With all the talk about "disparities" in innumerable contexts, there is one very important disparity that gets remarkably little attention -- disparities in the ability to create wealth. People who are preoccupied, or even obsessed, with disparities in income are seldom interested much, or at all, in the disparities in the ability to create wealth, which are often the reasons for the disparities in income.
In a market economy, people pay us for benefiting them in some way -- whether we are sweeping their floors, selling them diamonds or anything in between. Disparities in our ability to create benefits for which others will pay us are huge, and the skills required can develop early -- or sometimes not at all.
A recent national competition among high school students who create their own technological advances turned up an especially high share of such students winning recognition in the San Francisco Bay Area. A closer look showed that the great majority of these Bay Area students had Asian names.
Asian Americans are a substantial presence in this region but they are by no means a majority, much less such an overwhelming majority as they are among those winning high tech awards.
This pattern of disproportionate representation of particular groups among those with special skills and achievements is not confined to Asian Americans or even to the United States.
It is a phenomenon among particular racial, ethnic or other groups in countries around the world -- the Ibos in Nigeria, the Parsees in India, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Germans in Brazil, Chinese in Malaysia, Lebanese in West Africa, Tamils in Sri Lanka. The list goes on and on.
Gross inequalities in skills and achievements have been the rule, not the exception, on every inhabited continent and for centuries on end.
Yet our laws and government policies act as if any significant statistical difference between racial or ethnic groups in employment or income can only be a result of their being treated differently by others.
Nor is this simply an opinion. Businesses have been sued by the government when the representation of different groups among their employees differs substantially from their proportions in the population at large. But, no matter how the human race is broken down into its components -- whether by race, sex, geographic region or whatever -- glaring disparities in achievements have been the rule, not the exception.
Anyone who watches professional basketball games knows that the star players are by no means a representative sample of the population at large. The book "Human Accomplishment" by Charles Murray is a huge compendium of the top achievements around the world in the arts and sciences, as well as in sports and other fields.
Nowhere have these achievements been random or representative of the demographic proportions of the population of a country or of the world. Nor have they been the same from one century to the next. China was once far more advanced technologically than any country in Europe, but then it fell behind and more recently is gaining ground.
Most professional golfers who participate in PGA tournaments have never won a single tournament, but Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods have each won dozens of tournaments.
Yet these and numerous other disparities in achievement are resolutely ignored by those whose shrill voices denounce disparities in rewards, as if these disparities are somehow suspicious at best and sinister at worst.
Higher achieving groups -- whether classes, races or whatever -- are often blamed for the failure of other groups to achieve. Politicians and intellectuals, especially, tend to conceive of social questions in terms that allow them to take on the role of being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.
This can be a huge disservice to those individuals and groups who are lagging behind, for it leads them to focus on a sense of grievance and victimhood, rather than on how they can lift themselves up instead of trying to pull other people down.
Again, this is a worldwide phenomenon -- a sad commentary on the down side of the brotherhood of man.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
TS - Random Thoughts 01-16
Random thoughts on the passing scene:
Talk show host Dennis Miller said, "I don't dig polo. It's like miniature golf meets the Kentucky Derby."
Nothing illustrates the superficiality of our times better than the enthusiasm for electric cars, because they are supposed to greatly reduce air pollution. But the electricity that ultimately powers these cars has to be generated somewhere -- and nearly half the electricity generated in this country is generated by burning coal.
The 2012 Republican primaries may be a rerun of the 2008 primaries, where the various conservative candidates split the conservative vote so many ways that the candidate of the mushy middle got the nomination -- and then lost the election.
Because morality does not always prevail, by any means, too many of the intelligentsia act as if it has no effect. But, even in Nazi Germany, thousands of Germans hid Jews during the war, at the risk of their own lives, because it was the right thing to do.
In recent times, Christmas has brought not only holiday cheer but also attacks on the very word "Christmas," chasing it from the vocabulary of institutions and even from most "holiday cards." Like many other social crusades, this one is based on a lie -- namely that the Constitution puts a wall of separation between church and state. It also shows how easily intimidated we are by strident zealots.
If you don't like growing older, don't worry about it. You may not be growing older much longer.
What do you call it when someone steals someone else's money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.
When an organization has more of its decisions made by committees, that gives more influence to those who have more time available to attend committee meetings and to drag out each meeting longer. In other words, it reduces the influence of those who have work to do, and are doing it, while making those who are less productive more influential.
Anyone who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them -- instead of answering their arguments.
The wisest and most knowledgeable human being on the planet is utterly incompetent to make even 10 percent of the consequential decisions that have to be made in a modern nation. Yet all sorts of people want to decide how much money other people can make or keep, and to micro-manage how other people live their lives.
The real egalitarians are not the people who want to redistribute wealth to the poor, but those who want to extend to the poor the ability to create their own wealth, to lift themselves up, instead of trying to tear others down. Earning respect, including self-respect, is better than being a parasite.
Of all the arguments for giving amnesty to illegal immigrants, the most foolish is the argument that we can't find and expel all of them. There is not a law on the books that someone has not violated, including laws against murder, and we certainly have not found and prosecuted all the violators -- whether murderers or traffic law violators. But do we then legalize all the illegalities we haven't been able to detect and prosecute?
In the 1920s, Congressman Thomas S. Adams referred to "the ease with which the income tax may be legally avoided" but also said some Congressmen "so fervently believe that the rich ought to pay 40 or 50 per cent of their incomes" in taxes that they would rather make this a law, even if the government would get more revenue from a lower tax rate that people actually pay. Some also prefer class warfare politics that brings in votes, if not revenue.
Can you imagine a man who had never run any kind of organization, large or small, taking it upon himself to fundamentally change all kinds of organizations in a huge and complex economy? Yet that is what Barack Obama did when he said, "We are going to change the United States of America!" This was not "The Audacity of Hope." It was the audacity of hype.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM
Talk show host Dennis Miller said, "I don't dig polo. It's like miniature golf meets the Kentucky Derby."
Nothing illustrates the superficiality of our times better than the enthusiasm for electric cars, because they are supposed to greatly reduce air pollution. But the electricity that ultimately powers these cars has to be generated somewhere -- and nearly half the electricity generated in this country is generated by burning coal.
The 2012 Republican primaries may be a rerun of the 2008 primaries, where the various conservative candidates split the conservative vote so many ways that the candidate of the mushy middle got the nomination -- and then lost the election.
Because morality does not always prevail, by any means, too many of the intelligentsia act as if it has no effect. But, even in Nazi Germany, thousands of Germans hid Jews during the war, at the risk of their own lives, because it was the right thing to do.
In recent times, Christmas has brought not only holiday cheer but also attacks on the very word "Christmas," chasing it from the vocabulary of institutions and even from most "holiday cards." Like many other social crusades, this one is based on a lie -- namely that the Constitution puts a wall of separation between church and state. It also shows how easily intimidated we are by strident zealots.
If you don't like growing older, don't worry about it. You may not be growing older much longer.
What do you call it when someone steals someone else's money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.
When an organization has more of its decisions made by committees, that gives more influence to those who have more time available to attend committee meetings and to drag out each meeting longer. In other words, it reduces the influence of those who have work to do, and are doing it, while making those who are less productive more influential.
Anyone who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them -- instead of answering their arguments.
The wisest and most knowledgeable human being on the planet is utterly incompetent to make even 10 percent of the consequential decisions that have to be made in a modern nation. Yet all sorts of people want to decide how much money other people can make or keep, and to micro-manage how other people live their lives.
The real egalitarians are not the people who want to redistribute wealth to the poor, but those who want to extend to the poor the ability to create their own wealth, to lift themselves up, instead of trying to tear others down. Earning respect, including self-respect, is better than being a parasite.
Of all the arguments for giving amnesty to illegal immigrants, the most foolish is the argument that we can't find and expel all of them. There is not a law on the books that someone has not violated, including laws against murder, and we certainly have not found and prosecuted all the violators -- whether murderers or traffic law violators. But do we then legalize all the illegalities we haven't been able to detect and prosecute?
In the 1920s, Congressman Thomas S. Adams referred to "the ease with which the income tax may be legally avoided" but also said some Congressmen "so fervently believe that the rich ought to pay 40 or 50 per cent of their incomes" in taxes that they would rather make this a law, even if the government would get more revenue from a lower tax rate that people actually pay. Some also prefer class warfare politics that brings in votes, if not revenue.
Can you imagine a man who had never run any kind of organization, large or small, taking it upon himself to fundamentally change all kinds of organizations in a huge and complex economy? Yet that is what Barack Obama did when he said, "We are going to change the United States of America!" This was not "The Audacity of Hope." It was the audacity of hype.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM
Saturday, January 14, 2012
SL 01-13-2012
Time to Wake Up
January 13, 2012
As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America
By Seth Leibsohn
Given the news of the last few weeks, I have to confess for the first time in a long time I’m scratching my head. This was supposed to be our year. Everything we have done since President Obama’s inauguration was to culminate in 2012, to ensure he would be the last lesson of a failed experiment in left wing governance.
I have long-maintained that people had forgotten what a left-wing President was, they had forgotten the Jimmy Carter years and that if anything good would have come out of the Obama presidency, the one-term Obama presidency, it would have been a reminder to us of seven words: We Never Need To Do This Again. And yet here we are, after the takeback of the House in 2010, after electing Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey and a Republican to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat, after all the organizing and import of the Tea Parties, here we are with most of the major Republican nominees tearing themselves up and almost all of the national polls showing Obama beating our candidate, whoever he is (with the exception of two distant outliers).
Let us start with the attacks or the challenge to Mitt Romney on Bain Capital. Of course Bain is fair game. As has been pointed out, when you make your resume or any specific part of your resume, a campaign point, you fairly open it up to challenge. And you want that resume vetted before the general election. That said, three things more need to be stated. I) Of course not every business is to be beyond criticism and it is ridiculous to argue that a challenge to how one business or industry conducts its affairs is an attack on capitalism itself. Do we truly want to say certain companies, legal companies, even lucrative, profit-driven companies are beyond any and every level of criticism and that if they are criticized that is an attack on capitalism? When some of us challenged Hollywood and the music industry for the filth they were putting out, glamorizing drugs or sex or violence, that we were attacking capitalism? Of course not.
II) Having said that, this should mean that there can be a challenge to Mitt Romney’s stewardship of or the work of Bain Capital. And if it is to be defended, it is up to Mitt Romney who has made it a chief part of his political resume, or business background, to stand up for his work at Bain. He has yet to convincingly do that. There is a defense of Bain, I’m sure of it because I’ve heard parts of it…But from others. It will do no good to have a candidate in the general election or President of the United States who relies on others to defend his positions. We have had quite enough in previous experience of outsourcing our rhetoric. So the message there is either Mitt Romney needs to start making a convincing case for his experience now that it has been challenged (and I mean responsible challenges, not Michael Moore-type challenges) or he needs to talk about something else to bolster his credentials. The truth is, he has said that as a businessman he knows how to create jobs. Let’s hear more, much more, beyond that talking point—especially now that it has been questioned.
III). That all said, I have to borrow from Barry Goldwater in saying “Let’s grow up, conservatives.” We all want someone who can take it to Obama. And we want to give Independents and Reagan Democrats and those not already planning to vote Republican, because they are self-identified Republicans, a reason to vote for our candidate and against President Obama. Here, I salute Rick Santorum for not making his case based on Romney and Bain. And sure, yes, Ron Paul, too: These are conviction politicians. You know well where they stand and they have stayed focused on their case for themselves and against Obama. Paul is beyond the pale on many fronts, however, actually to the left of Obama on many issues from foreign to defense to domestic policy—and this is all I am going to say in praise of him: At least he sticks to his case.
But we now face an election where it is time for the candidates to stand on their own platforms, for their own cases, and show us what they have against Obama. Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman have done reasonable work for most of their campaigns to do that. They haven’t in the past few weeks, however. And so now we are cannibalizing ourselves. And Mitt Romney has not shown he can defend himself against such a campaign either. That should all be telling. Because there is a fourth point and it is this:
Obama needs to go, and our race is not over. Yes, of course, Romney seems like the front runner, and he seems that way because he is—in every poll, in money, and by almost every other calculation. But that is not all there is, and he is not all there is. We don’t coronate—or shouldn’t. And if you can’t defend your biggest calling card on your curriculum vitae, you have a problem. Bill Kristol put it best this week, saying this:
[A]fter winning by eight votes in Iowa, getting 40 percent of the vote in his basically, his second home state… this race is not over. It's just not, 25 percent and 40 percent in two states and everyone else is supposed to go, oh, sorry, we have to go home. That is not going to happen….The fact that the delegates are proportionally allocated, most delegates are not Romney delegates. Most delegates in Iowa were not Romney delegates and most the delegates in New Hampshire where he got 40 will end up not being Romney delegates….The media here is desperate to end this thing. Two states voted. There are 48 left. Let's end it. Let's call the football season off after the first two games.
So it’s not over yet. This puts an extra-heavy civilizational, democratic, and election burden on the voters of South Carolina and Florida now. I hope they do their due diligence and think long and hard about who the best candidate will be to attract other voters and beat Barack Obama in a general election. My own thoughts are that I think the party, just now, deserves a Romney – Santorum race. That is how we typically do it: an establishment figure versus a different kind of Republican. Sometimes it goes to the establishment figure and sometimes not.
But the point now is this: We have the worst foreign and defense and domestic policy president in recent memory, perhaps in my lifetime, and we are not on track to beat him right now—even after all our post-2009 efforts.
Here is the case, or at least a case: When President Obama was inaugurated, the average price of a gallon of gas was $1.85. Today it is well over three dollars. Is that an accident? You tell me. In September of 2008, Steven Chu said “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Three months later he was made our Secretary of Energy. In his second month in office, President Obama’s Interior Secretary cancelled 77 domestic oil and gas leases. Knowing of our domestic energy reserves that could take us off foreign oil and put us on a path to energy independence and increase employment all at once, did this President facilitate that? No. He gave us yet more moratoria. And just two months ago, President Obama turned his back on a job-packed Canadian deal to bring more oil to the United States from Canada. Result: no 20,000 jobs for the XL Oil pipeline, less oil from an ally, and the upsetting of our Canadian allies.
When President Obama was inaugurated, the Misery Index (inflation plus unemployment) stood at 7.8. The lower it is, the better. It went well over 12 points last year and sits at 12 points right now. It hit a 28 point high under President Obama. When President Obama was inaugurated, unemployment was 7.8. His policies, his advisors told us, would keep unemployment from reaching beyond 8 percent. We got Obama’s policies and unemployment went to over 10 percent and it is well over 8 percent now—and the only reason it is not higher is because so many have simply taken themselves out of the calculation, having given up looking for full time employment.
When President Obama was inaugurated, our national debt was 10.6 trillion dollars. Today it is over 15 trillion dollars. There is much more to say here, from attacking the State of Arizona for trying to stop illegal immigration rather than trying to stop illegal immigration to mandating that each and every American purchase something each and every American may not want to purchase. And setting a very dangerous precedent with such a law.
Going to war but avoiding going to Congress; voiding law passed by Congress and previous presidents. All kinds of constitutional violations.
And on the foreign and defense policy fronts, so much to say there too: From cutting our defense budget as he makes the needs for our defense so much the greater. From helping turn Egypt from an ally to an enemy and bolstering the Muslim Brotherhood to siding with Iran’s mullacracy when the people on the street in Iran had a brief, shining moment to change their government toward the better. From canceling our missile defense systems in Europe and upsetting our Czech and Polish allies while disarming ourselves in our arsenal against Russia. From blaming Israel for its quest to defend itself and dictating to it her borders and comparing its policies to apartheid while its enemies (and ours) continued to launch attacks against her. From snubbing the Dalai Lama to snubbing the British Prime Minister. And then there is Iraq and Afghanistan.
Starting next week, I am going to be tolling the human cost of our precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. For now, just recall this in Afghanistan: We are now negotiating with the Taliban, the very organization that gave safe haven to al-Qaeda, worked cheek to jowl with them, and brought us 9/11.
I will conclude with the under-reported story out of Iran this week. Fact: An Iranian nuclear engineer responsible for helping build an Iranian nuclear bomb was killed there this week. Fact: Iran wants to wipe Israel and the United States off the face of the earth. Fact: Iran is an enemy of ours that has killed countless Americans and supported terrorism that has killed countless more. Fact: There is an American hostage in Iran right now who has been sentenced to death. Fact: We don’t know who killed the engineer. Fact: Israel is an ally of ours and is the first target of Iran with the United States being the second. Fact: Iran blamed Israel and the United States for the killing. And Fact: The State Department condemned the killing, and left Israel out to dry while telling Iran—yet again—we are not serious about what they are doing.
Let me give you the quotes:
Hillary Clinton: "I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran." Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council spokesman, added: "The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this. We strongly condemn all acts of violence, including acts of violence like this." Victoria Nuland, Clinton's spokeswoman, said the state department condemned "any assassination or attack on an innocent person and we express our sympathies to the family.”
We can engage in drone attacks and targeted killings, even in countries not at war with us, even against American enemies of the state; but against Iran we take Iran’s side and in the process put Israel in greater danger by siding against her and with Iran and its complaint. The dictionary leaves me speechless to describe this kind of thinking.
That is but the very beginning of our case-but nowhere near a comprehensive statement of it. It is not Bain Capital. It is not that Rick Santorum lost one race in the worst year for Republicans in recent memory. It is not Newt Gingrich’s pugnacity. It is, instead, the weakening of America. We cannot afford four more years of even part of the Obama indictment, and yet we are not now on the path to making our case. Indeed, conservatives, let’s grow up.
January 13, 2012
As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America
By Seth Leibsohn
Given the news of the last few weeks, I have to confess for the first time in a long time I’m scratching my head. This was supposed to be our year. Everything we have done since President Obama’s inauguration was to culminate in 2012, to ensure he would be the last lesson of a failed experiment in left wing governance.
I have long-maintained that people had forgotten what a left-wing President was, they had forgotten the Jimmy Carter years and that if anything good would have come out of the Obama presidency, the one-term Obama presidency, it would have been a reminder to us of seven words: We Never Need To Do This Again. And yet here we are, after the takeback of the House in 2010, after electing Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey and a Republican to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat, after all the organizing and import of the Tea Parties, here we are with most of the major Republican nominees tearing themselves up and almost all of the national polls showing Obama beating our candidate, whoever he is (with the exception of two distant outliers).
Let us start with the attacks or the challenge to Mitt Romney on Bain Capital. Of course Bain is fair game. As has been pointed out, when you make your resume or any specific part of your resume, a campaign point, you fairly open it up to challenge. And you want that resume vetted before the general election. That said, three things more need to be stated. I) Of course not every business is to be beyond criticism and it is ridiculous to argue that a challenge to how one business or industry conducts its affairs is an attack on capitalism itself. Do we truly want to say certain companies, legal companies, even lucrative, profit-driven companies are beyond any and every level of criticism and that if they are criticized that is an attack on capitalism? When some of us challenged Hollywood and the music industry for the filth they were putting out, glamorizing drugs or sex or violence, that we were attacking capitalism? Of course not.
II) Having said that, this should mean that there can be a challenge to Mitt Romney’s stewardship of or the work of Bain Capital. And if it is to be defended, it is up to Mitt Romney who has made it a chief part of his political resume, or business background, to stand up for his work at Bain. He has yet to convincingly do that. There is a defense of Bain, I’m sure of it because I’ve heard parts of it…But from others. It will do no good to have a candidate in the general election or President of the United States who relies on others to defend his positions. We have had quite enough in previous experience of outsourcing our rhetoric. So the message there is either Mitt Romney needs to start making a convincing case for his experience now that it has been challenged (and I mean responsible challenges, not Michael Moore-type challenges) or he needs to talk about something else to bolster his credentials. The truth is, he has said that as a businessman he knows how to create jobs. Let’s hear more, much more, beyond that talking point—especially now that it has been questioned.
III). That all said, I have to borrow from Barry Goldwater in saying “Let’s grow up, conservatives.” We all want someone who can take it to Obama. And we want to give Independents and Reagan Democrats and those not already planning to vote Republican, because they are self-identified Republicans, a reason to vote for our candidate and against President Obama. Here, I salute Rick Santorum for not making his case based on Romney and Bain. And sure, yes, Ron Paul, too: These are conviction politicians. You know well where they stand and they have stayed focused on their case for themselves and against Obama. Paul is beyond the pale on many fronts, however, actually to the left of Obama on many issues from foreign to defense to domestic policy—and this is all I am going to say in praise of him: At least he sticks to his case.
But we now face an election where it is time for the candidates to stand on their own platforms, for their own cases, and show us what they have against Obama. Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman have done reasonable work for most of their campaigns to do that. They haven’t in the past few weeks, however. And so now we are cannibalizing ourselves. And Mitt Romney has not shown he can defend himself against such a campaign either. That should all be telling. Because there is a fourth point and it is this:
Obama needs to go, and our race is not over. Yes, of course, Romney seems like the front runner, and he seems that way because he is—in every poll, in money, and by almost every other calculation. But that is not all there is, and he is not all there is. We don’t coronate—or shouldn’t. And if you can’t defend your biggest calling card on your curriculum vitae, you have a problem. Bill Kristol put it best this week, saying this:
[A]fter winning by eight votes in Iowa, getting 40 percent of the vote in his basically, his second home state… this race is not over. It's just not, 25 percent and 40 percent in two states and everyone else is supposed to go, oh, sorry, we have to go home. That is not going to happen….The fact that the delegates are proportionally allocated, most delegates are not Romney delegates. Most delegates in Iowa were not Romney delegates and most the delegates in New Hampshire where he got 40 will end up not being Romney delegates….The media here is desperate to end this thing. Two states voted. There are 48 left. Let's end it. Let's call the football season off after the first two games.
So it’s not over yet. This puts an extra-heavy civilizational, democratic, and election burden on the voters of South Carolina and Florida now. I hope they do their due diligence and think long and hard about who the best candidate will be to attract other voters and beat Barack Obama in a general election. My own thoughts are that I think the party, just now, deserves a Romney – Santorum race. That is how we typically do it: an establishment figure versus a different kind of Republican. Sometimes it goes to the establishment figure and sometimes not.
But the point now is this: We have the worst foreign and defense and domestic policy president in recent memory, perhaps in my lifetime, and we are not on track to beat him right now—even after all our post-2009 efforts.
Here is the case, or at least a case: When President Obama was inaugurated, the average price of a gallon of gas was $1.85. Today it is well over three dollars. Is that an accident? You tell me. In September of 2008, Steven Chu said “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Three months later he was made our Secretary of Energy. In his second month in office, President Obama’s Interior Secretary cancelled 77 domestic oil and gas leases. Knowing of our domestic energy reserves that could take us off foreign oil and put us on a path to energy independence and increase employment all at once, did this President facilitate that? No. He gave us yet more moratoria. And just two months ago, President Obama turned his back on a job-packed Canadian deal to bring more oil to the United States from Canada. Result: no 20,000 jobs for the XL Oil pipeline, less oil from an ally, and the upsetting of our Canadian allies.
When President Obama was inaugurated, the Misery Index (inflation plus unemployment) stood at 7.8. The lower it is, the better. It went well over 12 points last year and sits at 12 points right now. It hit a 28 point high under President Obama. When President Obama was inaugurated, unemployment was 7.8. His policies, his advisors told us, would keep unemployment from reaching beyond 8 percent. We got Obama’s policies and unemployment went to over 10 percent and it is well over 8 percent now—and the only reason it is not higher is because so many have simply taken themselves out of the calculation, having given up looking for full time employment.
When President Obama was inaugurated, our national debt was 10.6 trillion dollars. Today it is over 15 trillion dollars. There is much more to say here, from attacking the State of Arizona for trying to stop illegal immigration rather than trying to stop illegal immigration to mandating that each and every American purchase something each and every American may not want to purchase. And setting a very dangerous precedent with such a law.
Going to war but avoiding going to Congress; voiding law passed by Congress and previous presidents. All kinds of constitutional violations.
And on the foreign and defense policy fronts, so much to say there too: From cutting our defense budget as he makes the needs for our defense so much the greater. From helping turn Egypt from an ally to an enemy and bolstering the Muslim Brotherhood to siding with Iran’s mullacracy when the people on the street in Iran had a brief, shining moment to change their government toward the better. From canceling our missile defense systems in Europe and upsetting our Czech and Polish allies while disarming ourselves in our arsenal against Russia. From blaming Israel for its quest to defend itself and dictating to it her borders and comparing its policies to apartheid while its enemies (and ours) continued to launch attacks against her. From snubbing the Dalai Lama to snubbing the British Prime Minister. And then there is Iraq and Afghanistan.
Starting next week, I am going to be tolling the human cost of our precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. For now, just recall this in Afghanistan: We are now negotiating with the Taliban, the very organization that gave safe haven to al-Qaeda, worked cheek to jowl with them, and brought us 9/11.
I will conclude with the under-reported story out of Iran this week. Fact: An Iranian nuclear engineer responsible for helping build an Iranian nuclear bomb was killed there this week. Fact: Iran wants to wipe Israel and the United States off the face of the earth. Fact: Iran is an enemy of ours that has killed countless Americans and supported terrorism that has killed countless more. Fact: There is an American hostage in Iran right now who has been sentenced to death. Fact: We don’t know who killed the engineer. Fact: Israel is an ally of ours and is the first target of Iran with the United States being the second. Fact: Iran blamed Israel and the United States for the killing. And Fact: The State Department condemned the killing, and left Israel out to dry while telling Iran—yet again—we are not serious about what they are doing.
Let me give you the quotes:
Hillary Clinton: "I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran." Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council spokesman, added: "The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this. We strongly condemn all acts of violence, including acts of violence like this." Victoria Nuland, Clinton's spokeswoman, said the state department condemned "any assassination or attack on an innocent person and we express our sympathies to the family.”
We can engage in drone attacks and targeted killings, even in countries not at war with us, even against American enemies of the state; but against Iran we take Iran’s side and in the process put Israel in greater danger by siding against her and with Iran and its complaint. The dictionary leaves me speechless to describe this kind of thinking.
That is but the very beginning of our case-but nowhere near a comprehensive statement of it. It is not Bain Capital. It is not that Rick Santorum lost one race in the worst year for Republicans in recent memory. It is not Newt Gingrich’s pugnacity. It is, instead, the weakening of America. We cannot afford four more years of even part of the Obama indictment, and yet we are not now on the path to making our case. Indeed, conservatives, let’s grow up.
Friday, January 13, 2012
VDH - No News Stories of 2011
The No News Stories of 2011
Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On January 1, 2012 @ 10:04 am In Uncategorized | 146 Comments
The German Stereotype
There were lots of stories that left a lot unsaid. The Germany/EU debt imbroglio was one of them. The more Germany’s 80 million people were looked upon to bail out the 120 million of Mediterranean Europe—if not still more in France and Eastern Europe—the more in our politically-correct age we never quite were told how this could be possible.
German Octopuses?
Did Germans not sleep? Did they each have eight arms? Was Germany itself sitting on secret oil reserves? Did it have tons of stolen war gold horded in its vaults (as some Greeks alleged)? Had it harnessed a new type of energy? How strange to be told that Germany was the new heart of Europe but never to be to told how and why?
So how, in fact, did a humiliated Germany of 1919, a Germany after the ashes of 1945, and a Germany stung by a $2 trillion bite in absorbing a ruined East Germany in 1989, find itself—as Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand once feared in 1989—once more adjudicating the history of Europe [1]? Were we terrified of stereotypes that were cruel to Germany (goose-stepping automatons were back again?) or that were cruel to southern Europeans (the Danes and Dutch were likewise solvent in comparison to the siesta-napping, and perennially shouting sunny Mediterraneans)?
Is there such a thing as national character or habit—both having nothing to do with race—in our postmodern age? In the 21st century, can we still say that Germans go to bed when Athenians go to dinner, or that they more likely consider tax cheating theft rather than ingenuity, or that they make things to work well rather than just make things to sell? Is it that when you go into a German bank you are served, and when you go into a Greek counterpart you witness an unending coffee break? Do tiny habits like your bus driver going down the aisle to collect trash versus throwing it out the window add up? When I see two Greek drivers scream and gesticulate at each other in Omonia Square over a tiny fender bender—as four lanes are shut down for their fifteen minutes of machismo — and, in contrast, watch two German drivers on Neuhauser straße in Munich exchange information, shake hands, and help push their dented cars off the road, does all that 1000 times a day also make a difference?
Is there a reason, aside from weather, why one would rather relax for a week in the Aegean than in Berlin, or retire on the Costa del Sol rather than in Bremen? For all the angry op-eds about the unraveling of the EU, no one quite walked us through exactly what Germans do each day that makes them different from other Europeans—although most who have visited Athens and Munich, or walked through Rome and Copenhagen, or sat in a café in Madrid and Frankfurt might be able to offer journalists some help. Of course, throughout 2011, I did read clever essays advising readers about how not to walk into this trap of believing in archaic and stereotyped notions like national character when some esoteric and almost unfathomable “real” cause (Thucydides’s aitia) far better explained the differences.
Iran: If Only …
Iran was another incomplete story this year. As the year ended, the Iranians were once again, in North Korean style, sounding off about their great navy closing the strait of Hormuz, attacking “foreigners” and all the other 1% probability nutcakery that responsible powers must nevertheless prepare for.
Oh, the efforts we go through to explain Iranian hatred of America, as we search endlessly for the “moderates” and remain puzzled over how in the world anyone could not like Barack Obama [2]. Ad nauseam, we hear of 1953, Mossadeq, and the Shah—never that we originally found ourselves involved in Persia not for oil (cf. the British), but in World War II to supply communist Russia against the Germans, and then afterwards to ensure the Russians did not do to Iran what they had done to most of Eastern Europe. From 2007-2009, we heard from Obama about reset and dialogue with Iran, and “face-to-face” negotiations. And we got all that and much more.
Four or five “deadlines” for Iran to cease work on the bomb were ignored. Obama not only was silent when nearly a million protested in the streets of Teheran against the theocracy in spring 2009 (one of the great blunders in American diplomatic history), but he even tried to contextualize his silence with, of course, oblique references to Mossadeq who, like Allende, is forever frozen in leftist amber to be hung as a locket next to the heart. The last three years of reset with Iran had followed thirty years of hostage taking, Hezbollah’s murdering of Americans, subsidization of terrorists to attack Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and various efforts worldwide to hamper U.S. interests.
Why do the Iranians do these things, year after year? To paraphrase Dirty Harry, “Because they like it.” And, of course, it pays. Take away the bomb threats, the terrorism, the hatred of the U.S., and Iran would be an oil-rich Turkey or a bigger version of Kuwait, in the way that Costa Rica is not Cuba or Laos is not in the news like North Korea. Influence, attention, the spotlight, fear, honor—these are not inconsiderable stimuli.
That fact does not mean we must be at war with Iran, but that the government in Teheran has similarities with other violently anti-American regimes in North Korea and Cuba that have long bitter histories with America, a deeply entrenched sense of victimization, and a wildly inflated notion of their own importance—and who all find “outreach” and “reset” a sort of weakness to be despised rather than magnanimity to be appreciated. In short, if Iran were to normalize relations and call off its endless religious war against the West, then hundreds of thousands of otherwise incompetent religious hacks, who are now wealthy and powerful at the helm of their police state, would have to go back to ranting and panting at mini-skirts from the mosque as they returned to the dole. Constant near war is what enriches them, and so why would they give that up for an empowered, free populace and a watchdog press?
Miles To Go
We are now into our twenty-third year of our long struggle with Iran—or around 1972 in Cold War chronology with the Soviets. I would imagine that we might well have another fifteen or twenty years to go before that rotten regime finally collapses. In short, the story of 2011 was, again, that the Iranian government hates us and always will until its own incompetence finally destroys even a huge oil exporting economy—about fifty years in normal dictatorship collapse time (e.g., 1979-2029).
Ah—Those Damn Records Again
There were lots of incomplete stories on the domestic front. From time to time, the media caricatured Rick Perry’s Texas A & M’s aggie Cs as proof that he was “dumb.” Recently Chris Matthews (but, of course) derided Mitt Romney’s privilege by comparison to Barack Obama, “who busted hump” to get into prestigious schools and Harvard Law. (“Busted hump” is now to follow “tingle” from out of Matthews’ creepy Freudian recesses?) Remember in 2008 that John McCain’s lackluster US Naval Academy transcript was supposed to offer proof that he was always an unserious and irascible sort. But the media never finish this silly go-all-the-way-back-to-college narrative by producing Obama’s straight As— to remind us how brilliant academic achievement has now continued with inspired White House leadership. Why is this?
First, the minor, peripheral reasons. The media were burned with the George Bush “dunce” stories of cheerleading at Yale—when it was revealed that both his SAT scores and GPA were as good or better than John Kerry’s. The media also believe that the Ivy League is a certifier, not an institution, of higher disinterested learning. The point is to get in somehow and get out any way possible stamped with the brand—not what you did in between (unless you are a nucular Bush). Most accept that if one is not in chemistry, engineering, math, etc., then one can coast in the humanities or social sciences in the Ivy League without a lot of work. Flunking out as a sociology or political science major at Yale or Stanford is a lot harder to do than flunking out with the same major at Ohio State or Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.
Or is it that Obama was a straight-A student and is holding back on the release of his transcript for the right moment to embarrass critics, in the way he did the sudden “birther” Donald Trump? Are the hidden straight As a complex political IED that will blow up in the face of any who jump upon it? Not likely, but to be fair I had to raise the possibility.
All of which gets us to the real story that was never reported on:
1) Barack Obama simply does not expect to follow normal political customs and traditions because he knows the media do not expect him to: he will not release the transcripts because he does not have to and it is his pleasure not to, in the way he did not worry about explaining [3] his near worship of his racist pastor of twenty years, or being the first to renounce public financing of presidential campaigns in the general election, or the first nominee in recent memory not to have released his medical records, or the first to have raised $1 billion dollars in private cash, or the first to have played 90 rounds of golf in his first three years in office. All of these may or may not be real issues, but they have always been real issues to the press and suddenly are no longer such—and Obama not only knows it, but enjoys knowing how the media exempts rather than audits him [4]. Does a Chris Matthews understand just how much contempt Obama has for someone so sycophantic as himself?
2) The second reason may well be that Barack Obama really did not “bust hump” to get into Occidental, Columbia, or Harvard, but in fact coasted the entire time. In other words, the record does not reflect an A-/B+ student whom affirmative action consideration can boost into the Ivy League, but perhaps a C+/B- (or worse?) student whom even “diversity” usually cannot. That would prove embarrassing in the sense that the myth of Michael Beschloss “smartest president ever” might be endangered (remember, PJ readers, the media, not us, iconize long ago college grades). A lackluster academic record might as well bring up the entire topic of affirmative action in a way not heretofore discussed. Finally, a dismal transcript might offer perspective on the Obama method of rhetoric over achievement.
At some point the Republican nominee will produce his entire medical and college records and matter-of-factly expect Obama at last to do the same. Watch the hysteria that follows [5]—for 24 hours. (Or would it be better for a Romney or Gingrich to say, “Of course, my medical and college records remain off-limits as is now the custom, and by the way, I will not be taking any federal campaign financing funds with all their bothersome attached strings”?)
What We Owe
But the big story of 2011 was debt, as in $16 trillion of it at home, a bankrupt European Union abroad, and a number of blue states—California, Illinois, New York— struggling under burdens of pensions, public employee salaries, entitlements, and the flight of higher income earners. There was a pattern here, right?
No one in the media connected those dots that Plato and Aristotle did long ago from their own observations of radical democracy: the “people” —hoi polloi, the dêmos, the ochlos, whatever—inevitably vote themselves entitlements that they cannot pay for and then in vain damn the shrinking number of those who can pay for them for a while longer—while questioning the entire premise of a system that allows some to have more than others. Under Obama we piled up a new $4 trillion in debt. The media was content to say that it was Bush’s fault, given that the latter did the same thing—but it left out two key “buts” [6]: one, Obama did it in three years, not eight; and, two, Obama added to an $11 trillion existing debt, not a $7 trillion—a consideration in the modern age of interest.
The subtext of the Simpson-Bowles commission was not just that Obama picked a committee and then ignored its findings, but that even the recommendations of this responsible commission were too timid: under their suggestions, most of us would never see a balanced budget in our lifetimes (e.g., over the next twenty years). Dream up the most stringent austerity program that is politically viable, and it is far too little and too late. So we wait, hoping that near zero interest rates will allow us to borrow even more.
In short, every time we promised the Pakistanis more money, each time the president promised more unemployment insurance and food stamps, at every evocation of a new element of the Dream Act, at all the fury over the number of F-22s to be built, no one said, “Hmm, all on borrowed money.” (To be fair, Ron Paul said just that [but unfortunately a lot of other things as well]). The media simply did not tell the public that we have collectively taken out a huge adjustable rate mortgage to pay for our daily consumption, and that each day we are going to have to eliminate more expenditures to service the interest.
Why the silence? Are the numbers simply too staggering to get a handle on? Is the reality too depressing? Or is there a sense that as we reach the unsustainable $20 trillion at last “they” will cough up (gorge the beast to ensure higher taxation?), as deficit spending is not the end, but the means, to ensure full income redistribution? Or perhaps at some point, our technocrats will remind us that “they” who have raised the bar on the rest of us, the 1%, the corporate jet owners, and the millionaires and billionaires, already have money. So are we, the 99%, forced to pay interest to “them” (whether Americans or not) who don’t need it? In the manner of the Chrysler creditors, perhaps we can run through the list of holders of U.S. debt, and decide whom and whom not should be paid back.
The Ministries of Truth
As a general rule, when you watch a story on CBS, listen to NPR, or read the New York Times, assume that the news is prepped in such a way as to suggest the opposite of what really happened. As for German dominance—mercantilism, reactionary financial ideology, and cultural insensitivity over patterns of consumption and lifestyle should not reflect any larger truth other than in the game of capitalism some like a few German bankers put “success” at a higher premium than did others. Who is to say it is better to count money in the bank on a Friday afternoon than to enjoy an outdoor glass of wine and conversation?
Moderates in Iran are still struggling with the legacies of colonialism and U.S. imperialism and so on occasion lash out in ways that sober and judicious Westerners must contextualize as we slowly rebuild trust through dialogue and consultation on shared issues of concern.
Straight-A students do not rub in their genius by releasing their long ago and now irrelevant college transcripts that would only prove what we already know and bring needless humiliation to lesser folk; those who are fit and trim really do not have health “issues” in a way those over sixty-five do, and therefore properly spare us the boredom of learning what we already know. As for those who cling to these birth-certificate-like obsessions, they should confront honestly and openly their own fears and prejudices that prompt such conspiracy mongering about Obama.
As far as debt goes, money, like the speed limit or changing hair styles, is simply a construct, a “keeping track” system that is always fluid and so can be at times modulated and redefined by our custodians to reflect social and cultural justice, whether by debt restructuring, various “hair-cuts,” inflation, quantitative easing [7], or renegotiation. $5, $15, $25 trillion even are just the score-keeping of blinkered, emperors-with-no-clothes card players who pile up their winnings, oblivious that their chips at some point have to be cashed out—and by those who might just see them as little more than red, blue and white plastic.
Article printed from Works and Days: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson
Friday, January 6, 2012
TS - Random Thoughts
Random thoughts on the passing scene:
Talk show host Dennis Miller said, "I don't dig polo. It's like miniature golf meets the Kentucky Derby."
Nothing illustrates the superficiality of our times better than the enthusiasm for electric cars, because they are supposed to greatly reduce air pollution. But the electricity that ultimately powers these cars has to be generated somewhere -- and nearly half the electricity generated in this country is generated by burning coal.
The 2012 Republican primaries may be a rerun of the 2008 primaries, where the various conservative candidates split the conservative vote so many ways that the candidate of the mushy middle got the nomination -- and then lost the election.
Because morality does not always prevail, by any means, too many of the intelligentsia act as if it has no effect. But, even in Nazi Germany, thousands of Germans hid Jews during the war, at the risk of their own lives, because it was the right thing to do.
In recent times, Christmas has brought not only holiday cheer but also attacks on the very word "Christmas," chasing it from the vocabulary of institutions and even from most "holiday cards." Like many other social crusades, this one is based on a lie -- namely that the Constitution puts a wall of separation between church and state. It also shows how easily intimidated we are by strident zealots.
If you don't like growing older, don't worry about it. You may not be growing older much longer.
What do you call it when someone steals someone else's money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.
When an organization has more of its decisions made by committees, that gives more influence to those who have more time available to attend committee meetings and to drag out each meeting longer. In other words, it reduces the influence of those who have work to do, and are doing it, while making those who are less productive more influential.
Anyone who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them -- instead of answering their arguments.
The wisest and most knowledgeable human being on the planet is utterly incompetent to make even 10 percent of the consequential decisions that have to be made in a modern nation. Yet all sorts of people want to decide how much money other people can make or keep, and to micro-manage how other people live their lives.
The real egalitarians are not the people who want to redistribute wealth to the poor, but those who want to extend to the poor the ability to create their own wealth, to lift themselves up, instead of trying to tear others down. Earning respect, including self-respect, is better than being a parasite.
Of all the arguments for giving amnesty to illegal immigrants, the most foolish is the argument that we can't find and expel all of them. There is not a law on the books that someone has not violated, including laws against murder, and we certainly have not found and prosecuted all the violators -- whether murderers or traffic law violators. But do we then legalize all the illegalities we haven't been able to detect and prosecute?
In the 1920s, Congressman Thomas S. Adams referred to "the ease with which the income tax may be legally avoided" but also said some Congressmen "so fervently believe that the rich ought to pay 40 or 50 per cent of their incomes" in taxes that they would rather make this a law, even if the government would get more revenue from a lower tax rate that people actually pay. Some also prefer class warfare politics that brings in votes, if not revenue.
Can you imagine a man who had never run any kind of organization, large or small, taking it upon himself to fundamentally change all kinds of organizations in a huge and complex economy? Yet that is what Barack Obama did when he said, "We are going to change the United States of America!" This was not "The Audacity of Hope." It was the audacity of hype.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM
Talk show host Dennis Miller said, "I don't dig polo. It's like miniature golf meets the Kentucky Derby."
Nothing illustrates the superficiality of our times better than the enthusiasm for electric cars, because they are supposed to greatly reduce air pollution. But the electricity that ultimately powers these cars has to be generated somewhere -- and nearly half the electricity generated in this country is generated by burning coal.
The 2012 Republican primaries may be a rerun of the 2008 primaries, where the various conservative candidates split the conservative vote so many ways that the candidate of the mushy middle got the nomination -- and then lost the election.
Because morality does not always prevail, by any means, too many of the intelligentsia act as if it has no effect. But, even in Nazi Germany, thousands of Germans hid Jews during the war, at the risk of their own lives, because it was the right thing to do.
In recent times, Christmas has brought not only holiday cheer but also attacks on the very word "Christmas," chasing it from the vocabulary of institutions and even from most "holiday cards." Like many other social crusades, this one is based on a lie -- namely that the Constitution puts a wall of separation between church and state. It also shows how easily intimidated we are by strident zealots.
If you don't like growing older, don't worry about it. You may not be growing older much longer.
What do you call it when someone steals someone else's money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.
When an organization has more of its decisions made by committees, that gives more influence to those who have more time available to attend committee meetings and to drag out each meeting longer. In other words, it reduces the influence of those who have work to do, and are doing it, while making those who are less productive more influential.
Anyone who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them -- instead of answering their arguments.
The wisest and most knowledgeable human being on the planet is utterly incompetent to make even 10 percent of the consequential decisions that have to be made in a modern nation. Yet all sorts of people want to decide how much money other people can make or keep, and to micro-manage how other people live their lives.
The real egalitarians are not the people who want to redistribute wealth to the poor, but those who want to extend to the poor the ability to create their own wealth, to lift themselves up, instead of trying to tear others down. Earning respect, including self-respect, is better than being a parasite.
Of all the arguments for giving amnesty to illegal immigrants, the most foolish is the argument that we can't find and expel all of them. There is not a law on the books that someone has not violated, including laws against murder, and we certainly have not found and prosecuted all the violators -- whether murderers or traffic law violators. But do we then legalize all the illegalities we haven't been able to detect and prosecute?
In the 1920s, Congressman Thomas S. Adams referred to "the ease with which the income tax may be legally avoided" but also said some Congressmen "so fervently believe that the rich ought to pay 40 or 50 per cent of their incomes" in taxes that they would rather make this a law, even if the government would get more revenue from a lower tax rate that people actually pay. Some also prefer class warfare politics that brings in votes, if not revenue.
Can you imagine a man who had never run any kind of organization, large or small, taking it upon himself to fundamentally change all kinds of organizations in a huge and complex economy? Yet that is what Barack Obama did when he said, "We are going to change the United States of America!" This was not "The Audacity of Hope." It was the audacity of hype.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM
Thursday, January 5, 2012
VDH - America's Two Front War
America’s Two-Front War
Pajamas Media
America has the slows. Sometime about mid-2009 America began changing psychologically. True, to the naked eye, America retained the old hustle and bustle, but in an insidious fashion it began to think a bit differently. And that change in mentality explains in part why a year-and-a-half recession that officially ended in summer 2009 seems never to have ended at all.
In short, a sizable fraction of the upper-incomes is hesitant, defensive, unsure — and to such a degree that for a while longer it is not hiring, buying, or investing in the old way. It believes not only that there is no certainty in the tax code, the cost of new entitlements, or our national finance, but that even if there were their own successes would be suspect and earn antipathy rather than praise.
In mirror-image fashion, those of the lower incomes are likewise hesitant to take risks — unsure that the rewards of work in the private sector are all that much better than what government can offer through subsidies. The former group fears government will grow; the latter that it will not. The one suspects that Obama will confiscate more earnings; the other hopes that it will. Either way, there are fewer enterprising employers and fewer self-motivated galvanized workers.
The result of this two-front war is that America has been slowing down.
Or in crudely reductionist terms: the one asks “why hire another worker, when it is not worth it to pay out more in new healthcare costs and taxes down the road?” while the other answers “why get off unemployment or food stamps when it is more likely that they will be extended than curtailed?”
We now accept the notion of the peasant mentality — that all wealth is finite and more for someone means less for another. In this new them/us atmosphere, Barack Obama took the natural tensions between the classes and exploited them as few other presidents dared. Suddenly, there really were two Americas: the suspect top who made over $200,000 and the more noble majority below who made less. Lost in that cheap division was any notion of the value to others from those who did well, or the reasons why some prospered, or the fragility of their brief good fortune.
If the upper 5% paid nearly 60% of the income taxes, then the problem was more fundamental: how had they been so well compensated in the first place to have the wherewithal to pay such taxes? It did no good to remind Obama that confiscating all the wealth of the 1% would not end the debt, or that steep new income tax on the 5% per se will do little to balance the annual budget. His war was not about finding a remedy to his own profligate borrowing, but in retaining power through revving up anger at the better-off.
In the last three years, we have become so numb to Obama’s monotonous invective that it is now part of the national DNA: spread the wealth, fair share, fat cat, punish enemies, corporate jet owners, Super Bowl and Vegas junketeers, 1%, raise the bar, Grinch, millionaires and billionaires, at some point you’ve made enough money, no time for profit, and on and on. The subtext is always the same: the reason why, say, an orthodontist makes more than a Wal-Mart clerk is due to some sort of race, class, or gender discrimination, unfair advantage, or fatal flaw in the capitalist system, and only a technocratic elite in government retains the wisdom and morality to rectify that resulting inequality. One’s salary, then, is not quite his own, but more the collective’s — given that the professional’s good fortune results from an insidious system of exploitation from the moment he was born to the last bill he sent out for services rendered.
Republicans have no answer for all this, and the most recent polls reflect that fact. The more we watch Ron Paul talk about American culpability for 9/11, the more Newt Gingrich talks about hauling in federal judges for inquisitions, the more we hear that Romney is an opportunistic flip-flopper, the more a Cain, Perry, or Bachmann melts down, the more Obama plays cool — emerging from Hawaii or the golf links to sermonize on fairness while hoping that a Joe Biden, Eric Holder, or Steven Chu keeps his mouth shut for a little longer. In comparison to whom is to blame, it is as if near 9% unemployment, $16 billion in aggregate debt, pathetic GDP growth, a dead housing market, and a $1 trillion-plus steady annual deficit are no more than “whatever.”
Note here, however, that the president’s social sermonizing is predictably selective. On the top end, we hear about the horrors of the anonymous millionaire and billionaire, never of the real Jon Corzine who bankrupted MF Global, gave over $70,000 to the Obama campaign, and cannot remember what he did with over $1 billion of someone else’s money. In the world of Obama, human greed is not endemic, but of a particular conservative and grasping sort; in contrast, liberal conniving is always one of carelessness or can be recompensed by liberal activism.
So what I most resent in Obama’s pop socialism is not just its proven impracticality and moral pretensions, but its utter hypocrisy.
And the rub is not just that he sees no contradiction between railing at the 1%, while keeping utterly silent about a George Soros’s past, or a John Kerry’s tax evasion, or a John Edwards’ palatial digs, or Leonardo DiCaprio’s $75-million-a-year in recompense, or his own preferences for elite getaway spots and golf links. Rather, he seems to think that redistributionist rhetoric provides a sort of penance for the high life, as if we are all to go for a stint in reeducation camp — and in the Buffett manner express remorse over the system that enriched us, or in the Soros fashion to fund organizations devoted to stopping what we had ourselves helped foster and perpetuate, or more mundanely, to vote for an organizer like Obama, a sort of 3-5% tax-increase mordida that is the cost of doing business.
On the lower end, in the them/us war of Barack Obama, the president never stops to contemplate the impulses in flash-mobs that target high-end stores, or why the poorer off still have the capital to buy $190 sneakers, and will fight savagely to get them. Or why shopping days around Thanksgiving and Christmas have turned into bare-knuckles free-for-alls in a nation that apparently is ill-housed and ill-fed. For Obama, the massive importation of cheap consumer goods, the revolution in technology, the vast expansion of federal entitlements, off-the-books cash income, the redistributive help from relatives and friends, all these considerations simply do not factor and therefore cannot nuance his picture of a vast underclass without access to basic necessities, at once victimized by the well off and in need of far more borrowed federal redress.
In the last three years, we have also developed a different idea about collective national wealth. In material terms, America has never had so vast a supply of natural gas and oil, so many minerals, timber, and prime agricultural land. Yet now there is something deemed wrong in carefully tapping such riches, whether in Alaska, offshore, in the Gulf, or throughout the American West. There is no logic to this strange attitude. After all, the Obama creed is to use fossil fuels abundantly. He likes arugula. Hardwood floors and lithium batteries are nice. The administration hardly cares that the exporters of much of our imported oil are politically illiberal and environmentally reckless. Instead, there is a deep sense of pessimism that there is something inherently wrong with profiting from our own oil, gas, trees, minerals in the ground, or soil. Is it the idea that a few will do too well from the exploitation of national wealth that will so enrich the many? Or is the idea that our culture is too affluent, too crass? Will solar, wind, and biofuel energy along with forced reductions in resources alone make Americans live the lifestyle that is more in accord with nature?
For Obama, the great tragedy of a Solyndra was not the corruption of old-style fast-buck artists masking their greed through insider green lobbying with members of his administration, but rather that such scandals (along with Climategate and the implosion of Al Gore) have sidetracked the entire green philosophy that mandated more government unionized employees, government technocrats, and government tax collectors to reorder society itself.
The result of all this is a sort of unending but rarely expressed war. The business man does not know what his taxes are, only that they should go up, given his privilege. He is judged not by the good that he does but by the excessive money he makes. The corporation does not know what the rules of the game are, whether his energy is too polluting, his workers not unionized enough, or his product not regulated enough. None believe Obamacare, as promised, will reduce costs. None believe that government borrowing and massive new entitlements are reducing unemployment and raising GDP. None believe that wealth can be created by record deficits and aggregate debt. None believe that printing ever more money will not lead to inflation.
What we have, then, is a war on two ends: the better off are hesitant to work more, given their fears that additional profits will either be more difficult to come by or not remain their own; the poor are hesitant to work more, given their expectations that entitlements will be extended and will be easier to come by. They both expect more government and they both as a result are not so eager to take risks and seek greater income in the private sector.
The result of Obama’s war is the current three-year slowdown. Obama in response counts on two strategies to nevertheless be reelected: either at some point the private sector will conclude that it is not going to get any better, and thus it is preferable to shrug, take its medicine, and get back to work, and so the economy picks up a little in 2012; or, to the degree that Obama can blame the lengthy pause solely on the minority of the undeserving rich, he believes that an angry and fearful bare majority may agree.
Pajamas Media
America has the slows. Sometime about mid-2009 America began changing psychologically. True, to the naked eye, America retained the old hustle and bustle, but in an insidious fashion it began to think a bit differently. And that change in mentality explains in part why a year-and-a-half recession that officially ended in summer 2009 seems never to have ended at all.
In short, a sizable fraction of the upper-incomes is hesitant, defensive, unsure — and to such a degree that for a while longer it is not hiring, buying, or investing in the old way. It believes not only that there is no certainty in the tax code, the cost of new entitlements, or our national finance, but that even if there were their own successes would be suspect and earn antipathy rather than praise.
In mirror-image fashion, those of the lower incomes are likewise hesitant to take risks — unsure that the rewards of work in the private sector are all that much better than what government can offer through subsidies. The former group fears government will grow; the latter that it will not. The one suspects that Obama will confiscate more earnings; the other hopes that it will. Either way, there are fewer enterprising employers and fewer self-motivated galvanized workers.
The result of this two-front war is that America has been slowing down.
Or in crudely reductionist terms: the one asks “why hire another worker, when it is not worth it to pay out more in new healthcare costs and taxes down the road?” while the other answers “why get off unemployment or food stamps when it is more likely that they will be extended than curtailed?”
We now accept the notion of the peasant mentality — that all wealth is finite and more for someone means less for another. In this new them/us atmosphere, Barack Obama took the natural tensions between the classes and exploited them as few other presidents dared. Suddenly, there really were two Americas: the suspect top who made over $200,000 and the more noble majority below who made less. Lost in that cheap division was any notion of the value to others from those who did well, or the reasons why some prospered, or the fragility of their brief good fortune.
If the upper 5% paid nearly 60% of the income taxes, then the problem was more fundamental: how had they been so well compensated in the first place to have the wherewithal to pay such taxes? It did no good to remind Obama that confiscating all the wealth of the 1% would not end the debt, or that steep new income tax on the 5% per se will do little to balance the annual budget. His war was not about finding a remedy to his own profligate borrowing, but in retaining power through revving up anger at the better-off.
In the last three years, we have become so numb to Obama’s monotonous invective that it is now part of the national DNA: spread the wealth, fair share, fat cat, punish enemies, corporate jet owners, Super Bowl and Vegas junketeers, 1%, raise the bar, Grinch, millionaires and billionaires, at some point you’ve made enough money, no time for profit, and on and on. The subtext is always the same: the reason why, say, an orthodontist makes more than a Wal-Mart clerk is due to some sort of race, class, or gender discrimination, unfair advantage, or fatal flaw in the capitalist system, and only a technocratic elite in government retains the wisdom and morality to rectify that resulting inequality. One’s salary, then, is not quite his own, but more the collective’s — given that the professional’s good fortune results from an insidious system of exploitation from the moment he was born to the last bill he sent out for services rendered.
Republicans have no answer for all this, and the most recent polls reflect that fact. The more we watch Ron Paul talk about American culpability for 9/11, the more Newt Gingrich talks about hauling in federal judges for inquisitions, the more we hear that Romney is an opportunistic flip-flopper, the more a Cain, Perry, or Bachmann melts down, the more Obama plays cool — emerging from Hawaii or the golf links to sermonize on fairness while hoping that a Joe Biden, Eric Holder, or Steven Chu keeps his mouth shut for a little longer. In comparison to whom is to blame, it is as if near 9% unemployment, $16 billion in aggregate debt, pathetic GDP growth, a dead housing market, and a $1 trillion-plus steady annual deficit are no more than “whatever.”
Note here, however, that the president’s social sermonizing is predictably selective. On the top end, we hear about the horrors of the anonymous millionaire and billionaire, never of the real Jon Corzine who bankrupted MF Global, gave over $70,000 to the Obama campaign, and cannot remember what he did with over $1 billion of someone else’s money. In the world of Obama, human greed is not endemic, but of a particular conservative and grasping sort; in contrast, liberal conniving is always one of carelessness or can be recompensed by liberal activism.
So what I most resent in Obama’s pop socialism is not just its proven impracticality and moral pretensions, but its utter hypocrisy.
And the rub is not just that he sees no contradiction between railing at the 1%, while keeping utterly silent about a George Soros’s past, or a John Kerry’s tax evasion, or a John Edwards’ palatial digs, or Leonardo DiCaprio’s $75-million-a-year in recompense, or his own preferences for elite getaway spots and golf links. Rather, he seems to think that redistributionist rhetoric provides a sort of penance for the high life, as if we are all to go for a stint in reeducation camp — and in the Buffett manner express remorse over the system that enriched us, or in the Soros fashion to fund organizations devoted to stopping what we had ourselves helped foster and perpetuate, or more mundanely, to vote for an organizer like Obama, a sort of 3-5% tax-increase mordida that is the cost of doing business.
On the lower end, in the them/us war of Barack Obama, the president never stops to contemplate the impulses in flash-mobs that target high-end stores, or why the poorer off still have the capital to buy $190 sneakers, and will fight savagely to get them. Or why shopping days around Thanksgiving and Christmas have turned into bare-knuckles free-for-alls in a nation that apparently is ill-housed and ill-fed. For Obama, the massive importation of cheap consumer goods, the revolution in technology, the vast expansion of federal entitlements, off-the-books cash income, the redistributive help from relatives and friends, all these considerations simply do not factor and therefore cannot nuance his picture of a vast underclass without access to basic necessities, at once victimized by the well off and in need of far more borrowed federal redress.
In the last three years, we have also developed a different idea about collective national wealth. In material terms, America has never had so vast a supply of natural gas and oil, so many minerals, timber, and prime agricultural land. Yet now there is something deemed wrong in carefully tapping such riches, whether in Alaska, offshore, in the Gulf, or throughout the American West. There is no logic to this strange attitude. After all, the Obama creed is to use fossil fuels abundantly. He likes arugula. Hardwood floors and lithium batteries are nice. The administration hardly cares that the exporters of much of our imported oil are politically illiberal and environmentally reckless. Instead, there is a deep sense of pessimism that there is something inherently wrong with profiting from our own oil, gas, trees, minerals in the ground, or soil. Is it the idea that a few will do too well from the exploitation of national wealth that will so enrich the many? Or is the idea that our culture is too affluent, too crass? Will solar, wind, and biofuel energy along with forced reductions in resources alone make Americans live the lifestyle that is more in accord with nature?
For Obama, the great tragedy of a Solyndra was not the corruption of old-style fast-buck artists masking their greed through insider green lobbying with members of his administration, but rather that such scandals (along with Climategate and the implosion of Al Gore) have sidetracked the entire green philosophy that mandated more government unionized employees, government technocrats, and government tax collectors to reorder society itself.
The result of all this is a sort of unending but rarely expressed war. The business man does not know what his taxes are, only that they should go up, given his privilege. He is judged not by the good that he does but by the excessive money he makes. The corporation does not know what the rules of the game are, whether his energy is too polluting, his workers not unionized enough, or his product not regulated enough. None believe Obamacare, as promised, will reduce costs. None believe that government borrowing and massive new entitlements are reducing unemployment and raising GDP. None believe that wealth can be created by record deficits and aggregate debt. None believe that printing ever more money will not lead to inflation.
What we have, then, is a war on two ends: the better off are hesitant to work more, given their fears that additional profits will either be more difficult to come by or not remain their own; the poor are hesitant to work more, given their expectations that entitlements will be extended and will be easier to come by. They both expect more government and they both as a result are not so eager to take risks and seek greater income in the private sector.
The result of Obama’s war is the current three-year slowdown. Obama in response counts on two strategies to nevertheless be reelected: either at some point the private sector will conclude that it is not going to get any better, and thus it is preferable to shrug, take its medicine, and get back to work, and so the economy picks up a little in 2012; or, to the degree that Obama can blame the lengthy pause solely on the minority of the undeserving rich, he believes that an angry and fearful bare majority may agree.
©2011 Victor Davis Hanson
VDH - ODS
I’d say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you’ve lost your mind. — John EdwardsWhen does the legitimate “I oppose Obama” descend into the illegitimate “I hate Obama”?It is popular now to suggest that conservatives in general and congressional Republicans in particular suffer from an obsession characterized by an uncontrolled antipathy for Barack Obama — personal and visceral — that warps their entire political outlook. No doubt some do experience the same obsessions that infected the Left in their furor at George W. Bush. One can find unhinged posters at anti-Obama rallies similar to those at anti-Bush demonstrations. Bloggers can show hatred for Obama in the manner one found them despising Bush. Perhaps for Howard Dean’s rants about Bush’s supposed foreknowledge of 9/11, we have Donald Trump insisting on a fraudulent Obama birth certificate.
Truthers are analogous to Birthers. And for every conspiracy theory that Bush was continuing a long family tradition of profiting from Nazi trade, there was a suggestion that Obama was a Manchurian candidate planted here by Islamic interests to destroy from the inside the United States.But again, I am not talking about conspiracy rants and raves, but a general psychiatric affliction that infects the influential political class — politicians, journalists, and those in popular culture and the arts. So how does one distinguish natural political opposition from a psychotic state?In other words, when will we know that popular opposition to Obama’s worldview and a dislike at the way he seeks to divide the country degenerate into the paranoid venom that was unleashed against Bush?
Here are some things to watch on the national scene to warn us:
1) Assassination Talk
Watch it when opposition to Obama evokes thoughts of assassination and is not countenanced by the conservative community. In other words, be on guard for the conservative equivalents of a Gabriel Range’s Death of a President — a docudrama imagining a hit on Barack Obama. Especially important is to note any positive reaction to such hatred, like a first-place award from the Toronto Film Festival.
And do not forget novels. We are in trouble when a mainstream New York publisher (say, an Alfred A. Knopf) publishes a novel in which characters fantasize about shooting Barack Obama — in the manner of Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint. Important here, then, is the reaction to such expression of murderous hate. Keep on guard for a conservative Michael Moore who might suggest that 9/11-like mass murder is appropriate for Obama supporters (“If someone did this [9/11] to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who did not vote for him!”) or who might resort to teen-age trash-talking, such as “What I meant to say is that George W. Bush is a deserter, an election thief, a drunk driver, a WMD liar, and a functional illiterate. And he poops his pants.”
The point is not that there won’t be conservative deranged equivalents to Moore, but to watch whether such demonic figures are fully embedded within the conservative political establishment. If one were to substitute Obama for Bush in Michael Moore’s rants, would he then be invited as a guest of honor to the Republican National Convention? If so, we would have a good example of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Note too the spread of Obama tics into the entertainment industry: do Hollywood celebrities routinely in their award acceptance speeches, performances, and interviews interrupt to blast Obama in the obsessive manner of a Barbra Streisand, Matt Damon, Sean Penn, or Dixie Chicks?
2) Nazi Talk
Watch the Nazi analogies from public figures; they are good evidence of psychosis. Are there anti-Obama zealots like an Al Gore, John Glenn, or Garrison Keillor who without rebuke compare Barack Obama to a brownshirt or Nazi? If they do so, and go unchallenged, then opposition to Obama may be reaching afflictive levels.
3) “Hate”
“Hate” and “liar” are also tip-offs, especially when used routinely by mainstream public figures and publications. We saw a little bit of that with Rep. Joe Wilson’s quite crudely spontaneous “You lie!” outburst during a presidential address. So look to see whether prominent conservative journals — a National Review, Commentary, or Weekly Standard — are publishing the equivalent of Jonathan Chait’s reprehensible New Republic article: “The Case for Bush Hatred.” It began: “I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I’m tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too.”
Of course, Chait’s article was not that unusual (cf. David Corn’s “The Lies of George W. Bush” — “George W. Bush is a liar”). Should the National Review ever publish an article that begins: “I hate Barack Obama. There, I said it,” then we can properly conclude its editorial board suffers from ODS.
4) America is Guilty Too
A good symptom would be conflating opposition with Obama with hopes for the failure of the United States — in the way a Michael Moore openly rooted for those killing U.S. troops in Iraq (“Minutemen”) and suggested our losses were proper penance for supporting Bush’s war. So does anger against Obama equate to anger at America itself? David Axelrod sort of argued that Republicans are actively trying to subvert Obama’s efforts to revive the economy in a way that is not constructive for the country (e.g., out of partisan maliciousness rather than genuine belief that Obama’s remedies are hurting rather than accelerating the recovery). But when a Senator McConnell openly states his efforts are focused on replacing Obama, or a Rush Limbaugh proclaims that he wants Obama’s program to fail, there is at least some indication that they offer such harsh judgment in hopes that Obama does not continue to apply statist medicine that makes us, the patient, worse off.
And, of course, arguments over how best to restore jobs are not quite like those aimed at a nation at war. By that I mean a true Obama Derangement Syndrome sufferer might announce that the U.S. military should quit fighting in mediis rebus — in the way Harry Reid declared the Iraq War lost, or that Barack Obama announced the ongoing surge was an instant failure even as it began succeeding. So far, we have not seen anything like the “General Betray Us” ads, or comparisons of our military to terrorists and mass murderers that were invoked against the Bush war in Iraq and the war on terror by the likes of a John Kerry, John Murtha, and Dick Durbin.
When opposition to Obama’s interventions is such that it translates into the hectoring of U.S. troops, then, yes, we have a reached a psychotic state. One can agree or disagree with Obama’s Libyan intervention (I thought “lead from behind” was poorly planned out) but once the U.S started bombing, then surely it was important to win that war. If any wished us to fail in Libya because Obama was commander in chief, then they were pathological.
5) Congressional Hatred
Joe Wilson’s outburst, as I noted, was quite wrong. But have we reached the point where senior Republican Congressional figures express serial personal animus in the strain of Harry Reid? (“President Bush is a liar. He betrayed Nevada and he betrayed the country.”) I am not aware of any Republican senator, as yet, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, who has compared Barack Obama to Hitler, in the way Robert Byrd did so — and without rebuke from his own party.
6) That Was Then, This Is Now
Look at issues that are identically embraced by both Bush and Obama. Are conservatives suddenly damning Obama, not for his hypocrisy, but for his advocacy of tribunals, preventative detention, the Patriot Act, renditions, and wiretapping? Or are many liberals now silent about or supportive of just those measures that they once damned when associated with George Bush? Are conservatives furious for Obama’s continuance of a U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2009-11? Are they mad at the extension of the Bush tax cuts because Obama supported it? It would be psychological derangement to so detest a president that one would simply condemn all his policies as nefarious.
In short, a symptom of BDS would be furious opposition to Guantamo, renditions, and tribunals, followed by silence or support for Obama’s embrace of them — in the manner ODS would envision a conservative in the past railing about the need for Guantanamo and tribunals followed now by abrupt opposition to them, given Obama’s surprising current signature upon them.
But Obama is Not Bush?
So far we do not have much evidence that there is unhinged hatred for Obama in the manner expressed for Bush by mainstream public figures, publications, films, and cultural institutions.
Why? I think ultimately the reason is that the Left really does believe in a sort of exalted ends justifying extreme means.
That is, they believed George Bush really was evil, incompetent, or fill-in-the-blank in the way that Barack Obama, champion of the poor and oppressed, could not possibly be. Therefore, hating Bush and what he stood for was legitimate in a way that opposing Obama is now deranged. Hypocrisy, then, just does not enter into the equation, given the claim of a greater morality that trumped consistency.
And it is sadly more than that: “correct-thinking” people, of course, can legitimately, given their exasperation at speaking truth to power, express venom for the Yale BA/Harvard MBA “nucular” idiot George Bush in the way that no one in his right mind could ever become furious at the Columbia BA/Harvard JD “corpse-man” savant Barack Obama. Dunce Bush got into the Ivy League only by pull and his now public undistinguished Yale undergraduate record proves that; genius Barack Obama got into Columbia by his brains and achievement and thus there is no need to produce the unreleased transcript to prove the obvious.
Tragically, in the end it is just that simple: Hating Bush is understandable opposition; opposing Obama is unfathomable hatred.
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