Maggie's Farm

What's the main predictor of income gaps in America? Single parenthood.

Excellent overview of the American working person and his income at Villainous. One quote re the non-static nature of low income in the US:

A University of Michigan study shows that only 5 percent of those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution in 1975 remained there in 1991. What happened to them? They moved up to the top three-fifths of the income distribution -- middle class or higher. Moreover, three out of 10 of the lowest income earners in 1975 moved all the way into the top fifth of income earners by 1991.

Thus there is no "poverty class" in the US. We are mobile, and poverty is temporary. Another quote, re Obama's taxes:

...the most astonishing sentence in the op-ed (in The Economist) is this one: “His plan would not raise any taxes on couples making less than $250,000 a year, nor on any single person with income under $200,000.” It amounts to a declaration of war on two-income families, a marriage penalty of punitive proportions.

If those two single persons with income just under $200,000 get married, Mr. Obama is going to hammer them with a huge tax increase. If the second earner, who in many cases is the woman, is going to have to give 54% of what she earns to the government, she might as well stay home with the children.

Read the whole thing. Link above.

Andy McCarthy says:

Congratulations to our friend Mark Levin on the publication of Liberty and Tyranny — A Conservative Manifesto, which is officially released this week.  It's going to be a huge bestseller, and deservedly so.  Mark has written a crystal clear and coherent summons to first principles against the statist onslaught — whether the issue is religious liberty, the free market, federalism, national-security, immigration, the environment or the welfare state.  Through and through, Mark's love of country, his passion for our history, and his mastery of the Founding and constitutional law are striking.  Yet the book is completely accessible to the non-lawyer:  it is written for conservatives and recognizes, first and foremost, that the law and the state are meant to serve American freedom and self-determinism — not the other way around.  And best of all:  it's a great read.  Do yourself a big favor and read it.

Charles Murray at The American. One quote:

...do we want the United States to be like Europe?

I argue for the answer “no,” but not for economic reasons. The European model has indeed created sclerotic economies and it would be a bad idea to imitate them. But I want to focus on another problem.

My argument is drawn from Federalist Paper No. 62, probably written by James Madison: “A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.” Note the word: happiness. Not prosperity. Not security. Not equality. Happiness, which the Founders used in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.

and another

What’s happening? Call it the Europe syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the twenty-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase “a life well-lived” did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.

At the Heritage Foundation. Wonderful and entertaining, as always.

We should have been following this conference in NYC closely, but we can't do everything. Here's a dispatch from Reason, with this quote from Klaus' speech:

Klaus (also) warned that powerful rent-seeking groups were riding the global warming alarmism bandwagon all the way to the bank. Rent-seeking occurs when individuals, firms, or organizations attempt to make money by manipulating the regulatory environment rather than by trade and production. Klaus cited firms and non-governmental groups that plan to profit from carbon rationing in the form of emissions permits trading and by deploying highly subsidized solar and wind energy projects.

Watts Up has been following the conference. He also offers this toon:

The case that the Western World has gone mad, that our elite leaders are fools, and that we live in a lunatic asylum. From Part 9 of From Meccania to Atlantis in The Brussels Journal:

The asylum’s restraining device, a chain and ball, is made of paper. The United States Federal Tax Code takes up 67,024 pages. The Federal Register, i.e. government rules and regulations, takes up 78,000 pages. These 145,000 pages, weighing about 730 kg, are just the nucleus of the crushing grid within which the American citizen has to try to go about his daily life. In addition, there are tens of thousands pages more of tax codes and sundry regulations in each of the 50 states. In addition, each spending bill with which U.S. Congress further destroys the country and debauches its money, is over 1,000 pages long and rarely read by the people who vote on it. 

In Europe, there were 80,000 pages of EU laws and regulations in 2005, 90,000 in 2006, and probably at least 100,000 now. Combined with the legal and tax code of each country, the EU citizen conducts his life with well over a ton of paper hanging from his neck. 

To quantify the measure of the insanity further, it suffices to grasp that the outstanding nominal value of global swaps and derivatives at the end of 2008 was $531.2 trillion. Estimated Gross World Product in 2008 was $70.65 trillion.  

We have therefore in our asylum inmates on the upper financial floor, hanging beyond the parapet with all of us in tow, unspooling toilet paper that they swear is worth 7.5 times the total value of all the goods and services produced on Planet Earth. And all of the West’s governments were blind as this was building up over many years, busying themselves instead with breaking their White subjects’ resistance to being governed by green pacifist lesbians or being invaded by over-100 million Muslims, Aztecs, and other assorted redeemers of the Euro peoples’ inexcusably Euro civilization. 

It just may be that in the course of human events, it’s the lot of this generation to stand up and walk out of the theater of madness. 

From Ed Driscoll's Rendezvous with Scarcity:

A Climate Change leader, quoted at Thompson (not satire):

The longer I work on climate change, the less important I think it is whether or not the warmists or the sceptics are right. [...] Imagine a world where we had listened to the climate scientists and started to change our resource-consuming behaviour and address the inequities of the global economic system. Although the warming still didn’t materialise, we would have addressed a host of environmental issues and be living a largely pollution-free existence. We may even be saying thank you to the climate scientists who, although they got it wrong, provided us the opportunity to create a cleaner, brighter and fairer world.

From A Beacon of Liberty amid Depression:

The event in question took place over four days in an obscure building, the Musée Social, just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris at the end of August, 1938. Present were some 26 academics, business people and writers, mostly from Europe, but including the American commentator and journalist Walter Lippmann (who, as it turned out, was in Paris on honeymoon at the time). Also in attendance, apart from the young Raymond Aron, were some of Europe's leading economists: Louis Rougier and Jacques Rueff from France, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek of the Austrian School, and two Germans, both living in exile, Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow. Although invited, neither the future Italian President Luigi Einaudi nor the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was able to attend. 

The immediate cause of this coming together was the publication of a French version of Lippmann's An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society by the Librarie de Médicis, the same publisher that had also recently published Rougier's Les Mystiques Economiques and von Mises's anti-collectivist broadside, Socialism. The wider context was the challenge to liberalism and the free market posed by the rise of a generalised state interventionism in the form of planning, corporatism and socialism. Capitalism seemed on the brink of systemic failure and for many it was capitalism itself that was to blame. Its decline and its end appeared inevitable. 

But the participants also saw that the challenge they faced was directed against more than simply the liberal economic order and the political democracy born out of the 19th century. "The totalitarian rebellion," Lippmann commented in his introductory remarks to the conference, "attacks the entirety of the Western tradition - its religion, its science, its law, its state, its property, its family, its morality and its conception of the human person." As a matter of urgency, the civilised world had to find a response to an inhuman enemy. 

And, like Benda, they saw that intellectuals were aiding and abetting this enemy. Never, Rougier asserted, had the clercs betrayed as much as they were now doing. They denounced the crimes of Hitler and of fascism but remained silent before the Moscow show trials. They called for the socialisation of the economy without understanding that they were weakening democracy and helping dictators. Believing themselves to be the most implacable enemies of tyranny, they were in fact its best allies. They were betraying the very cause that they professed to serve.

Read the whole essay at Standpoint