Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Income Inequality”

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…and the Left:

Just like the apparatchiks of the socialist regimes, the wealthy — including those who most yell about the injustices of income inequality — take very expensive vacations. They don’t opt for a day trip close to home or stay at a Holiday Inn a few days near a crowded public beach. Nor do they decide to give what they planned to spend on a luxury trip to the poor, so they could all have a vacation instead of staying at home the week or two they are off from work.

We know that these folks are hypocritical, and hope that no one will call them on their personal behavior. When they say that all their goals could be covered by higher taxes on the rich, they probably also realize that even if they raised the tax rate phenomenally for the truly wealthy, the amount they would raise would not cover any of the expenses for all the programs they support. Eventually, the category of “rich” will be lowered to those who earn, let’s say, $150,000 yearly in a big city, in which living expenses are so high and mortgages and rents also outrageously so. Such an income for a family of four puts one squarely in the mid ranges of the middle class.

They still believe that if inequality exists, redistributing the wealth is the only way to address the question. It reminds me of a cartoon I saw decades ago in The New Yorker, in which a king announces to the crowd that he wants an educated populace, so he’s awarding every subject a Ph.D. What the socialists who seek to make policy want is the equivalent: create equality by essentially making everyone more poor, so no one will have enough to go around.

Like equating “health care” with health insurance, leftists like to equate fighting poverty with erasing income inequality, because no one would argue that we shouldn’t fight poverty, while worrying about income inequality allows them to indulge in one of their favorite sins: envy.

But the two things are not the same. One can eliminate poverty (which in many ways we in fact have in America, as measured by the traditional definition (no or poor shelter, limited access to food and clothing and basic necessities) and still have income inequality. In fact, in America the “poor” have cell phones and fancy sneakers, and as others have noted, we are the first society in human history to have poor people who are obese. So curing poverty does not, in itself, end income inequality.

Similarly, one can eliminate income inequality by the very simple measure of impoverishing all. Which is what socialism and income redistribution tends to do, historically, for very good reasons. Well, except for the apparatchiks, who will always have theirs.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The American Energy Boom

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…booms on:

As Daniel Yergin puts it, “the shale-energy revolution [provides] a new source of resilience for the US and enhances America’s position in the world.”

It’s the one bright spot in the American economy, and it’s happening despite, not because of, “progressive” policies. Of course, they’ll take credit for it, though.

And the Left just hates it. I’d like to see to what degree the anti-frackers and anti-Keystone people are being funded by the Saudis.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Black Boot Or Red

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…it’s still a boot, stomping on your face.

In all of the humorous attempts by the left to expunge the Nazis and fascists from their history, they have to desperately grab for small straws of differences between fascism and communism. But what’s important is not the niggling differences, but what is the same — both are ideologies of the collective, of the State, and opposed to individualism. The difference, as I often say, is transparent to the user. But neither is “right wing,” if by that one means committed to individualism and human liberty.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Eco-Warriors Frozen In Global Warming

Mark Steyn’s take on the intrepid explorers:

…you’d have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay ice not to be howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition ‘stuck in our own experiment’, as they put it. I confess I was hoping it might all drag on a bit longer and the cultists of the ecopalypse would find themselves drawing straws as to which of their number would be first on the roasting spit. On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters. Forced to wait a year to be rescued, Sir Douglas later recalled, ‘Several of my toes commenced to blacken and fester near the tips.’ Now there’s a man who’s serious about reducing his footprint.

But alas, eating one’s shipmates and watching one’s extremities drop off one by one is not a part of today’s high-end eco-doom tourism. Instead, the ice-locked warmists uploaded chipper selfies to YouTube, as well as a self-composed New Year singalong of such hearty un-self-awareness that it enraged even such party-line climate alarmists as Andrew Revkin, the plonkingly earnest enviro-blogger of the New York Times. A mere six weeks ago, pumping out the usual boosterism, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that, had Captain Scott picked his team as carefully as Professor Chris Turney, he would have survived. Sadly, we’ll never know — although I’ll bet Captain Oates would have been doing his ‘I am going out. I may be some time’ line about eight bars into that New Year number.

Unlike Scott, Amundsen and Mawson, Professor Turney took his wife and kids along for the ride. And his scientists were outnumbered by wealthy tourists paying top dollar for the privilege of cruising the end of the world. In today’s niche-market travel industry, the Antarctic is a veritable Club Dread for upscale ecopalyptics: think globally, cruise icily. The year before the Akademik Shokalskiy set sail, as part of Al Gore’s ‘Living On Thin Ice’ campaign (please, no tittering; it’s so puerile; every professor of climatology knows that the thickest ice ever is a clear sign of thin ice, because as the oceans warm, glaciers break off the Himalayas and are carried by El Ninja down the Gore Stream past the Cape of Good Horn where they merge into the melting ice sheet, named after the awareness-raising rapper Ice Sheet…

There’s more.