why so many positive adjustments? Usually it's "seasonal fluctuations". Which means...?
The revolution of the left is the stratified revolution of Barack Obamas and Elizabeth Warrens, greedy political activists feeding at the watering hole of government and crying out for more. More power. More laws. More chains. Parse the rhetoric and all you get is the powerful demanding that we give them more power. This revolution of the greedy and corrupt would already be dead if it had not used the momentum of its ideological fervor to embed itself into every institution and seize control of the educational system and the cultural dialogue to program succeeding generations to give it even more power.
The time is ripe for a true cultural and political revolution of the right, but that revolution has been hijacked over and over again by the gatekeepers who warn us that it's time to play nice, that we must think of the long game, that some issues have already been lost and we need to fight only for the core issues that matter to them lest we alienate people. The long march never ends in a last stand, only another tactical withdrawal on issue after issue.
Both cities' rent control laws began as emergencies to meet temporary housing crunches (you always need a "crisis" to create an opportunity for government control). Then your "emergency" action becomes permanent due to its newly-created constituency. That is how Leviathan grows.
If rent control were eliminated in NYC today, in short time there would be tons of new middle class rental housing built; supply up, prices down. The moral issue, though, is that these controls do constitute a form of government theft from the owners.
Did the Founding Fathers make an error? As much as anything else, this Robinson interview with Paul Rahe (that's #5 of 5)captured most of the key political issues with which we Maggie's Farmers are concerned today.
Some people desire to run other peoples' lives for their own good. I wish those Rahe interviews were on YouTube. They deserve to be.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, many are asking questions about how much freedom most people really want. How much freedom will the average person trade for a bowl of lentils? In other words, for security or for free money?
When I was in 6th Grade, our school had a speech contest, the title being "What Freedom means to me." Mine came in second. If I were doing that speech today, I'd probably come in last. Freedom from involuntary servitude - slavery - is of course basic, but freedom from government power is the beseiged freedom of today, just as it has always been.
A wonderful synopsis of Roger Williams' life and influences:God, Government and Roger Williams' Big Idea - Banished from Massachusetts, the Puritan minister originated a principle that remains contentious to this day—separation of church and state.
I had not known that he had been a pretty big deal in English government before coming to Boston.
When you read about the Puritans in the 1600s - or about the C of E at the time, it is reminiscent of today's Middle Eastern Moslems. No "tolerance," and religious beheadings.
A quote on the founding of The Providence Plantations (Rhode Island):
On March 14, 1644, Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Plantations granted Williams his charter.
The committee could have imposed a governor or defined the government. Instead, it authorized a democracy, giving the colonists “full Powre & Authority to Governe & rule themselves...by such a form of Civil Government, as by voluntary consent of all, or the greater Part of them shall find most suteable” so long as its laws “be conformable to the Laws of England, so far as the Nature and Constitution of the place will admit.”
Even more extraordinary, the committee left all decisions about religion to the “greater Part”—the majority—knowing the majority would keep the state out of matters of worship. Soul liberty now had official sanction.
Williams had created the freest society in the Western world. But he had only begun...
"But, by an inference as false as it is unjust, do you know what the economists are now accused of? When we oppose subsidies, we are charged with opposing the very thing that it was proposed to subsidize and of being the enemies of all kinds of activity, because we want these activities to be voluntary and to seek their proper reward in themselves. Thus, if we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in religious matters, we are atheists. If we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in education, then we hate enlightenment. If we say that the state should not give, by taxation, an artificial value to land or to some branch of industry, then we are the enemies of property and of labor. If we think that the state should not subsidize artists, we are barbarians who judge the arts useless."
Modern-Day Prohibition - The eternal temptation to ban things that give people pleasure. Stier begins:
The new Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary Prohibition is a five-and-a-half-hour missed opportunity to demonstrate why bans on substances are doomed from the start. Fortunately, for those who want to understand the irresistible lure of all types of prohibitions, there is Christopher Snowdon’sThe Art of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition Since 1800. Although Snowdon’s comprehensive history will never reach as many people as the PBS series, The Art of Suppression makes the case that Burns seems to go out of his way to avoid: that prohibition of products that people desire, whether alcohol a century ago or Ecstasy today, is bound to fail miserably.
The world is full of cranks and zealots who want to make you do whatever they think they should do. From my standpoint, I tend to want people to make up their own minds, and if they want to spend their lives half-stoned on heroin or pot, or fat from ice-cream and pastries, so be it. It's their life and their body.
The list of things of which I disapprove is long, but the list of things I would chose to apply power to prohibit is very short. Murder and theft, for starters.
"Pat Moynihan once encountered Nixon in the hall of the White House and said ‘Mr. President, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention to what he has to say.’"
... if you do good research on how the world really works, if you have the right data and the right assumptions, and you make the right arguments, and (even) if you do this in a nonpartisan and objective way, it will lead in the great majority of cases to conservative conclusions, because good research amplifies that the world operates, when it operates successfully, on principles that conservatives embrace. It reinforces our commitment to free enterprise, personal freedom, and military strength.
At Minding The Campus, Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson presents the devastating critiques, from venues venerated by the left, of leftist Brooklyn College Political Science professor Corey Robin's book about conservatives.
As KC Johnson concludes:
Fifty years ago, academics frequently migrated in and out political life. Now, with the exceptions of a handful of fields (data-dependent economics; faculty from schools of law, business, or medicine, whose curricula are set in part by forces outside the academy), it's all but inconceivable to imagine professors whose views reflect the basic assumptions of their respective disciplines serving in responsible government positions. Indeed, with occasional exceptions (such as political scientists Brendan Nyhan or Jonathan Bernstein), it's hard to imagine academics outside of economics, the law, and medicine having much interesting to say about politics.
I suspect that most members of the majority viewpoint on today's campuses are willing to make the trade, firming up their power within the academy in exchange for losing virtually all influence in the public square. Whether society benefits from this exchange is another matter.
I nominated Corey Robin for leftist quote of the day. In short, Robin is a bird too commonly found in the professorate of US colleges.
(In the US) a married couple, each earning the minimum wage, investing only 10 percent of their earnings at a modest 7 percent return, retires with an annual income of more than $100,000 a year—even if they never touch the $1.5 million principle they’ll leave to their children. President George W. Bush was mocked for calling his proposal to cultivate such minimum-wage millionaires the “Ownership Society,” but it was the most important initiative of his presidency.
and
It will be considerably easier to create a market-based alternative to Social Security when there are no more Social Security checks being cut—and they are not going to be cut (cf. that $100 trillion unfunded liability). If we’re lucky and smart, we’ll start doing it before the Social Security checks stop. And it won’t just be Social Security: Medicare and Medicaid are going away, too, whether we like it or not. Most of the welfare state will either wither away entirely or be severely truncated. Americans will have the opportunity to rediscover such hoary-sounding virtues as thrift and independence, and their joint product, liberty. All of which turns out to be worth having in a way that is not nearly so corny and Tea Party–sounding and tricorn-wearing as you might think. That’s the optimistic take, and there is reason to believe that this is the more accurate forecast.
I was informed, as 2011 waned, that my tax credit for commuting would fall from $230 a month to $125. This bothered me. Not because I feel I deserve a credit to commute, but because I can't figure out what the government is trying to do.
The fact is, if public transport is a 'good' we should all take advantage of no matter what, then the government should pay for it by taxing everyone and making it available for 'free' - as they do in Portland. Of course, I oppose this idea entirely. However, if the theory is that we can get people to do something that is 'good for everybody', then isn't this the way to do it? Half-measures, like credits, subsidies, and other methods of this ilk only mask what is possibly (though probably not) a problem - that public transportation isn't really viable. There are ways to determine whether this is true, but not for the average commuter.
What is the premise behind having a tax credit for public commutation? I like it, I'll use it if it's offered, but I didn't demand it, nor did I write Congress to keep it at $230/month. The cost, to me, of increased taxation due to the lower credit will be about $270 over the course of the year, so it's not a big deal. Why not just get rid of it altogether? If public transport is truly efficient, then it would make much more sense for me to take it, rather than driving into the city myself (or carpooling).
My commute is about $330/month. The cost of driving (assuming the Federal allowance of .55/mile and $150 a month parking) is about $780/month. Even if I made a more realistic assumption of about .25/mile, public transport is still an advantage. But public transport is heavily subsidized. So I really don't know which is more efficient, and determining this is very hard.
Here is the issue: Subsidies and tax breaks are supposed to promote the 'public good'. But how do I know which is more efficient, let alone even better, for me personally? If it is a 'public good', then its value will be transparent without subsidies and credits. I'll take whatever credits get offered. It would be crazy for me not to. But I'd much rather have a clear means of determining which makes more sense by comparing simple features like cost, time and effort (hey - in the end, I like reading on the train, so if it did cost more I'd probably still take it).
It is precisely this lack of transparency that makes other government initiatives, like Obamacare, a pure misallocation of resources. Unable to determine where our real efficiencies lie, we opt for what we assume is 'best' or costs us least. But we cannot know for sure if these things really make sense at all.
"The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing."
...charity and compassion are always the actions of autonomous people acting as individuals. And, however much intellectuals try to argue otherwise, socialism in the end has to trade on envy and resentment, just as surely as tentative lovers discover that they cannot after all confine themselves to just holding hands, or a stolen kiss. Soon enough people are taken to be good or kindly only if they espouse the correct socialist opinions - we see this all around us in the present age - and human sympathy gets redefined in doctrinal terms.
Yet although left-wing assumptions have captured the intellectual elites of the western world - the humanities are almost dead - they have had limited impact on older people untouched by the bureaucratic and academic caste.
In my little old conservative Connecticut town, people help eachother every day. In fact, we do everything we can to assist eachother. The beauty of collectivism, charity, mutual help, etc. lies in its voluntariness, its mutuality, and in its local-ness. When there are guns and jails behind it (as via government), all of the beauty and love are lost and it just devolves into political power and into legal, armed plunder.
Infantile utopian dreams, in real life, quickly turn into real nightmares. They scare the heck out of me.
If you haven't heard about Congress' latest push to regulate the Internet, here's a primer:
My feeling is that either SOPA (the House version) or Protect IP (the Senate version) will pass. More info here and here, and if you're looking for a specific reason why they're doing this — outside of the usual power, ignorance and control — check out who's #4 on this list.
I'm opposed to any new income taxes. It matters little if they are assessed on my income or a much wealthier person's income. The average person is overburdened.
I feel the same way about corporate taxes, too. The oddity, in both personal income and corporate taxes, is how little people actually pay and how few of us pay. There are a myriad of reasons for this. Loopholes, primarily, but also the manner in which taxes are assessed. After all, capital gains and investment income are not taxed in the same fashion as earned income, for many good reasons. It is money at risk, and money at work. It must be treated differently.
My personal belief is that a flat income tax, with no (or very few) loopholes is transparent, easy to employ, and would reduce the need for a large bureaucracy chasing the average citizen. It would generate more, or at least equivalent, revenue but not cost the government as much. All told, it's a money saver. This is a preference that I'm unlikely to ever see, as many people don't fully understand the benefits of a flat tax, in particular its very 'fairness' (a vague term, but defensible in the manner I'm using it).
A flat tax alone probably isn't enough, though. To truly have an impact and get people focused on longer time frames, I've always felt a Tobin Tax would be useful. Capital gains taxes would be eliminated and replaced with a Tobin Tax on currency trades and a Transaction Tax on investments. There are many reasons to not like this, given the nature of Wall Street behavior today. However, as part of a broad tax overhaul, it would probably yield tremendous results. Bruce Krasting disagrees, as does the House of Lords. It's possible this is because the current concept would be to implement a Tobin Tax in addition to the existing tax structure, rather than as part of an overhaul. As part of a complete restructuring of the tax code, these taxes would focus investors on longer buy and hold periods, reduce High Frequency Trading, stabilize currency exchanges, and generate considerable revenue for the government. The problem, of course, is the level at which the tax is set. .03% is perhaps too high. Then again, OWS would complain it's too low.
It would be intriguing to see someone elected who is willing to alter the tax code so it more naturally meshes with the way business is done today.
Just minutes into last Monday afternoon's confab between Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich, I heard Newt say something really noteworthy and thought, Man, I should grab that clip for the post and jotted down the video time to snip it out later.
A few minutes after that, I heard another memorable quote and jotted down the time. Then another. Then-
At that point I realized the whole damn video was turning into a highlight reel. I realized that this wasn't a debate or a forum or even an in-depth discussion.
It was a seminar.
There quickly comes a point when you realize you've never heard anything quite like this before, and certainly not outside academia. It isn't just that both of these people are masters of the field of foreign policy, but they're both master tacticians, as well. You not only hear the what and why, but the how to, as well.
If Newt's the 'Big Picture' guy, Huntsman isn't far behind. His serving as Ambassador to China gave him a world view that none of the other candidates can touch save Gingrich. The extra dimension he provided to the affair is his in-depth knowledge on how to deal with this rising economic-military behemoth, while Gingrich does his usual superb job of keeping things in historical perspective.
When you have an hour and a half to spare sometime, give it a spin. The link is here. Click on the link over to the right to begin play.
This isn't something to be rushed through or watched in pieces. You'll see what I mean at the end. This is an event to be savored.
...the frugal wealthy understand that it is not wealth per se but rather its flamboyant display that erects barriers between the rich and the rest. Gated communities, private jets and the mass promotion of ridiculously expensive luxury goods -- all widespread only in the last generation -- have done more to provoke class division and remove the rich from contact with ordinary people than the actual increases in their wealth.
In the last generation, but also at many times in history. Let's face it. We have vulgar rich, vulgar poor, and vulgar in-between. There is no cure for vulgarity.
...it's upsetting that some people have so much while other people have so little. It isn't fair. But I accept this unfairness. Indeed, I treasure it. That's because I have a 13-year-old daughter. And that's all I hear, "That's not fair," she says. "That's not fair! That's not fair!" And one day I snapped, and I said, "Honey, you're cute, that's not fair. Your family is pretty well off, that's not fair. You were born in America, that's not fair. Darling, you had better get down on your knees and pray that things don't start getting fair for you."
Having the luck to be born in America is the most unfair thing of all. Where else on the planet do you have a wide open field to plan a life according to your own lights, interests, abilities, and desires, and run for it? Freedom of pursuit, but no guarantee of results on this planet. And still, some people bitch like babies.
Nobody really believed that Obamacare would do anything to improve our health-care system or, even more absurdly, "bend the cost curve." By vastly increasing the number of insured and therefore of demand for medical care, it could only drive up costs. Remarks like Nancy Pelosi’s about having to pass the bill in order to see what’s in it showed that they weren’t really interested in what was in it — and nor was the President, who left all that up to congressional Democrats. What they cared about was the establishment of the progressive principle that the government should be in charge of overseeing health care. The details would be worked out later as history pursued its inevitable course of increasing government control over people’s lives.
Leftists take the long view, the Gramscian approach. At one bite at a time, their growing Leviathan wants to consume all that it can of private life in America. It's never enough, and never will be.
That's the essential problem: there is no end-point.
For competitive college admissions, it is tough for Asians to dodge the Asian quotas by labelling themselves as "white." Goes to show how insane this preoccupation with race has become.
What race is a half-Asian? What race is an American Indian or an Eskimo? (Asian, right?) What race is Obama, who "passes" as black to his great advantage in life?
In my opinion, private colleges can do whatever they want (eg Morehouse College), but taxpayer-supported schools should be racially blind. After all, our taxes are racially blind. Ignore race and ethnicity, and just think about their potential to benefit from, and to add something to, the place.
This past weekend, my elder son asked me to drive him to the outlets so he could get some Ralph Lauren shirts at a reduced cost. Frankly, I don't know where he got this penchant for name brand clothing, but it's his money, not mine. What is my money is the gas it takes to drive an hour to the outlets and the time I gave up to make the 2 hour (round trip) drive. I thought it would be a good lesson for him on 2 levels. First, I could teach him about opportunity costs by showing him why the trip was frivolous. Second, he'd get some driving practice so he could get his license in 2 weeks.
I wound up getting to fulfill my goals, he got his shirts, and we both learned a valuable lesson.
No good deed goes unpunished. In other words, Murphy was right. You can almost count on unintended consequences.
I love the old phrase: "We have the answer. Now what was the question again?"
It's the corollary to "For a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail."
Re my post yesterday, I still cannot understand why a jelly shop needs to be licensed and regulated. Haven't farmers been selling jams, jellies, and pies to happy customers for hundreds of years?
Lengthy and complex regulations are employment schemes for government employees and lawyers as much as anything else. Forget state regs -there are 86,000 pages in the Fed Register. Nobody knows what is in there, but it you violate one of them, you can be screwed.
The rules are stacked against even the smallest of entrepreneurs. If and when I decided to set up my own thing, I already know what I'll need to borrow money for: Lawyers.
When we ask how our current political state of affairs measures up to the Founders’ standard, we usually find ourselves discussing whether a given law or program is constitutional, and soon enough get tangled in precedents and lawyerly rigmarole. But let’s frame the question a little differently: How far does present-day America meet the Founders’ ideal of free government, protecting individual liberty while avoiding what they considered tyranny? A few specific examples will serve as a gauge...
Read it. Wonderful essay. Another quote:
There’s indeed a lot of petty tyranny going around. The question is, at what point do many little tyrannies add up to Tyranny? Likely voters suggested a troubling answer in an August Rasmussen poll: 69 percent of them said they didn’t think today’s U.S. government enjoys the consent of the governed. And in September, 49 percent of respondents, an unprecedented high, told Gallup pollsters that “the federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”
"We created a group of self-entitled monsters." Hey youths, this is for you. Hey, OWSers, this is for you, too. Adam Carolla tells it like it is (language not entirely SFW, and h/t, SDA):
"Life is difficult." That book did me a lot of good, a few years ago. Got me into a little therapy, changed my life for the better, helped me realize that I was my biggest obstacle in getting on with life. Corny as it sounds, that empowered me. Shrink told me that there was nothing wrong with me except for being a "blaming and excuse-making a-hole" and I had to get my shit together, quit blaming and making self-flattering excuses, and take charge of my life like an adult who was willing to deal with reality instead of fantasies. Mean SOB was spot on. That's why I am, at present, having a very good life in New York City.
It is also why I don't do the morning posts here anymore. I am grandfathered in, to post whatever I want, whenever I want.
I am highlighting a weekend link about Fred Siegel that might have gone overlooked in the shuffle: 'The New Tammany Hall' - The historian of the American city on what Wall Street and the 'Occupy' movement have in common, and how government unions came to dominate state and local politics. One quote:
The future of his city worries Mr. Siegel. Forty years ago, New York had the most manufacturing jobs in America. But as the finance sector's share of the national economy grew to 23% in 2007 from 7% in 1980, New York turned almost into a one-company town. Meantime, the growing claims on the public purse by those who make little to no contribution to the economy have driven up taxes and the costs of doing business. The city creates jobs in tourism, hotels and restaurants at the lower end of the scale. "What we don't create are private-sector middle-class jobs," says Mr. Siegel. "We have a ladder with the middle rungs missing."
Government workers make up a growing share of the middle class. And perversely, says Mr. Siegel, unions can justifiably claim to defend the interests of the middle-class worker. "That's because the costs that they've imposed have driven out the private-sector middle class. They are the disease of which they proclaim themselves the cure."
The bad news is that she wasn't referring to Obama, dagnabbit. She thought she was just doing a voice-over and was flipping off some guys in the studio who were trying to distract her. There's a nice summation of it here.
The original progressives of the early 20th century, just like today’s seemingly incoherent liberals, were populist and technocratic — they argued both for direct democracy and for expert rule. Even as they called for enlarging the scope of the federal government and putting a class of educated specialists in charge of it, they also called for radical democratic reforms of our constitutional system. In the 1912 election, the Progressive-party platform proposed not only the direct election of senators but also the enactment of federal laws by public initiative, and even advocated allowing the public to overturn some court decisions by referendum.
And the progressives generally did not see a contradiction between their technocracy and their populism. They expected their technocratic ideas to be popular, and so they expected populism to lead to more expert government.
Progesssives hope citizens will sell their independence to the expert technocrats, without their realizing how venal and power-hungry those pols and technocrats are. Cannot fool all of the people all of the time, and there is no fool like an educated fool.
My always-fragile trust in self-anointed experts and elites diminishes daily - see the EU, or Washington, DC, for plentiful current examples.
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”
Think about what this means. All of the money and power would be focused in the state, but then the state would not do anything with that concentration of power. The state was innocent. There would be no cronyism, no corruption, no bureaucracy, and no concentration of stupidity so as to make mistakes much bigger.
This is precisely — without the proletarian aspects — the Obama worldview. Good citizens with high levels of education will be the philosopher kings, telling everyone what to eat, drive, and do for their own good. Naturally, these people would have no interests of their own. Naturally, their learning from books and theories rather than from real life would not lead them into really big mistakes.
Then, there is Marx’s view of what later became known as the withering away of the state:
“When…all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. … If the proletariat…makes itself the ruling class…then it will…thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”
What we have here today is not the triumph of the proletariat but the triumph of the managerial-bureaucratic-intellectual-cultural elite. The best describer of this is not Marx but James Burnham, a former Marxist whose writings in the 1940s were the basis for George Orwell in writing 1984. Then there is Karl Popper, who pointed out that the greatest threat to freedom (the “open society”) were those who thought they knew everything.
Our rule of thumb at Maggie's: Never trust any human who wants any form of power, especially over you. No matter what they say, they do not mean well. If they claim they are doing it for your own good, run the other way as fast as possible. I am with George Washington:
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
Just as housework withers away, so the obligations of parents to their children wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility. Under capitalism children were frequently, too frequently, a heavy and unbearable burden on the proletarian family. Communist society will come to the aid of the parents. In Soviet Russia the Commissariats of Public Education and of Social Welfare are already doing much to assist the family. We already have homes for very small babies, creches, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and health resorts for sick children. restaurants, free lunches at school and free distribution of text books, warm clothing and shoes to schoolchildren. All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective.
This was just as good, maybe even better, than the round table debate. The video is here. There's just something about the candidates sitting at a table that both lends itself to a more relaxed atmosphere, yet makes the whole event seem more 'businesslike', rather than sterile and 'debatelike'.
Like the last two debates, no bombs or barbs were hurled, and, much like the Cain-Gingrich confab, it was usually left to the participants to decide who answered what. More specifically, the moderator might ask the question of a specific candidate to get the ball rolling, then it was left to the group if anyone wanted to pipe up after that. It was cool, calm and collected.
There's a point to be made right from the start. This was a forum about morals and values, which actually is the definition of 'political party', in the sense that pragmatic and scientific issues such as defense spending, immigration and global warming have no business, whatsoever, being aligned with one political party or the other. The parties are supposed to be about moral issues like abortion and capital punishment; things that define a human being. How carbon dioxide reacts in the atmosphere is not something that defines a human being.
This does, however, work to our benefit, because there are many people out there who might identify with the Democrats on moral issues, but not buy into the AGW hoax and think we ought to drill, baby, drill in ANWR and immediately start building a hundred nuclear power plants. So they end up being Independents simply because they have nowhere else to turn. And Independents usually study the facts and know some history and, in theory, will be able to deduce that keeping a socialist in the White House for another four years is perhaps not the best of ideas.
So this debate was a little more important than how it might appear at first glance. This is the one that goes to the core.
This has been floating around recently and I thought it deserved a spot here.
The Debt Generation speaks:
Dear Republican National Committee: Come the general election, please discourage our candidate from running any self-promotional ads. Just run variations of the above over and over and over and over and over again, covering all ages, styles, types and classes of Americans.
I was all enthused about this afternoon's debate because of its different style and fewer participants until I saw a link this morning to an article on American Thinker, a highly-respected right-wing blog site, and read Prepare Yourself for Obama's Second Term, a thorough and persuasive demolition of the GOP's chances.
So I guess we should call this the "Why bother?" debate. Because, let's face it, according to the above article, we're just wasting our time, and it would be a lot better and healthier for the nation as a whole to simply give up now and concede the election. I'm sure this national feeling of peace and harmony was at the forefront of the writer's mind, and possibly those who linked to it. What's four more short years of Obama compared to how an impassioned and contentious election would tear the nation apart? It's nice to see that someone out there is looking at the bigger picture and seeing what we little people don't.
Nevertheless, I guess I'll dourly plunder on with this post. Haven't got anything better to write about at the moment.
This afternoon's dour waste of everyone's time is brought to you by 'family' groups, such as Family Leader and the National Organization for Marriage.
"This is not a debate," dourly said Bob Vander Plaats, President and CEO of The FAMiLY LEADER. "Our meaningless purpose is simply to learn about their dour worldviews and to listen to their dour hearts on key family issues. The discussion will allow us to see a more personal side of the dour and meaningless candidates."
(I edited the above quote a bit to bring it up to modern standards.)
I dourly note that neither Romney or Huntsman will be participating. What might make the event interesting, albeit in a dour and meaningless way, is that it's being touted as a 'forum', rather than a 'debate', so that should be fun to see, even if it is a total waste of everyone's time.
The good news is that you won't lose any of your valuable TV time as it's only being streamed via the miracle of the World Wide Web. Better yet, it's on at a grossly early 5 pm EST, so hopefully the entire nation will be too busy to watch this inconsequential pile of platitudes leading up to a foregone election.
Update: I meaninglessly just spotted that the sponsor site says "64 television stations will carry either live or delayed broadcasts" so check your local listings, although I doubt any station carrying it would bother mentioning it.
Again, I think the nation as a whole owes a debt of gratitude to American Thinker and their clear understanding of our hopeless chances (as well as those who linked to their fine piece) and, like the way global warming is finally dead, so, too, is this election, and I'm sure we've all got more important things to do than stare at some stupid computer in the middle of a beautiful Saturday afternoon when we should be out there living life to its fullest and doing important things, like cleaning the garage and washing the car.
Or, you could completely disregard the article's defeatist message and approach this afternoon's event with the same zeal and enthusiasm with which you've approached the others in our determined effort to get this horseshit socialist out of the White House.
Has individual liberty been a prime value in American politics and policy since Coolidge? (We are defining liberty as freedom from the power and interference of the state.)
Do Americans talk liberty, but desire utilitariansm? Is real freedom too difficult or scarey for most people nowadays?
Secondly, three guys including Will Wilkinson discuss Libertarianism and Liberty in serious depth at Boston Review. At Maggie's, we believe that the "liberty cost" has to be a large factor in any policy equation, or else we aren't America anymore.
Today, you hear more about financial cost, health cost, and environmental cost, than about liberty cost. (Can I trademark the term "liberty cost," or has somebody else done that already?)
Seems to me that Repubs talk more liberty than the Dems, who have eliminated it from their political calculus since Woodrow Wilson. However, the Repubs talk it better than they act it. Have pols simply learned that, when it comes to voting, people want stuff more from the feds than they want freedom?
"And the centerfielder's going back... back... Home run, Team Republican!"
Sorry, just getting in the mood.
With this extraordinarily long lull between debates (an entire week), I thought I'd step back and take a fresh look at things. Armed with the very latest in caffeine-fortified psychotropic drugs and a Jack Daniels I.V. drip, I'm prepared to take on such challenging questions as, "Does bra size matter in a presidential race?", and "Would you vote for someone with an opposing astrological sign?" That's why Maggie hired me, to take on tough, penetrating questions like these that no other blogger dares address.
By the way, I had a rare insight while writing this post and have resolved not to say too many scornful, derisive, abusive, reprehensible things about Ron Paul ever again. So that's good news for our Ron Paul fan(s) out there.
After last Saturday night's debate, I spent three hours writing one of the best wrap-ups yet. When I awoke the next morning, it had vanished from the Maggie's editor.
I have four logical theories on what might have happened:
1. The dog ate the server's hard drive.
2. Bird Dog, ever mindful of the "politically centrist" in the site's banner and the possibility of class action law suits for false advertising, read how many harsh, critical things I'd written about the liberal scum-dog moderators and immediately deleted the post to save the site's reputation. Because, as everybody knows, if there's one thing a politically-centrist site would never, ever, do, it would be to disparage one side without fairly and centristically disparaging the other.
3. The webmaster, never dreaming in his wildest dreams that some demented blogger would actually be writing on a Saturday night when he's supposed to be out there having one of those "life" things I read about did some kind of maintenance routine, or maybe an upgrade didn't work and he hit 'Restore', and that was that.
4. God is a Democrat, and omnipotently seeing that my article was destined to be viewed as the "greatest piece of literature in the history of mankind" and would be read in every language on every continent on earth and play the decisive role in getting Sarah Palin and Chris Christie elected Empress and Vice-Emperor Of The World (Newt Gingrich as Secretary of Earth, Mark Steyn as Chief of Staff), decided He'd better nip it in the bud. "This Palin woman just doesn't know her place," He mumbled. "And what's with that accent!"
There were, however, two telling moments during the debate, so I thought I'd grab the YouTube clips and snip out the scenes for your enjoyment.
Since liberal moderators will be speaking and there might be children present, decorum dictates that we continue below the fold.
Long-term mortgages may or may not be a good idea, but they do have willing sellers and buyers. In most of the world, mortgages are either rare or very short-term, ie 5 years, and are not tax-advantaged. From Forbes:
A 2005 paper by Adam Gordon describes the effects of federal mortgage policy from the 1930s until the 1960s. Congress created the Federal Housing Administration in 1934, and gave it the power to provide mortgage insurance to housing lenders. At the time, state and federal regulations strictly limited the kinds of mortgages banks could issue, which meant that mortgages were short—often as little as 5 to 7 years—and came with down-payments of between a third and half the value of a home. In the 1930s, the FHA convinced all 48 states to relax these rules for FHA-backed loans, arguing (correctly) that such loans were not as risky since they had the backing of the federal government. But most states did not liberalize the rules for banks with private mortgage insurance. In practice, this meant that FHA-backed loans were the only 30-year, low-down-payment loans on the market, giving the FHA de facto power to decide who would be eligible for such loans.
and
The FHA’s standards became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Young, upwardly mobile families in the market for a first home (at least the white ones) went where they could get the best deal, and thanks to federal guarantees that was the suburbs. Meanwhile, urban areas were starved of capital thanks to state laws that banned private parties from making long-term loans in those areas. Not surprisingly, suburban home construction boomed during this period, while urban areas stagnated.
The FHA and the mortgage interest tax deduction introduced giant distortions into housing markets. Just add "free" government highways to the mix, and you get what you have.
In my view, the FHA and the mortgage deduction are simply subsidies to construction industries and unions, and the freeways simply indirect subsidies to the auto and trucking industries and suburban construction industries.
Yes, yes, I know it's like Christmas came early, but there's another debate on tonight. What makes this one a little different is that this is the first debate aired on one of those old-timey 'broadcast' channels, often referred to as 'cave man channels' in the cable industry. I believe a roof antenna is required, if I remember my childhood correctly. Rabbit ears can be enhanced by wrapping balls of aluminum foil around the tips.
Of course, because microwave transmissions heat up the air and thus cause global warming, they can only broadcast for an hour at a time, so you might have to scramble if you want to watch the last half-hour.
The first hour will be broadcast live on the CBS Television Network. Additional portions will be broadcast on Face The Nation, CBSNews.com, NationalJournal.com and will be available to CBS affiliate television and radio stations for a mere $5 fee.
It looks like it's being streamed on the CBS News site.
The good news is that the debate's main topic isn't something crashingly boring like economics or Social Security. Tonight's 'primary' focus (get it?) will be on national security, and I'm eager to see how Cain defends his plan to put electrified barbed wire along the top of the southern border wall. The moderators will probably label it 'cruel', but it's really just a matter of how much voltage is applied. A mild, paralyzing shock never hurt anyone.
It'll also be about foreign affairs, so all Ron Paul advocates within the reach of this blog site are strongly urged to miss this one at any cost. I'd suggest a small hammer blow to the forearm or hand, just enough to warrant an hour and a half visit to the hospital. I promise you, the pain you'll feel will be much less than if you'd stayed home.
The question is how the audience will respond when Paul outlines his plan to distribute America's nuclear arsenal to every country in the world so that all nations can be equal, thus ending war forever. The audience might go for that, but they'll probably stop short when he suggests we rename Washington, D.C. to Ahmadinejadville. That guy really knows how to push boundaries, doesn't he?
As far as who's hosting the show besides CBS, we're in luck. It's some magazine called the 'National Journal' and it appears from their web site to be quite fair and evenhanded, which is just what we need after the CNBC Attack Machine went into overdrive last Wednesday.
Hold on, let me grab a quick screen shot:
Yep, looks fair and balanced to me. Actually, I thought they went a little easy on Perry, but maybe they're trying to show that they're above picking on him just because he had a small memory lapse in the last debate, although it's doubtful any professional media organization would ever stoop that low.
The fair and impartial extravaganza begins at 8 pm EST on your local Cave Man Channel.
I usually don't get to include videos in the debate wrap-ups because of the time crunch, but since last Wednesday's debate wasn't streamed and I had to watch it on YouTube, I figured I'd take advantage of the opportunity and snip out a few choice moments. Rather than the usual debate wrap-up, this'll be commentary on the vids and a few side thoughts.
Now here's a surprise:
The debates are getting better.
Although I didn't catch it live, I eventually saw it on video and the gang was on. My guess is that the moderators coming right out of the gate with their attack program really woke everybody up.
That is, if you consider the second question as 'out of the gate'.
The first question sounded fairly innocuous; how will Italy's impending meltdown affect America, and should we do anything to help them? A fair and reasonable question, directed to Mr. Cain.
Cain responds as you'd expect, pointing out that we can't really help them, and we should be focusing, instead, on the domestic economy. And how does the moderator respond? She phrases it like a statement, rather than a question:
"So, to be clear, focus on the domestic economy and allow Italy to fail."
Yeah, that's it, Maria. Focus on the economy and allow Italy to sink into the fiery abyss of hell incarnate, thereby telling every Italian-American in the audience, "Hey, screw your grandparents! Let 'em die!" Not surprisingly, Cain didn't bite, and when the question was directed to Romney, he said the same thing; that Europe was perfectly capable of fixing itself, thankyouverymuch.
From that point on, I wouldn't say the candidates were particularly on their 'best behavior' with the moderators. Three or four times a moderator cut in during an answer and was rewarded with a snippy "Pardon me, but do you mind if I finish?", if not outright ignoring them. It wasn't 'antagonistic', but certainly no undue respect was given the moderators the rest of the evening.
In truth, I don't think the moderators were quite ready for what they were about to unleash.
Jon Corzine left a few days ago, and turned down any funds he was due, as he should. He is no doubt positioning his defense. Is he any worse than Madoff? I certainly don't think he is any better. Yet another political figure, in this case of the Left, shames himself.
Say, what was that silly thing I said yesterday about "apathy" and blog sites like Hot Air? Oh, right. Guess who didn't even mention last night's debate yesterday?
Hot Air.
Update: No, wait, I was wrong. I just discovered it this morning. One of the main bloggers, 'God's Critic', did, indeed, write about the upcoming debate. A half an hour before it started.
Well, alrighty, then!
The asshats at CNBC didn't stream it (the first debate that hasn't been), so I didn't see it. If nothing else, though, at least it finally answered that pesky question, "Is there a liberal bias in the mainstream media?". Can you imagine them not streaming a debate if Democrats were involved? If you'd like to tell them what a bunch of biased pigs they are, their contact page is here.
And no, I haven't seen the Perry video, despite it being thrown in my face all morning long. Quite frankly, I'm not into sadomasochism. I read the transcript and feel sorry for the guy. I'll take a look at where we stand in the next election post.
First off, I've found an excellent site with all of the upcoming debate dates and videos of the past debates here.
As I see it, there are a three aspects to these political debates that, in general, the pundits out there either don't get, or refuse to acknowledge because it would devalue their article. Or, in some cases, negate the need for the article altogether.
The first is not recognizing that debates have procedures, no matter what the topic or venue. For example, if an opponent has used up his allotted time barking at you and continues to do so, the proper procedure is to address the moderator, not get into a cat fight with the asswipe breaking the rules, thereby breaking them yourself.
Here's Charles Krauthammer after the last debate, when Perry went bananas on poor Romney's ass:
Worse, Romney turned to the referee — moderator Anderson Cooper — with a plaintive "Anderson?" seeking intervention. An uncharacteristically weak moment.
That is precisely incorrect, and I saw this evaluation a lot after the debate. There are protocols in place for almost any endeavor where people get together, be it school board meetings, town hall meetings, the Rotary Club, the local kids' treehouse, you name it, and political debates are no different.
We tend to throw the words 'moron' and 'imbecile' around a lot in the blogosphere, but I believe the correct word in this case is ignoramus.
And then there's this from candidate Jon Huntsman, who sat out the debate:
"I was totally embarrassed -- completely embarrassed by the lack of seriousness, the lack of focus on the issues that really matter to the American people -- issues about reviving our economy and addressing joblessness were given short shrift," said the former Utah governor.
Sounds mighty powerful and caring and candidate-y, doesn't it? Well, Jon, here's the thing:
The candidates don't get to pick the topics!
I've seen the whiny "But they're not talking about the important stuff!" all over the place, including the comments here. Either these people have no business behind a keyboard, or they're purposefully glossing over the obvious so they'll have something to bitch about. As the renown TigerHawk says, can you think of a third alternative?
(As a small side note, I often use Tige's great question when reading an AGW article. I think at the time, either this moron actually believes this tripe, or he's lying through his teeth for a greater purpose, most likely his wallet. Can you think of a third alternative?)
And the worst of all is the dispiriting tenor of the bloggers. "Oh, Crap, Another Debate" blares Hot Air. "What A Snoozer!" screams PJ Media. It's been getting worse and worse as the debates roll by. This will sound absolutely ludicrous, but I'm the only blogger I see who's remaining excited about them and trying to keep our collective spirits up. Yes, I excoriate the candidates mercilessly at times, but I'm also quick to pass along kudos when I feel they're deserved. I crack jokes, I point out that Michele looks particularly hot tonight, I keep us in tune with the audience's reactions, like who got the first big applause, who got the biggest applause, and which candidate is the only one to get soundly booed so far (I wouldn't want to mention any names, but his initials are R.O.N. P.A.U.L.), all in the hopes of inspiring people to stay involved and upbeat.
Everybody else acts like watching and reporting on them is a chore.
The point is, with people being distracted by Thanksgiving and Xmas, the next few months are going to fly by and the primary elections will be upon us. After four months of steadily-increasing ennui, do the bloggers expect everyone to suddenly catch fire at the last minute just because they tell them to, or will the momentum that builds from apathy be too strong?
And, will it be too late?
As for tonight's debate, the subject is economics. Stand by for a bunch of complaints tomorrow from various pundits and commenters whining, "But they didn't talk about the important stuff!"
The debate will focus exclusively on the nation's economic challenges including the national debt, jobs and taxes.
Seriously, is it possible for them to be any clearer?
Game time is 8 pm EST, CNBC. The assholes aren't streaming it, so I'll miss it.
As a small side note, I've been pushing for Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin for the V.P. slot since the beginning. Add this to the reasons why.
It's about greed and the Blue Food Bowl. The middle class of America is increasingly dependent on government money, directly or indirectly, rather than on private industry - and the financial industry is in with the whole program. There are good reasons for the financial industry to be almost entirely Democratic and in political alliance with the government food bowl.
What all three groups share is a burning desire for more: a hunger and demand for ever larger amounts of government revenue and power. Money and power for the government enable the upper middle class good government types to dream up new schemes to help us all live better lives and give government the resources for the various social, ecological and cultural transformations on the ever-expandable goo-goo to-do list that range from a global carbon tax to fair trade coffee cooperatives and the war on saturated fat. All these programs (some useful in the Via Meadia view, others much less so) require a transfer of funds and authority from society at large to well-socialized, well-credentialed and well-intentioned upper middle class types who get six figure salaries to make sure the rest of us behave in accordance with their rapidly evolving notions of correct behavior.
That is, in accordance with our betters.
and
The cops, the teachers, the firefighters, the sanitation and transit workers: these are most of what remains of the backbone of what used to be the organized working class. Many who don’t work directly for the government work for the health care industry, where government and private insurance payments have kept the blue model alive for employees. Others work for infrastructure and construction companies – much of whose business comes from government. Their ranks were once swelled by reasonably well-paid manufacturing workers and other private employees in what was once a job-rich metropolitan environment. A few private bastions of the middle middle class remain (workers in the cooperative buildings where the überrich live, for example), but these days the purely private sector middle middle class is in full scale retreat in cities like New York and public and quasi-public sector employees take the lead.
This group doesn’t get paid as well or enjoy the prestige of the goo-goos, but they have built structures and institutions that secure them a middle-middle class existence. In the public sector at least they have done surprisingly well at passing their jobs and connections down to future generations. As the urban middle middle class shifted from a largely private sector group to a group primarily dependent on public sector spending and jobs, the political balance also changed. Like the goo-goos, the urban middle middle class needs more revenue from the rest of society: people in this group want the number of jobs in their institutions to grow and naturally enough they want to be better compensated: more take-home pay, better benefits, a younger retirement age with a more generous pension.
and
Threats to the food bowl both unite and divide the Party of Blue. All of them agree that federal revenues should be higher and that much of that money should flow to the cities and states. This preference helps hold the Democratic Party together and – combined with other groups (like big agriculture) that get fat subsidies – helps the Party stay competitive at the national level.
But when cuts must be made, or when limited resources must be divvied up, the groups divide. The goo-goos are willing to cut middle class entitlements and government pensions to fund upper middle class social priorities. Which, they will argue, is more important: to pay (excessive, irrational) pensions to superannuated firemen and cops. or to build a pathbreaking carbon cap and trade system that could save the planet? They are ready to sell state unions down the river, as Democratic politicians ranging from California’s Jerry Brown to Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel to New York’s Andrew Cuomo are doing as I write. But they prefer a peaceful and gradual approach that does not reduce the Democratic Party to a state of civil war and can present themselves to the unions as a lesser evil than Republican red staters who want to kill the unions altogether.
Government employees have a simpler point of view: they want the money and they want it now. They want it without reforms and they want it while they continue to enjoy their traditional privileges and perks.
It's not a Big Tent, it's a giant food bowl provided by a shrinking base of taxpayers. See Greece...
This was such a rare, wonderful event that I thought I'd bump this back to the top so you can get a flavor of what happened over the weekend. The video's available for watching.
Well, that was different.
Imagine, if you dare, two fierce competitors vying for the nomination fighting it out eye-to-eye in yet another political bloodletting on national television.
Over the next hour and a half, the following harrowing events occur:
— When the candidates are asked a new question, they decide between them who should answer first.
— The candidates are welcome to talk as long as they want. When the other wants a turn, he wags a finger and the floor is turned over to him when the next conclusion is reached.
— At one point, a candidate answered a question for about three minutes, then the other candidate talked for about three minutes, then the first candidate apologized and said he hadn't really stated his answer very well the first time, so he took another three minutes, resulting in a much better, clearer answer.
— When the candidates were invited to ask the other a biting, crippling question that would put their opponent's greatest weakness on display, one candidate referred to the other's extensive business background as a CEO and asked him what advice he'd pass along to the current crop of CEOs. Then that candidate referred to the first candidate's extensive political background and asked him what three things had he learned looking at the system from the outside.
— One of the candidates told a lengthy joke and everyone had a really good laugh.
— While they didn't wish to appear rude, it was clear that they didn't want the members of the audience to break in with applause any more than they had to. After all, it is a small breach of etiquette to interrupt someone while they're talking, and thankfully the audience took this slight with good grace.
— Over the course of an hour and a half, these two big, warm, lovable guys who were nothing but smiles all evening long used the words "cheaters", "liars" and "crooks" about a thousand times. They didn't hold anything back. With both of them, it was like a given that every government institution is filled with X percent of the aforementioned cheaters, liars and crooks. They were merciless.
America does have social classes, to some extent, based on all sorts of familial tribal signaling and shared understanding, but the mystery to most pundits especially on the Left is income mobility among economic levels. Social class and income are not the same thing. See "genteel poverty." Via The poor don't stay poor, the rich don't stay rich:
The data showed that fully 56 percent of those who in 2001 were in the lowest 20 percent quintile of income earners had moved up to a higher income quintile by 2007. At the opposite end of the spectrum, 66 percent of those who in 2001 were in the highest quintile of income earners dropped at least one quintile by 2007. And, as Perry notes on his Carpe Diem blog, lest anybody think the period spanning those years might not be representative because of the housing boom that triggered the Great Recession of 2008, data cited by the Fed point to the same pattern of high income mobility from 1996 to 2005. Fully 57.5 percent of those in the top 1 percent of income earners dropped to a lower quintile by 2005, while 57.8 percent of those in the lowest quintile in 1996 moved to a higher one by 2005.
In America, economic "class" is just a moment in time for most people.
The "MF" in MF Global does not stand for "Maggie's Farm". But it could stand for "Massive Fraud". What's amazing, as the MF Global story unfolds, is how one of the liberal standard bearers, Jon Corzine, put his future and his reputation on the line to make more money than the tidy sum he already has. He was, after all, known as a risk taker. But he was also one of the Left's golden boys.
There's nothing wrong with making money, and nobody should begrudge Corzine what he earned. However, I was happy to see him removed as my governor, due to the hypocrisy of his rhetoric and his disastrous leadership. His political views, contrasted with his behavior as CEO of Goldman Sachs, were inconsistent. He claims to be a man of the people, seeking to right wrongs and help the poor. He also gave support to, and received support from, unions. As CEO of Goldman during the run up to a public offering, he cut staff, fought unions, and tried to lower wages. In doing so, he oversaw a successful IPO, but was eventually ousted.
It's always intriguing to see liberal hypocrisy laid bare and listen to the spin. After all, it was recently speculated that Corzine might be a Geithner replacement. Few of his Democratic colleagues have jumped to defend him.
Corzine could, and should, have been much smarter about this. After all, MF Global purchased a firm which had executives jailed for exactly the same kind of fund commingling which seems to have just occurred. So it seems reviewing history was not helpful to the management of MF Global. Does a connected politico earn a jail cell for his behavior?
This was passed along by a friend. It's long, but honest. The breakdown on health is fascinating, putting the onus on misdirected incentives and unhealthy lifestyles. Clearly these things can only be fixed by an overbearing nanny state. I'm posting it late because I figure it's useful for insomniacs or data junkies like me.
I cannot find an image of the old Liberty and Property flag from the American Revolution, but it seems to have been flown often, and certainly in the town of Falls Village (part of Canaan, CT - not to be confused with the wealthy NYC suburb of New Canaan, CT).
The history of Falls Village with some info about the flag here.
Falls Village is still quaint, rustic, and desirable because its grand plans for industrialization failed.
I am reminded that Jefferson's first draft said "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property," but that it was changed in later drafts to the more general but hopelessly vague "Happiness."
The dam on ye olde Housatonic River in Falls Village (not my photo):
There are many reasons that the liberal meme about the unfairness of income inequality is misleading. Still, there is income inequality, and one of the largest causes of income inequality is the difference in rewards to those trained in technologies and those not. See this graphic of the difference in pay among those in hi-tech jobs and those in service jobs. Those with technical skills, also, go on to build successful businesses of their own and get wealthier. As the CBO report on income inequalitypoints out, an increased proportion of the wealthier are those applying skills rather than clipping coupons or withdrawals from trust funds. This News Hour interview nails it.
Our 4-year (yeah, I know, for many it’s 5 or 6 years) colleges do not produce enough graduates in the sciences, nor for that matter do they offer much training in the supporting tech vocational skills. As a result, we import immigrants with hi-tech skills and innovate to transfer more work to machines. Both of these do add to the nation’s productivity and wealth, to some extent benefiting the poor through funding government welfare programs and to some extent benefiting the non-tech middle class through added comforts and medical breakthroughs. But, still left behind are the earnings of those without hi-tech skills.
Our colleges serve their faculty with jobs for those in the humanities. Our colleges serve students with perhaps interesting courses, and delayed adult responsibilities, who do not acquire marketable skills. The opportunity costs are enormous of college enclaves buffered from the laws of supply and demand.
Community (2-year) colleges have many vocational and certificate programs of value to businesses, many allied with local businesses, and offer many entry-level courses for matriculation into 4-year colleges and at lesser tuition. But, they also offer wide-panoplies of fun courses for the young and for adults, courses that detour spending away from vocational curriculums and away from hiring higher-paid, more competent faculty. Private technical schools and vocational colleges do partly fill the gaps in training, the well-motivated with adaptive attitudes and sufficient intelligence getting better paid and more secure jobs. However, most of the brightest are blindly steered into conventional colleges’ humanities degrees (including various “diversity” degrees) where they do not acquire marketable skills. One could argue that most of them, however, lack the interest and application to be successful in technical degree programs anyway.
"Either the Commerce Clause gives Congress a plenary power to regulate anything it pleases or it doesn't; and let's have that argument," says George Mason University law professor David Bernstein.
A wonderful synopsis of Roger Williams' life and influences:
"The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing."
A rambling and interesting essay by David Wemyss: 
I love the old phrase: "We have the answer. Now what was the question again?"
From Yuval's 
A 2005 paper
