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Saturday, August 20, 2011

Progressive Intolerance

The Goal Is Freedom
Progressive Intolerance
Talking to themselves.
Sheldon Richman
Posted August 19, 2011

Television pundits increasingly express an attitude that is at once arrogant and ignorant: The people who oppose Keynesian economics -- specifically a massive increase in government deficit spending to create jobs and jumpstart the economy -- are the same kind of people who also believe that the earth is only several thousand years old (rather than 4.5 billion), that evolution is bunk, and that science is something to be feared on principle. MSNBC's Chris Matthews takes the strongest version of this position. To him even skepticism about catastrophic climate change is a sign of hostility to science, although a good number of scientists are skeptical.

It may not seem worth the time to expose the fallacies of cable television's talking heads, but since they are the source of what so many people "know" about public policy, the time is well spent.

TV hosts like Matthews of course are not authorities on economics, so when they judge Keynesianism as the only truly scientific economics, they mean two things: That is what a Keynesian taught them as undergraduates and that is what all their Keynesian friend-guests assure them is the case. Since they never invite a non-Keynesian economist on their shows to debate (Republican consultants don't count), they insulate themselves against all informed dissent from their faith. Considering this policy against head-to-head discussion, who's got the antiscientific attitude?

Simply Ignored

If someone doesn't fit their mold, he or she is ignored or vilified. I know many people who (like me) reject Keynesian economics (and are skeptical about catastrophic climate change) while embracing science. (Yet we realize that scientists have the same the foibles and temptations we all are prone to, such as confirmation bias and career ambitions.) But Matthews & Co. say there are no such people. The pundits can't even acknowledge good faith in their opponents.

This explains the intolerance shown those who refuse to agree that in a recession government spending is indispensable to raising aggregate demand and restoring economic growth. (Conservatives are not necessarily better. See my article on conservative Keynesians.)

If you point out that every dollar government spends, whether obtained through taxation or borrowing, is dollar removed from the private sector, the Keynesian pundit might agree but point out that business is not investing and consumers are not spending – so what's lost? The other night Matthews suggested that business may be sitting on its $2 trillion in cash in order to damage Obama's presidency. So to Keynes's animal spirits Matthews adds animosity to Obama in explaining why the economy is at a virtual standstill.

The pundits' blinders keep them from a broader perspective. Since all they know is the most vulgar rendition of Keynesian economics (Keynes wasn't quite as bad as the Keynesians, writes Mario Rizzo), they have no idea that two distinct factors prevent now economic growth. First, the boom (without which there's no bust) was created by monetary, housing, and financial policies that still exist. Government officials are trying to resurrect the housing industry, indicating that the ruling elite still does not realize that the industry's pre-bust condition was the artificial result of misguided interventions. Fed-depressed interest rates and easy-housing programs induced widespread malinvestment -- investments unjustified by real underlying conditions -- which have to be liquidated before economic growth can resume. Liquidation requires the costly but necessary adaption and transfer of resources and labor to purposes for which there is genuine demand. This correction cannot take place if political responses to the recession get in the way.

"Regime Uncertainty"

Second (as if that weren't enough), the government has created significant new uncertainties that chill the investment climate. (This is what Robert Higgs calls "regime uncertainty.") Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank law mandate the writing of hundreds of new rules governing employer-based health insurance and financial transactions. Why would anyone risk money in a new venture with so many yet-to-be-filled gaps in the regulatory environment? A government regulatory regime is bad enough; one that can change at any moment is far worse.

Finally, the pundits are blind to the fact that government can't create real jobs. Let's be clear what this means. It's not that government can't pay people to do things. It does that all the time! But in economic terms, a job is not merely exertion in return for a pay check. It's much more: activity that transforms resources from a less-valued form to a more-valued form in the eyes of consumers. For the sake of irony, I'll quote Karl Marx: "A thing cannot have value, if it is not a useful article. If it is not useful, then the labor it contains is also useless, does not count as labor and hence does not create value" (Capital, volume 1, emphasis added).

Keynesian pundits insist that a stimulus program to pay workers billions of dollars to repair schools, roads, and bridges would qualify as productive because people value those things. What's missed is that we live in a world of scarcity and tradeoffs, and that we always make choices at the margin. Repairing a school may sound good in a vacuum (Which school? How elaborate a repair?), but not so good when something more valuable must be given up in exchange.

Market Prices

We all make similar tradeoffs in the marketplace all the time, and we can do so intelligently because goods and services have prices. Prices enable each of us to engage in economic calculation, that is, to make rational tradeoffs aimed at obtaining higher values (subjectively appraised) in exchange for lower values.

But government-produced goods and services are not priced and sold in the market. Instead, government collects its revenues by threat of force, and politicians and bureaucrats dispose of them ostensibly in the interest of the people but more likely in the career interest of those same politicians and bureaucrats. Without prices and free exchange we cannot know if what government produces is worth the goods and services never produced. (We can say that the freedom lost is not worth the cost.) Putting the infrastructure into a marketplace void of privilege and subsidy would thus make economic sense.

The Keynesian pundits, then, are wrong on all counts. The government need not be the spender of last resort because 1) producers and consumers would spend just fine if it would get out of their way, and 2) the government can't be relied on to create, rather than destroy, value in its use of scarce resources.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/uncategorized/progressive-intolerance/

Joke

I am a socialist! You must become a socialist like me. Give me all
your money!
After you give me all your money
Then I will arrest you and put you in a debtors prisons. Then i'll
hang you for your revolutionary crimes. I'll be bloody rich and you'll
be dead...and that my friends is how capitalism works.
Wheeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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How the Left Harm America's Moral Character

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Fellowship of the Minds <no-reply@wordpress.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 1:29 PM
Subject: [New post] How the Left Harm America's Moral Character
To: baconlard@gmail.com

How the Left Harm America's Moral Character

Eowyn | August 19, 2011 at 11:29 am | Tags: big government, Dennis Prager, entitlement, equality, family, morality, narcissism, pacifism, self-reliance, voluntary associations, welfare state, West Europe, youth | Categories: Children, Culture War, Economy, Liberals, Military, United States | URL: http://wp.me/pKuKY-8za

Dennis Prager has an excellent article that perfectly explains why liberals are narcissists -- a conclusion I've arrived at from experience and observation.

~Eowyn

The liberal entitlement mentality

Ten Ways Progressive Policies Harm Society's Moral Character

Dennis Prager - July 19, 2011

While liberals are certain about the moral superiority of liberal policies, the truth is that those policies actually diminish a society's moral character. Many individual liberals are fine people, but the policies they advocate tend to make a people worse. Here are 10 reasons:

1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I? This is why Western Europeans, people who have lived in welfare states far longer than Americans have, give less to charity and volunteer less time to others than do Americans of the same socioeconomic status.

The greatest description of American civilization was written in the early 19th century by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. One of the differences distinguishing Americans from Europeans that he most marveled at was how much Americans -- through myriad associations -- took care of one another. Until President Franklin Roosevelt began the seemingly inexorable movement of America toward the European welfare state -- vastly expanded later by other Democratic presidents -- Americans took responsibility for one another and for themselves far more than they do today. Churches, Rotary Clubs, free-loan societies and other voluntary associations were ubiquitous. As the state grew, however, all these associations declined. In Western Europe, they have virtually all disappeared.

2. The welfare state, though often well intended, is nevertheless a Ponzi scheme. Conservatives have known this for generations. But now, any honest person must acknowledge it. The welfare state is predicated on collecting money from today's workers in order to pay for those who paid in before them. But today's workers don't have enough money to sustain the scheme, and there are too few of them to do so. As a result, virtually every welfare state in Europe, and many American states, like California, are going broke.

3. Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic. The great preoccupations of vast numbers of Brits, Frenchmen, Germans and other Western Europeans are how much vacation time they will have and how early they can retire and be supported by the state.

4. The liberal welfare state makes people disdain work. Americans work considerably harder than Western Europeans, and contrary to liberal thought since Karl Marx, work builds character.

5. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality -- another expression of narcissism. And the rhetoric of liberalism -- labeling each new entitlement a "right" -- reinforces this sense of entitlement.

6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption. As the famous truism goes, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Of course, big businesses are also often corrupt. But they are eventually caught or go out of business. The government cannot go out of business. And unlike corrupt governments, corrupt businesses cannot print money and thereby devalue a nation's currency, and they cannot arrest you.

7. The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many Democrats have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered vast numbers of males unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands. In effect, these women took the state as their husband.

8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults. As regards men specifically, I was raised, as were all generations of American men before me, to aspire to work hard in order to marry and support a wife and children. No more. One of the reasons many single women lament the prevalence of boy-men -- men who have not grown up -- is that the liberal state has told men they don't have to support anybody. They are free to remain boys for as long as they want.

And here is an example regarding both sexes. The loudest and most sustained applause I ever heard was that of college students responding to a speech by President Barack Obama informing them that they would now be covered by their parents' health insurance policies until age 26.

9. As a result of the left's sympathetic views of pacifism and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world's evils and even to defend them.

10. The leftist weltanschauung [worldview] sees society's and the world's great battle as between rich and poor rather than between good and evil. Equality therefore trumps morality. This is what produces the morally confused liberal elites that can venerate a Cuban tyranny with its egalitarian society over a free and decent America that has greater inequality.

None of this matters to progressives. Against all this destructiveness, they will respond not with arguments to refute these consequences of the liberal welfare state, but by citing the terms "social justice" and "compassion," and by labeling their opponents "selfish" and worse.

If you want to feel good, liberalism is awesome. If you want to do good, it is largely awful.

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Re: WARNING* Skank Alert **WARNING

Isn't she lovely?

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 11:26 AM, Travis <baconlard@gmail.com> wrote:

WARNING*** Skank Alert ****WARNING

catscanner150 | August 18, 2011 at 6:57 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/pKuKY-8NF

Janeane Garofalo's 'Racist Dogwhistle' Tells Us Herman Cain Doesn't Have a Mind of His Own

by John Nolte

Thanks to Barack Obama's failed presidency, the desperate Left is left with nothing to defend and can only personally destroy, and so they've created a world where the words "basketball," "clouds" and "food stamps" are all racist. The only thing that's not racist, however, is actual racism, especially when that racism is directed at a Black Republican.

Case in point: The Miserable Janeane Garofalo:

Garofalo also said successful businessman Herman Cain is either being paid to run or is suffering from Stockholm syndrome because he is a "person of color" running as a Republican in the party's presidential primary.

"[He's] in this presidential race because he deflects the racism that is inherent in the Republican party, the conservative movement, the Tea Party certainly. [In] the last 30 years the Republican party has been moving more and more to the right, but also race-baiting more. Gay-baiting more. Religion-baiting more," Garofalo said.

"But, Herman Cain, I feel like, is being paid by somebody to be involved and to run for president so that you go like 'I love that, that can't be racist. He's a black guy, a black guy asking for Obama being impeached.' Or 'it's a black guy whose anti-Muslim. It's a black guy who is a Tea Party guy.'"

(more…)

So Garbuffalo, who's the real racist here, a grass roots movement that has never made a racist comment about Obama, or a leftist goon who accuses a self made, successful black businessman of being an "uncle tom". I know who my choice would be, and it's picture is at the top of this post.

Tom in NC

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Re: Who Schooled Whom?

Geesh, Steveo "USA Lover" Norris sounds a whole lot like Lil' Stevie Stink, but I digress.

Here's an interesting article, about the "democratically elected" government of Iran, back in 1949 through 1953:

http://www.iranchamber.com/history/oil_nationalization/oil_nationalization.php

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 1:17 PM, USA Lover <steveo.norris@gmail.com> wrote:

THE ANNOINTED ONE Some stupid thoughts
The Fox News talking heads on are now telling us Tea Baggers what we
want to hear
in the upcoming elections and pointing out and denigrating those that
do not comply with their appointed political guidelines. (Perry
comment on the traitorous actions of himself)
What I want to hear is a candidate that has brains that has at
least a modicum of smarts and will help return the US to a more
democratic,
constitutionally compliant Government; One that recognizes the
true Sovereignty of Native American land.
Let's start with the Farmers watering down of the Marijuana crops and
what made
them so special.
Each right wing idiot has different table manners, underpants and sit-
com ideals. They gathered in clumps like that and immigrated to
specific areas of the nation in order to live freely in
a like-minded community with its own outhouses geared to those
ideals. The
idea of the corporate government and those that find one gay bar was/
is
somehow different, better or worse than another was and is to kill
Now that is really tough, Rhode Island is all about foreclosures and
Iowa
is all about Swedish fags; not only are there differences but for each
to do
what it does best there must be differences in all aspects of life
and
accepted practices. The Koch Brothers and those elected Republicans
seem to think that this
is just not so.
The white slave owners knew it had to be so.
To point this out and name the names that think otherwise is no
longer
considered good driving skills. It is considered to be anti-white as
if
there is a single definition as to what a white man is…. there is
not.
In all the history of the USA the ONLY time that right wing idiots
seem to
agree on everything is when their wives find out they been to a strip
bar This was true until the US decided to enter into a NASCAR event
on
a regular basis, now that which once made the USA multi-racial and a
beacon
to homeless people. It is considered unpatriotic and un-American to
think for yourself.
What we will soon have is "no laws, no nations, no air force" that
will
preclude any common sense. What we will have is a lack of
competition between men with small dicks for commerce and ideas; what
we will
have is just another homo country that loses its edge as it
slips into a Fascist quagmire.
What we are doing is losing that very identity that made the USA the
great and desired example it once was. That's my Glenn Beck Paranoid
Remember…States have no rights!!!!!!!!!!!!

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