A Classic Defense of How the Economy Should be Allowed to Work

Daniel Hannan is a British member of the European Union Parliament. He is speaking here at the Oxford Union Society about why the West's collective analysis of the the current economic crisis is so wrong and what is necessary to avoid making it worse and even happening again. It is brilliant, well presented and right. I hope that you will take the time to watch.

Every Journey Starts with a Single Step

GDP growth was -0.1% in the fourth quarter of 2012. Wait - I thought the economy was steadily improving, things were getting better and better in every way, every day!

www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth

What Difference Does it Make?

Those were Secretary Hillary Clinton's words yesterday to a Senate committee investigating the Benghazi debacle where four Americans lost their lives, including the American ambassador, in answering questions about who was responsible. Well, Madame Secretary, it makes a lot of difference. Here are just some of the ways it matters:

1. Families of the Dead Americans. They care what happened and they want the guilty to be held accountable.

2. American Policy. The responsible parties for this debacle should never be allowed again to make decisions affecting the United States because they are incompetent.

3. Integrity of the U.S. Senate.  It matters to the Senate which asked the question. The Executive Branch does not run the country unilaterally but the Senate has its own Constitutional role. In a courtroom a judge would have instructed you to answer the question.

4. Perjury/Misrepresentation.  It is entirely possible that facts were misrepresented to Congress and/or the public during this whole sordid mess. That is why witnesses are sworn, as you were yesterday. The public is entitled to the whole truth from its top officials; you avoided it. 

5. The American Public.  Above all, the public is entitled to know what its elected and appointed officials are doing in terms of carrying out the duties entrusted to them. We do not live in a dictatorship and the understanding that government officials are public servants is something that is rapidly receding - especially in the eyes of government officials. 

Your answer, Madame Secretary, was arrogant and dismissive of the democratic process, which is why you are not suited to be a Presidential candidate in 2016. You were able to bluff the Senate with your bluster. I hope that the same is not true of the electorate if you do run in four years. 

Thought You'd Like to Know

The GAO is the government's watchdog and is tasked with reporting the unvarnished truth to the American public, although many times it is after the fact. Here is what the GAO said in a report issued January 17, 2013, just a few days ago:

"The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that federal spending will drive the national debt to “unsustainable” levels in the coming decades, fueled by ever-rising health care costs and federal entitlement spending.

“The growing fiscal imbalance is driven on the spending side by rising health care costs and the aging of the population,” the GAO said in its report, The Federal Government’s Long-Term Fiscal Outlook, Spring 2012 Update.

Furthermore, "[d]espite limits on discretionary spending that would bring discretionary spending to levels not seen in recent history, our simulations show total federal spending continuing to exceed revenues and feeding an unsustainable growth in debt," states the report."The policy actions required to close the fiscal gap are significant, and changing the long-term outlook will likely require difficult decisions about both federal spending and revenue."

www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/01/22/media-Ignores-GAO-Report-Debt-Unsustainable

I am sure glad that this dire warning is getting such widespread media coverage. And also that President Obama set out such a daring plan to deal with it in his inaugural speech. Other than Bill O'Reilly and this story, I haven't heard a peep. Oh well, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we... 

St. Obama the Narcissist and His Apostles

Posters were being hawked around D.C. yesterday during the inaugural festivities depicting Obama as the Second Coming of Christ. Good luck meeting those expectations! In any event, it does give some insight into the religious-like faith that some people have in Obama and, from some of the things the President himself (Himself?) has said, he too may believe in his God-like powers. For insight into that mindset, a recent interview with Angelo Codevilla, a professor at Claremont and author of The Ruling Class, sheds some light. finance.townhall.com/columnists/jerrybowyer/2013/01/22/is-president-obama-liberalisms-gorbachev-n1494253

The Ruling Class uses an analytical framework that divides the U.S. into the Ruling Class and the Country Class, as if you were studying Roman or European history, and proceeds to study the norms held by each. The closer the norms of the two classes are, the more stable and dynamic the nation. Unfortunately,  Codevilla finds a huge gap between the two which is growing at a rapid clip. 

Some of the observations that Codevilla makes not only help with understanding what is going on in this country, but where we are likely to head in the long term:

•  The Ruling Class of America is not up to the challenge of leading America in the world, partly because it has engaged for several generations now in a process of reverse merit selection.
  

• Our ruling class has practiced negative selection for several generations now. I point you to a very, very interesting piece of research by a man called Ron Unz.

• Ron Unz, a wealthy entrepreneur, has just conducted interesting research on the admissions policies of America’s elite universities and has found that there is an iron quota against Asians in these universities: a limit of roughly 16 percent in these universities, even though the proportion of Asians relative to other ethnic groups among high achievers in the country has risen…they account for something like 40 percent of high achievers in the national merit scholar competition, national math and science competitions, etc.

• What you’ve got here is a ruling class in these universities which has perpetuated itself and has become more like itself, and has excluded alien elements. The element most excluded happens to be also the most numerous, which is to say ‘white non-Jewish Americans,’ and hence the overwhelming majority of high achievers. Yet the percentage of white non-Jewish admittees has continued to drop; there is especially a virtual absence of Christians among these admittees. The point being that this ruling class, which is increasingly styling itself as meritocratic, is anything but meritocratic and has renewed itself by cooption.

• This has nothing to do with fairness; this is not a moral argument I’m making at all…I’m saying that the people running this country are ever less competent to do their job. They are ever less able to do whatever the hell they do.

• They are ever more confident because they live in a bubble. They congratulate themselves. They give prizes to one another; they tell each other how smart they are.

• Having been a college professor for many years I saw students become ever more confident of their own intelligence and their own preparation while they were becoming less able to do the most elementary things.

• They are becoming more insular, less bright and less demanding of themselves.

• That’s what happens so often to ruling classes: they protect themselves against their competitors. Their greatest interest is in perpetuating their own cushy positions.

What Codevilla describes in a nutshell is an unstable nation that is becoming more so. Another way of saying it is that there are pre-revolutionary conditions arising in this country. If you study history, this occurs when a Ruling Class tries to consolidate its power and goes too far, causing a huge reaction by the Country Class that sweeps them out of power. Historically this has not usually been via the ballot box. The genius of America has been that its leaders and the people have always been close enough in their view of how things ought to be done that political transition has been accomplished peacefully. For a variety of reasons, that no longer appears to be true. The needle on the dial for the continuation of our peaceful political process of the last 237 years must be moved to "guarded."

One Size Fits All

In the 1960s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, formerly CEO at Ford, decided to build military planes the same way Ford built cars - take one model and trim it out differently depending on the target market. The F-111 was the result and it was a disaster. The Navy version never could shed enough weight to land on aircraft carriers. The Air Force version had the bad habit of running into mountains when its low-level terrain-following radar glitched. Eventually they salvaged the latter version by turning it into the long range FB-111 strike fighter and EA-111 anti-radar platform. History seems to repeat itself, however, and we are doing it again but this time with even higher stakes.

I posted in 2010 and 2011 about problems with the F-35 program. It is now 2013 and this article by Michael Auslin says the problems still are not solved. The big problem for the U.S.? The F-35 is supposed to be the replacement aircraft for all   three branches of the armed forces: Navy, Air Force and Marines. F-22 production has been shut down by Obama and current generation fighters are literally wearing out, not to mention easy targets for advanced Russian and Chinese fighters that are getting ready for production. This on top of massive defense budget cuts that will make it very difficult to address the problem. Auslin blames the Pentagon procurement procedures for part of this. I am sure that is true, but whoever is to blame, unless we can get some replacement aircraft that work on line PDQ, the U.S. is going to have its bare back end hanging out for anyone to take a shot at for an extended period of time.

www.nationalreview.com/articles/338032/pentagon-s-frankensteins-michael-auslin

Trashing an Icon

The logo to the left is instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever flown. American Airlines has had its troubles recently, but it is one of those carriers that you can count on to get you home and its 40-year old logo says that to one and all. 









This is American Airlines new paint scheme and logo. If you have read Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink you know that people make up their minds on new things in 5 seconds or so. At the 5 second mark I had already had an Al Roker moment in reaction to this new design, it was that visceral. As my son-in-law put it, why do you want to put a piano keyboard on the tail? Good question. Here are reactions from other people:

Colgan [Airlines] had sex with CSA and Cubana on a Greyhound bus in the same weekend and got pregnant. We know Colgan is the mother but we can’t tell who the father is. Nor do we care because the baby is still ugly either way.

Good God! What were they thinking? That livery is atrocious. Absolutely awful. They took a great brand and ruined it with that hideous tail design.

So AA is becoming the Greyhound bus of the air?

The tail reminds me of Where's Waldo's sweater.

Seriously, what a hack design. "Hey, we're called American, let's have a flag!" Any 5 year old would come up with that. And as for the logo, it looks like a ripped ribbon. Seriously! It's a line with a tear in it!

In other words, some other - actually a lot of other - people are unhappy with this nihilistic "upgrade." Oh well, if airline mergers keep up their pace we will all be flying just one carrier anyway - Acme Airlines in basic gray or institutional green. I can hardly wait. 

Observation Point

"The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."   C.S. Lewis

I Can See Clearly Now

"A new survey from Pew finds that, by a 2-1 margin, Americans support putting armed guards in the nation's schools. 64% support the proposal, first floated by the NRA, against just 32% who oppose it. Even this proposal, though, has a partisan tinge to it. 62% of Democrats support the idea, but Independents are slightly less favorable, at just 59% support. 73% of Republicans, however, support the policy."


www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/01/15/pew-64-want-armed-guards-in-schools

You can can fool some of the people all of the time, but clearly these people have not been fooled - they are serious about protecting their children and no amount of political kabuki dancing is going to convince them otherwise. If this same degree of realpolitik would spread to other issues affecting our society, we would be on our way back to health as a nation.

Poop Patrol Goes High Tech

"Orlando Condo Using DNA From Dogs to Track Owners Who Don't Clean Up"--headline, WKMG-TV website (Orlando), Jan. 14 

How about instead of paying who knows how much for DNA tests, the city hires a couple of unemployed folks at minimum wage to pick the stuff up? Just saying.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323596204578241691461160054.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

Thoughts on Gun "Control"

Consider this:

• Based on a 2000 study, Americans use guns to defend themselves from crime and violence 989,883 times annually. Banning guns would leave about 1,000,000 Americans defenseless from criminals who have no problem acquiring guns illegally.
• A nationwide survey reported over a five-year period 3.5% of households had a member who used a gun to protect themselves, their family, or their property. This also adds up to about the same 1,000,000 incidents annually.
• Each year about 200,000 women use a gun to defend themselves from a sexual crime or abuse.
• The Carter Justice Department found that of more than 32,000 attempted rapes, 32% were actually committed. But when a woman was armed with a gun or knife, only 3% of the attempted rapes were actually successful.
• Newer studies all point towards a figure of 2.5 million- that’s the new expert guesstimate of how many times Americans defend themselves from violent criminals each year. Guns save lives.

Let's we see what the bad guys themselves have to say:

• A survey of male felons in 11 state prisons across the USA found that 34% had been scared off, wounded or captured by an armed victim of their crime.
• 69% of felons knew other fellow criminals who had been scared off or captured by an armed victim.
• 57% of felons polled agreed that "criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about running into the police.

That's just the in the "violent" old U.S. The stats from England are even more enlightening. Yes, jolly Old England where Bobbies patrol without guns, people drink tea instead of coffee, home of Piers Morgan and where all are so civilized and have great accents. Well, not so much, at least to the violence part. The murder rate is indeed less than the U.S. but the violent crime rate is an astounding 333% higher than here in the colonies. According to FBI statistics, the violent crime rate in the United States is 386/100,000 population while in the U.K. it is 1,361/100,000 population. I would just as soon pass on the victim thing, thank you very much.

Gun control is really a misnomer. It controls the ability of law-abiding citizens to protect themselves while waiting for the police to arrive, but does nothing to deter the criminals from initiating violent crimes. I posted an earlier blog today about Groucho's "Marxist" political analysis and it was spot on. Too many politicians and media types are illustrating his point with reckless abandon. The nonsense has got to stop if we are really serious about protecting our families and children. I too just joined the NRA as a step against the idiocy. With firearms, always be safe, but be smart - the wellbeing of your family may depend on it. 

townhall.com/columnists/wayneallynroot/2013/01/13/why-i-just-joined-the-nra-n1487478

Marxist Political Analysis

Groucho Marx said it well:

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying all the wrong remedies.”

townhall.com/columnists/wayneallynroot/2013/01/13/why-i-just-joined-the-nra-n1487478

The Way to Stop Gun Violence

(Tip o' the hat to Al Lyons)

Violence and Hypocrisy in America

Well let's see, the top movie for the week of 1/10/13 is Django Unchained, which several professional movie critics have described as the most violent and sadistic bloodbath of a film that they have seen in years. Texas Chainsaw 3D is hanging in there in the #5 slot. boxofficemojo.com/daily/chart/  When pressed on whether his movie (Django) might be a little too violent for the current times, Quentin Tarantino and Jamie Foxx responded like  scalded cats, accusing people with the temerity to even raise such questions as "racist" and "disrespectful."

Then there are the video games. The current top of the charts sellers for games are Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Halo 4. Nailing down the #8 position is Far Cry 3, which the developer describes as, "The most relentlessly insane open-world first person shooter" game out there. Yup, that's what we need are more insane first-person shooters, but that would never happen.  www.vgchartz.com/

"But wait," comes the reply, "all these are protected by the First Amendment!" Indeed, they are, but all that is permissible is not necessarily helpful or useful. Advertisers don't soak us in commercials because they have data showing they don't work. Likewise, the Marines don't use realistic combat training videos because they are ineffective for training new recruits to kill in combat. The audiences for these movies and games are young males and usually more affluent young males because poorer guys can't afford the Xbox 360s, PS3s, etc. needed to play them, never mind the cost of the games themselves. The profile of the mass shooters is a white male, age 17-24, living at home. Notice any correlation? 

Finally comes our fabulous mental health system, which is neither "fabulous" or a "system" in any coherent sense of the word. Starting in the 1970s we started popping people out on the streets under the rubric of "community mental health." What this term really means is that it's very expensive to keep people on an extended in-patient basis and since these folks can't vote, we (the politicians) would rather take the money and spend it on things that do produce votes - open the gates! Most kids who watch movies like the ones above and play hours of similar videos never become psycho mass killers, although one does wonder about dry rot in their souls. There is a certain percentage of these kids that are psychotic sociopaths, however, and they are truly dangerous as we have witnessed again and again at places like Sandy Hook, Aurora, Columbine, Clackamas Town Center, VA Tech and more. They need to be locked up and treated, not just evaluated and cut loose. They are dangerous people and they will kill. Yes it's expensive, but what is the expense to the individual victims, their families, their communities and the nation? 

The poster for Texas Chainsaw 3D is the last place that I expected to see truth spoken, but there it is, "Evil wears many faces." Yes it does. It hides behind the faces of major Hollywood producers and directors, popular actors, game developers, major corporations producing video hardware - it hides behind lots of faces. It is imperative for our society if it wants to be healthy again to clearly recognize this and take consistent and decisive steps to counter the evil that hides and would doom us all. 

Observation Point

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."   C.S. Lewis