Maggie's Farm

VDH, via NRO. It's called "politics."

What I fail to understand about it all is that our hispanic illegals do not seem to me to be dependency-driven, but more opportunity-driven, traditionalist, family-oriented, and religious.

They think they own protests. They do not. They have the power now, and I do not like what they do to my country.

Funny how fast compromise and consensus flew out the window.

This link can save everybody a lot of trouble in life. It's actually titled Fifty Things every 18 year-old Should Know. (h/t, SDA)

I sent it to everybody in my family.

Obama admin defends warrantless wiretapping. Where's the outrage?

Christians are not wanted in the "helping professions". Moslems don't approve of Christians either.

Obama sells himself to the world stage - to help sell himself to the American stage. America is the only audience that matters.

How is he doing?

Is he a pompous windbag? There can be no doubt that he digs himself. That's for certain. More than he merits? You decide.

From Adam Kirsch's Europe's Last Man:

No sooner had humanity emerged from a century of hot and cold wars than Fukuyama was resurrecting Nietzsche’s admonition that a world of peace and prosperity would be a world of Last Men. “The life of the last men is one of physical security and material plenty, precisely what Western politicians are fond of promising their electorates,” he pointed out. “Should we fear that we will be both happy and satisfied with our situation, no longer human beings but animals of the species homo sapiens?”

While Fukuyama appreciates the seriousness of the Nietzschean warning, he hears it from the perspective of a partisan, not a foe, of liberalism. The danger he foresees is not simply that bourgeois democracy will cause human beings to degenerate, but that degenerate human beings will be unable to preserve democracy. Without the sense of pride and the love of struggle that Fukuyama, following Plato, calls thymos, men—and there is always an implication that thymos is a specifically masculine virtue—cannot establish freedom or protect it:

It is only thymotic man, the man of anger who is jealous of his own dignity and the dignity of his fellow citizens, the man who feels that his worth is constituted by something more than the complex set of desires that make up his physical existence—it is this man alone who is willing to walk in front of a tank or confront a line of soldiers. And it is frequently the case that without such small acts of bravery in response to small acts of injustice, the larger train of events leading to fundamental changes in political and economic structures would never occur.

There is no evidence for health risks with second-hand smoke. It's about control.

NYT reports that the ABA has a Leftist bias! Gee, who would have thought so?

Perhaps that is what the NYT views as news. It has been a well-known fact for 20 years. Just one more non-profit org that was hijacked by the Lefties who didn't want to be tested by real jobs, years ago.

What if my idea of the "common good" is different from yours? What if my idea of "the common good" is the freedom and sanctity of the individual? What if I believe that pursuit of individual freedom, self interest, opportunity, and happiness is the highest "common good"?

A paraphrase of Rush Limbaugh, on Monday. He is on a roll, and very funny these days.

Simon pointed out that a lot of our (legal) economy depends on heroin, and explains how they do it in Switzerland. (It's the way it used to be done here.)

Related: We are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail. I agree. I want non-violent crims off the public payroll, and paying for their crimes with $ fines. Last I heard it costs us taxpayers around $70,000/year per jailbird.

I would prefer that they pay us for their crimes - with money.

No time to write today, but I just wanted to post a little reminder that, in every recession in my lifetime, the Left screams "Failure of Capitalism!" and does its best to exploit the opportunity for government power grabs.

It's not about economics - it's all about power and control.

Literally. Well, it's the closest thing he's ever had to a for-profit job.

Plus he guarantees that government employees will fix your car when it breaks. That's reassuring.

While it may be overly simplistic to divide people into the producers (of profits) and the non-producers, there is still something to it. And there is something to it psychologically too, because the non-producers often carry a small secret uncomfortable feeling about being more directly dependent on the effort and profit of others to produce the $ to cover their paychecks. 

The creation of wealth is a kind of magic from which everyone benefits. I am sick of the CEO-bashing and business-bashing and bashing of commerce. The Left acts according to the foolish and economically moronic illusion that wealth (and poverty) are static, and operate on a zero-sum basis. That's what "Gimme yours" comes from.

When I think of producers and wealth-producers, I do not think of Ayn Rand's heroic industrialists, nor do I think of Wall Street deal-makers, bond salesmen, or money-managers. Those are a tiny number. No, I think of people like the alligator farmer they had on Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. I think of people like Sippican, who creates value out of a chunk of wood. I think of the high school drop-out who buys a gas station, adds a mini-mart, and ends up owning three of them and employing 40 people. I think of my gunsmith and his two younger apprentices who will probably buy the business from him someday. I think of a guy who buys an old building and fixes it up. I think of the gal who trained my hunting dogs. I think of my carpenter, who keeps my house from falling down. I think of the dairy farmer who uses some of our land for his yearlings. I think of our groom, a legal Mexican immigrant who built a grooming business and now has 12 grooms working for him - and now two blacksmiths too: he says he's too busy running things to do our grooming anymore. I think of Synthstuff with his general store. I think of the NYC bridge-painting contractor I met on a hunting trip who started out as a union apprentice. All independent, proud creators of value and wealth - out of thin air, sweat, hard work, and knowledge.

Those are the folks who pay all of the taxes, create the jobs, and make the donations. That is the beating commercial heart of America where anybody who wants to can still build a business and make money if that is what they want to do. Everything else depends on that and those folks, from government to churches to museums to opera houses to universities and every other non-profit, to bridges and airports and conservation and medical research. We should all be grateful to them for what they do instead of joining the silly few who look down their noses on commerce - while feeding off its magic.

The Left has been talking a lot these days about income equality. I have no idea why. Even putting aside the fact that the Left's only plan to reduce inequality is to reduce the incomes of the prosperous, I see no virtue in income equality.

Furthermore, I see many serious problems with the concept, just two of which are disincentivization of risk-taking and of the assumption of responsibilities.

Fred Bauer discusses Yglesias on redistribution of "the wealth" (h/t, Riehl). One quote from Yglesias:

What if we had a 95 percent marginal tax rate on income over $10 million? What dire consequences would flow from this?

Besides the minor details of the loss of freedom and the confiscation of citizens' property (and the fact that people would quit buying those $200 million Powerball tix), what could possibly be wrong with it?

Ed. note: Many of the topics on wealth and poverty are discussed in Cassandra's fine post.

An untrue story was going around about Polly-Jan Bobseine (photo above), but her real life story is plenty good enough.

National Health Preview: The Massachusetts debacle, coming soon to your neighborhood

Related: The Massachusetts anti-business debacle. If we do not nurture and cherish our productive profit-makers, we are lost.

Is there anything the Left doesn't want to control? Car color

Profile of denier Freeman Dyson

Michael Miller on Davos Capitalism: Adam Smith's Nightmare. One quote:

...we looked up to Davos Man. Who wouldn't be impressed by the gatherings at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, a Swiss ski resort? Sharply dressed, eloquent, rich, famous, Republican, Democrat, Tory, Labour, Conservative, Socialist, highly connected, powerful and ever so bright.

Then, when the whole managerial economy collapsed, the managers and technocrats lost faith in markets. But they did not lose faith in themselves, and now they want us to entrust even more of the economy to them.

Insty:

WORK? “More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life.” Hey, I’ve got an idea — why don’t we organize society so that it rewards hard work! We could even see that people who work harder and do better make more money! And then their efforts would pay off in more general societal prosperity, making life better for everyone! And we could . . . Naaaah.

Assortive mating on the internet, and related topics, at Becker- Posner. One quote:

Match.com says it has more than 15 million members. A study by Harris Interactive conducted for eHarmony finds that over 86,000 eHarmony users married between April 2006 and March 2007, which is three times the number estimated for 2005 in a different study. The Harris study also estimated that over two percent of all persons marrying between April 2006 and March 2007 were introduced through eHarmony.
Economic theory and empirical evidence (see my A Treatise on the Family) indicate that men and women who marry tend to have similar backgrounds by religion, race, education, family income, and many other characteristics. This is called positive assortative mating. Since marriages between persons of similar characteristics usually (but not always!) produce more satisfactory relationships, it is not surprising that marriages between unlikes; that is, persons with quite different characteristics, such as by education, religion, or race, are far more likely to end in divorce than are marriages between similar persons.

Obama goes for it all in budget.  Related: Does this debt have an exit strategy? I am afraid not, but it does have a long-term strategy:

Is it already the concensus that Obama, despite his personal appeal, is off to a weak and flawed start? Whatever happened to "Bring us together"? A quote from No He Can't at Prospect:

A president with historic ambitions was never going to be content with tackling a mere recession. Thus in his televised address before both houses of congress in February he delivered a special history lesson: “Our economy did not fall into decline overnight. Nor did all our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank.” The current recession and housing and financial problems have deeper causes, he said. What are these underlying maladies that so badly need the shaman’s touch? The president named four: energy, healthcare, education and debt. The “day of reckoning” for ignoring these issues—and for exacerbating this failure with excessive borrowing—has arrived, he said.

Americans who concentrated on the president’s words rather than on their characteristically sonorous delivery found the diagnosis baffling. Education, energy and healthcare policy in the US, as almost anywhere, all need help. But are America’s flaws in these areas really the causes of the housing bust and the paralysed banking system? What about the cyclical contractions that follow all economic booms? What about a decade and more of absurdly cheap money? How about all that Fannie and Freddie-fuelled lending to inappropriate borrowers? What happened to lax oversight? What about greed, that comforting straw man? No, according to Obama, we are losing our jobs and being kicked out of our excessively mortgaged houses because America lacks universal healthcare, federally sponsored nursery school, university for all, and a progressive emissions-oriented energy policy.

That is a lame and transparent effort to re-design America, using a recession and a banking mess as an excuse. I don't know anybody who buys this baloney. His eye is only on my wallet. Read the whole thing. Link above.

New York City has a population of 8.2 million. 5000 of those people pay 30% of NYC's taxes.

Is that a "fair" distribution of the load?  (h/t, Surber)

We have often opined here that the real purpose of a liberal arts education is life enrichment rather than to enhance one's future in commerce.

As usual, my views are hopelessly old-fashioned. Tim Black at Spiked discusses the subject in The Modern University: You Get What You Pay For. It's the UK, but it applies in the US too. One quote:

Underpinning the fees debate – indeed the thing that makes the fees debate possible – is this contemporary degraded idea of university education. Gone is the ivory tower; in its place stands the glass-fronted hub of much-mooted, never-seen economic growth. The establishment of the UK Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills is itself testament to the shiny new role laid out for the twenty-first century university. In his first speech as secretary of state for the department in 2007, John Denham stated: ‘To compete and prosper in this world, to respond to the needs of leading global and national businesses, we must enable many thousands more people to study and graduate each year. To become a world leader in skills, as Lord Leitch recommended, we must aim for at least 40 per cent of adults to have higher level qualifications by 2020.’ (6)

How Chaucer helps a nation compete in international business is beyond me, but I would not want to live in a world without him. Tim Black, like me, wonders what this is all about. Another quote from his piece:

The transformation of higher education into a glorified, paid-for training service has, likewise, turned what might once have been aspirant scholars into very demanding customers. Students today come not so much to learn, as to consume the ‘educational product’ on which they have just splashed several thousand pounds. In the proud words of the 2003 government white paper, The Future of Higher Education, students are at university for the ‘acquisition of skills’ (8). Their future earning potential depends on it. In this sense, the NUS’s alternative to tuition fees – a loan to be paid back dependent on earnings – seems like the demand of little more than a consumer watchdog.

It has not always been this way. In his 1853 treatise The Idea of a University, JH Newman defined it as ‘a place [for] teaching universal knowledge’ (9). Such notions of the integrity of university education were not nineteenth-century oddities. They were informed by a deep, anti-utilitarian sense of the intrinsic value of culture and knowledge, something perhaps best expressed by Newman’s contemporary, Matthew Arnold, as the ability to ‘turn a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits’. The university enshrined such freedom. It demarcated a place outside the demands and interests of commerce and business. The value of education bore no relation to monetary value; indeed its ‘uselessness’ was its virtue. Such humanistic ideas of the university accompanied the expansion of higher education provision in the 1960s. In the 1963 Robbins Report on giving more social classes the opportunity to attend university, the committee wrote ‘[the] search for truth is an essential function of the institutions of higher education, and the process of education is itself most vital when it partakes in the nature of discovery’ (10).

Bring me up to date, please. What is college for these days? Life enrichment? Creating an informed citizenry? Nurturing of scholars? Work certification? Job training?

There may or may not be a 1-3mm/yr sea-level rise ever since the last Ice Age, but the Maldives are holding up pretty well, contrary to alarmists. Watts Up. (I enjoyed the comments there too.) h/t, SDA

And yes, the Maldives have gone green - if you don't count the tourists jetting to their vacations.

If we had had this congress in 1920, we'd still have buggy-whip factories all over the place, feeding off the public trough. Just like GM. Senator proposes non-profit option for newspapers.

Mrs. B comments from the next room "They are mostly already not for profit, aren't they?"

Change, adapt, adjust, or go away if nobody needs you. I have always loved newspapers but, funny thing, I hardly read them anymore except on planes or trains - and online every day.

Wiki has a good entry on the S&L banking crisis of the 1980s. A quote:

 L. William Seidman, former chairman of both the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Resolution Trust Corporation, stated, "The banking problems of the '80s and '90s came primarily, but not exclusively, from unsound real estate lending,"

And the unintended consequences of government decisions always play a key role.