Boortz is pointing to an impressively craptacular display of ignorance this morning, an opinion piece by one Paul Heise, Ph.D. in economics. Heise is also professor emeritus at Lebanon Valley College.
I swear. If you ever put together a committee to make an important decision and you can’t afford one more learning experience…it absolutely, positively has to get done right…but you can’t afford the luxury of an individual making the decision — gather together everyone on that committee with impressive letters after their names, and kick them the hell off. Eckspurts, eckspurts, eckspurts. All the poorly-thought-out prejudices of normal people, with none of the accountability or righteous stigma.
Seldom correct but never in doubt.
The era of limited government is ending in a crash. We subjected those limited-government theories to the market test and, like President Herbert Hoover’s theories, they failed.
The idea that we can limit government and depend on markets alone to allocate resources and income in a just and efficient manner led us to a world of multiple economic crises. The word “depression” is back in the economist’s vocabulary.
From President Ronald Reagan to the present, the free-market ideology was tried and simply did not work. The most telling example of resulting wasteful injustice is the crisis in our banking system. Banks are failing, and people are losing their homes and savings because of the deregulation where government did not do its job.
Right, Paul. Because as we all know, if we want an example of private industry that is completely untouched by government regulation, we should all lay our peepers on banking and especially, within that, home loans.
Seriously. We have all kinds of folks running around, as free and as able to vote as you and me, who are in a big rabid slobbering hurry to point out the failures of the capitalist system. And, every now and then they find a good example upon which to stand, like Paul Heise here with the banking “crisis.” Before that it was our health insurance system. And then our tort system. And the way we educate our children.
Hey, question: How come these failures of the capitalist system always seem to be capitalist-marxist hybrids? And could someone explain to me why it always seems to be the case that, if you trace back the histories of these various industries, back to the day someone said “Hey! Let’s put a little bit of Marxism in here that’ll make everything okay!”…and then go back a year further…things, back then, were working pretty much okay?
I mean, not that anyone at the time was saying so. But you go back in time to the days when the purchase of gasoline was a purely market-driven exercise, compare that state of affairs to what we have going on today — you get a little nostalgic, huh?
Back when there were no HMOs and you just handed the doctor a ten dollar bill for birthing your child…or maybe gave him a couple of chickens…he made house calls. Anytime.
Then the Economic Recovery Act of 1981 encouraged savings and loans to invest in commercial real estate and high-risk loans to developers, casinos and ski resorts and in complicated financial instruments about which they knew nothing. That, of course, quickly brought on the much larger savings-and-loan crisis.
Not a single word about the Community Reinvestment Act or the September 2005 revisions thereof, linked by some analysts — using exactly the same logic Heise uses about Reagan-era deregulation — to the current sub-prime lending debacle.
Banks are not like other corporations in a private-enterprise economy. They have the power and privilege of creating money and lending it to people. But that requires them to be trustworthy and prudent, something we cannot trust them to be by themselves.
Riiiiiiight, Paul…everybody’s noggin swivels at breakneck speed, toward Congress, when we’re sniffing around for trustworthiness and prudence. Good one.
This is why I want to build a damn twenty-foot wall. Our society has become so developed and mature that we’ve now hit a point where every little thing we do is a mixture of capitalism and socialism. Therefore, any hitch in the giddy-up anywhere, large or small, is a convenient soapbox for whoever wants to bash government oversight or the free-market transactions the oversight is supposed to oversee. So Heise here is able to blame capitalism for the banking crisis. If the problem were to be fixed tomorrow, he’d be able to credit the object of his undying affection, government regulation. The facts don’t have to back him up anywhere on this. He makes it look like that’s the case, but it isn’t. He’s just casting blame in one direction and credit in the other, to serve his pre-existing agenda of bigger government.
If we had a wall, people could exercise free trade on one side of it and a nanny-state government on the other side of it. I wish for it longingly whenever I read tirades like this. We know, for a fact, that government is made possible because of the free trade. It is not subject to dispute. If ever it is, just say a word or two about putting a measly dent in the business taxes, and the nanny-state people will be at your throat. So we all agree — under the right circumstances of discourse, anyway — business is the host, government is the parasite. Government cannot exist without business, and therefore, without free trade.
Is free trade made possible by government? I doubt it. I don’t think that’s in dispute either. But if it is, let’s go ahead and built that twenty-foot wall and see which side does better.
The idea that we can limit government and depend on markets alone to allocate resources and income in a just and efficient manner…
…more perfect union, establish justice…domestic tranquility…provide common defense…general welfare…secure the blessings…of liberty…
Nope! Don’t see it. “Allocate resources and income in a just and efficient manner” isn’t in this copy of my Constitution. Maybe there’s some other version out there. Man — I’d just love to go back in time and watch Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson et al debate that one. “Point of order, Mister Chairman, before we sign this new Constitution it seems to me there ought to be a few words about allocating resources and income in a just and efficient manner.”
Professor emeritus Heise…dude…if it belonged in there, they would’ve put it in.
Gah. This isn’t that complicated. The guy isn’t talking economic cause-and-effect, he just likes big government. He’s a big government bigot. Neal Boortz says he feels sorry for the economics students at Lebanon Valley College. I agree.
Via (my) parent blog Webloggin, we learn of a clip of Glenn Beck’s show in which he finds a glaring contradiction in the words of that guy I’m trying like the dickens not to think about or talk about. He Who Walks On Water is saying we need to stop spending money putting Iraq back together and need to spend money instead on putting America back together. Then he presents a bill that would commit us to pouring $845 billion into the one-world government.
The “good stuff” is about 3 minutes into the video - solid information on Senator Obama’s Senate Bill 2433 - The Global Poverty Act.
I notice this about the democrat party lately; I wonder what a political junkie from a hundred years ago would think about this, were he frozen back then and thawed out now. The isolationism. It’s so selective. Always a strong and powerful yea-or-nay to isolationism, nothing in between the extremes. When isolationism would benefit our country, they talk about their open borders, and then when isolationism creates a hazard in the form of potentially devastating terrorism operations, all of a sudden they want it.
Anyway, I see this Global Poverty Act is getting some more attention lately. Good thing.
But hey, how can you be opposed to sending money to feed poor people? It’s not like there’s been any abuse of poverty aid programs within human history…certainly not within the glorious U.N.
Credit goes to Gerard for finding this one…
Al Gore—or, as he is known in his own language, Gore-Al—placed his son, Kal-Al, gently in the one-passenger rocket ship, his brow furrowed by the great weight he carried in preserving the sole survivor of humanity’s hubristic folly.
“There is nothing left now but to ensure that my infant son does not meet the same fate as the rest of my doomed race,” Gore said. “I will send him to a new planet, where he will, I hope, be raised by simple but kindly country folk and grow up to be a hero and protector to his adopted home.”
As the rocket soared through the Gore estate’s retractable solar-paneled roof—installed three years ago to save energy and provide emergency rocket-launch capability in the event that Gore’s campaign to save Earth was unsuccessful—the onetime presidential candidate and his wife, Tipper, stood arm-in-arm, nobly facing their end while gazing up in stoic dignity at the receding rocket, the ecosystem already beginning to collapse around them.
It’s twice as funny if you’ve seen that goofy movie, which has inspired so much debate about whether the science in it is any good. When I got ahold of it, I was more than a little surprised at how little science was in it, good or bad.
Gotta hand it to Gore-Al. He can look very sad when he stares at leaves floating in creeks, and with a little bit of slow background music it just about breaks my heart.
Wonder how much carbon was thrown off by that rocket ship when it blasted off. Ah well…too late I guess.
I really don’t feel like getting on my soapbox because I really have a lot to do today and want to get on it. But Ms. Zanotti’s analysis of the grocery bag situations in Los Angeles and Seattle, inspires a thought I’d like to just toss out there. That thought is this:
Does it seem to anyone else like, at the very moment in which there is supposedly the greatest intensity of widespread concern about a given issue, that is precisely when we put something in motion likely to exacerbate that problem in the service of something else? I’m referring here to the expected difficulty of the poor to be able to buy food…although the phenomenon seems to me to be a larger one, dealing more with human nature than with any one specific problem.
In the past few days, the city councils in Los Angeles and Seattle (two of my favorite cities in the world, by the way) both passed ordinances regarding the usage of plastic grocery bags within the city. They are trying to reduce the very large usage of plastic bags in these two cities because they are not biodegradable. That’s a noble goal.
Getting into the fine print of these ordinances, though, one discovers things that aren’t so great.
In Los Angeles, it requires people to buy the cloth reusable grocery bags, which run $1/bag, (or, if a superseding California state law passes, pay a surcharge of $.25 for each plastic bag used), or use paper bags, which while being more biodegradable, are also less sturdy. Essentially, then, it’s a form of tax on people, and that is something that I can’t agree with. Knowing from experience (I lived in Los Angeles for three years, and have visited Seattle several times), there are a lot of people who live in these cities who are poor. Forcing them to spend extra money for the bags to put their groceries in (which are getting expensive enough as is with the economoic crunch) is simply the wrong way to approach this problem.
:
As for Seattle’s ordinance, which takes effect sooner than L.A.’s (Jan. 1, 2009), they plan to give citizens a couple of free cloth bags and launch an “education effort” to get people to remember their bags, but if they don’t, they have to pay $.20 per plastic or paper bag used. They also banned plastic foam cups and food trays. This one goes even further into the realm of the overly intrusive, and worse so, with such a small timeline involved, will make it difficult for grocery stores. Meat and seafood departments use these trays to put their product in, and because of sanitary issues, there isn’t much in the way of alternatives.
Ah, Seattle, I knew it well. T.Y.N.S. (Thank You, Nanny State)!
One thing with which I must take issue, or at the very least, question…
One of the features of California is recycling centers. They are privately run, and available all over the place. Adding plastic grocery bags to the list of recyclable material is probably the best way to handle the problem. These centers already handle the majority of bottle and can returns in the state, and so adding plastic bags to the accepted material list would help immensely.
We don’t have that many where I live, and the ones that are here aren’t open for very long.
Whenever I’m done spending my half-hour waiting in line, being the impatient, numerically-obsessed curmudgeon I am, I run the numbers to “prove” (in the mathematical sense) that recycling is just something a lot of people talk about a lot, but that very few people actually do. In the greater area, there are millions of people living here; hundreds of thousands of households. The few recycling centers we have are open six days a week, between six and eight hours a day. The lines move v-e-r-y slowly, and even when you follow all the rules you’re going to be turned back half the time just as your car is pulling up because they are full.
At that point, you can go back home or you can drive to the next center, six miles away, or even farther. With Saturday morning traffic, God knows what kind of time commitment that is, or if you’ll find a different situation once you’ve made that unexpected journey. No way to call ahead and find out.
This just isn’t the kind of production scheme that would support the recycling needs of this area. Just set aside any of the arguments that could be made about how it could be more convenient to the recycling consumer — that is not the point I wish to make here — and instead, look at the number of empty containers that must become available in this area versus what could be run through the system under the most favorable circumstances. It’s like sipping away at Folsom Lake through a krazy-straw. The numbers simply aren’t there. People aren’t doing it. They pitch the bottles and cans in the trash and then they talk a big game about how they replaced their light bulbs, and isn’t Al Gore a wonderful guy. All pile into the air-conditioned Tundra, we’re outta cat food.
And back to the original subject, what about those poor people buying their food? Princess is right. We pay the issue the requisite lip-service, aw gee, a gallon of 2% milk is $3.68, whatta they gonna do. And then wham-bam, we make ‘em pay 25 cents for each plastic bag, without batting an eye. I mean, sure there’s other options for them. But it seems there’s a certain “pecking order” to these issues, and the environmentally-concerned ones never seem to take a back seat to anything. That seems a little odd to me because I can’t help noticing the long term cause-and-effect of environmental initiatives are notoriously difficult to predict.
I subscribe via e-mail to updates from the democrat National Committee (dNC), in addition to the Republican counterpart organization and a few right-wing think tanks here and there. I think listening to both sides is part of one’s obligation as a responsible citizen, and besides it’s an educational experience. One thing I’ve noticed, going back to my earliest days of using an e-mail account at home, and it’s an unbroken pattern…
…a right-wing fundraising letter (or request for participation, for signing a petition…whatever) invariably opens with some alarming event, and dire prognostications of where this might lead. It’s almost as if it’s addressed to people who haven’t made up their minds to support conservatives. It may summarize the events crudely, perhaps even inaccurately, but in nearly all cases there’s a foundation for the argument that substantially addresses the question of why I should care.
The messages from Howard Dean, et al, do not do this. Top to bottom, they are saturated with a call-to-arms. The theme never varies, even slightly — I, Morgan Freeberg, am the drop of water that is missing from the waterfall. It’s straight out of Mao Tse-Tung’s speech in 1945 about the Foolish Old Man Who Removed The Mountains. If everybody does their part, and you do yours Mr. Freeberg…we will win!
Not a single word about what’s going to happen once that is achieved. Or, “War in Iraq” aside, what dire calamity will befall us if we fail.
There is a suggestion here, and more than a whiff of it, that conservatism exists in service of other ideals that exist outside of it, whereas liberalism exists only for its own sake (or for some other set of ideals nobody wants to discuss). I’ve opined on this before, how incredibly suspicious I find it that modern-day liberalism shows all this dogged determination to promulgate itself, to impose itself upon echelons of high power in our society — and for no other purpose whatsoever. In other words, once the elections are won, it’s all about quitting. Before those elections are won, it’s all about winning them at any cost.
So I’m finding this bundling of ruminations from left-wing blog Orcinus more than a tad interesting. I’m thinking probably, the author has been watching too many movies and not paying sufficient attention to what happens in real life:
What, really, is eliminationism?
It’s a fairly self-explanatory term: it describes a kind of politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas for the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.
:
Rhetorically, it takes on some distinctive shapes. It always depicts its opposition as simply beyond the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself — unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus in need of elimination. It often depicts its designated “enemy” as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and loves to incessantly suggest that its targets are themselves disease carriers…And yes, it’s often voiced as crude “jokes”, the humor of which, when analyzed, is inevitably predicated on a venomous hatred. [bold emphasis mine]
This seems to me an almost perfect description of modern-day liberalism; at least the tactics of it, if not the strategy.
They want us to go away. I’m thinking, by “us,” all the usual targets. Housewives…abstinence education advocates…Christians…climate change skeptics…meat eaters…gun owners…Boy Scouts. Those groups, and many more, I’ve seen exposed to “complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.” “Unfit for participation in their vision of society.” Earlier in the piece, the author further defines eliminationism as something that “cuts the target off from the community support it might normally enjoy and leaves them feeling even more isolated.” Is it possible to jot down a more apt description for what has been done to the Boy Scouts? They were taken to court, the case went all the way up to the Supremes, and when the Boy Scouts won their opponents moved to block their funding from the United Way.
With “dialogue shunned” every single step of the way.
What a classic case of being what one calls others.
The situational difference I find most damning is this: When I have some real passion about an issue that is based on values, and I find out, say, 80% of the population feels the same way, the first thought in my head is what in the world is wrong with the other 20%. I notice a lot of the folks who agree with me on the issue have the same reaction, and when people form their opinions from their values, this is only natural — so long as we’re discussing generalized, baseline values for a civilized society, and not personally-customized nit-picky values. The Left, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be able to count up to any percentage higher than 51. It’s like Howard Dean says, they want to win. And then, I get the impression very often, whether they win by 51-49 or by 90-10, they couldn’t possibly care less which it is. So long as those who disagree with them are properly gelded, it’s all good. They don’t want us to convert, they want us to lose.
Orcinus talks about “eliminationism”; that situation with our leftists seems to me to be about as fitting a definition as can be found in modern times.
Incidentally, I learned about Orcinus’ rant by way of a wonderful and insightful essay on selective outrage by Confederate Yankee; and I learned of that essay by way of Rick.
“Conservatives consider liberals well-intentioned, but misguided. Liberals consider conservatives not only wrong, but really, really bad people.” – Larry Elder
Cross-posted at House of Eratosthenes.
It’s my birthday! OK, so maybe it’s only the best day of the year for me (and really, still not necessarily the best day). But it’s a pretty damn good day anyways. One of the good things about today being my birthday is that it’s the one day of the year that I’m allowed to be a shamelessly capitalist greedy pig. With that said… here’s what I’d like for my birthday from you, my dear readers, that would make me happy.
…for that silly “no-sweat” workout thing in Germany. Something to do with hustling the hustler. Hah!
Obama told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd over the weekend that his encounter with Bonesky at the Berlin Ritz Carlton gym was a set up.
“I’m just realizing what I’ve got to become accustomed to,” he told the paper on Sunday. “The fact that I was played like that at the gym. Do you remember ‘The Color of Money’ with Paul Newman? And Forest Whitaker is sort of sitting there, acting like he doesn’t know how to play pool. And then he hustles the hustler. She hustled us. We walk into the gym. She’s already on the treadmill. She looks like just an ordinary German girl. She smiles and sort of waves, shyly, but doesn’t go out of her way to say anything. As I’m walking out, she says: ‘Oh, can I have a picture? I’m a big fan.’ Reggie [his assistant] takes the picture.”
The unauthorized article was a blow to Obama’s carefully orchestrated media image. He has not allowed European journalists to travel with his campaign, and the German media has criticized the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for denying them interviews during his stop to their country.
So I read this as…Obama comes from that weird outer-world planet in which public relations is work. We all know someone like this. You work your ass off, and some “colleague” of yours takes the credit. If you don’t show up to his apple-polishing ass-kissing sessions he acts like you aren’t doing any work, and he’s doing it all…when really, all he does is talk to people, and as far as the ass-kissing sessions, he doesn’t even invite you in the first place.
So form is the substance. Talking is doing.
And this thing called “charisma” is, after all, a perfectly good qualification for being President. The only noteworthy one.
But then on top of that, he still wants to be the walks-on-water guy when he can’t even orchestrate his own photo-ops. He waltzes into this gym to pump his dumbbells ten times each, and lo and behold it turns out someone else has an agenda of P.R. too.
People at work who don’t really do work and just show off…at least they’ve been known to do a good job of anticipating the desires and motivations of others, friends & foes, and jumping out in front of them. It seems to me the Obamessiah can’t even do that much. He’s just another left-wing control freak. He’s got this charming baritone voice with its dulcet tones, which is just a gimmick when you get down to it. Putting that aside, when you watch him work with people, he’s just got his notions about what he’s going to do and what everyone else is going to do too. The second someone wants to do something he didn’t know they wanted to do, his plans all come undone and he’s blaming the other guy for it.
I’ve known quite a few people like this before. I’ll bet you have too.
My Obama fatigue is starting to set in. But I can’t bring myself to slam the door shut on some of these. Get the drum & cymbals ready:
“Obama bowled a 37 because he did not want to knock over the pins. He wanted to negotiate with them.”
“We live in a world where a soliloquy by Shakespeare makes you a bigot, but a monologue by a vagina makes you enlightened.”
“Here is how liberals can understand the severity of 9/11. When the nose cone of the plane entered the building, it created a hostile work environment.”
“This race is the August Senator versus the guy who has been a Senator since August.”
“Obama is so young and naive that Bill Clinton is hitting on him.”
“Of course we use 40% of the world’s energy. We have plugs. We also have things to plug into the plugs.”
I recognize that last one as a slight mod to Sam Kinison’s classic about people living where the food is (strong language warning). Whatever. The lining of truth is what makes it funny. Every city of any size has a suburb and a financial district. Define pollution in any way you want to, and there’s going to be butt-loads more of it coming from the financial district. And yet you wouldn’t propose doing away with the financial district, would you. You wouldn’t ramble on about forcing the financial district to live like the suburbs, would you. Of course not. That would hurt the suburbs, sooner rather than later. Yet somehow when we talk about the resources used by the United States in relation to the rest of the world, and how Canada and Sweden are cranky at us for spewing carbon and eating meat, somehow we imagine merit in thoughts like these…
Obviously, I don’t have the talent required to make these into punchlines.
Sayet does. Many more like those. Check ‘em…
