By T. Sowell
Random thoughts on the
passing scene:
Like so many people, in
so many countries, who started out to "spread the wealth," Barack
Obama has ended up spreading poverty.
Have you ever heard
anyone as incoherent as the people staging protests across the country?
Taxpayers ought to be protesting against having their money spent to educate
people who end up unable to say anything beyond repeating political catch
phrases.
It is hard to understand
politics if you are hung up on reality. Politicians leave reality to others.
What matters in politics is what you can get the voters to believe, whether it
bears any resemblance to reality or not.
I hate getting bills that
show a zero balance. If I don't owe anything, why bother me with a bill? There
is too much junk mail already.
Radical feminists seem to
assume that men are hostile to women. But what would they say to the fact that
most of the women on the Titanic were saved, and most of the men perished --
due to rules written by men and enforced by men on the sinking ship?
If he were debating Barack
Obama, Newt Gingrich could chew him up and spit him out.
Whether the particular
issue is housing, medical care or anything in between, the agenda of the left
is to take the decision out of the hands of those directly involved and
transfer that decision to third parties, who pay no price for making decisions
that turn out to be counterproductive.
It is truly the era of
the New Math when a couple making $125,000 a year each are taxed at rates that
are said to apply to "millionaires and billionaires."
On many issues, the
strongest argument of the left is that there is no argument. This has been the
left's party line on the issue of man-made global warming and the calamities
they claim will follow. But there are many scientists -- some with Nobel Prizes
-- who have repudiated the global warming hysteria.
With professional
athletes earning megabucks incomes, it is a farce to punish their violations of
rules with fines. When Serena Williams was fined $2,000 for misconduct during a
tennis match, that was like fining you or me a nickel or a dime. Suspensions
are something that even the highest-paid athletes can feel.
Most of us may lament the
fact that so many more people are today dependent on food stamps and other
government subsidies. But dependency usually translates into votes for whoever
is handing out the benefits, so an economic disaster can be a political
bonanza, as it was for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Don't count Obama out in 2012.
Politicians can solve
almost any problem -- usually by creating a bigger problem. But, so long as the
voters are aware of the problem that the politicians have solved, and unaware
of the bigger problems they have created, political "solutions" are a
political success.
Do people who advocate
special government programs for blacks realize that the federal government has
had special programs for American Indians, including affirmative action, since
the early 19th century -- and that American Indians remain one of the few
groups worse off than blacks?
I hope the people who are
challenging Obamacare in the Supreme Court point out that the equal application
of the laws, mandated by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, is violated
when the president can arbitrarily grant hundreds of waivers to the Obamacare
law to his political favorites, while everyone else has to follow its costly
provisions.
People who live within
their means are increasingly being forced to pay for people who didn't live
within their means -- whether individual home buyers here or whole nations in
Europe.
Regardless of how the
current Republican presidential nomination process ends, I hope that they will
never again have these televised "debates" among a crowd of
candidates, which just turn into a circular firing squad -- damaging whoever
ends up with the nomination, and leaving the voters knowing only who is
quickest with glib answers.
Have you noticed that we
no longer seem to be hearing the old familiar argument that illegal aliens are
just taking jobs that Americans won't do?
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