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.
Bertrand Russell, who met Lenin in 1920, came away with a different impression:
"When I met Lenin … my most vivid impressions were of bigotry and Mongolian cruelty. When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, ‘and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree—ha ha ha!’ His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold."
I think Stove is right, though—prescient even—about the ultimate destination of the welfare state: “We also know that the inherent tendency of the welfare state is to increase poverty; that ‘welfare’ still continues every year to absorb a greater proportion of our nations’ wealth and population; and that there is no social force in sight capable of stopping that process.”
Mix up a Martooni or two or a Gin and Tonic, and read and weep over the fecklessness of our political betters. As I have said before, I am worried about what the heck is going on and do not know anyone who is not.
The 70-Million-Check Constituency. It's about the delusion that "money happens." Money does not "happen" without people busting their asses in profitable work.
How to Contain the European Debt Crisis: Giavazzi and Kashyap. It is not a joke: the credit cards are at the limit, and the creditors are rightly concerned. If the big creditors blow up, we all blow up with them. Debtor nations are like suicide bombers, but at some point there is not enough money in the world to pay them off.
If Congress and President Obama, as well as the candidates who would like to succeed the president in 2013, maintain their silence, people should at least understand that the lousy jobs numbers are no mystery. They are the result of a policy that Washington has willfully chosen. As the Fed notes, the cost of this policy isn’t measured in dollars but in something more precious: time. Washington’s refusal to confront the debt problem is costing millions the most productive years of their lives.
That part is heart-breaking. But if you were or are an employer, would you be hiring now? We in CT are firing, not hiring, and not happy about it at all.
Never forget, never forget, and I think it’s very important for Democrats especially to remember this, that if Hitler had not come along, Franklin Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 with an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent and an economic recovery strategy that had basically failed.
The Fear-Based Economy - Further tax increases could bring an already frightened, sputtering economy to a standstill.We are watching the dramatic and deliberate destruction of the economy, of jobs, and of enterprise, but you'd think, from the MSM, that it is business as usual. If you have kids, you should worry because crazy, ignorant people are running this thing and harming everybody who is not a government employee.
Having built a small business into a big one, I can tell you that today the impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with. Home Depot would never have succeeded if we'd tried to start it today. Every day you see rules and regulations from a group of Washington bureaucrats who know nothing about running a business. And I mean every day. It's become stifling.
So the utopians cannot accept the functionalist notion of government as a means of conducting vital functions on behalf of the people, rather than the utopian tool of transforming the people into a great society with seven academic degrees for everyone and recycling at every curb. Such a system is not a moral one to them and they are duty bound to resist it. And the functionalists similarly cannot accept a system that deprives them of agency by overlaying its political code over every aspect of their lives.
But it is the utopians and their economic policies who have forced their own moment to its crisis. Had Obama not won, they would have been able to comfortably sit back and blame Bush era policies for the mess. But their will to power also undid them. It gave them so much power that they are choking on it. With predictable blindness they exploited the crisis for all it was worth and are now left holding the bag. And their policies are now at the center of the debate.
But deeper still is the question of the place of government in the political and economic life of the American. This moment is a wake up call for a country that has been willing to avoid looking too closely at the fine print of the social programs and the total cost of the national debt. And the real question that drifts out of the debates is not about spending cuts, but about the role of government.
The utopian conception of government is not only a freedom deficit, but a functional deficit. The former is obvious, but the latter is often less obvious. The left is often dinged for its controlling ways, but less often for its incompetence.
"Everybody has won and all must have prizes." That's the Dodo Bird Verdict.
Colleges, expecially private colleges, now hand "A"s out like jellybeans, and everybody is an honor student. Here's A History of College Grade Inflation.
When I went to college, an A meant "extraordinary distinction" in my Liberal Arts studies, and they were delivered like precious jewels. Probably 0-3% achieved that. Of course, in math and science it meant simply that you mastered all of the material in depth, and made no foolish exam errors. The wisest graders would overlook careless computational errors if the rest was correct.
Prof. Tim Groseclose tells the interesting story of his research on bias in American media, via Powerline. One quote:
At the University of Missouri, where my coauthor Jeff Milyo had just taken a job, the press office described our study in favorable terms and posted it on a prominent university web site.
Soon after the posting, the chairs of the humanities and social-science departments held a regular meeting with the dean. Although it was not supposed to be a topic for the meeting, our study soon became the focus of a heated discussion. The chairs of the departments of sociology, religion, and German and Russian languages were especially angry, and they called it “offensive” and “scandalous.” One said “The study isn’t research. It’s agitprop for the conservative blogosphere.”
The truth hurts: the MSM is agitprop for the Left, and has been for a long time. The Prof's tale, however, has a happy ending.
According to the government’s own survey data, in 2005, the average household defined as poor by the government lived in a house or apartment equipped with air conditioning and cable TV. The family had a car (a third of the poor have two or more cars). For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, a DVD player, and a VCR.
If there were children in the home (especially boys), the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a microwave, refrigerator, and an oven and stove. Other household conveniences included a washer and dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.
The home of the average poor family was in good repair and not overcrowded. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average European. (Note: That’s average European, not poor European.) The average poor family was able to obtain medical care when needed. When asked, most poor families stated they had had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs.
Read it and weep, you all in Euroland. Mind you, the majority of American "poor" are mother-only households, too. Maybe our War on Poverty did work, after all, despite the minor detail that it enabled all of the single-parent families with unsupervised kids and alley-cat boyfriends. That's the Law of Unintended Consequences, or the Law of Incentives. Anyway, time to end that War. 40 years of antibiotics ought to suffice for the material comforts and conveniences.
Of course, there is more to life than that, the things money cannot buy and that no government can deliver. And, believe me, those HDTVs will get you get nowhere in life unless lazy and distracted is your goal.
Image is Norman Rockwell's vision of one of FDR's Four Freedoms, Freedom From Fear. In my view, the only Freedom From Fear would be a lobotomy, and the only Freedom from Want is death.
The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they want a world filled with love and caring, and their opponents want one of callous indifference, in which the helpless must fend for themselves. (“We must reject both extremes, those who say we shouldn’t help the old and the sick and those who say that we should,” quips the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.) But in fact, everyone thinks that we “should” do this; the problem, in the face of the debt crisis, is finding a way that we can. It is about the “can” part that the left is now in denial: daintily picking its way through canaries six deep on the floor of the coal mine, and conflating a “good” with a “right.”
Read the whole thing. America has become addicted to the Welfare State same as in Euroland. But if everybody is addicted to freebies, who is going to pay for it all? My favorite examples of Welfare, guaranteed to offend almost everybody who hates to think of it this way:
Government student loans Medicaid Medicare Social Security and Social Security Disability Government housing Home mortgage interest deductions Food stamps Federal Flood Insurance Farm subsidies and the ethanol program The entire VA medical system Federal Unemployment insurance and I did not even include ObamaCare, because I cannot understand it
With freebies - welfare - for all, you might almost think that America was a nation of incompetent leeches rather than a nation of proud, independent citizens who are capable of taking care of themselves and their own problems (unlike the Euroweenies with their serf-like approach to life). I am in one of these programs (VA - but I do not use it. Also, I paid off my mortgage already, foolishly, but think I will take a home equity line so I can get some tax deductions for these Obama years). Interestingly but not surprisingly, most of such progams increase the cost of the "good" itself via market distortion.
What are your favorite welfare programs? And what do you want the government to do for you with your own, and your neighbor's, money which it is not doing yet?
Everything the White House has done in the debt limit fight it has done with an eye toward the president’s reelection. As important as whether he eventually got a “grand bargain” was how the president positioned himself throughout the process in the eyes of the electorate. And while we do not know the details of a final deal, if there is to be one, we do know one thing: Obama won this round. And Republicans helped him.
Did he? I am not sure. Nobody can win this game, but everybody I know who is not a government worker thinks the economy is a disaster.
My shop is cutting staff, both professional and clerical. Not only is biz down, but our CT taxes are up. Also, we figure, assuming Obamacare stays, we'll need to let go three or four professionals, and 4-5 clericals, to cover those expenses without running into the red. We have been here, mind you, for 110 years and have an excellent reputation.
We have never cut staff since the 1930s other than normal firings of incompetents and slackers. Our people know this. Fear is a powerful motivator for effort, but it will not be enough.
In order to fund Obamacare and the other opiates of Big Government dependency, the feds need to take 25 percent of GDP, now and forever: The "new normal." It can't be done. Look around you. The new normal's already here: flat-line jobs market, negative equity, the dead parrot economy. What comes next will be profoundly abnormal. His name was Obamandias, King of Kings. Look upon his works, ye mighty, and despair. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
Do they still teach Shelley in high school? Or just the "diversity manual" about "social justice" the Omaha Public Schools paid for with $130,000 of "stimulus" funding?
It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Who could have anticipated that? Taxpayers bribe people to live in flood zones. Brilliant! For total stupidity, NOLA is not even a flood zone - it is permanently below sea level, and always has been. Why am I, who made the reasonable decision to live above sea level, responsible for the life choices of people who want to live underwater?
And, of course, flood zones and flood plains are basically "wetlands." One might think these places should be protected from development for environmental and flood control reasons. A farm? OK, if you understand that it will periodically get flooded while being delivered a good supply of fresh, healthy silt for your next crop.
I know about flood zones. Part of our property is in one. We keep it in horse pasture, and our pool is down there. House and barns are above. People in 1786 weren't stupid, and they did not expect the government, ie their neighbors, to protect them from nature.
Furthermore, if you believe Al Gore that the water is rising, perhaps we should be bribing people to move further from water...but nobody believes Al Gore anymore.
I cannot count the number of times I have flown nationally and internationally over the past 20 years. I am a Christian, native-born, tax-paying, property-owning, passport-holding American with kids, with no criminal record (yet). If I am not a "trusted traveler," I don't know who is. True, I often fly with firearms in my checked luggage, but nobody cares much about that.
(Although I do not really mind some basic security precautions at airports, I much prefer flying privately with friends who have, or treat me to, their NetJets deals, where you just drive onto the tarmac and the co-pilot loads your gear for you and then asks you whether you want a drink while some helper takes your car to the lot. Can you have a cigar on private and charter jets? Certainly can.)
Maybe there is some hope. The bumbling, expensive, soon-to-be-unionized joke (termed by pilots "Thousands Standing Around") of the TSA to roll out ‘Trusted Traveler’ program. (I have to mention that I still think Bush's Homeland Security Dept. was a dumb and unnecessary move.)
Anyway, trust me, Uncle Sam. Sign me up for this. I do not like being treated like a criminal.
Believe me, it's not about informing your dog that he should not have peed on the antique rug, nor is about your dog's annoyance with you, as the critical animal he is, for being late with the suppertime kibbles.
Here's a joke for you: President Obama nearly bankrupts the country with his out-of-control deficit spending -- then demands responsible fiscal leadership from the Republicans.
As far as I can tell, the whole game is simply to move government from 20% to 25% of GDP, and to mail it to their voters in one form or another. Leave it to the next Dem President to get it up to 30%.
Polygamy has an ancient tradition, remains widespread in Moslem countries and is practiced quietly in Mormon communities. Although it is not in the European tradition (except among the wealthy and the nobility for whom marriage was just in name only), why should it be illegal? In fact, a felony? It harms nobody, and probably makes for a cleaner and more orderly household.
The religious topic is a separate one, and should have little to do with the legal matters. The Libertarian point that is made is that it's legal to live your whole life with, and bear kids with, as many women as you want - it's just illegal to marry more than one of them at a time. Same goes for gals: you can live with all the guys you can collect - just can't marry them all at once.
As we enter the post-gay marriage era, it's time to be open to all sorts of government-approved marital arrangements. Isn't it? What business is it of the government if you want to be married to Bill, Jane, Sally, Bob, and Lauren as one big happy family?
These Progressives advocated deference to the government for the same reasons Breyer articulates: reverence for experts, belief in majority rule, and the need to protect society from itself.
As a result, Progressive judges approved segregation laws, laws banning private schools, laws limiting women’s ability to participate equally in the workplace, and more. Most infamously, Justice Holmes vigorously approved of forced sterilization of the allegedly mentally infirm, relying on the public interest as articulated by contemporary experts. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” he wrote.
While well-intentioned rather than imbeciles, Progressives since Holmes' and Wilson's era have demonstrated more faith in powerful elites, technocrats, social engineers, scientists, and other assorted (mostly academic) experts than in individual freedom - which includes freedom to ignore the experts du jour. The Progessives (ie, modern "Liberals") been misguided about that, ever since. The examples are endless. There's no fool like an educated fool and, as CS Lewis said, there's no totalitarian as dangerous as the one who wants to do you good for your own good.
95% of experts on any topic are shown to be wrong, in time. Not so with common sense, which has endured through history. The unwise, impressionable, and self-impressed are vulnerable to having the common sense educated out of them, and arrogance put into them.
The Glorious Revolution was in many ways England’s great gift to the world. It established those fundamental principles of good governance which best allow man to achieve and to exercise his fundamental rights.
Why it's not a bad deal to be somebody's mistress. A quote from the review:
She gives great room to the idea of monogamy and to the lovely tedium of routine that comes with loving someone over the long term. That tedium unquestionably has its pleasures, but so too does allowing your partner and yourself to establish routines separately. The mistress in Drury’s book finds that a relationship kept removed from the “housework” — not just the washing-up but also the repetitive actions and the small moments of the daily life — can still be sustainable. It’s not simply sexual passion; it’s long-term love as adventure, creating a dynamic for each partner different from the inward-turning marriage. How you choose to fill that solitude brings out your character in a way that a crowded life cannot. “[The mistress] is thrown upon her own resources and must frequently entertain herself, and this gives her time to read and think and follow her own pursuits. She soon not only welcomes this but defends it with all the fierceness of the self-preserving instinct.” Drury’s mistress reveals herself to be the exact opposite of the public stereotype.
I read the whole review. It might be a good deal for some to be a mistress (or a gigolo), but I am certain that She Who Must Be Obeyed would be grouchy if I had another woman on the side.
The real reason we have a budget problem in America is because the middle class citizens in America aren’t willing to pay in taxes what their Social Security and Medicare benefits are worth or dramatically scale back the amount of benefits they receive. Instead, what they want, is for someone else to pay for a large part of their Social Security and Medicare benefits. Since the difference between what the middle class pays in and receives is too great to be covered by the rich and politicians don’t have the courage to tell them “no,” the country is headed towards financial oblivion.
...we need to realize that many of the most pressing problems of the inner city cannot be solved by the government. We can find ways to decriminalize drugs and to reform the legal system so that fewer young people are incarcerated for long periods for non-violent offenses — but government cannot mend broken homes or put addicts in touch with a higher powerable not only to ease their craving for drugs but to help them rebuild their lives. Government cannot take a nine year-old child who has never seen a healthy family and give the child the kind of psychological balance and strength children get from growing up in a loving and stable home. All the social workers in the world can’t fix this stuff.
What goes on in some of these families and communities after generations of breakdown and decay needs a kind of healing and care that government programs can’t provide — especially in a country like ours that for good and valid reasons has chosen to separate church and state. Some demons only come out with fasting and prayer, and the US government isn’t much good at either one.
It's a vicious cycle. The more you drive enterprise away, the more you need to soak the remaining people and the remaining businesses who have any money, and thus the more you drive business away or out of business.
Plunder only works to a point, and then you end up with Detroit or Greece.
CT even just placed a stiff tax on non-profit hospitals, if you can believe that. It is bad, and getting worse. One might easily imagine that they are trying to drive all of us to Florida. Personally, I do not care for Florida very much, and snow doesn't bother me at all. Weather is what you make of it and I make the best of it.
It's getting to the point that my state is only a good deal for the very rich (who can afford to avoid taxes or who don't care what they are) and the very poor. Oh yes, I almost forgot - and for government unions. The urban, unemployed poor, the government unions, and the limo Liberals in West Hartford, Litchfield County, and Fairfield County, own my state, at the moment.
It hardly seems like rugged Yankeeland here, politically, anymore. It's Gimme-land. The people with the olde codes have died or are no longer breeding. And to think that our Conservative governor candidate lost by only 6000 votes found, several days after the election, in bags in a Bridgeport warehouse or post office or something. Maybe it was legit. I don't know, but anything in Bridgeport is dubious these days.
A theme that recurs throughout the book is that most of X’s students aren’t in college by choice. They aren’t in his class because they want to learn about literature or even because they realize that they are weak in reading and writing. Instead, they’re in college because they have to get the credential!
Drawing an analogy to the housing bubble (as we at the Pope Center have on several occasions), Professor X writes, “In much the same way the country spent the first decade of the 2000s redefining what it meant to be a homeowner (to disastrous effect), so too have we reclassified which jobs require a college degree of some sort. Industry, including the civil service, wants its workers to be as credentialed as possible.” Therefore we find college degree “requirements” for jobs like managing a video store.
One result is that poor kids (and sometimes middle-aged adults) who want to escape from the drudgery of their current jobs and have a chance at even such mundane work as managing a video store have to get college degrees. Their coursework will enhance their ability to do that job scarcely one smidgen, but it’s the credential that matters. They have to spend or borrow money to take X’s evening course (and many others) just to get out of the “no college” trap.
Mix up a Martooni or two or a Gin and Tonic, and read and weep over the fecklessness of our political betters. As I have said before, I am worried about what the heck is going on and do not know anyone who is not.
Home Depot founder Marcus: 
Mann has now written 
At 
You will. 
Why it's not a bad deal to be somebody's mistress. A quote 
From Ace: