No tolerance to intolerance

Maskophobia, Murderphobia and Bombphobia

By D. Greenfield

Even as Australia was banning the veil, New Zealand was caught in a scandal over the veil after the Saudi consulate complained when two of their masked slaves were refused access to a Kiwi bus.

But the two bus drivers dodged accusations of Islamophobia by claiming that they instead suffer from Maskphobia. Maskphobia being the fear of people wearing masks.

While liberal New Zealand newspaper writers are ridiculing it as a dodge, it's actually a far more honest position than condemning every concern about Islam as Islamophobia. Few people are concerned about Islam because it is a five letter word or foreign. They are concerned about it, because it has a habit of murdering their kind of people. The kind who don't attend mosques, wear veils or bow to a desert deity who commanded his followers to subjugate all infidels. The proper term for this concern is Murderphobia.

Some people riding on a bus are concerned that Muslims will follow their habit of detonating buses in the name of Allah. That the masked and hooded lady is concealing a bomb belt under her portable black tent. This condition is known as Bombphobia.

When boarding a plane, many worry that a Quran bearer will be flying the friendly skies with them and will attempt to hijack the plane and steer it toward the nearest large building full of non-Muslims. This is known as Boxcutterphobia.

Some women worry about being sexually assaulted by a member of a religion which says that those of another gender who do not wear the veil are free for the taking. This is called IslamoRapephobia.

And some parents are concerned about their children being exploited in sex rings by a religion, which cannot be named, yet which consider infidel girls to be fair prey. And whose prophet married and raped a child. This is called IslamoPedoPhobia.

Many cartoons are concerned that if they depict the Prophet of the Religion of Peace (Pigs Be Upon Him) that they will then have to go into hiding and run for their lives. This is known as CartoonPhobia.

Blind people are worried that they will be left without transportation by Muslim cabbies who hate their seeing eye dogs, because their religion says that dogs prevent angels from entering a house. This is called StrandedByBigotedIslamoCabbiesPhobia.

Religious minorities, particularly Jews, are concerned that they are being driven out of the neighborhoods, cities and countries where they used to live by Islamic bigotry. This is a problem that everyone knows does not exist, which is why we are not allowed to talk about it. We are not allowed to talk about it in France, in Sweden or in the Negev. Like the rapes, murders, bombings and Muslim hate crimes-- it is something we do not talk about. But it might be called KristallnachtPhobia.

This entire complex of phobias of course has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. It just happens to entirely coincidentally involve Muslims. Which is no reflection on Islam, the latter being a wonderful Religion of Peace, which has inspired many people to do great things, like conquering and enslaving entire cultures, forcing women to dress like Klansmen and learning to use flight simulators. And I for one would never presume to suggest otherwise.

Islam is a wonderful religion. I'm not just saying that because I have a knife to my throat. It's one of those special religions whose very specialness is hard to express in words, but can be best learned about by visiting the survivors of a bomb attack in the hospitals and helping them feed themselves.

Islamophobia of course has no place in a modern society. It's as ridiculous as being afraid of land mines or serial killers. But unfortunately there is a constellation of related disorders that coincide with it. Such as Maskohpbobia, Bombophobia and Murderphobia that are in no way a response to anything Islamic, but do coincide with some behaviors that are occasionally spotted around people with veils, beards and holy books that tell them to slay the infidels.

What can we as a modern society do about this tragic situation? As tolerant people we must endeavor to accommodate these conditions. And as our Muslim neighbors are known to be fantastically tolerant people, as the diverse religious composition of their countries testifies, we are doubtlessly sure that they will eager accommodate these fears with their usual tolerance.

That will require them to make some slight adjustments to their daily routines. The veil must go. We recognize that this is a deep custom of religious significance and helps remind the Muslim male that his wife is his property, while reassuring him that absolutely no other man has looked at his property during the day, but this irrational fear we have of masks must be accommodated. It is the only tolerant thing to do.

Also the killing really must stop. We recognize that killing people is often mentioned in the Quran and that Jihad is a vital religious duty for Muslims-- and we would never dream of impeding their spiritual journey, even if it's on a plane with bombs in their underwear, but our nervous condition requires that we must ask them to carry out this religious obligation of theirs at home.

We are not particularly concerned whether they practice their Jihad in Saudi Arabia or Pakistani or whatever other of their countries they like. But due to our condition of Murderphobia, we ask that they not practice it here.

It is a lot to ask. We know. But we really must insist on being accommodated. And as a tolerant religion, the Islamic community, with its storied heritage and its water clocks, will no doubt be happy to comply.

Also the taxis for the blind thing. You hate dogs, we hate dogs too. Everyone hates dogs. I have no idea why anyone keeps them around. Certainly the blind don't need them. Mostly they're just lazy. If they really wanted to see, they would. Besides if they're blind, it's probably because Allah punished them for not getting up to prayers on time or walking a step ahead of a Muslim-- but still they have this irrational fear of not being able to get around, especially when your wonderful tolerant religion has monopolized so many of the cabs. So be good chaps and help them out.

Then there's the cartoons. Obviously you have the right to take an ax to anyone who draws squiggly lines that look like your prophet-- even though you don't know what your prophet looked like since no one is allowed to draw him. And none of us would dare interfere with this binding religious duty, just as we wouldn't dream of looking twice at an angry bearded man wearing a heavy vest in warm weather. Still some of our infidel cartoonists have this irrational fear of being murdered. Which naturally has nothing to do with your threats and plans to murder them. But still it would calm their irrational phobia if you wouldn't murder them. Thanks, that's a good Ahmed.

Finally the rapes. We don't like it. I don't want to be rude here, but we have a custom about these things. Our peculiar custom is that women are human beings with equal rights, who can't just be seized and assaulted because they're not wearing your favored full body headbags. I know this is natural in your culture and being a wholly tolerant person, who actually has an advanced degree in Tolerance, I would never object. But still it might be best if you accommodated our peculiar little culture and refrained from doing that sort of thing.

I don't know about you, but I for one am glad that we had this little chat. With such dialogue, many misunderstandings can be cleared up. For instance, many Muslims think that we are Islamophobic. Not at all. We are only Bomb, Murder, Rape and many other kinds of Phobic. Also we don't like masks in public, especially when they're worn by people with a history of triggering our Bomb and Murderphobias.

We appreciate your tolerance. Now please take that damn mask off. Our phobias are acting up again.

Ten thousand slow pricks, rather than an axe to the head.

Is Obama Our Gorbachev?

by D. Greenfield

He was a youthful leader with a law degree elected on the promise of reforms that would revitalize a world power trapped in the economic doldrums by its bureaucracy and huge debt. His approach of international engagement attempted to break through his country's global isolation by forging new ties and treaties with old enemies. And faced with a troubled war in Afghanistan, he authorized a temporary troop surge and counterinsurgency strategy, followed by a phased withdrawal shortly thereafter. Who was he?

The answer of course is Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. The man with the red spot on his head. Also the leader who presided over the dismantling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

On June 22nd, Obama delivered his final phase of the Gorbachev Afghanistan strategy, the reversal of the surge followed by a handover of responsibility to the Afghan national forces. The numbers are different. Gorbachev's surge took place in 1985. Obama's in 2009. But both Gorbachev and Obama approved the surge in the same year that they took office.

The Russian surge took their troop numbers to 140,000. Our surge took them to 100,000. The Soviet's Afghan allies also had much higher troop numbers than our Afghan allies do, but similar rates of desertion and non-performance. The Russian counterinsurgency strategy was more aggressive than ours, but it came with a much higher casualty rate. Almost five times higher. But beneath the numbers, the trajectory was nearly the same.

The similarities however go beyond this. Obama has been chosen to play a similar historical role. That of dismantling a world power. Obama won his election by 53 percent. Gorbachev won his by 59 percent. Both men ran virtually unopposed. Except that Gorbachev actually ran unopposed without the need for a popular election. Obama was forced to contend with the electorate and an opponent, whom his own Pravda media buried in an endless torrent of propaganda.

To many liberals, America looks like the Soviet Union did to conservatives back then, an empire built on a discredited economic and political philosophy that is standing in the way of history. And they see themselves as reformers guiding it into a new era. Post-Communism for the USSR and Post-Capitalism and Post-Nationalism for the US and Europe.

While Gorbachev was introducing a certain amount of private enterprise into a socialist system, Obama is tearing out the last remains of free enterprise and replacing it with socialism and crony capitalism. These reforms differ radically in direction, but not in nature. Both men were and are slowly dismantling a system that their backers did not believe in anymore. Rather than reform it through revolution, they avoided confrontation with a process of slow reforms that would let them keep their power while slowly turning the system into something fundamentally different, while preserving their own wealth and power.

The end result of that approach in Russia, after some twists and turns, is a crony capitalist oligarchy run by the former KGB. What it will look like in the United States isn't as obvious, but the EU provides a likely road map. If Russia went from a Communist oligarchy with no democracy to a crony capitalist oligarchy with very limited democracy-- the United States is going from a federalized democracy to a socialist oligarchy with no democracy. There will still be people at the top and at the bottom, but far fewer people in the middle who are not members of the 'Party'. And there will be no legal way to change the system.

The people behind this think of themselves as being on the right side of history. The United States, as well as any nation state based on free elections, free enterprise and common national identities, is to them a historical aberration being set right by global unions, open borders and progressive government. As far back as the late 19th century, they chose the path of peaceful transition over violent revolution, confident that the forces of historical momentum and the growing conversion of entire professions and the entire apparatus of government to their way of thinking under the influence of their educational and cultural programming would make active violence unnecessary. There would be no abrupt shift, only a gradual transition. Ten thousand slow pricks, rather than an axe to the head.

Every new Democratic administration in the 20th century served as a transition point, turning radical ideas into actual policy. From FDR to JFK to Carter and Clinton, the radicals made their revolutions, and then the conservatives made them seem socially acceptable, stripping away the most objectionable parts, but keeping the basic structure intact. The Obama Administration has followed a similar pattern, while meeting unprecedented resistance because it tried to do too many things, too fast.

FDR was the precedent for radical action, and indeed his administration carried out even more radical change with an even greater contempt for the Constitution and the laws, than the present occupants of the White House. But FDR's avuncular patrician persona was calculated to make Americans feel safe with his policies. Obama lacks such cover. His administration was meant to transition the very idea of what American leadership is, but that very transition undermined the margin of political safety that he needed. If Clinton's sleazy hippie antics at least seemed part of American life, there is no precedent for Obama's behavior outside the EU. And even the EU did not move someone so foreign so close to the top.

If Obama was meant to be the American Gorbachev, then he was an unwise choice. Attempting a cultural assault together with a political assault was overambitious, an overestimation of both media influence and the tolerance of the nation for radical change. That is not to say that the left has lost. Despite the 2010 setbacks, the Obama Administration and its allies have kept on track, ramming their agenda through by executive order, coming in through the window when the door was shut and through the chimney when the the window was barred. And the Republican congress has shown no real ability to confront him on his own terms. Which they can't do, because like most of the political class, their beliefs differ in detail, not in substance.

What most fail to understand is that the left's political victories are a product of its cultural victories. By the time that the left scores a political victory, it has long since secured the cultural battlefield, and even its opponents in the political and media classes lack a secure vision of their own. They are no longer conservatives, rather they are conservative liberals. The liberal beliefs of yesterday have become the conservative beliefs of tomorrow. The front line gets moved further and further away in the name of a greater appeal. There are victories from year to year, but look from the vantage point of generations, and the conservative side has racked up a profound and comprehensive defeat.

Why does the left think that the momentum of history is on their side, that the United States is doomed to collapse, that free enterprise will be replaced by socialism, that nationalism will give way to a global political authority, that the mores and values of the American family will be replaced identity politics? Because it can look back 50 or 75 years and celebrate victory after victory. What conservative can do that? Instead conservative politicians can look back with faint nostalgia, while being forced to admit that the liberals turned out to be right about most things. They don't really want to go back 50 or 75 years. What they want is a kinder and gentler liberalism.

25 years from now will they want to go back to a time before gay marriage was universally legal, industry wasn't controlled by international treaties, cheap energy contributed to global warming, guns were widely available, free speech meant that people could say anything, and border controls made it difficult for people to travel from one country to another? No they won't. These things will become unquestionable outside of a small extremist fringe. Instead the battles will be fought over One Child policies, the internationalization of the military, domestic peacekeeping operations, Spanish only requirements in some states, and as usual, taxes.

It doesn't have to happen this way. But if things keep going as they are, then it will. And keep in mind these are conservative estimates. The reality in 25 years will probably be worse. Far worse.

Right now there aren't two visions for this country. There is one vision and then critiques of that vision. Many of these critiques are incisive, witty and on point, but they are a reaction. A reaction to liberalism. The Reagan era came closest to setting out a different vision for the country and occasionally even trying to implement to it. It took the left some time to recover from the political and cultural defeats they were dealt, but they did it a while back. The same can't be said for our side.

As things stand now the left doesn't need to win every fight. It just has to stay in the game. And the dismantling of America will still continue. If Obama does not get the chance to play Gorbachev, then someone else will. And if the current patterns continue, it may well be a Republican who plays Yeltsin, bringing down the United States with the force of his misplaced moral convictions. Doing on faith what even the left is too pragmatic to do in the name of politics.

A nation cannot exist without direction. And a world power cannot survive without a sense of destiny. To the left, the United States is on the same path as the USSR. And the time frame in which this is averted continues to shrink. America is not static, its population is being transformed and its values are being dramatically altered. When the time comes for it to fall, the population and its values will have changed so much that there will be few who will even care if it lives or dies. That is the long term goal of the left. A long term goal now temptingly within their reach.

East of Eden

Poverty in America

C. Feldman

We are told that 30 million Americans live in poverty, but what exactly does “poverty” mean in America. Heritage’s Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield examine the record and report that it’s not quite what you might think:

According to the government’s own survey data, in 2005, the average household defined as poor by the government lived in a house or apartment equipped with air conditioning and cable TV. The family had a car (a third of the poor have two or more cars). For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, a DVD player, and a VCR.

If there were children in the home (especially boys), the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a microwave, refrigerator, and an oven and stove. Other household conveniences included a washer and dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.

The home of the average poor family was in good repair and not overcrowded. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average European. (Note: That’s average European, not poor European.) The average poor family was able to obtain medical care when needed. When asked, most poor families stated they had had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs.

By its own report, the family was not hungry. The average intake of protein, vitamins, and minerals by poor children is indistinguishable from children in the upper middle class and, in most cases, is well above recommended norms. Poor boys today at ages 18 and 19 are actually taller and heavier than middle-class boys of similar age in the late 1950s and are a full one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than American soldiers who fought in World War II. The major dietary problem facing poor Americans is eating too much, not too little; the majority of poor adults, like most Americans, are overweight.

The authors argue persuasively that the President and advocates like Marion Wright Edelman  blur the distinction between poverty and deprivation and that the new standards advocated by the President deal not with ameliorating actual deprivation . They are income redistribution measures, plain and simple. Distinguishing between those who meet the current or proposed new “poverty ” test and those actually living in deprivation may shrink the one trillion dollar poverty budget but is the only way to  ease the plight of those actually living in deprivation:

Those who are without food or homeless will find no comfort in the fact that their condition is relatively infrequent. Their distress is real and a serious concern.

Nonetheless, wise public policy cannot be based on misinformation or misunderstanding. Anti-poverty policy must be based on an accurate assessment of actual living conditions and the causes of deprivation. In the long term, grossly exaggerating the extent and severity of material deprivation in the U.S. will benefit neither the poor, the economy, nor society as a whole.

Poverty is a choice

The Coming UK Energy Meltdown

by H. Sarman

The UK desperately needs a new energy strategy based on a realistic assessment of its assets, its needs and the options available to it. Unfortunately, its freedom for technical and financial manoevre is deeply restricted by its self-imposed Climate Change Act and its commitment to the EU's 20-20-20 targets. Its technically illiterate, if financially canny politicians and civil service do not appear to understand that the world’s financiers are not likely to place the required £200 billion of long-term investment into their vision of a "low carbon" infrastructure while this concept remains so woolly and badly defined. If the UK government continues on this course, it will lead the country toward certain energy failure.

After hundreds of years of imperial and industrial power, the UK has suddenly become more or less powerless as a world player. With its North Sea resources fast depleting just when the world’s upstream energy producers of oil, coal and gas are struggling to meet rising global demand, saddled with a public debt of £ 1 trillion, and a massive trade deficit, its leading role as an innovative, world-class centre of scientific and manufacturing know-how being ceded to Germany, Japan and now China, it is ill prepared to become a net energy importer. Yet energy import dependence is what the country is rapidly headed for.

Figure 1

As the dramatic chart of Oil Drum editor Euan Mearns illustrates, the UK has run through most of its hydrocarbon inheritance within the lifetime of anyone over fifty years old today. This means that the country will be faced with an entirely new situation. In one way or another, Britain has been energy self-sufficient for most of the last five hundred years. The destruction of its forests for ship building and fuel, prior to the industrial revolution, came to an end with the invention of the steam engine and the exploitation of coal, which energized the industrial revolution. The empire-builders of the 19th century ensured secure commodity supplies, including hydrocarbons, by planting the Union Jack on an unprecedented fraction of the World’s land surface. Two of the world’s top oil companies are still domiciled in the UK (Shell partly).

Britain’s luck held out even as its Empire was dismembered during the period from 1947 to 1970. By then, the technology of finding and producing oil and gas in stormy, exposed seas enabled the country to replace oil and gas imports from its colonies and protectorates, with supplies from reservoirs under the North Sea. Very briefly, around the turn of the last century at a period of unprecedented low energy prices, Britain once more became a net energy exporter.

Hundreds of years of energy independence and trading experience appear to have instilled much unrealistic optimism among policymakers over the sharply changed circumstances in which the UK now finds itself. The country’s energy and economic policy relies on assumptions that are completely unrealistic in today’s multi-polar world.

The “central” fossil energy price projections for 2010 prepared by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) are summarized below.

Figure 2

For readers who prefer to think in traditional market trading units, the conversion factors for these are shown below.

	To convert from $/GJ
Oil	to Dollars per barrel multiply by	5.7
Gas NBP	to pence per therm, multiply by	6.7
Coal ARA	to $ per tonne, multiply by	25.0

The central planning scenario with which the new Coalition Government started out in May 2010, was for oil to rise from $70 to $85 per barrel by 2025. It assumed that the price of gas would rise from 58 to 71 p per therm in 2025. And that coal would actually get cheaper over the next 15 years, falling to $80/t.

Just one year later, a snapshot of the present (June 2011) shows Brent oil comfortably over $100/b, gas pushing 70 p/therm this coming winter and coal already 50% more expensive than the government’s assumption for 2025! 

The worst fate that can befall a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended

The Folly that is “Local” Currency

by George Selgin 

How’s this for a great idea: we build a small fleet of cars, and market them to people in the local community. How do we compete with Ford, G.M., Toyota, and all those other huge car companies? Easy. You see, our cars will have special octane requirements that will prevent them from refilling at ordinary gas stations. Instead, we’ll set up a few local stations that will be the only ones equipped with the right fuel. To top it off (so to speak), our cars will also have small gas tanks to prevent them from reaching the next town on a single tank. (Should we decide to go electric, we can instead equip them with special plugs and voltage requirements to accomplish the same result.) What all this means is that unlike other cars ours—call them “LETS” for “Local Energy Transportation Systems”—can only be used around town. That way, people who go shopping with them have no choice but to shop locally, and so contribute to boosting the local economy. Who wouldn’t want to do that?

The answer, to get serious, is plenty of people wouldn’t. Even people who like to buy local don’t like having to do so; and the option of driving out of town, whether to shop or for some other reason, is valuable. So a car that can go anywhere is worth more—for many a lot more—than one that can’t, which means that so long as Ford or Toyota or any other manufacturer can make a decent “national” car for no less than what the local alternative would cost, we’d better leave making cars to them.

Such reasoning presumably explains why there’s no such thing as a Local Energy Transportation System aimed at challenging existing car makers. Yet there is such a thing as LETS: it stands for “Local Exchange Trading System,” and there are now several hundred such systems in operation around the world. LETS are part of a still larger “local currency” movement. Like the fictional LETS we were just toying with, actual LETS and other local currency arrangements are designed to encourage people to shop locally. The UK LETS website, for example, boasts that, unlike ordinary money which “is quickly sucked out of the area where it has been created,” LETS “stays local, benefiting the community, rather than outside-interests.” The schemes’ promoters see to it that their currency won’t “leak out” of the local economy by encouraging local merchants and banks to accept it, while scrupulously refraining from encouraging “outsiders” from doing so. In short, they make a virtue of their currencies’ limited usefulness—of the fact that, unlike most exchange media, they are not generally accepted.

Wirtschaftswunder

‘German Miracle’ Barack Obama doesn’t see

Blinded by big government, the Obama Depression is no accident

By Milton Wolf

“The eye does not see what the mind does not know.” The difference between your patient’s life and death, my professors would warn, is what you see, and you cannot see what you do not know. Barack Obama cannot see a way out of America’s current economic malaise. He should ask the Germans what they know.

Obamanomics has produced the weakest, most anemic recovery since the 1930s, when another generation’s big-government planners turned their great recession into the Great Depression. To be fair, PresidentGeorge W. Bush certainly did not give the best economic handoff - he too was addicted to spending - but to be clear, President Obama has unarguably fumbled the ball. He has, to borrow his own phrase, put his “boot on the neck” of American businesses with his increased taxes and regulatory burden; he has grown government with his wildly increased spending and outright take-overs; and he has weakened the dollar with his “quantitative easing” printing press.

The devastation caused by Obamanomics is now undeniable. According to Investors Business Daily, 2 million net private-sector jobs have been lost; unemployment has increased by 1.5 percentage points; long-term unemployment is the worst ever on record; the dollar is 12 percent weaker; the number of Americans on food stamps has increased by 37 percent; the Misery Index (unemployment plus inflation) has increased by 62 percent; and the national debt has exploded by an alarming 40 percent. Mr. Obama is on pace to saddle America with more job-killing debt than all the first 43 presidents - combined.

Another Non-Hate Crime

by Dave Blount

White is the wrong color skin to wear on a subway into the Bronx, as Jason Fordell learned the hard way:

After Fordell transferred to a crowded 4 train at 42nd St., four young, black men began harassing him, cops said.

“People started saying stupid little comments — cracker this, white boy this, f—-t this,” Fordell said. …

As the train continued into the Bronx, the confrontation became physical, he said.

“I was in a headlock, punched and kicked on the floor,” Fordell said.

Then a passenger decided to join in — declaring, “Oh, I get a few shots, too,” before kicking and punching Fordell in the head, according to cops.

When Fordell finally left the train at his Fordham Road stop, his original attackers snatched his bag and ran. Inside was $2,900 worth of merchandise, cops said.

Fordell says everyone on the train egged on the attackers.

Police do not consider the incident a hate crime, for reasons that should be obvious by now.

What Is to Be Done?

The Opacity Of Hope

By Richard Fernandez 

Angelo de Codevilla’s ^[1] review of six accounts of Barack Obama’s life at the Claremont Review of Books ends in the conclusion that Obama was always something other than what he portrayed himself to be. What that is, in Codevilla’s summary, is this:

In sum, Barack Obama grew intertwined with the narrow, self-referential left side of the American Left. They helped one another believe they had come up the hard way, as underprivileged but brilliant, square-jawed tribunes of the common man. Their common problem, however, is that their agendas are antagonistic to people unlike themselves, and that they cannot keep from showing their contempt for the common folk in whose name they would ride to power.Since the days of Karl Marx’s First International a century and a half ago, this very human opposition between socialist theory (egalitarianism) and socialist reality (oligarchic oppression) has bedeviled the Left. Marx laid the problem bare in his “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875). Lenin dealt with it honestly and brutally in What Is to Be Done? (1902)—the foundational document of Communism. By acknowledging that the Communist Party is not the common people’s representative, but rather its “vanguard,” Leninists were comfortable with a party responsible only to itself and to history, a party that openly demanded deference from the humans whose habits it forcibly reshaped. Communism’s undeniable horrors forced the New Left to disassociate itself from What Is to Be Done? and once again to pretend that its socialism was neither oligarchic nor coercive, that somehow it was on the side of ordinary folks. This is a much tougher sell in the 21st century than it was in the 19th. Contemporary socialists try to explain away the common man’s suspicion of them as harbingers of oligarchy, corruption, and coercion by resorting to jargon (e.g., “false consciousness” and “socio-economic anxiety”). But that is ever less convincing. This is why the movement argues so strenuously with itself about whether and how much it should dissimulate its agenda.Which is one reason why it plays the “race card” and seizes on recruits like Barack Obama: because many black Americans’ ancestors were slaves, must not any black American be, ipso facto, unquestionably, a member and true representative of the downtrodden? And if a skeptic should argue that this or that black man is really a representative of old, white, nasty socialism, of the Corporate State, of upscale parasites who prey on working people, it is easy enough to re-focus the argument on the skeptic’s “racism.” If blacks inclined to play this role did not exist, the Socialist movement would have every incentive to invent them. And in a sense it tries to invent them, through the “black studies” programs that now divert so many young Americans from useful lives into partisan service.Obama is as close as one could imagine to a made-to-order front man for contemporary, upscale, shy-about-itself, nouveau socialism. From his earliest age, he shaped his dreams about himself to act out a character wholly fictitious, namely a black American from a humble background who rose up out of brilliance and merit, and who yearns to draw all of America’s low-born (plus the rest of mankind) up through the same paths. But he is none of that. Equally imaginary is his vaunted understanding of and sympathy for foreign cultures. A typical multiculturalist, Obama speaks no language other than a peculiar version of English. His native language, loves, and hates are common to some of the most leftist elements of the current American ruling class.That class knows about America only that it must be changed, and looks at the vast majority of Americans the way carpenters look at warped pieces of lumber. Barack Obama is neither more nor less than its product and agent.

There is much else in the reviewed books that Codevilla weighs, puts aside skeptically, or takes with a grain of salt. For example, there are the accounts that neither his father, mother, nor his maternal family nor even his Indonesian stepfather were just plain folks. It seems likely they were distinctly political animals with powerful beliefs and vaulting ambitions. There is the suggestion that they moved on the fringes of a CIA faction that “considered themselves family members of the domestic and international Left. They believed that America’s competition with Soviet Communism was to be waged by, for, and among the Left.”

Codevilla makes his arguments and one may believe them or not. But what is not in dispute is that Barack Obama is the least known quantity in the modern American presidency. He said of himself in his own book, or what is said to be his own book, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” Certainly his biographies show him as something very different from the image he portrayed on the hustings. Codevilla argues that far from being a hardscrabble black man made good, Obama is the product of an elite system of formation.

What the nature of that formation was is open to debate. Its elusiveness is indirect proof of the shortcomings of the gatekeeping system. Whether one cares for President Obama’s character or politics is a matter of political choice. But the choices should be as clear as the lettering in packages that we buy. That the nature of his politics and character should, in his third year of office, still be shrouded in ambiguity and remain in an unreadable script suggests a failure in the political and journalistic system to tell the public what was inside the box.

For surely the public had a right to know. Yet the same line of reasoning can also be marshalled to argue that the absence of narrative means there is no malignant narrative. “No Label” can simply mean too good to characterize. The opacity of Barack Obama might mean there is no conspiratorial pattern present; and what people take to be guile is but complexity. In that view Obama is merely the blank screen on which his opponents project their own bigotry.

But that is too facile an answer. It is also an example of what is sometimes called an “argument from ignorance”; the assertion that something must be good because it cannot readily be proven to be bad. It is logically sounder to assert that the more we know about the president the better off we are, because an argument from knowledge is always better than an argument from ignorance.  Yet there are some who would disagree that knowledge is our due. There is the view that a lot of knowledge, not just a little, is supremely dangerous. Only by turning our eyes aside from knowledge can we act. It is the frightful sight of the abyss that we must hide from sight  to nerve ourselves to scale the mountains.

W.H. Murray, a Scottish mountaineer ^[2], is famous for a remark he made about inner decisions; a remark that many Leftists would intuitively recognize. Describing his Himalayan expedition of 1951, Murray wrote that the expedition’s key act was to step into the unknown:

... but when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money— booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.

And in that light some may think it best not to know who or what Barack Obama is; at least not in comparison to what they imagine him to be, lest to know too much extinguish hope, not simply in the man, but in the Dream.

Black Swan Economics

Nassim Taleb Calls Dodd-Frank Created Office "Soviet-Style"

By R. Wenzel

Nassim Taleb, one of the witnesses at a recent congressional hearing, described the Dood-Frank Act created, the Office of Financial Research, an attempt to create “an omniscient Soviet-style central risk manager.”

In his testimony,  according to WSJ, Taleb said that “[f]inancial risks, particularly those known as Black Swan events cannot be measured in any possible quantitative and predictive manner; they can only be dealt with [in] non predictive ways.” He argued that trying to do what the OFR is designed to do could actually increase risks, in part by increasing “overconfidence” in the information’s ability to predict the next crisis.

Go Nassim! Let's hope you bring the same candor to the IMF..

The Reagan Myth

An Autopsy

by Murray N. Rothbard

Eight years, eight dreary, miserable, mind-numbing years, the years of the Age of Reagan, are at long last coming to an end. These years have surely left an ominous legacy for the future: we shall undoubtedly suffer from the after-shocks of Reaganism for years to come. But at least Himself will not be there, and without the man Reagan, without what has been called his "charisma," Reaganism cannot nearly be the same. Reagan’s heirs and assigns are a pale shadow of the Master, as we can see from the performance of George Bush. He might try to imitate the notes of Reagan, but the music just ain’t there. Only this provides a glimmer of hope for America: that Reaganism might not survive much beyond Reagan.

Reagan the Man

Many recent memoirs have filled out the details of what some of us have long suspected: that Reagan is basically a cretin who, as a long-time actor, is skilled in reading his assigned lines and performing his assigned tasks. Donald Regan and others have commented on Ronald Reagan’s strange passivity, his never asking questions or offering any ideas of his own, his willingness to wait until others place matters before him. Regan has also remarked that Reagan is happiest when following the set schedule that others have placed before him. The actor, having achieved at last the stardom that had eluded him in Hollywood, reads the lines and performs the action that others – his script-writers, his directors – have told him to follow.

Sometimes, Reagan’s retentive memory – important for an actor – gave his handlers trouble. Evidently lacking the capacity for reasoned thought, Reagan’s mind is filled with anecdotes, most of them dead wrong, that he has soaked up over the years in the course of reading Reader’s Digest or at idle conversation. Once an anecdote enters Reagan’s noodle, it is set in concrete and impossible to correct or dislodge. (Consider, for example, the famous story about the "Chicago welfare queen": all wrong, but Reagan carried on regardless.)

Division of Labor

The mother-of-14 without a husband who wants another baby to compete with her pregnant 15-year-old

By Kathryn Knight

When Joanne Watson learned that her 15-year-old daughter was pregnant earlier this year, she confesses to feeling shock and disappointment — but not for the reasons you might expect. 

Never mind the struggles that her daughter would face as a teenage single mum; Joanne was jealous that it was her daughter expecting a baby and not herself. 

‘I’d just done a pregnancy test of my own and it was negative. I came downstairs and that’s when Mariah said she had something to tell me,’ Joanne says. 

‘I somehow knew immediately that she was going to tell me she was expecting a baby, and it was the last thing I wanted to hear after doing my own test. I said: “I don’t want to know.” But there was no avoiding it. We went to the doctor’s and she was eight weeks gone.’

Mum of Britain's biggest family Joanne Watson, 40, left, stands at the head of her 14 children at their family home in St Martin, Guernsey: From left to right, Indianna, two; Tallulah, three; Armani (known as Arnie), five; Nerilly-Jade, six; Lilly-Arna 7; Charlie, nine; Febrianne, 10; Brittany, 11; Caitlin, 12; Georgia, 15; Mariah, 15; Shanice, 19; Bradley, 20; and Natasha 22

An astonishing response? Well, yes. But then Joanne, 40, is no ordinary mum. For including Mariah, she has 14 children, ranging in age from 22-year-old Natasha to two-year-old Indianna. Oh, and since her divorce three years ago, she’s a single mum, raising them all (you guessed it) on state benefits. Shocked? It gets worse. For Mariah is not the only one of the brood to have become a teenage mother. Her two elder sisters beat her to it. 

Natasha got pregnant with her son Branford, now six, when she was 16, while Shanice, now 19, gave birth to a baby boy at 17 and recently had another son. 

Now Mariah has followed in their footsteps, making a hat-trick of gymslip mums.

So does Joanne feel culpable for allowing her three daughters to embark on motherhood while they are still children themselves? Not a bit of it. It turns out she’s far too busy continuing her quest to expand her own brood, and is actively trying for another baby with her part-time lover.

When I suggest that some people may think this highly irresponsible, she responds with an angry snort of derision. ‘It’s not my fault I’m in the situation I’m in,’ she says. ‘I have my children because I love being a mum — not for the money. 

‘It makes me really cross when people accuse me of sponging or having children for benefits. I get pregnant very easily and I could never have an abortion — it’s just not something I agree with.’

European Pricing

The Disappearing Recovery

What if the weak recovery is all the recovery we are going to get?

By D. Henninger

Barack Obama, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have been performing an intricate scorpion dance over spending, taxes and the debt ceiling, premised on the belief that this is the deal that would ignite the recovery.

But what if it's too late? What if that first-quarter growth rate of 1.8% is a portent of the U.S.'s long-term future? What if below-normal U.S. GDP is, as the Obama folks like to say, the new normal?

What if the weak recovery is all the recovery we are going to get?

In May, Bob Lucas pulled his thoughts together and delivered them as the Milliman Lecture at the University of Washington, an exercise he described to me this week as "intelligent speculation."

Here is the lecture's provocative final thought: "Is it possible that by imitating European policies on labor markets, welfare and taxes, the U.S. has chosen a new, lower GDP trend? If so, it may be that the weak recovery we have had so far is all the recovery we will get."

The Obama-will-turn-us-into-Europe argument is a staple of the administration's critics. Prof. Lucas's intelligent speculation, however, carries the case beyond dinner-party carping.

The baseline reality for any discussion of where we're headed is that from 1870 to 2008, the U.S. economy has had average GDP productivity growth of about 3% and about 2% on a per-person basis. Despite displacements—wars, depressions—we've always returned to this solid upward trend. From 1870 till recently, real income per person has increased by a factor of 12—"an ongoing miracle," Prof. Lucas notes, "mainly due to free-market capitalism."

The Obama economists like to argue that this recession was the greatest meltdown since the Depression. Prof. Lucas agrees. Most recessions, he says, are not very important events. This one, though, has taken U.S. GDP almost 10% off its long-term growth trend. The only downturn comparable to this in the past century is the more than 30% decline during the Depression.

What discomfits him is the similarities in the policy choices that accompanied both delayed recoveries. By 1934, the Depression's banking crisis had been resolved, "yet full recovery was still seven years away," he said in the Milliman lecture. GDP stayed more than 10% below trend. "Why?" The answer, he says, was growth-suppressing policies, such as the Smoot-Hawley tariff, cartelization, unionization and, "most important but hardest to measure, FDR's demonization of business."

By the end of 2008, he notes, the primary storm of the financial panic was essentially over. We did get spending declines in GDP in that year's last quarter and in the first quarter of 2009. "But there is a world of difference," he says, "between two quarters of production declines and four years!" The persistence of growth 10 percentage points below its long-term trend line is troubling.

He credits the current Federal Reserve with avoiding the mistakes of the Depression, properly acting this time as the lender of last resort. With the financial side essentially in order and the recovery stalled, Prof. Lucas sees public-policy analogies to the 1930s: "The likelihood of much higher taxes, focused on 'the rich'; medical legislation that promises a large increase in the role of government; financial legislation that assigns vast, poorly defined responsibilities to the Fed and others."

The consensus assumption, however, is that the U.S. economy will return to its century-long growth trend. Prof. Lucas asks: "Is this really the case?"

Forgotten in most discussions of the U.S.-Europe comparison is that for the first 70 years of the 20th century, continental Europe's growth rose alongside that of the world-leading U.S. and U.K., especially after World War II. Through the 1960s, he says, there was every reason to expect a common, high living standard for all of us. Then, "in the 1970s, their catch-up stalled."

A 20% to 40% gap in income levels emerged between the U.S. and Europe, reflecting a lowered European work effort. In Prof. Lucas's view, that gap represents the cost (largely taxes) of financing a larger welfare state from 1970 onward. Other economists, he says, have cited a 30% loss in GDP per person in Western Europe since the 1970s.

The U.S.'s projected long-term welfare costs, including the new health-care law, are the justification the Obama economists give for pushing spending to 25% or more of GDP. The tax increase the president is fairly shrieking for this week isn't for the August debt limit. It's for the next 25 years.

"If we're going to move to a European welfare state," says Prof. Lucas, "we're going to have to pay a European price." And that price could be a permanently lower level of GDP per person. The U.S.'s amazing 100-year ride would slow.

Among the many things any such drop in GDP will siphon away is America's relentless productive vitality. "So much new happens in the United States," Prof. Lucas says. But will it still?

Econ 101

Why Do Medicare Patients See the Doctor Too Much? They Usually Pay Nothing Out-of-Pocket; So Demand Curves Really Do Slope Downward

From an editorial earlier this week in the WSJ:

"Almost all discussions about Medicare reform ignore one key factor: Medicare utilization is roughly 50% higher than private health-insurance utilization, even after adjusting for age and medical conditions. In other words, given two patients with similar health-care needs—one a Medicare beneficiary over age 65, the other an individual under 65 who has private health insurance—the senior will use nearly 50% more care.Several factors help cause this substantial disparity. First and foremost is the lack of effective cost sharing. When people are insulated from the cost of a desirable product or service, they use more. Thus people who have comprehensive health coverage tend to use more care, and more expensive care—with no noticeable improvement in health outcomes—than those who have basic coverage or high deductibles.In addition, Medicare's convoluted benefit structure encourages the purchase—either individually or through an employer—of various forms of supplemental insurance. Medicare covers roughly three-fourths of total costs, but about 85% of the Medicare population has expanded coverage with small to limited cost sharing. This additional cost insulation pushes seniors' out-of-pocket costs toward zero, thereby increasing overall utilization."

MP: This crystallizes one of our main health care problems: spending other people's money (see chart above, data here).  When out-of-pocket costs for medical care approach zero, it shouldn't be any surprise that utilization goes up, that's just the Law of Demand.