May 19th, 2012 by Lane
Economist Walter E. Williams writes at Townhall, Aug. 11, 2004:
…. It’s popular to condemn greed, but it’s greed that gets wonderful things done. When I say greed, I don’t mean stealing, fraud, misrepresentation or other forms of dishonesty. I mean people trying to get as much as they can for themselves. We don’t give second thought to the many wonderful things others do for us. Detroit assembly-line workers get up at the crack of dawn to produce the car that you enjoy. Farm workers toil in the blazing sun gathering grapes for our wine. Snowplow drivers brave blizzards just so we can have access to our roads. Do you think these people make these personal sacrifices because they care about us? My bet is that they don’t give a hoot. Instead, they along with their bosses do these wonderful things for us because they want more for themselves.
People in the education and political establishments pretend they’re not motivated by such “callous” motives as greed and profits. These people “care” about us, but from which areas of our lives do we derive the greatest pleasures and have the fewest complaints, and from which areas do we have the greatest headaches and complaints? We tend to have a high satisfaction level with goods and services like computers, cell phones, movies, clothing and supermarkets. These are areas where the motivations are greed and profits. Our greatest dissatisfaction is in areas of caring and no profit motive such as public education, postal services and politics. Give me greed and profits, and you can keep the caring….
May 16th, 2012 by Lane
We will have a meeting next Thursday, May 24th, at 6:30 pm at the Holiday Inn Express, 25 Smita Lane, Bentleyville (724-239-7700). We are going to talk about Twitter and a possible seminar/workshop on the federal constitution.
May 16th, 2012 by Lane
Tom Blumer writes at PJ Media, yesterday:
…. In the 2010 Trustees Report on 2009 results, tax collections were only $3 billion greater than benefits paid. 2010 went into the red by $49 billion, while 2011, after taking the payroll tax-cut reimbursements into account, had a deficit of $45 billion. After the 2012-2018 shorfalls cited earlier, annual cash deficits are projected to head quickly into the land of triple digits. If the economy doesn’t start generating significant growth and job creation, they might even arrive as quickly as the first cash deficits.
A few years ago, the Social Security system going cash-negative, especially so quickly, might have triggered the recognition of a widely acknowledged crisis. I thought it would be treated as one in a column three years ago. It hasn’t happened, even though its legitimacy as a genuine crisis is beyond reasonable dispute. Why not? I see only two reasons: A profoundly far-left Democratic administration, and a supportive and at least as far-left establishment press. This tipping point could not have occurred in a Republican or conservative presidential administration without the press and the left going into hysterics. If Barack Obama loses in November, I expect that the crisis will magically move to the front burner….
May 16th, 2012 by Lane
Charles Hugh Smith explains at Chris Martenson, Monday:
…. From the Central State’s point of view, everything outside its control poses a risk. The best way to lower risk is to control everything that can be controlled. Once the potential sources of risk are controlled, then risk can be shifted to others.
Put another way, once the State controls the entire economy and society, it can transfer systemic risk to others: to other nations, to taxpayers, etc.
In effect, the State’s prime directive is to cut the causal connection between risk and gain so that the State can retain the gain and transfer the risk to others. The separation of risk from gain is called moral hazard, and the key characteristic of moral hazard can be stated very simply: People who are exposed to risk and consequence act very differently than those who are not exposed to risk and consequence.
Every time the Central State guarantees something, it disconnects risk from consequence and institutionalizes moral hazard.
To take but one example of many, when the Central State guarantees mortgages so lenders and originators cannot lose and the borrower can’t lose more than his modest 3% down payment, then everyone in the chain is encouraged to pursue risky speculations because the State has disconnected risk from the consequence of a potentially large loss. The risk hasn’t vanished; it has simply been transferred to the taxpayers, who absorb the inevitable losses that result when speculation is encouraged.
Separating risk from gain inevitably generates systemic instability. The entire credit-housing bubble can be seen as proof of this dynamic….
May 15th, 2012 by Lane
Noted by Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard, dated May 21st (embedded ellipsis in original):
…. That the “rich and powerful” are identical to conservatives and Republicans — Edsall’s assumption — is a hoary idea dear to many Democrats and essential to their self-image as the opponents of privilege. It persists even though many of the plushest and most powerful institutions of American life are in the hands of liberal Democrats: public and private universities, government bureaucracies, nonprofit foundations, movie studios, television networks, museums, newspapers and magazines, Silicon Valley . . . Among the fabled “1 percent,” according to Gallup, the number of self-identified Republicans is only slightly greater than the number of Democrats. As Christopher Caldwell has pointed out in these pages, political donations from 19 of the 20 richest ZIP codes in the United States go overwhelmingly to Democrats, by a ratio of four to one or more. Democrats are the party of what Democrats used to call the superrich. Only Democrats seem not to realize this….
May 15th, 2012 by Lane
Arthur Brooks writes at WSJ, last Tuesday:
…. Earned success means defining your future as you see fit and achieving that success on the basis of merit and hard work. It allows you to measure your life’s “profit” however you want, be it in money, making beautiful music, or helping people learn English. Earned success is at the root of American exceptionalism.
The link between earned success and life satisfaction is well established by researchers. The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, for example, reveals that people who say they feel “very successful” or “completely successful” in their work lives are twice as likely to say they are very happy than people who feel “somewhat successful.” It doesn’t matter if they earn more or less income; the differences persist.
The opposite of earned success is “learned helplessness,” a term coined by Martin Seligman, the eminent psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It refers to what happens if rewards and punishments are not tied to merit: People simply give up and stop trying to succeed….
May 14th, 2012 by Lane
By Chad Kent:
The General Welfare Clause is one of the most distorted and misunderstood parts of the Constitution. A lot of people today — including the Supreme Court — will tell you that it grants the federal government a separate power to provide for the “general welfare of the United States.” In other words, that Congress has the authority to do whatever is in the best interests of the country.
It seems like common sense that no one who was trying to create a limited government would decide to give Congress this kind of broad, unrestricted power. Despite that, this can be a tricky topic to debate. To help you the next time you have to explain the obvious to someone, I’ve prepared a crash course for you on the General Welfare Clause.
Below is an explanation of the meaning of the General Welfare Clause, along with four reasons why it simply cannot be a separate grant of power — all broken down into individual arguments that you can use….
May 14th, 2012 by Lane
Democrats in the U.S. House are trained and coached to make charges of racism:
House Democrats received training this week on how to address the issue of race to defend government programs, according to training materials obtained by The Washington Examiner.
The prepared content of a Tuesday [May 8, 2012] presentation to the House Democratic Caucus and staff indicates that Democrats will seek to portray apparently neutral free-market rhetoric as being charged with racial bias, conscious or unconscious….
May 12th, 2012 by Lane
Pay attention to the tip offs.
A lot of people were puzzled by Vice Pres. Biden’s remarks on homosexual “marriage”, Sunday (May 6th). Why this? Why now?
On Wednesday, Pres. Obama finally came out… and admitted he favors homosexual “marriage”. We’re all supposed to pretend that he didn’t come out in its favor in 1996, just like the mainstream media pretends.
By Thursday, the Washington Post was doing a hatchet job on Mitt Romney, with implications somehow supposedly related to alleged treatment of an alleged, supposed, maybe homosexual in 1965. Nineteen. Sixty. Five.
That this series of hand-offs was a coordinated and choreographed effort has not escaped attention. The tip off, we now see, was Biden’s puzzling remark, puzzlingly timed.
One cannot help but be reminded of another puzzling media event: George Stephanopoulos bringing up the subject of contraception in a Republican debate (Jan. 7th). Why this? Why now?
Shortly, HHS affirmed its mandate for insurance coverage of, among other things, contraception. And the Democrats in the House trotted out Sandra Fluke — of Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” fame — to complain that, though a 30-year-old law-school student with a wealthy boyfriend, she was going broke from having to spend so much on contraception. This, too, was a coordinated and choreographed effort. And the tip off, too, was the puzzling time of a puzzling remark.
Recall now Pres. Obama’s puzzlingly-timed puzzling remarks (Apr. 2nd) regarding the power of the Supreme Court to strike down an unconstitutional law: that happened only a few days after the judges held their preliminary vote on the Obamacare case. Why this? Why now?
Since two other recent puzzlements — one by Stephanopoulos, the other by Biden — were eventually revealed to be the tip offs to behind-the-scenes communication, I think it is safe to conclude that Obama’s remarks on the Supreme Court indicate that he had been clued in to how the vote went. And it went the other way.
May 10th, 2012 by Lane
Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes at the New York Post, Saturday:
It’s no surprise to anyone who pays attention that mainstream media tilt their coverage in favor of Democrats and leftish ideas. But it’s not confined to endless puff pieces about the president, or the ignoring of unpleasant facts.
Often, it’s more subtle — as when the general thrust of a news story advances a particular narrative even when the facts within the story don’t really support it. For that sort of thing, you have to go to the acknowledged experts, the reporters and editors of The New York Times. And as Obama fights for re-election, you can expect to see a lot more of it….
May 10th, 2012 by Lane
You might have heard that Pres. Obama finally turned honest on the same-sex “marriage” issue today. What he really did was admit how badly his re-election effort is going — fund-raising in particular.
It’s no coincidence that the story hit the media late yesterday. Earlier in the day, all the news out of Tuesday’s state-level elections was bad for the White House:
- Jurassic-era Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) was defeated by a wide margin in his re-election bid,
- North Carolina voted by a wide margin to define marriage as marriage, and
- 4 out of 10 Democrats in West Virginia voted for a prison inmate instead of Barack Obama.
Not only are those three very inconvenient data points for the White House, they also give the lie to the mainstream-media narrative on all those issues: that the Tea Party is dead; that same-sex “marriage” is popular and inevitable; and, that Obama is popular and his re-election inevitable.
Update: James Taranto provides an excellent analysis.
May 9th, 2012 by Lane
Scott Swett writes at American Thinker, last Thursday:
…. Social science research offers some useful insights into how people typically make decisions:
- Reasoning is only a small part of forming opinions or judgments
- Judgments are often based on inadequate information
- Early and negative information has a disproportionally heavy impact
- Anecdotal, easy-to-remember information is also overly weighted
Therefore, disinformation campaigns use simple, powerful, negative, emotional arguments that tell a story. Since people resist changing their minds about emotionally loaded topics, the media campaign has to ramp up quickly, before the facts have a chance to catch up to the narrative….
May 8th, 2012 by Lane
Lawrence Solomon writes at the Financial Post, Apr. 27th:
…. Unlike their coverage of the political establishment or the corporate establishment, journalists will rarely be skeptical of the scientific establishment. Perhaps these unskeptical journalists don’t question scientists out of a belief that scientists’ pronouncements are free of the self-interest that taints politicians or corporations. Or perhaps these journalists, who are themselves rarely scientifically literate, blindly accept the views of scientific authority figures because they lack the training to assess rival views. Or perhaps these journalists fear being subjected to ridicule if they buck politically correct views. Whatever the reasons for journalistic deference to dogma in science, the victim is the information-consuming public, which at best is kept in the dark, at worst is duped….
