The Disaster That Is The Obama Recovery

This from the WSJ:

The U.S. economy reported a 1.9% drop in productivity in the first quarter of the year, underscoring the trend of historically slow productivity growth in the current recovery. The slowdown isn’t entirely understood, but one certain cause is slower than usual business investment. Money that could go to wealth-creating innovations is going instead to financial deal-making.

Companies have announced more than $1.3 trillion of mergers and acquisitions world-wide so far this year, a surge of 23% from the same period last year and the most since the financial crisis. It’s not irrational exuberance that’s driving many of today’s deals—just the opposite. With fewer opportunities for growth but plenty of credit available to fund deals, mergers are often the most sensible way for a company to expand. . . .

In the U.S., the combination of loose monetary policy and restrictive government has created one of the great ironies of the Obama era. The labor-force participation rate of 62.7% persists at a 1978 level, and Americans who have jobs see little wage growth. But it’s a boom time for the Wall Streeters Mr. Obama vilifies, especially the attorneys and financiers who arrange corporate mergers.

Small companies are also struggling to find new customers and markets. A recent survey from the National Federation of Independent Business shows that the availability of credit is not the problem; business owners aren’t borrowing because they don’t know what to do with the money. Merely 5% of business owners reported that all their credit needs weren’t met. NFIB says that interest “rates are low, but prospects for putting borrowed money profitably to work have not improved enough to induce owners to step up their borrowing and spending.”

It is the story of this era. The Kauffman Foundation, which tracks new businesses, says its data show 2013 was “the second consecutive year to show an entrepreneurial activity decline in the United States.” Being an entrepreneur always takes guts. It takes special courage during an Administration that has twice set the annual record by issuing more than 81,000 pages of regulations.

But you wouldn’t know the challenges of the overall economy by observing the financial economy. The boom in corporate mergers has investment banks reporting surging advisory revenue. Dealogic reports that, world-wide, markets posted the best first quarter ever for equity capital deals, with initial public offerings, secondary stock sales and convertible bond offerings up 27% from the same period last year. Corporate debt issuance remains robust.

What are companies doing with all the money they raise? Not necessarily funding future prosperity. A recent note from Strategas Research Partners points out that much of the money flowing into companies in recent years was directed to “financial, rather than economic, risk-taking.” Strategas says that as of the end of last year the dollar volume of stock buybacks had soared 287% since the post-crisis low and the value of mergers and acquisitions was up 179%.

Senator Elizabeth Warren and others on the left want to blame all this on the companies. But what she doesn’t understand is that this is a perfectly rational market response to the sheer weight of the Obama regulatory apparatus that punishes innovation and risk-taking. The progressive urge is to command businesses to make more investments, but if there’s an opportunity, no one needs to be commanded to exploit it. Washington simply needs to allow it.

Capital expenditures support business expansion. In the U.S. they shrank in the first quarter by 3.4%, according to the Commerce Department’s measure of nonresidential private fixed investment. Such investment is needed not only to create new productive capacity, but to replace assets that are worn-out and obsolete. A separate Commerce measure, tracking net investment—meaning new investment minus the capital assets that are consumed—shows that even in an era of easy money, American businesses aren’t eager to spend on expansion.

Commerce has data through 2013 for this statistic. And in constant dollars, over the first five years of the Obama Administration net private nonresidential fixed investment was the lowest since the mid-1990s when the economy was much smaller. Even near-zero interest rates haven’t been able to offset ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, new EPA emissions rules, the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, and myriad other threats from Washington.

This White House has offered an abundance of taxpayer-funded stimulus plans. But the only true and lasting economic stimulus is one that gives people a reason to invest their own money. That will require a sharp reduction in the regulatory and tax burden that continues to inhibit business activity. Workers far from Wall Street desperately need relief.

And with yet more bad news on the Obama economy, this from Zero Hedge:

In what was an "unambiguously" unpleasant April jobs payrolls report, with a March revision dragging that month's job gain to the lowest level since June of 2012, the fact that the number of Americans not in the labor force rose once again, this time to 93,194K from 93,175K, with the result being a participation rate of 69.45 or just above the lowest percentage since 1977, will merely catalyze even more upside to the so called "market" which continues to reflect nothing but central bank liquidity, and thus - the accelerating deterioration of the broader economy. . . .

If anyone from the left quotes the bullshit unemployment rate to you of 5.4% as a sign that Obama is providing good stewardship of the economy, feel free to beat them bloody, since they are either partisans lying to you or idiots lying to themselves. Either way, they are in need of an epiphany.

Yet another aspect of the Obama economy that bears mention is that, while we have hemorrhaged good paying middle class jobs under the Obama economy, we have created a lot of low wage positions. Thus, it is not surprising to find that virtually all job gains since the 2007 Recession have gone to immigrants.

Since the beginning of the recession in December of 2007 — said to have ended in June 2009 — the foreign-born population has seen a much greater net employment growth than native-born Americans.

In December 2007 the number of foreign-born workers was 22,810,000. By April 2015, the number had increased to 24,819,000 or a net job growth of more than 2 million.

For native-born workers that number in December 2007 was 123,524,000 by April of this year the number of employed native-born Americans was 123,769,000 or a net job growth of 245,000. . . .

Governments cannot create prosperity. The long history of failed socialist and crony capitalist experiments of the 20th and 21st century are proof positive. What governments can do is create the conditions for prosperity with the minimal necessary laws and regulations. Or they, like Obama and the left are doing now, can strangle economies with heavy regulation and punishing taxes.

Why well meaning people on the left cannot grasp these concepts is beyond me? The closer one comes to free market capitalism, the more wealth is created and the better people fare at all economic levels. The closer one moves towards socialism or crony capitalism, the more regulations and punishing taxes one imposes, the more the economy suffers. There is a reason that the Obama years have been an economic disaster for all but the wealthiest Americans. Talk of economic redistribution sounds wonderful, but in Obamaland, the lower one is on the economic scale, the more one suffers under his administration. Indeed, the only thing that has kept this nation afloat for the past several years is the Fed's near zero interest rates and quantitative easing - i.e., spinning the printing presses at high speed. And the only people that is good for are those in the top few percent of economic wealth who are able to take advantage. We are seeing huge stock market bubbles form here and in Europe. Yes, there is an income gap and the wealthy are becoming wealthier while the middle class has suffered actual declines in economic well being, not to mention record or near record jobless levels. Blame for that rests squarely with Obama and the left.

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The Baltimore Riots, The Problems In The Black Inner Cities, & The Failure Of Progressive Ideals (Updated)

The following is Judge Andrew Napolitano, appearing on Fox News, opining that the investigation into the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, the ostensible justification for the recent riots there, has not been properly handled and that the riots might well have been avoided had the Baltimore City Police Department reacted with greater swiftness. That assumes of course that the investigation could have been concluded much quicker, and I do not know if that is accurate:



Regardless, Judge Napolitano is right about what should happen going forward. Freddie Gray is owed justice. There is also no question that Freddie Gray's wrongful death was the ostensible justification for the Baltimore riots. That said, the real issues plaguing a very substantial portion of the black community, particularly those in the inner cities, go far deeper than the issue of Freddie Gray's death or police misconduct.

Senator Harry Reid, the Democrat majority leader, though repeating the utter canards that racism is at the root of the problems experienced by inner city blacks, in fact came close to hitting the mark from the floor of the Senate Monday:

"[T]he underlying problem [giving rise to the Baltimore riot is] that millions of Americans feel powerless in the face of a system that is rigged against them.”

Reid stressed that “it’s easy to feel powerless when you see the rich getting richer while opportunities to build a better life for yourself and your family are nonexistent in your own community.”

“It’s easy to feel devalued when schools in your community are failing. It’s easy to believe the system is rigged against you when you spend years watching what President Obama called today ‘a slow-rolling crisis’ of troubling police interactions with people of color,” he continued. “No American should ever feel powerless. No American should ever feel like their life is not valued. But that is what our system says to many of our fellow citizens.”

“No American should be denied the opportunity to better their lives through their own hard work. But that is the reality that too many face. In a nation that prides itself on being a land of opportunity, millions of our fellow citizens live every day with little hope of building a better future no matter how hard they try. We cannot condone the violence we see in Baltimore. But we must not ignore the despair and hopelessness that gives rise to this kind of violence.”

The reality is that Democrats own the inner cities as well as this nation's response to the plight of our black citizens since the start of the Great Society and the welfare state. They try to maintain the canard that the only things holding back blacks in the inner city today are rampant (conservative) racism, white police racism, and but a bit more application of government spending. The reality is that racism is absent from all but the fringes of society today, that inner city black youths have exponentially far more to fear from other black youths than from white police, and that the Great Society welfare state has not just failed a substantial portion of the black community, but actually worsened their situation over the past half century.

Several writers have addressed this issue today. The Editorial Board of the WSJ points out the obvious, that the progressive blue-city model is a failure. As to Baltimore city in particular, the authors note:

The latest figures from Maryland’s Department of Labor show state unemployment at 5.4%, against 8.4% for Baltimore. A 2011 city report on the neighborhood of Freddie Gray—the African-American whose death in police custody sparked the riots—reported an area that is 96.9% black with unemployment at 21%. When it comes to providing hope and jobs, we should have learned by now that no government program can substitute for a healthy private economy.

Then there are the public schools. Residents will put up with a great deal if they know their children have a chance at upward mobility through education. But when the schools no longer perform, the parents who can afford to move to the suburbs do so—and those left behind are stuck with failure. There are many measures of failure in Baltimore schools, but consider that on state tests 72% of eighth graders scored below proficient in math, 45% in reading and 64% in science.

At National Review, Michael Tanner notes that Maryland maintains one of the highest tax rates in our nation, as well as a very generous welfare system, a highly unionized work force, and an environment largely hostile to private business. Baltimore city itself suffers from declining population, high crime, very high unemployment, high out-of-wedlock births, and poor schools. As he concludes:

Once order is restored in Baltimore, there will be time to take stock. We can expect to hear the usual chorus about neglected neighborhoods and the need for government jobs programs or additional social spending. Instead, we should take to heart President Obama’s admonition that “When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.”

Big government has failed Baltimore. If we learn nothing from what just happened — if we simply go back to throwing money at the same tired old programs — it will be just a matter of time until this happens all over again."

In yet another article, Michelle Malkin makes the same point, that the left is out of ideas to address the problems in the black inner city communities beyond spending ever more money on exactly the same type of programs that have utterly failed to this point. But probably the most articulate on these issues today is Kevin Williamson writing at National Review:

St. Louis has not had a Republican mayor since the 1940s, . . . the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Baltimore has seen two Republicans sit in the mayor’s office since the 1920s — and none since the 1960s. Like St. Louis, it is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Philadelphia has not elected a Republican mayor since 1948. The last Republican to be elected mayor of Detroit was congratulated on his victory by President Eisenhower. Atlanta, a city so corrupt that its public schools are organized as a criminal conspiracy against its children, last had a Republican mayor in the 19th century. . . . Atlanta is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department.

Black urban communities face institutional failure across the board every day. American cities are by and large Democratic-party monopolies, monopolies generally dominated by the so-called progressive wing of the party. The results have been catastrophic, and not only in poor black cities such as Baltimore and Detroit. Money can paper over some of the defects of progressivism in rich, white cities such as Portland and San Francisco, but those are pretty awful places to be non-white and non-rich, too: Blacks make up barely 9 percent of the population in San Francisco, but they represent 40 percent of those arrested for murder, and they are arrested for drug offenses at ten times their share of the population. Criminals make their own choices, sure, but you want to take a look at the racial disparity in educational outcomes and tell me that those low-income nine-year-olds in Wisconsin just need to buck up and bootstrap it?

There are people who should be made to answer for that: What has Martin O’Malley to say for himself? What can Ed Rendell say for himself other than that he secured a great deal of investment for the richest square mile in Philadelphia? What has Nancy Pelosi done about the radical racial divide in San Francisco?

. . . [The rioting] we have seen in places such as Ferguson and Baltimore is much more ordinarily criminal than political. But there is a legitimate concern here — from which no one seems to be willing to draw the obvious conclusion: There is someone to blame for what’s wrong in Baltimore.

Would any sentient adult American be shocked to learn that Baltimore has a corrupt and feckless police department enabled by a corrupt and feckless city government? I myself would not, and the local authorities’ dishonesty and stonewalling in the death of Freddie Gray is reminiscent of what we have seen in other cities. There’s a heap of evidence that the Baltimore police department is pretty bad. This did not come out of nowhere. While the progressives have been running the show in Baltimore, police commissioner Ed Norris was sent to prison on corruption charges (2004), two detectives were sentenced to 454 years in prison for dealing drugs (2005), an officer was dismissed after being videotaped verbally abusing a 14-year-old and then failing to file a report on his use of force against the same teenager (2011), an officer was been fired for sexually abusing a minor (2014), and the city paid a quarter-million-dollar settlement to a man police illegally arrested for the non-crime of recording them at work with his mobile phone. There’s a good deal more. Does that sound like a disciplined police organization to you?

Yes, Baltimore seems to have some police problems. But let us be clear about whose fecklessness and dishonesty we are talking about here: No Republican, and certainly no conservative, has left so much as a thumbprint on the public institutions of Baltimore in a generation. Baltimore’s police department is, like Detroit’s economy and Atlanta’s schools, the product of the progressive wing of the Democratic party enabled in no small part by black identity politics. This is entirely a left-wing project, and a Democratic-party project. When will the Left be held to account for the brutality in Baltimore — brutality for which it bears a measure of responsibility on both sides? There aren’t any Republicans out there cheering on the looters, and there aren’t any Republicans exercising real political power over the police or other municipal institutions in Baltimore. Community-organizer — a wretched term — Adam Jackson declared that in Baltimore “the Democrats and the Republicans have both failed.” Really? Which Republicans? Ulysses S. Grant? Unless I’m reading the charts wrong, the Baltimore city council is 100 percent Democratic.

The other Democratic monopolies aren’t looking too hot, either. We’re sending Atlanta educators to prison for running a criminal conspiracy to hide the fact that they failed, and failed woefully, to educate the children of that city. Isolated incident? Nope: Atlanta has another cheating scandal across town at the police academy. Who is being poorly served by the fact that Atlanta’s school system has been converted into crime syndicate? Mostly poor, mostly black families. Who is likely to suffer from any incompetents advanced through the Atlanta police department by its corrupt academy? Mostly poor, mostly black people. Who suffers most from the incompetence of Baltimore’s Democratic mayor? Mostly poor, mostly black families — should they feel better that she’s black? Who suffers most from the incompetence and corruption of Baltimore’s police department? Mostly poor, mostly black families. And it’s the same people who will suffer the most from the vandalism and pillaging going on in Baltimore, too. The evidence suggests very strongly that the left-wing, Democratic claques that run a great many American cities — particularly the poor and black cities — are not capable of running a school system or a police department. They are incompetent, they are corrupt, and they are breathtakingly arrogant. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore — this is what Democrats do.

And the kids in the street screaming about “inequality”? Somebody should tell them that the locale in these United States with the least economic inequality is Utah, i.e. the state farthest away from the reach of the people who run Baltimore.

Keep voting for the same thing, keep getting the same thing.

What happened to Freddie Gray demands justice. What has happened with a substantial portion of the black community over the past half century started as a tragedy, Today, in a nation as rich as ours, it has now reached the point of obscenity. It is every bit as equally deserving of justice.

Update: This from Powerline:

The Washington Post reports that a prisoner who was in the police van with Freddie Gray says he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed he “was intentionally trying to injure himself.” According to the Post, the prisoner’s statement is contained in an affidavit that’s part of an application by the police for search warrant seeking the seizure of the uniform worn by one of the officers involved in Gray’s arrest or transport.

I can’t tell for sure from the Post’s report whether the prisoner executed the affidavit or whether the affidavit is from a police officer who relates what the prisoner allegedly told him. It looks like the Post is saying it’s the latter.

It seems counter-intuitive to suppose that Gray inflicted serious bodily injury on himself. However, without knowing Gray’s state of mind at the time — e.g., was he high on drugs; was he trying to set up a claim of police brutality — it’s impossible to evaluate the plausibility of the perception that this is what happened.

In any event, if Gray’s fellow prisoner does indeed say he heard Gray banging against the walls and that Gray seemed to be trying intentionally to injure himself, this will cast doubt on claims that police mistreatment caused Gray to sustain injuries while he was in the van. Such evidence will also make it difficult to attribute Gray’s death to the police.

The Post says that “video shot by several bystanders to Gray’s arrest shows two officers on top of Gray, their knees in his back, and then dragging his seemingly limp body to the van as he cried out.” Thus, some of his injuries may be due to what happened during the arrest, while others may be due to what happened in the van.

There is also the police commissioner’s statement that officers violated policy by failing properly to restrain Gray via a seat belt while he was in the van. However, the police union is pushing back on this assertion.

The union president says that the policy mandating seat belts wasn’t emailed to officers until three days before Gray was arrested. Moreover, it was emailed as part of a package of five policy changes.

Officers should, of course, read about all policy changes. But human nature being what is, the union president’s statement that officers tend not to do so is plausible. It would be one thing if the officers who dealt with Gray had violated a longstanding, widely known policy on seat belts. It’s another if, as seems to be the case, the policy was brand new and had only just been communicated by email as part of package of policy changes.

In any event, the Post’s report suggests that the facts surrounding Gray’s unfortunate death may not be as straightforward as those who have rushed to condemn the police assert them to be. The best approach remains what it has been all along — wait for the facts before forming a judgment.

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Wolf Bytes - The Hillary Follies

Hillary

Hillary Clinton is trying to coast her way below the radar to a coronation. The last thing she wants is to answer questions about her record and qualifications. Her journey of a 1,000 miles (love the Maoist symbolism there) road trip to Iowa was about as phony as one could get. What makes it all the more sickening is that the mainstream press isn't all over this. They are playing along.

This from Megyn Kelly and Marc Thiessen - Is Hillary Clinton running a phony campaign?

KELLY: So the real people, like the whole listening tour so she can understand real ordinary people. Apparently she's really going to only understand people who work for Planned Parenthood and drove around Vice President Joe Biden and were Democratic campaign operatives.

THIESSEN: No, exactly. This was supposed to be -- they specifically decided to launch this campaign with a listening tour to listen to ordinary Americans. So she pulls in with the Scooby van into a Chipotle where there are actual real Americans there. And she puts on the big sunglasses to try to avoid being recognized. But then when she goes to a coffee shop where she is supposed to meet ordinary Americans, they're planted Democrat operatives. They're fake real Americans. I mean, she actually staged a coffee shop visit.

And from Stacy McCain: Her Fakeness, Hillary Clinton

The point isn’t so much that Democrats are being brought in by the campaign as “plants” at these events, but rather that the media are playing along and pretending that the events (and the people at the events) are “spontaneous.” That is to say, the media are just there to provide free campaign publicity for the Democrat.

Meanwhile, the National Enquirer is reporting that Hillary took a giant magnet to her hard drive to hide e-mails that would identify her partners in lesbian affairs. To be honest, given the National Enquirer's role as the sole media outlet to expose John Edwards, I don't discount that.

In other articles, Heather Willhelm writes that The Clinton Campaign Is Even Creepier Than You Think. Buzzfeed points out that Hillary Clinton's reference to the "immigrant experience" of her grandparents is a lie. Only one of her grandparents was an immigrant, and he came to this country as a child. In her first campaign speech in Iowa, she called for limiting freedom of speech. And then, this multi-millionaire, in order to show that she is one of the people, left Iowa and flew coach to NJ, "toting her own" luggage. As Bookworm Room points out, this is shades of Jimmy Carter, who used to try to show his bona fides as a regular American by toting an empty suitcase on board planes.

Hillary is a trainwreck. One blogger describes her as Nixon in a pantsuit, but I think she is a thousand times worse than Nixon ever thought of being.

Hillary Clinton has much to answer, about the e-mail scandal, about Benghazi, about her record as Secretary of State. She also should be weighing in on the critical issues of the day, in particular this Iran abomination and Obama's unconstitutional attempt to legislate in regards to millions of illegal aliens. Anyone know where she stands on any of that? This is a travesty.

The War On Religion

I've pointed out, countless times, that socialism seeks to deconstruct Western civilization and rebuild it in its place a utopian world. One element of that effort is to war on religion and religious institutions, including marriage. This from Daniel Greenfield, The Deconstruction Of Marriage:

The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution. . . .

The left's deconstruction of social institutions is not a quest for equality, but for destruction. As long as the institutions that preceded it exist, it will go on deconstructing them until there is nothing left but a blank canvas, an unthinking anarchy, on which it can impose its perfect and ideal conception of how everyone should live.

Government and the Economy

The left sees government central player in the economy, regulating it, picking winners and losers, with government spending as perhaps the single most important part of the economy. It inevitably creates an environment of high taxes and stifling regulation. Conservatives see the government's only function in an economy as establishing a framework based on laws that promote free market competition while protecting all of us from fraud and theft.

Allen West points out the failure of the most recent attempt in New York to draw investment into a state that is very much run according to the economic theories of the left.

As reported by Townhall.com, “Governor Andrew Cuomo was all too proud to unveil his Start-Up NY program in the Empire State. They called it a ‘game changer’. The ingenious program offered tax-free environments to tech and manufacturing companies for 10 years if they worked with state colleges and universities. It was supposed to boost entrepreneurism and create thousands of jobs throughout the state. Yet, one year later, the most New Yorkers have to show for it is emptier pockets.”

“The ubiquitous Start-Up NY promotional campaign has cost taxpayers $53 million since the program’s inception in late 2013, while it has led to $1.7 million in private investment so far, state records show. The state spent $47 million on the ads alone since the program started in December 2013, and the total cost included production expenses and other marketing efforts through last month, according to Empire State Development Corp. In July, the agency said $28 million had been spent on the ads.”

So what is the result from $53 million spent — $47 million on the ads alone with a program that has been operating for about a year and a half?

“The state has spent $697, 368 per job so far. These grisly numbers come in after the governor made several pledges across the state that jobs were going to start pouring in. Seventy-two in Albany, 123 in Western New York, he said. His promises have been mostly air thus far. Perhaps even more embarrassing for the governor, however, is the fact that New York has just come in dead last for economic competitiveness, as ranked by The American Legislative Exchange Council.”

As Mr. West points out, government's don't create jobs. They can only kill them with taxes and regulation.

France

And finally, Stacey McCain has a damning indictment of France:

. . . The French are a nation of degenerate swine. They are the nation that gave the world Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Monique Wittig. Do French men behave like animals on public transportation? Do they treat all women like whores? Sure. It’s part of French culture. You know, like wine, socialism, defeat, surrender, hating Jews and collaborating with Nazis. France: An entire nation that’s worse than Massachusetts.

I could not have said it better.

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Pathologies and Motivations of the Left

There are some very good posts out of late, trying to analyze the motivations, and in some cases, tactics, of the left wing our political spectrum. Both are correct. I would take them a bit farther in some respects.

At Bookworm Room, the author writes:

Near the end of his talk about American communists’ long-term plan (now coming to fruition) to flood America with a permanent Democrat majority through Hispanic amnesty, Trevor Loudon tossed in an interesting throwaway. When someone asked him why Leftists would want to reduce the US to the status of a Latin American banana Republic, he said that, in a conversation with Tammy Bruce (a former hard Leftist herself), she told him “They’re all damaged individuals.” That is, we have a powerful political movement made up of damaged people out for revenge.

The author goes on to flush out the point about damaged individuals. They are the footsoldiers of the left. The left invites them to embrace their grievances, nurse them, use those grievances to define themselves. Then they claim moral superiority as victims of society, for which they demand sympathy and obsequence. Woe be unto any person in society who does not provide both for, whenever possible, the left will enlist the police power of the state to punish them.

At American Digest, where Gerard Van Der Luen invariably looks at the oddities of life from a unique perspective, he opines that the left has taken the seven deadly sins and turned them into left-wing virtues:

Progressive PRIDE: It’s no accident that this word comes up again and again in their writings. It is essential for the Progressive to internalize extreme amounts of Pride. Pride in the self is the single most important element the freed will needs to move God out of the universe entirely and Self into the center. Once Self is in the center and the feeding of Self the most important element of existence, there is effectively no limit on what the Will can demand for the Self. . . .

Progressive ENVY: This is an ancient organizing tool that uses those with less than everything as tools against those who have, well, more. It doesn’t matter if “more” is an second goat, or an extra billion dollars. Thou shalt covet is the commandment here. . . .

Progressive SLOTH: One of the pleasures of being a Progressive is the one never has to actually produce anything of use in the form of innovation and invention. Progressives need only put in place things that impede innovation and invention in the form of excessive laws and continuing and complex regulations and false customs. It is remarkable in this century that one can spend a lifetime making these impediments to prosperity in the media, in academic life, in unions, and in a bureaucratic career, and only rise from reward to greater reward by making those and other careers safer for slackers and lay-abouts. . . .

Progressive LUST: . . . [T]here are endless fully-supported programs that enable sex without any chance of pregnancy and, should avoiding pregnancy prove to be beyond the mental capabilities of the betas, there are subsidized programs for terminating any inconveniences. . . .

Progressive AVARICE: The old joke of the two line IRS form that reads,

HOW MUCH DID YOU MAKE? __________________.
SEND IT IN.

seems less and less amusing as it becomes more and more clear that Progressivism is merely the stalking horse for the complete control of private property and assets of the middle class. (Graduation to the “political class” aka “The Party” or “Politburo” grants you and your family a waiver.)

Both BWR and van der Luen are accurate in their assessments of the left and the left's tactics. I'll go just a bit farther in trying to relate my own thoughts.

1. Victim Groups: Marx, in his magnum opus, The Communist Manifesto, claimed in his opening lines that all of history was nothing more than a "history of class struggles" between "oppressor and oppressed." It is an incredibly simplistic, distorted and myopic view of society and history, but it is the one the left has wholly adopted. Thus, the left seeks power by dividing the world into discrete victim's groups, and, as Bookworm Room points out, this draws the traumatized and those who feel wronged like moths to a flame. They become the foot soldiers and captains in the left's war on Western civilization.

2. Moral Superiority: The left claims for themselves moral superiority on behalf of the victim groups. The left uses that to justify harnessing the police power of the state, ostensibly in defense or furtherance of these victim groups. And in order to work fundamental change, the left seeks to punish not merely deed, but thought and speech through the police powers of the state.

Note here the corollary to all of the above. Once the victims groups have served their purpose and the left fully takes power, there are no more victims groups, only the state and enemies of the state.

3. Socio-Economics: The entire focus of the left is on socio-economics. From each according to his means to each according to his needs, as Marx once wrote. A leftist views perfection as equality of outcome, and more particularly, economic outcome. Thus does the left see societal problems and solutions as all rooted in economics. All problems of this nation and, indeed, the world, can be solved with better job opportunities and increased sharing of wealth. It is one of the reasons our modern left has failed in so many ways to actually help the victim groups they claim to champion, yet whose problems largely transcend economics. It's why you have Nicholas Kristoff at the NYT this week bemoaning the fact that the left ignored the Moynihan report half a century ago. And it is why the left is having so much trouble dealing with Iran and Islamic terrorism, none of whose motivations are rooted in economics.

4. Religion As The Enemy: The goal of marxism and the left is to rework society, to uproot it from its historical foundations, and to create a paradise of equality for all on earth. Since the inception of left wing philosophy in the French Revolution, it's adherents have sought, as absolutely necessary for achieving their ends, to drive the Judeo-Christian religion from the public square. The Judeo-Christian religions are inextricably linked to our governing systems, laws and societal structures and provide the basis for Western morality, elevating the sanctity of the individual human life above all. The left wants morality to be determined solely by Government. That can only be accomplished when the Judeo-Christian religion no longer influences our society.

The left relied on the Courts and a bastardized interpretation of the First Amendment to attack the Judeo Christian religion for the past near century. But their greatest weapon has come with "gay rights," given that both Judaism and Christianity view homosexuality as a sin. That tool has been coupled with an expansive version of "women's rights" to include forced taxpayer funding of contraception, to include abortifacients, as a means to attack and marginalize religion in society.

5. Education: Lenin once famously said ""Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." And thus the left has long sought to dominate academia at all levels, to control the curriculum, and to teach left wing values.

6. Family: The basis for society since the dawn of Western civilization has been the family, with it being the parent's responsibility to teach their children values and morality. But the left seeks to intercede, and indeed, limit the role of the family in raising children. This desire to stand in loco parentis is nowhere more apparent than in regards to decisions regarding sex, abortion and birth control, where the left has long sought to completely disengage parents from these decisions, where issues, implicating as they do fundamental morality.

7. Emotion Over Reason: The left relies on emotion over reason, which is perhaps their greatest strength. Oh, left wing academics kill entire forests to add the patina of reason to justify left wing policies. But the reality is that the pull of the left is their emotional appeal to values we all share, even if those values are utterly perverted by the policies the left adopts.

8. Kulaks: The left must have their Kulaks, their groups of implacable enemies and oppressors. For race hustlers, it is white conservatives. For radical feminists, it's the patriarchy. When Obama was pushing Obamacare, it was the insurance companies. For people to feel emotion and certainty of moral purpose, the left must always have an evil oppressor to demonize.

9. Hatred of Western Civilization: Within the larger context of left wing ideology, since it is our nation and Western civilization that the left wishes to co-opt and change, it is our nation as well as Western civilization that is promoted as uniquely evil. Thus do women's rights advocates spend mountains of ink attacking such burning issues as man-spreading on the NY subway while wholly ignoring the complete lack of women's rights in the Islamic world. Thus can Obama excuse Muslim violence against the West by pointing back a thousand years in history to the Crusades. How often can the West be condemned for imperialism before it is noted that virtually every extant nation on earth has engaged in imperialism at one time or another, and that the Muslims have been the most imperialistic and expansionist force in history. When left wing academics condemn Americans for expanding into Indian territory in America, do they ever go back to look at the brutal wars the Indians themselves fought for territory? No, in every case, for the left, nothing excuses the actions of the West, nor does anything rise to the level of sin outside of the West.

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The Nature of Anti-Semitism (Updated)

Anti-semitism is a dark stain on the Western soul. It dates back well over a millenium, and has been the cause of countless acts of unforgivable carnage. And for my entire life, I've never understood it. But now, thanks to Robert Avrech, the Emmy Award winning writer and blogger at Seraphic Secret, I finally do.

What I never understood was that anti-Semitism in the West has distinct causes occurring in different historical period. The first period stretches from about 800 A.D. to 1800 A.D. The Jews were in a diaspora, congregating as minorities in close, tight knit communities much of the world over. It was how they survived as a distinct culture. But, it also made them suspect in their home countries, and in an era of tribalism, it was inevitable that Jews would be suspect and scapegoated. The vestiges of tribalism still no doubt undergird some of the modern anti-semitism that we still see.

Between 800 A.D. and 1,500 A.D., Christians were under religious edict not to loan money at interest. Jews became the proto-bankers and money lenders for Europe. Every Royal Court, duchy, and even the Vatican had their Court Jew to handle their finances. These Jews became wealthy and powerful, and thus a very visible object of envy for some. And lastly, there was a very practical reason for anti-semitism during this period. Those who borrowed money did so willingly, those who had to repay their loans were not so willing.

At the end of the 18th century, socialism was born in the French Revolution, and with it, the modern era of anti-semitism. Socialism's greatest enemy is religion, specifically Judaism and Christianity, both of which are wholly entwined in the foundations, culture and law of Western Civilization. The two provide the moral and ethical codes that govern our world. Socialism would change that.

The goal of socialism is to deconstruct traditional Western society and remake it under the auspices of an omnipotent government that would use its police powers to create a new order of ostensible social and economic equality. Socialists want to replace God with government as the source of morality. Thus Judaism and Christianity are under constant and unrelenting attack from the left. Within this context, anti-Semetism in the modern era is simply the grafting on of a new motivation for an old, tribal hatred.

Then, of course, there is Islam. In the last half century, rabid Wahhibis and Khomeinists, who view all religions other than their own as blasphemy, have brought their own genocidal anti-Semitism to the mix. The left, happy to find another group equally dedicated to deconstructing Western civilization and driving out the Judeo-Christian religions, have happily welcomed the Islamists.

Now, to me at least, I can understand the genesis of anti-Semitism and why it is still with us today. It makes anti-Semitism no less evil, but understanding the motivations of those who profess this evil allows them to be more successfully challenged.

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Socialism's Nightmare In Greece

"The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"

PM Margaret Thatcher, 5 Feb. 1976, This Week on Thames Television

What could possibly be worse for socialists than taking over a country that has already run out of other people's money? I'm not sure, but you could ask the newly elected left wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece. His happy talk during the election of feta cheese in every pot and ouzo on everyone's lips has already met the reality of needing to borrow other people's money, and the lenders don't have any intention of paying for Greece's free ride.

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Obamacare: The Mother Of All Market Distortions (Updated)

Market distortion occurs when government imposes artificiality on markets through regulation. Such distortions always - always - always - cost the economy and individuals. I am not talking about laws of contract and fraud which set the parameters of the playing field for the operation of the free market, but rather regulations limiting free market decisions. Some are simply corrupt - i.e., the protection of vested interests. Others are more insidious and derive from the penultimate deceit of the left - that they are more intelligent than millions of individuals making their own decisions on how and what to purchase and sell.

Its hard to top the left's subprime housing crisis that brought our economy to its knees for market distortion. But that was a distortion that took fifteen years to bear its poisonous fruit. The biggest market distortion we are likely to see in our lifetimes and this side of the Soviet Union - one that is already bearing immediate fruit - is Obamacare. Healthcare is one sixth of our entire economy, and Obamacare is just starting to explode it.

The left has taken over our healthcare industry, mandating vastly expanded mandatory areas of coverage, from pregnancy, mental health, pre-existing conditions, "free" wellness checks, and "free" contraception, including the "morning after" abortion pill. They have mandated universal coverage - for supposedly an additional 30 million people - as well as subsidized coverage for lower and lower middle economic class. For this to work without adding to government debt, the middle and upper class are going to have to pay much more for their coverage, the young need to buy into the plans so as to subsidize the old and sick, and there is going to have to be a lot of new tax revenue to take up the slack for subsidies.

There is zero chance that this plan will work as advertised by Obama and the left. It will not save people money. It will not bend down the cost of health care. It will not provide universal coverage. It will not reduce the deficit. And of course, people who like their coverage will not be able to keep it at their choosing.

Some of these claims were knowing falsehoods.



Others seem to be attributable to the supreme conceit of the left, that they are smarter than the free market.

Because Obama has unilaterally put off the employer mandate to 2015, we are going to have to wait one more year to be able to take full stock of the near term impact of Obamacare in all of its 'glory.' But my full expectation is that it will add steeply to the deficit, that it will send the economy into even greater stagnation, if not outright recession, and jobs will further contract. It will be a far left trifecta.

The only good thing about this is that the far left owns this monstrosity. Whatever the right does, it should not agree to anything as a fix. Any attempt to put a band aid on this cancer will only extend out the pain. There is one answer only - repeal.

There will likely never be a greater experiment in socialist and Keynsian economic theory than the Obama administration policies in virtually all areas of government. The only question is whether the American people will ever take realistic stock of the outcomes.

Additional Updates: From Powerline on the higher costs of insurance under Obamacare:

For a succinct explanation of why Obamacare is making health insurance more expensive for millions of Americans, check out this short interview with Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini. Bertolini identifies three main factors: 1) Obamacare imposes a requirement that, on an actuarial basis, insurance cover at least 60% of health care costs. Currently, more than half of Americans who buy individual coverage are below 50%. 2) Obamacare imposes 4% to 5% additional cost in the form of new taxes and fees. Aetna alone will pass on $1 billion in Obamacare taxes and fees to its policyholders. 3) Obamacare mandates many coverages, whether customers want them or not, and requires insurers to provide subsidized coverage to those who are already sick.

And via Hot Air, there is Charles Krauthammer:

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Is Charlie Manson The Model For Our MSM?

Bookworm Room has posted on her belief that "Mainstream media is the spiritual descendant of Charlie Manson." It is a very creative and well made argument. Says Book:

Manson had a goal: he envisioned a new world order, with himself and his followers as the leaders. To bring about this new world order, he first had to destroy the existing one. He came up with an idea that he called “Helter-Skelter“: he was going to incite race warfare because he was pretty sure that would bring America down, leaving room for him and his followers to take over. He figured that the best way to start an apocalyptic race war was through violent murder. He wasn’t going to do the murder himself, of course, but he did incite his dumb, sexually-opiated, often drugged followers to commit the deeds on his behalf.

Now, let’s think about the mainstream media. The MSM has a goal: a completely Democrat-dominated political machine, with the MSM and the politicians it’s created in total control. Because this will be a statist new world, the MSM must first destroy completely America’s current, still vaguely capitalist market and individualist ideology. To that end, the media has decided that it will incite race warfare, because it’s pretty sure that race warfare will destroy existing institutions and allow it and its political class to take over. Media members figure that the best way to start this societal breakdown is to sow so much division between blacks and whites in America that the country becomes dysfunctional and, if necessary, bloodied. The media elite are not going to sully their own hands, of course, but they will work hard to incite their followers to commit the deeds on their behalf. (And sadly, to the extent they have followers in black inner cities, these are young people who are minimally educated, inundated with unhealthy sexual messages from movies and rap songs, and too often on drugs. Just think of Trayvon….)

I can’t prove the MSM’s goal, but I can prove its tactics. . . .

Do read her whole post. Her reasoning is solid. I have to take issue on only one point - Charlie Manson was merely a cog in the great socialist wheel. I would name the spiritual progenitors of our MSM as Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

Here are the comments she and I made to her post:

Me:

A fascinating piece, but in the pantheon of mass murders with dreams of grandeur and world change, I think you aim a bit too low. I would have picked Stalin as the MSM’s ideological progenitor. He in fact worked to change an entire country, and indeed, under him, there came to be the division between objective truth and socialist truth. There was control of the media to communicate only approved messages. Etc., etc. And some of the old Soviet movies – particularly the post WWII biopic on Ivan The Terrible – are probably pretty analogous to The Butler in that both teach a version of history not grounded in fact, but rather in message.

On a final note, if you are going to point out things about Oprah, I think that you are missing the most outrageous – her assertion that Trayvon Martin is the “Emmett Till of our time.” Oprah rather surprised me, actually. She built her career by being careful to appear as a normal American rather than an “African American.” She was accepted on those terms. Yet now it turns out that she too is a closet race hustler. May her career be effected accordingly.

Book:

I agree with you about the media’s general leftism, along with its global domination plans. What struck me, though, was how tightly their script regarding racism follows Charles Manson’s plans. It’s as if, when it comes to destroying the U.S. specifically through racial divisions, the media poured over Manson’s evil plans for sowing racial disharmony, and made those plans their own.

Me:

Book, as to racism generally, the only reason blacks weren’t targeted as part of the leftist ideology in Stalin’s Russia was because there were none in that country. But that said, the very foundation of socialism and the left has always been the disparity between the “oppressed and the oppressor.” It is their entire schtick. Blacks were being heavily recruited into the communist party of the USA in the lead up to the 60′s. Even Thomas Sowell was recruited into communism as a young man. The treatment of blacks as a victim class fits hand in glove with the opening lines of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Manson’s view of a race war was nothing new. It was in fact Marx’s view of all human history.

While Stalin and Lenin didn’t have blacks, what they had was class warfare. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to Obama and thought that his words could have come from the mouth of Lenin demonizing the Kulaks. Indeed, I looked up some of Lenin’s old speeches old speeches on the Kulaks just to verify my thought – and I was 100% correct. Class war and race war are virtually one in the same – both rely on the oppressed and the oppressor paradigm, both involve demonization of the other, and both are political tools used in precisely the same manner. It is just Marx’s paradigm pointed in two slightly different directions.

I am not saying that your choice of Charlie Manson was in any way wrong. Indeed, I would say that it causes much more of an emotional response to think of it that way then the pedantic argument that I am making. I admit to a bit of shock when I was your post heading in a way that I wouldn’t have been if it referenced Stalin instead of Manson. Thus I will bow to your choice on this one.

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All Wealth Belongs To The Government

The bottom line is we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money, it’s just the government doesn’t have it. . . . The government has a right, the government and the people of the United States have a right to run the programs of the United States. Health, welfare, housing – all these things.

That's a quote from Keith Ellison, D-Minn, the other day as he called for the imposition of a $300 billion a year tax on the sale of stocks and bonds to fund his "Inclusive Prosperity Act." Ellison is one more in an endless line of Democrats who see the wealth of America as something to which the government has a right, allowing others to keep only what government decides that it does not need at the moment. Ellison believes that he would more fairly use this money to create prosperity for all by putting it to domestic health, welfare, and housing programs as well as "international sustainable prosperity programs."

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Applying Socialism To Economics Class

From Counting Cats, the story of an Econ 101 professor who, at the urging of his students, applied the socialist economic principle of equality of outcome to grading the class. The predictable result, everyone failed.

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The Left's War On Religion & Family

The left has two goals - one, to imbue children with socialist morality and ethics (to the extent such can be said to exist) irrespective of how parents want to raise their children. The second is to drive its biggest competitor in the arena of ethics and morality, Christianity, from the public square (see A Historical Perspective On Religion & Obama's HHS Mandate). One area where these two goals converge for the left is in regards to sex.

In NYC, Mayor Bloomberg started a stealth program three years ago to freely dispense birth control drugs and the morning after "Plan B" abortion pill to NYC high school students. This was done without the knowledge or permission of the children's parents. After the program came to light, a FOIA request showed:

About 40 separate “school-based health centers” doled out 12,721 doses of Plan B in 2011-12, up from 10,720 in 2010-11 and 5,039 in 2009-10, according to the newly released data. About 22,400 students sought reproductive care from January 2009 through last school year, records show.

This is a left wing government standing "in loco parentis," assuming the role of parents in deciding about how to address sex and abortion with their children. Parents are pushed wholly out of the loop on these critical issues. Moreover, in the way this is being handled, the state is promoting the sexualization of our children. Just as a practical matter, this a huge issue for the health of our children. If the Plan B pill was doled out 12,721 times last year, that shows a high number of teens having unprotected sex. The implications of that are frightening. According to the CDC:

An estimated 8,300 young people aged 13–24 years in the 40 states reporting to CDC had HIV infection in 2009. Nearly half of the 19 million new STDs each year are among young people aged 15–24 years.

On top of AIDS, we now have STD's that are becoming resistant to antibiotics. Anyone who has unprotected casual sex is playing Russian roulette. The Bloomberg solution is to pass out the Plan B abortion pill like candy and with no notice to the parents. Leave aside for the moment the moral and ethical issues associated with abortion that parents should have the absolute right to discuss with their children upon notice that they are sexually active. The fact is that while parents can't completely stop their children from having sex, notice would at least allow parents to drive home the point that having unprotected sex is very dangerous.

As to the moral and ethical issues associated with sex and, in particular, abortion, the left likes to pretend that they simply don't exist. One can trace a direct line from socialists of yore to Bloomberg's policies of today. In the U.S., Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, as a committed socialist, was a staunch proponent of consequence free sex and an implacable enemy of Christianity (all in addition to being a eugenicist). These things were not unique to Sanger, but rather an established part of the socialist blueprint in their war on religion and family. For instance, in a fascinating article on "cultural marxism" at the American Thinker, author Linda Kimball writes:

In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary. He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary. Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow. Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools. Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority. All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters.

And of course, it is not just teen sex. There has been no greater challenge to religion in our country than Obama's HHS mandate that requires employers to offer health plans that include free contraceptives and Plan B abortion pills. This would require not merely Church and affiliated employers to fund something to which their religion has been opposed since antiquity, but it would require private employers to violate their religious conscience (see Hobby Lobby). The failure to comply would result in massive penalties that would drive quasi religious institutions and businesses owned by Christians out of existence. It is hard to imagine any more of a direct attack on the ability of Americans to engage in the free exercise of religion, nor a plan more directly aimed at driving religious institutions and individuals out of our public and economic life.

If you have any doubt that this is a policy aimed directly at religion, understand that contraceptives are a nominal cost. Further, programs are already in place for women in the lower economic class to receive free contraception. This is not an HHS program aimed at solving a systemic problem for our nation's women as to either access to or affordability of contraceptives.

Obama's contraceptive / Plan B abortion pill mandate was recently made final in regulations issued by HHS. The regulations include the same accounting gimmick that Obama announced last year - that while all employers other than the Churches themselves would have to provide free contraceptives and abortion Plan B pills free to employees, in the case of quasi religious institutions, the employer would not have to pay for contraceptive/abortion aspects of the policy. Rather, their insurer would be required to provide the contraceptives and plan B pills "free of charge" to women. The response from the Catholic Church:

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops on Thursday rejected the latest White House proposal on health insurance coverage of contraceptives, saying it did not offer enough safeguards for religious hospitals, colleges and charities that objected to providing such coverage for their employees.

The bishops said they would continue fighting the federal mandate in court.

The late Andrew Breitbart's riason d' etre was that culture mattered - that it was in the culture wars that the left was working fundamental change to our nation. He was right. And there are no clearer examples of the left's war of cultural marxism on religion and family than the lefts push to sexualize our children, to drive parents from the decision making regarding their children as regards sex, and the left's push to drive religion and the religious out of our public and economic life. The stakes in this war are existential.

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Truth Slips Out: France Is Totally Bankrupt Says . . . The Government's Labor Minister

If you listen to politicians long enough, you will eventually get nuggets of truth. France, the country that bequeathed socialism to the world, has found that its own socialist policies have drained the national piggy bank dry - at least that according to France's labour minister, Michel Sapin, who in an interview yesterday called his nation "totally bankrupt."

Ah, but there is more to the story. It is not just that France is bankrupt, it is that they are socialists trying to salvage their welfare state by jacking up taxes on the wealthy to unprecedented levels. So how is that working our for them:

The comments came as President Hollande attempts to improve the image of the French economy after pledging to reduce the country’s deficit by cutting spending by €60bn (£51.5bn) over the next five years and increasing taxes by €20bn. Data from Banque de France showed earlier this month that a flight of capital has already left the country amid concerns that France’s Socialist leader intends to soak the rich and businesses. The actor Gérard Depardieu has renounced his French citizenship and decamped to Russia in protest, while David Cameron said Britain will “roll out the red carpet” to attract wealthy individuals.

I do get an inordinate amount of schadenfreude from the French socialists. But then again, they deserve it.

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Seventy Five Minutes of Krauthammer

Perhaps our most insightful pundit on the right, Charles Krauthammer, recently gave a long talk at the NRO, recorded by CSPAN, on modern liberalism and a host of other topics. It is great to hear him speak in longer than a 1 to 2 minute soundbyte on Special Report. Unfortunately his talk cannot be embeded. You can find it here

His points paraphrased:

- The 2008 election reflected the desire of America to withdraw from the world stage, both as a function of economics and national will. The problem is that while we can freely ignore our enemies, they will not ignore us.

- Obama wants us to emulate European social democratic nations, with a much reduced military and far more spending on social welfare. Europe was able to do this after WWII because they were protected by the U.S. military. We do not have that option. If we reduce our military, we create a power vacuum.

- The end result of Obama's policies will be unmistakably negative for our country, and because of that, we will see a return to conservatism.

- 2010 was a pure ideological election on the relationship between citizen and state - between the big government leftism versus small government conservatism. That is why it was a wave election. The 2012 election was not a campaign based on ideology. Romney eschewed the ideological arguments and tried to run just on the state of the economy. That is why he lost.

- "Romney spoke conservatism as a second language."

- Krauthammer was once a communist. It only lasted a weekend during college, but it was "one hell of a weekend."

- Republicans should make no suicidal charges during the next two years. We can't govern from the House. We can and should block, as well as make small advances.

- Obama is going to use the regulatory bureaucracy to go around Congress because they would never approve his radical agenda. Moreover, some of Obama's executive orders have been lawless. The House should highlight these facts through hearings.

- Conservatism is not dead, and the Democratic theories of demographic Republican decline are not believable. The one troubling spot is that the Republicans have lost a natural constituency in Hispanics. We need to neutralize the immigration issue. Step one, stop illegals crossing our border by building a fence just like the Israelis did to stop the violence of the Second Intafada. Step two, then grant limited amnesty with a path to naturalization.

- Single women, the youth, and urban dwellers are natural liberal constituencies. So what. Conservatives have larger natural constituencies.

- Is our society devolving? The rise in births to unmarried women under 30 is troubling, but on the flip side, there has been a huge decrease in crime. We are in the midst of adapting to new social relationships that inevitably work themselves out in the end.

- Krauthammer, once a speech writer for Walter Mondale, moved to the right in the 1980's for two reasons. On foreign policy, the left became incredibly irresponsible, advocating such things as a nuclear freeze. On social policy, Krauthammer came to the realization that the social policies of the left were doing great damage to the constituencies they were put in place to help.

- A crime of American liberalism is consigning inner city children to a life of desperation because of the influence of teachers' unions. It is failing for lack of competition. There are a host of intractable problems troubling the inner city youths, but changing public education is simple and key.

- Affirmative action actually hurts more than it helps. It takes away the life chances of a large number of Americans by setting them up for failure.

- It is improper to call Obama a "socialist." Socialism is too broad a term. Obama is not a socialist in the totalitarian sense. He is in the ilk of a social Democrat in the post-WWII European sense.

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The Most Insightful Line Of The Decade?

Karl Marx famously said that "religion is the opiate of the masses."

Screenwriter Robert Avrech has replied: "Marxism is the opiate of the elites."

One could easily write entire books in support of that position. It is the most insightful line I've read in years. Do read Mr. Avrech's entire post on his evolution from left to right.

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What Happens With Guns & Self Defense When The Left Rules Unconstrained? Look To The UK

Britain is a country to watch very closely to see what awaits the U.S. Britain embraced socialism in the immediate aftermath of WWII. And while Britain has dispensed with much of socialism's economic policy, it is still firmly embracing far left social policy - some aspects of which are Britain's policies towards guns, self defense and criminal justice.

I pointed out below that Britain, a country where both the law abiding and the police are near wholly disarmed, is suffering from a rate of violent crime over five times that of the U.S. The British are left with no means of making themselves equal in force to potential criminals at the point of a crime, and as one British Police Inspector wrote the other day, the "thieves rule this country at night, not us." The left in Britain look askance at anyone who might try to defend themselves, and this is coupled with a far left leaning judiciary that is more protective of the criminal than the law abiding.

Britain still allows individuals to own shotguns for hunting purposes under very strictly controlled conditions. Self defense is not considered a legitimate reason. Thus, when, horror of horrors, a Brit with a shotgun uses it to defend the lives of himself or others, he becomes the criminal.

Case in point, Mr. Bill Edwards owns a farm in Yorkshire - one that has been repeatedly raided by thieves. He also owns a shotgun for hunting and pest control on his farm. Several months ago, he and his mother were out walking on the farm when they came upon a thief who was stealing various items. When they confronted the thief, he jumped in his van and accelerated towards them, putting them in fear for their lives. Edwards fired the shotgun at the thief to get him to turn away - which he did, unharmed. The Daily Mail explains the rest:

A farmer accused of attempted murder after catching an intruder red-handed spoke of his outrage last night after the thief walked free with a £100 fine.

Unemployed criminal David Taylor was captured when Bill Edwards confronted him on his isolated woodland property.

Mr Edwards, 21, fired his shotgun at a van driven by Taylor as the thief accelerated towards his mother, Louisa Smith, 50.

Taylor was caught after a high-speed chase but it was the farmer who endured a horrendous ordeal at the hands of police who arrested him on suspicion of attempted murder.

Last night Mr Edwards labelled the experience ‘four months of hell’ and attacked the ‘pathetic’ punishment handed out to the intruder.

The former public schoolboy said: ‘It’s completely changed my view of the police. They treated me like a criminal. The police have acted like bullies who have turned someone who was very supportive of their work into someone who wants nothing more to do with them. They can’t protect the public but don’t allow the public to protect themselves.’

Speaking about the sentence, he added: ‘It is hard to find words to describe how ridiculous the sentence is. I’m absolutely disgusted.

‘We have had four months of being treated like criminals only to see the real criminal let off with a measly fine which will be paid for by the taxpayer since he is on state benefits.’

Mr Edwards and his mother feared for their lives during the confrontation on their land on the outskirts of Scarborough, North Yorkshire, last August. . . .

Mr Edwards said his family has lost thousands of pounds through theft and damage caused in a number of raids on their land.

They caught Taylor and an accomplice loading stolen metal cables into the back of his Ford Transit after spotting that outbuildings had been tampered with. The thieves jumped into the van and drove it towards the pair as they desperately dialled 999 for help.

Mr Edwards fired his shotgun, which was loaded with lightweight rabbit shot, several times, hitting the van’s windscreen and bodywork. No one was hurt. Police eventually caught Taylor when Mr Edwards gave chase and gave a running commentary on his mobile phone. But the crook was only charged with metal theft.

Mr Edwards' shotgun was loaded with lightweight rabbit shot when he fired it at the van.

He was accused of attempted murder after firing his shotgun at a van driven by thief David Taylor as he and his mother feared for their lives.

Meanwhile Mr Edwards and his mother were arrested, held overnight in cells and left on bail for four months. Mrs Smith was arrested on suspicion of possessing a firearm with intent.

It is believed police have a recording of the 999 call in which the shots can be heard as Mrs Smith shouts: ‘He is trying to kill us, shoot his tyres.’

But even now the farmer has not had his shotgun and other weapons returned to him which he uses to control pests on his land and as a hobby. Scarborough magistrate Mike Dineen fined Taylor £100 and ordered him to pay £34.99 for damage caused to the farm gate and padlock when he rammed through it to escape.

Taylor left court grinning and sneered ‘lucky you’ at Mr Edwards after finding out the attempted murder allegation had been dropped. [emphasis added]

Moments earlier his solicitor Ian Brickman said the thief ‘is in many ways the victim in this’ and was left so ‘traumatised’ he cannot work. . . . [emphasis added]

If the left in the U.S. had their way, I have little doubt that we would resemble the U.K. today, both in gun control policy and self defense laws. The question to my mind is, when does something like this become so intolerable that the people revolt? When are judges and prosecuting attorneys going to be held liable for caring more about the welfare of the criminal than the law abiding.

At the core of the social compact between the people and its government is that the government will administer justice fairly so that the injured do not have to resort to vigilante justice. When the government systemically fails in their duty, when thieves rule the night and the criminals go unpunished, how long will it be before the law abiding have had enough, and take justice into their own hands as to the criminals, and aim violent retribution at Judges and prosecuting attorneys for their utter disdain of the law abiding.

At any rate, the UK is very much a cautionary tale for us as to the wages of left wing control and what that means for crime and self defense. I await the day when the law abiding among the UK revolt against this insanity, and the UK becomes an object lesson for the left of the bankruptcy and immorality of their ideology.

Related Posts:

- Guns, Equality, The UK - Where "The Thieves Rule This Country At Night," & An Insane NTY News Analysis - Boy Uses AR15 To Stop A Home Invasion

- Larry Correia's Brilliant Essay On Guns, Gun Control & Concealed Carry

- Thoughts On Gun Control From The Late Paul Harvey

- The Futility Of An Assault Weapons Ban As An Answer To Sandy Hook

- When Seconds Counted At Sandy Hook, Police Were Twenty Minutes Away

- St. Louis Police Chief Calls for Arming School Personnel

- John Fund essay on Mass Murders, Gun Control & Our Treatment of Mental Illness

- Luby Cafeteria Massacre, Testimony of Suzanna Hupp, Texas School District Authorizes Concealed Carry For Its Schools

- Reynolds On Gun Free Zones, The Left's Mistrust Of Armed Private Citizens, & Our Problematic Mental Health Laws

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