Scoundrels At The Wheel, Pigs At The Trough

If ever there was any doubt about the elitist mentality of today’s Left, one needs only to witness their condescension and smarm in response to those who oppose their communist-lite healthcare agenda.

The mask is slipping and the real agenda is revealing itself:  Obama and his sycophants are intent on controlling the culture forever.  How?  By controlling three of its largest institutions:  Finance, Manufacturing, and Healthcare.  If they get away with it, you can kiss your freedoms goodbye as they will control the central machinery of American prosperity.  And we know what the devout Left does with prosperity, right?  They give it away to moochers, losers, thugs, political hangers-on, and all the sewage and effluvia that circles the Progressive Planet.

How did it come to this?  Simple, the Scoundrels At The Wheel can always count on the Pigs At The Trough – the people mooching for stuff they have not earned nor deserve.  Obama’s central appeal is first to the Something-For-Nothing crowd and only secondarily to political children spewed forth from the university madrassas over the past 5 decades.  Telling crackwhores they are entitled to – indeed have a right to – a home, buys votes.  Now replace “crackwhore” with every manner of human dysfunction, personal irresponsibility,  and loser behaviors and you have the core voting block of the Left.

There is, however, a way to jam this back down the throats of the pig farmers in the Congress – let’s make them live with the programs they propose first.    Every person confronting a Congress Critter should demand the following:

Will you as a Congress Critter commit to a 5 year trial run of whatever healthcare system you think is good for all of us that applies only to the Congress, the President, and all other government employees? Will you further commit to limit these trial participants to ONLY the benefits of such a program and agree to not use your private wealth to get better health coverage in any way-, shape-, or fashion?

Let’s see how enthusiastic these bottom feeding political windbags are if they have to live with the system they define first, and shake out the bugs.  I’d love to see Ted Kennedy waiting in line for his brain tumor treatments.  I’d love to see Nancy Pelosi no longer eligible for the cosmetic procedures that give her that permanently surprised look.

Let’s demonstrate publicly what all sane citizens know:  The Congress is hypocritical and corrupt,  Obama cares only about his place in the record books and not a whit about the nation, and half of We The People are dishonest, greedy, and only too happy to steal from the other half.    Let government employees – all of them – be first to be forced to live with the system the Scoundrels At The Wheel are trying to inflict upon all of us.

The Obama Worshipers

This ought to be required reading for all American (and by that I include Canada, Mexico, Central-, and South American) High School students. Strike that, this is a Must Read for any person with brains enough left to realize what a threat to durable liberty Obama and the Left present:

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/7705

P.S. The Right isn’t much better, if at all.

Our Long, Cold, Winter begins …

All Hail The Neo-Coms

Today the nation that presided over the death of Communism presided over the death of Capitalism.  The very people who benefited most completely from free markets, rule of law, property rights, and personal responsibility have turned their backs on all of it, preferring instead to drink from the sewage spewed forth by the collectivists.  In so doing, it breathed new life into the very Communist ideology that 4 generations of Americans and its allies fought to suppress.  Neo-Communism is the new order.  All hail the Neo-Coms.

Their first General Secretary, Comrade Obama stands in the wings prepared to rule over the workers in a grand socialist paradise.   Like all dictators, he speaks in the grandiloquent, claiming to do good – but only if the good is at the expense of others, the hated rich.  Never mind that he himself is many leagues removed from the common man.  (He does, after all, already have his own Khrushchev-era dacha in Chicago obtained via his currently-imprisoned real estate fairy, Tony Rezko.)  Never mind that his vision of “change” merely involves reinstating the collective that oppressed literally millions during the 20th Century.  Never mind that he is willing to sacrifice our individual liberties – any and all of them – on the altar of the “public good”.  He is Comrade Change.  He is the Great Black Hope.  He is the Collectivist Savior.  So … all hail the Neo-Com Stalin.

And what of the oligarchs?  The people who allegedly caused the problem and now will reap direct financial support from the people of the United Soviet States Of America?  It’s easy to understand their motivation.  After decades of being abused by the growing collectivism in their nation; of having to pay a disproportionate portion of the taxes; of being vilified for being successful; of being blamed for any and all social ills … the rich got even.   They took huge risks (with the possibility of reaping huge rewards) and laid of the losses on the general public.  No demonstration of the evils of collectivism could ever be more compelling, but the American Sheeple, via their execrable legislators, demanded government “fix” the economy, so the risk takers got paid off.  One can only hope that – in the larger scheme of all the taxation they’ve endured – at least they broke even.  All hail the Neo-Com General Assembly.

In the end, no matter how lousy the politicians, this destruction of liberty is primarily the fault of the people – they whiny liberals, the slimy progressives, the limp conservatives, the fakers, the takers, the indolent, the lazy, the greedy, all of them collaborated to put the knife in the barely quivering carcass of Freedom.  So, all hail the Neo-Coms – you majority of the USA’s 300 million inhabitants.  You have managed to undo in a couple generations what took hundreds of years to build.

The West, and more particularly, Western liberty is dead.  What is before us now is the slow and inexorable slide, first to irrelevance, then to subjugation, and finally to extinction.  And we deserve nothing better.   Any nation willing to embrace the diseased “something for nothing” ideas of Comrade Obama and his fellow travelers shall surely get what it asks for.

God Bless America … What’s Left Of It.

Bailing On Liberty

It is maddening to listen to the many voices weigh in on the current banking “Crisis”.  It’s as if all reason has been abandoned.   Stike that.  Reason has been abandoned.  As the congresscritters writhe and moan like Pfleger and Wright at an Obama concert, it is, perhaps, instructive to “review what we’ve learned”:

1. This wasn’t caused by free markets or Capitalism.  It was caused by decades of government spending.  In particular, it was caused by government spending money it did not have.  It did so explicitly – via deficit spending – and implicitly, by forcing lenders to make bad loans and then promising them they’d be “protected” from the subsequent losses.  This is, after all, what the “Your welfare qualifies as mortgage income” scam was all about.  In other words, the last thing we had here was a “free” market.
2. Once government figured out it could no longer tax its way out of trouble, it retreated to the next ring of hell: it printed money, lots of money.  Well, more precisely, it lowered interest rates.  This devalued the currency, drove oil prices through the roof, and generally had the effect of being inflationary, even though the formal measure of inflation did not reflect this.  This, um, slowed the economy down further.
3. The banks in question do bear some responsibility, notwithstanding the predations of the government upon their lending practices.  In no case are they entitled to your money unless you’d like to donate it as a charity.  Using government to force you bail them out of their own mess is flatly communist … which is probably why Obama is particularly keen for it.  Laying off the risk to the public while retaining the rewards for oneself is the act of a despotic oligarch, hence the neo-cons, con-neo-cons, and just plain con men who support this.
4. This produced the perfect storm for the usual communists like Comrade Obama and oligarchs like McCain and Bush.  They are trying to terrify us into supporting a further violation of our wealth by “fixing” the economy with tax money.  They are wrong and they are profoundly evil for demanding this.  The way to “fix” this problem is to let the banking institutions in question go bankrupt and be reorganized under competent new managers appointed by whoever buys their remains.  Alternately, the banks might want to renegotiate the terms of their mortgages voluntarily with the borrowers.

There is no simple fix here.  Nothing we do will avoid massive pain in the short run.  But, if we allow the scoundrels in government to prop up the failing banks, we will pay for this forever.  Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” will not be held back.  It does not answer to Congress, it does not answer to the Obama communists, it does not answer to the oligarchs.  It answers to Reality – so should we.

Political Genius

While the “news” claps and cheers about Obama finally distancing and now denouncing Jeremiah Wright, I stand in awe of the sheer facility and political play of the Obama campaign.

Wright’s racist vitriol was part and parcel of his weekly expositions on Black Liberation Theology (which is neither liberating nor theological, and even less so Black). Yet, after 20 years, Obama managed to never have heard any of it.  Then, along comes the media-at-large with the evidence, and Obama finds himself in a royal pickle.  He can’t back away too far from his “spiritual adviser” because that demonstrates a lack of loyalty – an unforgivable sin for most of us.  He can’t stay too close, because that would, ahem, make him, well … RACIST.  He’s stuck.

Oh dear, what’s the “Presidential Candidate For Change – ANY Change” ™ to do?  Simple.  Call up your dear spiritual adviser and ask him to say what he’s already been saying louder and more often.  Wright’s over-the-top performance these past days was done with one purpose in mind: To give Obama the room to walk away with credibility.  To be able to say that these “extreme” views are offensive. In short, to disconnect the loyalty issue so Obama could get back to polishing his “mainstream agent of non racial, oh so earnest, candidate of destiny” image.

It’s genius I tell you.  Obama’s political competitors are rank amateurs by comparison.  Whether Obama is elected President or remains a pestilence in Illinois, look for “The Barak & Jerry Show” – a cartoonish public reconciliation when Wright’s vile bilge and Obama’s midden of ideas no longer matter.

Contra Kinsley

Every now and then, someone proposes to condescend sufficiently to honor us “chipmunky and earnest” libertarians:

http://tinyurl.com/273vcc

It’s nice to be loved, however condescending the tone. But Kinsley needs refutation, for no other reason than, well … he’s wrong about a lot of things (Some snipping of the original text follows for brevity, not rhetorical advantage):

Libertarians deserve a listen

Yes, they can drive an idea right over a cliff.
But it’s the journey that’s half the fun.
By Michael Kinsley January 12, 2008

Libertarians get patronized a lot. Chipmunky and earnest, always

No condescension here, is there … But, it’s important to be earnest, ask Oscar Wilde.

Legislators and regulators should ask themselves far more often than they do whether their activities expand freedom or contract it.

Legislators and regulators are not served if freedom is expanded.

Furthermore, democracy and majority rule are no answers. Tyranny ofthe majority is a constant danger. How would you like a law requiring people with odd Social Security numbers to give $1,000 to people with
even Social Security numbers? To libertarians, much of what government does is essentially just that.

It’s not just “to libertarians” … it is so as a matter of fact.

So what is wrong with the libertarian case for extremely limited government? Economics 101 teaches some of the basic justifications for government interference in the economy. Some things, such as the cost of national defense, are “public goods.” We can’t each decide for ourselves how much defense we want.

So far, so good. There are things into which we stipulate – via the social contract – the government may poke its nose. This is not because they are “public goods”, but rather those things which are required to preserve and grow liberty itself. Kinsley is making a bogus argument with this “public goods” business, because it allows for almost all manner of abuse – you can call anything you like a “public good” so along as you rationalize it as in the best interest of the group. This is the intellectual basis upon which all Collectivist systems rest (Communism, Socialism,Nazism, Facism, Hillarycare, W’s drug bill …)

Then there are “externalities,” which are costs (or, sometimes, benefits) that your decisions impose on me. Pollution is the classic example. Without government involvement of some sort to override our individual judgments, we will produce more pollution than most of us want. There are “market-oriented” solutions to this problem, but there is a difference — often forgotten, especially by Republicans — between using market forces and leaving something to  the market. The point of principle is whether the government should intervene at all. How it intervenes is purely pragmatic.

Right conclusion, but boneheaded foundation. Interdiction in matters of pollution – say, the raw sewage that emanates when Al Gore opens his mouth – is a matter of thwarting force. If I could pollute just my air, it would be none of the government’s business. But because pollution pretty much always harms others, the government has a role because impeding acts of force increases liberty. What is also not conveniently mentioned here is that the government just loves to do this via non-elected regulatory agents who answer to almost no one in practice.

Libertarians have a fondness for complex arrangements to make markets work in situations where the textbooks say they can’t. Hey, let’s issue stamps, y’see, and use the revenue to form a corporation that sells stock to buy military equipment, then the government leases the equipment and the stockholders vote on whether to use it … and so on. The point becomes proving a point, not economic or government efficiency. Libertarians also have a tendency to see too many issues in terms of property rights (just as liberals, they would counter, tend to see everything in terms of discrimination and equal protection).

No, libertarians see things in terms of more- or less liberty. The example above that he cites as excessively complex sounds contrived to me – at least I’ve never heard it. If government is restricted to its Constitutional limits, these kinds of contrivances are not required. It has been the so-called “liberals” (who are no such thing) and “conservatives” (who are no such thing) that have chosen to prostitute government into the most complex, inefficient, and byzantine leviathan ever conceived by man.  Libertarians want things simpler not more complicated.

Pollution, libertarians say, is simply theft: You are stealing my clean air. Settle it in court. This is a really terrible idea: inexpert judges, lawyers and juries using the most elaborate and expensive decision-making process known to humankind — litigation

As opposed, of course, to the “expert”, competent, beneficent, and generally great rendering of judgment that proceeds from the Congress, their regulatory appointees, and guys they meet in a Minnesota airport bathroom? Be serious. The peeeepul cannot possibly be worse at this than the unfirable hosts of public “servants”. I’ll take a jury of my peers over the smug, self-satisfied EPA regulators any day.

Sometimes libertarians end up reinventing the wheel. My favorite example is an article I read years ago advocating privatization of highways. This is a classic libertarian fantasy: government auctions off the land,
private enterprise pays for construction and maintenance, tolls cover the cost, competing routes keep it all efficient.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. In this case, libertarians are trying to fix an already broken system (and it’s is almost certainly too
late to do so). Moreover, there is a good case to be made for the roads being run by the government as a matter of national
defense – this was, after all, the original justification for the interstate highway system.  The only beef I have with that is that, if the private sector wants access to those roads, then thems that use ‘em should pay for ‘em.

Something similar goes on when the government forbids or requires people to do something for their own good. Why shouldn’t people, at least adult people, have the right to decide for themselves? Libertarian thinking
has been useful, for example, in making it easier to get prescription drugs through the approval maze at the Food and Drug Administration. The Terri Schiavo case of 2005 was libertarianism’s greatest moment so far, as the entire nation rose up in defense of her right to die.

Yeah, too bad Liberals as a group – who always love this part of libertarianism – fail to see that allowing abortion may arguably
be good for the mother, but its pretty bad for the child. To be fair, many libertarians don’t get this either.

The trouble here is that libertarians tend to analogize everything to the right to die. If you have the right to end your own life, you must have the right to do anything else you wish, short of that. If you’re allowed to shoot yourself through the head, why aren’t you allowed to drive without a seat belt?

The answer is that it’s a bad analogy. When you drive without a seat belt, you are not motivated by a desire to die, or even a desire to take a small risk of dying. Why should your motive matter? Because your death — especially your death in a car crash — does impose externalities on me. I would pay good money not to see your bloody carcass lying beside the highway, or endure the traffic jam or pay the emergency room costs. A serious right, like the right to choose the time and manner of one’s death, may be worth the cost, while a right to be careless or
irresponsible is not.

This argument is bogus on many levels. The most obvious is this: If “you” insist in sticking the government into the process of things that ought to be private – say, like healthcare – you have no business complaining when my behavior “imposes externalities” upon you. What’s next? “We pay for your healthcare, so you have to work out 5 times a week, quit smoking, stop listening to Hannity & Combs …” The externalities to which he refers are not an artifact of the behavior of free citizens. They are the artifact of nosy, self-righteous, save-the-world, self-anointed saviors of mankind who want to do “good” … at the point of a gun. (One also wonders what the criteria separating the “serious rights” from the rest of them might be. I shudder to think.)

A similar flaw affects libertarian thinking about government-mandated income redistribution. Extreme libertarians believe this is immoral or even unconstitutional, and even moderate libertarians disapprove of social welfare programs as an infringement on the freedom of taxpayers.

Because it is wrong morally AND practically. It is wrong morally because it is done by threat of force. It is wrong practically because it “oursources” my choice of which charitable causes I wish to support.  So, for example, some portion of my taxes go to support abortion – something I find vile and outrageous (and even worse than having to support “All things Considered” on NPR… which is pretty bad in its own right).

But freedom is only one of the two core values our nation was built on. The other is equality. Defining equality, libertarians tend to take a narrow view, believing that it means only political equality with no financial aspects. Defining freedom, by contrast, they take a broad view, and see a violation in every nickel a citizen is forced to spend.

No, Sparky, libertarians don’t “take that view”. It was the view of the Framers. They understood (imperfectly) that it was to
be equality of opportunity to government protections, not equality of outcomes.  That is, government should serve its citizens equally. This is very different than various formulas (he cites below) wherein both liberals and conservatives wish to use government to mediate how “fair” things are generally, even/especially in the private sector.

Libertarians ask: By what justification does the government concern itself with inequality, financial or otherwise? They are nearly alone in asking this question. Even conservatives claim a great concern for equality of opportunity, while opposing equality of result. And the reasons seem obvious: some degree of material equality as a necessary basis for political equality; the huge role of luck in getting each of us to our relative stations in life; etc.

This is neo-collectivist nonsense in the absence of a real argument.  There are any number of vivid counterexamples of people who achieve great things in the presence of a manifestly unfair world, economic or otherwise. The moment government is injected into the fairness equation, no good thing comes from it. Why? Because, apart from defending liberty itself, anytime government decides what is “fair”, it almost always does so to the benefit of one group and at the expense of another. Liberty is diminished.

In rare cases, this is justified. For instance, the liberty of a murderer is limited intentionally, because not doing so causes a net reduction in liberty for victims. But that’s not the debate being had today. Today’s “fairness” police inevitably end up poking about in personal matters which – frankly – are almost never about our corporate liberty, but are a tinkering exercise designed to buy votes.

But nothing like this is obvious to libertarians. They force us to think it all through from scratch. Good for them.

Sadly, all that “thinking” we induce seems not to result in productive conclusions in those who are doing that thinking … at least as evidenced by this piece.

The Cure Is Worse Than The Disease

This story gave me pause:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,295432,00.html

It is, on the one hand, astonishing that our nation, with a 1st Amendment specifically protecting free speech and religious freedom, has descended to these depths. On the other hand, it is entirely predictable. Once tax money got into the education business, nothing but nonsense followed.  Who would have thought that we’d see a Constitutional Democracy with a government forbidding open religious expression?  But, when you take your neighbor’s money using government force to pay for “your” schools, you also take the government whip that goes with it.

Watch carefully. Our civil liberties will be further eroded by similarly covert means. Wait until (it is all but inevitable) the Sheeple decide that government is also the instrument best suited to dispatch healthcare. Do you smoke? Eat fast food? Drink alcohol?  Eat donuts? Love a good steak? Drink soda pop? Fail to exercise regularly? Once the snoopy Feds have their hands around the healthcare purse strings, they will then be enfranchised to incrementally dictate what should indisputably be personal choices.

Isn’t it interesting that the Western political Left is laser focused on trying to institutionalize healthcare as yet another government function. Yet it is just outraged by the perceived decline in civil liberties induced by covert wiretapping and surveillance directed at foreign nationals. Why no one seems to be able to connect the dots that these are all faces of the same dangerous coin is maddening.

Then again … I suppose the political players know exactly what they’re asking for. The Right wants a commercial oligarchy, the Left a political oligarchy. The Sheeple – as always – want Something For Nothing and serve as a gateway for the malevolent dreams of both political factions.

God help us all.  Oh wait - can I even say that?

“Right” On

I was recently moved to the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments while listening to a radio advertisement. (These are, by the way, not recommended activities while driving a 5000 lb vehicle – it, um, interferes with safe driving.)

The ad in question was for a firm that “freed” deeply indebted people from the “burden” of their debts. The money quote that induced said poor driving practices was something along the lines of, “You have a right to be debt- and worry-free.”

Oh really? So, I guess by extension, I have a “right” to own a home, car, flatscreen TV, boat, vacation villa, all of which I cannot afford? After all, if I have a “right” to be debt-free, then it follows easily that I need not be overly concerned about incurring the debt in the first place.

Absurd? Of course. What is most troubling here, though, is that the people peddling this “service” are doing so knowing full well that there is an audience for their sophistry. In a sane, ethical, and thoughtful society, such claims could never get traction. An advertisement like this would be jeered for the moral corruption that it represents. But a good part of “modern society” is so fundamentally ethically debauched, that this sort of thing passes almost without comment.

So how, exactly, did we become so morally numb? What is it about free people that causes us to buy into utter nonsense when we really do know better? I’d suggest three root causes:

• As Western society developed, there was a shifting emphasis on just what living was supposed to accomplish. In the early days, living was defined primarily by survival activities like reproducing, fishing, farming, and building. As the blessings of Liberty began to produce wealth – in some cases, great wealth – we looked at ourselves and began to think about living our lives to “do good”. A poor man doesn’t have time for charity. Charity is a rich man’s hobby. Andrew Carnegie had the time and wealth to do this on a scale that Thomas Jefferson, for example, could not have contemplated. But in the 2oth century especially, we’ve come to see life as a quest for pleasure, contentment, meaning, and even just wealth itself. Notions like honor, truth, and goodness have become almost entirely overshadowed by “how I feel about things“. Crushing debt makes me feel bad. I can’t possibly allow that to happen – feeling bad is the only “sin” left in our narcissistic culture. Clearly, anything that remediates my feeling bad is a “good” thing and thus ought to be pursued with all haste and vigor.

• Most people are personally pretty honest. If you drop your wallet on the street, most folks will happily return it to you. But the same honest citizen manages to have moral amnesia when the victim is anonymous. The same wallet-returning saint will often have no problem commiting a minor act of larceny when the target is a faceless corporation, for example. The claimed “right to be debt-free” works precisely because it is some “evil” bank or lending institution that will suffer the consequences. In actual fact, of course, we all pick up the tab for bad debt in the form of higher prices. But “we all” is just as anonymous as “the eeevil banker” and thus similarly fair game to be defrauded.

• For the better part of 300 years, we’ve been busy enjoying the blessings of Liberty bestowed upon us by Locke, Jefferson, Smith, and all the rest of the Dead White European thinkers. In so doing, we’ve mostly stopped thinking about just why this all works. In particular, we have a deeply polluted notion of “rights”. In today’s vernacular, a “right” is anything I desire highly. According to the culture-at-large, I have a “right” not only to not pay my debts, but also to a “quality” education, “decent” living conditions, and “good” healthcare. At this rate, I shortly expect to be granted the “right” to a Ferrari and a mansion.

Meanwhile, back in Reality, we really have only one real “right” – We have the right to that which we have earned or what someone will voluntarily donate to us. Anything else is simply fraud. Worse still, the getting of something other than what we have earned pretty much always involves the use of threat or force. Here again, we see the convenient distinction between personal and anonymous morality. A good many “decent” citizens – who would never contemplate violating their neighbors’ property or stealing from them directly – think nothing about voting in laws that have essentially the same effect. Do you want a better school for your children you cannot possibly afford? Vote in higher property taxes. ‘Don’t like what you pay for prescriptions? Pass a law that has “government” (aka “All the rest of us”) pick up the tab. Does your neighbor’s choice of vice offend you? Well, get together with the rest of the mob and make those activities illegal. The list is endless and grows daily. Until and unless we reclaim the intellectual traditions of the Enlightenment and once again declare ourselves to be both free and honest, we will continue to drown in the moral abyss that is our culture.

The Wealth Of Numbskulls

Adam Smith published The Wealth Of Nations in 1776, thereby laying the foundation for all modern economics. It stands as co-equal with the American Revolution in defining the modern free state because political and economic liberty are two faces of the same coin.

And … these two forces were phenomenally successful. In less than 300 years, the US experiment produced a global tidal wave of change (for the better) that the previous 9700 or-so years of recorded history could not accomplish. Today pretty much everyone on the planet benefits directly or indirectly from Smith’s foundational ideas about how wealth is produced. Even the most remote and “primitive” cultures benefit from Western wealth, whether via medicine, transportation, communications, or commerce.

But, perhaps this economic success was just a wee bit too successful. The Western beneficiaries of Smith, who enjoy historically unprecedented wealth, seem to have utterly forgotten his lessons. Today, you see, wealth is actually under attack. Attacking wealth is the luxury reserved only for the (relatively) wealthy. It’s no accident that some of the loudest anti-Capitalist voices emminate from the children of wealth. A good part of the 1960s counterculture, for instance, were rich kids going to tony elite schools on daddy’s credit card. This model persists today among the ultra wealthy population of actors, musicians, and drunken scions of political families.

And they’ve had their desired effect. Today, a good part of the general population has been taught to resent the wealth of others and is sure that wealth=dishonesty. They are fully immersed in the intellectual sewage spewed forth by the academy, the “entertainment” community, and even the politicians at large (almost all of whom depend on wealthy donors, but can never admit it out loud).

Nowhere is this more apparent than the incessant drumbeat of hatred directed toward “Big Eeeeeeevil Corporations”. Look Left, look Right – you’ll find some “thought leader” peddling the usual “Corporations Are Bad And Harm The Little Guy” line of toxic waste. But even a slight examination of Reality lays this notion to waste. Consider, for a moment, the richest members of society. Bill Gates has an approximate wealth of $50 Billion – a nice tidy sum. Let’s suppose there are a  hundred like him (there aren’t).  For those of you that suffered at the hands of New Math, that’s a total of $5 Trillion.  Now, suppose our mythic hundred Eeevil Rich Guys pooled their money in order to oppress us Little Guys. Oh wait, the US economy alone cranks out about $13 Trillion every year. At most, our evil cabal can buy up less than a half year’s annual wealth – and that’s just the US, nevermind the Anglosphere, Europe, Asia, India … So, Big Eeeevil Rich People do not, in actual fact, own the bulk of large business.

So… who exactly owns Big Eeeevil Corporations?  We do! We do so via our retirement plans, our investments in mutual funds, our teachers’ pensions, our union pensions, and so forth. In effect, attacking large business interests is an attack on ourselves (aka “The Little Guy”).

In a related vein, we often hear about “overpaid” CEOs. Apparently, we, the owners of their companies don’t think so, because we keep investing in them. BTW, most corporate executives own a vanishingly small percentage of the companies  they run. It would be better if they owned more, because they’d have a greater interest in their company’s performance.  But the Wealth Haters have seen to it that the aforementioned executives don’t get too large a piece of the action by means of foul laws that make stock options harder and harder to grant.

There are dozens of similar examples, but they all boil down to one thing: The failure to understand basic economics coupled with personal greed and class envy has turned our “Wealth Of Nations” into the “Wealth Of Numbskulls”. The Goose That Lays The Golden Eggs can only be plucked so often. Sooner or later, we’re going to get the devastating effects of attacking wealth, the people who produce it, and those who possess it.

Jefferson had it right in his first draft of The Declaration Of Independence. It should say “life, liberty, and property”. Without a respect for wealth, there can never be liberty.

The Absurdity Of Global Warming Politics

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22069080-5001031,00.html

The beauty of the current Global Warming Religion is that it can be used as the basis for local cooling, warming, more rain, less rain, more storms, fewer storms, … pretty much anything your lil’ heart desires. Since the GW pantheists have pretty much dispense with scientific rigor, peer review, experimental duplication, validation of input data, and all the rest, anything is possible.

This ought not to surprise anyone. When an issue divides itself almost perfectly along lines of political ideology, you can pretty much bet there isn’t much science or reason involved – it’s all about agenda.

When you look to the Right, you see people flatly denying the anthropogenic model of warming because … well, “God gave us dominion over the planet” or “it’s bad for business” or (worse still) “it won’t be a problem in my lifetime”.

The Left has wildly embraced the anthropogenic warming mode. It has done so because of a slightly more complex set of intellectual defects than the Right and these come in several parts:

1. The Left was deeply influenced by “theory”in the mid 20th Century. I don’t mean a real theory like scientists might propose. I’m talking about the -isms: Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Deconstructionism, and such. These schools of “thought” varied in detail, but shared one essential character: Reason was not seen as the sole or even primary way by which humans acquired knowledge that could be made normative upon other humans. It was all about reading meaning into the object under consideration, even if that meaning was entirely an artifice of the reader. When you abandon Reason entirely – which the various theory schools did, more-or-less – you can make anything “true” as you see fit.N.B. That even the most devoutly religious members of the Right never abandoned Reason. They merely claim that it is only one of several ways we acquire knowlege. A considerable portion of Judeo-Christian theological history was dedicated to the development and use of Reason in service to the Creator.
2. The Left was also early to the game of abandoning religion and any notion of transcendent meaning outside human definition. If there is no Creator and no meaning to the physical universe – it is just a random set of physics equations – then it follows pretty quickly that the only possible source of either “good” or “bad” things happening to our world must either be one of those random equations OR we humans are to blame. In effect, elevating humanity to being the single highest source of transcendence in the known universe, opened the door to blaming humans for the “bad” things that might happen. In short, anthropogenic warming serves a kind of Humanist ego agenda that with the help of 1) above doesn’t need any real rational basis.***
3. Even as traditional religious observation was abandoned, nothing could stop the inherent nature of humans to seek meaning in their lives. Here the Left stepped up with a variety of offerings from Eastern Mysticism to the various gobbledygook New Age practices. One popular form of replacement religion was Earth-worshiping – shrouded in the form of “Environmentalism”. In effect, the adherents of these ideas became closet pantheists with the Earth as their (non-personal) deity and the Environmental dogma as their theology.
4. The Left has been losing political traction since the late 1970s. Witness the recent Democrat “mandate” in the mid-term US elections wherein the Left Democrats have been essentially powerless in actual fact. In the face of losing the hearts and minds of the voters (“You mean those people in the Mid-West and South actually vote????!”), one sure way to try and win them back is to scare the “dummies” into believing that: a) There is imminent danger ahead and b) Your side has the answer.

Taken together, 1-4 explain the Left obsession with anthopogenic warming causes. Now, it may well be that we are in fact causing some acceleration of warming. But the science still isn’t complete and cannot make that case in any compelling way just yet. But that doesn’t stop the ideologues on both sides from making declarations with solemn certainty.

*** A closely related expression of this intellectual defect (the Humanist insistence that there is no transcendent meaning to life outside of mankind itself) can be seen in the current healthcare debates. At the bottom of the noise, there is, I am convinced, an essential bitterness on the part of the Humanists. It just annoys them to no end that we humans inevitably die. Especially so since, in the absence of any transcendent meaning, life alone has meaning. Death ends all meaning. Thus, it is all the more important that the center of the universe of meaning – the human being – be preserved for as long as possible and at any cost, even the use of government force. What is particularly revolting about this view, beyond its necessary use of force to be achieved, is that the same people who hold this view get convenient amnesia when the subject of abortion is introduced. Apparently, only some human lives’ meaning are worth preserving.