Friday, August 12, 2011
A Tottering Technocracy
We are witnessing a widespread crisis of faith in our progressive guardians of the last 30 years. These are the blue-chip, university-certified elite, employed by universities, government, and big-money private foundations and financial-services companies. The best recent examples are sorts like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Robert Rubin, Steven Chu, and Timothy Geithner. Politicians like John Kerry, John Edwards, and Al Gore all share certain common characteristics of this Western technocracy: proper legal or academic credentials, ample service in elected or appointed government office, unabashed progressive politics, and a free pass to enjoy ample personal wealth without any perceived contradiction with their loud share-the-wealth egalitarian politics.
Revenge of the Gods of the Copybook Headings
All of our economic woes, more or less, have come from defiance of what Rudyard Kipling called the Gods of the Copybook Headings. These are the nonpartisan, scientific, and implacable laws of economics and human behavior.
"The first ten amendments were proposed and adopted largely because of fear that Government might unduly interfere with prized individual liberties. The people wanted and demanded a Bill of Rights written into their Constitution. The amendments embodying the Bill of Rights were intended to curb all branches of the Federal Government in the fields touched by the amendments—Legislative, Executive, and Judicial." -- Justice Hugo L. Black (1886-1971)
"The first ten amendments were proposed and adopted largely because of fear that Government might unduly interfere with prized individual liberties. The people wanted and demanded a Bill of Rights written into their Constitution. The amendments embodying the Bill of Rights were intended to curb all branches of the Federal Government in the fields touched by the amendments—Legislative, Executive, and Judicial." -- Justice Hugo L. Black (1886-1971)
US Supreme Court Justice Source: Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 71 (Dissent) (1947).
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Thought for the Day
"All men have equal rights, but not to equal things." -- Edmund Burke
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Thoughts on the Welfare State
"Welfare mostly subsidizes people in poverty, helping few escape from it. In their hearts, most people who are poor would like to be rich, or at least self-sustaining, but this president never talks about how they might achieve that goal. Instead, he criticizes those who made the right choices and now enjoy the fruits of their labor. Rather than use successful people as examples for the poor to follow, the president seeks to punish the rich with higher taxes and more regulations on their businesses." Cal Thomas Columnist 2011
"It is precisely this clinging to victimhood as a means of demonstrating one’s
virtue and advancing one’s well-being that has led us into a society in which
welfare and quotas are “civil rights,” government handouts are “entitlements,”
and payment to girls having babies out of wedlock are “compassionate,” while
hard-working, ambitious people are “greedy,” punishment of crime is
“oppression,” and an independent thinker who stands for courage and
self-reliance is dismissed as an “Uncle Tom.” J. Tucker Alford
"Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this:
The communist seeing the rich man and his fine home says, “No man should have so much.”
The capitalist seeing the same thing says, “All men should have as much.” "
Phelps Adams (1903-1991) Chief Washington correspondent for The New York Sun (1928-50), adminstrative vice president for United States Steel (1950-67)
Sunday, August 7, 2011
The Debt Sky
Although advocates of government projects try to appropriate the aura of market investment, their schemes can’t escape being acts of consumption. They are guided not by market prices and expected consumer preferences but by politicians’ wish to be reelected. The funds won’t be acquired by consent and therefore put to a market test, and the services won’t be offered on the market to free consumers with the power to say no thank you. Rather, resources will be acquired either by taxation, that is, by the threat of force, or by borrowing, which is possible only because the government has power to tax. Any resulting services will be provided not on the market but through the political process in which some are compelled to subsidize others. Costs are severed from benefits.
The lesson then is that real and dramatic spending cuts through a radical reduction in what government does is the authentic way to stimulate economic growth, not to mention expand individual freedom.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
American Animal Farm
The original vision of an entrepreneurial, capitalist republic has devolved now to a social democratic nightmare where government programs actually suffocate initiative and enterprise. Literal, and figurative, industry is now vilified from the Oval Office. At the local level, especially in urban areas, social democrats thrive in dysfunctional, one-party towns. These urban blights cannot afford incompetence, even; it must be subsidized.
Fifty percent of the population pays no income taxes, but they do have the vote. This constituency has no skin in the game except, maybe, to collect a government check. There's no incentive for fiscal prudence when deadbeats can be bought with other people's money.
The American crisis was not created by reformers or conservatives. It was created by a bovine electorate and a porcine federal government -- a horrible model that actually cultivates social pathologies for political purposes. More than four out of ten dollars spent by Washington must be borrowed to finance what now amounts to an American "Animal Farm." Indeed, George! The pigs have taken over again. Napoleon and Squealer are back.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/the_american_animal_farm.html
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Why Capitalism is worth Defending
As Obama demonizes the wealthy and pitches a dozen plans to restructure the economy, opponents of this program need a reminder of what exactly we're fighting for. We are resisting bureaucracy, central planning, and encroachments on our freedom and communities. But this does not get to the heart of the matter. We are not only an opposition movement, countering the president and his partisans' agenda. More fundamentally, we stand in defense of the greatest engine of material prosperity in human history, the fount of civilization, peace, and modernity: capitalism.
There is a myth that capitalism is the dominating doctrine. It seems almost everyone believes this, most finding it at least somewhat unfortunate, which itself should tell you there's a problem with assuming capitalism's unchallenged popularity. In fact, capitalism has few authentic defenders. Conservatives pretend to support it but make exceptions for education, energy, agriculture, labor, central banking, borders, intellectual property, and drugs, to say nothing of national defense and criminal justice. Even worse, many conservatives of the anticorporatist, localist variety are more protectionist and economically nationalistic than the establishment Right. They will sacrifice property rights for their cultural preferences on guns, religion, so-called family values, and certainly patriotism. With friends like these, capitalism needs truer allies.
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