Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Which Is Worse?

June 11, 2009 Rand Simberg 4 Comments

I don’t think Obama realizes — or, more frighteningly, perhaps he doesn’t care — what this spending is going to do to the economy. After all, the free market is just a rival power center. As Tim Noah says: ‘On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.”

I’ll have more thoughts on this Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy tomorrow at PJM.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Glenn’s post was motivated by Megan McArdle’s thoughts on deficits, and who to blame for them:

The problem with the budget deficit is not any particular program, or even any particular tax cuts. It is not that George Bush or Obama is a bad person who does bad things. The problem with the budget deficit is that, unlike the deficits George Bush ran, the deficits projected under Obama (and beyond) are actually large enough to potentially precipitate a fiscal crisis. If our interest rates suddenly spiked up, perhaps because lenders were worried about the size of our budget deficits, we’d find ourselves in the kind of nasty fiscal jam that regularly plagues third-world countries. The difference is, no one has enough money to bail us out.

Obama is the one who will have to prevent this. Yet instead of plans, we’re getting fairy numbers from the OMB. That’s worrying, and it’s sure not George W. Bush’s fault. His OMB liked to inflate the deficit projections, so that they could take credit for a mostly imaginary reduction.

It’s almost like he wants to wreck the economy.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

The Liberal-Leftist Mind Set

June 11, 2009 Rand Simberg 11 Comments

One of Jonah Goldberg’s readers nails it, I think:

Political thought can be described as a straight line with communism occupying the far left position, fascism the far right.

While I’m in agreement with a lot of its positions I’m not a socialist. For instance, I think some income inequality is probably necessary. And while there are parts of communism that I agree with, there are also parts that I have significant misgivings about, like the relative lack of press freedom and free speech.

There is almost nothing I find appealing or I’m in agreement with when it comes to conservatism.
My own views are pretty centrist. I may lean a little to the left but there isn’t anything extreme about my politics, and besides most of the people I know have similar opinions so I must be pretty solidly in the center.

Conclusion:

If I’m in the center, and can find more common ground with communism than conservatism then conservatism must be pretty far to the right; if not exactly fascist very much in the same neighborhood.

Note the false premises that lead to the conclusion, starting with the very first one (which has at least two — the notion that politics is expressible on a single-dimensional axis, and that fascism is the opposite of communisim on such an axis). Another is that such views are “centrist” (a term that again implies that there is a single line to be in the “center” of).

But as Jonah says, their problem is that they don’t understand their own intellectual history, and most of them think that “progressivism” and “liberalism” (neither of which term really applies to their belief system) started in the sixties, when they think about it at all.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Good News

June 11, 2009 Rand Simberg 2 Comments

The Democrats will have an uphill political battle to screw up our health care the way they want to.

[Update a couple hours later]

Blue on blue on health care:

“It is all about Democrats,” said Adam Green, chief executive officer of Change Congress, which launched the Nelson campaign. “We only need 50 votes. We could conceivably have 60 votes on our own if we keep Democrats unified. It is a matter of convincing Democrats whose conventional wisdom is based on the old political order. This is an extremely popular proposal spearheaded by an extremely popular president, and it is OK to support it.”

As Michael Barone points out, it’s only popular among young people, who don’t care about it that much, and don’t vote that much. Those of us whose actual health is on the line will fight it tooth and nail, and the “moderate” Democrats know it.

[Mid-morning update]

The Dems have lost the AMA. I applaud the crumbling of this coalition.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More here, from the Gray Lady:

The opposition, which comes as Mr. Obama prepares to address the powerful doctors’ group on Monday in Chicago, could be a major hurdle for advocates of a public insurance plan. The A.M.A., with about 250,000 members, is America’s largest physician organization.

While committed to the goal of affordable health insurance for all, the association had said in a general statement of principles that health services should be “provided through private markets, as they are currently.” It is now reacting, for the first time, to specific legislative proposals being drafted by Congress.

The devil’s always in the details…

Humor, Political Commentary, Space

Another Unprovoked Interplanetary Attack

June 10, 2009 Rand Simberg 5 Comments

This is like Pearl Harbor all over again:

It is set to impact in the lower-right section of the moon’s near side (see image). Coming in at a very shallow angle – nearly parallel to the ground – the probe has a high chance of skipping across the surface, like a stone across a pond.

It’s all right, though, I’m sure that another presidential apology will be forthcoming directly.

Political Commentary

Europe Coming To Life?

June 10, 2009 Rand Simberg 9 Comments

An interesting piece on the recent electoral revolt:

The last few decades in Europe have made three things crystal-clear. First, social-democratic welfare systems work best, to the extent they do work, in ethnically and culturally homogeneous (and preferably small) nations whose citizens, viewing one another as members of an extended family, are loath to exploit government provisions for the needy. Second, the best way to destroy such welfare systems is to take in large numbers of immigrants from poor, oppressive, and corruption-ridden societies, whose rule of the road is to grab everything you can get your hands on. And third, the system will be wiped out even faster if many of those immigrants are fundamentalist Muslims who view bankrupting the West as a contribution to jihad. Add to all this the growing power of an unelected European Union bureaucracy that has encouraged Muslim immigration and taken steps to punish criticism of it—criminalizing “incitement of racism, xenophobia, or hatred against a racial, ethnic, or religious group” in 2007, for example—and you can start to understand why Western Europeans who prize their freedoms are resisting the so-called leadership of their see-no-evil elites.

I hope that Americans will wise up as well, next year.

[Update a few minutes later]

As I noted in comments here, immigration, multi-culturalism, democracy. Pick any two.

[Update just before noon]

Here’s a familiar theme:

The situation in Spain is a reminder that not all “right turns” are created equal. If the Danes have affirmed individual liberty, human rights, sexual equality, the rule of law, and freedom of speech and religion, some Western Europeans have reacted to the mindless multiculturalism of their socialist leaders by embracing alternatives that seem uncomfortably close to fascism. Consider Austria’s recently deceased Jörg Haider, who belittled the Holocaust, honored Waffen-SS veterans, and found things to praise about Nazism. In 2000, his Freedom Party became part of a coalition government, leading the rest of the EU to isolate Austria diplomatically for a time, and last September, his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, won 11 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Or take Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has called the Holocaust “a detail in the history of World War II” and advocated the forced quarantining of people who test HIV-positive—and whose far-right National Front came out on top in the first round of voting for the French presidency in 2002. The British National Party (BNP), which has a whites-only membership policy and has flatly denied the Holocaust, won more than 5 percent of the vote in London’s last mayoral election. Then there’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), formerly Vlaams Bloc, whose leaders have a regrettable tendency to be caught on film singing Nazi songs and buying Nazi books. In 2007, it won five out of 40 seats in the Belgian Senate.

For establishment politicians, journalists, and academics, these parties serve an exceedingly useful purpose: their existence makes it easy to tar any nonsocialist party with the fascist brush—labeling it racist and xenophobic, equating its leaders with the likes of Le Pen and Haider, and stigmatizing its supporters. No party in Europe has been subjected to more unfair attacks than Norway’s Progress Party, whose extraordinary electoral successes have outraged that country’s socialist elite. Like other parties on what we may call Europe’s respectable right, the Progress Party has expressly distanced itself from parties like the National Front and Vlaams Belang. Yet despite these disavowals, American media have routinely echoed the leftist establishment’s unjust calumnies.

Yes, not “all right turns” are created equal. Particularly when they’re only turns to a slightly different “left” direction. There’s little that fascism has to do with classical liberalism.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Stimulus”

June 10, 2009 Rand Simberg 4 Comments

The $787B mistake:

…the 1930s Keynesian model that was used to sell the idea of fiscal stimulus to Americans was eliminated from economics decades ago.

And this abandonment of Keynesian multipliers does not reflect any ideological or partisan issues that divide conservatives and liberal economists. Rather, it is because the old Keynesian model does not come anywhere close to meeting today’s standards for economic analysis…

…modern economic analysis shows that the impact of government spending on the economy depends on what it is being spent on and how it ultimately is paid for.

The upshot of this new research is that multipliers are nowhere near the numbers that were cited in support of ARRA and, in fact, can be negative, depending on how the spending is ultimately financed. Robert Lucas, the 1995 Nobel laureate in economics who specializes in macroeconomics and government policy, recently remarked that the promise of large multipliers presented by private macroeconomic consulting firms in support of ARRA was “schlock economics.”

One of the infuriating things about the rush to passage of that disastrous legislation was the continual lies, from people like Ed Rendell, and Chuck Schumer and others, that most economists agreed that it was essential to recovery when, at best, there was merely a consensus that something should be done to soften the blow of the financial implosion, but not ARRA. And the media, of course, never called them on it. And of course, the president and others trotted out their usual straw men, and false choice, saying that anyone who didn’t want to implement that legislative atrocity wanted to do “nothing.”

Simply suspending the payroll tax for the rest of the year would have been a lot more effective, and cost a lot less, without creating this huge new tidal wave of debt in the out years.

[Lunchtime update]

Rasmussen: 45% say cancel the rest of the stimulus spending. Only 36% disagree. Expect that number to go higher. And that’s not “adults.” It’s likely voters. Democrats will ignore this at their peril next election season.

And note this:

A plurality of government employees believe speeding up the stimulus will be good for the economy. However, those who work in the private sector strongly disagree.

In other words, the people who understand how the economy works (because they’re the ones who make it work) are opposed to this, while the people who get their money from it are in favor. The goal of the Big Government party (on both sides of the aisle) is to increase the latter and decrease the former, not understanding that, eventually, this will cause the collapse of the nation.

[Another update a couple minutes later]

Here’s a nice visualization:

History, Political Commentary

A Disturbing Comment

June 10, 2009 Rand Simberg 4 Comments

General Petraeus is a brilliant military tactician and strategist, but he doesn’t seem to understand much about politics in the Middle East:

You can tell a lot about a person’s views (and values) by the way he answers the following question: “Would a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict solve the problems of the Middle East, or would solving the problems of the broader Middle East — namely, Iran — one day bring about a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?”

Someone should ask him to elaborate on his views.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Presidential Misogyny

June 10, 2009 Rand Simberg 43 Comments

Speaking of American Sharia, why does Barack Obama have it in for Muslim women?

You haven’t told your parents, but you don’t want to be a Muslim anymore. You hate wearing the hijab and would tear the damn thing up — but you’re afraid of another beating. You don’t discuss Islam with your father — the beating put a stop to that, too. Your friend Susan doesn’t know about the beating, but she says it’s wrong to make you wear the hijab. “This is America. You have rights. Women are equal here.”

True, you think, and we’ve got a new president, Barack Obama. He’s not right-wing, like George Bush. He’s a Democrat who believes in equal rights. He’s black, an outsider, so he’ll know how you feel. And some of his family are Muslim. He says he wants to reach out to Muslims. He’ll speak for you. Then you hear his Cairo speech:

It is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit — for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism.

You laugh. Not the carefree laugh of your childhood, but a hollow, bitter laugh.

He panders to Islamist sensibilities at the cost of the rights of half the population of “the Muslim world.”

Political Commentary

“Troubling Gaps”

June 10, 2009 Rand Simberg

…in Judge Sotomayor’s questionnaire. I’m sure that only some people will be “troubled” by them, though, and they don’t have the votes.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

A Warning To Republican Conservatives