Saint Shyster

A cautionary tale of boom and bust:

Let’s imagine a society slightly different from the one we currently live in: a society like that of days gone by, in which the workforce is paid in cash at the end of each week, in personalized little brown envelopes.

Now imagine that we can divide this workforce into two different types of people. The first type is honest and hardworking and puts in a full week’s work. Let’s call them the saints. The other is dishonest and lazy and preys upon its diligent counterparts as they make their way home on a Friday, lying in wait outside the factory gates and appropriating their hard-earned wages for themselves. Let’s call them the shysters.

At first it would seem as if the shysters have got it made: that crime pays. And, indeed, in the short term at least, it does. The saints clock in to keep the community going, while the shysters reap a twofold benefit. Not only do they enjoy the advantages of living in a flourishing society, they also, by stealing the saints’ wages, “get paid” for doing nothing. Nice work if you can get it.

But notice what happens if the pattern of behavior continues. The saints begin to tire and fall sick. Having less disposable income with which to look after themselves, they begin to die out. Gradually, the ratio of the “working” population starts to shift in favor of the shysters. But this, of course, is precisely what the shysters don’t want! With the number of saints diminishing by the week, the likelihood increases that the shysters will encounter each other. Moreover, even if they do run into a saint, there’s a greater chance that they’ll come away empty-handed. Another shyster may well have beaten them to it.

Eventually, if the fun and games are allowed to play out naturally, the power balance comes full circle. The pendulum swings back in favor of the saints, and society reverts to working for a living. But note how history is programmed to repeat itself. The saints call the shots for only such time as the economy is in recession, and the shysters preside for only as long as the saints can keep them afloat. It’s a bleak carousel of recurring boom and bust.

Commerce Clause Ascendancy

Excellent riposte:

If birth means entering the market, Congress is omnipotent, authorized by the commerce clause to regulate “every human activity from cradle to grave.” —Michael Carvin

From an excellent—as usual—Krauthammer article.

Government Bearing Gifts

Here’s a pithy summation of why higher education isn’t either:

There's something of a pattern here. The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we'll have more middle class people.

But homeownership and college aren't causes of middle-class status, they're markers for possessing the kinds of traits -- self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. -- that let you enter, and stay in, the middle class.

Read the rest.

Sclerosis

As Mark Steyn ably—and so humorously, as usual—points out, even the revolution isn't revolutionary:

America is seizing up before our eyes: The decrepit airports, the underwater property market, the education racket, the hyper-regulated business environment. Yet, curiously, the best example of this sclerosis is the alleged "revolutionary" movement itself. It's the voice of youth, yet everything about it is cobwebbed. It's more like an open-mike karaoke night of a revolution than the real thing. I don't mean just the placards with the same old portable quotes by Lenin et al, but also, say, the photograph in Forbes of Rachel, a 20-year-old "unemployed cosmetologist" with remarkably uncosmetological complexion, dressed in pink hair and nose ring as if it's London, 1977, and she's killing time at Camden Lock before the Pistols gig. Except that that's three-and-a-half decades ago, so it would be like the Sex Pistols dressing like the Andrews Sisters. Are America's revolting youth so totally pathetically moribund they can't even invent their own hideous fashion statements?

Heave a sigh and try to enjoy the decline, folks.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Walter Williams:

Poverty in Egypt, or anywhere else, is not very difficult to explain. There are three basic causes: People are poor because they cannot produce anything highly valued by others. They can produce things highly valued by others but are hampered or prevented from doing so. Or, they volunteer to be poor.

Yah, what he said.

Also:

Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior.

Uhuh.

Thanks!

Carrie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

This article, published in City Journal, is an account of one teacher’s experience in a very well-funded urban school, viz:

“At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up. We don’t want for books—or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non-Title I schools can’t afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works.”

The problem? A soul-wrecking list of the symptoms of a failed and broken society which, in failing to discuss and attack the real issues, fails the most vulnerable in the worst way.

Read it. Then weep.

Ask Not, JFK!

On this the 50th anniversary of JFK’s “Ask not …” inauguration speech, I remember something has always struck me as askew about that passage. It took reading this quote from Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom to explain why:

"In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic "what your country can do for you" implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man's belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, "what you can do for your 'country" implies the government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary.

To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather "What can I and my compatriots do through government" to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom?  And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?

What he said.

Thanks, American Spectator.

Fact and Fable

Thomas Sowell’s column on Medical Facts and Fables contains the following difficult truism:

The most basic fact is that it is cheaper to remain sick than to get medical treatment. What is cheapest of all is to die instead of getting life-saving medications and treatment, which can be very expensive.
Despite these facts, most of us tend to take a somewhat more parochial view of the situation when it is we ourselves who are sick or who face a potentially fatal illness. But what if that decision is taken out of your hands under ObamaCare and is being made for you by a bureaucrat in Washington?

At 2400 pages, putting BO-Care into practice is sure to be “interesting” but Sally Pipes’ new book, The Truth About ObamaCare lays the facts out in “plainest English,” as Sowell puts it. In effect, what is the expected quality of healthcare under BO-Care? If government-run healthcare around the world is any guide, it’s going to be rough.

Thomas Sowell

Work

Dumb PRKs

How many times must Free Market Capitalism be proven, one wonders: North Korea’s capitulation.

Dumb California

In 1970, California had the 7th most educated work force of the 50 states in terms of the share of its workers who had completed high school. By 2008 it ranked 50th, making it the least educated state.

That’s what illegal immigration does to you, dip shits.

Bork and Hayek discuss "Intellectuals"

Unhappy Tax Day

If you’re one of the approximately 50% who pay tax, ever wonder where your money goes?

Thought of the day:

I have often wondered why economists, with these absurdities all around them, so easily adopt the view that men act rationally. This may be because they study an economic system in which the discipline of the market ensures that, in a business setting, decisions are more or less rational. The employee of a corporation who buys something for $10 and sells it for $8 is not likely to do so for long. Someone who, in a family setting, does much the same thing, may make his wife and children miserable throughout his life. A politician who wastes his country’s resources on a grand scale may have a successful career.
—Ronald Coase, “Comment on Thomas W. Hazlett”

VOTE THEM ALL OUT!

Limping Elephant

Politically, I am no fan of Airbus Industries. There are so many things I don’t agree about the way this conglomeration of government-sponsored companies is run that I simply don’t have the time and space to devote for expansion. Suffice it to say Airbus sucks.

As a pilot, I don’t like Airbuses. I don’t like their design, their avionics, their control systems. Heck, I don’t even like the design of the side stick controller. I especially don’t like the Airbus A380. It’s a waddling oaf of an aircraft that looks like it was designed by a committee of European art school drop-outs—my smarminess doesn’t rule out the fact it probably was designed by European art school drop-outs. Next to the Boeing 747—known as the Queen of the Skies—the Airbus A380 is an arthritic elephant. It’s quite positively f-ugly!

Economically, Airbus have got a problem: no one’s buying this thing. And the few airlines that do have them in their fleets have reported some “problems,” to put it euphemistically. When the A380 first came into the news, I remember someone at Boeing dismissing it—as they naturally would—with the rather prophetic statement that Boeing had tried and failed to find an economically feasible super-jumbo even though they’d designed and built one in the past.

Now it seems Airbus is trying to dig itself out of this jumbo hole in which they’ve dug themselves.

Expand & Feed The Beast

Charles Krauthammer:

Obama set out to be a consequential president, on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama's triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan's strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes -- then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.

Obama's strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast, and then feed it. Spend first -- which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.

We’re in trouble, folks. I hope you’re cinching those belts.

The Forgotten Man

Amity Shlaes’ incredible book of the same title and published two years ago is even more appropriate. In this history of the Great Depression, Shlaes handily describes the incredible leap into Fascism led by none other than ‘Feather Duster’ Roosevelt himself and his Brain Trust.

It’s uncannily similar to present times: we have a President (and Congress) hell-bent on central management, growing the Federal Government to expanses heretofore unknown in American history.

The New Deal only sunk the country further into depression. I hope this blatant takeover of healthcare also sinks this country further into depression as it ought. Why? Well, unless and until the American voter understands through heartache, pain, and suffering what central planning and Socialism means, we will continue to get pinheads like Barack Odor and Congress.

90 Seconds To Understand Healthcare

The Plan

Here:

The very next sentence of my bill provides that the exclusive regulator of insurance companies will be the state where the company's home office is. Every insurance company in the country would incorporate in the state with the fewest government mandates, just as most corporations are based in Delaware today.
That's the only way to bypass idiotic state mandates, requiring all insurance plans offered in the state to cover, for example, the Zone Diet, sex-change operations, and whatever it is that poor Heidi Montag has done to herself this week.

That’s a great start (actually the great start to the bill is revoking the antitrust exemption protections the insurance companies currently enjoy.)

Read more.

A Great Statesman vs. A Lousy Marxist