…and economic patriotism. As Kevin points out, another name for “economic patriotism” is fascism. But these clowns are so historically unaware that they have no idea how they come off those those who do understand both economics and history.
Category Archives: Business
The Real “Deniers”
Matt Welch has thoughts on the willful blindness to fiscal reality by the Democrats:
…for me the biggest direct reveal of how current Democratic rhetoric leads to bad public policy was one of the evening’s honorary former Republicans, Cincinnati firefighter Doug Stern. “The Republican Party left people like me,” Stern complained. “Somewhere along the way, being a public employee—someone who works for my community—made me a scapegoat for the GOP. Thank goodness we have leaders like President Obama and Vice President Biden who still believe that public service is an honorable calling.”
It was classic major-party Manicheasm: Eastasians do bad things for the simple reason that their hearts are bad; Eurasians’ hearts are good, so they don’t do bad things.
In this idyllic landscape of Democratic magical thinking, there is no state and local budget crises, no unaffordable and underfunded defined-benefit public pension obligations, nothing at all standing in the way of “investing” in our public safety, except (in ex-Republican Stern’s words) “right-wing extremists.” Vallejo, California is not bankrupt because of public employee pensions, and the rest of the state is not following suit. It’s a hell of a place, this Democrat-land. Wish I could live there.
The problem is that so many vote do live there, in their minds.
American Character
A half-century of unfettered expansion of entitlement outlays has completely inverted the priorities, structure and functions of federal administration as these were understood by all previous generations. Until 1960 the accepted task of the federal government, in keeping with its constitutional charge, was governing. The overwhelming share of federal expenditures was allocated to some limited public services and infrastructure investments and to defending the republic against enemies foreign and domestic.
In 1960, entitlement payments accounted for well under a third of the federal government’s total outlays—about the same fraction as in 1940, when the Great Depression was still shaping American life. But over subsequent decades, entitlements as a percentage of total federal spending soared. By 2010 they accounted for just about two-thirds of all federal spending, with all other responsibilities of the federal government making up barely one-third. In a very real sense, entitlements have turned American governance upside-down.
It’s not just a fiscal problem, or a governance problem. It’s a moral problem, when so many think that they are literally entitled to live off the productivity of others. It can’t go on, so, one way or the other, it won’t.
Media Madness
…and the reckoning.
I don’t buy the polls, either. I think that we’re going to see a huge preference cascade, and it may already be happening.
Another Amusing Spam
Here’s my new favorite. This isn’t the subject, it’s the “From”: “Pubs may generate their own and submit for approval!”
Light Blogging
I can’t really sit up very well, so any computer work I do is lying on a couch with a laptop. I’m watching football and poking away at my space safety paper.
But I will note an amusing spam. It was from “Cancer.” Yeah, that’s just who I want to open emails from. One of the generally bizarre things about spam is that the spammers make no distinction between “From” and “Subject” headers. You’ll find anything in either one, and often the same thing in both.
The Road To Serfdom
The Readers Digest condensed version. No, really.
Maybe even the president could get through that version, though it would probably still make no sense to him.
The Commercial Space Race
Here’s a pretty good article on what’s going on, but I found this graf amusing:
The Antares rocket has been waiting patiently since last month in its processing facility at MARS.
My emphasis.
Don’t anthropomorphize rockets. They hate when you do that.
The Wages Of Leftism
Thoughts on the reality avoidance of the “elites,” from VDH:
…tokenism is not the only reaction when postmodern liberal dreaming ends up in concrete premodern catastrophe. Escapism is a related response. I don’t think Dream Act supporters in Santa Monica or Atherton wish to live in, or visit much, Parlier or Orange Cove. When CSU presidents retire from Central Valley campuses, they usually frown and head to Palm Springs or Monterey. Doctrinaire liberalism is predicated on the notion of escapism, that one has the means and know-how to ensure that children do not go to the schools whose curriculum and policies follow your own utopian thinking. Or that you make sure your “wind and solar and millions of green jobs” windmills are obstructing someone else’s view. Or that the first high-speed rail link connects Fresno with Charles Manson’s prison in Corcoran rather than cutting a wide swath through Bay Area suburbs.
Medieval exemption is yet another response to liberalism. As I wrote in 2008, I watched with curiosity as tony Palo Alto neighborhoods sprouted bigger Obama campaign signs on their lawns, even though the owners were by definition one-percenter segregationists (East Palo Alto and Redwood City are a mile — and a solar system — away). The mansions of an Al Gore, John Kerry, and John Edwards are expiated by their owners’ always louder liberal outrage. No one really wishes to live in a world governed by the laws of contemporary liberalism. So the architects escape it and justify their flight by finding a suitable token, a convenient scapegoat, a secular priest like Obama to offer them penance for their sins of enjoying elite privilege.
When we talk of tokenism, escapism, or penance, we are still in world of symptoms, not the etiology of the malady. All can understand the very human desire to support a liberal crusader like Barack Obama among those who pay no income tax, belong to the near 50% who receive some sort of government aid, or are part of the one-sixth of the population on food stamps. Self-interest is an understandable motivation. It explains why the public employee and teacher naturally worry more about pay increases than the tax wherewithal to pay for them.
But for the more elite and influential progressive, affluence has allowed liberal orthodoxy to evolve to its theoretical limitations. There is a reason why 90% of professors — life-long tenure, summers off, guaranteed pay raises — are liberal and 70% of small-business people are conservative. The more removed one becomes from the elemental struggle to eat one more day — and never in the history of civilization have so many been so exempt from such existential worries — the more one enjoys the luxury of pondering more cosmic issues such as extending Social Security disability payments to youths suffering from attention deficit disorder or mandating gay history in state public schools or saving the smelt.
California is on its way to becoming Greece.
Hopey Changey
You call this a recovery?
This is what happens when you put people in charge who not only don’t understand how economies work, but think that it’s more important to redistribute wealth than to create it.