Kazoo Objectivist

Obama's war on Oil

2012-01-25T10:20:00.000-08:00

This article can be found at IBD ...as Americans struggle paying ever increasing gasoline costs it is important to remember that at least more than 50% of us voted for Obama. And don't tell me that you didn't know what he was...a leftist who does not care much for our Founding Father's principles. So now we're stuck with him for at least another 9 months and ugh .... maybe another 4 years and 9 months. I shudder at the thought. Read below.

Congress Can Constitutionally Skirt Obama On Keystone

Posted 01/24/2012 06:04 PM ET

Energy: The president might think that he's killed the Keystone XL pipeline, at least for as long as he's in office. But he could be very wrong.

President Obama was able to snuff out the project and with it a vast supply of needed crude because the executive office has traditionally handled permits on cross-border facilities, which the pipeline is considered since it would originate in Canada.

But that doesn't mean that's the only way for the pipeline to be approved. Attorneys at the Congressional Research Service have determined that lawmakers can pass a bill requiring a permit for the pipeline — which would have carried crude that will now instead be shipped by a rail line owned by Warren Buffett, one of Obama's supporters.

Their review "suggests that legislation related to cross-border facility permitting is unlikely to raise significant constitutional questions, despite the fact that such permits have traditionally been handled by the executive branch alone pursuant to its constitutional 'foreign affairs' authority."

Passing legislation is an option that Republicans are already looking at.

According to USA Today, Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., has written a bill that would remove the president's authority to approve the pipeline and give it instead to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

With a 50-vote majority in the House, the GOP should be able to get Terry's bill, or one similar to it, passed.

The Senate, however, still in Democratic hands, poses a much bigger hurdle. (READ HERE)

"Why Bad Economics Won't Go Away" ...and Why We Repeat the Same Bad Policies Over and Over Again

2012-01-20T10:18:00.000-08:00

Kucinich Wants to be a Character in "Atlas Shrugged": The Villain

2012-01-20T07:05:00.000-08:00

It is amazing that we are in the year 2012 we still are talking about the looters in Washington after Atlas Shrugged has been out there for everyone to read since 1957. That makes it 55 years since the publication of one of the most important pieces of literature ever written. I mean EVER written. Remember, in the story Ms Rand unequivocally describes the looters and the mouchers - what makes them tick (power) and what makes them cry for more power (money and fame). We can now say that 2012 is living up to Ayn Rand's looters and the moochers in Atlas Shrugged, by scribbling the bill: H.R. 3784 "GAS PRICE SPIKE ACT OF 2012".

Thanks moochers for including the year 2012 in the name of the bill. It will be remembered in mockery and disdain for decades. What else can one do but laugh at the ridiculous. Read Erica Johnson's piece at TownHall Magazine below:

Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), want to set up a "Reasonable Profits Board" to control gas profits.

The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a "windfall profit tax" as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation. The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit.

The Gas Price Spike Act, H.R. 3784, would apply a windfall tax on the sale of oil and gas that ranges from 50 percent to 100 percent on all surplus earnings exceeding "a reasonable profit." It would set up a Reasonable Profits Board made up of three presidential nominees that will serve three-year terms. ...

Specifically, he said the money would be used to fund a tax credit on the purchase of fuel-efficient cars and set up a grant program for mass transit programs when oil-and-gas prices are high. ...The following is part of the actual bill to make new law allowing expropriation of producer's profits. ATLAS SHRUGGED again. Except this time the people should shrug and go on strike against Washington and Obama.Rread the bill below. I'd cry if it weren't so funny to read this crap.

Co-sponsoring the bill are five other Democrats: Reps. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), Bob Filner (Calif.), Marcia Fudge (Ohio), Jim Langevin (R.I.), and Lynn Woolsey (Calif.)

112TH CONGRESS

2D SESSION

H. R. 3784

To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to impose a windfall profit

tax on oil and natural gas (and products thereof) and to allow an

income tax credit for purchases of fuel-efficient passenger vehicles, and

to allow grants for mass transit.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

JANUARY 18, 2012

Mr. KUCINICH (for himself, Ms. WOOLSEY, Mr. CONYERS, Mr. LANGEVIN, Ms.

FUDGE, and Mr. FILNER) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Ways and Means, and in addition to the

Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of

such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned

A BILL

To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to impose

a windfall profit tax on oil and natural gas (and products

thereof) and to allow an income tax credit for purchases

of fuel-efficient passenger vehicles, and to allow grants

for mass transit.

1 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives

2 of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

3 SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

4 This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Gas Price Spike Act

5 of 2012’’.

READ THE REST OF THIS ridiculous bill here.

Obama Gets Real

2012-01-18T10:20:00.000-08:00

By:

Peter Schiff

Friday, December 9, 2011

For most of his time as a national political figure, Barack Obama has been careful to cloak his core socialist leanings behind a veil of pro-capitalist rhetoric. This makes strategic sense, as Americans still largely identify as pro-capitalist. However, based on his recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the President appears to have reassessed the political landscape in advance of the 2012 elections. Based on the growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the recent defeat of Republicans in special elections, he has perhaps sensed a surge of left-leaning sentiment; and, as a result, he finally dropped the pretense.

According to our President's new view of history, capitalism is a theory that has "never worked." He argues that its appeal can't be justified by results, but its popularity is based on Americans' preference for an economic ideology that "fits well on a bumper sticker." He feels that capitalism speaks to the flaws in the American DNA, those deeply rooted creation myths that elevate the achievements of individuals and cast unwarranted skepticism on the benefits of government. He argues that this pre-disposition has been exploited by the rich to popularize policies that benefit themselves at the expense of the poor and middle class.

But Obama's knowledge of history is limited to what is written on his teleprompter. And his selection of the same location that Teddy Roosevelt used to chart an abrupt departure into populist politics is deeply symbolic in the opposite way to that which he intended. It is not by some genetic fluke that Americans distrust government. It is an integral and essential part of our heritage. The United States was founded by people who distrusted government intensely and was subsequently settled, over successive generations, by people fleeing the ravages of government oppression. These Americans relied on capitalism to quickly build the greatest economic power the world had ever seen - from nothing.

But according to Obama's revisionist version of American history, we tried capitalism only briefly during our history. First, during the Robber Barron period of the late 19th Century, the result of which was child labor and unprecedented lower-class poverty. These ravages were supposedly only corrected by the progressive policies of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. We tried capitalism again in the 1920s, according to Obama, and the result was the Great Depression. This time, it allegedly took FDR's New Deal to finally slay that capitalist monster. Then, the account only gets more farcical. Apparently, we tried capitalism again under George W. Bush, and the result was the housing bubble, financial crisis, and ensuing Great Recession. Obama now argues that government is needed once again to save the day.

This view is complete fiction and proves that Obama is not qualified to teach elementary school civics, let alone serve as President of the United States. I wonder what other economic system he believes we followed prior to the 1890s and 1920s (and during the 1950s and 1960s) that that he now seeks to restore? Capitalism did not start with J.P. Morgan in 1890s or John D. Rockefeller in the 1920s as the President suggests. In fact, it was about that time that capitalism came under attack by the progressives. We were born and prospered under capitalism. The Great Depression did not result from unbridled capitalism, but from the monetary policy of the newly created Federal Reserve and the interventionist economic policies of both Hoover and Roosevelt - policies that were decidedly un-capitalist.

The prosperity enjoyed during mid-20th century actually resulted from the incredible progress produced by years of capitalism. Contrary to Obama's belief, the New Deal and Great Society did not create the middle class; it was, in fact, a direct result of the capitalist industrial revolution. The socialist programs of which Obama is so fond are the reasons why the middle class has been shrinking. America's economic descent began in the 1960s, when we abandoned capitalism in favor of a mixed economy. By mixing capitalism with socialism, we undermined economic growth, and reversed much of the progress years of laissez-faire had bestowed on average Americans. The back of the middle class is being broken by the weight of government and the enormous burden taxes and regulation place on the economy.

America's first experiment with socialism, the Plymouth Bay Colony, ended in failure, and our most successful colonies - New York, Virginia, Massachusetts - were begun primarily as commercial enterprises. When the founding fathers gathered to write the Constitution, they represented capitalist states and granted the federal government severely limited powers.

Apparently, Obama thinks our founders' mistrust of government was delusional, and that we were fortunate that far wiser groups of leaders eventually corrected those mistakes. The danger, as Obama sees it, is that some Republicans actually want to reverse course and adopt the failed ideas espoused by great American fools like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin.

The President unknowingly illustrated his own contradictory thinking with the importance he now places on extending the temporary payroll tax cuts. If all that stands between middle-class families and abject poverty is a small tax cut, imagine how much damage the far more massive existing tax burden already inflicts on those very households! If Obama really wants to relieve middle-class taxpayers of this burden, he needs to reduce the cost of government by cutting spending. After all, there is no way to pay for all the government programs Obama wants simply by taxing the rich.

History has proven time-and-again that capitalism works and socialism does not. Taking money from the rich and redistributing it to the poor does not grow the economy. On the contrary, it reduces the incentives of both parties. It lowers savings, destroys capital, limits economic growth, and lowers living standards. Maybe Obama should take his eyes off the teleprompter long enough to read some American history. In fact, he could start by reading the Constitution that he swore an oath to uphold.

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NPR and Atlas Shrugged!

2012-01-16T14:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.npr.org/2011/11/14/142245517/on-capitol-hill-rands-atlas-cant-be-shrugged-off

Go to NPR to listen to this talk about Ayn Rand....16Jan2012! Wow she's getting more and more attention as the United States is looking more and more like the United States depicted in Atlas Shrugged. What she foresaw has come to be.

The Iron Lady - A Movie About Margaret Thatcher

2012-01-16T11:28:00.000-08:00

"If the state wishes to spend more, it can do so only by borrowing your savings or taxing you more. And it's no good thinking someone else will pay, that someone else is you." Margaret Thatcher.

I went to see Iron Lady last night at the movie theater and was kept in rapt attention at this woman's life. I'm in my 50's so I remember her in the 90's but had only a vague idea that she was one of the good guys. This movie manages to show that but not to the extent I would have liked. They do dwell too much on her later years when Alzheimer's was taking her mind. I would have liked to see more of the political battles she fought. She was the ONLY woman to have won a seat in Parliament at the time and she went on to win the elections for Prime Minister in 1979.

I got this from Wikipedia:

"She was influenced at university by political works such as Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to

Serfdom (1944),^[17] which condemned economic intervention by government as a precursor to an authoritarian state.^[18] "...she became the face of the ideological movement opposing the welfare state Keynesian economics they believed was weakening Britain. The institute's pamphlets proposed less government, lower taxes, and more freedom for business and consumers.^[51]^{[page needed]}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher

So there you have it. An amazing movie even though it lacked more about her life. Maybe someone will do a better movie and put her entire life in perspective. How about a movie on Ronald Reagan?

We Should Learn Something About the Science of Economics

2011-12-23T13:45:00.000-08:00

The following are some quotes by the great economist Ludwig von Mises. These are important because our political class will try to pull one over on us every time. But we can protect ourselves by becoming familiar with the economic principles that made this country great in the first place. Today's politicians, never so much as Barack Obama, are defying these good economic rules and this can end only one way - in slavery to the state.

Economics is not about goods and services; it is about human choice and action.

Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power. They must reluctantly admit that they are subject to the laws of nature. But they reject the very notion of economic law . . . economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.

All those not familiar with economics (i.e., the immense majority) do not see any reason why they should not coerce other people by means of force to do what these people are not prepared to do of their own accord.

The main achievement of economics is that it has provided a theory of peaceful human cooperation. This is why the harbingers of violent conflict have branded it as a dismal science and why this age of wars, civil wars, and destruction has no use for it.

Rulers do not like to admit that their power is restricted by any laws other than those of physics and biology. They never ascribe their failures and frustrations to the violation of economic law.

As conditions are today, nothing can be more important to every intelligent man than economics. His own fate and that of his progeny is at stake.

The body of economic knowledge is an essential element in the structure of human civilization; it is the foundation upon which modern industrialism and all the moral, intellectual, technological, and therapeutical achievements of the last centuries have been built.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

War doesn't liberate; it enslaves. It is the state on overdrive: taxing, inflating, kidnapping, killing. February 25-25 2012 | Furman University, Greenville, SC

We Must Return to the Gold Standard

2011-11-10T12:14:00.000-08:00

Ben Bernanke's Lone Positive Legacy: A Return To The Gold Standard by Bill Frezza (Forbes) I’ll make two predictions with utter confidence. The first is that one day Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will be ridden out of town on a rail, joining Arthur Burns in that special circle of hell reserved for monetary debauchers. The second is that in the aftermath of our pending inflationary disaster we will see the gold standard return.

The Federal Reserve long ago lost control of inflation, now ravaging several sectors of our economy. This is obvious to every economist not a member of Bernanke’s Greek chorus, singing lyrics provided by the gnomes in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Their modern re-interpretation of the dance of the seven veils uses statistical “adjustments” instead of scarves, but these keep the evidence of inflation as hidden as Salome’s charms. My favorite fudge has to be the “hedonic quality adjustment.” What are you going to believe, the government’s regression coefficient estimates or your own lying eyes?

What Bernanke made clear now that he launched his own reality TV show is that his primary mission is no longer ensuring a stable currency, or even pursuing the illusory goal of full employment. Rather, Helicopter Ben will make his last stand managing inflationary expectations. As long as he maintains the illusion of monetary stability the Fed’s printing presses can run flat out. What could please his masters more, who get to spend this fresh dough before it floods into the economy to dilute ours?

Reading from the playbook of successful defense attorneys the game is on to Deny, Deny, Deny! All evidence of inflation is explained as transitory. High food prices? It’s the weather. Gasoline? Blame speculators or oil industry profits. Ben knows he can get away with this dodge for at least two or three more quarters. After that? Don’t you worry; if inflation ever raises its ugly head Ben the Beneficent will rise up and smite it immediately!

Do you have a friend that is a high function alcoholic? “Back off, I can handle it! I’m doing fine at work. Things at home have never been better. What’s the big deal; it’s just a few traffic tickets. If my drinking becomes a problem I can stop any time.” After he wraps his car around a tree, loses his job, and his wife leaves him you’ll be there to check him into rehab. But his life will never be the same.

Nor will our economy after the triple whammy of double digit unemployment, double digit inflation, and an uncontrollable budget deficit comes down on our heads. That’s why I think the gold standard will make a comeback. It’s too bad the country has to be dragged through so much avoidable misery, but perhaps that’s the only way we can put a stake through the heart of fiat currency.

Don’t be melodramatic; we survived the seventies without restoring the gold standard didn’t we? Sure. But last time Washington went on an inflationary binge the world was a simpler place, and we sat firmly atop it. There was no Euro. China was the world’s largest penal colony barely able to feed itself, not a manufacturing giant and our biggest creditor. The evil empire threatened. Fax machines were the latest thing in international communications. World financial markets were neither integrated nor interconnected by broadband. And citizens got their news from three government regulated TV networks.

Paul Volcker had a far more manageable problem dumped in his lap than will Bernanke’s successor, who will be confronted by genuine challenges to the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. And therein lies the opportunity for gold.

Faced with the alternative of ceding monetary supremacy to the Chinese the gold standard will be the only politically palatable option. In addition, all those gold cranks the liberal media spent decades portraying as fools are going to look pretty smart when gold hits $2,000 an ounce. With enough think tanks in Washington rehabilitating gold as a respectable monetary anchor and ratings agencies threatening to reduce T-bills to junk bond status, hard money will have its day in court.

And it will win because the gold standard makes but one promise, and that is to stabilize the value of money. At that task it has never failed, unlike every fiat currency in history. Gold makes no false promises to cure unemployment, direct credit to the unworthy, juice a slack economy, boost exports, deliver stealth tax hikes, erode unfunded liabilities, or all the other things that fiat currency advocates promise. A gold peg merely sets immutable ground rules for exchange and leaves us alone to work out the rest. By taking the distorting levers away from Washington elites a hard money standard grounds the economy on our own productive efforts and not the whims of bureaucrats. And productivity is a playing field on which America has always done its best.

Laugh at the gold standard if you’d like, but don’t count on laughing last. When Bernanke’s funny money takes its inevitable fall, gold will still beckon.

Bill Frezza is a writer and venture capitalist living in Boston. He can be reached at bill@vereverus.com.

Congression Reform Act of 2011 - LET"S DO IT!!!!!!!

2011-10-31T13:22:00.000-07:00

Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with CNBC, offers one of the best quotes about the debt ceiling:
"I could end the deficit in 5 minutes," he told CNBC. "You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971... before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc. Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure.

Warren Buffett is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise. In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

*Congressional Reform Act of 2011*

1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no
pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. Maybe it is time.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS

If you agree with the above, pass it on.

The Ladies in White of Cuba

2011-10-18T18:41:00.000-07:00

Freedom: Laura Pollan Toledo was a humble schoolteacher who led Cuba's defiant Ladies in White. She died Friday in Havana. But she left a legacy of untold courage that terrified Cuba's long-communist dictatorship.

As surely as the sun will rise, a day will come when Cuba is free of its 52-year Marxist nightmare. And when its history is written, it's likely to begin with the story of Laura Pollan Toledo, the wife of an arrested dissident who shined a light on the totalitarian nature of the regime for all the world to see.

Pollan was a founder of the Ladies in White, the noted group of dissidents' wives who silently walked in procession, wearing white and carrying gladiolus flowers. They attended Mass together at St. Rita's Church to pray for their husbands' return.

They never made public statements, but the Castro regime understood the power of their silent protest and its global impact. For that, they considered Pollan a threat.

Pollan and the others, mostly wives of 75 dissidents arrested in the Black Spring of 2003, were followed, insulted, harassed, threatened, beaten by mobs and menaced for silently witnessing to the truth about Cuba's lack of human freedom.

Pollan died in a Cuban hospital of dengue fever and a viral infection, in the end at the mercy of Cuba's collapsing state health system, refusing transfer to an elite medical facility as the publicity-nervous regime offered.

It's hard to imagine the courage that Pollan's simple act of witness took, in a regime that considers going to church a threat to the state.

In Castro's island hellhole, praised by the Hollywood and congressional left, free speech is forbidden. Calling for elections brings a knock on the door at midnight. Trying to leave the island brings prison — even death. (READ Cuba's Lady of Valor),

The Smell of Decaying Brains

2011-10-14T07:39:00.000-07:00

Our young are so ill educated (in more ways than one) that they don't even understand the difference between socialism/communism and capitalism. It's time they learned why they don't have jobs, why everything costs more and why our future as far as the eye can look is bleak unless we get rid of the occupier of The White House. Maybe it's time for these youngsters to learn the lessons of government intervention in the economy and to recognize anti-American sentiment in our leaders. Oh yeah, that's right. I forgot for a moment that our young don't know history - thanks to our ah,,,,,,,government run schools. So we have a bunch of nitwits barricading Wall St who probably attended public schools who are protesting the rich and blaming Wall Street for THEIR problems. It's the lunatics running the asylum syndrome. I say after we rid ourselves of the socialist/communist Obama and his incompetent appointees (Eric Holder comes to mind) we then get rid of the totality of our public schools and allow the free market to function. Then maybe we'll be lucky and get some Thomas Jefferson clone who will remind us of what America was meant to be..

...Still, if anyone in the Occupy Wall Street movement wants an intellectually honest explanation for why they can't find a job, they might start by considering what happens to an economy when the White House decides to make pinatas out of the financial-services industry (roughly 6%, or $828 billion, of U.S. GDP), the energy industry (about 7.5% of GDP, or $1 trillion), and millionaires and billionaires (who paid 20.4% of all federal income taxes in 2009). And don't forget the Administration's rhetorical volleys against individual companies like Anthem Blue Cross, AIG and Bank of America, or against Chrysler's bondholders, or various other alleged malefactors of wealth.

Now move from words to actions. Want a shovel-ready job? The Administration has spent three years sitting on the Keystone XL pipeline project that promises to create 13,000 union jobs and 118,000 "spin-off" jobs. A State Department environmental review says the project poses no threat to the environment, but the Administration's eco-friends are screaming lest it go ahead.

Then there are the jobs the Administration and its allies in Congress are actively killing. In June, American Electric Power announced it would have to shutter five coal-fired power plants, at a cost of 600 jobs, in order to comply with new EPA rules. Those same rules may soon force the utility to shutter another 25 plants. Bank of America's decision last month to lay off 30,000 employees is a direct consequence of various Congressional edicts limiting how much the bank can charge merchants or how it can handle delinquent borrowers.

These visible crags of the Obama jobs iceberg are nothing next to the damage done below the waterline by the D.C. regulations factory, which last year added 81,405 pages of new rules to the Federal Register, bringing the total cost to the U.S. economy of regulatory compliance to an estimated $1.7 trillion a year.

Less easy to quantify, but no less harmful, are the long-term uncertainties employers face in trying to price in the costs of ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, the potential expiration next year of the Bush tax cuts, the possible millionaire surcharge, the value of the dollar and so on. No wonder businesses are so reluctant to hire: When you don't know how steep the trail ahead of you is, it's usually better to travel light.

This probably won't do much to persuade the Occupiers of Wall Street that their cause would be better served in Washington, D.C., where a sister sit-in this week seems to have fizzled. Then again, most of America's jobless also won't recognize their values or interests in the warmed-over anticapitalism being served up in lower Manhattan. Three years into the current Administration, most Americans are getting wise to the source of their economic woes. It's a couple hundred miles south of Wall Street. What's Occupying Wall Street?

Social Security Scam Keeps Playing on and on and on

2011-10-13T11:22:00.000-07:00

If Chile can reform their Social security why can't we? We can't even START the conversation!

Posted 09/29/2011 06:33 PM

Cain's 'Chilean Model'

Election '12: Herman Cain's victory in Florida's straw poll is notable, among other things, for his advocacy of "Chilean Model" Social Security reform in a state filled with retirees. It ought to be a wake-up call to all candidates.

Aside from the insta-analysis about Cain's victory being a protest vote against Texas Gov. Rick Perry, it's worth noticing that — in Florida, no less — both Cain and Perry, who finished first and second in the weekend's GOP straw poll, were the two most outspoken candidates about confronting the U.S. crisis in Social Security.

It completely ends the notion that addressing the issue of unfunded pension liabilities — in Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare — is the third rail of politics.

Voters migrated from Perry to Cain, but there were multiple Tea Party favorites to choose from. In moving to Cain, they went from a moderate to a strong stance on Social Security reform.

Perry did call for a national dialogue on the matter. But Cain went much further, at least three times in debates calling for "The Chilean Model" to replace Social Security, bringing the idea to as many as 15 million viewers.

Chile's system, enacted in 1981, took government out of the pension business altogether and replaced it with a system of personal retirement accounts.

It's one of most successful fiscal reforms in history.

It outperforms Social Security on returns, yielding about 9.23% compounded annual returns over 30 years under private management. READ THE REST AT IBD

Tea Partiers and TheWall Street Mob

2011-10-09T14:02:00.000-07:00

Ann Coulter notes the difference between these two groups. It's one of principle and love for our Founding Principles vs the mob crying for handouts on the alter of envy for those who have been successful.

The Difference Between the Wall Street Protesters and the Tea Partiers:

"I am not the first to note the vast differences between the Wall Street protesters and the tea partiers. To name three: The tea partiers have jobs, showers and a point. ...

"The tea partiers didn't arrogantly claim to be drafting a new Declaration of Independence. They're perfectly happy with the original.

"Tea partiers didn't block traffic, sleep on sidewalks, wear ski masks, fight with the police or urinate in public. They read the Constitution, made serious policy arguments, and petitioned the government against Obama's unconstitutional big government policies, especially the stimulus bill and Obamacare.

"Then they picked up their own trash and quietly went home. Apparently, a lot of them had to be at work in the morning."

"For America to remain a capitalist nation, America's banks must remain free. Remember this as you listen to anti-bank slanders from the White House"

2011-10-07T18:28:00.000-07:00

Socialism: The mob assaults against our banking system by unemployed leftists and their political allies are part of a larger strategy to control the commanding heights of our economy. And we'll all be much poorer for it.

The White House has thrown in with the anticapitalism crowd, and banks had better watch out. You only had to hear President Obama's cynical, politicized expressions of sympathy for the unwashed legions "occupying" Wall Street this week to be worried.

"Not only did the financial sector, with the Republican Party in Congress, fight us every step of the way," Obama said at his news conference Thursday. "But now you've got these same folks arguing we should roll back all those reforms and go back to the way it was."

But no criticism of the demonstrators.

In fact, added Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, "We are going to push back harder," making what sounds like a fairly explicit threat against the banks.

Welcome to class warfare, 2011-style. Obama's ratings have never been lower, and administration policies leading to a dead-in-the-water economy with 9%-plus unemployment are incredibly unpopular.

So he must think his only hope for re-election is to somehow tie the GOP to fat-cat bankers on Wall Street and then convince voters that the banks are to blame for all their ills.

Sound cynical? It is. But this is what Obama and the Democrats are doing. They've even put out a video: "Republicans: On the Side of Wall Street, not Consumers."....(READ THE REST HERE at Investors.com)

The Milton Factor - Statists Would Rather Rule in Hell Than Leave Us the Hell Alone by Robert Tracinski

2011-09-23T06:48:00.000-07:00

Recently, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez announced that he was moving the nation's entire overseas reserve of gold bullion, valued at $11 billion, back to Caracas, a move that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars just for security. (Ragnar Danneskjold, where are you?)

There are two theories about why Chavez is doing this. The first theory is that he is withdrawing hard assets that could be attached when the World Bank's International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes rules against him for illegally seizing $14 billion in assets from American and European companies.

The other, wider theory, the one I consider to be more accurate, is that Chavez is being treated for cancer and is paranoid that his weakness will provide an opening to political opponents, so his regime is trying move the country's reserve of hard money to some place where they can physically grab hold of it. In effect, Chavez is piling up gold in his bunker in anticipation of fighting off a Libyan-style insurrection. Roger Noriega sums it up: "These momentous decisions by the ailing leader and his nervous cronies suggest they are more concerned with their ability to hold on to power when Mr. Chavez falters than with the well-being of the Venezuelan economy." No investor will ever touch Venezuela again, and with no foreign reserves, it will function about as well in the global economy as North Korea. But no one will be able to pry the Chavez regime's death grip off of the country.

This is not a new phenomenon, neither in Venezuela nor in the world. It is a principle I call the Milton Factor. No, this has nothing to do with Milton Friedman. I named it after John Milton, author of the epic poem "Paradise Lost," in which he attributes to Satan a classic statement of evil. After being cast down onto the Lake of Fire as punishment for his rebellion against God, Satan accepts his grim fate by declaring that it is "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

Every dictator eventually faces this choice, when he has to choose between economic prosperity and political control. Like Chavez, they usually choose control and cause their economies to collapse, plunging millions into poverty and outright starvation. They choose to rule in Hell rather than to be a minor and inconsequential bureaucrat in Heaven.

It is not just dictators who have to make this choice. Our own "moderate" statists often make the same choice, though in less stark terms. With his recent proposals on jobs and taxes, President Obama is making it, too.

To rule in Hell or serve in Heaven is actually a false alternative, because ruling and serving are not the only options. (If this were true, then on Satan's own terms there is a certain nobility in his choice to reject servitude, which is why Milton has often been accused of sympathy for the devil.) Men are not doomed to be either master or servant, but can live as independent equals, which is what they are in a free society. So the modern statist's version of the Milton Factor is even more perverse. It is not a choice between ruling and serving, but a choice between having control over others and leaving them free. They always want to keep the control, even if it means destruction for everyone.

They would rather rule in Hell than leave us the hell alone.

You can see this in President Obama's latest economic proposals. Consider the fraud of his jobs bill. Even as he abjured Congress to pass the American Jobs Act "right away," there was no such bill. He had not written it yet, he had lined up no sponsor to introduce it in the House, and he had not bothered to secure the support of his own congressional allies. The result, a little over two weeks later, is that no Democrat has even introduced Obama's bill in the House, while Democratic leaders in the Senate have pushed it off into the indefinite future. As to its content, it is just a rehash of the president's previous failed "stimulus" bill.

None of this makes sense as a legislative strategy or an economic policy. It only makes sense as crude political maneuvering: propose a bill that is doomed to fail, then blame the opposition. At a time of dire economic emergency, with long-term unemployment and poverty reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression, President Obama would rather pursue a re-election slogan than propose legislation that might actually pass and improve the economy.

Meanwhile, Obama promised to tour the country pushing his jobs bill, but what he is actually pushing is a new tax on the rich. The real focus of his rhetoric and political energy is the so-called Buffett Rule, based on the alleged fact that billionaire investor Warren Buffett's secretary pays a larger share of her income in taxes than Buffett does.

The whole thing is another fraud. If Buffett feels undertaxed, perhaps he could start with his company's unpaid back taxes. Moreover, his situation is far from typical. In reality, millionaires pay about 30% of their income in taxes, compared to 20% (or less) for the middle class. The top one percent of earners pay 40% of all income taxes, while about half of Americans pay no income tax at all. So who isn't paying their "fair share"? And then there is the fact that "Warren Buffett's secretary" is a fiction. A reporter who actually bothered to call the headquarters of Buffett's investment company discovered that he has several "administrative assistants," whose responsibilities are a lot greater than taking dictation and fetching coffee. (The whole image of a "secretary" is a bit of hopelessly old-fashioned "Mad Men" chauvinism. No wonder the women in Obama's administration describe it as a "hostile workplace.") And given that Buffett's assistants work for a man who manages $100 billion in assets, they probably make more money than you do. They may well make enough, especially when combined with their spouses, to rise above the $200,000 per year income level that will incur higher taxes in Obama's new plan to tax "billionaires."

This new tax is, in effect, just a second Alternative Minimum Tax, and the history of these taxes suggests that they are never limited to "the rich." The income tax itself began as a 1% tax on the rich, before spreading to nab the vast majority of the middle class. The original AMT, meant to prevent a small group of the very wealthy from gaming the government's vast network of tax loopholes, has now crept down to affect the middle class, ensnaring thousands of small businesses. This one will do the same and will create the same kind of drain on the economy.

But remember the Milton Factor. This is not about economics. It is about control. Republicans have criticized this proposal as "class warfare," but I don't think that really names the right issue. America does not have economic classes in the old-fashioned European sense. Long ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that individualism, economic freedom, and the doctrine of "self-interest properly understood" was something one heard, in America, "as much from the poor as from the rich." We certainly don't have anything like old-fashioned class warfare when it is the Warren Buffetts and Jeff Immelts who are providing cover to Obama, while middle-class and blue-collar folks flock to Tea Party rallies. If this is class warfare, the plutocrats and the proletarians have gotten their cues mixed up.

What actually differentiates the warring factions here is the issue of control versus independence. If there are classes involved, they are not "rich" versus "poor," but the "government class" versus the "independent class."

Consider, for example, one Silicon Valley entrepreneur's description of how the Buffett Rule would squash returns for venture capitalists who back high-tech start-ups. Then contrast that to this administration's "venture socialism," as embodied in the Solyndra fiasco, where the Obama administration rushed through a half-billion-dollar loan guarantee to a politically correct, politically connected business.

Philip Klein makes a similar comparison between Solyndra and Social Security. "Obama thinks it's OK for government to risk taxpayer money on business ventures that he deems worthy of investment. But he's outraged at the suggestion that younger Americans be allowed to have more control over the allocation of their own tax dollars."

The pattern is consistent. The government class wants everything to be controlled by a central authority, either through direct government action or through a Solyndra- or Government Motors-style "public-private partnership." They are tyrants, in their own way. And like the world's dictators, even when their policies lead to disaster (witness the current state of the economy), they just cannot bring themselves to give up control.

It's the Milton Factor. They would rather rule in Hell than leave us the hell alone.

VISIT "The Intellectual Activist" at www.intellectualactivist.com.

The Farce of Global Warming Gets One More Unveiling

2011-09-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

The chickens are coming home to roost - and the chicken called Global Warming by every measure over the past several years was a hoax and is still a hoax. Unfortunately, it is the science field that is promoting this lie (I'm a scientist) and it shames me to call these men scientists. Hurray for Dr. Ivar Giaever for choosing to be able to live with himself with integrity intact.

The global warming theory left him out in the cold.

Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, Sept. 13, from the premier physics society in disgust over its officially stated policy that "global warming is occurring."

The official position of the American Physical Society (APS) supports the theory that man's actions have inexorably led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide.

Giaever does not agree -- and put it bluntly and succinctly in the subject line of his email, reprinted at Climate Depot, a website devoted to debunking the theory of man-made climate change.

"I resign from APS," Giaever wrote.

Giaever was cooled to the statement on warming theory by a line claiming that "the evidence is inconvertible."

"In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?" he wrote in an email to Kate Kirby, executive officer of the physics society.

"The claim … is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period," his email message said.

A spokesman for the APS confirmed to FoxNews.com that the Nobel Laureate had declined to pay his annual dues in the society and had resigned. He also noted that the society had no plans to revise its statement.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/09/14/nobel-prize-winning-physicist-resigns-from-top-physics-group-over-global/#ixzz1Y34fXAfH

The Right to Join or NOT a Union

2011-09-14T12:10:00.001-07:00

As we all try to understand the dramatic changes that have overcome our nation with regards for the continuing decline of our liberties we have to educate ourselves and be ready to uphold the standard of freedom wherever it is being attacked more so than ever in today's climate of hostility to the ideas and hard fought for rights as written in our Founding Documents. The following is from "Michigan's Grassroots Campaign for LIberty".

Nobody should be forced to not join or join a union.

There may be here and there a worker who for certain reasons unexplainable to us does not join a union of labor. This is his right, no matter how morally wrong he may be. It is his legal right and no one can or dare question his exercise of that right."

- Samual Gompers, first and longest-serving President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL)

Before the 20th century, unions were voluntary organizations where workers had the freedom to associate, or not associate, with anyone they choose. Businesses could also choose to bargain with employees as individuals or groups.

We believe Samual Gompers is correct and we believe that Michigan should be a Freedom to Work state!

As of December 2010, Michigan has the third highest unemployment rate in the nation.
In 1965, Michigan was 9th in per capita personal income. Since then, 28 states have surpassed Michigan which has become a comparatively poor state, ranking 39th.
Americans are moving from forced-unionism states to RTW states. As a result, forced-unionism states have lost a total of 25 Congressional seats over the past 30 years. [BLS/Census]
From 1993-2009, private sector employment increased 37.9% in RTW states (15.8 million jobs) compared to 19.6% (14.5 million jobs) in forced-unionism states. [Haver Analytics/BEA]
RTW states experienced a 497,041 net increase in private sector business establishments from 1993 to 2009. This is 46% greater than the 339,834 new private sector businesses added in forced-unionism states over that same period.

Finally People Realize Who Obama Really Is

2011-09-11T17:14:00.000-07:00

At last people are realizing who and what we elected to lead our country. It has taken 2.5 years of utter stupidity, negligence and downright dereliction of duty by Obama for the truth to come out - that Obama is not fit to be the leader of anything let alone a great nation like The United States of America. We made a mistake - now let's not repeat it by re-electing this inept man to a second term. That may be the end of us.

It's amazing how quiet liberals have become recently in defense of Obama. This was another "big speech" week, but we had no liberals out there defending the president.

I don't know. Maybe as his own chief of staff, Bill Daley said, sometimes there is no defending the indefensible.

Dahni wrote: I'm beginning to think that Obama really isn't very smart, as proclaimed by many, and as indicated might be the case with his degree from Harvard. Cunning, immoral and self-loving might be much more accurate in describing him. He does so many things that I consider pretty stupid.- in response to Obama Proclaims: Stimulus Forever.

Kind of a weird admission for your own chief of staff to make, but it tells you exactly why Obama's in trouble.

...I think even liberals are catching on to the fact that Obama isn’t what has been advertised.
I don’t know how smart you have to be to be president, but I think that maybe we could try someone who doesn’t have an Ivy League degree next time. More common sense, less education would be a great relief to the country. My understanding is that getting into Harvard is the hard part, but once in, they do what they can to grease you through.
...Obama, his whole adult life, has been getting away with mediocrity disguised as brilliance by a practiced and nuanced cadence that he reads from a script. He’s gotten away with it because liberals are in love with the color of his skin, his romantic and mysterious background, his diversity. Now that he’s being graded like the rest of us are, he’s shown that he can’t adapt. He’s doing the same things he’s always done and those things just aren’t working.

...

Obama's Inability to Solve Problems

2011-09-08T08:31:00.000-07:00

A good question to ask is why Obama cannot fix any problem he "tackles". Why is that? Why indeed. The title of Craig Steiner's article at www.finance.Townhall.com is revealing. Schizophrenia? Maybe that IS the right diagnosis for this President!

...By reading economic news, one would think the economy is slowly moving away from the financial crisis of 2008.

The truth is that absolutely nothing is changing in our economy on a day to day basis. Whether it be a tsunami in Japan or a hurricane on the eastern seaboard--or even an earthquake in Washington DC--nothing has changed economically in any significant way.

In fact, the only change since September 2008 is that things have gotten worse.

Our federal government is closer to bankruptcy, as are many of our states, counties, and cities.

Our unemployment rate is higher than it was when Obama was elected, and appears to be going higher.

We have millions of homes in or near foreclosure, and many which are abandoned and falling into disrepair, yet construction companies continue to build new homes.

Obama's stimulus failed to create jobs. So did QE1. And QE2. The Keynesian's are out of tricks.

Even as Social Security enters deficit territory we've created a new unfunded entitlement with Obamacare.

Around the world, individual debts became too much so they were unloaded on banks. The debt of the banks then became too much so they were bailed out and unloaded on the taxpayers. And now sovereign debt is too much and countries are collapsing and the United States has been downgraded.

The reality is that what the unemployed feel--that the recession never really ended--is completely true. Sure, it may have ended from a strictly statistical measure of GDP. But employment never recovered and--just as importantly--the root causes of the financial crisis have never been addressed.

We're not just going to wake up one morning and find that the economy has gotten better for no apparent reason. A month of good car sales or a quarter of increased home prices are just blips on the economic radar. As long as we continue to ignore the fundamental problems in our economy, there's no need to get excited about occasional good economic news. It's nothing more than statistical noise.

The state of our economy will not significantly change until we change our economic policies.

Instead of trying to prevent housing prices from falling, we need to let them fall and find their bottom. Instead of stopping foreclosures, we need to foreclose on homes as quickly as possible and get it over with. Instead of pumping up the stock market with QE1 and QE2, we need to let the market find its true value. Instead of trying to convince consumers to spend more money to spark economic activity, we need to encourage them to complete the process of deleveraging and fixing their balance sheets. Instead of getting in the way of corporate bankruptcies, we need to let those companies fail... READ Obama's Schizophrenic Reality.

Open Immigration

2011-09-07T05:47:00.000-07:00

by Harry Binswanger

This is a defense of phasing-in open immigration into the United States. Entry into the U.S. should ultimately be free for any foreigner, with the exception of criminals, would-be terrorists, and those carrying infectious diseases. (And note: I am defending freedom of entry and residency, not the automatic granting of U.S. citizenship).

An end to immigration quotas is demanded by the principle of individual rights. Every individual has rights as an individual, not as a member of this or that nation. One has rights not by virtue of being an American, but by virtue of being human.

One doesn't have to be a resident of any particular country to have a moral entitlement to be secure from governmental coercion against one's life, liberty, and property. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, government is instituted "to secure these rights"—to protect them against their violation by force or fraud.

A foreigner has rights just as much as an American. To be a foreigner is not to be a criminal. Yet our government treats as criminals those foreigners not lucky enough to win the green-card lottery.

Seeking employment in this country is not a criminal act. It coerces no one and violates no one's rights. There is no "right" to be exempt from competition in the labor market, or in any other market.

It is not a criminal act to buy or rent a home here in which to reside. Paying for housing is not a coercive act—whether the buyer is an American or a foreigner. No one's rights are violated when a Mexican, or Canadian, or Senegalese rents an apartment from an American owner and moves into the housing he is paying for. And what about the rights of those American citizens who want to sell or rent their property to the highest bidders? Or the American businesses that want to hire the lowest-cost workers? It is morally indefensible for our government to violate their right to do so.

Immigration quotas forcibly exclude foreigners who want not to seize but to purchase housing here, who want not to rob Americans but to engage in productive work, raising our standard of living. To forcibly exclude those who seek peacefully to trade value for value with us is a violation of the rights of both parties to such a trade: the rights of the American seller or employer and the rights of the foreign buyer or employee.

Thus, immigration quotas treat both Americans and foreigners as if they were criminals, as if the peaceful exchange of values to mutual benefit were an act of destruction.

To take an actual example, if I want to invite my Norwegian friend Klaus to live in my home, either as a guest or as a paying tenant, what right does our government have to stop Klaus and me? To be a Norwegian is not to be a criminal. And if some American business wants to hire Klaus, what right does our government have to interfere?

The implicit premise of barring foreigners is: "This is our country, we let in who we want." But who is "we"? The government does not own the country. Jurisdiction is not ownership. Only the owner of land or any item of property can decide the terms of its use or sale. Nor does the majority own the country. This is a country of private property, and housing is private property. So is a job.

American land is not the collective property of some entity called "the U.S. government." Nor is there such a thing as collective, social ownership of the land. The claim, "We have the right to decide who is allowed in" means some individuals—those with the most votes—claim the right to prevent other citizens from exercising their rights. But there can be no right to violate the rights of others.

Our constitutional republic respects minority rights. 60% of the population cannot vote to enslave the other 40%. Nor can a majority dictate to the owners of private property. Nor can a majority dictate on whom private employers spend their money. Not morally, not in a free society. In a free society, the rights of the individual are held sacrosanct, above any claim of even an overwhelming majority.

The rights of one man end where the rights of his neighbor begin. Only within the limits of his rights is a man free to act on his own judgment. The criminal is the man who deliberately steps outside his rights-protected domain and invades the domain of another, depriving his victim of his exclusive control over his property, or liberty, or life. The criminal, by his own choice, has rejected rights in favor of brute violence. Thus, an immigration policy that excludes criminals is proper.

Likewise, a person with an infectious disease, such as smallpox, threatens with serious physical harm those with whom he comes into proximity. Unlike the criminal, he may not intend to do damage, but the threat of physical harm is clear, present, and objectively demonstrable. To protect the lives of Americans, he may be kept out or quarantined until he is no longer a threat.

But what about the millions of Mexicans, South Americans, Chinese, Canadians, etc. seeking entry who are not criminal and not bearing infectious diseases? By what moral principle can they be excluded? Not on the grounds of majority vote, not on the grounds of protecting any American's rights, not on the grounds of any legitimate authority of the state.

THE MORAL AND THE PRACTICAL

That's the moral case for phasing out limits on immigration. But some ask: "Is it practical? Wouldn't unlimited immigration—even if phased in over a decade—be disastrous to our economic well-being and create overcrowding? Are we being told to just grit our teeth and surrender our interests in the name of morality?"

This question is invalid on its face. It shows a failure to understand the nature of rights, and of moral principles generally. Rational moral principles reflect a recognition of the basic nature of man, his nature as a specific kind of living organism, having a specific means of survival. Questions of what is practical, what is to one's self-interest, can be answered only in that context. It is neither practical nor to one's interest to attempt to live and act in defiance of one's nature as a human being.

Yet that is the meaning of the moral-practical dichotomy. When one claims, "It is immoral but practical," one is maintaining, "It cripples my nature as a human being, but it is beneficial to me"—which is a contradiction.

Rights, in particular, are not something pulled from the sky or decreed by societal whim. Rights are moral principles, established by reference to the needs inherent in man's nature qua man. "Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival." (Ayn Rand)

Every organism has a basic means of survival; for man, that means is: reason. Man is the rational animal, homo sapiens. Rights are moral principles that spell out the terms of social interaction required for a rational being to survive and flourish. Since the reasoning mind cannot function under physical coercion, the basic social requirement of man's survival is: freedom. Rights prescribe freedom by proscribing coercion.

"If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work." (Ayn Rand)

Rights reflect the fundamental alternative of voluntary consent or brute force. The reign of force is in no one's interest; the system of voluntary cooperation by mutual consent is the precondition of anyone achieving his actual interests.

To ignore the principle of rights means jettisoning the principled, moralresolution of conflicts, and substituting mere numbers (majority vote). That is not to anyone's interest. Tyranny is not to anyone's self-interest.

Rights establish the necessary framework within which one defines his legitimate self-interest. One cannot hold that one's self-interest requires that he be "free" to deprive others of their freedom, treating their interests as morally irrelevant. One cannot hold that recognizing the rights of others is moral but "impractical."

Since rights are based on the requirements of man's life as a rational being, there can be no conflict between the moral and the practical here: if respecting individual rights requires it, your interest requires it.

Freedom or force, reason or compulsion—that is the basic social alternative. Immigrants recognize the value of freedom—that's why they seek to come here.

The American Founders defined and implemented a system of rights because they recognized that man, as a rational being, must be free to act on his own judgment and to keep the products of his own effort. They did not intend to establish a system in which those who happen to be born here could use force to "protect" themselves from the peaceful competition of others.

ECONOMICS

One major fear of open immigration is economic: the fear of losing one's job to immigrants. It is asked: "Won't the immigrants take our jobs?" The answer is: "Yes, so that we can go on to better, higher-paying jobs."

The fallacy in the protectionist view lies in the idea that there is only a finite amount of work to be done. The unstated assumption is: "If Americans don't get to do that work, if foreigners do it instead, we Americans will have nothing to do."

But work is the creation of wealth. A job is not just drawing a salary, it is acting to produce things—food, cars, computers, internet content—all the goods and services that go to make up our standard of living. And we never get a "too high" standard of living or "too much" wealth. The need for wealth is limitless. And that means the need for productive work is limitless.

From a grand, historical perspective, we are only at the beginning of the wealth-creating age. The wealth Americans produce today is as nothing compared to what we'll have two hundred years from now—just as the standard of living in 1800 was as nothing, compared to ours today.

Unemployment is not caused by an absence of avenues for the creation of wealth. Unemployment is caused by government interference in the labor market, preventing the law of supply and demand from "clearing the market" in labor services, as it does in every other market. Yet, even with that interference, the number of jobs goes relentlessly upward, decade after decade—from 27 million workers in 1900 to about 140 million in 2010. Jobs do not exist as a fixed pool, to be divided up. Jobs can always be added because there's no end to the creation of wealth and thus no end to the useful employment of human intelligence. There is always more productive work to be done. If you can give your job to an immigrant, you can get a more valuable job.

What is the effect of a bigger labor pool on wage rates? Given a constant money supply, nominal wage rates fall. But real wage rates rise, because total output has gone up. Economists have demonstrated that real wages have to rise as long as the immigrants are self-supporting. If immigrants earn their keep, if they don't consume more than they produce, then they add to total output, which means that prices fall (if the money supply is constant).

And, in fact, rising real wages was the history of our country in the nineteenth century. Before the 1920s, there were no limits on immigration; yet these were the years of America's fastest economic progress. The standard of living rocketed upward. Self-supporting immigrants brought economic benefit, not hardship.

The protectionist objection that immigrants take away jobs and harm our standard of living is a solid economic fallacy.

WELFARE

A popular misconception is that immigrants come here to get welfare. In fact, this is rarely immigrants' motive. It is true that the small minority of immigrants who come to get welfare do constitute a burden. But this issue has been render moot by the passage, under the Clinton Administration, of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which makes legal permanent residents ineligible for most forms of welfare for 5 years. I support this kind of legislation (which should be enacted at the State level as well; currently left-leaning States, like California, continue to throw tax money at immigrants—and everyone else).

Further, if the fear is of non-working immigrants, why is the pending House bill aimed at employers of immigrants?

CRIME

Contrary to "accepted wisdom," the data show that immigrants are less prone to crime than are native Americans. For instance, over one-fourth of the residents of the border-town El Paso, Texas are immigrants. But El Paso has about one-tenth the murder rate of Baltimore, a city of comparable size.

That's not an anomaly:

"If you want to find a safe city, first determine the size of the immigrant population," says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Massachusetts. "If the immigrant community represents a large proportion of the population, you're likely in one of the country's safer cities. San Diego, Laredo, El Paso—these cities are teeming with immigrants, and they're some of the safest places in the country."

http://reason.com/archives/2009/07/06/the-el-paso-miracle

Criminals have a short-range, stay-in-the-'hood mentality. Immigrants are longer-range, ambitious, and want to earn money, not grab it.

The deeper point is moral-legal. The fact that some men in a given category may commit crimes is no justification for treating everyone in that category as criminals. Guilt is not collective. Just as Bernie Madoff's crimes are his, not those of all hedge-fund operators, just as the fact that Madoff is of Jewish descent in no way legitimates anti-semitism, so it is a slap at morality to curtail the rights of all immigrants because of the crimes of a few individual immigrants.

Man has free will. The choices of some do not reflect on the moral status of others, who make their own choices. Each individual is responsible for his own actions, and only his own actions.

OVERCROWDING

America is a vastly underpopulated country. Our population density is less than one-third of France's.

Hordes of immigrants would come to overcrowd America? Okay, take a really extreme scenario. Imagine that half of the people on the planet moved here. That would mean an unthinkable eleven-fold increase in our population—from 300 million to 3.3 billion people. The result? America would be a bit less "densely" populated than England. England has 384 people/sq.km; vs. 360 people/sq. km. if our population multiplied 11-fold. Another comparison: with half of mankind living here, we would be less densely populated than the state of New Jersey is today (453/sq. km.). Note that these calculations exclude Alaska (our biggest state) and Hawaii. And the density-calculations count only land area.

Contrary to widespread beliefs, high population density is a value not a disvalue. High population density intensifies the division of labor, which makes possible a wider variety of jobs and specialized consumer products. For instance, in Manhattan, there is a "doll hospital"—a store specializing in the repair of children's dolls. Such a specialized, niche business requires a high population density in order to have a market. Try finding a doll hospital in Poughkeepsie. In Manhattan, one can find a job as a Pilates Method teacher or as a "Secret Shopper" (two jobs actually listed on Craig's List). Not so in Paducah.

People want to live near other people, in cities. One-seventh of England's population lives in London. If population density is a bad thing, why are Manhattan real-estate prices so high?

THE VALUE OF IMMIGRANTS

Immigrants are the kind of people who refresh the American spirit. They are ambitious, courageous, and value freedom. They come here, often with no money and not even speaking the language, to seek a better life for themselves and their children.

The vision of American freedom, with its opportunity to prosper by hard work, serves as a magnet drawing the best of the world's people. Immigrants are self-selected for their virtues: their ambitiousness, daring, independence, and pride. They are willing to cast aside the tradition-bound roles assigned to them in their native lands and to re-define themselves as Americans. These are the people our country needs in order to keep alive the individualist, hard-working attitude that made America.

Here is a short list of some great immigrants: Alexander Hamilton, Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, most of the top scientists of the Manhattan Project, Igor Sikorsky (the inventor of the helicopter), Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Ayn Rand.

Open immigration: the benefits are great. The right is unquestionable. So let them come.

Copyright © 2010 TOF Publications, Inc. www.hblist.com/immigr.htm Permission hereby granted to republish, in whole or in part, provided no changes are made in the wording of material used, Harry Binswanger's authorship is stated, and this notice is carried.

Judging Obama by All Accounts As a Failure and Bad For America

2011-09-02T07:09:00.000-07:00

The stats are in on Obama and no surprises. This man will go down as the worst president in United States history.

One animating theme of Barack Obama's campaign and early Presidency was that he would repair government's post-Reagan reputation, expanding its role in American life so voters would turn once again to Democrats as the party of government, as they did in 1964 and the 1930s. So how's that working out?

Not so well, judging by a remarkable Gallup poll this week that asked the public about its views of government and various businesses. The federal government dropped to its lowest approval levels ever. Only 17% were positive, 63% negative, for a net approval rating of minus-46%. Government never ranks well, but for the first time since Gallup began asking in 2003 it fell to last place—below even the oil and gas industry, which netted minus-44% approval.

In fact, as shown in the bottom chart nearby, the public's hostility to government has climbed to all-time highs under President Obama's tenure. A plurality had a very or somewhat positive view as recently as 2003—41% versus 35%. Dissatisfaction climbed over President Bush's second term amid an unpopular war and tapped-out GOP, then fell slightly on public hopes for Mr. Obama as he took office in 2009. This annual survey is conducted in August, so it may have missed the worst of the public's reaction to the autumn 2008 panic on Wall Street and Capitol Hill. Yet today, negative views are higher, and positive views are lower, than ever before.

Gallup is hardly an outlier. In a mid-August Washington Post poll, merely 21% was satisfied with "the way this country's political system is working," down from 38% in 2009. Some 78% were dissatisfied, up from 61% in the 2009 poll and 64% in 2007. The Pew Research Center also reported last month that only 22% of the public is "basically content" with the federal government, by far the lowest share since the survey began in 1997.

All this is a striking rebuke to the President who rode into Washington planning to rehabilitate the country's confidence in government as a means of advancing entitlements and transfer programs. As Mr. Obama mused during the primaries, he envisioned himself as Ronald Reagan in reverse, making the case that government is the solution and not the problem. His 2009 health-care speech to Congress ended with a soaring peroration about "the perils of too little" government. (READ "In Government We Mistrust" @ WSJ)

All Eyes On Castro Brothers as They Shmooz with Hezbollah

2011-09-01T18:14:00.000-07:00

How much longer are we going to tolerate the shenanigans of the evil Castro brothers? And why are they harboring Hezbollah terrorist so openly? Why indeed....they are not afraid of Obama that's why. They perhaps see a brother in spirit?

Terrorism: For years, Cuba's apologists have debunked U.S. warnings of Havana's sponsorship of terror. It withers in the face of news that Cuba has just set up a Hezbollah base.

According to a report in Italy's respected Corriere della Sera Wednesday, three Hezbollah terrorists operating out of Mexico have left that country to establish a permanent "bridgehead" to the communist island, calling their clandestine operation "The Caribbean Dossier."

Twenty-three other terrorists from the Iran-linked terror group are expected to join the operation, which has a startup budget of more than $500,000. Corriere reported that the mission in Cuba is to provide logistical support for upcoming terrorist attacks planned in the hemisphere.

This is what "state sponsor of terrorism" means, which is how the U.S. accurately classified this odious regime since 1982, even as Cuba's leftist apologists have dismissed it, claiming Cuba is no threat.

Safely ensconced with the Castro brothers' hospitality, Hezbollah's operatives can carry out missions such as acquiring passports, recruiting informants and forging documents.

More disturbingly, they have been tasked to network with Hezbollah's other terrorist cells in Venezuela, Paraguay and Mexico, all in need of logistical support for attacks.

The Italian newspaper reported that Hezbollah might be planning a major attack against Israeli targets in the Western Hemisphere in retaliation for Israel's killing of Hezbollah's chief assassin, Imad Mughniyeh, in Damascus in 2008. Mughniyeh was a Hezbollah terrorist leader implicated in the two huge attacks in Buenos Aires in the 1990s on Jewish targets — strikes that remain unpunished. (READ HERE)

The Blah, Blah, Blah President....

2011-08-08T16:02:00.000-07:00

By Alan Caruba

President Blah, Blah, Blah got in front of the television cameras midday on Monday to say the usual meaningless things he has been saying since he was elected, none of which are true and none of which have been able to hide the fact that he has driven the nation into the ditch with a lot of help from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Over the weekend he unleashed the White House attack dogs to blame the nation’s problems on the Tea Party when, of course, it was his administration that added three trillion to our debt.

After a while we just stop listening to what a president says; especially if we have concluded he is either clueless or has a hidden agenda.

“If his lips are moving, he’s lying” is an old cliché, but it fits President Barack Hussein Obama because it is quite likely that no one believes him any more with the exception of the usual brain-dead liberals who still think he is a genius. So far he has shown a genius for increasing the debt and the unemployment numbers.

This is a man who was still talking about electric cars, high speed trains, and renewable energy while the price of gas continued to increase along with everything else.

On Monday he was still talking about the nation's infrastructure as a source of jobs even after recently admitting there were few "shovel ready" projects. Tired ideas, ideas that don't work, repeated over and over again.

President Obama has been boring people from the day he took office. “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” The oceans have been rising a few centimeters every century and the planet is just fine. His election did not transform either the laws of nature or physics.

Instead, all that transformational gibberish turned out to be about a nation already in financial trouble as the result of the September 2008 bursting of the housing bubble. His response was to waste a great deal of time forcing Obamacare on everyone. Americans want to feel that they have a say in what the government is doing and, when they don’t, they organize. READ THE REST HERE....

Imploding America Brought to You by Obama

2011-07-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

Alan Caruba at "Tea Party Nation" shows us the evidence that Obama's goal is NOT to right what is wrong with America but to destroy the very meaning of what America stands for. 2012 is our chance to remove this traitor from the highest office in the land.

...There is no mystery as to how the U.S. can recover from the present recession. Government spending must be reduced. Tax rates must be reduced for corporations and the middle class to encourage investment, growth and more employment. Entitlement programs will have to be revised to ensure they can meet their obligations. They represent sixty percent of all government expenditures.

A government that must borrow forty cents of every dollar to pay its debts and whose current debt of $14 trillion equals the entire annual gross domestic product of the nation is endangering the present and future economy for present and future generations of Americans.

At this writing, it looks as if Obama intends to deliberately implode the nation’s ability to meet its obligations and he has used the most raw fear tactics to achieve his goal, falsely claiming that Social Security checks would not be sent, that the military would not be paid.

If ever a President was begging for impeachment the time for such action has arrived. The evidence that he was ineligible to run for office and to hold it is beyond question, if only because he was not a “natural born” American whose both parents were citizens. His father was a citizen of Kenya.

Raise the debt ceiling. Impeach Obama. America must be set free. What he is attempting to bring about is the worst “change” imaginable in the nation’s history. READ "Obama is Determined to Destroy America".

Time To Kill The Welfare State and Embrace Capitalism

2011-06-25T08:03:00.000-07:00

Robert Tracinski writes an excellent article about the miserable failure of the welfare state or socialism/communism. Government run economies DO NOT WORK. Let's learn the lesson and embrace what does work - CAPITALISM. Below is Mr. Tracinski's article.

A while back, Peggy Noonan wrote that "unsustainable" is the "word of the decade." She's onto something. From the debates over Social Security and Medicare reform, to the Greek debacle in Europe, to the pensions of state government employees, to the higher-education bubble, we are saddled with institutions that are economically unsustainable. They are doomed to collapse by the ruthless certainty of arithmetic.

What do all of these things have in common? They are manifestations of the modern welfare state--and that is what is unsustainable.

I could rehearse the statistics. Social Security is projected to completely use up its trust fund in 2036 and Medicare in 2024, but both systems are already going into the red because there are no actual assets in those trust funds. As Social Security and Medicare begin to pay out more than they take in from payroll taxes, they are swallowing up the entire federal budget and guaranteeing a steady increase in our already dangerous debt. For some state governments, like California, insolvency is looming. For others, it has already arrived; Illinois hasn't paid its bills for years. And where we're all headed is demonstrated by Greece, where government debt now equals more than 175% of the country's annual economic output, well above the threshold (roughly 100%) where debt starts to become impossible to service.

Everyone has already had plenty of time to absorb these statistics. What most people haven't absorbed yet is the basic economic unsustainability of the welfare state.

The welfare state is taken for granted as the "normal" state of affairs, as if it has always existed. At least, it is assumed that the welfare state has been around for so many decades that the current crisis is just a temporary aberration, a rough patch that we can get through with only minor reforms. But the actual economic history does not bear this out. The welfare state "as we know it"--that is, at its current size--is a product of recent decades. In all of its branches, it has vastly increased just in the past 30 to 40 years. So the current crisis is not some temporary aberration. It is cause and effect. It is a direct consequence of the modern welfare state

Let's take a look at the major branches of the welfare state, particularly the ones that are in crisis. They are: education, government employment, health care, and retirement.

The first two are interconnected. State governments are in crisis, not because of firefighters and policeman, but mostly because of salaries and pensions for public school teachers. Government spending on all levels for public education has more than doubled since 1970, after adjusting for inflation, with no improvement in the system's results.

Something similar has been happening in higher education, mostly through the indirect mechanism of student loans...READ "The Half-Life of the Welfare State" by Robert Tracinski at RealClearMarkets.

The Deadly Meddling of Government in Healthcare

2011-06-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

Yet another example of how government skews and disrupts the natural order of free enterprise. The availability of life saving drugs is being disrupted by meddling politicians in Washington.

...The Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been stepping up its quality enforcement efforts — levying fines and forcing manufacturers to retool their facilities both here and abroad. Not only has this more rigorous regulatory oversight slowed down production, the FDA’s “zero tolerance” regime is forcing manufacturers to abide by rules that are rigid, inflexible and unforgiving. For example, a drug manufacturer must get approval for how much of a drug it plans to produce, as well as the timeframe. If a shortage develops (because, say, the FDA shuts down a competitor’s plant), a drug manufacturer cannot increase its output of that drug without another round of approvals. Nor can it alter its timetable production (producing a shortage drug earlier than planned) without FDA approval.

Even the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has a role — because minute quantities of controlled substances are often used to make other drugs. This is the apparent reason for a nationwide shortage of ADHD drugs, for example, including thegeneric version of Ritalin. And like the FDA, DEA regulations are rigid and inflexible. For example, if a shortage develops and the manufacturers have reached their preauthorized production cap, a manufacturer cannot respond by increasing output without going back to the DEA for approval.

Price Controls. Also contributing to the problems of many facilities is a little known program that forces drug manufacturers to give discounts to certain end users. The federal 340B drug rebate program was created in 1992 to provide discounted drugs to hospitals and clinics that treat a high number of indigent patients, clinics treating patients on Medicaid, hospitals and clinics in the Public Health Service and certain Federally Qualified Health Centers (more listed here).Currently, the law requires drug companies to provide rebates of 23.1 percent for brand drugs; and 13 percent for generic drugs off of their average manufacturer’s price on qualifying outpatient drug use. States have the right to negotiate further discounts and actual rebates negotiated are typically much steeper than the federal requirement. (READ "Deadly Regulations" at Townhall).

ATM's Cause Unemployement as per President Obama

2011-06-16T13:37:00.000-07:00

"There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don't go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you're using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate." (Obama)

That's right, the Smartest President Ever just said innovation is a job-killer. His next step, presumably, will be to demonize the Republicans for making such deep cuts to the Department of Buggy Whips. Hey, why is the President of the United States blaming machines for unemployment . . . on TELEVISION? Doesn't he care about all those out-of-work town criers?"

Jim Treacher writing at DailyCaller.com, June 15:

From a June 2 news story in the New York Times

It's Time To Return to a Gold Backed Dollar

2011-05-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

"What seems astonishing today could become conventional wisdom in a short period of time," Forbes said.

Such a move would help to stabilize the value of the dollar, restore confidence among foreign investors in U.S. government bonds, and discourage reckless federal spending, the media mogul and former presidential candidate said. The United States used gold as the basis for valuing the U.S. dollar successfully for roughly 180 years before President Richard Nixon embarked upon an experiment to end the practice in the 1970s that has contributed to a number of woes that the country is suffering from now, Forbes added.

With a stable currency, it is "much harder" for governments to borrow excessively, Forbes said. Without lax Federal Reserve System monetary policies that led to the printing of too much money, the housing bubble would not have been nearly as severe, he added.

"When it comes to exchange rates and monetary policy, people often don't grasp" what is at stake for the economy, Forbes said. By restoring the gold standard, the United States would shift away from "less responsible policies" and toward a stronger dollar and a stronger America, he said. "If the dollar was as good as gold, other countries would want to buy it."

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

Kasich Stands up to Obama About Balancing the Budget

2011-04-30T14:15:00.000-07:00

Freedom Must be Defended or it Will Die

2011-04-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We did not pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." Ronald Reagan

"Reasserting Federalism in Defense of Liberty by Ken Cuccinelli (Imprimis a publication of Hillsdale College)

SOME FAVORITE VIRGINIANS OF MINE who inspired and crafted our federal Constitution—Mason, Madison, Jefferson, and Henry—also drafted the Constitution of Virginia. And in the latter, they included a critical statement that said, “No free government, nor the blessings of liberty, can be preserved . . . but by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”

Our founders well understood that our liberty could not be preserved without frequently referring back to first principles. But while they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to defend those principles, we have often taken them for granted, as we have become complacent in thinking that government will take care of every problem.

We have asked government to do more for us, and all the government asks for in return is a little bit more of our liberty. Over the decades, we kept asking. And because the courts and the politicians were all too happy to oblige, regardless of what the Constitution said, we no longer have a federal government of limited powers. We have an overreaching central government—a government that seeks to plan and control virtually every aspect of our lives and our economy, from health care, to energy, to automobile manufacturing, to banking and insurance.

Thankfully, though, in the last several years, people have woken up and are pushing back. With this pushback, we are seeing the idea of federalism reemerge. People want to return to a government of limited, enumerated powers, and an arrangement in which states serve as a check when the federal government oversteps its constitutional bounds...READ THE REST HERE.

Atlas Shrugged - The Movie and Just at the Right Time

2011-04-27T16:13:00.001-07:00

Listen to this conversation about Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" the movie part 1. I saw it last week and loved it. I'd been waiting for decades for a movie and I was ecstatic to see it on the big screen. The timing of course is impeccable! What with our politicians taking us down the road to self destruction as a country it couldn't have come out at a better time. Ayn Rand knew where we were headed 50 years ago and wrote down all her ideas and forecasts for America in a great novel called "ATLAS SHRUGGED".
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=113&load=5271

What Islam Does to Civilized Life - Destroy Human Happiness

2011-04-25T16:45:00.000-07:00

The following is from a marine stationed in southern Afghanistan. It is a sad and realistic assessment of Islam I read at "Atlas Shrugged" by blogger Pamela Geller.

I am growing increasingly upset with the culture of Islam here. I am growing increasingly vocal. In a meeting the other day as local elders were discussing ways to improve this place, I announced that the reality of the situation is that the men have screwed this place up so bad it’s time to arm the women with machine guns and give them a turn. A few laughed; I didn’t. Soon, no one laughed when they realized I was serious. What I have learned is that Islam is pain and human suffering. For the rest of my life I will fight it wherever it creeps. Even the Northern Afghanis who fight with us against the Taliban and their much more open minded (think New York Catholic) view of Islam (who say the only solution is to genocide the south and start over) lack an element of humanity, that righteous desire to “defend the defenseless.” I have attached an unclassified intelligence report that sheds some light on what Islam in it’s pure form does to civilizations.

I have seen the face of Islam and I do not care what Charles Johnson or Ibrahim Hooper say: social, economic, and religious systems must be judged by their fruits. The same standard by which I reject socialism, communism, and Nazism is what I use when I reject Islam. That standard is human happiness.

"Where Your Tax Dollars Are Going"

2011-04-22T17:41:00.000-07:00

Via: Heritage Foundation

Atlas Is Shrugging and We All Know Why! People Are Fed Up with Intrusive Government

2011-04-14T16:45:00.000-07:00

Go to the movies and watch Part 1 of Atlas Shrugged and you'll see how Ayn Rand showed in her novel what is going on today and for the past 100 years!

The Averted Government Shutdown - Key elements

2011-04-09T06:10:00.000-07:00

Key elements of the deal that averts a government shutdown:

Sets discretionary spending for the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, at $1.049 trillion. That is $39 billion less than was budgeted for 2010 and $79 billion less than President Obama had requested. House Republicans had wanted $22 billion in additional cuts.
Includes $513 billion for defense – less than Republicans and President Obama wanted but more than the $508 billion provided in 2010.
Drops Republican-backed provisions that would have ended funding for the new health-care law, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and National Public Radio.

Drops Republican-backed provisions that would have barred funding for Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases and for the Federal Communications Commission to implement "net neutrality" rules.
Bans the use of funds for the transfer of prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba to the U.S. mainland.
Calls for the Senate to take up-or-down votes on separate bills to cut off funding for the health-care law and to turn federal aid to family-planning programs into block grants to the states.

Bans the use of any public funds – federal or local – to pay for abortions in the District of Columbia.
Re-establishes a school voucher system for the District of Columbia, a longtime cause of House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio). The program provides low-income children with vouchers to attend a school of their parents' choice.
Includes a mandate calling for an annual audit of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had been created by last year's Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law. Republicans have been widely critical of the law. SEE ARTICLE at WSJ.

List of Grievances in The Declaration of Independence

2011-02-28T17:44:00.000-08:00

Some remarks by Rob Tracinski at The Intellectual Activist and TIA Daily from last year's Tea Party in Charlotsville.

...Let's take a look at the Declaration of Independence. I was at the July 4 Tea Party in Charlottesville last year, and one of the things that I really liked is that Joe Thomas

began the event simply by reading the Declaration of Independence, and when you read through it like that, you notice a lot of things that people don't tend to pay enough attention to. People tend to remember the philosophical part at the beginning, about individual rights and the consent of the governed, which was the theory behind the American Revolution. And I wish a lot more people would read that part and take it seriously. But we tend to skip the middle section, which is the list of grievances that the American colonists had against King George III and the British Parliament.

Unfortunately, that list is still relevant and timely today. For example, take this issue of taxes. One of our Founding Fathers' chief complaints against King George was that "He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance." Sound familiar?

As the old saying goes, taxation without representation is slavery—but taxation with representation isn't that great, either. And so we find that we don't need a swarm of officers to come all the way across the Atlantic to eat out our substance. We can summon our own army of domestic parasites.

That is the unique achievement of the current administration. Barack Obama has presided over an economic boom and a rising tide of prosperity—ifyou work for the government.

Recently the news came out that, for the first time in America's history, the number of government employees exceeded the number of employees in "goods producing industries." Now I want to point out that "goods producing industries" is a very broad category. It includes things like logging and mining and agriculture, and not just manufacturing. The number of government employees has already exceeded the number of employees in manufacturing, long ago. Does anyone know when that happened? According to my research, it happened back in 1990.
So the number of people who make things are now exceeded by the number of government bureaucrats whose job is to prevent things from being made. And some of these government jobs are pretty plush: another report revealed recently that while the rest of us were in a recession, the number of government jobs paying more than $100,000 per year increased by almost 50%. Government jobs paying more than $150,000 more thandoubled.
It used to be that if you worked for the government, there was a tradeoff: you got better benefits, but the pay was lower. Not any more. Another recent study concluded that government jobs pay much more on average than the private sector. And you also get job security. The federal government is hiring, but what about the state governments? They can't take on trillion dollar deficits because they can't print money like the federal government can. Yet on the state level, there has been no decrease in government jobs during downturn, while overall unemployment is 10%. So if you're in the private sector, there's a significant chance you lost your job in the last year. If you're in the government, you're safe. Oh yes, and when they shoved through the health care bill, the Democrats also sneaked in a federal takeover of student loans, which includes a provision that makes your student loans go away after ten years—again, if you work for the government.

A Policy Sure to Impoverish Us All - Obama Hates Oil/America

2011-02-27T10:20:00.000-08:00

Why does Obama hate oil so much? Why Why Why? Could it be that oil and all the products that are derived from it represents American freedom to travel and ingenuity? Could it be that Obama resents American freedom and ingenuity...our can do spirit? What else can one make of this administration's utter disregard for the fact that America needs oil to function and that we have abundant oil and that we need to drill for it. Ask yourself what it accomplishes. Only one thing - to make us impoverished and to force us to downscale our lives as a consequence.

The day before President Obama was inaugurated, the average price of a gallon of gas was $1.83, the Heritage Foundation notes. Today it's well over $3 and on the way to $4. Prices for this February and last December were the highest ever for those months.

While we sit on abundant oil and natural gas reserves, prices at both the wellhead and the pump are rising on fears of spreading Mideast turmoil and short domestic supply. But then, maybe that's the plan.
The silver lining for this administration in the gathering storm over the Middle East may be what it's doing and may yet do to energy prices. The average price for gasoline jumped nearly 12 cents a gallon last week to $3.287, according to AAA. But at the White House, that's not necessarily bad news.

...The administration's hostility to fossil fuels is documented. Immediately on taking office, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar canceled 77 leases for oil and gas drilling in Utah. Recently, in a stunning land grab, Salazar issued an order allowing Bureau of Land Management officials to place land with "wilderness characteristics" off-limits to energy development. Some 6 million acres in energy-rich Utah would be affected...

...John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil, told Platt's Energy Week Television that Americans could be paying $5 for a gallon of gasoline by 2012 based on the uncertainty of world events, the lack of domestic supply and increased worldwide demand fueled by countries like India and China.
Democrats once accused Big Oil of deliberately restricting supply to enrich itself. Now the Obama administration may be doing the same on purpose — a policy sure to impoverish us all. READ "Does Obama Want $8 Gallon Gasoline?

"I Have Never Had a Feeling Politically that did not Spring from the Sentiments Embodied in the Declaration of Independence"

2011-02-26T12:08:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

February 22, 1861

On Abraham Lincoln's inaugural journey to Washington, he stopped in Philadelphia at the site where the Declaration of Independence had been signed. One of the most famous statements in the speech was, "I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence."

President Lincoln's Speech:

I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here, in this place, where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live. You have kindly suggested to me that in my hands is the task of restoring peace to the present distracted condition of the country. I can say in return, Sir, that all the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which originated and were given to the world from this hall. I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here, and framed and adopted that Declaration of Independence. I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army who achieved that Independence. I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is a sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful.

Unions Should Disintegrate Into the Dust-Heap of History

2011-02-26T06:06:00.001-08:00

Finally the day of reckoning with entitlements has come. After more than 50 years of some people getting transfers of cash from other people it's time we the people went on strike. Why should I be working to support the lifestyle of a union member? Do you get that? NO MORE UNIONS! Most people get a job by interviewing, landing the job, doing good work on the job and then getting rewarded with a paycheck. Union members join a club where their job is guaranteed and their wages are higher than most people's wages in the private sector and they don't even have to prove that they are worthy of holding on to the job. Is that American? NO! Like other bad ideas - socialism, communism, fascism, Gadhafi - it's time the Unions disappear into the dust-heap of history.

"Rubicon: A River in Wisconsin," Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, February 25

At the federal level, President Obama's budget makes clear that Democrats are determined to do nothing about the debt crisis, while House Republicans have announced that beyond their proposed cuts in discretionary spending, their April budget will actually propose real entitlement reform. Simultaneously, in Wisconsin and other states, Republican governors are taking on unsustainable, fiscally ruinous pension and health-care obligations, while Democrats are full-throated in support of the public-employee unions crying, "Hell, no."

A choice, not an echo: Democrats desperately defending the status quo; Republicans charging the barricades....

Here stand the Democrats, avatars of reactionary liberalism, desperately trying to hang on to the gains of their glory years—from unsustainable federal entitlements for the elderly enacted when life expectancy was 62 to the massive promissory notes issued to government unions when state coffers were full and no one was looking.

Obama's Democrats have become the party of no. Real cuts to the federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell, no.

"The Left Is Running Out of Utopias"

2011-02-24T16:17:00.000-08:00

The Democratic lawmakers who have gone on the lam in Wisconsin and Indiana—and who knows where else next—are exhibiting a literal fight-or-flight response, the reaction of an animal facing a threat to its very existence.

Why? Because it is a threat to their existence. The battle of Wisconsin is about the viability of the Democratic Party, and more: it is about the viability of the basic social ideal of the left.

It is a matter of survival for Democrats in an immediate, practical sense. As Michael Barone explains, the government employees' unions are a mechanism for siphoning taxpayer dollars into the campaigns of Democratic politicians.

But there is something deeper here than just favor-selling and vote-buying. There is something that almost amounts to a twisted idealism in the Democrats' crusade. They are fighting, not just to preserve their special privileges, but to preserve a social ideal. Or rather, they are fighting to maintain the illusion that their ideal system is benevolent and sustainable.

Unionized public-sector employment is the distilled essence of the left's moral ideal. No one has to worry about making a profit. Generous health-care and retirement benefits are provided to everyone by the government. Comfortable pay is mandated by legislative fiat. The work rules are militantly egalitarian: pay, promotion, and job security are almost totally independent of actual job performance. And because everyone works for the government, they never have to worry that their employer will go out of business.

In short, public employment is an idealized socialist economy in miniature, including its political aspect: the grateful recipients of government largesse provide money and organizational support to re-elect the politicians who shower them with all of these benefits.

Put it all together, and you have the Democrats' version of utopia. In the larger American culture of Tea Parties, bond vigilantes, and rugged individualists, Democrats feel they are constantly on the defensive. But within the little subculture of unionized government employees, all is right with the world, and everything seems to work the way it is supposed to.

This cozy little world has been described as a system that grants special privileges to a few, which is particularly rankling in the current stagnant economy, when private sector workers acutely feel the difference. But I think this misses the point. The point is that this is how the left thinkseveryone should live and work. It is their version of a model society.

Every political movement needs models. It needs a real-world example to demonstrate how its ideal works and that it works.

And there's the rub. The left is running low on utopias...READ at TIADaily.com (The Intellectual Activist by Rob Tracinski).

Laws and Laws and More Laws

2011-02-15T13:43:00.000-08:00

When men are caught in the trap of non-objective law, when their work, future and livelihood are at the mercy of a bureaucrat's whim, when they have no way of knowing what unknown influence" will crack down on them for which unspecified offense, fear becomes their basic motive, if they remain in the industry at all-and compromise, conformity, staleness, dullness, the dismal grayness of the middle-of -the-road are all that can be expected of them. Independent thinking does not submit to bureaucratic edicts, originality does not follow "public policies," integrity does not petition for a license, heroism is not fostered by fear, creative genius is not summoned forth at the point of a gun.

Non-objective law is the most effective weapon of human enslavement: its victims become its enforcers and enslave themselves.

...The which cannot be formulated into an objective law, cannot be made the subject of legislation-not in a free country, not if we are to have a "government of laws and not of men". An undefinable law is not a law, but merely a license for some men to rule others.

"Vast Quicksands" in The Objectivist Newsletter, July 1963 - Ayn Rand

My how little has changed except the speed with which we are using our own ropes to hang ourselves.

Fighting the Mullahs With Fun? Great Idea!

2011-02-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

The Iranian youth should have a revolution of fun and see if the mullahs can combat that! What a wonderful and powerful idea by the playwright Tom Stoppard. The Wall Street Journal has a great article on this concept.

In "Rock 'n' Roll," the playwright Tom Stoppard proposes that rock music more than anything else—the arms race, dissident intellectuals, economic decay—brought down the communist system because it came from an unanticipated source for which the politburo theorists had no answer. Their enforcers could counter explicit resistance, but their ideologues never prepared defenses against the onslaught of pure fun.

Some 70% of Iran's population is said to be under the age of 30, so it seems natural that Valentine's Day has caught on in a country where the young keep trying to find non-state-mandated rituals to call their own. The state, for its part, continues to respond with a Whack-a-Mole approach to any social ripple not dreamt of in its philosophy.

Theocratic regimes invariably suffer from the same besetting sin: As the world evolves, they must either revise their antiquated doctrines or try to hold the world rigidly in stasis. Iran's ruling mullahs keep choosing the latter option. And with mosque and state firmly conjoined, there's no stray detail of daily life so arcane that the scriptures can't be mobilized to rein it in.

The Iranian state has pronounced against unauthorized mingling of the sexes, rap music, rock music, Western music, women playing in bands, too-bright nail polish, laughter in hospital corridors, ancient Persian rites-of-spring celebrations (Nowrooz), and even the mention of foreign food recipes in state media. This last may sound comically implausible, but it was officially announced by a state-run website on Feb. 6. So now the true nature of pasta as an instrument of Western subversion has been revealed.

The regime's posture turns the smallest garden-variety gestures into thrilling acts of subversion. Slipping a Valentine card to a girlfriend takes on the significance of samizdat. Every firecracker set off during Nowrooz diminishes the police state's claims to omniscience. The mullahs have appointed themselves the enemy of fun; as a result, wherever fun herniates into view, it is a politicized irruption of defiance....READ "Iran Bans Valentine's Day" at The Wall Street Journal.

Will Cuba Be the Next Nation to Demand Freedom? It is Time for Their Time in the Sunshine of Freedom

2011-02-11T16:28:00.000-08:00

As we contemplate the situation in Egypt and the other countries rising up against tyranny let's not forget the tiny island just a few miles off our shores - Cuba which probably has the worst tyranny of any as well as one of the longest. Anastasia O'Grady writes about Cuba and the ghoulish and murdering Castro brothers. Cubans are a creative and good people and deserve freedom.

...Developments in Egypt over the last two weeks brought Cuba to my mind. Why does a similar rebellion against five decades of repression there still appear to be a far-off dream? Part of the answer is in the relationship between the Castro brothers—Fidel and Raúl—and the generals. The rest is explained by the regime's significantly more repressive model. In the art of dictatorship, Hosni Mubarak is a piker.
That so many Egyptians have raised their voices in Tahrir Square is a testament to the universal human yearning for liberty. But it is a mistake to ignore the pivotal role of the military. I'd wager that when the history of the uprising is written, we will learn that Egypt's top brass did not approve of the old man's succession plan to anoint his son in the next election.
Castro has bought loyalty from the secret police and military by giving them control of the three most profitable sectors of the economy—retail, travel and services. Hundreds of millions of dollars flow to them every year. If the system collapses, so does that income. Of course the Egyptian military also owns businesses. But it doesn't depend on a purely state-owned economy. And as a recipient of significant U.S. aid and training for many years, the Egyptian military has cultivated a culture of professionalism and commitment to the nation over any single individual.
In Cuba there are no opposition political parties or nonstate media; rapid response brigades enforce the party line. Travel outside the country is not allowed without state approval. If peaceful dissidents with leadership skills can't be broken, they are eventually exiled. Or they are murdered....

The military dictatorship was helpless to contain the bad publicity.
In a similar fashion, when the Ladies in White—a group of wives, sisters and mothers of political prisoners—walking peacefully in Havana were roughed up by state security last year, the images were captured on cellphones and immediately showed up on the Web. It was more bad PR for the Castro brothers and their friends like Mexican President Felipe Calderón and Spanish President José Luis Zapatero. economy. And as a recipient of significant U.S. aid and training for many years, the Egyptian military has cultivated a culture of professionalism and commitment to the nation over any single individual...READ at WSJ "Will Cuba Be The Next Egypt".

American Government Officials Snitching to Russia (our enemy), About Britain (Our Friend)

2011-02-07T16:38:00.000-08:00

The United States is now a snitch for our foes and a turncoat against our friends. It is a sad day in America when the administration gives out sensitive military secrets about our friends to our not so friends like Russia. This is how low America has come down that we betray our friends in the name of what? Hilary Clinton did it among others in our state department. Is this disgusting and deserving of being accused of anti-American activity? I should say it is. But then we have a President that is part and parcel of this anti-American sentiment. How sad for America that our own American leaders are paving the way for our downfall. There is only one thing we can do. We must get patriots back into the highest offices of the land. It's either that or the fall of America.

If you want to understand how this anti-american sentiment can exist among Americans read the book: "Underdogma" by Michael Prell. It will explain a lot of things that make no sense to a sane person.

Alliances: When spies give military secrets to a foreign power, it's espionage. When an American president does it, betraying an ally to befriend a longtime foe, what do we call it?

According to diplomatic cables obtained by Britain's Daily Telegraph, mined from the thousands of classified documents released by WikiLeaks, the U.S. government agreed to provide Russia with information on the British nuclear deterrent as part of the deal behind the ratification and signing of the New START treaty.

Specifically, the Telegraph reports, the U.S. provided Moscow with the serial numbers of each Trident missile in the British ballistic missile submarine inventory. The Russians presumably already know how many Tridents the British have but can't be sure. British policy has been to refuse to confirm the exact size of its relatively tiny arsenal.

Last year, British Foreign Secretary William Hague disclosed that Britain had "up to 160" warheads operational at any one time, but he did not disclose the total number of missiles and warheads in its nuclear inventory. Duncan Lennox, editor of Jane's Strategic Weapons Systems, says: "They want to find out whether Britain has more missiles than we say we have, and having the unique identifiers might help them."

The State Department denies this, and spokesman P.J. Crowley said via Twitter that the U.S. simply "carried forward requirement to notify Russia about U.S.-UK nuclear cooperation from the 1991 treaty." So why did we, according to the Telegraph, have to ask Britain in 2009 for permission with detailed and classified information on the British Tridents, permission that was reportedly denied?

Indeed, according to one leaked memo, "the Russian Federation will receive unique identifiers for each of the missiles transferred to the UK, which was more information than was disclosed under START." So the State Department seems to have gone above and beyond the call of duty.

The British have quietly gone along with the State Department explanation, but then why wouldn't they? It wouldn't serve the new government of Prime Minister David Cameron well to acknowledge, after a series of snubs and insults from this side of the pond, that the U.S. had just thrown it under the strategic bus.

That we would betray Britain's nuclear secrets would not be surprising, since we are quite willing to betray our own. Before a recent U.N. conference on nuclear nonproliferation, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced: "Beginning today, the United States will make public the number of nuclear weapons in our stockpile and the number of weapons we have dismantled since 1991."...(read The Betrayal Of Great Britain at IBD)

How The FDA Stifles New Life-Saving Drugs

2011-02-06T04:55:00.000-08:00

Did you know that our government is the major roadblock to the discovery and production of new critical life-saving drugs? At every turn we are seeing how Washington rules and regulations prevent Americans from moving forward and no area is more onerous than in the field of medicine. Read this excellent article by Dr. Paul Hsieh.

America has a serious drug problem, but it’s not one most Americans have heard of. The problem is not illegal drugs, but rather a critical shortage of many life-saving legal drugs. And the federal government is about to make things worse.

During the past year, medical professionals have received alarming reports about critical shortages of important drugs. These drugs aren’t the common over-the-counter medications that consumers purchase in their local drugstores. Rather, the shortages are in various injectable drugs typically administered to seriously ill patients in hospitals.

Melly Alazraki of Daily Finance reports that the shortages include “vital medications such as chemotherapy, antibiotics, analgesics (painkillers), anesthetics and more.” ABC News details how Minnesota cancer patient Mark McKee was suddenly told at a scheduled chemotherapy session that the hospital did not have enough of the critical medication doxorubicin for his prescribed treatment. Despite the fact that his tumor had grown recently, his doctors told him he had to settle for a significantly reduced dose and hope that “something may be better than nothing.”

Of course, various factors can contribute to the shortage of any specific drug — for instance, a manufacturing problem at a key factory or difficulty obtaining a particular raw material from an unstable foreign country. But as ABC News notes, often the problem is simply that “the production cost outweighs the profits.” And a leading cause of this problem is the federal government, specifically in the form of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

FDA regulations impose an enormous financial burden on drug companies. In a detailed critique of the FDA, pharmaceutical industry writer Stella Daily Zawistowski observes that the FDA drug approval process currently costs companies approximately $800 million “from the time a molecule is discovered in the laboratory through animal trials and multiple stages of trials with human subjects.” Furthermore, the 20-year patent clock starts “ticking” once the drug is discovered, even though the drug approval process often takes more than 10 years. Hence, a company that spent enormous sums developing a new drug might enjoy less than half of that theoretical 20-year patent life to recover its initial investment before other companies start selling chemically identical cheaper “generic” versions.

In addition to stifling the development of new drugs, Zawistowski emphasizes that the FDA also distorts the market for the types of drugs being developed. It’s generally faster and cheaper for pharmaceutical companies to get FDA approval for “copycat” drugs that are minor variations of already-approved medications than to get approval for groundbreaking new drug categories. Hence, we see a plethora of cholesterol drugs, sleep aids, and antidepressants — and fewer advances in other vital categories, such as antibiotics effective against drug-resistant bacteria. In fact, UCLA medical school professor Dr. Brad Spellberg has warned that our pipeline of these vitally needed new medications is nearly empty because the FDA is “a huge impediment to getting a new antibiotic to market.”

The FDA drug approval process is so onerous that many experts believe that certain drugs currently in widespread use would never have been approved by today’s FDA — including penicillin, aspirin, and acetaminophen (Tylenol). In 2010, the FDA approved a mere 21 drugs — what the Wall Street Journalcalls “a relatively modest figure” and a continuation of the “drought in recent years.”

The Obama administration has acknowledged that the slow pace of new drug development is a problem. However, their response is not to reduce government barriers to private drug development — but rather to create a new government agency to supposedly “fix” this problem. According to the New York Times, the Obama administration will create a “National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences” within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to “help” promote new drug development. But many scientific and industry experts are deeply skeptical that this new program will succeed. (read more at Pajamas Media)

Caught With His Pants Down - Our President

2011-02-05T12:19:00.000-08:00

News reporters and analysts are starting to question why the President was caught flat footed regarding the Egyptian uprising. Yes indeed. And where is his leadership now by the way? Mute in the White House. Well it appears that Obama was informed about Middle East trouble over a year ago. He was derelict of duty then and he still is derelict in his duty to protect American interests. Are you surprised? I'm not. This is truly the first anti-American president we've ever had. No one comes close. Read the article below and see the comparison with Ronald Reagan and his troubles with Iran. Iran knew they did not have a patsy in Reagan. Obama on the other hand is responsible for this mess because the Middle East smells weakness and understands that Obama is NOT Ronald Reagan.

One of President Obama's own nominees has revealed that the CIA briefed him on impending trouble for the Mubarak government. A stronger president surely would have acted.

In October 2008, less than a month before Barack Obama's election, Investor's Business Daily warned — and not for the first time — about the dangers of electing someone president who would project the image of a weak America to our enemies around the world.

"An early sign of the coming greatness of the Reagan presidency," we noted, "was that within an hour of the former actor's taking the oath of office, the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamofascist regime in Iran released the 52 U.S. hostages it had been holding for 444 days."

As we pointed out, "Somehow, Ronald Reagan's lack of foreign policy experience didn't give Tehran the impression it would be a good idea to find out what he was made of; the mullahs already knew."

Now it's been revealed that Obama was warned about instability in Egypt. During testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee last Thursday, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked associate deputy director of the CIA Stephanie O'Sullivan when, and how well, the president had been briefed on the country's impending unrest.

O'Sullivan, who is Obama's nominee for principal deputy director of national intelligence — the No. 2 post in the massive, multi-agency U.S. intelligence community — told Wyden: "We warned of instability but not exactly where it would come from," and "we didn't know what the triggering mechanism would be."

The briefing warning of what now looks to be a revolutionary crisis in Egypt "happened at the end of last year," O'Sullivan said. READ : WHEN DID THE PRESIDENT KNOW IT? at IBD.

Mr Obama: Remove Our Chains and Leave Us to Our Work

2011-02-05T07:34:00.000-08:00

With the Middle East spinning out of control where is our President? With our economy going down the tubes where is our President loosening up restrictions on businesses, lower taxes and espousing freedom of trade? With our schools graduating dummies by the millions where is our President protecting America's future brain resources? While small businesses are closing at rates faster than you can snap your fingers where is our President removing the barriers to entrepreneurship? Where are you Mr. President? Loosen the chains that bind us and we will grow our economy....we will make it possible to create jobs.

Job creation is not what government does well. We all know that by now. Here's an article by Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal- "A Presidency to Nowhere".

No president before Barack Obama has been so right and so wrong.

When in his State of the Union speech Mr. Obama said, "This is our generation's Sputnik moment," citing the emergence of global competition from the likes of China and India, he was right.

Minutes later he proposed to cover the country with high-speed rail and companies making solar shingles.

High-speed rail and solar shingles? If that's the president's idea of meeting our Sputnik moment, then Houston, we have a problem...

...For a while Tuesday night, it appeared Mr. Obama would replicate Bill Clinton's almost sci-fi ability to absorb his opposition's best ideas, such as welfare reform, and re-infuse them into the body politic as his own. But no. We got high-speed rail and solar shingles.

Barack Obama believes what he believes. The ideas he came in with are the ideas he will go out with, and nowhere in that speech was there a fully formed policy idea reflecting authentic belief in the private economy....

...Once past the Reagan moment, the Obama policy menu had three entrees: clean energy, education and infrastructure. This was lifted, almost verbatim, from the Obama budget message two months into his presidency: "Our budget will make long overdue investments in priorities—like clean energy, education, health care, and new infrastructure." He extolled "new jobs that pay well" such as "installing solar energy panels and wind turbines."

This isn't a vision. It's an obsession.

Sending the completed trade agreements with Colombia and Panama to Congress for ratification should have been a lay-up for a president seeking the center. That's not happening.

What's ahead? Mainly one thing: November 2012....(read at WSJ)

The 1929 Depression Which Lasted 16 years

2011-01-01T06:31:00.000-08:00

Perhaps for the new year Americans should learn the history of the 1929 depression and why it happened. A Republican Herbert Hoover was president at the time. They doubled the income tax via the Revenue Act of 1932, they enacted the Smoot-Hawley act which destroyed international trade including affecting our agriculture industry. Then Roosevelt wins election and having decried Hoovers economic policies as socialist goes ahead to complete the damage to the United States. He passes the Industrial Recovery Act based on the theory that there is too much competition. The answer from Roosevelt was to stifle competition by cartelizing industries. The government tells industries what prices to charge across the board and across the economy. Is that a way to start a recovery?

The "Agricultural Adjustment Act" levied a new tax on agriculture that was already depressed and the government used the revenue to destroy healthy cattle, pigs and sheep and to plow under perfectly good land planted with wheat and corn. Under the triple A 6 million baby pigs were destroyed to supposedly raise the prices of pigs to help the farmer. All that did was raise the market price of pigs and hurt the people that had to eat. Roosevelt tried to raise the income tax to 98% and then changed his mind and raised it to 100%. It didn't pass but this is the real Roosevelt.

The Wagner Act bestowed vast new powers to labor and created the National Labor Board which made it easier for th labor to organize and strike. The # of strike days from 1936 to 1937 doubled from 14 million strike days in 1936 to 28 million in 1937. Labor costs soared during a severe depression.

In 1937 there was another collapse due to the Wagner Act.

Economic Liberty Lecture Series: Lawrence Reed from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo.

Who Elected the Environmental Protection Agency?

2011-01-01T05:21:00.000-08:00

Recapping the global warming scam from our government

..Ignoring both Congress and the voters, the Environmental Protection Agency starts the new year governing by decree with job-killing regulations. Take a deep breath, but if you exhale you're a polluter.

Cap-and-trade is dead, long live cap-and-trade in the form of regulations promulgated in the coming year by what George Orwell might call the Ministry of Environment. It claims that the Clean Air Act and a Supreme Court ruling in 2007 let the EPA regulate carbon dioxide as a planet-warming pollutant ..READ "Rules Will Trump Your Rights" at IBD.

Jobs Leave America While Obama Dithers in Washington

2010-12-31T07:50:00.000-08:00

Obama - does this man know how people make a buck...how money is made? Does he think it drops from the skies by the good graces of God? Does he think that because he is President of the once greatest country in history people will just go on making money while he does all he can to thwart those efforts?

While only 900,000 jobs were created in 2010, U.S. companies sat on $1.1 trillion in cash. Why? The reason is that the business climate in the United States is anti-business and add to that the fact that we have a President in the White House who either does not understand about "business climate", or is downright anti-business then you have the ingredients for a NO GROWTH economy. Take your pick - it doesn't matter because business owners are not going to waste their dollars creating jobs if there is no gain to be had. Would you? So they are going to foreign lands where the lessons of lower taxes and regulations have been learned. Kudos for them. When will Washington get out of our way and leave us to the business of business?

…The fact is, companies sitting on cash aren't doing nothing. They're hiring overseas, creating 1.4 million jobs in 2010 alone, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

That's not because they prefer foreigners to Americans, but because the bad business climate here pushes them to do so.

The rest of the world is a vastly different place from Obama's U.S., which is characterized by high taxes and protectionist set-asides for politically connected unions that shut out free trade.

In places like Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan, India and Thailand, nobody demonizes business or blasts trade. Instead great efforts are made by the state and the private sector to draw in foreign investment by becoming more competitive than their rivals.

U.S. multinationals go to these places not because labor is cheap but because these policies also create boomtowns with lots of customers. Incredibly enough, sometimes overseas profits and jobs provide a lifeline for troubled U.S. companies back home. Take GM — today, its Brazil and Korea operations help keep it afloat.

Growth in the 8% to 9% range is typical in Asia. But even in other pro-business areas — like the city of Lyon, France, or the manufacturing mecca of Tijuana, Mexico — governments are going out of their way to attract U.S. investment.
…Mexico is drawing aerospace manufacturers and hiring engineers. Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Qatar and even the Republic of Congo are pulling them in, too.

Why? So long as profits are encouraged instead of taxed, the natural outcome is jobs. It's that simple. They get it. Why don't we?

Salon magazine noted that as companies shift their hiring overseas, the 1.4 million jobs created there could have, if they were created here, lowered the unemployment rate to 8.9% from 9.8%... READ "Why Jobs Leave" at IBD.

If We are Honest With Ourselves We all Know that Social Security Should be Eliminated

2010-12-29T11:33:00.000-08:00

I think it's time we Americans realized, before we destroy ourselves, that something has to give. Social security cannot be sustained anymore. It simply is impossible...the numbers don't lie. Americans are known for their honesty and their ability to look at reality and deal with it. Let's call for the elimination of this Ponzi scheme. Each individual would then be in charge of his own destiny. Isn't that the American way? Thomas Sowell at IBD has a good analysis of our situation.

...This is the way a Ponzi scheme works, with the first wave of "investors" getting paid with the money paid in by the second wave.

But, like Social Security, a Ponzi scheme creates no wealth but only an illusion that cannot last. That is why Mr. Ponzi was sent to prison. But politicians get re-elected for doing the same thing.

As the baby boomers begin to retire, and there are now fewer working people per retired person to pay for Social Security pensions, this scam is likewise headed for a rude revelation of reality — and perhaps riots like those in Europe.

All the incentives are for politicians to do what they have done, namely to promise benefits without raising enough taxes to pay for them. That way, it looks like you are getting something for nothing.

When crunch time comes and politicians are either going to have to tell people the truth or raise taxes, the almost inevitable choice is to raise taxes.

If the people think they are already taxed too much, then the taxes can be raised only for people designated as "the rich."

If "the rich" object, then demagogues can denounce them for their selfishness and "greed" for objecting to turning over ever-growing amounts of what they have earned to politicians.

Economists often make stronger objections than the high-income people themselves.

That is because history has shown repeatedly that very high rates of taxation lead to all sorts of ways by which those very high rates of taxation do not have to be paid.

No matter how high the tax rates are, they do not bring in more revenue when many of the people subject to those tax rates do not in fact pay them.

The scams inherent in welfare states are not only economically counterproductive, they turn group against group, straining the ties that hold a society together. READ" FREE LUNCHES ARE KILLING US WITH THE COST".

Bush Was Right About Gitmo; Obama Strikes Out

2010-12-13T07:22:00.000-08:00

Of the many "errors" of Obama perhaps this one is the most dangerous: The fact that he has refused to continue Bush's policy of detaining these terrorists in Guantanamo and treating them as prisoners of war. It seems like our President keeps making the wrong decisions...time and time again. What's up with that?

When announcing in 2002 that the U.S. would detain al Qaeda fighters at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously described the base as "the best, least worst place." Mr. Rumsfeld's quip distilled a truth: The U.S. would capture enemy fighters and leaders, and their detention, while messy, was of great military value.

For two years, President Barack Obama has pretended that terrorism is a crime, that prisoners are unwanted, and that Gitmo is unneeded. As a presidential candidate, he declared: "It's time to show the world . . . we're not a country that runs prisons which lock people away without ever telling them why they're there or what they're charged with." Upon taking office, he ordered Gitmo closed within the year.

But the president's embrace of the left's terrorism-as-crime theories collided with his responsibility to protect a great nation. Now the reality of the ongoing war on terror is helping to shatter the Gitmo myth and end its distortion of our antiterrorism strategies.

This week the intelligence community reported to Congress that one-quarter of the detainees released from Guantanamo in the past eight years have returned to the fight. Though the U.S. and its allies have killed or recaptured some of these 150 terrorists, well over half remain at large. The Defense Department reports that Gitmo alumni have assumed top positions in al Qaeda and the Taliban, attacked allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and led efforts to kill U.S. troops. READ "The Collapse of the Guantanamo Myth" at WSJ

A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither - Thomas Jefferson

2010-11-29T06:14:00.000-08:00

It seems as if Thomas Jefferson were speaking to us across the ages and warning us of the dangers of our government devolving into unbridled power.

"Experience hath shown, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operation, perverted it into tyranny."

"If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and assemblies, judges and governors shall become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions."

Caroline Glick Describes How Obama's Ineffectiveness at Dealing with Enemies of Freedom is Making The World an Incredibly Dangerous Place

2010-11-27T12:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com Crises are exploding throughout the world. And the leader of the free world is making things worse.

On the Korean peninsula, North Korea just upended eight years of State Department obfuscation by showing a team of US nuclear scientists its collection of thousands of state of the art centrifuges installed in their Yongbyon nuclear reactor.

And just to top off the show, as Stephen Bosworth, US President Barack Obama's point man on North Korea was busily arguing that this revelation is not a crisis, the North fired an unprovoked artillery barrage at South Korea, demonstrating that actually, it is a crisis. But the Obama administration remains unmoved. On Tuesday Defense Secretary Robert Gates thanked his South Korean counterpart Kim Tae-young for showing "restraint." Thursday, Kim resigned in disgrace for that restraint.

The US has spoken strongly of not allowing North Korea's aggression to go unanswered. But in practice, its only answer is to try to tempt North Korea back to feckless multilateral disarmament talks that will go nowhere because China supports North Korean armament. Contrary to what Obama and his advisors claim, China does not share the US's interest in denuclearizing North Korea.

Consequently, Beijing will not lift a finger to achieve that goal.

Then there is Iran. The now inarguable fact that Pyongyang is developing nuclear weapons with enriched uranium makes it all but certain that the hyperactive proliferators in Pyongyang are involved in Iran's uranium based nuclear weapons program. Obviously the North Koreans don't care that the UN Security Council placed sanctions on Iran. And their presumptive role in Iran's nuclear weapons program exposes the idiocy of the concept that these sanctions can block Iran's path to a nuclear arsenal.

Every day as the regimes in Pyongyang and Teheran escalate their aggression and confrontational stances it becomes more and more clear that the only way to neutralize the threats they pose to international security is to overthrow them. At least in the case of Iran, it is also clear that the prospects for regime change have never been better. READ "Rocking Obama's World" at Jewish World Review.

Muslim Terrorists in America Under Our Noses

2010-11-27T10:57:00.000-08:00

It's scandalous that it's taken so long to prove that these Muslim groups have ties to terrorism if not down right sponsoring it. They should be kicked out of the country or imprisoned if they have broken American laws.

Islamofascism: Now that a federal judge has unsealed evidence showing the three most prominent Muslim groups in America support terror, Washington must cut all ties with them.

U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis has ruled there is "ample evidence" to support the Justice Department's decision to blacklist the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as unindicted co-conspirators in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror trial.

He refused requests to strike their names from the list.

At the trial, which ended in guilty verdicts on all 108 counts, FBI agents testified that ISNA, NAIT and CAIR are fronts for the federally designated terrorist group Hamas, which has murdered countless Israelis and at least 17 Americans...

...Outrageously, these dangerous fronts, cloaked as they are in religious garb, still enjoy charitable tax status. The IRS exempts their funding, much of which comes from the Middle East.

And they are still free to lobby Congress, Homeland Security and the TSA against airport profiling and other anti-terror measures.

Yet none are even registered as lobbyists, let alone foreign agents.

Although the FBI has severed ties with CAIR, other government agencies have not...

The FBI, meanwhile, still does outreach with ISNA. And the White House has solicited the group for resumes. Many Muslims tied to ISNA have been hired for sensitive positions within the government.

A handful of senators — including Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. — have called for a governmentwide ban on these groups, a move that seems long overdue, given the new court evidence. At a minimum, the IRS should revoke their tax-exempt status.

It's a scandal such enemy collaborators continue to enjoy government entree and recognition in a time of war. READ- CUT TIES TO TERROR at IBD.

The Lie: "Government's Denial of the Link between Islam and Terrorism"

2010-11-24T12:30:00.000-08:00

Rob Tracinski at www.TiaDaily.com discusses the LIE that is our airport security. Because of political correctness we must not name the enemy. And that is exactly why we have not defeated the Islamic terrorists because we have become craven cowards unable to name whom we are fighting. Well the Israelis will have non of that....they know who the enemy is and they have used profiling for decades and NOT ONE - NOT ONE incident has occurred in their airport. To be victorious over an enemy one has to name them first and then can one see clearly what one has to do. Here is Tracinski, then the article at New York Post.
...The article below describes these measures as "security theater" meant to create the impression that the government is taking extraordinary measure to protect us, when it really isn't doing anything but harassing the law-abiding.

In fact, airline passengers themselves continue to be the only effective line of defense. They have to submit to taking their shoes off or having their groin groped—yet they are the ones who subdued the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber.

But the real purpose of all of this "security theater" is to support a lie. Its purpose is to support the government's denial of the link between Islam and terrorism by acting as if anyone might be a terrorist. The government is deliberately avoiding focusing its security screening on those who pose the greatest threat, because it doesn't want to admit that they are a threat.

This is another problem whose solution is very simple: stop lying to ourselves. If we were willing to recognize the source of terrorism and the identity of the enemy, we could adopt a system more like what the Israelis use, successfully, to prevent terrorist attacks on El Al flights—and believe me, if the Arabs could blow up Israeli planes, they would have done so long ago.

The center of this system is profiling, i.e., the use of intelligence gathering to target extra security screening at those who are actually most likely to pose a risk. READ at TIA Daily.

Climate-gate Erupts So Now Will Come "Global Reparations Climate Tax"...It never Ends with The Power Hungry

2010-11-22T11:17:00.000-08:00

How can we get government to stay out of our lives permanently? Why does mildly OK government always devolve into tyranny? We must be careful of who we put into office until we find the miracle cure for powerlusters.

Hoaxes: A high-ranking member of the U.N.'s Panel on Climate Change admits the group's primary goal is the redistribution of wealth and not environmental protection or saving the Earth.

Money, they say, is the root of all evil. It's also the motivating force behind what is left of the climate change movement after the devastating Climate-gate and IPCC scandals that saw the deliberate manipulation of scientific data to spur the world into taking draconian regulatory action.

Left for dead, global warm-mongers are busy planning their next move, which should occur at a climate conference in relatively balmy Cancun at month's end. Certainly it should provide a more appropriate venue for discussing global warming than the site of the last failed climate conference — chilly Copenhagen.

Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change (say that twice), told the Neue Zurcher Zeitung last week: "The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War." After all, redistributing global wealth is no small matter.

Edenhofer let the environmental cat out of the bag when he said "climate policy is redistributing the world's wealth" and that "it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization."

In his IPCC post, Edenhofer was a lead author of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. Based on anecdotal evidence, it contained unsubstantiated claims that the Himalayan glaciers would soon disappear and Bangladesh would be totally submerged.

Edenhofer claims "developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community" and so they must have their wealth expropriated and redistributed to the victims of their alleged crimes, the postage stamp countries of the world. He admits this "has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."

It has everything to do with a different kind of green. U.N. warm-mongers are seeking to impose a global climate reparations tax on everything from airline flights and international shipping to fuel and financial transactions. At first, this punitive tax on progress is expected to net $100 billion annually, though that amount, like our energy costs, is expected to necessarily skyrocket. ..
READ "The Climate Cash Cow" at IBD.

"Shakedown" by Steven Malanga - How The Unions are Using Taxpayer Money to Fund Their Leftist Ideology

2010-11-21T09:11:00.000-08:00

Americans Turn From Docility to Rebellion

2010-11-21T08:02:00.000-08:00

"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be—to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all—the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government." Thomas Jefferson.

Tyranny throughout the ages has always been fought by individuals who defy the tyrants. The 20th and the beginning of the 21st century can be defined as an era of ever shrinking freedom for Americans. Our politicians at every level of government are constantly inventing new "rules of the game" to control us and to suck us dry. Americans need a hero or at least a new philosophy to rally around and to focus our attention on the growing tyranny in this country. Rob Tracinski at http://www.tiadaily.com/ does a great job of explaining this. Let's rally around "Don't Touch My Junk" and get government out of our lives. Get TIA.daily in your mailbox for great analysis of what's going on from the point of view of individual freedom.

...And as a statement of the proper relationship between the individual and the state, "don't touch my junk" is a principle with universal application. It is the answer to nearly every political question.

Should we raise income taxes to pre-Bush levels? Don't touch my junk. Should the EPA be allowed to issue sweeping new regulations on the greenhouse gas emissions that come from your car, your lawnmower, your house? Don't touch my junk. Should the new "food bill" be allowed to put massive new regulations on farmers, dictating what you can and cannot eat? Don't touch my junk...John Tyner isn't just a folk hero. He is a political philosopher of the first order.

He is astute enough, at least, to name one big issue clearly. Told that being groped by a TSA screener was not sexual assault, he replied, "It would be if you were not the government." And that's the big issue: when we have no rights, all restrictions on government—from the Constitution to ordinary criminal law—are broken down.

All of this depends on only one thing: our docility. It depends on our being overawed by the authority of government. The Tea Party movement and its electoral results were a demonstration that the ordinary American will stand up when pushed far enough. John Tyner has just opened the next phase of this rebellion.

The enhanced patdowns and strip-search scanners are a kind of trial balloon, to test exactly how much we're going to take, to see whether there is any area so intimate that we will demand that the government stay out of it. And now we know what to say in response.

Don't touch my junk. (www.TIADaily.com)

Is It Time For the Federal Reserve to be Brought Down a Peg or Abolished?

2010-11-20T09:02:00.000-08:00

Let's learn as Americans all we can about "The Federal Reserve" because they have done much damage to our economy at different times ever since its creation in 1913 with the "Federal Reserve Act". We can only hope now that the great champion of abolishing the Federal Reserve, Senator Paul Ryan the incoming Chairman of the House budget Committee will now be successful at least at reining it in.

If there is a silver lining to the uproar over the Federal Reserve's decision to create $600 billion in new reserves in the next few months, it is the renewed public attention to the Fed's impossible dual political mandate for stable prices and maximum employment.

To be specific, Paul Ryan suddenly has company. The Wisconsin Congressman has since 1999 proposed legislation that would let the Fed focus monetary policy solely on the goal of stable prices. This week he's been joined by fellow Republicans Mike Pence of Indiana and Tom Price of Georgia, while Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee told us he plans to work with Mr. Ryan to introduce legislation next year that would lift the dual mandate. If the 112th Congress did nothing else, this would be worth the price of its election and a major contribution to better economic policy.

These columns have decried the dual mandate since it became the law of the land in 1978 with the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act, aka Humphrey-Hawkins. To appreciate the problem, consider that in the original Federal Reserve Act of 1913 Congress asked the central bank to supervise banks. It did not mention explicit economic goals. Even in the Keynesian heyday of the Employment Act of 1946, Congress did not ask the Fed to manage the economy.

But with Humphrey-Hawkins, Congress ordered the central bank to "promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long-term interest rates." The political context in that age of Jimmy Carter will sound familiar. U.S. unemployment was stubbornly high and the fiscal policies (tax rebates) of a Democratic Congress had failed to stimulate. So the politicians decided to conscript the Fed in its job creation mission by ordering the ostensibly independent central bank to target employment as well as prices...READ the rest at "The Fed's Bipolar Mandate" at The Wall Street Journal.

Jindal vs Obama Care

2010-11-19T12:07:00.000-08:00

America is Being Forced to the Left as Europe Veers to the Right - Huh?

2010-11-18T15:47:00.000-08:00

... the traditional American economic model based on small government and private initiative has been under attack for a long time.

Europe's social democracies themselves, however, are also undergoing change. While the Bush and Obama administrations may have increased the size and scope of government in the United States, a number of European countries have turned to free- market solutions.

True, the European left sees social-democratic Europe as the antithesis of America's "cutthroat capitalism." Germany's left uses the term "American conditions" as shorthand for a total lack of a social safety net.

In reality, the annual price tag of anti-poverty programs ($600 billion), unemployment insurance ($60 billion) and Social Security payments and Medicare benefits ($1.2 trillion) in the U.S. is staggering.

The American left sees Europe as an inspiration. Earlier this year, Paul Krugman declared European social democracy as "a success" that "demonstrates ... (that) social justice and progress can go hand in hand." In reality, the left on both sides of the Atlantic hangs onto an image of a Europe that no longer exists — if it ever did.

First, in terms of social and economic policy, there is no such thing as "Europe." The European Union is an association of 27 independent countries that have pooled their sovereignty in a number of important policy areas, including trade relations with the rest of the world.

The EU "government" in Brussels remains less powerful in terms of its competencies than the U.S. federal government, though, as is the case with Washington, much of what the bureaucrats in Brussels do is either unnecessary, such as regulating the curvature of cucumbers, or possibly harmful, such as a common fisheries policy that has resulted in massive depletion of fish stocks in the waters around Europe.

Second, European nation-states still retain a great deal of independence in social and economic decision-making. That independence leaves national governments substantial room to maneuver. Some have used it to surprising ends.

For example, seven EU countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia) have introduced a flat income tax, which has proven so popular and economically beneficial that three more EU members (Hungary, Poland and Greece) are considering it.

Meantime, the U.S. is stuck with a tax system so complicated that the cost of compliance is estimated to reach $483 billion per year by 2015.

Similarly, driven by falling birth rates and rising costs, seven EU countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Sweden) have reformed their unsustainable pay-as-you-go pension systems. These countries now allow or mandate their citizens to invest a portion of their retirement contributions in private pension funds.

In the U.S., Social Security reform remains highly contentious, worsening demographics and $16 trillion in unfunded liabilities notwithstanding.

Another seemingly unsolvable problem in the United States is the country's appallingly expensive but underperforming system of state-run primary and secondary education. In the 1990s, one European Union country embraced a radical reform that saw the establishment of private for-profit but taxpayer-funded schools that succeeded in raising education standards in both private and state-run schools. That country is Sweden — the supposed paragon of social democracy.

Sweden is not the only Western European social democracy with some surprisingly free-market characteristics. The World Bank's annual Doing Business report, which looks at the ease of doing business around the world, shows that while the U.S. has the fourth-most-welcoming business environment, Great Britain, Denmark and Ireland come in 5th, 6th and 7th place, respectively.

Are we witnessing a convergence of the two models? It may seem that way now, but the future of the social democratic model seems doomed. Just as the crisis of the early 1990s forced the Swedes to curb government spending and intervention, the current crisis is forcing the Greeks to reevaluate the balance between government spending and private-sector growth. READ "Europe Embraces Free-Market Reforms" at IBD.

Japan Asks: Will Obama Honor It's Commitments to Our Allies?

2010-11-14T07:02:00.000-08:00

Thugs of the world like China smell weakness and probably celebrated the election of Obama as President of the United States. Do you see Obama defending and standing up for Japan's right to the island under dispute? Probably not. He bows to kings and dictators and shrugs off democratically elected leaders of nations like England. We elected, for the first time since Wilson and Roosevel,t the worst anti-American President in our history. Now we have to pay the piper for another 2 years then undo all the damage Obama has left in his path.

Obligations: A seemingly minor collision off an obscure Pacific island chain may mean nothing. Then again, it may be about China seeing just how serious we are about our treaty commitments to Japan.

It would be easy to dismiss the recent collision of a Chinese fishing boat with two Japanese Coast Guard vessels as a minor altercation between two former adversaries with a contentious and often bloody history. Easy, that is, if it weren't a continuation of incidents testing Western reaction and will.

The incident occurred off a group of uninhabited rocky outcroppings in the East China Sea just south of Okinawa called the Senkaku Islands. They are called the "Diaoyutai" by the Chinese, who claim them as China's territory largely based on legend and old drawings and paintings depicting the area

....Worth noting is that the waters off the Senkaku Islands are not only rich fishing grounds. They also sit atop significant oil deposits vital to a China scouring the world for energy for its growing economy. Possession of these uninhabited rocks would be the basis for declaring an exclusive economic zone around the islands.

Japan claims that aside from the dispute over who first discovered the islands, the Senkakus became Japanese territory after Japan defeated China in their 1894-95 war. Japan points out that neither Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China nor Mao Zedong's People's Republic of China protested at the post-war placing of the islets under American administration.

It was only after a 1968 U.N. survey reported the huge oil and gas potential of the area that both competing Chinese governments began to protest against the scheduled 1972 U.S. return of the islets to Japanese control.

So far, the U.S. government has taken no position on ultimate ownership of the Senkakus. But it has noted that, as things currently stand, the islands would be under the purview of the 1960 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty that covers all territories under Japanese administration.

We should make our commitment to Japanese security and sovereignty unmistakably clear. The West failed to do so in 1938, when Nazi Germany claimed sovereignty over a faraway place called the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. And the rest, as they say, is history. READ "Testing an Alliance" at IBD.

Sarkozy Can Teach Obama A Thing or Two About Facing the Truth About the Need to CUT GOVERNMENT

2010-11-10T16:24:00.000-08:00

France's Sarkozy is doing the right things to get control of runaway pensions, spending and unions - even in the face of severe protests by the French and his lowering popularity. But sometimes in life just as fathers and mothers must do the tough disciplining of their children in order that they straighten up so must a country that has run awry of their duty to govern within their mandates and means. Sarkosy deserves kudos and applause and Obama should learn a lesson in leadership - that is honest leadership.

Leadership: France's President Nicolas Sarkozy signed off on pension reform Wednesday, winning big and saving his nation's system. But the obstacles he stared down went beyond anything average politicians will tolerate.

Ever since he was elected in 2007, the conservative French president has vowed to "modernize" France's stagnant, noncompetitive, socialist economy.

So in just three years, Sarkozy extended the work week, changed laws to permit overtime, scrapped retail price controls, simplified business formation, tamed unions and yanked benefits from work-shirkers.

But his biggest victory to date was this week's reform of France's lavish pension system that was fueled by endless deficit spending.

Naturally, the usual mix of communists, union thugs, illegal immigrants, students and criminals sprang into action to protest any cuts in entitlements, rioting night after night. They did this in the hopes that Sarkozy would roll over for them — just as past French presidents, particularly Jacques Chirac, always did.

When car burnings and street blockades didn't work, they shut down transport, including even air traffic. When that failed, they shut down oil installations, bringing on fuel shortages.

And in the worst blow for a politician, Sarkozy's popularity dropped, precipitously, falling from the high 60s to the low 20s, as the public balked at the reforms he promised.

As the invective and Molotov cocktails flew, Sarkozy refused to back down. "I am fully aware that this is a difficult reform," Sarkozy said. "However, I always felt it was my duty, and the government's duty, to carry it out. With this law, our pension plan by equal division is saved."

He's right that it's not easy to tell workers anywhere that their retirement age must be raised by two years to 62 for a partial pension, or 67 for a full one if the system is to stay solvent.

But it's even harder to argue with economic numbers, which unflinchingly warned that the demographic curve in France was falling and, unless adjustments were made, the system would crash.

Sarkozy, who had held top positions in budget, economy and interior ministries, fully grasped that the situation in France was unsustainable and chose reality over the false promises of socialism.

It was leadership at its finest and a wake-up call to the U.S. that courage will be needed from our own political leaders to stop the flood tide of spending. As incoming U.S. congressional leaders confront runaway spending and the urgent tasks of entitlement reform, including Social Security, Sarkozy provides a useful lesson.

His big message: To win, it takes courage. Will Congress have it? (READ AT IBD Sarkozy's Boldness)

Obama WANTS to Ruin America-There is No Other Explanation

2010-11-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

Obama is about all that is negative. There is nothing positive for our country coming from the Oval Office. And one has to ask himself if this is by design. The answer after 2 years of spending and talking down this great country is a resounding yes. He definitely has an agenda and in many areas he is incompetent. This last one, incompetence was obvious during the gulf oil spill. What a difference to Bobby Jindal and his proactive attention to the oil spill getting people working on the situation and talking to the affected people trying to allay their fears. But we don't have Jindal for President we got Obama and what a disaster it has been so far. So now we have another wave of printing money which is backed by nothing not even the productivity of the American people because there are so many out of work.

This was written back in June of 2010 by Rob Tracinski at TIADaily.
...Everywhere you look, wherever there is a crisis, Obama is not simply doing nothing. He's making things worse. America is about to plunge into unsustainable deficit spending? Obama got us started early with the stimulus package and the health care bill. Big states are being bankrupted by public employee unions? Obama wants to increase the unions' power. Not enough power plants? Obama wants to restrict them further. Iran is seeking nukes? Obama gave them a reprieve against a popular uprising. Karzai doubts America's resolve in Afghanistan? Obama wavers on our strategy and declares our intention to bug out, no matter how much disarray there is in our strategy and command.

There's an old saying: When you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But the pattern of the Obama administration has me wondering if we're seeing the inverse: when you plan to fail, you fail to plan. That is, if American contraction and retreat is your goal, why would you make any plans to revive the economy or win wars?

I think what we're seeing here is something worse than just a failure of leadership by a disengaged president. We have to ask ourselves why he is disengaged. Why, when multiple alarm bells are ringing, is he spending more time on his hobbies than the rest of us? Or more to the point, when existing policies lead to failure, why does he double down and make things worse?

From the beginning, we've been warning that Barack Obama is an anti-American president, that he believes in American decline on principle—that he thinks we're too wealthy, too powerful, and too free and need to be taken down a peg. His policies are achieving that goal.

Americans are learning that Obama is an ineffectual leader by the standard of achieving America's success, prosperity, and security. What they need to learn next is the terrifying truth that these are not his standards. Everything is still true today. Obama is a dedicated socialist who wants to bring America to her knees. Go to www.TIADAILY.com for more from Rob Tracinski.

What 52% of The Electorate Wanted For the Past Two Years Was Ice Cream

2010-11-03T13:20:00.000-07:00

From a teacher in the Nashville area.

"We are worried about 'the cow' when it is all about the 'Ice Cream.'

The most eye-opening civics lesson I ever had was while teaching third grade this year.

The presidential election was heating up 2 years ago and some of the children showed an interest. I decided that we would have an election for a class president.

We would choose our nominees.
They would make a campaign speech and the class would vote.

To simplify the process, candidates were nominated by other class members.

We discussed what kinds of characteristics these students should have.

We got many nominations and from those, Jamie and Olivia were picked to run for the top spot.

The class had done a great job in their selections. Both candidates were good kids.

I thought Jamie might have an advantage because he got lots of parental support.

I had never seen Olivia's mother.

The day for their speeches arrived.

Jamie went first.

He had specific ideas about how to make our class a better place. He ended by promising to do his very best.

Everyone applauded and he sat down.

Now is was Olivia's turn to speak. Her speech was concise.
She said, "If you vote for me, I will give you ice cream."
She sat down.

The class went wild. "Yes! Yes! We want ice cream."

She surely would say more. She did not have to.

A discussion followed. How did she plan to pay for the ice cream?
She wasn't sure.
Would her parents buy it or would the class pay for it? She didn't know.

The class really didn't care.
All they were thinking about was ice cream.

Jamie was forgotten. Olivia won by a landslide.

Every time Barack Obama opened his mouth he offered ice cream and 52 percent of the people reacted like nine year olds.

They want ice cream.

The other 48 percent know they're going to have to feed the cow and clean up the mess.

The American Revolution at the Ballot Box

2010-11-01T08:33:00.000-07:00

Regarding our Constitution the prohibitions are on the government NOT THE PEOPLE! Let's remember this as we go to the polls tomorrow November 2, 2010 - Americans have their revolution in the ballot box. And this one is going to be big.

Puerto Rico Comes on Board the Lower Taxes Bandwagon

2010-11-01T06:23:00.000-07:00

There comes a time in the life of every government at least in freedom loving countries when the people must decide enough with the taxation already! That time has come for our country. Are we to live as slaves to a state that has no compunction about seizing a part of our wealth to fund idiotic and expensive politically motivated schemes whose end goals are always to control the "little people"? After all, according to their ideology, people do not know what is best for themselves or for the nation. Well, governors like Chris Christie and apparently Luis Fortuno in Puerto Rico are thinking over that perhaps politicians should not be taking control over the any economy.

Move over, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. You've got a tax-cutting, pro-growth competitor who may be even bolder than you. His name is Luis Fortuño and he is the governor of Puerto Rico, a place that, if you can believe it, is in worse fiscal shape than the Garden State.

When Mr. Fortuño took office in January 2009, Puerto Rico had a 46% budget shortfall equal to $3.3 billion. Things were so bad, he told me in a telephone interview from San Juan on Tuesday, that he had to fly to New York while still governor-elect to explain his fiscal plan to the investment community in order to avoid a sharp downgrade of Puerto Rican debt. "We were one step from junk status," he says.

After 22 months in office and a boatload of spending cuts, the deficit is now down to about 11%. That achievement notwithstanding, the commonwealth still is spending more than it takes in. In the Washington political handbook this means Puerto Ricans are not paying enough in taxes.

Mr. Fortuño has a much different view of the problem: He thinks high taxes have destroyed the Puerto Rican economy. He has already signed into law a five-year property tax holiday for real estate purchased through June of next year and waivers on fees for those transactions. Last week he handed his legislature a radical plan to simplify the tax code and sharply reduce corporate and individual rates.

Mr. Fortuño says that Puerto Rico's recession—which began two years before the U.S. recession—only partly explains the current crisis. "If you look at the past decade, Puerto Rico has had negative growth for the entire period." (According to his office, the economy contracted 0.2% in the 2000s.) This shows, he argues, that "we are in need of a major overhaul. If we just tweak it a little, we won't accomplish what we need."...
READ AT The Wall Street Journal

The President as Transformer and Redeemer Explains Obama

2010-10-31T10:47:00.000-07:00

Shelby Steel has an interesting take on Obama and how he's governing...as a transformer and redeemer. He sees America not as exceptional but as needing of transformation and redemption for all our evils. But that is not the America I know. Even with our warts and mistakes America and Americans is and are good and have been a force for positive change in the world. That cannot be denied however one wants to bend and twist history. America is a force for good and everything that is decent in this modern world. And on Tuesday we the people are poised to prove that that is what we believe and what we stand for.

Whether or not the Republicans win big next week, it is already clear that the "transformative" aspirations of the Obama presidency—the special promise of this first black president to "change" us into a better society—are much less likely to materialize. There will be enough Republican gains to make the "no" in the "party of no" even more formidable, if not definitive.

But apart from this politics of numbers, there is also now a deepening disenchantment with Barack Obama himself. (He has a meager 37% approval rating by the latest Harris poll.) His embarrassed supporters console themselves that their intentions were good; their vote helped make history. But for Mr. Obama himself there is no road back to the charisma and political capital he enjoyed on his inauguration day.

How is it that Barack Obama could step into the presidency with an air of inevitability and then, in less than two years, find himself unwelcome at the campaign rallies of many of his fellow Democrats?

The first answer is well-known: His policymaking has been grandiose, thoughtless and bullying. His health-care bill was ambitious to the point of destructiveness and, finally, so chaotic that today no citizen knows where they stand in relation to it. His financial-reform bill seems little more than a short-sighted scapegoating of Wall Street. In foreign policy he has failed to articulate a role for America in the world. We don't know why we do what we do in foreign affairs. George W. Bush at least made a valiant stab at an American rationale—democratization—but with Mr. Obama there is nothing.

...But Barack Obama is not an "other" so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying "otherness" but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.

Bad faith in America became virtuous in the '60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the "imperialism" of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the '60s: that America was characterologically evil. Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was America's natural default position...

"Hope and Change" positioned Mr. Obama as a conduit between an old America worn down by its evil inclinations and a new America redeemed of those inclinations. There was no vision of the future in "Hope and Change." It is an expression of bad faith in America, but its great ingenuity was to turn that bad faith into political motivation, into votes.

But there is a limit to bad faith as power, and Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party may have now reached that limit. The great weakness of bad faith is that it disallows American exceptionalism as a rationale for power. It puts Mr. Obama and the Democrats in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great nation. They bet on America's characterological evil and not on her sense of fairness, generosity or ingenuity.

When bad faith is your framework (Michelle Obama never being proud of her country until it supported her husband), then you become more a national scold than a real leader. You lead out of a feeling that your opposition is really only the latest incarnation of that old characterological evil that you always knew was there. Thus the tea party—despite all the evidence to the contrary—is seen as racist and bigoted.

But isn't the tea party, on some level, a reaction to a president who seems not to fully trust the fundamental decency of the American people? Doesn't the tea party fill a void left open by Mr. Obama's ethos of bad faith? Aren't tea partiers, and their many fellow travelers, simply saying that American exceptionalism isn't racism? And if the mainstream media see tea partiers as bumpkins and racists, isn't this just more bad faith—characterizing people as ignorant or evil so as to dismiss them?

Our great presidents have been stewards, men who broadly identified with the whole of America. Stewardship meant responsibility even for those segments of America where one might be reviled. Surely Mr. Obama would claim such stewardship. But he has functioned more as a redeemer than a steward, a leader who sees a badness in us from which we must be redeemed. Many Americans are afraid of this because a mandate as grandiose as redemption justifies a vast expansion of government. A redeemer can't just tweak and guide a faltering economy; he will need a trillion- dollar stimulus package. He can't take on health care a step at a time; he must do it all at once, finally mandating that every citizen buy in.

Next week's election is, among other things, a referendum on the idea of president-as- redeemer. We have a president so determined to transform and redeem us from what we are that, by his own words, he is willing to risk being a one-term president. People now wonder if Barack Obama can pivot back to the center like Bill Clinton did after his set-back in '94. But Mr. Clinton was already a steward, a policy wonk, a man of the center. Mr. Obama has to change archetypes. READ AT WSJ

It's Not Extremist Muslims-It's The Everyday Muslims

2010-10-25T17:52:00.000-07:00

Maybe our television commentators should know what they are talking about. Take the example of the latest blow up on the small screen. Two women who know nothing about what they are talking about - most of the time - blew up and walked out on O'Reilly who was a guest on their "The View" show. Why? Because he dared utter that Muslims did 9/11 and did not say "extremists". Let's get one thing straight. The Muslim religion demands Jihad from all Muslims. It is part of their religion. While the West has tamed Cristianity, Muslims have NOT tamed their religion. It is part of their duty to do Jihad.

A shocking statistic states that some 43,000 people have been murdered worldwide by about 17,000 Jihadists. That is a slaughter and the West is not doing enough to squelch this scourge. Los Angeles Times national correspondent Terry McDermott writes the following at Investors.com

Islamofascism: O'Reilly, Whoopi and Joy are all wrong. The 9/11 terrorists weren't "Muslim extremists" or just plain "Muslims." A liberal newspaper reporter says they were model Muslims.

More precisely, they were "perfect soldiers" for Allah, says Los Angeles Times national correspondent Terry McDermott.

He would know. After traveling to the hometowns of the Muslim hijackers and investigating their family backgrounds, McDermott discovered they were not heretics or even "extremists," but in fact good, pious Muslims. And their families and communities encouraged them to join the never-ending Islamic holy war, or jihad, against us.

The lefties at NPR who fired analyst Juan Williams and the cackling hens on "The View" who walked out on his Fox colleague Bill O'Reilly would benefit enormously from reading his book, "Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It." It would open their PC-encrusted eyes to a truth that is already self-evident to most Americans.

The detail-rich book — which is endorsed by anti-war gadfly Seymour Hersh, no less — reveals that the 19 hijackers did not "hijack Islam," as conventional East Coast wisdom would have it. They weren't career criminals using the religion as an excuse to wantonly murder people. Nor were they misled into martyrdom by Osama bin Laden or other Svengali personalities.

On the contrary, they were deeply religious Muslims following the tenets of their faith, McDermott found. Most of them were from well-off families.

"Several were described as among the best boys — bright, respectful — in their towns," he reports in his book. "Many had gone to university," he adds. "Three had studied Islamic law." At least one, Ahmed al-Haznawi, had memorized the Quran, a sign of deep devotion much respected by Muslim elders. In fact, he earned the honorary religious title of "hafiz" at a young age.

McDermott describes how another hijacker, Wail al-Shehri left home to train for jihad in Afghanistan after a long period of recitation of Quranic verses. He had the approval of a local imam.

But he wasn't the only one who knew what they were planning. "Two-thirds of them told their families they were leaving to join the jihad," McDermott writes, adding that their families did not discourage them. "They went where they were called by their religion."

That's not the story we heard after 9/11. In media interviews, the parents of the hijackers expressed shock about the deeds of their sons. We must have the wrong men, they insisted. Their boys could never do such a thing. Jihad? What jihad?

Take Egyptian Mohamed el-Amir, father of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta. Right after 9/11, he denied knowing anything about his son's activities. Then in 2005, after the London bombings, he confided to a CNN producer in his apartment in the upper-class Cairo suburb of Giza that his son had done a good thing and that the London suicide bombers were following in his footsteps. He said all this was just the start of a 50-year religious war, and that there would be many more fighters like his son.

El-Amir, a "skilled lawyer" by McDermott's account, declared that terror cells around the world were a "nuclear bomb that has now been activated and is ticking." He passionately vowed that he would do anything within his power to encourage more attacks.

Instead of mouthing tolerant-sounding platitudes and misleading their audiences about the true nature of the threat we still face, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar and NPR's executives should educate themselves. They can start with McDermott's "Perfect Soldiers," which punctures the politically correct mythology surrounding 9/11.

Is Our Science Getting "Sovietized"?

2010-10-23T06:52:00.001-07:00

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.

Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.<

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal

The Day Of Reckoning - November 2, 2010

2010-10-20T16:10:00.000-07:00

November has to be a referendum on FREEDOM! Freedom from government messing with our lives and our futures. Get out of our lives and leave us alone ....Here is an essay by Rob Tracinski at "The Intellectual Activist".

Time to Show the Democrats Who's Boss
by Robert Tracinski

With only two weeks left until November 2, it's time to give my official election recommendation.

For regular readers, there will hardly be any suspense about what I'm going to say. I advocate a straight Republican vote, across the board. It is imperative to vote the Democrats out of power and to do so by a historic margin, as a sweeping and unmistakable national repudiation.

November 2 is not just an election day. It is a day of reckoning.

The Democratic Party faces a reckoning for using the financial crisis as a pretext for a government takeover of the economy and for the exercise of raw, unchecked, arbitrary power. It faces a reckoning for spending trillions of dollars of money we haven't even earned yet on a wish-list of big-government programs and paybacks to the public employees' unions. It faces a reckoning for engineering the government takeover of whole industries and for expropriating the rights of bond-holders in order to favor the interests of unions. It faces a reckoning for acting as if there are no constitutional limits on government power, as if they can do anything they like to us so long as they tell us it's for the "general welfare."

The Democratic Party faces a reckoning for not being "shovel-ready"—for being effective only at preventing private economic activity—for enacting, in the first weeks of the new Congress, a stimulus bill that swiftly succeeded in bankrupting the country, but which failed to stimulate anything other than the bloated pensions of state employees and the six-figure incomes of federal bureaucrats.

And most of all, it faces a reckoning for passing a trillion-dollar takeover of our health care against our will and over our loudly expressed objections.

The Democratic Party faces a reckoning for showing contempt for the governed—for telling us that they had to pass the bill so that we could find out what was in it, as if we were too stupid to analyze it for ourselves—for smearing ideological opponents as racists—for regarding all the bitter clingers in flyover country as mentally defective because, in the words of President Obama, they're "hard-wired not to always think clearly" when the issues get too difficult for their poor little heads.

The Democrats face a reckoning for trying to revive the basic principle of aristocracy: the idea that there is a small elite in the nation's capital who know better than us how we ought to work and think and who are therefore entitled to run our lives and spend our money.

This is what needs to be repudiated. If the Democrats are allowed to keep control of Congress after so openly defying the will of the American people, then they will be emboldened to initiate a new and even broader round of assaults on our liberty. And at this point, with expectations high for Republican gains, if Democrats lose control of Congress by a small margin, they will think they got a reprieve and they may be motivated to cling to their agenda for the final two years of Obama's presidency.

They need to be shown who's boss. They need to taught, in a way they will remember for decades, that they answer to the people. We need a Democratic loss that will go down in the history books, one that will stun even the most pessimistic Democrats. They have to realize they are up against a broad historical movement and not just a temporary off-year protest against incumbents.

We need to make this election into the opening shot of a second American Revolution.
This is why I'm offering my recommendation two weeks before election, because it is important not just to vote for Republican and against Democrats. It is important to make November's victory as big as possible by doing whatever you can to aid Republican congressional campaigns. There is still time for your campaign donations to make a difference in close races, and now is the perfect time to offer your services as a volunteer, particularly for the "get out the vote" operation. We need to bring as many pro-liberty voters to the polls as possible, to ensure a massive advantage in turnout that buries the Democrats.

This is also no time for third-party protest candidates. If you want to send a message to the Republican Party to reform itself—well, we already had an opportunity in the primaries, and we did a pretty good job of it. We'll get another good opportunity in the 2012 primaries. But now is the time to support your local Republican candidate even if he is uninspiring—because at least he will be susceptible to pressure from the Tea Parties and from pro-liberty voters, whereas the Democrats have demonstrated that they will simply ignore us.

And he will be susceptible to pressure from a Tea Party Caucus of small-government radicals in Congress, including a number of congressmen who are influenced by Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. These are the Republicans—I've profiled many of them in TIA Daily, and I'll continue to do so in the final weeks—who deserve our positive, fully enthusiastic support. One of the ways you can support them is to send them to Congress as part of a strong congressional majority in which they will wield outsized influence.

With a committed leftist still in the White House, it is crucial to have a powerful, radicalized Republican majority in Congress as a counter-balance to the vast arbitrary authority of the modern presidency. We can expect an unrepentant and unreformed President Obama to try to bypass the new Congress, imposing his agenda through the vast authority of executive-branch regulatory agencies. The EPA is already preparing a system of energy rationing more draconian than "cap-and-trade," which they are ready to impose with no specific authorization from Congress. The only thing that can prevent this is a significant effort by the Republicans to reclaim that constitutional authority of Congress. The REINS Act would be a good start.

The issue here is whether there are any limits on government power—whether the Constitution is a limit and whether the consent of the governed in a limit. In the past two years, the Democrats have made their position on constitutional government clear: they are against it. The Republicans are mixed, but their party contains the only Washington contingent of constitutionalists, and they must be put into power.

The best analogy to the current situation is the old story about the frog in a pot of water, who doesn't notice as the heat is gradually turned up until he is boiled alive. President Obama turned up the heat a little too fast, and a lot of voters have suddenly begun to notice: this water is boiling. And they're not going to be content with just turning it down to a low simmer. I think a significant portion of the public has woken up to the fact that we've been losing our liberty for a century and we're on the brink of socialism. The first step is the pull back from the brink, and the next step is to begin pulling back the government to within its narrow constitutional limits.
In that respect, this election not the end of the struggle for liberty. It is the beginning—and let's make it a strong beginning.

Just as Freedom and Prosperity are Linked - Unfreedom and Poverty are Linked as Well

2010-10-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

The top 10 countries in economic freedom and prosperity. Are you surprised that America is not in 1st place? Really - you are surprised? Where have you been the last 80 years?

Rank Country Overall Change

1 Hong Kong 89.7 -0.3
2 Singapore 86.1 -1.0
3 Australia 82.6 0.0
4 New Zealand 82.1 0.1
5 Ireland 81.3 -0.9
6 Switzerland 81.1 1.7
7 Canada 80.4 -0.1
8 United States 78.0 -2.7
9 Denmark 77.9 -1.7
10 Chile 77.2 -1.1

View full list »