The "Debt Ceiling Crisis" and the Left's addiction to demonization

Frank J. Fleming has a little fun with the exaggerated language from the Left:

Wow, that whole debt-ceiling debate was scary. For a while there, it looked like a few radical extremists were going to keep the country from going further into debt. And then where would we be? Without all the free stuff we like, because some people are stuck on the primitive notion that a budget should balance? I think you can say without hyperbole that people who think like that are literally terrorists, except a million times worse.

What makes people think the government should spend less money than it brings in? Probably racism. Also, a lust for violence. Because there is no logical reason for the government to spend less. None.

I do know one reason people keep bringing up as to why we should spend less: Because otherwise we leave the debt for future generations. But no one ever explains why that’s a problem.

Read the whole thing. Heh.

Police extorting political support in Wisconsin

Iowahawk:

Wisconsin state employee union woos Wisconsin small business support with threats of severed horse heads

Well, he is a satirist. But union supporters HAVE been "doubling down" on intimidation of local businesses as a crucial election approaches. Among other nasty practices. The videos are interesting. But this is more worrisome - Ann Althouse:

I can’t get my head around the concept of police involvement in boycotting businesses. That reads like pure corruption. I can’t believe it’s being done openly. Can someone explain to me how you can even argue that it is acceptable for police to extort political support from citizens?

Interesting to consider the circumstances under which extortion is effective.

Is California next? The legendary Democrat WILLIE BROWN, who managed California politics for years, is worried about pension costs?

Bill Whittle: Michael Moore's Right

Ace: Bill Whittle: "Michael Moore's Right: We Can Balance the Budget By Taking Money From The Rich.   Ah, but there's a catch. Great video; stay with it." Allahpundit: Long, but it has to be.

First came the video by Mary Katherine Ham's analysis of Michael Moore's simple, elegant solution to America's financial crisis.

 The reviews above concern Bill Whittle's visual illustration of a more detailed Iowahawk blog post on Moore's Madison speech ON VIDEO. Iowahawk is a genius. Bill Whittle, a screenwriter, provides the images to make his words memorable.

One thing you have to say about Michael Moore is that he is effective in persuading and energizing his intended audience. Since Moore declared war on the government of Wisconsin, Governor Walker's poll numbers have been going down, and now the Left is engaging in a deceitful and intimidating campaign to unseat a supreme court judge in Wisconsin. (They are also going door-to-door for signatures on recall petitions, while misrepresenting the language of the petitions.)

There are powerful psychological reasons for the allure of liberal social policies even in the face of economic disaster.   Mark Steyn characterizes two very different types of protesters in the London protests and riots against modest cuts in government benefits, in The Human Right to Suspend Reality, then makes the following observation:

In a democracy, there are not many easy ways back from insane levels of “social” spending, and certainly not when the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition panders to the mob by comparing them to anti-apartheid activists.

Michael Moore is apparently proud of his recent appearance on the Colbert Report.   Note, starting at about 6 minutes and 30 seconds how viciously and falsely he characterizes America's 400 billionaires, from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to the "littler Mubaraks" like Oprah Winfrey.  Who could really believe that Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey are conspiring to concentrate ALL of the money in the United States into the hands of exactly 400 people?  But it's the emotion that counts -- no evidence needed.

I am in no position to judge the deepest intentions of America's billionaires, but I would imagine that not all of their motives are altruistic.  However, the leadership of the Left proclaims that it knows EXACTLY what  "the rich" are thinking.   Might this be a form of projection?  The Left tends to think of money as power more than classical liberals, libertarians or conservatives do.

The leadership of the Left knows that its primary weapon is to demonize some person or group on the other side. "Personalize and Polarize", as Saul Alinsky liked to say. It is impossible for them to portray those on the other side as having ANY honorable motives. Their worldview REQUIRES them to attribute evil motives to others, because the record of the left's economic policies has been consistently disastrous (given enough time).

Questions for Michael Moore:   If these 400 billionaires are conspiring to control ALL of the wealth in the United States, WHY DO MANY OF THEM GIVE AWAY SO MUCH OF THEIR MONEY TO CHARITY?  And why do they have so many employees?  And to whom do they sell products or services?  What is the true nature of their wealth?

Compare Moore's economic philosophy with that of Abraham Lincoln.

I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. …. I want every man to have the chance — and I believe a black man is entitled to it — in which he can better his condition — when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system.

p.s.:   While taxes for corporations are not fairly distributed in the U.S., tomorrow the United States will have the worlds highest corporate tax rate. Not only that, but no country leans on upper-income households more than the U.S. for tax revenues. And then there's this little bit of fact to counter Mr. Moore's scary scenario of total control of America's assets by 400 very rich people:

I like to point out that the low rate at the top of the income scale is an artifact of the lower capital gain rate, that it doesn't count the double taxation of corporate income, and the fact that people usually get to the very top of the income scale once, when they sell their business or some other big asset in capital gain transactions.

In other words, most rich people reach high, temporary income levels by giving up control of the businesses or stocks which made them rich. There is, over a period of decades, a fair amount of turnover in the richest families in America. But Michael Moore will present only the worst possible characterization of "the rich" because it is part of his strategy.

Meg McArdle via Instapundit: THE RICH REALLY ARE DIFFERENT: Their Incomes Fluctuate More. “This is one of the reasons that we can’t fix all our budget problems with higher taxes on the rich – if we do that, revenues are going to collapse dangerously every time there’s a recession.” McArdle quotes Robert Frank:

Nearly half of California's income taxes before the recession came from the top 1% of earners: households that took in more than $490,000 a year. High earners, it turns out, have especially volatile incomes--their earnings fell by more than twice as much as the rest of the population's during the recession. When they crashed, they took California's finances down with them.

Mr. Williams, a former economic forecaster for the state, spent more than a decade warning state leaders about California's over-dependence on the rich. "We created a revenue cliff," he said. "We built a large part of our government on the state's most unstable income group."

As far as I can tell, if Michael Moore had his way, there would be no risky investments because there would be no rich people. Only people toiling happily under the direction of the Federal Government (or the Revolutionary Council or whatever), which would magically provide good jobs, good wages and benefits to all of the 300 million people in America. It would be a Worker's Paradise. Sort of like Cuba. THE POSSIBILITY OF BILLIONAIRES TAKING ALL YOUR MONEY WOULD VANISH.

Captains of Capitalism set out to CHANGE capitalism

Via the New York TImes, GE's profits are now highly dependent on its tax strategy:

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.
Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

In other words, you've been paying taxes to GE! Unfettered Free Enterprise rules in the United States!  Everybody follows the same rules!  Heh.

Ace says:

Via Nathan Wurtzel . . . who reminds us that until earlier this year GE owned the pro-tax MSNBC. Well, pro tax for the little people, not them. Big difference.

Which gives me an excuse to link the fantasy video in which Chris Matthews Tells the Truth. Rich Democrats DO seem awfully good at evading or avoiding taxes: John Kerry docking his yacht out of state to avoid taxes amd Clair McCaskill's maneuvers to avoid taxes on her plane are just two recent examples. Of course, the very rich don't necessarily have to be Democrats to find ways to avoid paying taxes. But high tax rates motivate the very rich to seek help from government in finding loopholes or other ways to avoid paying "their fair share".  Watch what they do, not what they say.

Special deals for certain corporations can be more damaging to the economy than loopholes for individuals because they provide the favored companies with an unfair advantage over competitors. "As The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney has reported, days after President Barack Obama’s inauguration, Immelt wrote to GE shareholders:

[W]e are going through more than a cycle. The global economy, and capitalism, will be ‘reset’ in several important ways. The interaction between government and business will change forever. In a reset economy, the government will be a regulator; and also an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner."

Hmmm. "regulator, industry policy champion, financier and key partner."   WHERE HAVE WE SEEN THIS KIND OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY BEFORE? ITALY?   What could possibly go wrong? 

Tigerhawk on Obama and the Fortune 500:

. . . I wish that the president would stop catering to the Fortune 500 tools. These are not the companies that innovate. They don't create a lot of American jobs in the long run, they are big enough to lobby for legislation to protect their entrenched businesses, their CEOs consort with politicians partly for the fun of it, and they are in general willing and inevitable participants in the government-corporate complex. If President Obama really wants to motivate business, he will start paying attention to the next several thousand companies, which are the real engine of growth and innovation in the great American prosperity machine.

Meanwhile, Left-wing billionaire George Soros is reportely quietly planning to push for 'a grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order.' Because, you know, American leadership at present is "unacceptable" to Mr. Soros, who wants to use us as guinea pigs in his grand design to establish a global sheriff. I wonder if he is boosting greater power for China at the expense of India? We know he thinks America is awful, but does he think India is worse than China because the people are somewhat more free?

I think these people bear watching. But we're too busy watching the Marxist incitements of Michael Moore, who's only a millionaire, and a former SEIU official.

Kind of reminds me of the rumor that Jamie Gorelick is on President Obama's short list to head up the FBI, even though she's the "Typhoid Mary of policy fiascos." If the villains from Enron should be in prison for cooking the books, so should she. Being a reliable Washington Democratic insider has its privileges. But even though she's not in prison, her name makes all the other candidates seem wonderful by comparison.

Former SEIU official plans to destabilize the economy again

This guy is more serious about redistribution than Michael Moore.

But don't worry, he's going to give Wall Street's money to YOU. No word on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's money. He plans to start the revolution by focusing the hatred of the people on JP Morgan Chase in early May. (May Day communist celebration, perhaps)?

Big firms such as this make an easy target for hatred after the government bail-outs. But the consolidation of firms into entities which are considered "too big to fail" is, more often than not, favored by complex government regulation.

I think a separation of political power from the ability to amass wealth is critical for long-term prosperity. Corporations which are "too big to fail" become dependent on government to prop them up. This is a sign of decline in both equality before the law and in the firms which are dependent on government for special favors.  Other corporations, especially those without special government connections, don't know how to proceed with their businesses when regulations are fickle.  Fickle regulation was one of the ways FDR's administration inadvertently lengthened the Great Depression.

It would be better if we had more financial firms which were big enough to be stable, but not so big that they were "too big to fail". I believe that it is better for such firms to go bankrupt if they are mismanaged  than for the government to rashly set aside the rule of law and property rights in the process of "saving" them.  And it didn't help that these firms were forced by the government and "community activists" to make loans to people who would be unlikely to pay the loans back.

I believe that a separation of political power from the ability to amass wealth is critical for long-term survival of our culture.

Lerner said that unions and community organizations are, for all intents and purposes, dead. The only way to achieve their goals, therefore--the redistribution of wealth and the return of "$17 trillion" stolen from the middle class by Wall Street--is to "destabilize the country."

Lerner's plan is to organize a mass, coordinated "strike" on mortgage, student loan, and local government debt payments--thus bringing the banks to the edge of insolvency and forcing them to renegotiate the terms of the loans. This destabilization and turmoil, Lerner hopes, will also crash the stock market, isolating the banking class and allowing for a transfer of power.

What I can never figure out is why people like this are so obsessed with the concentration of money, but seem totally fine with a concentration of political power. Maybe because they believe that THEY wiill have the power. And this variant on the old "Cloward-Pivens Strategy" still seems predictably short on details concerning what happens between the "destabilization" and the utopian new egalitarianism which the "destabilization" will bring about. BUT WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Well, right off the bat, it would likely devastate the 401k retirements of most older Americans. When George Soros set out to destabilize the Bank of England, he made many British widows and widowers very poor.

And has Lerner ever heard of "hyperinflation"? Would he care if hyperinflation stole money from everyone? What about a deflation which would make debts unpayable? Which way would the destabilization go? Either way, it would cause grave problems in the lives of ordinary people. Would his dream of a utopian egalitarian society be worth the suffering he would cause?

Business Insider notes Lerner was forced out of SEIU last year for spending millions pursuing some kind of plan that looked a lot like this.

But you know who's scary? The Tea Party, man.

Housing or Homes?

From a man who has lived among the poorest of the poor, my pick for today's Thought Piece.

What happens when a dream goes wrong? Alexander von Hoffman of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University described the various postmortems of something that was unquestionably dead: the Pruitt-Igoe Housing project.

Read the whole thing. Watch the video at the end.

Then you might want to scan the comments. Lots of fascinating life experiences are represented in these comments, from several different countries. There are lots of politically incorrect thoughts in there, some better than others. There are several observations about why high-density housing works in places like Singapore, but not in places like Pruitt-Igoe.   Plus some thoughts on the "social-engineering" architects like Le Corbusier, ("Le Corbusier adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s. . . in the absence of a first name, it suggests a physical force as much as a human being." whose goals in designing buildings included weakening bonds between people.   It would all be so efficient and well-planned.   Lots of people in lots of countries thought he was a genius.

Le Corbusier does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism. . .  Clearly, he was not alone; he was both a creator and a symptom of the zeitgeist. . . 

Below are a few comments I thought were interesting.  But there are others.

#10. Demolition video from YouTube, by an Austrian guy.

#20: - written by a guy who once ran a homeless shelter

Pat Moynihan told LBJ he would destroy Black families with his new welfare program. The old sociologist was right. Most families then – including Black ones – had 2 married parents living at home. Not now, thanks largely to Welfare. Now over 80% of the poor are never-married moms and their children – and very dysfunctional too. These families are the major source of poverty in the U.S. Also the major source of violent young criminals, 70% of whom are fatherless. . .

....the key to slums and dangerous housing is not architecture, nor government programs. It is the 2-parent family. As you noted Blert, boys need a father badly, especially when they get bigger. (Girls do too, although for somewhat different reasons.)

That is where we need to focus. If the stable, 2-parent, enduring family built on marriage can somehow be restored, the slums will lose most of their horror.

Otherwise, each new generation of fatherless kids becomes a civilization-destroying onslaught of new Barbarians.

When the number of fatherless children becomes too large, a family or society cannot provide enough acceptable male role models. During the Great Depression, a period of low crime in spite of widespread poverty, the marriage rate among Blacks was higher than among Whites.

#23: It's not just big projects which have problems

On the connection between Section 8 housing and high crime rates, below is a link to an article titled “American Murder Mystery,” from the July/August 2008 Atlantic. It discusses the findings of a criminologist and housing expert (a married couple) studying changing crime patterns in Memphis. . .

#69. Wretchard pipes in on his own thread:  What all this means for us today:

. . . . Maybe housing isn’t about housing at all. Back in the Tondo Days, we had people negotiating with the Marcos administration who wanted to demolish the Foreshore and relocate everyone to Sapang Palay, Bulacan, where there wasn’t a hope in hell of employment.

The people who lived in Tondo were there because they found a niche in the ecosystem as ragpickers, small tradesmen, day-laborers in nearby factories, or in service industries like home laundry and domestic service. That whole ecosystem would be bulldozed over and its human contents sent off to a rural area.

It was a recipe for disaster, but you couldn’t convince the planners, who had degrees from pretty good universities, to see that. Later, they relented and decided to reclaim some more land from the Bay and turn it into the Dagat-dagatan estate, which at least would be nearby. . .

But if housing is not about homes, then what? PR has already been mentioned. Other objects come to mind. Housing could be about votes. It is almost always about money and the subprime crisis is in some way the perfect confluence of PR, money and votes. It was the perfect vehicle to achieve all these non-homing goals. Here was an “affordable housing” project, which was good PR, for which people were to be eternally grateful through votes. And it made a pile of money too — for a while — and for some.

And then, like some terrible, virtual Pruitt-Igoe the whole subprime thing imploded and its ruin is still upon us. The fragments are still raining down. So maybe Barney Frank is right: housing has lasting value, at least for his own political faction. See he’s still in office. Yet Dionne Warwick may have been right too. “A House is not a Home”. In fact, homes have been broken up to fit people into housing. You have whole communities of single-parent, unemployed, poor people where once you might have had communities of relatively familial, employed poor people. Homes for housing is a poor trade.

But at least the machine has the votes. And of course, for the connected, there is also the money. “The poor we will always have with us.” So the only question is how to make a buck off of them.

#90. Wretchard gets REALLY politically incorrect. Beginning with an Australian example this time.

Update: #105: "Car 54 Where Are You?" Herman Munster before he was Herman Munster.

Reducing Social Divisions and Inequality: When Liberal Pundits Fight

Do you increase social cohesion and reduce social inequality by reducing income inequality through taxation,  or by limiting cultural and racial diversity, for example, by limiting immigration?  Follow the Links  to read about some in-fighting among liberals* on this issue.  Starting off, conservative/libertarian Tom Maguire points out that the same data can lead to different conclusions if you haven't accounted for all variables:

Yesterday Nick Kristof delivered a daft column invoking income inequality as a proxy for social inequality and arguing that inequality is stressful and bad. . .

The obvious conclusion, based on the examples presented by Kristof, is that racial diversity creates undesirable social stress. An obvious public policy implication is that immigration should be discouraged. Believe it or not, Kristof did not reach those conclusions, since they don't fit his narrative. Instead, he rode the data to his preconceived destination, which is that we need to tax the rich and spread the wealth. Yeah, yeah - if you aren't going to let the data tell its story, why send it on stage? Or, if the data leads to unacceptable conclusions, maybe the premises are wrong (e.g., maybe social stress is bad but it is a necessary consequence of achieving other goods.)

Well. As if on cue, the Times has a front-pager telling us how they reduce income inequality and maintain social cohesion in laudable Japan - they kick out foreigners, thereby propping up wages. . .

OK, it looks like national suicide to me and it could never work in America (nor should it be attempted at this level, although we need stricter border control and workplace enforcement), but this is a country Nick Kristof is holding up as our goal.

Mickey Kaus notes differences between the famous New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and less famous  liberal (and libertarian/liberal) commentators on the issue of immigration. Some of whom seem to have a tendency toward name-calling.

Somewhat-related Graphs: Median income vs. incomes for the top 1% in America over time.  Update:  Tom Maguire has no mercy.

* Well, Mickey Kaus is more moderate than the rest - with some libertarian leanings. I sure wish his Democratic primary challenge to Barbara Boxer had been more successful. But he made some good points with very little money.

Southern Europe's Young See Little Benefit in Education

THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTS on a "Doomed Generation" of highly educated young Europeans who can't find work??? Pigs fly.

Young people in Europe start to understand the looming demographic crisis.

With pensioners living longer and young people entering the work force later — and paying less in taxes because their salaries are so low — it is only a matter of time before state coffers run dry.

“What we have is a Ponzi scheme,” said Lawrence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University and an expert in fiscal policy.

Glenn Reynolds: "Funny how it seems to work out this way everywhere that high-tax, high-regulation schemes are tried, but young people are usually dumb enough not to realize who gets hurt the most. And what happens when a higher education bubble bursts:"

In Italy, Ms. Esposito is finishing her lawyer traineeship at a private firm in Lecce. It pays little but sits better on her conscience than her unpaid work for the government.

“I’m a repentant college graduate,” she said. “If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t go to college and would just start working.”

John Hinderaker:"It seems to me that the Times conflates several rather distinct issues in chronicling the malaise of Europe's young. It is not obvious that accumulating "certificates" is the optimum path to gainful employment. Europe has long tended to prize credentials over actual productivity, but that is probably a secondary issue in the current crisis. . .

That is what happens when government inserts itself into every employment decision and when labor unions are given quasi-official powers and status. The result is economic disaster, a disaster first suffered by the young. What has happened in Europe, especially Southern Europe, is a flashing red alert, warning the United States not to follow the same path of government interventionism and union empowerment"

Instapundit reader concerning the demographic problems discussed in the New York Times article:

Mark Steyn  has been warning about this for years, most notably in his book America Alone. Except when he broaches the subject he’s accused of being a right-wing lunatic.

Reynolds: "Well, yes. As with the Hitler/Stalin pact, one must not only have the right opinions, one must have them at the correct time."

Wretchard has additional thoughts on the Times piece, including the phenomenon of educated Europeans moving to Latin America for job opportunities:

So for some Europeans it is Costa Rica or bust; where one of the virtues, in common with most of the Third World, is that there are almost no rules. The absence of regulation must make the non-Western world something like the frontier, where both disaster and great fortune seem to lurk right around the corner. . . .

The Hard Left's Latest Ideas for Improving Society

Honored professor of sociology and political science Frances Fox Piven, co-author of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, has some timely advice for the unemployed in America. She wants to foster again what they call over at Protein Wisdom the "blind rage of Cloward-Piven":

they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant

You might think of it as encouraging a generalized, emotional sort of covetousness for revolutionary purposes. Ron Radosh:

What she is calling for is nothing less than the chaos and violence engulfing Europe.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy was one part of American history about which I knew very little until a couple of years ago, when people started pointing out that some of its ideas had contributed to the financial meltdown. ACORN's* agitation for home loans for high-risk borrowers helped to  crash the real estate market in the U.S., and very nearly the financial system of much of the West. Of course, they had big assists from brilliant Ivy League computer modelers on Wall Street and their friends in Government, with their slick computer models for the bundling of bad loans with good loans (and all the reckless behavior which accompanied the acceptance of those models).  Of course, you can't discount  government borrowing and fractional lending by banks. (Too bad American banks were not allowed, or even encouraged, to be as realistic as Canadian banks.) 

But the West's financial system is still limping along.  So far, the hoped-for (by Cloward-Piven types) Rise of the Proletariat Masses to build a glorious new world on the ashes after their planned collapse of the structure of Western civilization has failed to materialize. Even if they did succeed in bankrupting New York City back at the height of their influence. I remember news stories about the bankruptcy of New York City and its relationship to high welfare costs. I DON'T remember hearing that there was a deliberate movement to overload the welfare system. I wonder why the press suppressed this bit of information?

Wall Street and Government financial hotshots (in the recent financial crisis) and the Cloward-Piven bunch (in their dreams to change the world) exhibited a remarkable lack of forecasting abilities. This gives one slight pause about revolutionizing the entire world's economy based on Global Warming computer models and utopian plans for redistributing wealth. Apparently the recent Cancun Climate Conference was more about Climate Justice than about reducing greenhouse gasses.  Even though some UN bureaucrats seem to have some doubts about giving all that money to corrupt, brutal African dictators (or perhaps even to common uneducated Africans). And they may have a point, given the irresponsible reactions of Greeks to the money flowing to their government from other European counties. Although poor, Greece was not exactly a third-world country when the money started flowing in without much effort on the part of the populace.  And when the government ran out of money  --  REALLY ran out of money -- the reaction was rage.  Would not even more irresponsibility be expected if third-worlders were suddenly awash in money they didn't earn?

The trouble is that the Hard Left has always been better at taking over and/or destroying existing institutions than at building new ones.

Frances Fox Piven can look to recent models for her dream of an angry identity-formation from Americans who have been hurt financially by the economic crisis. Richard Fernandez (nom de blog: Wretchard) provides some additional education on the  rise of ANARCHY, once again, in Europe.

In fine anarchists are Red Guards of the European Left, a collection of dupes formed inside the vast and creaky infrastructure of Marxism to advance the interests of one faction against another faction. It is impossible to understand the politics of the Left without grasping that it is all about deniable intimidation. The real problem European anarchism solves is how to send bombs without seemingly sending them, or how to trash the Tory party headquarters in London without really doing it.

Just as Mao’s Red Guards were never about themselves, always about Mao, anarchists are about a larger political question: what is the correct political line? Once the Red Guards of China had resolved that in Mao’s favor they were allowed to rampage for a time to bring hatred down upon themselves and subsequently suppressed, hapless tools to the very end.

Read the whole thing. Wretchard was once part of a genuine rebellion himself (in the Philippines)  and he interacted with revolutionaries who had various ideological reasons for participating in the rebellion.  Some of these revolutionaries seemed more threatening to him than the corrupt, autocratic government against which he was rebelling.

Wretchard's commenters often have some interesting ideas, too.  If you make a comment which he thinks brings something important to the conversation, he may comment on it, as well.  Glenn Reynold notes a few clarifying comments from others on various types of anarchists - some more responsible than others.  A "true anarchy" doesn't sound at all appealing.

I wonder how many generations ahead Fox Pivens was thinking when she called for this angry, indignant reaction from the unemployed in America?  Has she ever considered Thomas Sowell's perpetual question to the utopian thinker, "And then what?"

BLAST FROM THE PAST (circa 1980), Thomas Sowell takes on Frances Fox Piven in the last part of this 6-minute video. He was really feisty back then. Sowell and Fox Piven don't seem to have persuaded each other much in the intervening years.

Additional reading: Life and Death in Shanghai is the story of a remarkable woman's experiences with the Red Guard and the Maoist government after being identified as an "enemy of the people".

Wretchard  comments on VDH's latest piece comparing the behavior of the Left in Greece and California. Can the Left be brought to understand to the reality of the dire situation they are in?

So Hanson says, why not let them have it but make it clear that the state will have to pay for it? Let them see for themselves where the path leads if they won’t listen to reason. . . . .

Maybe they won’t listen to experience either, just as certain types of people keep trying the same thing while hoping for different results. They will press on despite failure, despite debacles and just press the keys harder. But under no circumstances will “sorry, we won’t loan you anything at any interest rate, so please by all means riot all you wish” get anyone else off the hook. Because other people are permanently on the hook. The whole point of socialism is precisely that it’s built on somebody else’s money. If it were built with their money it would be capitalism.

WH Auden observed that “all sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.” If the Left the world over has reached the point where they have got to have their fix, then neither reason nor experience will be persuasive. . .

The Hard Left aside, even more moderate young Social Democrats of Europe are starting to wake up to the consequences of not asking Sowell's question, "And then what?"   in their social planning. As reported by the NEW YORK TIMES?  Similar education bubble coming to a state near you.  Demographic issues may be a little different.

Video showing the lighter side of Marxism in NYC linked at the bottom of this post.

* Does ACORN really have BILLIONAIRE supporters who need to be informed of their business plans like, maybe, George Soros? Seems odd for a group focused on financial equality.  But then, Soros has justified destroying currencies in his stated quest to create more equitable governments.

UPDATE:  An old Stalinist is also delighted by the world's financial difficulties.   Even Fox-Piven had evolved beyond loving Stalin, I believe.

YouTube University: Milton Friedman Explains Libertarianism

Although currently allied with conservatives, libertarians are not exactly like the typical conservative. The late Milton Friedman explains libertarianism in a 1999 interview with Peter Robinson. You can watch the whole thing a one time, or in shorter segments. You might want to consider where you fall on the continuum between supporting the maximum possible individual liberty on one hand OR mandating equality of outcome as well as providing safety, services, etc. through government action on the other hand.

Peter Robinson looks "inauthentic" on a motorcycle. But in this classic interview he asks Milton Friedman some tough questions about his libertarian positions. A college semester in 25 minutes.

Want shorter classes?

What is a libertarian?

What produced the dark and dirty London of Charles Dickens?

Are regulators like the FDA necessary to safeguard consumers? I could tell some stories to support either a yes or no position.

Should the government mandate that nutritional labels be placed on food packaging?

Of 14 cabinet departments, Milton Friedman says he would only keep a handful.

MORE: The kinds of interviews you don't see on TV anymore (radio interviews sometimes still provide this kind of exchange):

GREED 2 minutes. Kudos to Phil Donahue for asking good questions, then listening.

Federal Reserve and the New Deal, Chrysler bailout in 1979, automobile industry. 10 minutes.

Economics of medical care 9 minutes

Why it isn't necessary to change elected officials in order to change government. One minute.

The four ways to spend money.3 minutes

Local vs. Federal Government Spending, increasing production of goods and services (what the Greens want us to keep to a minimum). 3 minutes

More on Our Ruling Class

Further to the Codevilla essay, Wretchard discusses Caroline Glick's article on the foreign policy implications of The Essay Read Round the World. Plus thoughts on Niall Ferguson's positions, presented in Australia: Ferguson describes how rapidly empires can fall.

The Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity. The sun set on the British Empire almost as suddenly. The Suez crisis in 1956 proved that Britain could not act in defiance of the US in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of empire.

But those things happen only to the denizens of history.   People who live in the today usually think they are different. So despite evidence of dramatic change, people who have spent their whole lives among the policy certainties of the postwar period find it difficult to accept they may have to build a world of their own from first principles. Ferguson asks his audience: “what would you do in a world without America? Has the question even crossed your mind?” . . .

Australia’s post-war foreign policy has been, in essence, to be a committed ally of the US. But what if the sudden waning of American power that I fear brings to an abrupt end the era of US hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region? Are we ready for such a dramatic change in the global balance of power? Judging by what I have heard here since I arrived last Friday, the answer is no. Australians are simply not thinking about such things.

But if the Australians are not thinking about it, the Chinese are certainly preparing for it. . . .

Don't know if I am ready for China to be "policeman to the world".

More:

If the love of money is the root of all evil, the lack of it is the cause of the fall of empires. Ferguson gave some examples:

Think of Spain in the 17th century: already by 1543 nearly two-thirds of ordinary revenue was going on interest on the juros, the loans by which the Habsburg monarchy financed itself.

Or think of France in the 18th century: between 1751 and 1788, the eve of Revolution, interest and amortisation payments rose from just over a quarter of tax revenue to 62 per cent.

Finally, consider Britain in the 20th century. Its real problems came after 1945, when a substantial proportion of its now immense debt burden was in foreign hands. Of the pound stg. 21 billion national debt at the end of the war, about pound stg. 3.4bn was owed to foreign creditors, equivalent to about a third of gross domestic product.

Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed in Washington, as the US contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $US1.47 trillion ($1.64 trillion), about 10 per cent of GDP, for the second year running.

But alarm bells aren’t ringing in Washington. The entire alarm system has been disabled, disconnected, perhaps scrapped. Anyone who wants to turn it back on will have to root through the dumpster to see if any usable parts can still be retrieved. No better symptom of the absence of alarms is the genuine astonishment of Charles Rangel that it is illegal to break the law. Almost as a matter of course he concealed hundreds of thousands of dollars in income, used Congressional letterhead to solicit donations for private causes, took four rent controlled apartments for himself. Innocently. He probably didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. . . .

Everyday evidence of the existence of a Ruling Class:

The Academic-Industrial Complex: University presidents on corporate boards, etc.

Social Privilege and the career of Elena Kagan. Written by a lefty.

"Taxes are for the Little People" - Yachting and Vacation Edition

From the Joan Vennochi, Boston Globe:

From Newport, R.I., where Kerry’s ‘Isabel’ was berthed before heading to Nantucket, to Rhinebeck, N.Y., where Chelsea Clinton was married in a mansion modeled after Versailles, today’s Democrats are looking more like Louis XVI than Tip O’Neill. Kick in the First Family’s vacation plans for Martha’s Vineyard, and there’s a real air of Marie Antoinette & Co. retreating to idyllic gardens, while Fox News whips up revolutionary flames. The ethics charges against Representative Charles Rangel of New York are added foie gras.

The author goes on to make a case that the image is only superficial, because:

While Republicans drape themselves in middle class values, they are sticking it to the middle class. It’s all in the effort to deny Obama and the Democrats any positive political message.


Last week, Senate Republicans rejected a bill to aid small business with expanded loan programs and tax breaks.

BUT she leaves out some details about the bills they voted against:

First, the tax provisions to which she refers are a provision of Obamacare which requires the issuance of a 1099 for anything purchased over $600. Insofar as every Republican in the house and senate voted against Obamacare, they already voted against this nonsense. Secondly, in an effort to repeal the mistake which nearly every Democrat in the house and senate voted for, they proposed a bill repealing the provision, but enacting a large tax increase as well. It was for this reason that Republicans voted against the bill; because it was a tax increase.

So which is Joan Vennochi? Is she a liar or an ignoramus?

She also mentions Scott Brown's vote against a bill to extend unemployment benefits. What doesn't make it into the news, because of people like Joan Vennochi, is that the Republicans explained that they were voting against the bill BECAUSE IT WAS 'FUNDED' BY ADDING IT TO THE DEFICIT. They proposed funding extended unemployment benefits with unspent "stimulus" money. It is true that they were trying to hold the Democrats' to their "pay as you go" pledge, so their opposition was partly political. But they were also voting in favor of the interests of FUTURE middle-class Americans. And probably in the interests of middle-class Americans not too far into the future. Not that they didn't lose their way in the past with their own deficit spending. But deficit spending during this administration is WAY out of control and truly threatens rising generations.

Roger L. Simon on the Party of the Rich and the Press:

But wait, as they say, there’s more. At this moment, two of their leaders from a supposedly disadvantaged minority are about to be tried for ethical transgressions (read: thievery) even Congress couldn’t sweep under the rug. Never mind that these transgressions mostly exploit the very minority these people purport to represent. It’s part of the game. Convince minorities they should act like victims. Extort guilt payments from the majority and keep the change. Meanwhile, nothing improves for the minority because it would interrupt the system.

This all occurs during the administration of a president who once trumpeted “transparency” and “change,” pronouncements that seem to have been made so long ago now you can’t remember if it happened before or after the fall of the Roman Empire. This same Democratic president, however, continues to collect big royalties from books he may or may not have written. He’s certainly not the first.

Furthermore, in recent days, some Grub Street drones have been revealed to be enablers, or perhaps cheerleaders, of all the above. Particularly clueless, this crowd does the low-paying grunt work for their truly plutocratic Democrat employers from Huffington to Sulzberger. At least the Dems’ Hollywood supporters are making some decent money off their useful idiocy.

Talk about a confederacy of dunces. . . .

I used to think, as I wrote in my book on Hollywood of a couple of years ago, that these limousine liberals created “mini-me” clones out of the Austin Powers flicks to proclaim publicly their undying support for the common man; so that, in their private lives, these same “progressive plutocrats” could go on raping and pillaging as before. Barbra Streisand is a typical example, but George Soros, more than any movie star, is the poster boy for that kind of behavior.


But these days, it seems, even the “mini-me” is being abandoned. The pretenses are gone. No more Mr. Good Guy, phony as he was. No more obeisance to Mother Teresa (she’s dead anyway) or special concerts for African AIDS. It has evolved to another stage. Chelsea Clinton gets her multi-million dollar wedding no matter how it looks to the rest of us. John Kerry acts as if having tax issues for your yacht is just another average problem for Joe Normal, and Al Gore … well, the less said about him the better.


When I say it has evolved to another stage, I also mean that our political leaders now behave more or less like members of competing Mafia families. The Clintons do not invite the Obamas — or the Gores, for that matter – to their wedding. That Jenna Bush’s wedding cost a paltry one hundred grand is forgotten, a thing of the past barely commented upon. Chelsea marries into a family whose connections are no more savory than the Corleones, as Ron Radosh reminds us.


Meanwhile, the tea partiers are accused of racism that no one can prove. The illusion that the Democrats are the party of the people continues. And the beat goes on.

Our Economic Mess: Videos from Contrasting Perspectives

A British academic explains the failures of capitalism from a Marxist perspective. As The Anchoress notes, it's an appealing video. But the attractive "Marxist Perspective" somehow produced the most repressive, murderous ideology  in human history, despite the beauty of "pure" Marxist theory. Consistently, wherever it was tried. And academics don't seem much interested in this.  This incurious attitude leads me to believe that avoidance of tyranny is far less important than the pursuit of equality in their minds. And totalitarianism can be tempting to the benevolent.

Reason Magazine explains from a libertarian perspective why the new Federal financial reforms won't work. Two minutes, featuring tax cheat and Obama financial guru, Timothy Geithner.

Milton Friedman's classic discussion of Greed with Phil Donahue.

California - No Budget, AGAIN

The Governor gets dramatic with a (probably ineffective) decrease in the salaries of State employees to the federal minimum wage. But this kind of drama does not produce meaningful reform in the long run.

After he was elected to replace a man who had lost control of the State budget, the governor actually tried to enact some real reforms.  He did so with a considerable amount of bravado.  Remember "girly men"?  But The Terminator was, in effect, beaten to a pulp by the entrenched Democratic legislature and decided that if he couldn't beat them, he would join them.  And his wife is from the most prominent Democratic family in America, so his changing political positions probably eased some tensions at home, too.

Better to go with something like Ireland's austerity plan than the yearly drama in California: Tie government salaries to the deficit.   The details show this to be a far more sensible plan than the "cut them all to minimum wage" approach. Glenn Reynolds notes that the Irish plan has the benefit of turning government workers into a lobby for responsible spending. And it might cut down on some corruption, too. Embezzlers, etc., would be directly affecting the paychecks of their co-workers.

Unfortunately, the response in California makes it sound more like Greece.  The government proposes  draconian austerity, then waits for protests which make austerity impossible. Those on the government payroll do more to drive business out of the state so that the budget mess gets even worse.  Politicians cave to current pressures let the guys who are elected after you term out deal with the growing problem, until everything falls apart.

Too Weak to Fail

George Will on the bailouts of GM and Greece:

To understand the pertinence to America of events in Greece, notice General Motors' most recent misbehavior. A television commercial featuring CEO Ed Whitacre demonstrates the institutional murkiness and intellectual dishonesty that result when the line between public and private sectors disappears. . . .

Under crony capitalism, when government and corporate America merge, both dissemble.

"Crony Capitalism" (AKA "Corporatism") is a big part of what this book (published pre-Obama) is all about. And with the addition of "The Chicago Way", Crony Capitalism becomes an even bigger feature of American politics.

Will continues:

Now American taxpayers also own a little bit of a small nation. They provide the U.S. contribution of 17 percent of the assets of the International Monetary Fund, which is giving Greece $39 billion (the IMF also is contributing $321 billion to a "stabilization" fund for other eurozone nations with debt problems). So the U.S. government, which would borrow 42 cents of every dollar it spends under the president's 2011 budget, is borrowing to rescue Greece and others from the consequences of their borrowing.

Greece, whose gross domestic product is below that of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, is "too big to fail," meaning too inconveniently connected to too many big banks. Bailing out Greece really rescues European banks that improvidently bought Greek bonds. . . .

Read the whole thing for details concerning the idiocy of current European borrowing patterns, and comparisons to the situation in America. Plus the dopiness of the current position of the Greek communist party. And the uselessness of the value-added tax, which is a big feature in the finances of the "PIIGS", the European countries currently in the worst financial shape.

Germans are furious about being the biggest bailers in this bailout of a nation where tax evasion is pandemic. . . .

Why accept "austerity" (as that is understood in Greece -- no more annual bonuses of two months' salary, no more retirement at 53)? Suppose, after pocketing some of the bailout, we just threaten to collapse and make a mess of "Europe"?

Greece now knows the terrific strength of weakness. Beware of Greeks -- or any other people -- receiving gifts.

There are a few predictions out there that the entire world economy could collapse in the next few years --- REALLY collapse. Perhaps the examples of GM and Greece show us how this might become possible.

Money for Nothing

Michael Barone knows more about the American political culture than just about anyone. He has some observations about our current administration:

Anyone who has spent much time in Chicago knows the city has impressive civic and business leaders, talented and cultured people who creatively support charities (not always effectively - ed.) and the arts. But they also play team ball. . .

To some it may seem anomalous that Obama, who began his Chicago career as a Saul Alinsky-type community organizer, should have taken to the Chicago Way. But Alinsky's brand of community organizing is very Chicagocentric.

It assumes that there will always be a Machine that you can complain about and that if you make a big enough fuss it will have to respond. And that the Machine can always get more plunder from the private sector.

The problem with Obama's Chicago Way is that Chicago isn't America. The Chicago Way works locally because there is an America out there that ultimately pays for it. But who will pay for an America run the Chicago Way?

Read the whole thing.

Of course, the "Chicago Way" just makes the "money for nothing" mindset already well-established among our political classes that much worse. For example, there are now TWO AMERICAS:   Federal workers make twice as much as the people who pay their salaries. Three trillion in pension underfunding?  Aren't these supposed to be the people who care about "the children" whom they are making slaves to debt? Generosity with other people's money hurts people who are often "out of sight, out of mind" to the generous politicians handing out the largesse. And who could be more invisible than future taxpayers?

Also via Instapundit, a takeoff on this music video (with which people more "in touch with the popular culture" than me were probably familiar) "I want my MTV.". The PolitiZoid version of Money for Nothing may be a bit hard on Nancy "We have to pass the bill so you can find out what's in it" Pelosi and her provocative giant gavel, but Harry Reid's kind of cute.  "Oh, Nancy Pe-lo-si"   "Director: Rahm Emanuel" Heh.

The power of denial and the end of trust:    "I want my MTV."

On a lighter note, Weird Al had some fun with the same paean to decadence in:   Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies
He's very good at what he does.

Meanwhile, how's that "Money for Nothing" mindset working out for Greece?  Or for California?  

The Death Spiral of the Welfare State

Greece is just the beginning of the unfolding financial disaster in Europe.

What we're seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn't Greece's problem alone, and that's why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven't fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies. . . .

And what happened in Greece is not too different from what is happening in California.

Canadian Human Rights Advocate Mark Steyn explains some of the ways the world is changing. Click to full screen mode after starting the video you select below. If you're the impatient type, just go with the Chapter 4 or Chapter 5 video. Interesting ideas, whether or not you agree with them.

Chapter 1 Breaking down the numbers: why the West is dying
Chapter 2 Unsustainable habits of the West
Chapter 3 Civilizational exhaustion
Chapter 4 Response to critics
Chapter 5 Comparing Europe and America

Federal Budget Austerity during the Recession

In April, President Obama promised to find ways to cut 100 million dollars from the federal budget. This video puts that number in perspective.

So why would the President make a big announcement over a budget cut which is said to equal the amount the federal government spends every 13 minutes? Just about anybody could do better than that with their own budget.  Maybe because it's all about image:

President Obama has reportedly been working closely with noted behavioral economists, and their studies have shown that most people are “insensitive to scope,” meaning they are not very good at putting large numbers in their proper context. People will react about the same to a policy proposal whether the cost/benefit is $10 million, $10 billion, or $10 trillion. Consequently, the $100 million cut may seem huge to many voters.

What else mightt the President do to enhance his budget cutter immage and to fulfill his promise to bring America together?

Conservatives should welcome converts, and ask President Obama to not stop at a measly $100 million. Why not come together to cut:

· At least $55 billion in annual program overpayments;

· $60 billion for corporate welfare;

· $25 billion in unused federal property

· $123 billion for programs for which government auditors can find no evidence of success;

· $140 billion in potential budget savings identified in the CBO’s “Budget Options” books; and

· Massive program duplication, such as the 342 economic development programs?

Grecian Formula: How Public Sector Unions Broke California

Depressing.   Follow the link to the City Journal article. And Doug Ross paints a grim picture about the financial situation of Greece, with lots of charts and graphs.

Greece's story will have a series of European Vacation sequels as Italy, Portugal, Spain and other countries also tremble under the strain of crushing debt.

Earlier, VDH gave a 4-step "Grecian Formula" for decline in the post linked here. And Mark Steyn has also compared Greece and California.

VDH again, with commentary by Wretchard - bringing bankruptcy in the UK into the picture.

Are you preparing, personally, to weather the turmoil which seems inevitable, eventually? I'm starting to take these developments seriously.

What the Tea Party Movement is really about

Glenn Reynolds links two short, easy-to understand pieces. From the New Ledger:

I can’t turn around without reading something new about how the Tea Party is the 10-20 percent marginalized rump of Rush Limbaugh listeners who want to keep the government from making life better in every way. Most commenters dismiss the TP as a nuisance deserving only to be ignored. Some go a little farther. David Brooks fears the TP because, as he notes, some TPers are independents, not Republicans, and their few percentage points are enough to swing lots of elections. Noam Chomsky fears the TP because he sees in it the germ of an American Nazi party that is only waiting for its charismatic Hitler to emerge and destroy the world with military power that, unlike Germany’s in 1939, is unchallengeable.

Here’s what the TP itself really fears, in an inchoate way that for most of its members doesn’t rise to the level of clear understanding, but is still intuitively very powerful: the US is embracing central planning as a governing theory, as fast as our legislative processes will allow.

Central planning has a long record of failure, but Americans have always believed that we know how to succeed where others can’t. That leads to the hubris of people like Barack Obama, who says “YES WE CAN! . . . .

Central planning has two primary flaws, when compared with economic freedom: it misallocates resources, and it magnifies the impact of corruption. . . . .

The endpoint of central planning, if not outright failure, is a much deeper and more intractable division of society into haves and have-nots. After promising a better world for everyone, the progressives will end up creating a society that is more polarized than ever.

Keep this firmly in mind, because you’ll see it first in stories that middle-income people are somehow having more and more trouble just affording the necessities of life. This is an unstoppable treadmill leading downward. . . .

And we’re already seeing everywhere, from David Brooks to Noam Chomsky, the signs of how the elites will have to deal with the polarization: by loudly proclaiming in their captive media that the have-nots are stupid and, eventually, evil.

From Hot Air:

What is money? It’s a medium of exchange – you use it to make purchases. To the average individual, money is also a means of cooperation. It transforms the value of your labor into a very efficient form of communication. . .

What is value? It’s more than just the number on a price tag. If you look around your home, you’ll find many objects with value that far exceeds their price: treasured heirlooms, gifts from your children, mass-produced artwork that you happen to like. Value is subjective… which means, in essence, it’s a function of choice. . . .

What is power? It is the ability to impose your will upon others. Power requires compulsion, which can range from a mild set of incentives through absolute domination. Your best friends might be willing to honor almost any of your requests, but you don’t really have power over them. . . .

In a constitutional republic, our elected government is meant to be the exclusive concentration of legitimate power. By definition, the amount of power exercised by the government increases as it grows larger. Power is compulsion – fines, subsidies, regulations, and imprisonment. More power means less freedom. Reduced freedom means less value. As money is drained away from free citizens, their ability to cooperate voluntarily is reduced… and only voluntary cooperation produces genuine value.

This is the dreadful equation of socialism. Money can be used to create value, or it can fuel the exercise of power, but not both. You can see this happening around you, right now. It has happened everywhere in the world, every time central planning has been tried. It would happen even if politicians were the selfless, compassionate, disciplined civil servants they claim to be. . . .

I believe that the ideas in these two pieces are very important. Please consider them as they relate to current political developments.