Jun 07 2009

Sowell on Burke and Obama: The Limits to Power?

Category: government,Obama,Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 9:15 am

Our new maximum leader has nationalized the biggest car company in the USA. Thomas Sowell connects the dots to the thought of Edmund Burke (much more at the link)

When Burke wrote of his apprehension about “new power in new persons,” I could not help think of the new powers that have been created by which a new President of the United States — a man with zero experience in business — can fire the head of General Motors and tell banks how to run their businesses.

The mind boggles just a bit. What are the limits of the President’s power, if he can take over GM in this way?

National media conglomerates are struggling, as well as newspaper chains.  What if NBC was going out of business?  Would the US government, under Obama, step in and “rescue” it by taking ownership and appointing an “independent” board to run it, packed with Obama’s stooges?  Talk about freedom of the press…

Just thinking out loud here….  what if all three major networks were on the rocks, like GM, Chrysler, and Ford (which may have trouble competing with a subsidized GM…)?  Is there anything in current law that would prevent Obama from doing the same thing to all three, that is, simply taking them over?  Does this thought make you nervous?  I hope so.  Imagine those hard-hitting exposes on the corruption of Republican senators, the violence of the NRA, the hatred of Christian fundamentalists, the selfishness of big corporations, and the tolerant forbearance of Muslims.

Of course, cynics might say that it would be hard to tell if the networks suddenly became more pro-Obama than they already are….  and now that I think of it, I’ve already seen the kinds of coverage I just listed, ad nauseam.

If McDonald’s starts to struggle, and the feds take over, will we start seeing nothing but tofu burgers and salads with no dressing (more or less the parallel to the kinds of cars it appears Obama plans for GM to make)?

I’m personally hoping for an Obama takeover of the movie industry.  I expect that Hollywood would immediately begin making movies critical of George Bush, the Iraq War, and the War on Terror.  They’d start holding lots of fundraisers for Obama endorsed candidates.  Hmm…  maybe no discernable change there, either.

OK, what if Obama took over the laptop computer industry?   Would all the built in screen savers feature Barry and Michelle?  Would the ability to link to conservative websites be blocked?  Would Google-searches for “Obama and Wright and Ayers” always come up with zero hits?  Would all new laptops feature an Obama button that immediately links the user to http://www.whitehouse.gov?

The scariest possibility for me is this.  What if the National Archives went bankrupt?  What if Obama took over?  What if he changed the text in the original version of the 22nd Amendment?  Now it could read, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, unless he is of Kenyan descent and used to live in Chicago, in which case he can be president for life.”  It wouldn’t matter that it read differently everywhere else.  Obama would have the ORIGINAL.

I’m trying hard to see the humor in this, but honestly, the idea of Government Motors terrifies me for what it means about our nation.

Jun 06 2009

Combat Power, Capitalism and the real enemy

Category: capitalism,economy,government,liberty,socialism — harmonicminer @ 9:00 am

To win battles, you have to achieve adequate combat power in relation to your enemy:

… Combat power is created by combining the elements of maneuver, firepower, protection, and leadership. Overwhelming combat power is the ability to focus sufficient force to ensure success and deny the enemy any chance of escape or effective retaliation. … Overwhelming combat power is achieved when all combat elements are violently brought to bear quickly, giving the enemy no opportunity to respond with coordinated or effective opposition. …

Commanders seek to apply overwhelming combat power to achieve victory at minimal cost. … They attempt to defeat the enemy’s combat power by interfering with his ability to maneuver, apply firepower, or provide protection.

Four primary elements – maneuver, firepower, protection, and leadership – combine to create combat power – the ability to fight. Their effective application and sustainment, in concert with one another, will decide the outcome of campaigns, major operations, battles, and engagements. Leaders integrate maneuver, firepower, and protection capabilities in a variety of combinations appropriate to the situation. …

The idea of combat power may seem a bit abstract, so a few examples may help.

If you have a combat force of 100 soldiers, how should you distribute weapons?   How should you distribute ammunition?   How should you distribute the soldiers in the battle space?  The answer can be stated generally this way:  you want the best, most powerful weapons to be gathered at the point where they will be most effective, with the most available ammunition, supported by as many soldiers as necessary to use the weapons, protect the weapons, and protect the soldiers who are USING the main weapons until those weapons have been effectively employed and the enemy is destroyed or neutralized.

Here is what you don’t do.  You don’t automatically distribute the ammunition evenly to each soldier.  You don’t just spread the soldiers out and hope that one of them runs into the enemy.  You don’t hold a lottery to decide who gets the biggest guns, or the ones with the highest rate of fire.  You don’t give all the soldiers identical training, and you don’t place soldiers in particular roles without primary regard for their achievement and acquired skills.

Combat power is the idea of focusing energy and resources where they will do the most good in defeating the enemy.  Somebody has to be in command, to make the decisions that will lead to that timely concentration of power.  It won’t happen by accident.  Ideally, an officer moves up through the ranks by demonstrated success against the enemy, although in this imperfect world, other criteria will sometimes be applied.

There is a strong relation between the concepts of combat power and capitalism.  Capitalism gets its name from the fact that it involves building up sufficient resources to accomplish economic tasks that are beyond the “average resources” of individuals.  An important point:  although “capital” is analogous to “combat power,” the enemy for capitalists is poverty.   This fact is not obvious, on the surface, to anti-capitalists, including socialists, who also claim that their enemy is poverty.  But consider: there is an upper limit (and it’s pretty low) to how rich a person can be in a poor society.

The richest man in a third world country may still have to spend a lot of time in considerably less luxurious circumstances that most American inner cities, where no one spends much time bouncing over dirt roads, rarely has to smell open sewage, can safely drink water from pretty much any tap, and so on.  You know all those rich people you read about in third world countries?  They are often rich only because they have managed to sell a product into a developed middle-class economy (think Saudis selling oil to the USA), or because they just plain stole it by means of military force, or maybe both.  Would you rather be the richest guy in Zimbabwe, or comfortably middle-class in Topeka?  The richest guy in Zimbabwe has to watch his back….  In any case, the best way to STAY rich (and alive) is to be rich in a middle-class economy.  Globalization has masked the fact that the rich in third-world countries are often dependent on the middle-class of developed nations, again proof that capitalists need markets with disposable income, while statists/socialists need a lower class to justify themselves.

It took capital to build the first railroads, the first airlines, the first automobile factories, and the first computer businesses, not to mention electronics factories, farm equipment factories, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, clothing factories, retail outlets for all of these, and more. In each case, poverty was the enemy of the capitalists who funded these things, who took risks to make them happen.  If your society is poor, its members don’t have the resources to buy whatever you’re selling.  It really is that simple.  (A secondary enemy of capitalists is people whose power is threatened by them, mostly statists/socialists/royalists/entrenched privilege…  but even then, the major enemy is still poverty, which limits the ability to market what you make or do.)

John D. Rockefeller ruthlessly suppressed his competition by the simple expedient of finding every possible way to deliver his product at a lower price than his competitors.  But he depended on a technological infrastructure that created a need for the product he wanted to sell.  That is, if people hadn’t needed kerosene and oil, Rockefeller couldn’t have sold it to them.  They needed oil because they lived in a society that was rich enough to afford devices that required oil.

The enemy of capitalists is poverty, not other capitalists.

Let’s make this a little clearer this way:  the enemy of professional baseball team owners is not other baseball teams; it is an apathetic public that no longer cares to watch baseball.  Of course, there is competition, with “winners” and “losers,” but even the losers win if the public keeps coming to watch them lose.

No capitalist is required to stay a “loser,” because in a free system they are allowed to adjust their activities until they are winners.  That is the original meaning of “win-win.”  If I can’t make a particular widget that you want to buy at the price I can sell it, then I’ll find something you DO want enough to pay me for it, and we’ll both “win.”

The enemy of capitalists is poverty, not other capitalists, because it is only poverty that makes it unlikely for captalists to be able to sell anything at all.

Committed egalitarians would have us believe that the real enemy is the “gap between rich and poor.”  This is ludicrous on historical grounds.  Would these people prefer us to live in a society where everyone is equally poor?  The very, very exciting thing about a free, capitalist society is that no one has to STAY poor.  And there is no capitalist who WANTS the poor to stay poor, for the simple reason that it’s impossible to sell much to poor people, unless the government has required lending institutions to make loans to them that can’t be repaid.   And we all know how that ends.

Just as you don’t win battles or wars by equal distribution of troops, weapons and bullets, you don’t win the struggle against poverty by equal distribution of income or goods.  Instead, you let natural forces and markets encourage the concentration of those resources in the hands of the most productive among us, to the betterment of us all, as they produce goods and services we would never have had otherwise, and offer us choices we would never have had without them.  Successful capitalists are those whose products and services make the lives of the rest of us much better than they would have been without them.  It makes no more sense to resent fabulously successful capitalists than it makes to resent the success of Alexander the Great, or General Eisenhower.  Would you rather have fought on the side of Darius?  Or Hitler?  Would you rather be equally poor with everyone else, everywhere else?

Capitalism WAS the original war on poverty, and it is a war that was being won, pretty much on all fronts, right up until the government decided to hogtie its best commanders, divert resources used in weapons production to planting daisies in the park, send half the army on furlough, sound the retreat and sue for peace.  Peace with poverty, that is.  It is one of the great achievements of the Left that the only war that can go on forever, without a significant change in strategy or tactics, and with no strategy for withdrawal, is the publicly funded “war on poverty.”  Call it The Forever War.  It is the war that socialists/statists can never allow to be won.

Conjecture:  if there had never been anti-monolopy laws, but if the rule of law was scrupulously enforced, if corporations were not penalized for success, if government did not try to pick winners and losers, if government did not allow itself to be bought BY capitalists (no one said capitalists were angels), if government did not see the success of capitalists as a source of unearned income for itself (the only reason capitalists CAN try to buy government), if bad personal behavior wasn’t rewarded by government largess, if people were not conditioned to see “the safety net” as a hammock, if government did not promise things it can’t deliver forever, and in particular, if the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson hadn’t happened (and their allied Left political constituencies), we would be richer now than most folks can possibly believe.  We would not now be just getting around to returning to the moon in 15 years or so, we would have permanent colonies there.  The standard of living of virtually all Americans would be higher, much higher.  We would have even more medical and pharmaceutical innovation, and it would cost us less.  Fuel would be cheaper, energy in general would be cheaper, and we would have more leisure time.  And paradoxically, the air and water would probably be cleaner.  We would be profiting, all of us, from economic expansion that would dwarf what actually happened.

The reason is simple: the diversion of resources away from focused, productive use, by the programs of anti-capitalist government, has made us all poorer, because those resources did not produce greater “capital power,” and diverted many, many people away from being productive themselves.  To put it simply, we ate our seed corn, instead of planting it.

We are now hip deep in another presidency that has the ambition to make as permanent a mark on America as those of FDR and LBJ.  I have no doubt that it will be possible to reduce the average gap between “rich” and “poor,” but it will not be done by making the poor any richer, and the price will make it even harder for the poor to change their circumstances.

It’s very, very simple.  Capitalists need a middle class into which to sell their goods.  Socialists need a lower class in order to justify their existence and political power.  Socialists, if they ever succeeded in eliminating poverty, would immediately lose power.  Who would need them anymore?  Capitalists can win forever, as we all just keep getting richer, and richer.  Statists/socialists see the resources generated by a period of successful capitalism, and they lust after them.

Capitalists need middle classes, and capitalist activity tends to promote the growth of them.  Socialists/statists need lower classes, and socialist/statist activity tends to promote the growth of them.  The fact that socialists/statists seem always to manage to take over, just as capitalism starts to succeed, is all the proof anyone should require of original sin.

It is as if socialists/statists went to the front line of battle, just as their own general’s brilliant strategy is about to win a great victory, and insisted on unloading the weapons of some of their own soldiers, just to make it fair.

May 30 2009

An age now fading

Category: diversity,economy,environment,government,Group-think,Obama,race,racism,society — harmonicminer @ 9:04 am

Reflections On an Age Now Fading… Read it all.

On matter of race, one detects beneath the therapeutic calls for inclusiveness, an unfortunate renewal of identity politics with a new harder edge-we saw that in the campaign with the slips about reparations and oppression studies, the clingers speech, Rev. Wright, and the ‘typical white person’ put down. Then with Eric Holder’s blast about Americans as “cowards” and now with the Supreme Court nominee’s somewhat derogatory remarks about the proverbial white male judge. We are not hearing praise of the melting pot ideal of intermarriage, assimilation, or integration-even if such elites in their private lives do not predicate their daily regimens in terms of racialism. I spent 21 years in a university in which quite affluent elites sought any multicultural patina possible for an edge in professional advancement and general leverage–the hyphenated name, the addition of the accent mark on the name, the non-American accentuation, occasional ethnic dress, the relabeling of one as a designated minority who otherwise had not previously emphasized race, etc.—that would suggest they were not part of the popular capitalist culture-supposedly centered on the white male-around them. Yet I left sensing the industry of race was doomed, due to the power of popular culture, the unworkable labyrinth of racial identification due to intermarriage, the laughable contradictions (the jet-black immigrant from India got no favored treatment, the light-skinned Costa Rican name Jorge piggy-backed onto the Mexican-American experience), the son of the Mexican father who used his name Gomez was authentic, the son of the Mexican mother who carried his non-Mexican father’s name Wilson was not. And on and on with this ridiculous neo-Confederate practice of adjudicating percentages of race to the sixteenth, and drops of targeted minority blood—a racist enterprise to the core. The only constant? The white male was fair game. It mattered little that more women were graduating than men, that under the racial spoils system we were beginning to see white males in less percentages than those found in the general population at the university; instead, it was sort of OK to trash, as in the manner of Sotomayor’s comment, the proverbial white male, as if we are collectively ashamed of everyone from the Wright Brothers to Lincoln to John Wayne to JFK.

When so close an observer of history and modern life as Victor Davis Hanson is this pessimistic, I feel the need to go see an escapist movie or something.

Read his entire article. Then go get a massage or a pedicure and try not to think about it.

May 24 2009

Harvey Milk Day?

Category: government,media,society,Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 9:00 am

The myth of Harvey Milk, “martyr for gay rights” (not), and his relationship to mass murderer Jim Jones, are detailed in Drinking Harvey Milk’s Kool-Aid

Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk is as real as Toby Maguire’s Spider-Man. Who has time for the sordid details of purportedly staged hate crimes and boosterism of America’s most prolific mass murderer when there is a gay Martin Luther King to be mythologized? Even the fervent atheist Milk understood the need for patron saints. When confronted by a jaded supporter over his fabricated tale that the Navy had booted him out because of his sex life, Milk responded: “Symbols. Symbols. Symbols.” He understood his movement better than his movement did. When the facts didn’t fit the script, both Milk and his present-day admirers adjusted the facts. As the elected sponsors of Harvey Milk Day realize, Californians are more likely to remember the celluloid hero they saw depicted by Sean Penn earlier this year than the obscure city official who walked largely unnoticed in their midst three decades ago.

The advocates of a Harvey Milk Day know box office. They don’t know the real Harvey Milk.

I’ve never tried putting Kool-Aid in milk.  Sounds yucky.  California doesn’t need another holiday, even one where people still have to go to work.  We don’t need to commemorate anyone else this year.  Or next year.

May 22 2009

What’s wrong with the electorate? Nothing, this time.

Category: Congress,economy,freedom,government — harmonicminer @ 9:35 am

In the 2008 elections, a bit over 13 million people voted in California.  Obama won about 8 million votes, while McCain won about 5 million.

On May 19, 2009, California held a special election to decide if taxes were to be raised to the tune of about $15 billion dollars (to try to close an enormous financial deficit for the state government), or if the state politicians would have to do the hard work of cutting spending.  About 4 million people voted, with 2 to 1 margins _against_ the tax increases.

Therein lies a tale.  Given that Obama was well known to have favored enormous government spending programs, and tax increases that would be needed to support them, how is it that so many people voted for him, but against the same policies for the state?  It’s actually pretty simple.  A very large number of people who voted for Obama didn’t know much about his policies or stances on important issues, nor about his history as a politician and activist.  The media put forward an attractive image, acting as his unpaid campaign staff, and the public bought it, but professional polling has demonstrated that Obama voters were disproportionately ignorant of fundamental facts about Democrats, Republicans, Obama, McCain, Palin and Biden.

So why didn’t it work this time, too?  Why was the turnout in California less than a third of the presidential election’s turnout?  Why did those who did turn out vote 2 to 1 not to raise taxes in California?

Simply, the only people who voted this time were people who were reasonably aware of the issues, enough to have an opinion about them.  Given that public employees in California, whose jobs and pay are imperiled by cuts in the state budget, probably voted 4 to 1 FOR the tax increases, and given that there was probably a higher percentage turnout OF those employees than the general electorate, the result is even more decisive.  If you aren’t a public employee (including teachers, bureaucrats and staffers, etc.), the odds are overwhelming that you voted NO on the tax increases, if you voted at all.

There are a number of reasonable observations:

1)  People who are aware of what’s actually happening in government, who care enough to vote their opinion about it, and who don’t have a personal agenda (i.e., they work for the government), are overwhelmingly likely to vote more conservatively in fiscal matters.

2)  It is likely that the large majority who voted NO on tax increases also voted for McCain.  Of course, there will be a few examples to the contrary….  but not many.

3)  California’s fiscal future is being shaped, at least to some degree, by McCain voters, not Obama voters.

4)  It is likely, given the size of this sample, and the generally leftward tilt of California as a state, that if a national election were held today to raise taxes in order to “balance the budget,” but no other issue was on the ballot, the result would be similar.  With no _face_ on the ballot, many of those new, Obama-smitten voters would be hard pressed to make an appearance at the polls.  And the generally better informed conservative electorate would be more likely to vote.

5)  The media, and Democrats, will do their very best to keep anyone from noticing the implications of the California rejection of higher taxes.

6)  The job of the Republicans is to continue to tie the Democrat party, justly, to high taxes and high spending, in the public mind.  This will require some courage and resolve, and a refusal to succumb to the minor guilt that remains over excesses of spending by Republicans during the Bush years.  At this point, they are like someone who merely stole a car being afraid to point out the people who are robbing Fort Knox.  Obama and the Democrats are preparing to spend us into deficits FOUR TIMES the size of anything Bush every dreamed about, and that will have to be paid for, sooner or later, with higher taxes.

7)  Expect the media to have very little to say about California’s rejection of higher taxes, with national Democrats saying even less.  (On the other hand, if the high tax initiatives had passed, you can imagine the result being trumpeted far and wide as representing “the public will,” can’t you?)

The simplest way to explain all this:  the people who have jobs in the private sector (and who know something about what’s going on in state government) voted overwhelmingly against higher taxes.  Public employees voted for them, mostly.  People who fit in neither category couldn’t be troubled to turn off Oprah and get to the polls….  which is likely why they were watching Oprah in the first place.

Tags: , , ,

May 21 2009

Use your imagination

Category: Congress,freedom,government — harmonicminer @ 9:51 am

We do have a Constitution in the USA, sort of. We ignore it sometimes. Well, to be more accurate, the Left ignores it sometimes, and gets away with it whenever possible.  There is, for example, a 2nd Amendment, that guarantees the right of citizens to keep and bear (that means CARRY) arms.  Except, of course, that it doesn’t, because legislators and the courts have decided the words don’t mean what they mean. 

Here’s a headline:

Steny Hoyer says Democrats beaten on guns

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer admits that Democrats are conceding the gun issue to Republicans for now.

Republicans have been increasingly using pro-gun amendments to throw a wrench into Democratic legislation, attaching amendments to seemingly unrelated bills allowing for expanded gun carrying privileges in national parks.

The tactic seems to be working, with Democrats acknowledging that pro-gun members rule in both chambers.

“There clearly is a majority in both houses that the Second Amendment rights … that relate to the national parks are too restricted,” Hoyer told reporters Tuesday. “The reality is that a majority in both houses agree with that position.”

Imagine:  a majority of both houses (which has to include a decent share of democrats in the current congress) seems to be willing to uphold the 2nd Amendment as meaning what it means. 

So, now to use your imagination.  What if the headline read this way?

       “Steny Hoyer Says Democrats Beaten on Freedom of Speech”

And, what if, as we read the article, it said that Democrats had been trying to restrict Freedom of Speech, but unsuccessfully so far.

That’s where we are these days.  We have, to our shame, a government of men, not one of laws.  And it will probably get worse.

Tags: , ,

May 17 2009

The Spiritual Poverty of Socialism? Part 2

Category: capitalism,economy,freedom,government,liberty,religion,socialism,Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 10:02 pm

The previous post in this series is here.

First, in order to be able to talk about this, let’s agree that no purely socialist society has ever existed.  Nevertheless, it’s reasonable to observe that some government policies and programs are more socialist than others.  So it’s the morality of socialist policies and programs in general that is in question, without regard to whether they exist in a purely socialist system.  In any case, experience suggests that it’s a smokescreen to argue that particular politicians or governments “aren’t socialist” in some absolutist sense.  What’s very clear is that some policies are socialist.  Governments and politicians who primarily pursue those policies can reasonably be called “socialist” in normal speech.

So what ARE socialist policies?  Basically, socialist policies attempt to disconnect outcomes for individuals from the efforts made BY those individuals, and to do so with money and other resources taken from other individuals in the form of taxes, fees, restrictions, regulations, and sometimes outright confiscation.   This isn’t a theoretical economic definition, but is rather an observation of what animates socialist policies (the disconnection of outcomes from individual efforts) and the means by which socialist policies are carried out (taxes, fees, restrictions, regulations, and confiscation).  Call it an operational definition that allows the correct identification of “socialists in the wild” without first capturing them, checking their DNA and doing a complete morphological exam of their complete economic policy.  If it walks like socialist, talks like a socialist, and generally acts like a socialist….

You can look up socialism in several online references and get various definitions, some requiring “state ownership of the means of production” and “central planning of economic activity” and other things.  The problem:  the definition of “state ownership” is vague.  If I theoretically own something, but the state can tell me IF I can use it, how to use it, when to use it, who I have to pay to use it, how much I have to pay them to use it, who I have to hire to use it, where I can sell it, IF I can sell it, perhaps price limitations on what I can sell it for, what kinds of conditions I am required to provide for those I hire, etc., and after all that the state confiscates a large percentage of whatever money I can make using it, even with all those restrictions, regulations and requirements, at what point does my putative “ownership” cease to mean “ownership” in the normally accepted sense?   Particularly if the next “owner” to whom I sell it has the same relationship with the state that I did when I owned it? And now, what if all the people who (theoretically) don’t own my property are still allowed to vote for regulations and policies and taxes that impose all the restrictions I just listed, for their own benefit as they see it?  Who, exactly, owns my property?  Well, quite a few of us, apparently.

This is why those textbook definitions are of little benefit in really identifying “socialism on the ground.”  When someone tells you that European nations “aren’t really socialist,” it means they are looking at the textbooks, instead of the realities on the ground.  It’s like saying that the Soviet Union wasn’t really a dictatorship because they had elections.

So, while textbook definitions of “socialism” often obscure more than they reveal, it’s easy to see that socialist policies attempt to disconnect outcomes for individuals from the efforts made BY those individuals, and to do so with money and other resources taken in the form of taxes, fees, restrictions, regulations, and sometimes outright confiscation.

Statism and socialism have much in common.  It’s pretty safe to say that socialism requires statism to function; if there isn’t much statism going on, there won’t be much socialism, either.  On the other hand, some forms of statism (the purely kleptocractic dictatorship, for example) aren’t particularly socialist, because they have no intent to secure ANY particular outcome for individuals other than those in power.  So:  all socialists are statists, but not all statists are socialists, although in the modern world most are.

In what follows, therefore, everytime I use the word “socialist” it would be good to remember that it means “socialist and statist.”  I just don’t want to say it that way everytime.

Most people who reject socialism are really rejecting statism, its unavoidable symbiote.  I am one of those.  If there was some way of having an entire culture participate in “voluntary socialism,” where everyone worked as hard as if they were working only for themselves, and behaving as responsibly with public resources as if they were personally owned, I might be willing to consider it (though I would have several reservations…  and since we don’t live in Heaven yet, and the Fall happened, this is a ludicrous conjecture anyway).  For me, the deal breaker is the degree of statism that must accompany socialism.

In the next post in this series, I’ll discuss the continuum of socialism/statism, i.e., starting with those “socialist” policies that most of us agree about, and moving to those that are more controversial.   Then, we can get to the spiritual implications of all this, the moral questions, the really interesting stuff.  Stay tuned.  I know this has been a bit dull, but it’s about to get much more interesting.

The next post in this series is here.

Tags: , ,

May 14 2009

Thomas Sowell on the The Blame Game

Category: Congress,government — harmonicminer @ 12:01 pm

Read it all

After virtually every disaster created by Beltway politicians you can hear the sound of feet scurrying for cover in Washington, see fingers pointing in every direction away from Washington, and watch all sorts of scapegoats hauled up before Congressional committees to be denounced on television for the disasters created by members of the committee who are lecturing them.

Do you REALLY want these people running your health care?

May 13 2009

Is the real problem “White Male Privilege,” lack of “Diversity,” and discrimination against “people of color”?

Category: abortion,affirmative action,diversity,government,history,judges,legislation,marriage,parenthood,racism,religion — harmonicminer @ 9:18 am

It has become common to berate institutions of all kinds that are deemed to be insufficiently “diverse,” as if there is automatically some institutional barrier preventing “people of color” from associating with them, and is if some kind of unfair “white male privilege” is the problem.   While there were significant institutional barriers in previous decades, those barriers are now largely gone, and civil-rights activists are busily fighting a war they’ve already won, almost in a manner reminiscent of Civil War re-enactments.   Nevertheless, the removal of those barriers isn’t enough for diversity activists, who now insist that institutions pursue essentially quota-based strategies to “diversify.”  The latest set of institutions engaged in self-flagellation for perceived failures of diversity are Christian colleges and universities, many of whom are scrambling just as fast as they can to “get diverse.” It is as if these institutions believe that if only they are more diverse, then the problems of minorities in American society will go away, or at least be ameliorated.  Or perhaps, if they are more diverse, they can at least feel less guilty about it.

The two biggest problems of injustice in black — and, increasingly, Hispanic — America are abortion and the epidemic of fatherless children. Blacks abort their babies at a rate five times that of whites.  Nearly 70% of black children are born into fatherless households.  The first of these issues is directly traceable to the national legalization of abortion in 1973, an act of a left-leaning, activist court.   The second of these issues is directly traceable to the creation of LBJ’s Great Society programs in 1965, the act of a left-leaning congress and president.  These two problems cannot be primarily attributed to racism, for the historical reason that abortions were far less common before it was legalized, and the “illegitimacy rate” of blacks in 1960 was about 25%, not 70%.  What changed was government policy, in legalizing the murder of the unborn for essentially any reason at any time in the pregnancy, and in providing incentives to make babies out of wedlock by paying more for each one.  It is arguable that left-leaning governmental policies did more harm to black America than Jim Crow.  And it’s worth noting that blacks were climbing out of poverty rather steadily in the period from 1940-1960 (Thomas Sowell writes very clearly on this), while Jim Crow was still the norm.  Progress slowed dramatically with the beginning of the Great Society, proving that you can indeed offer someone too much help.

“Social justice” activists are fond of pointing to the disproportionately high representation of black men in prison as evidence of white injustice in law enforcement, the judicial system, the economy, etc.  But when the statistics are controlled for the presence of a father in the home, blacks raised with a married father in the home are no more likely than whites to be in jail.   So the “justice” problem is a society that discourages black families from forming, let alone failing.  The Left will say that “there are all kinds of families” and imply it is prejudice to promote the traditional understanding, but the sociologists and criminologists know better, if they have the courage to look at their own data.

The third biggest social justice problem for blacks is the state of the schools, but that cannot be fixed without addressing the issue of black families at the same time.   All too often, the family values are missing that will produce children with whom schools can work effectively.  Schools, no matter how well intentioned and well funded, can’t replace successful parents.  Churches can certainly help, but not when they are basically apologists for the status quo, and are used as platforms for leftist politics as much or more than for faithful transformation of inner-city culture along Godly lines.  None of this means the schools can’t be better, and various experimental schools have shown that typical inner-city black children can benefit greatly from improved schools, provided those schools don’t have to keep the most troublesome students enrolled, and are allowed to pursue educational techniques and policies of their own choosing.  But no one believes that schools alone can make up for deficits in parenting, even in experimental schools that shuck the usual pieties of the education lobby, even when the schools simply do what works, without trying to be social laboratories and places to park troubled children.

The real “white male privilege” with which we should concern ourselves most is that of white doctors killing black babies in the womb, or just barely out of it, for profit, in abortion clinics placed conveniently near inner city neighborhoods to encourage repeat business.  We would submit that the apparent nature of “black male privilege” does more damage to blacks than anything white males are doing, or saying.  Finally, there is the “white male privilege” of mostly white politicians who depend on the black vote, and buy it with government benefits and promises of more, the new form of sharecropper oppression, because by taking the deal, blacks have crippled themselves as a group in being able to improve their own circumstances by their own efforts, though there are obviously many individual exceptions.

These problems will not be solved by whites.  They will not be solved by a black president, leading a government made up mostly of whites, unless that black president is determined to undo the government incentives that encourage bad behavior.  That seems unlikely in this case, doesn’t it?  These problems will only be solved by black leaders “on the ground,” who must spend more time challenging their own communities, straightforwardly demanding better behavior, teaching skills and values for successful living, than they spend twisting the arms of “white” institutions to be more “diverse.”   They need to be teaching their people to reject government handouts that weaken their motivation to lift themselves up, tempting them to lower standards for personal and public behavior.  We need ten thousand people like Jesse Peterson, Clenard Childress and Johnny Hunter for every Jackson/Sharpton shakedown artist and/or community organizer whose idea of service is to take a young woman who shouldn’t be pregnant to city hall to apply for benefits (to “find her voice”), or, even worse, to provide rides to the local abortion mill, and in either case protecting from any responsibility the man or boy who made her pregnant, and in many cases the parent or guardian (usually only one) who failed to provide her with adequate supervision.

Inner-city black America is suffering not from being non-diverse, not primarily because some colleges and universities are not diverse, but because it is killing itself. We have just inaugurated a president who will encourage much, much more of the same, judging by his record, his public statements, his political commitments to his supporters, and his chosen advisers.

In the meantime, those Christian colleges and universities that are in a headlong rush to “diversify” are learning that it is very difficult to avoid all the Leftist influences that accompany diversity activism.  Some of these schools, which were once unabashedly pro-life, pro-traditional-family and pro-American, are now finding that with diversity comes the choice between promoting life or lionizing Obama-as-symbol, between being pro-traditional-family or endorsing all kinds of other arrangements as being “just as good,” and between acknowledging the strong Judeo-Christian ethic in the American founding and social ethos, or seeing America as “just another nation” with no uniquely important religious elements shaping its heritage, values and behavior.

It’s a choice these institutions are making, this decade.  The faculty they’re hiring now will be the ones who decide the directions of those institutions in the next decade, not today’s adminstrators and board members, who may make policy statements attempting to “hold the line,” etc.  Adminstrators and trustees come and go, but faculty have tenure.  Unfortunately, it seems no more possible in the current environment for prospective faculty to be asked, “Are you anti-abortion?” than it is to ask a prospective supreme court judge about future rulings.  That’s because, somehow, abortion has been relegated to being a “political question” instead of the frankly moral one that it is.  Somehow, it has become acceptable in some quarters for Christians to vote for pro-abortion politicians, and for that choice, and campaiging for such, to be seen as a valid “political choice.”  Yet I’m quite sure that most Christians would consider it a sin to vote for a pro-slavery candidate.

We are in a grim place, and those of us who see it that way need to be deep in prayer over it, and then we need to work within our institutions to improve the situation.

UPDATE: Walter E. Williams on Race Talk

Race talk often portrays black Americans as downtrodden and deserving of white people’s help and sympathy. That vision is an insult of major proportions. As a group, black Americans have made some of the greatest gains, over the highest hurdles, in the shortest span of time than any other racial group in mankind’s history. This unprecedented progress can be seen through several measures. If one were to total black earnings, and consider black Americans a separate nation, he would find that in 2005 black Americans earned $644 billion, making them the world’s 16th richest nation — that is just behind Australia but ahead of Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. Black Americans are, and have been, chief executives of some of the world’s largest and richest cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. It was a black American, Gen. Colin Powell, appointed Joint Chief of Staff in October 1989, who headed the world’s mightiest military and later became U.S. Secretary of State, and was succeeded by Condoleezza Rice, another black American. Black Americans are among the world’s most famous personalities and a few are among the richest. Most blacks are not poor but middle class.

On the eve of the Civil War, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed these gains possible in less than a mere century and a half, if ever. That progress speaks well not only of the sacrifices and intestinal fortitude of a people; it also speaks well of a nation in which these gains were possible. These gains would not have been possible anywhere else.

May 11 2009

Darth Greenspan

Category: economy,government — harmonicminer @ 1:34 pm

Darth Greenspan Read it all at the link.

The former chairman of the US Federal Reserve shares a lot in common with one of the most famous villain characters in the history of Hollywood, Darth Vader, who was first a member of the Jedi coalition when his name was Anakin Skywalker.

« Previous Page — Next Page »