We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
As the Left leads America deeper and deeper into a welfare state in which we take money from our neighbors to pay for our personal responsibilities and to cover our losing risks (after government takes its hefty cut, of course), I found this proposal amusing: Free Diapers
At the risk of pissing off most of our readers, I would assert that anyone benefiting from unemployment, mortgage interest deductions, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, government pensions, Social Security, welfare checks, disability, SSI, etc etc is in diapers.
I am sick of that old "I paid into it" line. Maybe you were fooled into thinking you did, but you did not. I never hear any gratitude from the recipients, just endless demands for more money to be extracted from the shrinking pool of taxpayers - who I term "neighbors" because that is who they are.
They told you that you did, that you did pay into it and deserve it, and they told you that fiction so you would feel entitled to it and eternally grateful to "government" - not to your neighbor - for supplying it. However, you did not pay into "it." There is no "it" there, to distort Gertrude Stein. There is no money there, waiting to be used. It's just all borrowed from the Chinese, who will soon own the USA as a semi-dysfunctional subsidiary - a "distressed asset."
We Americans should be ashamed of ourselves, or at least own up to our condition in which dependency has become socially and politically acceptable instead of being viewed as charity. It's not the way our tough ancestors lived, and mine led fine, honorable, sacrificial, difficult lives as far as I know, without expecting anything from anybody except spouse, family, and neighborly helping. Good lives, no mooching.
In America, they put you into diapers, sooner or later, whether you want the freebies or not. Most people welcome the freebies, because, however undignified, it's human nature and we want to convince ourselves that we are entitled to it, somehow, to rationalize our sponging off of others and to reduce the shame of dependency in adulthood. I suppose I would accept the money too were I in dire straights, but I would not feel good about it because I would know that it is taken from my neighbor - not voluntarily, but by force. That's the plan - a nation of dependents. It might be the European Way, the Serfdom Way, but I do not think of it as the American Way.
All of this weakens our people, our nation, our spirit, and our backbone. It is designed to do that. It is a political strategy.
It's a shame Ron Paul is such a (partial) nutjob. A shame that Cain doesn't know what he is talking about, compared with your average Maggie's reader.
With temerity I critique one of the clearest foreign policy analysts in America, Angelo Codevilla. We share some friends and common roots in the teachings learned at the knee of Robert Strausz-Hupe of laser focus on core US interests over distractions, especially those wasteful or unproductive. With timidity at facing Codevilla’s sharp pen and keyboard with which he punctures and flattens flabby or fatuous thinking, I face his latest essay, The Lost Decade. Codevilla disembowels the foreign and domestic policies of the US since 9/11, with many telling arguments. Yet, I stride forth to face his iconoclastic critique with iconoclastic critique. I agree in temper and some hindsight but disagree with some of Codevilla’s specifics that go too far or which share some common illusions with those Codevilla criticizes.
There are two core arguments in Codevilla’s almost 8,000 word essay, a self-serving, misfocused and exclusionary US elite that failed to identify or act against domestic and foreign threats. Instead, they enriched themselves and intruded into all Americans' freedoms with the overly expensive and expansive, ill-suited to US liberties, feeble Homeland Security, and got bogged down in self-limited wars of illusory nation-building that distracted funding from the major weapons systems necessary to US strategic superiority and failed to confront real enemies. Combined with irresponsible profligate domestic spending and programs that have led to our deep ongoing recession, our means and will to continue our foreign engagements or rebuild our needed future weaponry and military has deteriorated. No wonder most Americans distrust these elites and the federal government.
Although in 2001 many referred to the United States as "the world's only superpower," ten years later the near-universal perception of America is that of a nation declining, perhaps irreversibly. This decade convinced a majority of Americans that the future would be worse than the past and that there is nothing to be done about it.
The idea that we need more entrepreneurs to help improve the economy (a theme I've been thumping) is not lost on the government. However, their solution is to use taxpayer money to invest in areas they deem worthy. Most venture capitalists look for profitable businesses with a high potential return. Or at least some kind of return. The government has the luxury of being able to borrow as much as it wants from the Fed, or taxing the citizenry to death to pursue its dreams of a greener world...and is not seeking any return.
This is not entrepreneurial behavior. This is not venture capitalist behavior. It is the kind of behavior we should all be wary of - the government picking winners and losers. It's a precarious game, particularly if you choose a market that is so small your money isn't likely to have any kind of decent return. This administration claims the GM and Chrysler bailouts "made money" (though I am sure a careful accounting will prove otherwise). Assuming this is true, and politicians are astute enough to put taxpayer money to a profitable end - why the hell are we investing in this?
At its very core, it's just wealth redistribution. They just slapped a different label on it.
Ed: A quote from that piece:
Politicians write the press releases first and worry about the taxpayer losses later.
"... we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected) he often feels that it would not be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along - illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation - he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us."
"Wait a sec. Did he say 'levitation'?? Oh, come on! What's next, ESP? UFOs? Boy, the crap you see on blog sites these day, huh?"
Yeah, well...
Hat tip Theo. Home site is here, although there didn't appear to be any more vids or info on the above. Pretty amazing, though. You know that fun old literary theme of going back in time and appearing real smart compared to everybody else? If I'm going back in time, I'm bringing along one of these babies.
Exit question: How long would it spin in a vacuum with no air resistance to slow it down?
Think life is not as good as it used to be, at least in terms of your wallet? You'd be right about that. The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the US government began recording it five decades ago.
Desperately Seeking Talent - Employers worry more about the effects of a bad hire than about the problems of hiring someone who is competent but not exceptional.
Despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data...
Wall St. is overwhelmingly Democratic, esp in the upper echelons
The AFL-CIO is making headlines by running ads promoting “Occupy Wall Street.” One seriously doubts that members of the working class have much in common with the left-wing professional agitators running these protests and the tent cities they are erecting illegally in private and public parks in New York, Washington, D.C. and other cities. The most interesting part of this story, however, is that one of the AFL-CIO affiliates behind the campaign, the Working America group, is headed by a veteran of the Venceremos Brigades to Cuba, a progressive activist by the name of Karen Nussbaum. Equally significant, her husband works for the public relations firm that represented billionaire hedge fund operator George Soros.
There are many small ways of being quietly and undramatically herioc in life, short of going into combat. It's heroic, in a sense, for an agoraphobic to go to the store, for a drunk to go to AA, or for a man to do an unpleasant job his whole life to take care of his family.
Heather MacDonald has fun with the OWS people (who seem to be slowly getting less coverage and interest - and cold rainy Octobers are not fun times to sleep in a park) at City Journal: Get a Job! Working is (usually) more admirable than protesting. She begins:
Why is a month-long slumber party in a public park more heroic or newsworthy than getting up daily and going to work? “I’ve been here a week and I’m lovin’ every minute of it,” a jagged-toothed, self-described vet leaning against a planter in Zuccotti Park told me on Sunday. One of the biggest decisions that he and his fellow occupiers have to make each day is whether to eat vegan or to scarf down some saturated animal fats in the Dunkin’ Donuts that regularly make the rounds, thanks to the bounteous food donations that pour into the park on an hourly basis. (The most critical decision, of course, is which local establishment to invade for your sanitary needs.)
I am deeply concerned about a risk for obesity and constipation among these heroic protesters. Read the whole, amusing thing, and realize that this is a sort of lark for these people, a vacation from real life, party time in the guise of socio-political importance.
As he points out, this nonsense led indirectly to the terrible child abuse "hidden memory" epidemic which destroyed many peoples' lives before finally being fully discredited.
Liberalism has been unable to decide whether it is for or against more democracy for nearly a century now, ever since it underwent a radical transformation from a creed believing that advancing the cause of individual liberty meant limiting government power and protecting individual rights into the creed we know today of believing that larger and more powerful government is the primary means of securing the realization of individual liberty. None of the liberal complaints about “gridlock” are new; Progressives like Woodrow Wilson deplored the separation of powers and other limiting features of the Founding as obsolete years before he tried to ignore them as president.
To paraphrase Insty the other day, the message is "Government is corrupted by power and money, and we need more government with more money to run more things."
The saying, “charity begins at home”, gets at many issues at the heart of most learned discussions of the charitable deduction from income tax, but also raises a core issue that is too often missed. The income tax is not about charity and should not be given equivalency to charity, and even if many government programs are charitable individual choices to either give charity or not is preferable in most cases and should not be discouraged or dictated by government.
Charity should not begin, or end, wherever government says so. Government should begin or end wherever citizens say so. There's room between but to place government above private choice and enterprise is to misplace priorities and public good and benefits.
The US Senate Finance Committee just held hearings about the charitable deduction that mirrored the arguments that have been raised since the inception of the deduction with the federal income tax during World War I. The questions revolve, and revolve and revolve, around should there be a deduction or other scheme, how much should be allowed, by whom, to which type of organization. Reading a brief history of hearings on the deduction, there is an underlying premise that all of income is subject to government priorities.
I won’t argue for the most selfish interpretation of “charity begins at home”, that all of one’s means should be kept within one’s walls. The Jewish conception of what in English is called charity, tzedakah, makes it a high personal obligation, and unlike the frequently cited 10% the Jewish Testament calls for more as can be afforded. Christians and others of good faith or morality think similarly and give similarly.
On the other hand (as any good Talmudic discussion goes) “charity begins at home” also raises that it is voluntary and one should not abuse one’s personal responsibilities. In other words, the fruits of one’s inheritance or labor are primarily one’s own to decide their use. On the other hand, again, in the social contract we enter into for the personal benefits of being part of a larger order, government, we accept that we are taxed for the general good. In a democracy, cumulatively we choose how much that tax may be and on what. Of course, that is not perfect as there are differing ideas of how much and on what. But, public engagement and elections are available to weigh in.
Throughout the years of government debates on the charitable deduction the incentive has been on raising government revenues, with differing theories of who should pay how much and the relative efficiencies of the schemes and their effects on differing types of recipients being the details.
No one denies, all should abhor, that there are many recipient organizations that abuse the laws and donors’ good intentions to profit insiders and not the public good. That calls for increased enforcement through public exposure, investigations and criminal prosecution. But, on the other hand, that still leaves many recipient organizations allowed by the tax code to commit other abuses of common understandings of charity, such as being mostly political or their proceeds benefiting other than the needy poor. After much outrage and years of mulling this, I still have to come down on the side of the argument that says our money is ours and that there is inadequate justification for giving it instead to government that too often does the same as non-charity charities, not to mention profiting politicians, revolving-door or job-protecting bureaucrats, and government cronies.
Washington, D.C. is the country’s wealthiest area, richer than Silicon Valley. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says “government jobs must take priority over private-sector jobs.” There are Republican and Democrat feeders at the government trough and who are profiting from crony capitalism. There is less to show from all their taxpayer expense than they would want us to believe. There is more to show in general public good from entrepreneurs, productive businesses, steering progress through private choices of what is needed or desirable.
I never have the free time to do all of the things I want to do. All I have is late evenings and weekends, plus stealing a few minutes to try to throw something of interest onto our website.
Besides work and taking care of kids, what productive, fun, or constructive (or unconstructive) things do our readers do?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Here's what I do: A little golf, a little horseback riding with the Mrs., Deacon at church, one committee in our town government, a committee at our golf club, a fund-raising committee for a conservation charity, a little fishing in season, a little shooting, unskilled labor on our place (field-mowing, tree-clearing, log-splitting, fence-repairing, some barn cleaning), spare-moments surfing the net, some book-reading every night, and a fair amount of socializing which I try to limit to two things per week. A quite ordinary American life for a fellow whose kids have flown the nest, I think. A nobody, or an everybody. I am blessed that my spouse, dogs, and friends like me.
I bartended in Vegas a number of years ago, and while I hated the traffic, I loved the general feel of the city. Seeing The Strip off in the distance was a constant reminder that You're in party town, USA, bub. It was frolicsome and fun. I have some observations here.
I suppose the word we'll be seeing for this debate is fiery.
The St. Paul speech only made manifest what is implicit in much of Obama’s presentation of himself. How could Obama have brought himself to utter such laughable pap? This is either one politician who takes himself way too seriously, or who holds his supporters in incredibly low esteem, or both.
If you’ve lived through the past four decades, does it really seem like America is no better off today? It doesn’t to Jason Furman, the deputy director of Obama’s National Economic Council. Here is Furman back in 2006: “Remember when even upper-middle class families worried about staying on a long distance call for too long? When flying was an expensive luxury? When only a minority of the population had central air conditioning, dishwashers, and color televisions? When no one had DVD players, iPods, or digital cameras? And when most Americans owned a car that broke down frequently, guzzled fuel, spewed foul smelling pollution, and didn’t have any of the now virtually standard items like air conditioning or tape/CD players?”
No doubt the past few years have been terrible. But the past few decades have been pretty good—for everybody
“Again, if you can’t cut back the government bureaucracy in good times (because there is enough tax money and we have ‘unmet needs,’ etc.) and you can’t cut it in bad times (because we have to preserve those jobs as ‘stimulus’) when does the government stop growing? Has Obama even attempted to answer this concern?”
This is an oldie, but still good for a chuckle for me:
I know this is a boring waste of cyber-ink, but many of our readers may not be on the emailing list and perhaps Dr. Mercury might enjoy the game:
Friend --
If you've been able to sit through any of the Republican presidential debates so far, I commend you for your patience and commitment to the President.
With all the talk about "class warfare," "Obamacare," "9-9-9," and how Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme," the Republican candidates have tended to leave very little time to discuss constructive solutions to the actual challenges facing our country.
Well, there's another Republican debate tonight in Las Vegas. And if we can't convince the candidates to talk about jobs or how to provide economic security for the middle class, we can hold them accountable for what they choose to talk about instead.
The campaign has put together a debate watch game to make sure there's a real cost to all the attacks and nonsense. Here's how it works: You pick a word or phrase from the list below to sponsor, and pledge to give $3 or $5 (or however much you'd like) for each mention. So tonight, as the Republican candidates prattle on about defunding Social Security, ending Medicare as we know it, and everything else they support, they will literally be building this campaign.
We have to assume that the Republicans in this race are sincere about wanting to be President. But when so much of the discussion is about rolling back protections put in place by the Affordable Care Act and Wall Street reform, and instituting a tax plan that would mean middle-class families pay thousands more every year, we can question how sincere they are about helping to solve the very real problems millions of people confront every day.
Americans deserve a leader who takes the job seriously.
So I'm looking forward to seeing what you think they'll say this time. We should have some fun with this -- it's Vegas, after all.
But we're not just doing this for our own entertainment. We're building a campaign that can withstand a barrage of special-interest funded attacks from the other side, and make sure President Obama can continue the important work we have left to do.
Any donation you end up making tonight will be put to work right away to that end.
I have been returning to the theme of government as enterprise over the past couple of years, but the Knish Man put more effort than I ever did in fleshing out the concept: The Business of Government.
Government is indeed a bubble, as much in the US as in Greece. Just two of many possible good quotes:
Like most non-profits the real business of government was creating profits for its board, employees and their friends. This core business was funneled through constant busywork and massive projects and programs that existed to conceal the real business of government. Layered around it was chaos and incompetence that prevented even those on the inside from being able to fully evaluate the real cost of its operations.
and
The monopolistic nature of the business of government had created a company immune to outside concerns. But that bubble was being challenged by the consequences of its mismanagement and the growing public dissatisfaction at the value of its services and their cost. The collision was as inevitable as its timing was unclear and it would change how the business of government was to be conducted.
We may now have scores of sophisticated books written by highly esteemed PhDs and a well-tread, lollipops over Castor oil, time-outs over spankings parenting path, but our progressive march through human history has ultimately produced adults that are… well, still childish.
Worse, we’ve managed to add an extra decade to adolescence.
AVI gave us a free mini-post in his comment, here:
Journalism at present involves a great deal of believing that you know other people's motives. We are told that OWS has some legitimate complaints. Not because very many of them are actually clearly articulating legitimate complaints, but because journalists can think of reasons that people might be upset that sell better. This is common in the type of anti-American rhetoric we get explained to us: "Well can you blame them? America has done blah, blah, blah..." Those are not, in fact, the reasons why foreigners hate us. They are the reasons liberals hate us. They project this crap onto others all the time, because they really are that narcissistic and tribal.
So helping out OWS is just a natural extension of that. They are "giving voice to the voiceless, to the inarticulate rage of the disenfranchised, who deeply resent the inequitable distribution of wealth that allows people with unapproved attitudes to...oops, I mean, 'that saddles future generations...' no wait, I'm looking for the right words here... 'that finds a way to make a fortune even in hard times...' damn, this is hard..."
Because they see it as Us vs. Them, zero-sum, for cultural hegemony and prestige. That is the subtext.
Hegemony, prestige... and cash, AVI. OPM. That's what they really want.
Consider romantic Lord Byron, who had spent the previous Summer in a villa in Switzerland ruminating with other literaries about the issues of advancing science (which led to cohabiter Shelley’s Frankenstein), writing this drivel poetry the following December, Christmas eve 1816, in support of the Luddites:
As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!
When the web that we weave is complete,
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,
We will fling the winding-sheet
O'er the despot at our feet,
And dye it deep in the gore he has pour'd.
Though black as his heart its hue,
Since his veins are corrupted to mud,
Yet this is the dew
Which the tree shall renew
Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!
Today’s self-declared intellectuals and media wannabes, similarly, extol the stand-against-the-machine OWSers in the parks. An essay from novelist Thomas Pynchon, maybe appropriately written in 1984, expresses the hope, “Is it OK to be a Luddite?” Pynchon traces Ludditism to belief in miracles against the “machine,” of modern life, then steps forward to today.
Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible.
But, garbage in, garbage out. Now as then, retreat to fantasies misstate and contradict realities of how machines free labor to be more productive and remunerative, not only to investors but to the daily lives and liberties of workers. Now as then, it takes capitalists to exert practical imagination, risk capital, and bring to fruition and everyone’s table the produce. Not fairies.
See Polling the OWSers: "...the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people." And with reality. They are miracle fairies for President Obama who will make disappear from consciousness all his abject failures and misdirections. Dream on as you drive into the wall of reality, President Obama. But, please spare the rest of us being further injured by your reckless driving.
As the Left leads America deeper and deeper into a welfare state in which we take money from our neighbors to pay for our personal responsibilities and to cover our losing risks (after government takes its 
Mrs. BD likes 
US medical care 
Four Small Things