The Census Bureau released a set of estimates on Thursday May 17 showing that 50.4 percent of our nation’s population younger than age 1 were minorities as of July 1, 2011. This is up from 49.5 percent from the 2010 Census taken in April 1, 2020. What? The White Race is no longer in the majority, now the Minority Race is in the majority. Wait — “the Minority Race?”
Well, yes. That’s how silly this whole race thing is. Last time I went in for a routine mammogram, the forms insisted that I fill out a lengthy form listing my race — to see if I had cancer? I went for the “refuses to answer” designation. Damn government is just too intrusive.
Race doesn’t mean anything anyway. There is no such thing as a “minority race.” Barack Obama is half-white and half-black, but he has settled for black. People from South of the border are “Hispanic”, even if they are Indian. People from Spain, even with names like Garcia or Fernandez, are not Hispanic, but white — because Spain is in Europe.
The “Minority Race” is composed of everyone who is not of European heritage: folks from south of the border, from Asia, the Pacific Islands (but not Australia, unless Aborigine), Africa (unless Moslem) from North Africa, or white from South Africa, and so on. Members of the minority race may have nothing in common, and certainly cannot be classified together. And what do you do when people start intermarrying — which they do.
There was a time when Scots and English loathed each other and fought constant wars. So some Scots went to live in Ireland where they became Scots-Irish, from whence they emigrated to America where they were roundly despised until it was discovered that they were good with guns and crack shots, and useful in war. In turn, the Irish were despised and called shanty Iris, or lace-curtain Irish. The Italians, Greeks, Albanians and Turks were despised for being darker skinned with funny accents.The Poles— are you old enough to remember Polish jokes?
And then we have Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law professor, running for Congress as a minority because she has high cheekbones which she inherited from her great, great grandmother who was possibly or definitely not (depending on who you listen to) Cherokee and thus native American.
People have all sorts of different shades of skin. Those who are pasty-white like me spend scads of money to darken it in tanning booths, with tan in a bottle stuff, or preferably at expensive sunny resorts. Being white, we are assumed to be deeply prejudiced against those who have the darker skin that we are trying so hard to acquire.
People of mixed racial heritage, and intermarriage is so common these days that there are many, are still asked to declare their race. ‘Many’ is not acceptable, you have to pick. George Zimmerman was accused of a racially based hate crime until the media finally discovered that he was part Hispanic and part black as well as the white part.
The Democrat party has long found it profitable to divide their potential voters up into victim groups. Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and Women are assumed to be incompetent without massive federal help with housing, food, transportation, health care and preferential laws to make their lives worth living. Campaigns are organized to pander to those areas where the group may feel most vulnerable. See the fabled “War on Women.” Republicans talk some about the Hispanic vote or the Black vote, but they’re not any good at it because they don’t really believe in it.
America has had a difficult history with slavery, but far more slaves were transported to the sugar islands and to South America than to this country. It is deemed a far greater evil for America because we talk about it. We fought a horrendous war over it, and we have fought to get rid of its vestiges, step by step, very publicly. With a history of a free press, we have washed our dirty linen in public, and the world knows every step we have taken. But who knows the history of slavery in the Caribbean and South America — hardly anyone, though it lasted much longer and was in many cases more difficult.
Americans come in all shades and sizes, and we are coming much closer to simply recognizing all of us as “Americans”— an eventuality much to be desired. But the government schools keep teaching our children that their race is the most important thing about them, and that some races are victims. And the government insists on counting how proportions of races within a school, a business, a class compare to the proportion in society, as if that is important. And the Census Bureau keeps dividing us up by categories that just don’t matter at all. Resist.
Over the weekend, 230,000 unemployed people lost their benefits, they just ran out. The recession continues, prices climb at the grocery store, crisis in Europe, class warfare; this seems like a time of unrelenting pessimism. In his book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley took a comprehensive look at all of human history through the lens of the awesome power of trade: trade in goods, resources, services, and above all in ideas.
Mr.Ridley says as he writes (in 2010) “it is nine o’clock in the morning. In the two hours since I got out of bed I have showered in water heated by North Sea gas, shaved using an American razor running on electricity mae from British cola, eaten a slice of bread made from French wheat, spread with New Zealand butter and Spanish marmalade, then brewed a cup of tea using leaves grown in Sri Lanka, dressed myself in clothes of Indian cotton and Australian wool, with shoes of Chinese leather and Malaysian rubber, and read a newspaper made from Finnish wood pulp and Chinese ink.” He continues, but the point is the worldwide trade that is part of every object we use. Free trade.
For from the earliest man, a trade involved a willing purchaser and a willing seller who agreed on the exchange. The Occupy people are in the streets carrying signs objecting in (often) vile language to capitalism and the free market. Socialism, they are sure, would be much better — then somebody else would pay their college bills. But socialism too has a history. And it has been a disastrous failure everywhere it has been tried. And this time will not be different — it never is. and they are sure, always, that they can fix things with more central planning, more regulation by wise government experts.
Last April 27, one of the worst tornadoes in American history ripped through Tuscaloosa Ala., killing 52 people and wrecking or destroying 2,000 buildings. It took only 6 minutes to put almost one tenth of the city’s population into the unemployment line. Only a month later, Joplin, Mo., suffered an even more devastating blow— in a city with half the population of Tuscaloosa, a tornado killed 161 people and damaged or destroyed more than 6,000 buildings.
More than 100,000 volunteers mobilized to help the stricken cities. A year later, that spirit lives on in Joplin, where eight of 10 affected businesses have reopened, while fewer than half in Tuscaloosa have even applied for building permits, and vacant lots abound. In Tuscaloosa, officials sought to remake the urban landscape top-down, imposing a redevelopment plan on business, while Joplin took a bottom-up approach, allowing businesses to take the lead in their own recovery. Evidence.
From Small Dead Animals: Wells Fargo Bank is taking steps toward repossessing Stockton, California’s new City Hall, a eight-story high-rise. City government has never moved into the $40.7 million building. City officials in America’s most miserable city still take in over $50,000 in processing and other fees on each new home built, and has been fining homeowners for not painting their yellowing lawns green. Ninety-four retired city union employees receive pensions of over $100,000 a year and free healthcare for life. Big spenders, bankrupt city. Evidence.
Well, that’s California. Governor Brown is raising taxes on the wealthy, who are moving out of the state in droves, as are businesses. Governor Jerry Brown also says that California is facing a higher-than-expected $16 billion budget shortfall, but they are still not ready to call a halt to their ambitious high-speed rail programs. They get lots of Obama money for rail, but California will bear the brunt of the escalating cost, and the shortfall when nobody rides. California has had a net loss of four million residents to other states, and yes, this is evidence as well.
President Obama’s fiscal policy is a dismal mixture. On spending, he wants a European-style welfare state. On taxes, he is fixated on class-warfare tax policy.
If we want to know the consequences of that approach, we can look at the ongoing collapse of Greece. Or, if we don’t like overseas examples, we can look at California. If the (formerly) Golden State is any example, it turns out that having high tax rates doesn’t necessarily translate into high tax revenues.
It seems that across the nation, the states with the greatest outflow of citizens and businesses are the states that are trying to recoup their financial standing by raising taxes and increasing regulation — after California, there is Illinois, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and their businesses and their people are moving to low tax states, with less regulation and even right-to-work rules as governors cut costs and regulations, and rein in out of control benefits. Evidence.
As California is a bad example in the United States, so it is with the ongoing crisis in Greece. Obama wants us to be more like the European welfare states, but Europe is in crisis, and the big questions are whether the European Union can survive at all. The political left has long wanted America to be more like a Scandinavian nation. But while we weren’t paying attention, Sweden has changed with the election of Fredrik Reinfeldt as prime minister in 2006.
Mr. Reinfeldt took office in October of that year, and by January of 2007, tax cutting had begun. They cut welfare spending and began to deregulate the economy. These steps not only did not harm Sweden’s economy, but improved it. Sweden pulled strongly out of the decline of 2008 and 2009, posting GDP gains of 6.1% in 2010 and 3.9% last year, when it ranked at the top of Europe’s fastest growing economies.
While most European countries borrowed heavily, Finance Minister Anders Borg pared back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut. Borg strongly opposed the Keynesian solution which the left has continued to advance while it rejects an austerity that has yet to be implemented. Evidence.
These are just a few examples of the free market at work. The free market starts with an agreeable exchange between two people. It’s not all that different if it is an early man trading a bearskin for some shells or you plunking down the money for a new laptop. The exchange will take place only if each feels that they are getting a good deal. Multiply that exchange by the 330 million people in the United States, and attempt to explain how the heavy hand of government, high taxes and heavy regulation can improve upon that trade. Everywhere you look, you will see the free market at work, — or not working because of government interference.
And do read Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimistor John Steele Gordon’s An Empire of Wealth. Perfect antidotes for a pessimistic time. They are not only an optimistic view of the world, but a clear and incisive portrayal of what works. Beside that, they are just good reads.
What a strange period in history we are living in. Democrats in Congress, looking forward to the elections in November, have announced that they want to amend the Constitution to replace all those freedoms in the First Amendment. Liberals have always been at odds with freedom of speech, and the press, freedom of religion, the right of people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
They have even written a new First Amendment, called The People’s Rights Amendment:
Section 1. We the people who ordain and establish this Constitution intend the rights protected by this Constitution to be the rights of natural persons.
Section 2. People, person, or persons as used in this Constitution does not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities established by the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state, and such corporate entities are subject to such regulation as the people, through their elected state and federal representatives, deem reasonable and are otherwise consistent with the powers of Congress and the States under this Constitution.
Section 3. Nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, and such other rights of the people, which rights are inalienable.
So Congress could ban the speech of nonmedia business corporations, it could ban publications by corporate-run newspapers and magazines, the religious practices of most churches which are generally organized as corporations, most universities, incorporated unions and non-profits. All corporate entities would be stripped of all constitutional rights. All corporate entities would be treated as artificial creatures of the state. Congress could ban speech about elections and any other speech about religion, politics or anything else. It could ban speech on viewpoints that they didn’t like.
State legislatures and local governments could do the same. They could seize corporate property without providing compensation and without providing due process. All corporate entities would be stripped of all constitutional rights.
The government urges us in this case to uphold a direct prohibition on political speech. It asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet, and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concerns.
The Left— Liberals, Progressives, Democrats— doesn’t like to be disagreed with. They want to shut down opposing voices. They have long wanted to eliminate freedom of speech. Witness the recent campaign to get Rush Limbaugh off the air because he said something rude about Sandra Fluke, while they completely accept any and all rude things said about Sarah Palin. Witness the outcry against Fox News particularly, but any other Right-leaning publication. Congressional Democrats want the power to shut down opposing voices.
As far as that goes, they aren’t too crazy about the other First Amendment freedoms. They were outraged when Tea Party people exercised their constitutional right to peaceably assemble. The Occupy people camping out and vandalizing public and private property were simply nice young people righteously protesting. And morphing ‘freedom of religion’ into a ‘separation of church and state’ has tried to eliminate any sign of public religion from the public scene.
Perpetually discontented, they don’t like what is, and want something — that they like better. A Utopian world where no one will disagree with them, and where they will always be in charge and have the power to do what they want without interference or objection.
Like every other law, the Constitution must bind officials, not empower them.
Perhaps you remember back when the Democrat Congress and Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed ObamaCare, and she was asked where in the Constitution Congress found the power to enact a “individual mandate” to buy insurance. The then Speaker responded with an incredulous “Are you serious? Are you serious?”
The Volokh Conspiracy listed today some of the Pearls of constitutional wisdom from our elected representatives:
Here are a few more pearls of constitutional wisdom from our elected representatives. Rep. Conyers cited the “Good and Welfare Clause” as the source of Congress’s authority [there is no such clause]. Rep. Stark responded, “the federal government can do most anything in this country.” Rep. Clyburn replied, “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do. How about [you] show me where in the Constitution it prohibits the federal government from doing this?” Rep. Hare said “I don’t worry about the Constitution on this, to be honest [...] It doesn’t matter to me.” When asked, “Where in the Constitution does it give you the authority …?” He replied, “I don’t know.” Sen. Akaka said he “not aware” of which Constitutional provision authorizes the healthcare bill. Sen. Leahy added, “We have plenty of authority. Are you saying there’s no authority?” Sen. Landrieu told a questioner, “I’ll leave that up to the constitutional lawyers on our staff.”
Well, it hasn’t been overturned yet, and may not be, but the possibility hadn’t even occurred to Democrats.
Chris Matthews was incredulous. “No one I know ever said ObamaCare could be overturned” “I never heard it discussed politically— that they could overturn his major achievement.”
For most of the last century, Liberals have preached that the Constitution is a living document that needs to be interpreted and re-interpreted to fit the needs of the times. That interpretation leads them to a vast expansion of government and a large number of new rights that suit the needs of whatever election is current. Activist liberal judges have consistently ignored the constitution and imposed their own ideas, and changed the way we think about government. The very idea that a conservative majority might rule ObamaCare unconstitutional has the editorial writers at the New York Times up in arms: “The Supreme Court faces a central test: whether it will recognize limits on its own authority to overturn well-founded acts of Congress.” They are shocked! Shocked!
The Times— completely missing the irony — believes that if the court overturns ObamaCare, it will be a “willful rejection” of “established constitutional principles that have been upheld for generations.” We can hope.
Peter Suderman of the Reason Foundation remarks on the ObamaCare mandate:
The Obama administration has repeatedly and somewhat counterintuitively argued that the individual mandate to purchase health insurance is not, in fact, a requirement that compels anyone to purchase health insurance. Arguing the case in front of an appeals court in Atlanta, Neal Kumar Katyal, the Obama administration’s former acting solicitor general,told judges that the government is “not asking people to buy something they otherwise might not buy.”
Eventually, Katyal argued, everyone will need health care. Requiring individuals to purchase health insurance merely regulates how that care will be financed.
Katyal and other defenders of the mandate have used this idea that the provision merely regulates financing as a response to the concerns about the mandate’s novelty and the scope of congressional action it might allow. Congress already regulates the financing of health care, the argument goes; this would simply be a new way to regulate that financing. By minimizing the provision’s novelty, the law’s defenders can sidestep concerns about the breadth of power granted to Congress under the Commerce Clause should the mandate be ruled constitutional.
There’s a big difference between regulating commerce in which an individual has chosen to participate, and compelling someone to participate in a specific form of commerce in which they have chosen not to participate. The protestations that the pig in the poke is not a pig are getting increasingly weird.
The mandate doesn’t regulate commerce, it requires commerce. Unwanted commerce.
The headline at Think Progress GREEN reads:”Access to Birth Control Is A Fundamental Component of Climate Survival. The gap between the beliefs of the progressives and the conservatives is wider than you probably realized.
Any morally acceptable pathway to prevent catastrophic global warming includes broad access to affordable birth control for the world’s women. The conservative war on birth control is a war on women’s rights, and thus on the rights of us all. Manmade global warming is one of the most troubling symptoms of economic and social injustice around the planet, and the ”countries in the developing world least responsible for the growing emissions are likely to experience the heaviest impact of climate change, with women bearing the greatest toll.” Researchers have found that empowering women to reduce unplanned pregnancies is one of the most cost-effective ways to combat greenhouse pollution, as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson discussed at the Durban climate conference last December.
Last year, Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times explained that birth control is the solution to, well, everything:
What if there were a solution to many of the global problems that confront us, from climate change to poverty to civil wars? There is, but it is starved of resources. It’s called family planning, and it has been a victim of America’s religious wars.
The problem is overpopulation, and unless we get rid of all those kids in the third world, they’ll keep lighting dung fires and cutting down forests and creating carbon dioxide which will just make the globe warmer and we are headed for catastrophe if we don’t keep them from having babies.
Progressives talk to themselves. They read progressive things, listen to progressive programs, and try to eliminate any news, words, thought or ideas that come from dreaded right-wing sources. They move in progressive circles and associate with other progressives. They truly resent being disagreed with, and try to eliminate the source of the disagreement. That’s why they are so enraged by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. They are thoroughly confused about what the decision actually says, but agree that it lets corporations have a voice in American elections, and that’s just not acceptable.
“Progressive” they may be, but their progressiveness comes from John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ and Jimmy Carter. They keep missing things that are happening in today’s world. Malthus has been discredited, when malaria and water-borne diseases are controlled and children can be expected to survive childhood, people choose to control the size of their own families. The Earth hasn’t warmed at all since 2000. Cold is a far bigger killer than warmth, and the “hockey stick graph” and the IPCC that so promoted it have been thoroughly discredited.
The think progress article is attempting to emphasize the idea that President Obama’s effort to see that all women get free birth control at the expense of everybody else is another valiant effort to control disastrous global warming. They don’t mention the president’s contraception debacle, but the usual suspects — Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray — are sure that if the rest of us don’t pay for the birth control for all the women of child-bearing age, then we are denying their “right” to choice. Only progressives get to choose, you see.
According to Google, a 30-day supply of birth control pills costs $4 at WalMart.
Janet Daley is an American born, British columnist and writer fort the Telegraph. She had an important column in the Telegraph yesterday, on free market economics and the private banking system.
But in spite of the official agreement that there is no other way to organise the economic life of a free society than the present one (with a few tweaks), there are an awful lot of people implicitly behaving as if there were. Several political armies seem to be running on the assumption that there is still a viable contest between capitalism and Something Else.
If this were just the hard Left within a few trade unions and a fringe collection of Socialist Workers’ Party headbangers, it would not much matter. But the truth is that a good proportion of the population harbours a vague notion that there exists a whole other way of doing things that is inherently more benign and “fair” – in which nobody is hurt or disadvantaged – available for the choosing, if only politicians had the will or the generosity to embrace it.
She suggests that you try an experiment. Gather a bunch of 18-year-olds, and ask them what world event occurred in 1945. They should ( I hope) be able to tell you how the Second World War ended and some vague idea of its aftermath. Then ask them what historical milestone happened in 1989? Deer in the headlights?
The failure of communism should have been, after all, not just a turning point in geo-political power – the ending of the Cold War and the break-up of the Warsaw Pact – but in modern thinking about the state and its relationship to the economy, about collectivism vs individualism, and about public vs private power. Where was the discussion, the trenchant analysis, or the fundamental debate about how and why the collectivist solutions failed, which should have been so pervasive that it would have percolated down from the educated classes to the bright 18-year-olds? Fascism is so thoroughly (and, of course, rightly) repudiated that even the use of the word as a casual slur is considered slanderous, while communism, which enslaved more people for longer (and also committed mass murder), is regarded with almost sentimental condescension.
Bad guys in the movies have long been Nazis, and in thrillers the KGB, but compared to Nazi concentration camps, the Gulag is practically unknown. Communism committed mass murder at far greater rates than Nazi Germany — something far over 100,000,000 murders, but still seems to be regarded as a more “fair” way of running a government. Communism has been a dismal failure everywhere it has been tried, and socialism is following closely behind.
Now we have the Occupy people wallowing in tents and filth to protest Capitalism, waving their communist signs around — yet the one thing they make clear is that they have no understanding of the free market whatsoever. And these are the people that George Soros is supporting and hoping will become a real revolutionary movement by next summer.
Janet Daley adds:
If the European intellectual elite had not been so compromised by its own broad acceptance of collectivist beliefs, maybe we would have had a genuine, far-reaching re-appraisal of the entire ideological framework. And that might have led to a more honest political dialogue in which everybody might now be talking sensibly about capitalism and how it needs to be managed. It is people – not markets – that are moral or immoral. Communism’s fatal error was in thinking that morality resided in the mechanisms of an economic system rather than in the people who operated them.
Someone named Jill Stein is running for president on the Green Party ticket. To join in the conversation, she has published “A Green New Deal for America.” It’s even more tiresome than the president’s version, but you might get a few chuckles.
She writes:
The Green New Deal is an emergency four part program of specific solutions for moving America quickly out of crisis into the secure green future….
For this reason, The Green New Deal begins with an Economic Bill of Rights that recognizes our rights to an economy that serves people. This means that everyone willing and able to work has the right to a job at a living wage. All of us have the right to quality education, health care, utilities, and housing. Each of us has the right to unionize, to fair taxation, and to fair trade. …
We will end unemployment in America once and for all by ensuring a job at a living wage for every American willing and able to work. This includes jobs that improve our environment, like clean manufacturing, organic agriculture, public transportation and clean renewable energy. It also includes jobs that provide urgently needed social infrastructure – for public education, health care, child care, elder care, youth programs, and arts and culture. …
Our Full Employment Program will create 16 million jobs through a community-based direct employment initiative that will be nationally funded, locally controlled, and democratically protected against conflicts of interest and pay-to-play influence peddling. The program will directly create jobs in the public and the private sector. Instead of going to an unemployment office when you can’t find work, you can simply go to the local employment office to find a public sector job.
We will honor the right to a tuition-free, quality public education from pre-school through college at public institutions. And we will forgive student loan debt left over from the current era of unaffordable college education.
We will honor the right to decent affordable housing, including an immediate halt to all foreclosures and evictions. We will create a federal bank with local branches to take over homes with distressed mortgages and either restructure the mortgages to affordable levels, or if the occupants cannot afford a mortgage, rent homes to the occupants. We will expand rental and home ownership assistance, create ample public housing, and capital grants to non-profit developers of affordable housing until all people can obtain decent housing at no more than 25% of their income. …
The 16 million jobs created by the Full Employment Program mentioned earlier will be the core of the Green Transition Program. It will provide jobs in sustainable energy, transportation and manufacturing infrastructure: clean renewable energy generation, energy efficiency retrofitting, intra-city mass transit and inter-city railroads, weatherization, “complete streets” that safely encourage bike and pedestrian traffic, regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture, and clean manufacturing of the goods needed to support this sustainable economy.
A new world really is possible. We can, and must, shift to an economy in which 100% of our electricity is generated renewably. We can and must leave the old economy behind – which was based on mining, extraction, and dirty dangerous expensive nuclear power. We can and must stop poisoning ourselves, our children, and other living beings.
How is it possible for any sentient human being to be so ignorant of basic economics, math or history that they swallow this crap? The longing for Utopia persists, but they never, never understand what their Utopia would look like:
You almost have to feel a little sorry for the Occupy young people. They are so young and stupid. They have no knowledge of history, or they would be aware that socialism has been a dreadful failure everywhere and every time it has been tried.
They rage against capitalism without any understanding of what ‘capitalism ‘ is — simply the name Karl Marx gave to the workings of the free market. They assume their own jobless state or the student loans they took out are the result of something other mean people have done to them rather than something that results from poor choices on their own part. Aside from lessons in history and economics, they seem to have missed some of the standard guardrails of life like “there’s no free lunch,” or “a penny saved is a penny earned” and “life isn’t fair.”
All the old socialists and communists turned up to offer encouragement and pamphlets, but I notice that they are visibly absent when confrontations begin. The idea of “revolution” has always been appealing to the young and idealistic when the hormones are raging.
Another clash on New Year’s Eve in Zuccotti park, when the Occupy bunch tried tear down the barriers and re-occupy the place. The Left clearly expected something a little — um, nobler, when expressing their support for the movement, but they can’t help themselves, they love the idea of revolution. The reality is something they only want to support from a distance.
I’m afraid that the interest in Occupy theatrics has waned, and they’ve become simply tiresome and rather pathetic. “Occupied Zuccotti Park” isn’t something I’d recommend putting on your resume. Irving Kristol once wrote something appropriate:
In every society the overwhelming majority of people live lives of considerable frustration and if society is to endure, it needs to rely on a goodly measure of stoical resignation.
That’s the problem. The Left has never understood human nature nor accepted the flawed nature of man. They go off dreaming of utopian solutions and try to fix the unfixable with ever more rules and regulations. Sorry, the rich are not going to pay your bills, nor will they offer you a job — they’ll applaud while you man the barricades, but don’t expect anything more.
We apparently had an Occupy event in the Seattle suburbs a week ago, and I missed the whole thing. There was a picture in the paper of a number of people holding signs, numbered from one to ten, and a brief article that said the demonstration —which consisted of a bunch of people standing around on a street corner in one of the most upscale suburbs (median income $129,000) — was organized by MoveOn.org. The signs, derived from MoveOn’s ten-point philosophy read:
Invest in America’s Infrastructure
Create 21st Century Energy Jobs
Invest in Public Schools
Offer Medicare for All
Make Work Pay
Secure Social Security
Return to Fairer Tax Rates
End the Wars and Invest At Home
Save the American Dream
Strengthen Democracy
President Obama said that the movement’s aims were one of the reasons he ran for president, so he has claimed it. The most notable thing about the Occupy camps, aside from the squalor and crime, has been the incoherence of their statements about why they were protesting.
—We tried investing in America’s infrastructure to the tune of $825 billion wasted.
— Obama is shutting down the 21st century energy jobs as fast as he can, unless you mean “green” energy jobs. That was always a pipe-dream. There aren’t any.
—The one thing our public schools don’t need is more money. They have spent it on unnecessary administrative expansion, and continued to deprive classrooms of funds.
—Medicare is broke. Medicare for all is a joke. It must be reformed to save it. —”Make Work Pay” What does this mean ? The usual way is to work hard and get promoted because you are a valuable employee. A job is a cost to business — you have to be worth it.
— Social Security is broke. It cannot be “secured,” it can be reformed. —”Return to fairer tax rates?” The Bush tax cuts lowered taxes for everyone. The bottom 40% pay no income tax, and contrary to leftist rhetoric, the “rich” got the least percentage cut. Democrats are sure that if you just raise the tax rate on “the rich” to 80% then you can do all these other fantasies. Sorry, the rich don’t have enough money. Won’t work.
— President Obama is “ending the wars,”and probably giving away all the gains our military achieved. Invest in what? Obama has “invested” $825 billion and it was not only a complete waste, but has hurt economic growth in the future through uncontrolled spending.
— You cannot save the American Dream by increasing the size and overreach of government, increasing spending, and increasing regulation. The American Dream is a result of free markets and free people.
— Strengthen Democracy — this does not compute. You cannot strengthen democracy by increasing socialism and the welfare state. Increasing socialism leads to tyranny.
The Occupy movement has no aims that anyone has expressed, other than they want someone else’s money. They want someone else to pay their taxes, someone else to pay their student loans, someone else to provide a nice comfortable place for them to camp, someone else to provide bathrooms and food. They profess non-violence, yet refuse to obey police orders, tolerate rape, drugs, drunkenness and assault. They cannot articulate why they are there and are deeply uninformed about the very things they claim to be protesting about. It’s not a movement. It’s a joke.
The Euro crisis continues. It seems as if it has been going on forever. Daniel Hannan, MEP for South East England, though a member of the European Parliament, is definitely not a fan of the European Union. He said today:
Shall I tell you the truly terrifying thing about the EU? It’s not the absence of democracy in Brussels, or the ease with which Eurocrats swat aside referendum results. It’s the way in which the internal democracy of the member states is subverted in order to sustain the requirements of membership. …
Euro-enthusiasts in Brussels and in Athens are ready to bring down an elected government rather than allow a referendum. Yet the funny thing is that Papandreou is a Euro-enthusiast. He fervently wants to remain in the euro, and had been planning to campaign for a Yes vote. His sin, in the eyes of Brussels, was not to hold the wrong opinions, but to be too keen on democracy. Leninists had a term for people who, while they might be committed Bolsheviks, none the less behaved in a way which endangered the movement. They were called “objectively counter-revolutionary”. Poor Papandreou finds himself in this category.
It is probable that Greek voters will reject the European Union deal, unless Germany, France and the others decide to come up with an alternative offer. Nile Gardiner explains from the British (Tory) point of view:
The Greeks have largely dug their own hole of despair after years of excessive public spending and borrowing (as well as over-regulation of their economy). Several other Euro countries are in the same boat, including Portugal, Spain and even Italy, the EU’s third-largest economy.
But it is only right that the Greek people have the final say in deciding their own future; in any case, no amount of German-funded bailouts will rescue Greece from financial collapse. In fact, the promise to hold a referendum is practically the only major decision the Greek government has got right in the past decade. It will no doubt spark calls for popular votes on the EU across
Europe.
From its inception, the 17-country single European currency has been an inherently political project, designed to artificially unite a diverse group of nations stretching across southern, central and northern Europe. It has in practice served to artificially push down interest rates in traditionally high-rate countries, leading to excessive borrowing and the current debt crisis.
The European Union was formed to unite the many countries in the European Continent who had been warring for centuries, and borders shifting and changing. After the devastation of World War II they wanted to prevent any more wars. But they did it with a fundamentally undemocratic approach, foisting an untested economic experiment on their own people without popular consent. No Eurozone country has held any kind of popular vote on its own membership in the monetary union. Layer on top of that the European compulsion to spend vast quantities of money on alternate energy schemes, carbon trading, wind farms and solar arrays such as the ones that have so damaged the Spanish economy.
Socialist economic planning and an unelected and unaccountable parliament have resulted in economic decline and an increasingly disillusioned electorate. Treasury Secretary Geithner said that we will be very helpful as a major funding source for the International Monetary Fund, but has offered no specifics. So we are left to watch and hope, short of information, and with little understanding of how this all works. We’re left hoping that events across the water won’t come back to bite us. President Obama did advise the Europeans to do a stimulus like he did, but, fortunately, they quickly rejected that advice, and not too politely at that.
Bret Stephens wrote back in September that the hard fact on which postwar Europe was founded was military necessity: “crisply summed up by Lord Ismay’s famous line that NATO’s mission was ‘To keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
In 1965, government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 28% in Western Europe. Today it hovers just under 50%. In 1965, the fertility rate in Germany was a healthy 2.5 children per mother. Today it is a catastrophic 1.35. During the postwar years, annual GDP growth in Europe averaged 5.5%. After 1973, it rarely exceeded 2.3%. In 1973, Europeans worked 102 hours for every 100 worked by an American. By 2004 they worked just 82 hours for every 100 American ones. …
There was the convenient fiction that Europe didn’t need robust military capabilities when it could exert global influence through diplomacy and soft power. There was the convenient fiction that Europeans shared identical values and could thus be subject to uniform regulations governing crime and punishment. There was the convenient fiction that Continentals weren’t lagging in productivity but were simply making an enlightened choice of leisure over labor.
And there was, finally, the whopping fiction that Europe had its own “model,” distinct and superior to the American one, that immunized it from broader international currents: globalization, Islamism, demography. Europeans love their holidays and thought they were entitled to a long holiday from history as well.
Stephens says that America will survive this because America is a state. But the European project will implode. Countries want to retain their own fiscal independence — the core essential of democratic sovereignty. Not promising, not pretty.
