Europe in decline

This is another great article by Mark Steyn for National Review magazine he names "Lethal Leisure"....

In 1853 or thereabouts, Czar Nicholas I described Turkey as the sick man of Europe. A century and a half later, Turkey is increasingly the strong man of the Middle East, and the sick man of Europe is Europe — or, rather, “Europe.” The transformation of a geographical patchwork of nation-states into a single political entity has been the dominant Big Idea of the post-war era, the Big Idea the Continent’s elites turned to after all the other Big Ideas — Fascism, Nazism, and eventually Communism — failed, spectacularly. The West’s last Big Idea is now dying in the eurozone debt crisis. Although less obviously malign than the big totalitarian -isms, this particular idea has proved so insinuating and debilitating that the only question is whether most of the West dies with it.

“Europe” has a basic identity crisis: As the Germans have begun to figure out, just because the Greeks live in the same general neighborhood is no reason to open a joint checking account. And yet a decade ago, when it counted, everyone who mattered on the Continent assumed a common currency for nations with nothing in common was so obviously brilliant an idea it was barely worth explaining to the masses. In the absence of ethnic or cultural compatibility, the European Union offered Big Government as a substitute: The project was propped up by two pillars — social welfare and defense welfare. The former regulated Europe into economic sloth even as India, China, and Brazil began figuring out how this capitalism thing worked. The latter meant that the U.S. defense umbrella ensured once-lavish budgets for hussars and lancers could be reallocated to government health care and other lollipops — and it still wasn’t enough. Whatever the individual merits of ever-more-leisurely education, 30-hour work weeks, six weeks’ vacation, retirement at 50, the cumulative impact is that not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. And once large numbers of people acquire the habits of a leisured class, there are not many easy ways back to reality.

Defense welfare does the same at a geopolitical level. In absolving the Continent of responsibility for its own defense, the United States not only enabled Europe to beat its swords into Ponzi shares but, in a subtle and profound way, helped enervate the survival instincts of some of the oldest nation-states on the planet. I tend to agree with John Keegan, the great military historian and my old Telegraph colleague, that a nation without a military is in a sense no longer a nation. One of the few remaining serious second-tier powers is now joining their ranks: Under the “Conservative” premiership of David Cameron, a nation that within living memory governed a fifth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population and provided what global order there was for much of the rest will have a military incapable of independent force projection. Were the Argies to seize the Falklands today, Her Majesty’s Government would have to content itself with going to the U.N. and getting a strong resolution. Were the toppling of Saddam to be attempted today, Britain would be incapable of reprising the role it played eight years ago — of holding down the lower third of Iraq all but singlehanded while the Yanks pressed on to Baghdad. But beyond that, in a more general sense, nations that abandon their militaries tend also to abandon their national interests: Increasingly, instead of policies, they have attitudes. “Global warming” — “saving” the planet — is the perfect preoccupation for the ever-more-refined sensibilities of the post-national nation.

While Europe slept in and slept around, new powers emerged. China and India, on course to be the world’s top two economies within a couple of decades, both act as more or less conventional nation-states. So too do Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey — and many lesser players. We live on a planet in which the wealthiest societies in history, from Norway to New Zealand, are incapable of defending their own borders while basket cases like North Korea and Pakistan have gone nuclear, and Sudan and Somalia are anxious to follow. Whatever supple lies it may tell itself, a rich nation that cannot bother keeping up an army is retreating not only from imperialism and conquest but also from greatness. Continentals enjoy more paid leisure time than anybody else, yet they produce less and less great art, music, literature. A land of universal welfare invariably universalizes mediocrity.

Whether Greece defaults or gets bailed out one mo’ time doesn’t really matter: It’s insolvent, and there isn’t enough money in Germany to obscure that fact indefinitely. The longer “political reality” tries to dodge real reality, the bloodier the eventual reacquaintance will be. Europeans are going to have to relearn impulses three generations of Continentals have learned to regard as hopelessly vulgar. Can they do that? A land of 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees has so thoroughly diverted the great stream of life that it barely comprehends what’s at stake. “Europe” as a geopolitical rather than geographical concept has been for half a century the most conventional of conventional wisdom. Those, like Britain’s Euroskeptics, who dissented from it were derided as “swivel-eyed” “loony tunes.” The loons were right, and the smart set — the political class, the universities, the BBC, Le Monde — were wrong. “Europe” was a blueprint for sclerosis and decline, and then a sudden, devastating fall. As the “loony tunes” could have told them, it ends with, “That’s all, folks.”

Conservatism per Timothy Geoglein

Timothy Goeglein, longtime deputy director of public liason for George W. Bush sums up what conservatism means to him:

"The essential nature of 21st century American conservatism is a view that the federal government is too large and should be relimited; that governments, like families, should live within their budgets; that the market economy is the road to prosperity and is consistent with human nature; that our defense budget must be robust in defense of our liberty; that above all we need to preoccupy ourselves with the moral framework of our freedom; and that we need to preserve the values of Western civilization in the Greco-Roman but especially the Judeo-Christian traditions as the bulwark of virtue that nurtures freedom."

No Taxation without Representation

A message from the future

BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON and NATIONAL REVIEW MAGAZINE

Hey, Grover Norquist — I have a message from Mason and Emma, two adorable little newborn Americans still in diapers: “Pay your own goddamned taxes.”

Mr. Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, is the Republican party’s self-appointed policeman working the beat against tax hikes — for us. In effect, he’s working for tax hikes on those Americans being born today and in the next several years, Americans who have no say in our current fiscal policies but will end up paying a heavy price for our indiscipline.

Most Republicans in Congress have signed a well-meaning but destructive pledge to Mr. Norquist’s organization that they will not vote for any tax increase. This includes not only increases in tax rates but also ending special-interest tax subsidies, such as the ridiculous ethanol handout that lately renewed the war of words between Mr. Norquist and his chief Republican antagonist, Sen. Tom Coburn. Senator Coburn, to his credit, has been pushing to get rid of part of our embarrassing corn-gas program, specifically, the part composed of special tax credits for the ethanol emirate. Mr. Norquist, to his discredit, insists that any reduction in the ethanol tax subsidy be accompanied by an equal reduction in other taxes, lest the maneuver constitute a net tax increase and thereby start transforming United States into Germany or Canada or some other country not running Godzilla-sized deficits and spending its children into future penury.

Senator Coburn, Mr. Norquist argues, is an absolute fiend for tax increases: “He’s trying to screw the rest of the Republican party because he is so mad at the world,” Norquist told National Review Online. “He didn’t want to get rid of the ethanol tax credit without raising taxes. The important thing in his life was raising taxes.” Senator Coburn has his shortcomings, to be sure, but it is plainly absurd to claim that “the important thing in his life” is “raising taxes.” Mr. Norquist’s rhetoric then took a sharp turn from the absurd to the perverse as he characterized Senator Coburn’s tactics thus: “He said, ‘Ha, ha, popped your cherry, lost your virginity. Now give me $2 trillion in tax increases.’ As soon as they voted, he turned around and called them sluts. Guys like that didn’t get second dates in high school.” As tempting as it is to apply psychoanalysis here, I’ll stick to fiscal analysis.

The original Americans for Tax Reform were the Boston Harbor renegades and the musket-toting revolutionaries of 1776, and they marched under the banner of “No Taxation without Representation.” The Crown had argued that the American colonists enjoyed “virtual representation” in a parliament in which they had no vote. The Americans didn’t buy it, and neither did William Pitt, whose fine English nose detected a distinctly bovine aroma about the “virtual representation” argument: “The idea of a virtual representation of America in this House is the most contemptible that ever entered into the head of a man,” he proclaimed. “It does not deserve a serious refutation. The Commons of America, represented in their several assemblies, have ever been in possession of the exercise of this, their constitutional right, of giving and granting their own money. They would have been slaves if they had not enjoyed it.”

Roman Genn

Slaves, the man said. But the Stamp Act and the tea tax, odious though they were, are the lightest of yokes compared with the burdens the American Congress is laying upon the shoulders of American citizens not yet born, who have absolutely no say in the matter. If tradition is the democracy of the dead, as G. K. Chesterton put it, then thrift is the liberty of the unborn, who ought not to be encumbered with massive debts that will fundamentally alter the very nature of the American enterprise without their ever having been given the courtesy of a vote. They should not be indentured under a social contract they never signed and would not sign if they had a lick of sense about them.

Your average Age of Obama trillion or so in annual deficits? Chump change next to where our entitlement programs are going. Children being born today might expect to retire around 2075. Unless we take serious action in the very near future to reduce the size of our public debt, those newborn Americans will almost certainly spend their working lives encumbered by much higher taxes — 88 percent higher to accommodate present spending, according to an International Monetary Fund working paper, “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” You can imagine what such a tax increase would do to economic growth, investment, innovation, and the prospects for satisfying employment. (If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on your paycheck — forever.) The middle-of-the-road version from the IMF crew is a mere 35 percent hike in every federal tax, combined with a 35 percent cut in benefits, just to maintain basic national solvency.

And national solvency is a real concern. To get an idea of the size and heft of the millstone we’re hoisting around the necks of little Mason and Emma (the most popular names in 2011 for boys and girls, respectively, inexplicably), take a panicky gander at the annual report of the trustees of Social Security and Medicare. By the time today’s little curtain-climbers get ready to hit the shuffleboard decks or the holodeck or whatever it is retirees end up doing for low-impact kicks in 2075, the two big-boy entitlements will be leaving annual craters in the American economy about the size of the one left by the meteor that sent T. Rex & Co. into the evolutionary version of Chapter 11. Left on its current course, Social Security — Social Security alone — will run a deficit of $3.758 trillion in 2075. (Those are 2011 dollars, not inflated spaceman dollars from 2075, when a loaf of bread will cost $20 or so, if inflation in the next 65 years equals inflation in the past 65 years.) Add in Medicare hospital insurance (which the Social Security trustees also estimate) and you have a one-year deficit of $4.802 trillion — for two programs. That’s under the “intermediate” scenario. The trustees also calculate a “high-cost” run-for-the-hills scenario, under which that 2075 deficit hits $19.3 trillion — which then jumps to $30.5 trillion in 2085. That’s not the whole federal deficit — that’s just the deficit from two programs in one year.

Admittedly, the high-cost scenario is unlikely, which is not to say implausible; fiscal forecasting is hardly an exact science. And, sure, Pollyanna says, those numbers look shocking today, when our GDP is only about $15 trillion or so. But in 65 years our economy will be a heck of a lot bigger, and $30 trillion or whatever won’t be such a big bad wolf of a terrifying deal. About that, I have some bad news for you, Sunshine: If our economy grows for the next 65 years at the same rate it grew for the last 65 years — and that may be optimistic — that gets us only to about $100 trillion, meaning that we’d be spending about 24 percent of GDP on two entitlement programs, and about 5 percent of GDP on deficits in those two programs. Currently, all federal spending amounts to just over 25 percent of GDP — and that’s nearly an all-time high, exceeded only during the war years of 1943–45.

What if we don’t grow as fast as we did for the past half century? If GDP growth looks more like the 1.9 percent it has averaged since 2000 and outlays stay on track, then we’ll be spending about half of GDP on those two programs, which will be running a combined deficit equal to 10 percent of GDP. Which is to say, we’ll be spending about twice as much on Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance as we spend on the entire federal government today.

It is hard to tell a believable story in which a nation remains thriving and competitive — or even solvent and functional — while spending half of its GDP on two entitlement programs. Not when the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that, barring some real reform, our publicly held national debt will hit 200 percent of GDP around the time Mason and Emma are getting out of college. (That’s under CBO’s “Alternative Fiscal Scenario,” which is not a worst-case projection, but one “incorporating some changes in policy that are widely expected to occur and that policymakers have regularly made in the past,” as CBO puts it.)

Everybody but Grover Norquist and the majority of our elected representatives is starting to get the picture. Even AARP, which for years has been to Social Security reform what Americans for Tax Reform is to tax reform — a pig-headed obstacle — has quietly conceded that some cuts in benefits are inevitable, if not desirable. ATR and its allies have been adamantine on taxes but have been in effect AWOL on the real issue, which is spending. Incredibly, the Republicans’ favorite line of attack against Obamacare is that it entails Medicare spending cuts. When Democrats proposed cutting Medicare, Sen. Mitch McConnell denounced them. When Rep. Paul Ryan proposed cutting Medicare, Newt Gingrich denounced him. Granted, the Democrats’ Medicare cuts almost certainly are fictional, but Republicans ran against the very idea of cuts — the one thing they should be championing. If you can’t cut spending and won’t raise taxes, you are, in effect, one half of the Bipartisan Coalition for Eternal Deficits, haunted by the Ghost of Taxes Future.

You think Mason and Emma would, given a choice, vote themselves higher taxes in order to help Newt Gingrich come in third in Iowa instead of fifth? Hard choices have to be made. We demand premium Canadian levels of government spending at discount Colombian levels of taxation. We are demanding that our children pay our taxes so that we don’t have to pay them ourselves. Cutting spending would be a lot easier, and there would be a greater constituency for it, if we paid our own taxes.

King George III, like any self-respecting power-mad colonial potentate, taxed the unrepresented to lard up his treasury and keep himself in wig powder. Our forefathers showed his generals the door at the point of a bayonet. To what end? We’re all Hanovers now, practicing a form of inter-temporal colonialism, a particularly nasty variety of taxation without representation, pillaging our own children and grandchildren to put off unpleasantness now. The longer we wait to fire both barrels at the deficit and debt, the bigger the tax increase we’re passing on to Mason and Emma, and the lower the standard of living we’re leaving them. No taxation without representation — not for us, not for them.

Violence and mental illness

This is a great article by E. Fuller Torrey for National Review in 2011 titled "Let Them Take Pills": misguided civil-liberties concerns hurt the mentally ill and the public. 

 For many years it has been politically correct to claim that people with schizophrenia or other forms of mental illness are no more dangerous than the general population. Even after the recent homicides in Arizona attributed to Jared Lee Loughner, an obviously mentally ill young man, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law stated: “Studies show that having a mental illness, in itself, does not increase one’s propensity to commit serious violence.” Likewise, Mental Health America, previously known as the National Mental Health Association, publicly claimed that “people with mental health conditions are no more likely to be violent than the rest of the population.” Advocates for the mentally ill seem to think that if they repeat this often enough, it will become true. The facts are otherwise, as shown by several studies over the past two decades. It’s true that most individuals with mental illnesses, including all those taking the medication needed to control their symptoms, are not more dangerous than the general population. However, among the 4 million individuals with serious mental illnesses, primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, a small number are clearly more dangerous — and, as happened to Jared Loughner, they become headlines when their delusional thinking and auditory hallucinations lead them to commit some heinous act. Since 1990, eight major studies have been carried out in the United States assessing violent acts by individuals with serious mental illnesses. The 1998 MacArthur Foundation–funded study, which is usually cited by mental-health advocates as proving that these individuals are not more violent, actually proves the opposite. The study followed 951 patients who were discharged from psychiatric hospitals. Although many patients had refused to participate in the MacArthur study, thus removing some of the most paranoid members from the sample, in a one-year period the 951 individuals committed a total of 608 acts of serious violence (physical injury, threat or assault with a weapon, or sexual assault). The violent acts included six homicides. Overall, 18 percent of the patients who were not substance abusers, and 31 percent of those who were, committed an act of serious violence. These rates were 25 percent higher than the rates among other residents of the high-crime neighborhood in which the study was carried out. 

An alternative means of measuring violence is to question those who have a mentally ill family member. In 1992 the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill asked more than 1,400 of its members whether their mentally ill family member had physically injured anyone or threatened to do so in the previous year. Eleven percent responded that their family member had harmed someone, and an additional 19 percent said their family member had threatened to do so. Given such studies, it should not be surprising to find that approximately 10 percent of all homicides in this country are committed by individuals with serious mental illnesses, a figure that was reported in two small studies in California and New York and a recent large study in Indiana. Can we predict which mentally ill people are most likely to become violent? The two strongest predictors of violence in all individuals, mentally ill or not, are a history of violence and the abuse of alcohol or drugs. 

For those who are mentally ill, however, there are additional predictors. The strongest is a failure to take their medication. Virtually every high-profile violent act committed by a mentally ill person was done by someone not taking medication. 

Another factor that increases the risk of violence is the presence of certain kinds of psychiatric symptoms, especially paranoid delusions or a belief that someone is trying to control your mind. Jared Loughner had both of these risk factors, according to those who knew him. Given the prevalence of such episodes of violence, what should we do? The real tragedy is that they continue to occur even though serious mental diseases are treatable in most cases. We have a variety of effective anti-psychotic medications that control a patient’s symptoms and let him live a reasonably normal life, even if they don’t cure him. If Jared Loughner had been properly treated, he would probably now be finishing community college and able to hold a job, rather than facing the probability of life in prison. But medications are, of course, effective only if the person takes them. And there’s the rub. Approximately half of all people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are aware of their illness and thus competent to make an informed decision about whether to take medication. The other half, however, are not aware of their illness. The disease impairs the part of the brain that we use to think about ourselves, much as Alzheimer’s disease does. Such people deny they are sick or need medication, and most of them will not take medication unless it is mandated. Out of this dilemma emerged laws requiring some mentally ill individuals to take medication involuntarily. Such laws, often called assisted outpatient treatment (AOT), basically say to the person: You can live in the community as long as you take your medication, but if you do not, we have the legal right to bring you back to the hospital. In states where it has been studied, AOT has been shown to be remarkably effective in decreasing rehospitalization, homelessness, incarceration, and violence. In a North Carolina study of subjects with a history of serious mental illness and serious violence, the proportion who committed further acts of violence declined from 42 percent to 27 percent when AOT was continued for at least six months. In New York, AOT reduced the proportion of individuals who “physically harmed others” from 15 percent to 8 percent. Unfortunately, however, AOT is little used by most states, including Arizona. Six states — Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Nevada — do not even have a provision for AOT. And neither AOT nor any other psychiatric services will be effective if they are not available. Arizona and most other states have markedly reduced the number of psychiatric beds and outpatient services they provide, so it is extremely difficult to get treatment, even for someone who is severely mentally ill. The states have done this under the illusion that they are saving money. It is now clear, however, that the costs of untreated serious mental illness show up in other ways, such as social services, court costs, the expense of keeping mentally ill individuals in jails and prisons, and of course homicides. The most important reason many seriously mentally ill people do not get treated is the opposition of groups that place civil liberties above all other considerations. 

But in protecting a person’s right to remain psychotic, are we really doing that person a favor? Being seriously mentally ill and homeless or in jail is unpleasant on some days and a living hell on others. 

And what about the civil rights of those who must endure the consequences of this non-treatment? Shouldn’t citizens going to talk to their congresswoman be considered as well? In the Tucson killings, six people were deprived of their lives as well as their civil rights. The ultimate duty to fix the mental-illness mess rests with the states. For two centuries, they had the primary responsibility for overseeing treatment of the mentally ill, but in recent years much of the funding for mental-health services has been shifted to federal sources. Given the publicity surrounding the Arizona tragedy, maybe this would be a good time to experiment with alternative ways to deliver mental-health services. For example, in two or three states, all federal funds now going to support mentally ill individuals, including Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, and SSDI, could be block-granted, with the states free to devise a better treatment system and spend the money accordingly. The results would be carefully assessed prior to, and three years after, the block grant. We can’t do any worse than we are presently doing. 

 Mr. Torrey, a psychiatrist, is the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center (www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org) and the author of The Insanity Offense: How America’s Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens (W. W. Norton, 2008).

The alternative to Obamacare

In light of all of the exemptions (waivers) being doled out by the democrat administration to their friends in the business world and their friends in the labor unions (companies, non-profits, and unions would have to otherwise drop their health insurance plans without the waivers due to the high cost of the required changes forced upon them by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or "Obamacare"), there is much talk of repealing the law and starting over with healthcare reform. The more reliable republican alternative was offered during the McCain campaign but was not well defended by the candidate and therefore ignored by most of the voting population. What is the alternative for improving (reforming) our healthcare system:

• End the tax preference/benefit for employer-provided health insurance gradually over the course of several years. This will encourage the growth of the market for individually purchased insurance (I actually have such a plan) that gives individuals or families more control over their plan and its costs, and make it possible for them to take it from job to job.



• The tax break should be converted into a flat credit so the most expensive insurance plans (used for high wage employees) lose the incentive to overspend. Employees should be able to use the credit toward their company plans OR allowed to use them for self-purchased plans.



• Allow individuals and families to buy insurance across state lines. The competition among insurers would reduce premiums, and the regulations of individual states would arguably have less impact on one's costs.



• With individual plans purchased on the open market, people would be able to select renewable policies instead of relying on an employer's plan that terminates when they quit or get laid off and causes great difficulty to those with chronic illness in getting a new policy (the pre-existing condition problem). Although younger people can lock in renewable policies right now on open market plans, people with pre-existing conditions right now would still be unserved, so republicans support creating a government "high-risk pool" subsidized program for the uninsurable today that would be weened away after several generations.



• The federal government should cap (establish maximum not to exceed funding level) Medicaid and let the states run the program to provide aid to only the most needy in each state.



• Medicare must be converted to a voucher program with the budget for each person established using reasonable formulas or criteria. The alternative is provided in Obamacare: tax increases and healthcare rationing.

The healthcare system pre-obamacare was not a free market system, it was over-regulated and therefore an excessively government manipulated system. It was not a market failure, but a failure to have free markets that has caused many of the problems.

Earth Hour

This is a great article by James Lileks of National Review, i had to post it:

"This year's 'Earth Hour' came and went without much hoorah. A few cities turned off their lights downtown for 60 minutes to show how glorious the world could be if we were all kickin' it Pyongyang-style, and people swooned. The objections are obvious: it's symbolic. It accomplished nothing. It flatters those who believe they are better people because they fret about carbon, compost their fair-trade coffee grounds, and lecture people who use superglue when they could use Himalayan yak spittle (seriously, you can find it at any co-op). If Freud were around these days, he's reduce their psyche to the Id and the Super-eco.

Here's the problem with Earth Hour: how do you know when it's over without consulting some carbon-powered instrument? I know, I'll check the sundial, like the wise old carbon-neutral Greeks! Someone light a candle so i can see what time it is. But candles give off the CO2, the Devil's Breath. One candle, it is estimated, gives off 0.00000001 PBs of carbon, with 1 PB being the amount it takes to melt a glacier and strand a photogenic polar bear on a floe. So no wicks, no tapers. Better to curse a candle than to light the darkness.

Perhaps one could use a wind-up timer to know when Earth Hour's done. That would have a symbolic message possibly lost on the celebrants: civilization, like and egg-timer, winds down unless maintained and resupplied with energy. The problem with our current energy situation, though, is that we won't hear the ding! when time is up. Things will just grind down until the economy is on blocks in the front yard because gas is six bucks a gallon, inflation is galloping like a stagecoach horse, and the entitlement state has become so enormous the only thing Congress can do is meet twice a year to turn it over so it doesn't get bedsores. We're supposed to be panicked about unsustainable fuels and switch to putt-putt plastic cars that run on hemp, but we could sustain ourselves for osme time with the oil we have and nuclear plants we could have. Might give us some breathing room, so skylines need not be darkened to divert the last precious watts to a hospital's ICU.

In the high holy holidays of the ecology movement, Earth Hour is the precursor to Earth Day, the annual reminder that despite 4 decades of laws and regulations, the planet is still precariously imperiled. Grade-school students will spend the day writing letters to Congress so the Koch brothers don't interject plutonium into the earth's core as part of their "mwah hah hah, die everyone die" initiative. But just as Earth Hour has lost steam, Earth Day has challenges. The latest Gallup poll indicates that Americans are caring less about global warming than before. The care most about 'contamination of soil and water by toxic waste,' which will surely spur the moribund EPA to fight all those laws that permit American Cadmium and Lead to pour their industrial waste into ponds by the elementary school. Most people also worry 'a great deal' about 'air pollution', 28% don't give it much thought at all, but they're sitting in boardrooms lighting cigars with $100 bills to kick off National Belching Smokestack Week. A majority of people, 57%, are worried about 'urban sprawl and loss of open spaces.' That is also the percentage of people who have never flown across the Midwest and looked out the window.

Bottom of the list: global warming. 51% "worry" about it "a great deal or a fair amount." The poll didn't dig into specifics, alas, one would love to know how the people who worry a great deal go about their day. [...]

The beauty of Earth Hour: it's predictable, it's voluntary, it happens at night, and it doesn't interrupt anyone's dentist appointment. Countries that have their own unscheduled "earth hours" several times a day must look at the West like a starving person regards a trencherman who announces he will abjure oysters once a year between 3 and 4 PM. We can give it up because we don't have to. Yet. If the grid goes down for good, and the human infestation on aching Gaia is reduced to hominids huddled in huts, children may ask toothless gramps to tell them what it was like when the great dark towers shone at night, when the night was banished by the proud gleam of our hasty and tireless servant, electricity. But if gramps was a green, he might well scoff: "twas a vain boast that man could outmatch the stars, and what did we get out of it? Besides a century of unparalleled prosperity? A 0.5 degree rise in global temperatures. Or so some say. The instruments that compute such things had to be plugged in to work. Anyhow, stop your fussin' and go to bed, sun's down, day's done."

NPR: National Progressive Radio

In October 2010 NPR accepted $1,800,000 from George Soros' leftist "Open Society Foundations". NPR president at the time Vivian Schiller soon fired Juan Williams arguably for his affiliation with the Fox News channel. Although the democrat controlled media outlets do not discuss Mr. Soros and his associations, his views are shared by those at NPR. Matthew Shaffer collected evidence of the political sympathies of board members of NPR Inc. and its fundraising entity the NPR Foundation in November 2010. Almost every board member has demonstrably liberal/democrat political leanings (support for democrat candidates, pro-abortion groups, and environmental activism for example). NPR Foundation chairman Antoine W. Van Agtmael was a trustee at the leftist Brookings Institution. Jane Katcher gave Democrats and Emily's List more than $64,000. Sukey Garcetti was also director of the Roth Family Foundation ("progressive" PAC). 50 such examples were collected by Mr. Shaffer. The content of NPR programming is one issue, but as to who runs the partially taxpayer funded operation, there is no argument, it is run by the democrat/liberal side of our country's 2-party ideological split and has no business being granted taxpayer money.

Stages of adulthood

I had to chuckle at a comment by James Lileks (National Review writer). He wrote this in an article poking fun at the observation today that people in their 20's are taking longer to grow up (i.e. government taking care of you, parents acting like friends with money instead of parents, etc).

What are the 5 stages of adulthood:

1. Finishing up school
2. Not sponging off the parents
3. Getting a job
4. Swapping rings with someone who will put up with you
5. Turning out replacement units

I have completed the 5 stages so i guess i am entering my mid-life crisis :)

Progressive = Totalitarian

This is a nice piece by Johah Goldberg of National Review:

"I had to chuckle at a lengthy post on a [liberal] website by a guest blogger named Sara Robinson:

'Every American over the age of 10 knows what the GOP and the conservative movement stand for. [...] low taxes, small government, strong defense, traditional families. See? You know the tune, and the harmony line, too. Ok, now: What do Democrats and progressives stand for? Take your time. It's a tough question. Give up? So have most progressives. Even the movement's most deeply committed members often have a hard time answering this one. And that is the problem. [...]'

Robinson goes on and on in this vein, as if hers were a new observation. The reality is that this is one of liberalism's mossier cliches. Whenever liberals get in trouble, [they will argue] it is not because they are wrong, it is because they have not communicated their [ideas] sufficiently. A few years ago, this claim was best reflected in the writings of George Lakoff, the linguist who thinks everyone will love trial lawyers if we just call them "public protection attorneys". This idea has great and obvious appeal to liberals [democrats] because it places the blame on the public for failing to appreciate just how right [the liberal elite] are, while offering themselves a backdoor compliment: we are too smart to talk at the hoi polloi's level.

That said, i think Robinson is right about one thing. Progressives do have a branding problem. But it stems from the nature of progressivism. What progressivism stands for is having progressives be in charge. Period. Progressivism stripped of all its pretensions and its many good intentions (and it does have many good intensions) is at its core the dogmatic belief that the familiar band of technocratic egalitarian statists [democrats] should be calling the shots.

This is the upshot of liberalism's much vaunted "empiricism" and hostility to labels, ideology, etc. When liberals [democrats] claim they do not believe in labels, what they are saying is that they don't want to be locked into a view, an idea, a principle, that will constrain them later.

This view is what defined FDR's "experimentalism" and JFK's "cool pragmatism." JFK argued that "political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solution" of contemporary challenges. "Most of the problems...that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems." These problems "deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men" and therefore should be left to the experts. These days, if you hear a libearal invoke pragmatism, you can reliably translate his statement into "shut up we know what to do." This has more or less defined Obama's 'pragmatism' since he took office.

Even where progressives claim to be laissez-faire - say in matters of sexuality or abortion - there is always an implied expiration date (does anyone believe that progressives will remain so dogmatically pro-choice the day homosexuality can be prevented in utero?). It is very hard to find an area where liberals claim to be truly liberal (by which i mean libertarian) and their love of freedom is not conducive to their preferred outcome. Personal liberty is awesome, so long as you eat the right food and smoke fashionable plants. They are for free speech in principle, but would define away disagreement as a 'hate crime'. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism when it is liberal dissent, while the dissenting tea partiers are [called] plain old racists.

This arrogant double dealing mindset is what creates progressivism's branding problem. They cannot admit to their real slogan: "shut up, we are in charge."

Johan Goldberg, National Review, Nov. 2010

Climate-mania over?

From the March 8 issue of National Review......

"Exaggeration and alarmism have been a chronic weakness of environmentalism since it became an organized movement in the 1960's. Every ecological problem was instantly transformed into a potential world-ending crisis, from the population bomb to the imminent resource depletion of the 'limits to growth' fad of the 1970's to acid rain to ozone depletion, and there was always an overlay of moral condemnation for anyone who dissented. With global warming, the environmental movement thought it had hit the jackpot - a crisis sufficiently long-range that it could not be proved nonexistent and broad enough to justify massive political controls on resource use at a global level. Former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth was unusually candid when he remarked in the early days of the climate campaign that:

'we've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing - in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.'

Not surprisingly, after Wirth left the Senate and the Clinton administration, he ended up at the UN.

The global-warming thrill ride looks to be coming to an end, undone by the same politically motivated serial exaggeration and moral preening that discredited previous apocalypses. On the heels of the East Anglia University 'Climategate' scandal have come embarassing retractions on an almost daily basis from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding some of the most loudly trumpeted signs and wonders of global warming, such as the ludicrous claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear within 30 years, that nearly half of the Amazon jungle was at imminent risk of destruction from a warming planet, and that there was a clear linkage between climate change and weather-related economic losses. The sources for these claims turned out to be environmental advocacy groups, not rigorous peer-reviewed science. Then Phil Jones, the scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University (he is the author of the now infamous phrase 'hide the decline') dropped several bombshells in a surprisingly candid interview with the BBC. He admitted that his surface temperature data are in such dissarray that they probably cannot be verified or replicated; said the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today; and agreed that there has been no statistically significant warming for the last 15 years - three points that climate campaigners have been bitterly contesting.

To be sure, these revelations do not in and of themselves mean that there is no anthropogenic global warming. But this is probably the beginning of a wholesale revision of the conventional wisdom on climate change. Al Gore and the climate campaigners cannot go on saying with a straight face that the matter is 'settled science'. One of the central issues of Climategate - the veracity and integrity of the surface temperature records used for our estimates of warming over the last few decades - is far from resolved. The London Times ran a headline last week: 'World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists'. The next frontier is likely to be a fresh debate about climate sensitivity itself. There have been several recent peer-reviewed papers suggesting much lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases than the IPCC 'consensus' computer models predict. And alternative explanations for observed climate change in the Arctic and elsewhere, such as shifts in ocean currents and wind patterns, should receive a second look.

Dissenters who pointed out these and other flaws in the IPCC consensus were demonized as deniers and ignored by the media, but they are now vindicated. The American media are still averting their gaze, though the British press - even the left-wing Guardian and The Independent - is turning on the climate campaigners with deserved vengeance. The IPCC is mumbling about non-specific reforms and changes to the process by which it will produce its next massive climate report, due otu in three or four years. It should emulate a typical feature of American government commissions and include a minority report from dissenters or scientists with a different emphasis. But the next report may not matter much, with the collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen talks, and the likely rejection of cap-and-trade in Congress, climate mania may have runs its course."

Swiss ban islamic minarets

This is another great article by one of my favorite pundits, Mark Steyn, who is a writer for National Review magazine....

"The Swiss minaret ban and the leaked climate e-mails are really the same story - or, more precisely, are symptoms of the same disease. In the Times of London, Olive Kamm deplored the results of Switzerland's referendum, consigned it to the garbage can of right-wing populism, and for good measure dismissed my analysis of euro-demographics. Instead, Mr. Kamm called for a 'secularist and liberal defense of the principles of a pluralist society'.

"That's not the solution to the problem, but one of the causes. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for liberalism and pluralism and whatnot. And, in the hands of a combative old bruiser like Christopher Hitchens, they're powerful weapons. But most people are not like Mr. Hitchens. And so in much of the post-Christian West 'a pluralist society' has subsided into a vast gaping nullity too weak to have any purchase on large numbers of the citizenry. In practice, the 'secularist and liberal defense' is the vacuum in which a resurgent globalized Islam has incubated."

"It is only human to wish to belong to something larger than oneself, and thereby give one's life meaning. For most of history, this need was satisfied by tribe and then nation, and religion. But the Church is in steep decline in Europe, and the nation-state is all but wholly discredited as the font of racism, imperialims, and all the other ills. So some (not all) third-generation Britons of Pakistani descent look elsewhere for their identity, and find the new globalized Islam. And some (not all) 30th generation Britons of old Anglo-Saxon stock also look elsewhere, and find global warming. 'Think globally act locally' works for environmentalism and jihad. Adherents of both causes are saving the planet from the same enemy - decadent capitalist infidels living empty consumerist lives. Both faiths claim their tenets are beyond discussion. Only another climate scientist can question the climate-science 'consensus':you bus-boys and waitresses and accountants and software designers and astronomers and physicists and meteorologists are unqualified to enter the debate. Likewise, on Islam, for an unbeliever to express a view is 'islamophobic'. As to which of these competing globalisms is less plausible, I leave it to readers: Barack Obama promises to lower the oceans; Hizb ut-Tahrir promises a global caliphate. The Guardian's ecopalyptic Fred Pearce says Australia will be uninhabitable within a few years; Islam4UK says Britain will be under Sharia within a few years. I'm not a betting man but if i had to choose....."

"Think globally, act locally, but if you're on the receiving end of globalized pathologies, it's very hard to act locally. A conventional if tyrannical nation-state is free to act against both Islam and 'the environment'. China is happy to stick it to the Uighurs and to turn the Yangtze into a frothing toxic cauldron. But these days non-tyrannical nation-states are barely nations at all, and certainly not to the extent of having anything so declasse as a 'national interest'. If the Swiss are indeed the raging right-wing populists Oliver Kamm says they are, their knuckle-dragging neofascism is a limp and effete strain. If you truly believe Islam is the cuckoo in your clock, you might ban new mosque construction or even muslim immigration. Instead they have banned a symbolic architectural flourish, while the mosque building and the immigation continue, which means that one day the minaret ban will be overturned. And were the country a member of the European Union, even this forlorn gesture would not be permitted."

"In Switzerland's defense, it was pointed out that Saudi Arabia prohibits not just church spires but churches. But this argument went nowhere, except to give detractors an opportunity to tut that the Swiss had chosen to become Alpine Saudi. To progressive opinion, it's taken as read that 'multiculturalism' is a one-way street: it seems entirely reasonable for a Wahhabist to say an Anglican church in Riyadh would see, gee, i dunno, just somehow kinda un-Saudi, whereas it is entirely unacceptable for Heidi's grandfather to say a Deobandi mosque in Lucerne is un-swiss. In contemporary Western discourse, a commitment to abstract virtues - secularism, pluralism - must trump any visceral sense of ethnocultural allegiance."

"That's a very shifting patch of sand to draw a line in. Recently, the writer Barbara Kay testified to the House of Commons in Ottawa about a jewish teacher at a francophone school in Ontario. Around 2002 she began to encounter explicitly anti-semitic speech from muslim students: 'Does someone swell a Jew? It stinks in here'. 'You are not human, you are a jew.' Had Anglo-Saxon skinheads essayed such jests, Oliver Kamm's warriors of pluralism would have crushed them like bugs. But when the teacher went to the principal, and the school board, and the local 'hate-crimes unit', they all looked the other way and advised her that it would be easier if she retired. 60 out of 75 French teachers at the school opted to leave: a couple were jewish, a few more practicing catholics, and most of the rest were the liberal secularists on whom Oliver Kamm's defense of the west rests. The francophone children withdrew too. And now the principal and most of the students and faculty are muslim."

"Maybe it would have wound up like that anyway. But having nothing to stand in your way except liberal progressives certainly accelerated the progress. And as it went at one schoolhouse, so will it go on the broader horizon: if you believe in everything, you're unlikely to stand for something."

Democrat Economic Policies Doomed to Failure

This is an article by Brian Riedl (National Review), it was so good I had to post it.

"Conservatives have correctly declared [the economic stimulus policy of the democrats and President Obama] a flop. [...] Yet few have explained correctly why the stimulus failed. By blaming the slow pace of stimulus spending, many conservatives have accepted the premise that government spending stimulates the economy. [...]"

"In 1939, after a doubling of federal spending failed to relieve the Great Depression, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau said that 'we have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work...After eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started...and an enourmous debt to boot.' Japan made the same mistake in the 1990's (building the largest government debt in the industrial world), and the USA is making it today."

"This repeated failure has nothing to do with the pace or type of spending. Rather, the problem is found in the oft-repeated Keynesian myth that deficit spending injects new dollars into the economy, thereby increasing demand and spurring economic growth. According to this theory, government spending adds money to the economy, taxes remove money, and the budget deficit represents net new dollars injected. Therefore, it scarecely matters how the dollars are spent. John Maynard Keynes famously asserted that a government program paying people to dig and then refill ditches would provide new income for those workers to spend and circulate through the economy, creating even more jobs and income. Today, lawmakers cling to estimates by Mark Zandi of Economy.com that on average $1 in new deficit spending expands the economy by roughly $1.50. If that were true, the record $1,600,000,000,000 deficit spending over the past fiscal year would have already overheated the economy. Yet despite this spending, which is equal to fully 9% of GDP, the economy is expected to shrink by at least 3% this fiscal year. If the spending constitutes an injection of 'new money' into the economy, we may conclude that, without it, the economy would contract 12%, hardly a plausible claim.

If $1,600,000,000,000 in deficit spending failed to slow the economy's slide, there is no reason to believe that adding $185,000,000,000 - the 2009 portion of the stimulus bill - will suddenly do the trick. But if budget deficits of nearly $2 trillion are insufficient stimulus, how much would be enough? $3 trillion? $4 trillion?

This is no longer a theoretical exercise. The idea that increased deficit spending can cure recessions has been tested, and it has failed. If growing the economy were as simple as expanding government spending and deficits, then Italy, France, and Germany would be the global economic kings. And there would be no reason to stop at $787 billion: Congress could guarantee unlimited prosperity by endlessly borrowing and spending trillions of dollars.

The simple reason government spending fails to end recessions is that Congress does not have a vault of money waiting to be distributed. Every dollar Congress 'injects' into the economy must first be borrowed or taxed out of the economy. No new income, and therefore no new demand, is created. They are merely redistributed from one group of people to another. Congress cannot create new purchasing power out of thin air.

This is intuitively clear in the case of funding new spending with new taxes. Yet funding new spending with new borrowing is also pure redistribution, since the investors who lend Washington the money will have that much less to invest in the economy. The fact that borrowed funds (unlike taxes) must later be repaid by the government makes them no less of a zero-sum transfer today.

Even during recessions, when total production falls, leaving people with less income to spend, Congress cannot create new demand and income. Any government spending that increases production at factories and puts unemployed individuals to work will be financed by removing funds (and thus idling resources) elsewhere in the economy. This is true whether the unemployment rate is 5% or 50%.

For example, many lawmakers claim that every $1 billion in highway stimulus will create 47,576 new construction jobs. But Congress must first borrow that $1 billion out of the private economy, which will then lose a roughly equivalent number of jobs. As transportation-policy expert Ronald Utt has explained, 'the only way that $1 billion of new highway spending can create 47,576 new jos is if the $1 billion appears out of nowhere as if it were manna from heaven.' Removing water from one end of a swimming pool and dumping it in the other end will not raise the overall water level. Similarly, moving dollars from one part of the economy to the other will not expand the economy. Not even in the short run.

Consider a simpler example. Under normal circumstances, a family might put its $1000 savings in a CD at the local bank. The bank would then lend that $1000 to the local hardware store. This would have the effect of recycling that spending around the town, supporting local jobs. Now suppose that, induced by an offer of higher interest rates, the family instead buys a $1000 government bond that funds the stimulus bill. Washington spends that $1000 in a different town, creating jobs there instead. The stimulus bill has changed only the location of the spending.

The mistaken view of fiscal stimulus persists because we can easily see the people put to work with government funds. We don't see the jobs that would have been created elsewhere in the economy with those same dollars had they not been lent to Washington.

In his 1848 essay 'What is Seen and What is Not Seen', French economist Frederic Bastiat termed this the 'broken window' fallacy, in reference to a local myth that breaking windows would stimulate the economy by creating window repair jobs. Today, the broken window fallacy explains why thousands of new stimulus jobs are not improving the total employment picture.

Keynesian economists counter that redistribution can increase demand if the money is transferred from savers to spenders. Yet this 'idle savings' theory assumes that savings fall out of the economy, which clearly is not the case. Nearly all individuals and businesses invest their savings or put it in banks (which in turn invest it or lend it out), so the money is still being spent somewhere in the economy. Even in this recession, with tightened lending standards, banks are performing their traditional role of intermediating between those who have savings and those who need to borrow. They are not building extensive basement vaults to hoard cash.

Since the financial system transfers savings into investment spending, the only savings that drop out of the economy are those dollars literally hoarded in matresses and safes - and there is no evidence that this is occurring en masse. And even if individuals, businesses, and banks did distrust the financial system enough to hoard their dollars, why would they suddenly lend them to the government to finance a stimulus bill?

Once the idle-savings theory collapses, so does all the intellectual support for government spending as stimulus. If there are no idle savings to acquire, then the government is merely borrowing purchasing power from one part of the economy and moving it into another part of the economy. Washington becomes nothing more than a pricey middleman, redistributing existing demand.

Even foreign borrowing is no free lunch. Before China can lend us dollars, it must acquire them from us. This requires either attracting American investment or raising the Chinese trade surplus (and the American trade deficit). The balance of payments between America and other nations must eventually net out to zero, which means government spending funded from foreign borrowing is zero-sum.

I've purposely ignored the Federal Reserve, which actually can inject cash into the economy, but not in a way that constitutes stimulus. Congress can deficit-spend, Treasury can finance the deficit spending by issuing bonds, and the Federal Reserve can buy those bonds by printing money. Any economic boost is then due to the Federal Reserve's actions, not the deficit spending - and of course the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates, slowing the economy again, to bring the resulting inflation under control.

If government spending doesn't cause economic growth, what does? Growth happens when more goods and services are produced, and the only true source of this is an expanding labor force combined with high productivity. High productivity in turn requires educated and motivated workers, advanced technology, adequate infrastructure, physical capital such as factories and tools, and the rule of law.

Government spending could boost long-run produtivity through investments in education and infrastructure - but only if politicians could target those investments better than the private sector would. And it turns out that politicians cannot outsmart the marketplace. Mountains of academic studies show that government spending generally reduces long term productivity.

The only policy proven to increase productivity in the short term is to lower tax rates and reduce regulation. Businesses can grow only through consistent investment and an expanding, skilled workforce. Cutting marginal tax rates promotes these conditions, by creating incentives to work, save, and invest.

It's happened before. In 1981, President Reagan inherited an economy stagnating under the weight of 70% marginal income-tax rates. Under Reagan, the top rate fell to 28%, and the subsequent surge in investment and labor supply created the strongest 25-year economic boom in American history.

Such tax-rate reductions are superior to tax rebates designed to 'put money in people's pockets'. Rebates - like government spending - simply redistribute existing dollars. They don't increase productivity because they don't change incentives: no one has to work, save, or invest more to get a tax rebate. The 2001 and 2008 rebates failed because Congress borrowed money from investors and foreigners and redistributed it to families. Not surprisingly, any new personal consumption spending was matched by corresponding declines in investment spending and net exports, and the economy was stagnant.

Congress can only redistribute exisitng demand, it cannot create new demand. [...] The more serious, long-term danger is that President Obama's Europeanization of the economy will bring the same slow growth, stagnant wages, job losses, high taxes, and lack of competitiveness that have plagued Western Europe, leaving the USA at an ever-growing disadvantage with Asian countries not so afflicted.

[Conservatives and free-market supporters - Republicans - must be elected into Congress to put the brakes on the deficit spending and high taxation, and return the money to the private sector where it can grow the economy and improve our standard of living.]

Joe Wilson said "You Lie", and he was right.

This is an excerpt from Ralph Reed's commentary on Sept. 13, 2009. Although shouting out in the middle of a speech is poor manners, our Congress is still fantastically proper relative to legislatures such as those in South Korea or Great Britain. Joe Wilson did, however, make a correct statement.

"[...] Consider just a few of the dishonest statements in Obama's speech:

First: He said "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits - either now or in the future." If so, then the President should have announced his public opposition to the Senate leadership bill and HB3200 months ago [the democrat health care plan]. In June the Congressional Budget Office found that the legislation would increase the budget deficit by $240,000,000,000 over the next 10 years. That's just the beginning. A new study by the Lewin Group finds that in the second 10 years, it will increase the deficit by $1,000,000,000,000. The White House has publicly praised and supported both [democrat] bills. So Obama stated a whopping $1,240,000,000,000 falsehood.

Second: [President] Obama said he would not cut Medicare and affect basic care for seniors. But the Obama plan includes $600,000,000,000 in UNSPECIFIED Medicare cuts. It destroys Medicare Advantage with $250,000,000,000 in cuts, decimating a pro-consumer option that 25% of seniors [use] and allows them to choose the best insurance and doctor for them. Even the Associated Press [dominated by democrat reporters] has called Obama on this lie. AP reported that "although wasteful spending in Medicare is widely acknowledged, many experts believe some seniors almost certainly would see reduced benefits from the cuts. That's particularly true for the 25% of Medicare users covered through Medicare Advantage.

Third: [President] Obama said that Sarah Palin and others have claimed that "we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens." [...] What critics have pointed out is that seniors will be required to submit regularly to "end of life" counseling sessions (page 425 of HB3200) that, combined with cost controls and rationing of care, could lead to them being denied life-saving treatment. As healthcare expert Betsy McCaughy, chairwoman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, has pointed out, the bill includes "substantial funding for "comparative effectiveness research" which is generally code for limiting care based on a patient's age. Economists are familiar with the formula, where the cost of treatment is divided by the number of years (called QUALYs, or quality adjusted life years) that the patient is likely to benefit.

Fourth: [President] Obama claimed that the bill does not use taxpayer funds for abortion. This is also false. The Democrats rejected amendments in the House committee that would have specifically excluded abortion from coverage under the so-called government option. In its place, Democrats took the private portion of the premium (not the public subsidy) and specified that only those funds could be used for abortion services. This is an accounting gimmick. The fact is that abortion will be massively subsidized with billions of dollars in taxpayer funds for the first time in US history.

Fifth: [President] Obama claimed that his plan did not provide care for illegal immigrants. Here again, false. By rejecting a Republican amendment requiring proof of legal residence prior to receiving care under the government-run plan, the Democrats have opened the door for non-citizens and non-legal residents to receive care for which they have not paid into the system. If one refuses to require proof of citizenship or legal residence, one cannot claim to limit benefits to only USA citizens. [wait times and costs increase with increses in demand from illegals].

Healthcare services and industries should not be managed by the federal government. This is a mistake that our kids and grandkids will pay for if this democrat plan goes through and is not sunset by the next republican Congress.

Canadian Healthcare: Free but Slow (see investigative video)

This is a 20 minute video but it is worth watching if you want to see what government managed healthcare is like. This is what will happen to us in the USA if we allow Democrats to pass federal government managed healthcare:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2jijuj1ysw&feature=related

The feds need to stay out of the healthcare industry except for regulation to prevent fraud and unreasonable litigation.

Stossel also put together a shorter piece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJgkvF19QA&feature=related

Quote of the Day: Governor Rick Perry

"There are certain truths that have to be agreed to. One is that economies grow when they are free from over-taxation, over-regulation, over-litigation, and they have a skilled workforce. Government is not difficult in theory, don't spend all the money, keep taxes low, have a fair and predictable regulatory climate, keep frivolous lawsuits to a minimum, and fund an accountable education system so that you have a skilled workforce available. Then get the hell out of the way and let the private sector do what the private sector does best. It's simple in theory, but it's difficult to accomplish. In Texas, we've implemented that theory, and it's produced an economy that has no match in America."
--- Texas Governor Rick Perry, Republican

This quote was published in the National Review article "Going Alamo" by Kevin D. Williamson, which talked about why so many people are moving to the republican controlled state of Texas: great economy because of great republican economic policies and limited government interference. Texas has a divided executive branch (Lt Governor and Governor have distinct powers)and a weak legislature because of strict constitutional limits, preventing government from causing too much harm :)

"The Texas experience suggests that the more government you say no to, the more investment you say yes to."
--- Kevin Williamson

Wind Farms: All hype and ill effects

The public or media enthusiams for wind farms (large tracts of land taken up by huge wind turbine towers, some 400 feet tall) needs to come to an end. Consider the following:

1. Property values in areas where wind turbines are visible decrease, negatively impacting everyone who lives within the line of sight of these ugly turbine towers.



2. Tourism in areas where their originally pristine natural views are changed by the installation of wind farms goes down. See study done in Scotland www.viewsofscotland.org/library/tourism.php



3. The air pressure difference in front of and behind a turbine blade are strong enough to cause lung blood vessel bursting in bats. Wind turbines are responsible for the killing of thousands of bats every year. A Tennessee windfarm study found an annual bat kill rate of 64 bats per turbine.



4. A study of Denmark windfarm industry found that the large wind turbines had serious negative environmental impacts, insufficient production reliability, and high production costs. Conventional power plants (ie coal powered) cannot be simply turned on and off as the wind comes and goes, so the wind farms have not led to any notable decrease in coal powered energy consumption.



5. Infra-sound emitted by turbines can pose a hazard to human health. I didnt believe this either until a european doctor started collecting data on cases of health problems for residents near turbines.



6. Lights on the turbine towers ruin night sky visibility for star gazers and astronomers.



7. Deforestation and/or the large footprint taken up by large numbers of wind turbine towers create terrible negative environmental impacts on local wildlife and recreational land users.



8. CO2 emission savings is only equal to one 18-wheeler truck PER TURBINE, that is it. Canadian study discovered this fact which all but makes wind farms appear to be a waste of time and money and land: www.aandc.org/research/wind_pec_present.html

Cartoon of the day

Obama apologizes for America's history

More evidence republican governance is better than democrat

The chart plots the average unemployment rate in April 2009 for different categories of democrat (blue) and republican (red) controlled states defined as having voted for the democrat or republican presidential candidate. States where a democrat or republican candidate win reliably are good correlators to same party governor and legislature control. The first column for example consists of states where the democrat candidate won the vote ever since the 1980's.

States that are traditionally republican controlled (governor, legislature) do better economically than democrat controlled states. This is simply because republicans provide a pro-business environment while democrats produce oppressive enviroments for business to operate, whether it has to do with lack of lawsuit tort reform, oppressive taxation, excessive regulation, etc. Republican economic policies have been beneficial to the economic condition of their states, while democrat policies have been poison. Facts dont lie, only politicians and their PACs do. Vote smart, vote republican.

Booker T. Washington: First Black Republican

Excepts from David Beito and Jonathan Bean's article in National Review (March 2009).

"In 1899, as Americans looked forward to a new century of progress, Booker T. Washington published 'The Future of the American Negro'. A reporter asked him whether that future would include a black man as president. 'I should hope so' Washington responded. He did not expect to see it in his lifetime: Black [Americans] could not vote in the South, Jim Crow laws enforced rigid segregation, and lynching was rampant. Even so, Washington envisioned a day when black Americans would achieve political equality - and he believed he had a role to play in making it come about. 'One generation lays the foundation for succeeding generations' he wrote. By laying that foundation, Booker T. Washington helped make the election of Barak Obama possible.

That is not to say he would have entirely approved. Washington was a rock-ribbed Republican, and arguably America's first black conservative. Obama's brand of politics would have disappointed him deeply. On Election Night last November [2008] it was John McCain - not Obama - who invoked Washington's name. Liberals, it turns out, don't have much use for Washington. Yet he has much to teach, especially as we enter the Age of Obama.

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) possesses one of the best-known names in the history of black America. He was president of the renowned Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an influential advocate for civil rights, and the most admired black man of his generation. For most of the 20th century, however, certain black leaders and academic liberals rejected his vision of racial advancement. Its emphasis on self-help, faith in entrepreneurship, and abject refusal to embrance victimhood seemed to demand as much from blacks as from whites. For these later figures, Washington was simply too conservative [...].

For years [...] the standard view was that white racism was the primary reason for black misfortune. That is an increasingly difficult case to make now, when the main afflictions of black America [and any poor community regardless of race] are the breakdown of 2 parent families, crime, drugs, lousy public schools, and unprecedented dependency on [government]. The time may have come to revive Booker T. Washington as an inspirational figure.

He was born a slave in Virginia [...]. Shortly after the Civil War, he went to work as a child laborer in a salt works. His sharp mind greatly impressed the wife of his employer, who taught him to read and opened the door to what would become his first great opportunity. Washington's hunger for learning led him on a 500 mile trek to the Hampton Institute, a school that allowed black [Americans] to to work for their education. There, he came under the influence of the school's founder, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a former Union officer who had commanded black troops at Petersburg during the Civil War. Armstrong tried to instill the habits of hard work and good character in his students and admonished them to "live down prejudice". Under his mentorship, Washington excelled in school. In 1881 when Armstrong received an inquiry from a white man founding a school for black [Americans] in Alabama, he recommended his star pupil.

Washington became the first president of Tuskegee Normal & Industrial Institute, orginally founded as a teachers' college. Under Washington, the school trained students in the liberal arts and industrial labor. They learned to respect knowledge and hard work as requirements for becoming good teachers, craftsmen, and civic leaders. [...] [the] school was grounded in a philosophy of self improvement. [...] By the turn of the century, Tuskegee was enrolling 1,000 students, all of them black. Tuskegee has more students than the two leading white institutions in the state - the Univ. of Alabama and Auburn - combined.

When Frederick Douglas died in 1895, Washington immediately succeeded him as black America's most prominent figure - a role in which he would continue until his own death two decades later. [...] Tuskegee's requirement that students learn highly paid industrial skills fostered [...] goals of self-help and capitalist uplift.

Booker T. Washington authored 'Up From Slavery' in 1901, a book that inspired generations of black Americans with his personal account of success. [...]

One of the most important contributions of [Robert J. Norrell, Univ. of Tennessee]'s book is to show how the leading racists of the day, such as Rep. J. Thomas Heflin (Democrat, Alabama) and Sen. Benjamin 'Pitchfork' Tillman (Democrat, South Carolina) feared and denounced Washington's strategy to educate blacks and equip them with economic skills. In 1901 [...] democrats raged when Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington, the leading black republican, to dinner at the White House. [...]

In a hostile environment [of the early 1900's] Washington repeatedly spoke out against lynching, disfranchisement, and segregation. [...] Economic hisorians have documented the progress of black farmers, workers, and business owners - progress made possible because conservative courts (republican appointees) upheld the right to work against the lily white unionism of the time. In his 1977 book Competition and Coercion, Robert Higgs showed that the % of black farmers in the South who were landowners increased from virtually zero in 1865 to 25% by 1910. [...] Nationwide, the number of black businesses skyrocketed from 4,000 to 50,000. Washington played a key role in nurturing these enterprises by creating the National Negro Business League in 1900. [...]

As Norrell describes, gains in education provide perhaps the clearest vindication of Washington's efforts. He had no small role in the spectacular increase in the literacy rate for blacks in the South from 5% in 1865 to 70% in 1910. Although white politicians [...] shunted blacks into inferior schools, Washington was instrumental in providing them with alternatives in the private sector. It was largely because of his influence, for example, that Julius Rosenwald financed the building of 5,500 black schools throughout the South (known as the Rosenwald schools.)

[...]

Obama's worldview is profoundly different from that of Washington. Washington repeatedly emphasized that thrift was the basis of advancement. [...] The secret of success was to shun excessive debt, delay gratification, and 'learn the saving habit, until we learn to save every nickel.' Washington rejected the philosophy that people could spend their way to success. While Obama believes that government can create jobs simply through spending, Washington put his trust in the resourcefulness of individuals to accomplish this goal. He had, he said, 'little patience with any man, white or black, with education, who goes through the country whining and crying because nobody will give him a job of work. A man with education should be able to create a job for himself, but in doing so he may have to begin at the very bottom.' Progress ultimately rested on a solid foundation of hard work, thrift, and production. Excessive debt, especially without the means to repay it, only created a trap leading to more debt and regress. It is doubtful that Washington could have imagined the endless bailouts of our own day. They certainly would have appalled him.