The King's "New Socialism" Speech

President Obama is a pyromaniac in a field of strawmen.*

In Kansas, Obama railed against nefarious forces …

“They want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years,” Obama said of the GOP. “And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

Just who are the people who believe this? I don’t know any. Playing by your own rules is perfectly ok in your own domain, but it has no place in a free marketplace. Free market capitalism is predicated upon a known set of rules that everyone must follow. You can’t steal from others or murder your opponents, for example. You can’t lie to your business partners or customers. And what specific policies “stack the deck against middle-class Americans?” Give us specifics!

Mickey Kaus (America's smartest liberal) homed in on Obama’s attempt to shame corporations into what Kaus calls patriotic charity: staying here and hiring people even if you have to lose money or forgo greater profits or productivity gains to do it:

A patriotic Charity Economy is a conveyor belt to corporatism!

After all, what happens when the factory of celebrated businessman X who recognizes his patriotic obligation to employ Americans at $20 an hour is faced with competition from uncelebrated, selfish businessman Y who employs Chinese ex-peasants at $2 an hour? Businessman X is going to need a “partnership” with government, sort of a pre-bailout bailout. Obama doesn’t seem to have a problem with this sort of cozy arrangment. (Kaus – Obama’s Charity Capitalism)

An Unfair Presidency

Obama compared capital gains tax apples to personal income tax oranges, excoriating greedy CEOs for paying less taxes than their secretaries (a blatant lie).

He decried a system of laws that does not treat everyone equally, as his administration favors certain companies (Solyndra, GM) over others.

He hectored companies for using modern technology like ATMs, digital phone switches and that newfangled contraption known as the internet, while his armed agents raid workplaces and he shuts down job-creating factories and pipelines.  And then he taunts his pornographic lover Big Biz for not hiring. The man is a walking, talking BS machine.

But by Obama's own measure, the country has gotten more "fair." The richest 1% now pays almost 40% of all federal income taxes, up from 25% two decades ago, while the bottom half pays only 2%, down from 6%. The federal regulatory state has never been as big, and government spending as a share of the economy is at record levels. (IBD)

Here’s the kicker:

the only winners since Obama took office have been corporations (profits are up 68%) and Wall Street investors (the Dow's up more than 45%). The rest of the country has gotten the shaft. (IBD)

I’d like to see him try to get reelected running on that...

As Socrates would say, let’s define our terms

Just what exactly is “fair?” Or a better question, what specifically is unfair here in the US? Wage disparity? Unequal outcomes? Can it be traced back to a root cause?

East coast Massachusetts kids named Kennedy have about a 100% chance of going to an Ivy League school, regardless of how dull they may be. Silverfiddle kids have about zero chance. Is that fair? Who knows? Who cares? It’s all a waste of time. We are individuals, our needs and wants are unique, and our efforts produce disparate and varied outcomes.

Now, if we find that a certain class of people is rounding up other people and kicking them and their progeny down a hole so as to keep them from pursuing their American dream, that would be unfair. I don’t see that happening in this country. We are not all born into identical circumstances, so equalization would be quite a task. Everywhere it’s been tried, those on top were dragged down, rather than those on the low end being elevated.

Rather than all this inflated fascistic rhetoric designed to whip the proles into a revolutionary frenzy, how about restoring the rule of law? Forcing Big Banking and Corporate America off of the government teat? How about getting the federal government’s snout out of every corner of our lives and allowing us to solve our problems at the lowest level?

Even the venerable bastion of corporate statism, The Washington Post, gave Obama’s Robespierre acid trip flashback in Kansas three Pinocchios for its bald-faced dishonesty.

* - William F. Buckley’s description of John Kenneth Galbraith

Further Reading:
Harsanyi – Obama vs Capitalism
NY Times – Obama Tongue Bath
IBD - A Lesson in Fairness for Obama
Obama Urges Fair Play

Barry Plays Dress Up, Again

We're all laughing at Obama

First, Obama wanted to be Abraham Lincoln when he grew up. Then he laughably compared himself to Ronald Reagan. Now he’s playing dress-up again, this time as the Rough Rider, Teddy Roosevelt.

Teddy Roosevelt was a tough, self-made man who was forever seeking out ways to challenge himself physically and mentally. He was a conservationist, a crime fighter and war veteran. Barack Obama is an effete metrosexual who has had everything handed to him on a silver platter.

A banker grandmother who funded his private schooling, an Ivy League education paid for by others, a political career in the corrupt Chicago sewer, where well-connected crooks took care of the competition for him…

Teddy Roosevelt, born into wealth, went out west to toughen himself up, fought in the Spanish American war, and once sparred with a professional prizefighter, damaging his eyesight in the process. The closest Obama has come to matching TR’s impressive tough guy record is occupying a bank lobby and fighting for more government money for the various agitation groups he was a community organizer for.

Obama’s only accomplishment is hoodwinking enough Americans to vote for him by promising billowy nebulae of Hope and Change and promising transformative leadership. He hasn’t led and he hasn’t been transformative. Those on the disappointed left will tell you he's George Bush without the flight suit.

Obama and the Pelosicrats serve up these absurd and ridiculous comparisons because it’s all they’ve got. No economic freedom, no hope, no change, no jobs; just more of the same with a corrupt Chicago spin. 

 

Further Reading:

Obama's no Lincoln

Barack Obama is no Harry Truman

Mr Obama, you're no Ronald Reagan

Gingrich: That Pig Won’t Fly

While GOP voters are in the irrational grips of Newt-mania (he's the least conservative candidate in the race), good columnists are reminding us about Newt Gingrich. You read them and go, “oh, yeah… I forgot all that…”

On Paul Ryan’s budget plans, Rich Lowry explains that many on the right had questions, but Gingrich had to bombastically dismiss the plan as “rightwing social engineering.”  It took a vigorous scolding from conservative elder statesman Bill Bennett to force a Newt climbdown.

Only Gingrich, though, felt compelled to take a rhetorical flamethrower to the document endorsed by almost every House Republican.

He can’t help himself. Gingrich prefers extravagant lambasting when a mere distancing would do, and the over-arching theoretical construct to a mundane pander. He is drawn irresistibly to operatic overstatement — sometimes brilliant, always interesting, and occasionally downright absurd. (Rich Lowry – Newt the Unreliable)

And there’s also the little matter of Gingrich having a long history of his own social engineering experimentation, from Fannie and Freddie to global warming and health care...

Mr. Gingrich’s ability to reach leaders like Mrs. Clinton was a selling point for the Center. A PowerPoint presentation for prospective members advertised its “contacts at the highest levels” of federal and state government. Paying $200,000 a year for the top-tier membership, it said, “increases your channels of input to decision makers” and grants “access to top transformational leadership across industry and government.” (Commentary - Gingrich was an Influence Peddler)

Gingrich needs to come out singing “I Saw the Light” if he wants to remain credible in the face of his substantially statist record. As a warm up, he also needs to face up to his DC power player past and stop the ridiculous “outsider” pose. His Center for Health Transformation, while perfectly legal, was a classic milk-the-taxpayer beltway bonanza.

I understand that people can change, and politicians more than most, since they compete for power under constantly shifting ground. Maybe Newt’s changed, who knows? How would we know? His promiscuous mind has produced flamboyant government plans by the wagonload. Grandiose agendas and melodic musings are his imperial domain. Is there anything he hasn’t thought of?

A Lust for Ideas

My problem with him is that he is an egghead, more enamored of shiny new ideas than with governing from a core set of well thought out principles. We don’t need an intellectual thrill seeker in the White House, and Newt has shown himself to be an edge junky looking for the next cerebral high.

He belongs in the lofty forums of Davos and Aspen, not in the White House, where he would morph into an intellectually aroused Anthony Wiener, taking pictures of his tumescent ideas and flashing them, unwanted, into the homes of unsuspecting citizens. We don’t need that.

We don’t need theoretical experimentation and thought titillation from a president; we need principled conservative leadership, and Gingrich has no track record of that.

Further Reading:
George Will - GOP's Front Runners
Ramesh Ponnuru makes a convincing case for why Mitt’s the One.
Charles Krauthammer sizes it up: Krauthammer – Newt vs Mitt
Bill Bennett Schools Newt Gingrich

Moonday

Obama: I Need another Term to Finish Us Off

Concerned that the damage will prove to be neither lasting nor complete, the president pressed his case…

"I'm going to need another term to finish the job," he said.

Not Even Barack Hussein Obama can destroy a 235 year old country in just four years. Progressives of all parties have been softening us up over the past 100 years, to the point where a critical mass now believes our rights come from government and the states work for the federal government. Are we citizens or subjects?

Biden 2016!

Gaffmaster Joe could make a play in 2016! Maybe he could run on his embarrassing honesty. He’s too dumb to be crooked.

Liberal Logic: Requiring voter ID is “rigging an election.”

Debbie Washerman Schultz (is she married to Ed Schultz? They’d make a perfect couple) says voter ID laws disenfranchise voters. 

So you need an ID to buy a pack of cigarettes, but not to protect the citizens' greatest exercise of power over government?  Democrats counter that voter fraud is not a problem, but how do they know that? With such lax rules in place, all but the most blatant fraud would be almost impossible to detect.

It takes a village of idiots…

As this fecund human playground reminds us…

"Somebody needs to be held accountable, and they need to pay."




We all pay, whether we want to or not.  Everyone pays but the serial empregnators who score with these stupid women and then leave them with the trophies.  The liberals whose policies have destroyed the American family need to be held accountable.  Create a nanny state and you will end up with a nation of  infants, wards of the state, crying for mommy and daddy to clean up their messes.

Clash of Civilizations

Did Nostradamus predict 9/11?

No, but Samuel P. Huntington did. Dr. Huntington of "Clash of Civilizations" fame, died back in December of 2008, but his work lives on. As Mark Steyn points out, this Harvard professor of Political Science championed the idea that culture trumps all. Steyn gives us an example of his own:

in Bradford, 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins. As to the seductive assimilatory charms of time, 30 years ago the percentage was half that. A victory for culture over economics. (Mark Steyn)

The Australian has an interesting article on this great man who foresaw this current age of terrorism back in 1993:

The Clash of Civilizations was a hard-headed look at what political scientists had traditionally dismissed as a soft subject: culture. Originating as a 1993 article in the policy journal Foreign Affairs, and published three years later as a book, it argued that the key sources of post-Cold War conflicts would not be national or ideological but cultural. It was Huntington's riposte to those who thought the fall of communism meant the universal triumph of Western values. The West's arrogance about the universality of its own culture would blind it to the ascent of "challenger civilisations", particularly Islam and China.

Shot through with cautions about Western decline, the book counsels Europe and the US to unite: "The prudent course of the West is not to attempt to stop the shift in power, but to learn to navigate the shallows, to endure the miseries, moderate its ventures, and safeguard its culture." Exporting American pop culture and trainers was easy; exporting values of freedom and democracy far harder.

"Somewhere in the Middle East," Huntington wrote, "a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner." (The Australian)

"Brilliant" minds and miscellaneous critics poo-pooed his thesis at the time, but 9/11 and its aftermath brought a sad vindication.

We really are undergoing a clash of civilizations.

To understand Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, follow these three easy steps. If you care about the future of Western society and culture, it's worth it:

1) Read Huntington's famous essay. It is a scholarly work yet easily readable by ordinary folks. It  puts the current global struggle into focus. Unfortunately, it is locked up tight, inaccessible unless you pay a fee to Foreign Affairs Magazine. They should be ashamed of themselves for sequestering such a seminal work. Some Googling can usually find it clandestinely posted somewhere. Even better, go get the book.

2) Scholars and other thinkers often pitted Huntington's thesis against Francis Fukuyama's "End of History." You can read Stanley Kurtz's commentary on the subject at Policy Review.

3) Finally, Professor Fouad Ajami, himself an imminent scholar and brilliant writer, wrote an insightful piece on Huntinton's essay the January after Huntington's death.

Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism’s conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)

I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are “nowhere men,” children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.

More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision. (Fouad Ajami - The Clash)

I pray we at least pause to contemplate Dr. Huntington's thesis. A self-ashamed society that stands for nothing will fall for anything; and angry fire-bearers from the East really could burn it all down.

Green Dreams, Economic Nightmares

California continues to serve as an object lesson to the rest of the nation.  

That most blessed land of Queen Calafia, that could be an economically and geographically viable nation in its own right, is stumbling and staggering under the weight of progressive statism. It's latest woe, like all the others, is of its own doing.

The state has mandated that one-third of its energy must come from renewable sources by 2020.

California's increasing use of renewable power will come at a price, pushing up electricity bills across the state.

And while it's impossible to tell how big the cost to consumers will be, some experts fear the total cost of renewable energy in California will be in the billions of dollars.

"You're going to see significant price increases over time from renewables," said Aaron Johnson, director of renewable energy policy at Pacific Gas and Electric Co. "As you add it to the system, it is going to result in higher costs for consumers."  (SF Gate - California Renewable Energy)

Eschewing cheap and bountiful gas and coal for green pipe dreams is suicidal, but suicide is California's specialty.  The only thing that keeps such governmental action from being criminal is the fact that people can escape, and they are.  The ones that are still there voted for higher energy bills, so I don't feel sorry for them.

Meanwhile, in China, a Boom Goes Bust...

Jersey (I think it was Jersey, if not, it was one of the statists that comment here) was complaining last week about China subsidizing it's solar industry.  I told him we should thank the government of China for chipping in to make solar panels we buy cheaper.  Our government would be stupid to do the same.

Now comes news that China's solar industry is collapsing...

Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Losses for China’s largest solar manufacturers, including Suntech Power Holdings Co. and JA Solar Holdings Co. may continue through next year as declining shipments prompt them to slash prices and liquidate inventory.

“Liquidation is leading to suicidal pricing.” Polavarapu said in an interview today. "There are too many solar companies in China, he said, and they are cutting prices to maintain share."

Once freed from government intervention (bad money always chases out good), solar will make technological gains and perhaps be economically viable someday.  For now, it remains the energy of the future.

Meanwhile, as Obama's venture socialists still talk of stimulus multipliers and lust for the opportunity to dump even more money down green job sinkholes, the gas and oil industry is creating real jobs and providing cheap energy to an America mired in high-unemployment Obamanomics.

The petroleum industry has done more for this country than Obama could ever dream of.

WRM - Chinese Solar Industry Goes Belly Up
The Fraying of China's Guilded Age

Why Orwell Matters

"Thus he faced the competing orthodoxies and despotisms of his day with little more than a battered typewriter and a stubborn personality."    -- Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters

Christopher Hitchens is very much an Orwell for our times, only more caustic and with sharp edges. He wrote a book back in 2002 entitled, Why Orwell Matters. It's a great introduction to Orwell for those who may only be familiar with his two greatest works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four.

George Orwell was many things: A brilliant essayist who was considered a mediocre novelist who ended up writing two of the 20th century's most gripping novels; a socialist who was an anti-communist; a hater of war who warned his fellows about the dangers of pacifism; a champion of the poor and benighted who could suddenly provide uncanny insight into the mind of the overlord.

George Orwell was completely unencumbered by received ideology and orthodoxy, a rare genuine freethinker. He faced life as it presented itself to him, and that's what makes him such a compelling and authentic figure even today.

He was a truly independent man, holding views anathema to both left and right. Disdained by both, until the other side deploys one of his arguments, then they fight over who the true Orwellites are. Truth is, nobody owns him. Like God, he is not on anyone's side; we can only hope to be on his side, because he was unwaveringly on the side of liberty over tyranny, humanity over bureaucratic mechanization, natural beauty with warts and all over ginned up fripperies packaged by elites and sold to the rubes.

Best of all, he was a keen analyst of life, using his experience and the light of reason to draw logical inferences that bore themselves out with frightening accuracy.  Yes, communism really was slaughtering millions.  Orwell knew it, years before the truth slipped out, even as useful idiots on both sides of the Atlantic sung the praises of Uncle Joe Stalin and wrote glowingly of strong men making the trains run on time.

If you're looking for a short and well-written introduction to George Orwell, Hitchens' book is just the thing.