"Managing" the poor

Government vs. Production

By Ben Stein

Impose the world's highest corporate income tax rate, and we can expect the result will be too few corporations and too much government.

"The United States may soon wind up with the distinction that makes business leaders cringe -- the highest corporate tax rate in the world," wrote New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski last week.

"Topping out at 35 percent, America's corporate income tax rate trails that of only Japan, at 39.5 percent, which has said it plans to lower its rate," reported Kocieniewski.

Include additional taxes imposed at the state level, and the corporate tax rate in the U.S. jumps to more than 40 percent in 19 states.

Leading the pack are Iowa and Pennsylvania with corporate income taxes, respectively, of 12 percent and 9.99 percent, creating the nation's highest barriers via taxation to new corporate investment and associated new jobs.

Similarly in relation to obstacles to business expansion: Create an education system that produces four times more college graduates in social science and history than in engineering and computer science, and we can expect to see too many American firms unable to compete in the global marketplace and too many academics writing papers on America's lack of competitiveness.

In "We've Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers" Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal, reported that in the U.S. today, "there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million)."

In short, we got better at expanding bureaucracies than manufacturing cars, better at making rules and regulations than producing clothes or oil.

It wasn't always this way. The world's first automatic transmission was invented in 1904 in Boston. The year before, Orville Wright became the first person in history to be a passenger in a machine that had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight.

In 1960, the aforementioned 2-to-1 ratio between government employees and manufacturing workers in America was weighted precisely in the opposite direction, as Moore reported, with "15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government."

Utopia-land and the negation of economics

Red Ink and Upward Redistribution

By Ralph R. Reiland

After doing nothing during his first two years in office to deal with the debt tsunami that's clearly visible on the horizon and heading our way, President Obama delivered a 2012 budget plan that, asInvestor's Business Daily accurately editorialized, "proposed spending $252 billion more in 2012 than the feds spent in 2010 -- at the height of the stimulus spending spree."

Longer run, worse than doing nothing, Obama's projected budgets over the next decade add enough trillions in red ink to double the size of the incoming tsunami.

The federal government's current $14 trillion debt averages out to approximately $50,000 per American, $200,000 for a family of four. For the half of U.S. households who still pay federal income taxes, that averages out to $400,000 per family for those are getting stuck with the tab.

Add to that the next decade's proposed red ink and each of those taxpaying household ends up, on average, $800,000 in the hole. That could become an unworkable $80,000 a year in interest payments per taxpaying household, on average, if the U.S. credit rating drops and lenders require 10 percent interest payments.

Unfortunately, even this $800,000 per family scenario is based on some very rough and overly optimistic guesswork. Politicians projecting out a decade and more have every incentive to paint a rosy scenario, plus a clear incentive at every election cycle to buy more votes via additional trillions in red ink.

Nothing succeeds, as planned.

The third-world Cuba the Castro revolution saved us from

By Alberto de la Cruz

Here is the third-world country the Castro revolution saved Cubans from. Notice how primitive and uncivilized the capital of Havana was in the 1950s, while today, thanks to the Castro revolution, it is a clean, well-maintained modern mecca.

"Most Californians are undoubtedly feeling dread today"

Jailbreak

by Heather Mac Donald

If the real-world consequences for individuals and communities were not so potentially dire, the mass release of inmates from California prisons just ordered by the Supreme Court would carry considerable interest as a criminological experiment. For decades, academics and advocates have argued that the U.S. is over-incarcerating its criminal population. Driven by irrational fear and political cowardice, the anti-incarceration lobby maintains, we are locking up harmless sad sacks who should never have been sent to prison in the first place. Recently, academics such as Columbia law professor Jeffrey Fagan have gone one step further: Not only are the country’s incarceration policies unnecessary, they’re positively harmful to communities. Sending convicted offenders to prison breaks apart stable families and prevents other families from forming in the first place. High rates of incarceration tied to certain communities are not the result of high rates of crime, in this view; they are, rather, the cause of those high crime rates.

With regards to California in particular, anti-prison advocates argue that the state enforces draconian policies with parole and probation violators: it sends them back to prison far too frequently. Missing a parole appointment, or being found in gang territory in violation of your conditions, the advocates say, shouldn’t be treated as such a big deal. Anyone can slip up.
In fact, we have already lived through this coming experiment. During the 1960s and much of the 1970s, America had a very low rate of incarceration, even though crime was blasting through the roof. In 1967, James Q. Wilson wryly observed in The Public Interest: “Other than drunks, the average criminal or delinquent will so rarely be sent to jail that the large numbers of inmates can be explained only by assuming that they were born there or wandered in by mistake.” It was precisely because our lax incarceration policies seemed to be contributing to, rather than lessening, America’s crime problem that states gradually began decreasing judicial discretion in sentencing offenders to probation or issuing lax sentences. Starting in the late 1970s, states began imposing mandatory sentences and three-strikes felony laws and requiring that offenders serve most of their sentences. The prison population unquestionably grew: the per-capita rate of imprisonment tripled from 1973 to 2000; the number of state and federal prisoners grew fivefold between 1977 and 2007, from 300,000 to 1.59 million. During the 1980s, national crime rates were variable even as the prison population inexorably rose. But in the 1990s, as the incapacitative potential of prison reached its maximum “throw weight,” in UC Berkeley criminologist Frank Zimring’s phrasing, crime nationally began a long, unprecedented drop, when the greatest number of criminals was off the streets. Coincidence? California may find out.

Three chairs for Detroit!

TRUCE AND CONSEQUENCES

by Mark Steyn

Mitch Daniels has wrapped up his "To be or not to be" routine, and, according to Paul Rahe, left the GOP looking like a hamlet without a prince. Paul is upset. I'm less so. As I said on the radio some months back, one should never underestimate the Republican Party's ability to screw up its presidential nomination. The GOP had a grand night last November only because the entire party establishment was more or less absent from the 2010 election dynamic. It would be unreasonable to expect that luck to hold, and a presidential year requires a single frontman for the party that makes election season less friendly to decentralized insurgency Tea Party-style.

And in any case doesn't last November seem an awful long time ago? A transformative Tuesday night, followed by an entirely untransformed Wednesday morning after. There is the Paul Ryan plan, but last year's hero Scott Brown has come out against it. And he won't be the last if NY-26 goes south. And the Ryan plan itself is, in the grand scheme of the looming abyss, extremely minimal and cautious.

Governor Daniels' long tease over the Presidential race will be remembered mainly for one thing - the "truce" he called for over so-called "social issues". This was depressing on two fronts: First because Republicans spend too much time pre-emptively conceding and agreeing to play on the left's turf - and, if ever there were an electoral cycle when that should be unnecessary, it's this one. And secondly because the social issues are not separate from the debt crisis. The collapse of the American family is a fiscal issue: Unwed women are one of the most reliable voting groups for big government.

Steven Hayward suggests Daniels proposed the wrong truce, and that the one implicit in the Ryan plan is closer to what's needed: Both Republicans and Democrats accept the current obligations of the welfare state, and figure out a way to make them work. I'm inclined to agree with Michael Tanner at the Cato Institute - that the GOP would get suckered:

There is no evidence that if conservatives agree not to try to roll back the welfare state, liberals will agree to restrain its growth. More likely, conservatives will simply become involved in a bidding war, in which they will inevitably look like the less caring party.

You don't need to hypothesize about that. In essence, it's the "truce" accepted by so-called "right-of-center" parties (Jacques Chirac) in post-war Europe. And all it means is that the troika of permanent bureaucracy, government unions, and a vast dependency class gets to carry on bankrupting the nation even under nominally "conservative" government.

Out there in Insolvistan life goes on. Detroit, a city that has the functioning literacy rate of a West African basket case, has just renovated its library with designer chairs from Allermuir costing $1,000 apiece. Any books to go with the chairs? Who cares? "How about the young mother with several children that looks forward to a weekly trek through the snow/sleet to improve their reading skills and are hopeful that a spot near the fireplaces will be open, because the warmth provided is greater than what they experience at home?" argues Allermuir sales rep Paul Gingell in a Dickensian vignette that warms the heart of my bottom almost as much as his chairs do. God forbid any Detroiter should be required to "improve their reading skills" without a thousand-dollar seat to sink their illiterate posteriors into. What matters is to keep spending at all costs. Three chairs for Detroit!

The battle cry of the Elite

"Do You Know Who I Am?"

by  John Hayward

Fox News is running an exclusive with new details about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, gleaned from “law enforcement sources close to the investigation.”  The former IMF chief is charged with perpetrating a violent sexual assault against a maid.

One interesting detail is that Strauss-Kahn was apparently lurking in his hotel suite long after checkout time, and evaded detection by at least one room service employee, suggesting he might have been lying in wait for the maid.  Even $3000 suites have check-out times.  You’ve got to make room for the next high-rolling socialist overlord who needs the junior presidential suite.

The most striking bit of information contained in the Fox report is the one I just knew would surface eventually.  According to the maid, when she begged DSK to let her go and wailed that she could lose her job, he replied, “Don’t worry, you’re not going to lose your job.  Please, baby, don’t worry.  Don’t you know who I am?”

Ah, the battle cry of the privileged elitist.  It translates readily into every language.  They belt it out whenever their desires are thwarted by law, custom, or the rights of an insignificant citizen.  To name one example that comes readily to mind, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Junior angrily bellowed the question at the cop who arrested him for acting suspiciously outside his own home. 

It’s the punch line to many a tale of ordinary people running afoul of Massachusetts senator John Kerry. In a 2004 essay, Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr said most such stories “have a common theme: our junior senator pulling rank on one of his constituents, breaking in line, demanding to pay less (or nothing), or ducking out before the bill arrives.  The tales often have one other common thread: most end with Senator Kerry inquiring of the lesser mortal, do you know who I am?”

It’s funny how so many of the elitists are loudly obsessed with the plight of the “common man.”  The irony of a top-ranking “socialist” blowing thousands of dollars on a fabulously plush hotel suite is lost on the Left… because to them, it’s not ironic. 

Of course the all-wise, all-knowing masters of destiny live elaborate lifestyles.  It’s only logical, once you accept the premise that society should be ordered and structured by a permanent elite ruling class. Such structure requires a great deal of power to create and enforce.  The powerful do not live the same way as the powerless.  Their sense of entitlement is only deepened by the moralistic language deployed against their political adversaries by fellow leftists.  If they are opposed only by monsters, then they must be gods. 

Many observers have expressed amazement that Dominique Strauss-Kahn would risk a position of fabulous wealth and power – to be almost certainly succeeded by the presidency of France – in order to assault a hotel maid.  Indeed, this is cited by some of his more arrogant defenders as evidence that the maid is lying, or serving as part of some nefarious plot by his political enemies to destroy him. 

 It’s not really hard to understand in the context of the boorish behavior displayed by DSK on numerous occasions… which, according to the New York Post, culminated in him barking “What a nice ass!” to a flight attendant on the Air France plane where he was arrested.  His career ended in that New York hotel room because he forgot who he was.  Fortunately, the NYPD was able to remind him, before the plane took off.

Game over

In Europe, Rifts Widen Over Greece

By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

Fissures among Europe’s currency partners are becoming even deeper and more widespread than was previously evident, raising new doubts about whether the group can resolve the regional debt crisis that has simmered for more than a year.

Gloomy investors on Monday drove down Europe’s stock indexes by about 2 percent, while the euro fell nearly 1 percent against the dollar, touching a two-month low.

Meanwhile, yields rose on 10-year Spanish and Italian bonds, reflecting a market perception that the risks are rising that those two indebted nations might be following the downward spiral of Greece. Greek 10-year bonds reached a record 16.8 percent as investors demanded a high premium for holding them.

On Wall Street, major stock indexes were also down more than 1 percent, in part over the uncertainties in Europe.

The markets seem to reflect the growing discord within the 17-member euro zone currency union, barely a year after European governments came together with a 750 billion euro ($1 trillion) safety net for debtor-nation members. Tensions also remain over whether to restructure Greece’s debt and force bondholders to take losses.

It is clear that the bailout package and the austerity terms imposed on Greece have deepened its recession and added to its already substantial debt burden. The debate now is whether making more cuts and recharging a program to privatize many formerly government-run agencies and social services in Greece will be enough to persuade a reluctant Europe to lend the country another 60 billion euros.

“It looks like a real unraveling — everyone is taking their own position and as a result cooperation has become an impossibility,” said Paul De Grauwe, an economist in Brussels who advises the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso.

The discord has become increasingly apparent since Greece’s financial decision makers were summoned to secret talks at a Luxembourg castle by their currency partners this month.

The Greeks probably knew that a tongue-lashing over the country’s stumbling financial overhaul effort was coming. What they probably did not expect was that beleaguered Spain and Italy, as opposed to economically robust Germany, would take the lead in upbraiding them.

The meeting, on May 6, showed that the disagreements in the euro zone were not just between richer northern countries like Germany and the less wealthy south.

"A Republic, if you can keep it"

The Conquest of the US by Spain

By Ralph Raico

The year 1898 was a landmark in American history. It was the year America went to war with Spain — our first engagement with a foreign enemy in the dawning age of modern warfare. Aside from a few scant periods of retrenchment, we have been embroiled in foreign politics ever since.

Starting in the 1880s, a group of Cubans agitated for independence from Spain. Like many revolutionaries before and after, they had little real support among the mass of the population. Thus they resorted to terrorist tactics — devastating the countryside, dynamiting railroads, and killing those who stood in their way. The Spanish authorities responded with harsh countermeasures.

Some American investors in Cuba grew restive, but the real forces pushing America toward intervention were not a handful of sugarcane planters. The slogans the rebels used — "freedom" and "independence" — resonated with many Americans, who knew nothing of the real circumstances in Cuba. Also playing a part was the "black legend" — the stereotype of the Spaniards as bloodthirsty despots that Americans had inherited from their English forebears. It was easy for Americans to believe the stories peddled by the insurgents, especially when the "yellow" press discovered that whipping up hysteria over largely concocted Spanish "atrocities" — while keeping quiet about those committed by the rebels — sold papers.

Politicians on the lookout for publicity and popular favor saw a gold mine in the Cuban issue. Soon the American government was directing notes to Spain expressing its "concern" over "events" in Cuba. In fact, the "events" were merely the tactics colonial powers typically used in fighting a guerrilla war. As bad or worse was being done by Britain, France, Germany, and others all over the globe in that age of imperialism. Spain, aware of the immense superiority of American forces, responded to the interference from Washington by attempts at appeasement, while trying to preserve the shreds of its dignity as an ancient imperial power.

When William McKinley became president in 1897, he was already planning to expand America's role in the world. Spain's Cuban troubles provided the perfect opportunity. Publicly, McKinley declared, "We want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression." But within the US government, the influential cabal that was seeking war and expansion knew they had found their man. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, now at the Navy Department, "Unless I am profoundly mistaken, the Administration is now committed to the large policy we both desire." This "large policy," also supported by Secretary of State John Hay and other key figures, aimed at breaking decisively with our tradition of nonintervention and neutrality in foreign affairs. The United States would at last assume its "global responsibilities," and join the other great powers in the scramble for territory around the world.

'Wise Guardians' and the 'Unwise Rest of Us'

The Downfall of the Elitist

by Robert 

The two-tiered socialist system is, actually, the most basic sociopolitical system on Earth. It's essentially tribal, set up to ensure stability. To prevent the disruption of change it moves its authority into an essentially hereditary mode. You have the 'Anointed' (upper tier) . . . and the 'Unanointed' (the vast majority in the lower tier).
There's no means of movement between these two groups. One class, the anointed, are deemed by birth, education etc. to be Guardians, Rulers, Wise Men. These 'Noblesse oblige' feel they have a duty and a right to govern the unanointed lesser people.
In days past it would be the tribal elders of one clan that ruled over the other clans. In the feudal period it would be the nobles and the church. The elite prevented the lower class from gaining power; kept them uneducated, dependent on the financial and 'saviour' powers of the nobles/church who owned all the means of production (the land), owned all means of hope and salvation from your supposed sins (the church), all knowledge.
Keeping the unanointed peasantry down became difficult only when the population increased beyond the 'organizing capacity' of such a two-tiered system. After all, you have to enforce a system where the peasantry can't become educated, can't get enough knowledge or fiscal power to control their own lives, can't own land, aren't allowed to read, can't own businesses, etc.

Notice in the Middle East - keeping knowledge out of the hands of the ordinary people and confining them to subservience has become difficult with the electronic media. The Middle East is going through its own transition from a two-class to a three-class structure. Not easy, as the two-class is all about the security of stability, while the three-class is about risks and change.
In Canada, the Liberals were dominant for so long because Canadians were kept passive peasants by the Ottawa government which was focused around the crony big businesses in Quebec and Ontario. But with the rise of the West, the ability of Ottawa/Liberals to keep people down became weak. The Liberals were run as an Elite Governance, a set of insiders who all knew each other, were shareholders in the same big businesses located in Montréal-Toronto, used the government to subsidize themselves, and kept Canadians passive. But the West and the increased population and the rise of small businesses changed all this. The Liberals didn't adapt; they kept to the two-tiered structure with themselves as the Elite. They simply settled in this mode, without policies or programs. That's why they've imploded.
As for Layton's NDP and Quebec - that was just a protest vote against the Bloc. Both the Bloc and the NDP are similar: Socialist. Quebec is socialist because it is cocooned within the Canadian economy. Like a spoiled teenager it can pout and insist upon special treatment, knowing that the parents will eventually give in and hand over all the treats. I think there'll be trouble in La Belle province for Layton with Mulcair.

In our Western world, we have the Elite as the 'intellectuals': the arts and humanities grads who so often move into the civil service and run our world. They are isolated from reality, cocooned in their tenured government jobs, with their pensions, their untouchable isolation from accountability. Their ability to live an economically secure life isn't dependent on their ability to run a store, bake a cake, set up a business, etc. It isn't dependent on their willingness to take risks - and a middle class growth economy absolutely rests on individuals taking risks in setting up and competing for new business ventures.

Shocked, shocked, she is, as they say in Casablanca.

^{Where Dreams Die}

^{by Victor Davis Hanson}

I was given a great gift — but see below — to travel throughout California the last week, by land and by air over the state. It was hard to determine whether the natural beauty of the landscape or the ingenuity of our ancestors was the more impressive. The Sierra is still snow-locked and towers in white above a lush valley floor below. The lakes of the 1912 Big Creek Hydroelectric Project — Shaver, Huntington, and the still snowbound Edison and Florence above — belong in Switzerland. The squares of grapes and trees below look like a vast lush checkerboard from above.

I prefer the beauty of the Napa and Sonoma valleys to Tuscany; the former lacks only the majestic Roman and Renaissance history of the Italian countryside. Human genius in just a half-century has almost matched 2500 years of Italian viticulture. The California coast — the hills, beaches, and landscape — could be in the Peloponnese and easily stands the comparison. When early summer finally comes to the state in late spring, as it did last week, the result is almost divine: warmth and light without high humidity, daily rains, or high winds.

They say the Central Valley is the ugliest part of the state; I disagree. Last week from my great-great-grandmother’s upstairs balcony I could see snow capped mountains tower just thirty miles away; in-between were millions of green trees and vines and the water towers of small towns in every direction. Nothing in Spain or southern France is prettier. A man would have to be mad to leave such beauty, and the brilliant work of his predecessors who as artists built the dams and canals, laid out the agrarian patchwork, founded these communities that serve as bookends to the works of architectural and municipal genius in San Francisco, or Los Angeles and San Diego. Yes, a man would have to be mad — or quite rational — to leave paradise lost.

You see, here is the situation in California. Tens of thousands of prisoners are scheduled by a U.S. Supreme Court order to be released ^[2]. But why this inability to house our criminals when we pay among the highest sales, income, and gas taxes in the nation? Too many criminals? Too few new prisons? Too high costs per prisoner? Too many non-violent crimes that warrant incarceration? God help us when they are released. We know what crime is like now; what will it be like if thousands are let go? I doubt they will end up in the yards of the justices who let them out.

I think I have a clue to what’s ahead. Here is an aside, a sort of confession of my last six months in the center of our cry-the-beloved state:

December 2011: rear-ended by a texting driver; I called 9/11 and the police; she called “relatives” who arrived in two carloads. You get the picture. Luckily the police got there before her “family” did, and cited her. Still waiting to fix the dented truck.

March 2011: riding a bike in rural California, flipped over a “loose dog,” resulting in assorted injuries. Residents — well over 10 in various dwellings —claimed ignorance about the dogs outside their homes: no licenses, no vaccinations, no leashes, no fence. Final score: them: slammed door and shrugs; me: ruined bike, injuries, and a long walk home.

"Anti-government" public "employees" in action

Viva, err… what, exactly?

"It is flagrant self-flattery for the young people who have been camping out in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square in the run-up to Spain’s municipal election to compare their protests to the angry revolts that have swept across the Arab world. Placards that bluster such slogans as ‘From Tahrir Square [in Cairo] to Madrid, World Revolution’ call to mind the deluded black British Labour politician of the 1980s who tried to put his election as MP for South Brent on a par with the Soweto uprisings against apartheid. Yet these lazy parallels have been echoed in reports of the Spanish protests from the BBC and other serious news outlets."

by Mick Hume

What do events in Europe and the Arab world have in common? It is certainly true that both political situations illustrate a yawning chasm between the ruling elites and large sections of the ruled. It is also unfortunately true that the protests of the ‘Arab spring’ and those in Spain and elsewhere are each characterised in different ways by an absence of clear political leadership or coherently radical demands.

But the contexts and the consequences of these protests are very different. While the Arab peoples’ alienation from discredited dictatorial regimes has inspired them to rise up and demand more democracy in a real and often-bloody struggle for power, the Spanish protestors’ disaffection with their own bankrupt political Euro-class so far appears to have led to little more than a collective emotional wail of anguish and abstention from the old politics. And where the absence of political principles and leadership risks holding back a far-reaching democratic revolution in the Arab world, on the quieter streets of Spain and elsewhere in Europe it means there appears little prospect of the movement for democracy making it out of those laid-back city square campsites and storming any palaces just yet.

The sit-in protests began in Madrid last week and spread to other Spanish towns and cities as the municipal elections approached, in defiance of a rule barring political demonstrations on the eve of elections – albeit a rule which the insecure authorities made little or no attempt to enforce before polling day. They quickly became the focal point for those seeking a public expression of anger about Spain’s dire economic and financial crisis, which has pushed the official unemployment rate above 21 per cent - more than double that for young people - while the Socialist government imposes public-sector wage cuts and tax rises to appease the financial markets.

Much of the world’s media has been so taken by these nice, well-behaved protestors that reports have even credited them with embodying a new national spirit of political change and helping to inflict the unprecedented defeat suffered by the ruling Socialist Party (PSOE) in Spain’s weekend elections; the Socialists were hammered in cities and regions across the country and even lost control of such strongholds as Barcelona, Seville and Estremadura.

The tale of two tales

Bill “Chicken Little” McKibben

by DON BOUDREAUX

Writing in today’s Washington Post, Bill McKibben blames deadly recent weather events on climate change.  And he snarkily dismisses as naive the argument that humankind can adapt well to such change.

Let’s look at data from the National Weather Service on annual fatalities in the U.S. caused by tornados, floods, and hurricanes from 1940 through 2009.  Naturally, these data show that the number of such fatalities varies from year to year.  For example, in 1972 the number of persons killed by these weather events was 703 while in 1988 the number was 72.  On average, however, the trend is clear and encouraging: the number of such fatalities, especially since 1980, is declining.

The average annual number of such fatalities over this entire 70-year span is 248.  In each of the four decades prior to 1980, the average annual number of fatalities was higher than 248; in particular:

1940-49: 272

1950-59: 308

1960-69: 282

1970-79: 296

The average annual number of such fatalities over the full 40 years 1940-1979 was 290.

But in each of the three decades starting in 1980, the average annual number of fatalities caused by tornados, floods, and hurricanes was lower than 248; in particular:

1980-89: 173

1990-99: 171

2000-09: 238

The average annual number of such fatalities over the full 30 years 1980-2009 was 194.  (This number falls to 160 – just over half of the 1940-79 number of 290 – if we exclude the deaths attributed to hurricane Katrina, the great majority of which were caused by a levee that breached a day after the storm passed.)

By all means

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

--Joseph A. Schumpeter

RACE, CULTURE, AND EQUALITY¹

by Thomas SowellDuring the 15 years that I spent researching and writing my recently completed  trilogy on racial and cultural issues,² I was struck again and again with how common huge disparities in income and wealth have been for centuries, in countries around the world-- and yet how each country regards its own particular disparities as unusual, if not unique.  Some of these disparities have been among racial or ethnic groups, some among nations, and some among regions, continents, or whole civilizations.

In the nineteenth century, real per capita income in the Balkans was about one-third that in Britain.  That dwarfs intergroup disparities that many in the United States today regard as not merely strange but sinister.  Singapore has a median per capita income that is literally hundreds of times greater than that in Burma.
    During the rioting in Indonesia last year, much of it directed against the ethnic Chinese in that country, some commentators found it strange that the Chinese minority, which is just 5 percent of the Indonesian population, owned an estimated four-fifths of the capital in the country.  But it is not strange.  Such disparities have long been common in other countries in Southeast Asia, where Chinese immigrants typically entered poor and then prospered, creating whole industries in the process.  People from India did the same in much of East Africa and in Fiji.
    Occupations have been similarly unequal.
    In the early 1920s, Jews were just 6 percent of the population of Hungary and 11 percent of the population of Poland, but they were more than half of all the physicians in both countries, as well as being vastly over-represented in commerce and other fields.³  In the early twentieth century, all of the firms in all of the industries producing the following products in Brazil's state of Rio Grande do Sul were owned by people of German ancestry: trunks, stoves, paper, hats, neckties, leather, soap, glass, watches, beer, confections and carriages.⁴
    In the middle of the nineteenth century, just three countries produced most of the manufactured goods in the world-- Britain, Germany, and the United States.  By the late twentieth century, it was estimated that 17 percent of the people in the world produce four-fifths of the total output on the planet.
    Such examples could be multiplied longer than you would have the patience to listen.⁵
    Why are there such disparities?  In some cases, we can trace the reasons, but in other cases we cannot.  A more fundamental question, however, is: Why should anyone have ever expected equality in the first place?
    Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that not only every racial or ethnic group, but even every single individual in the entire world, has identical genetic potential.  If it is possible to be even more extreme, let us assume that we all behave like saints toward one another.  Would that produce equality of results?
    Of course not.  Real income consists of output and output depends on inputs.  These inputs are almost never equal-- or even close to being equal.
    During the decade of the 1960s, for example, the Chinese minority in Malaysia earned more than a hundred times as many engineering degrees as the Malay majority.  Halfway around the world at the same time, the majority of the population of Nigeria, living in its northern provinces, were just 9 percent of the students attending that country's University of Ibadan and just 2 percent of the much larger number of Nigerian students studying abroad in foreign institutions of higher learning.  In the Austrian Empire in 1900, the illiteracy rate among Polish adults was 40 percent and among Serbo-Croatians 75 percent-- but only 6 percent among the Germans.
    Given similar educational disparities among other groups in other countries-- disparities in both the quantity and quality of education, as well as in fields of specialization-- why should anyone expect equal outcomes in incomes or occupations?

"Do you know who I am?"

Strauss-Kahn's pals bid to pay off woman's kin

By ORON DAN, LAURA ITALIANO and BOB FREDERICKS

The family of the Guinean woman who says the former International Monetary Fund chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, tried to rape her in a New York hotel, in their home village of Tchiakoulle.

Friends of alleged hotel sex fiend Dominique Strauss-Kahn secretly contacted the accusing maid's impoverished family, offering them money to make the case go away since they can't reach her in protective custody, The Post has learned.

The woman, who says she was sexually assaulted by the disgraced former head of the International Monetary Fund, has an extended family in the former French colony of Guinea in West Africa, well out of reach of the Manhattan DA's Office.

"They already talked with her family," a French businesswoman with close ties to Strauss-Kahn and his family told The Post. "For sure, it's going to end up on a quiet note."

Prosecutors in Manhattan have done their best to keep the cleaning woman out of the reach of Strauss-Kahn's supporters, but the source was already predicting success for the Parisian pol's pals.

"He'll get out of it and will fly back to France. He won't spend time in jail. The woman will get a lot of money," said the source, adding that a seven-figure sum has been bandied about.

While the DA's office has sequestered the maid -- and is even monitoring her phone calls -- her extended family lives in a village that lacks paved roads, electricity and phone lines.

The average monthly income is $45, which is near-starvation, and some of her family members can't even afford shoes.

They live so off-the-grid in a remote village that they didn't know the maid was allegedly nearly raped until reporters trekked to the village to inform them.

The alleged victim, who lives with her 15-year-old daughter in The Bronx, came to the United States from Guinea several years ago after her husband died. She has received some financial help from her sister and brother-in-law living in New York.

The DA's office has warned local family members not to accept calls from associates of Strauss-Kahn. Even without the maid's testimony, however, prosecutors claim they have plenty of damning evidence to prosecute Strauss-Kahn, including her videotaped statement, grand-jury testimony, statements from fellow hotel employees and semen samples found on the hotel room carpet.

Strauss-Kahn, 62, remains under house arrest in a pricey lower Manhattan pad secured by his billionaire wife, Anne Sinclair. He must wear a GPS-enabled ankle bracelet and have armed guards to prevent him from escaping.

Meanwhile, in another development yesterday, it emerged that Strauss-Kahn allegedly shouted, "Do you know who I am?" as he assaulted the victim, according to a new report.

"Don't you know who I am? Don't you know who I am?" Strauss- Kahn repeatedly inquired during the incident, according to Fox News.

"Please, please stop. No!" she cried as he pinned her to the bed, law-enforcement sources said. "Please stop. I need my job, I can't lose my job, don't do this. I will lose my job. Please, please stop!"

In a heartless reply, Strauss-Kahn, allegedly told her, "No, baby. Don't worry, you're not going to lose your job," sources said, adding that he again repeated, "Don't you know who I am?"

While she begged him to stop, he allegedly pressed the attack, dragging her down the hall and forcing her to perform oral sex.

The maid finally escaped by pushing him into a piece of furniture in the $3,000-a-night Sofitel suite, she said. Sources said that the Frenchman has a gash on his back where he hit the armoire and that blood was found on the sheets.

Investigators also confirmed a DNA match between Strauss-Kahn and a semen sample found on the maid's shirt.

Meanwhile, Strauss-Kahn faces a deadline this morning to vacate the apartment at 71 Broadway where he's been under house arrest since he was sprung from Rikers on Friday.

He is now hunting for a townhouse so he doesn't have to deal with belligerent co-op and condo boards, and has a $50,000 monthly budget, sources said.

"He has been calling around, but no broker wants to work with him," a top broker said. "He wants to find a broker who will help secure a place for him with more privacy so he won't be harassed, and he is not particular about the neighborhood."