Orwellian Word Games

Posted on February 24, 2013 by alsanblog

Ezra Klein is again making an Orwellian argument to mislead readers, this time about taxes and spending. It appears that Klein, other liberals, and even a few misguided Republicans have agreed to use another word for “taxes,” especially those taxes that relate to what has become known as tax expenditures. The new word is “spending,” so for example, under this approach, liberals prefer to say that if we increase taxes (by closing certain loopholes), we really decrease spending. Got it?

Of course, rational people might conclude that an increase in taxes would mean a decrease in the deficit, not spending, but never mind. Liberals really go for the confusion because it allows them to say to Republicans:  If you want to reduce spending, you should raise taxes. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Ha-ha, just raise taxes. But consider how it sounds if we turn it around and someone says to liberals:  If you want to increase spending, you should lower taxes, including tax rates. Ha-ha again. Obviously, this is all nonsense and unhelpful.

The biggest problem with Klein’s abuse of language is that it presupposes government owns 100% of its citizens income, as if we’re living in some Medieval realm where the king owns all property and people within the realm. When the king owns everything, then changes in taxes would indeed equal a change in spending:  with lower taxes, the king spends more of his wealth on us; with higher taxes, he spends less. But last I heard, the government exists for us rather than the other way around (well, so far).

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Obama Is Not A Centrist

Posted on February 19, 2013 by alsanblog

Liberals love to misuse language to obscure their policies and plans for America. Government spending is characterized as “investment,” gun control is renamed gun “safety,” price controls are “cost containment” measures, and proposed legislation that would eliminate the secret ballot in union elections is called the “Employee Free Choice Act.” And don’t forget the infamous “Affordable” Care Act that most likely will increase the cost of health insurance.

One of the biggest obfuscations is that Obama is a centrist. Liberals point out that a majority of Americans agree with Obama’s position on such issues as entitlements, immigration, climate change, and same-sex marriage. But even if Obama enjoys popular support on key issues, which is debatable in itself, it doesn’t make him a centrist. If popularity is the criterion, then a demagogue and socialist such as Hugo Chavez would also qualify as a “centrist,” as he enjoys significant support in Venezuela.

Obviously something is wrong with liberal reasoning when it can position someone like Chavez in the center. But even ignoring goofy liberal theories, our ideas of the political left, right, and center are worthless. It makes no sense to talk about left-wing and right-wing when both terms are used, for example, to describe authoritarian regimes. The salient point is that such regimes are authoritarian and a political spectrum running from “left” to “right” only confuses matters.

It would be more illuminating to think in terms of coercion and freedom, rather than left or right. If we do so, we quickly realize that left-wing and right-wing authoritarian regimes are not on opposite ends of a political spectrum, but are located next to each other on the coercion end. Located closer to the freedom end would be the various democracies, and the center would be between freedom and coercion. Although the U.S. is presently closer to the freedom end of the spectrum, the question is:  where are we going and where will we end up after the liberals have had their way?

The implementation of Obamacare gives us a pretty good idea of where we’re headed, and it’s certainly not toward freedom. Most people go to doctors and hospitals that are lo-cated within a few miles of where they live, so healthcare is a local activity. Yet Obama-care will place 315 million Americans firmly under the control of a central government. The resulting coerciveness, in a sector of the economy that accounts for almost 20% of the whole, will move the U.S. away from freedom and significantly past the center.

Healthcare isn’t the only sector that Obama is bent on centralizing:  indeed, we’ve al-ready seen him nationalize firms in the finance and auto industries. But Obama’s actions in healthcare and his preference for a single-payer system provide evidence enough to reject any claims that he is a centrist. Some argue that Republicans have supported aspects of Obama’s policies, but that doesn’t make Obama a centrist – it only makes those Republicans likewise authoritarians.

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Liberals And Redskins

Posted on February 16, 2013 by alsanblog

Well, about once a year, various liberals at the Washington Post pull out and dust off their old columns in which they claim the nickname of Washington D.C.’s professional football team is offensive, racist, etc., and demand that the team change its name. The claims this year seem to be more strident than usual, and according to the liberals, a “groundswell of support” has built up over the last few months to change the name.

Recently, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian hosted a symposium for a bunch of liberals, and based upon the meeting’s agenda, liberals seem to presume that the “Redskins” nickname is offensive. Evidently, the question of whether the name is offensive in the first place is beyond dispute. These liberals have it all figured out and are as certain of their viewpoint and their own brilliance as are, oh say, the Taliban. No need to introduce something crazy such as facts into the discussion.

But let’s say we did want to consider some facts. One fact to consider, for example, might be the 2004 poll of Native Americans taken by the Annenburg Public Policy Center at the Univer-sity of Pennsylvania. The results showed that 91% of the Native Americans polled found the “Redskins” nickname acceptable, which confirmed the results of an earlier Sports Illustrated poll.

So the nickname is not objectively offensive, and we can reasonably conclude that those who are offended simply have nothing better to do with their lives than to take offense at everything and everybody. Opponents of the “Redskins” nickname cite other polls showing that the majority of Native Americans are offended by the name. But really, given how liberals misrepresent the truth in support of their agenda, can we really expect polls produced by them to be scientific and accurate? For all we know, they sat around and polled each other.

Although the majority of Native Americans are not troubled by the “Redskins” nickname, the activists most likely will win out in the end, no matter what the facts. The author-itarian impulse within liberals gives them a firmness of purpose that eventually wears down reasonable people. For liberals, there is a place for everything and everything in its place (as they define it and under their collective thumb), including sports mascots.

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Ezra Klein: The Wise Boy

Posted on February 13, 2013 by alsanblog

First, NBC News publishes a column online touting Hillary Clinton’s “defining moments” that included no accomplishments, and now The New Republic has come out with a veri-table love letter to liberal propagandist Ezra Klein, a/k/a Alfred E. Neuman (check out his Washington Post photo), that is equally light on the accomplishments. Clinton and Klein seem to be the Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian of politics and propaganda:  they’re famous for being famous.

Although light on specifics, TNR claims that Klein understands Washington’s often “esoteric policy debates” and translates it for the interested layman. Evidently, Klein understands how “government works,” and when it’s broke, he’s the guy who knows how to fix it. According to a White House official, even the president “talks to Ezra,” and so Klein’s voice matters “a lot.” And apparently Nobel Prize winning economists such as Paul Krugman hang on his every word.

But rather than understanding how Washington works or how to fix things, Klein mostly “understands” only that Republicans are the cause of dysfunctional and divisive govern-ment. And for Klein, this means that Republicans refuse to become liberals and do Obama’s bidding.

Klein has sacralized Big Government and worships at its altar, to the point that his “translations” invariably call for nothing more than greater centralized control over 315 million citizens. Because Big Government is his religion, to which he clings as stubbornly as Obama, Klein is incapable of recognizing or understanding that the solution to political gridlock is to reduce the central authority in favor of more self-government at the state level.

This would mean returning to our decentralized system as originally designed, in which the founders limited central authority to certain enumerated powers, reserving the bulk of the power to the states. Limiting the scope and powers of the central government would make it far easier for people to come together in support of it.

Restoring the states to their original position within the structure of the American government might shift political gridlock from the federal to the state level, but at least individuals living in any one state could leave and go to another state whose policies they find more palatable. Exercising power at a local level used to be called self-government and self-determination although progressives today, such as Klein, have either forgotten these concepts or never heard about them in the first place.

Klein is supposed to be smart and fancies himself to be empirically driven, but until he comes to understand the importance of a decentralized political structure and recognizes that the movement away from our original structure is the fundamental reason for the political stalemate in this country, he is not worth taking too seriously. As it stands now, Klein is hardly the wise boy that TNR claims, and he couldn’t hold a candle to even Alfred E. Neuman.

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Collective Action Without Big Government

Posted on February 11, 2013 by alsanblog

During his second inaugural speech, Obama called for more “collective action” on the part of the American people, and in the process, knocked down a straw man by which he implied that those who disagree with him cling to a theory of individual action that is unrealistic. Everybody understands the issue is not between collective vs. individual action – we live in an interdependent society – but that the choice is between decen-tralized vs. centralized regulation of our collective activities.

An example of collective action that challenges Obama’s vision of centralized govern-ment is the creation of the Freelancers Insurance Company in 2008 by Sara Horowitz. Companies generally do not offer health insurance to freelance contractors because they’re temporary workers, so after organizing the workers and making the usual de-mands on companies without success, Horowitz decided to create her own private for-profit insurance company.

The FIC lost money in its first year of operation, but turned a profit starting in its second year. And today, the company consists of 25,000 subscribers acting, dare I say, collec-tively, to share the risk of large, unpredictable healthcare expenses. The creation of the FIC represents community organizing at its decentralized and entrepreneurial best. And as Horowitz herself is a liberal and union activist, the example is unexpected – who would have guessed?

Contrary to Obama’s vision of centralized healthcare (control over 315 million people), risk can be shared with as few as 25,000 subscribers, and a number of such insurance companies operating in a competitive market would provide healthcare to subscribers more efficiently than anything provided under the control of a central authority. The FIC example not only raises questions about the wisdom of centralized federal or state control over healthcare specifically, but also contradicts Obama’s general formulation that equates collective action with centralized government.

Horowitz’s approach also contrasts sharply with the thinking of the Russian government. As the Washington Post reports, there has been an upsurge in volunteer activity in Russia over the past year or so, and no surprise, such decentralized action does not sit well with the authoritarian impulses of the Russian government. It appears that Russia’s parlia-ment has even introduced legislation to regulate volunteer activity. Evidently, the politi-cians want to be sure that volunteer activity “conforms to the government’s priorities,” which of course would destroy the effectiveness of volunteerism.

The U.S. is not Russia, but really, the liberals’ healthcare dream is the eventual creation of a single-payer system run by the federal government, holding the entire population under its thumb. If this dream is ever achieved, we can forget about collective activity of the sort illustrated by Horowitz and the FIC. And at that point, the difference between us and Russia may not be so great after all.

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Serving People

Posted on February 9, 2013 by alsanblog

The Washington Post is reporting that Jay Rockefeller, senator from West Virginia, will not seek reelection after serving almost 30 years in that position. It surely has to be reckoned as a flaw of democracy when voters of a state or district elect the same guy to Congress decade after decade. One would think that every once in a while the voters could find at least one other person qualified for the job, but evidently not in West Virginia.

The Post article includes a quote from a political advisor who praises Rockefeller because he “found a way to be a Rockefeller that was about serving people.” So it seems that Rockefeller, as a politician, served people whereas his ancestors apparently disserved people by working in business. The idea that people are served best through politics and not business is seriously misguided, and requires a quick review of how the world works.

No doubt businesses and their owners seek profits, but in a society based on voluntary exchange and competitive markets, businesses do not earn the profits they desire unless they first figure out how to serve others. Profits are derived from the sale of goods and services that people need and want, and businesses that fail to provide those goods and services generate no profits. Such firms quickly disappear from the market in favor of businesses that do a better job serving others.

When exchange is voluntary, we value what we receive more than what we give up, otherwise, we wouldn’t make the exchange. So the millions of us who have purchased Microsoft products and enriched Bill Gates in the process, for example, actually received more in value from Gates then what we paid. And because Gates received more in these exchanges than he gave up, the exchanges have left all parties better off than they were before making the exchanges.

Gates became a billionaire because his company served millions of us, and it’s not hyperbole to say that buying and selling in a competitive market based on voluntary exchange is the epitome of service and serving others. Politics is unable to match this, and the sooner we reacqaint ourselves with this basic truth about markets and competition, the better off we will all be.

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Hillary In 2016 – Really?

Posted on February 4, 2013 by alsanblog

An NBC News online article about Hillary Clinton highlights “15 moments that define her public life,” and remarkably, there isn’t a single moment on the list that could fairly be characterized as an accomplishment. Indeed, three of the moments are nothing more than humiliations suffered at the hands of her womanizing husband and her acceptance of such treatment, because, after all, she “loved him.” Yeah, it’s more likely she loved the idea of riding Bill Clinton’s coattails right into the Senate and from there to the presidency.

One of Hillary’s defining moments is her election to the Senate, but if anything, her initial run for the Senate must stand as one of the great moments of liberal arrogance in the entire history of U.S. politics. The big question for Clinton wasn’t whether she would be elected, but rather which state, among several, would have the honor of electing her. As we know, New York got the nod, and although one might think that voters facing such arrogance would send a candidate packing, the good people of New York instead proceeded to elect her.

SIDE BAR:  A few years after electing Clinton to the Senate, the people of NYC at least had the opportunity to redeem themselves. At that time NYC’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, got his buddies to change the term limit law, which had been established by a vote of the people, to allow him to run again. Instead of showing Bloomberg the door, the voters returned him to power, and in so doing, proved their total lack of self-respect.

Clinton supposedly made one of her marks in September 1995 when she gave a “forceful critique of the abuse of women in China” during a U.N. conference. Perhaps women in China faced abuse in 1995, but one might have expected her to focus on the more pronounced oppression and enslavement of women in the Middle East. We’ve all seen the photograph of her covered head on a visit to Pakistan, but was it a show of solidarity with the women of the Middle East or was she siding with the men who force the women to cover up?

Liberals struggle to identify any accomplishments during Clinton’s four years as secretary of state. Some at least admit that Clinton’s record was mixed (to say the least), but still tend to ignore the negatives and focus on the almost 1 million miles that Clinton traveled during her tenure. In the past, accomplishment used to mean, well, accomplishing things, but these days, accomplishment = travel. Never mind the state of relations with Russia or Iran, or American indifference toward those fighting for democracy during the Arab Spring uprisings.

Promoting democracy hasn’t been high on Clinton’s list of priorities. In 2009, the president of Honduras, Manuel Zalaya, attempted to change the law to allow him to continue in power (perhaps following Bloomberg’s lead in NYC). In response, the Hondurans booted him from the country, named an interim president, and followed up by electing a new president. During this time, the U.S. sided with the authoritarian Zelaya over democracy. Even after a new president had been elected, and Honduras had moved past the crisis, the U.S. ambassador still demanded that Honduras reinstate Zelaya as president.

But the most disgraceful episode in Clinton’s diplomatic career would be her lies about the events at Benghazi that caused the deaths of four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya. Clinton famously showed her disdain for the concept of the “truth” during her congressional testimony by asking “what difference does it make.” In addition to the lies, she also claimed to “take responsibility” for the incompetence of her department in Benghazi, but in so far as she didn’t resign her position, she took no responsibility at all.

The NBC News article most likely meant to praise Clinton, although it’s hard to know for sure. Many of Hillary’s defining moments – the humiliations, policy failures, ineffective diplomacy, disdain for the truth, and her lip service to the idea of democracy – are not worthy of praise. Rather, they establish the grounds for disqualifying her from the presidency. But that won’t deter her from running, and amazingly enough, it will not deter half the voters in this country from supporting her.

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Counterfactual Thinking

Posted on February 1, 2013 by alsanblog

A recent Washington Post interview with economist Alan Blinder about his new book nicely illustrates liberal condescension. While discussing the effects of TARP and the stimulus bill, the Post’s reporter and Blinder questioned the reasoning ability of those who think that TARP and the stimulus failed to stimulate the economy. You see, non-liberals apparently have difficulty “with reasoning counterfactually,” meaning that people only see what actually happened and don’t understand that it’s necessary to consider what might have happened in a hypothetical, non-stimulus world.

Of course, Blinder contends that without the stimulus, the economy would have been worse, implying that a substantial drop in private economic activity was essentially offset by increased government spending. But the argument against the effectiveness of TARP and the stimulus is that these policies themselves, and the political environment surrounding the policies, kept much private business activity on the sideline. That is, without TARP and the stimulus bill, government spending may have been lower, but private business activity would have been higher.

Contrary to the musings of the reporter and Blinder, this argument is not simplistic and it even implicitly contains the counterfactual, because it suggests that TARP and the stimulus affected business activity in a negative manner that could have been avoided. If anything, it is Blinder whose thinking is simplistic when he states “if you think about it for 30 seconds, it’d be impossible to spend that much money without creating any jobs.” Yes, a whole 30 seconds, and he’s got the answer.

I haven’t yet read Blinder’s new book (inertia sets in when it comes to financing liberal propaganda), so possibly he has evidence showing that the decline in business activity would have occurred or persisted anyway, even in the absence of the stimulus policy and Obama’s leftwing agenda. But even if Blinder has evidence – his “30-second” statement suggests that he’s not looking into the question too deeply – it wouldn’t change the sophisticated nature of the argument against TARP and the stimulus.

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What Difference Does It Make?

Posted on January 27, 2013 by alsanblog

Lance Armstrong used various drugs and blood doping to enhance his performance during his cycling career, and now we have Beyonce, singing at the presidential inauguration, using pre-recorded music to enhance her performance. Both performers have engaged in essentially the same conduct (including the claim that “everyone does it”), yet somehow it’s only Armstrong who faces a lifetime ban from sports, lost endorsements, lawsuits, and perhaps more criminal investigation.

Beyonce, meanwhile, goes about her merry way without a care in the world. And one Slate writer positively gushes over her, concluding that Beyonce answered her critics in the “most badass way possible,” by singing the national anthem a capella during the press conference for her upcoming Super Bowl gig. During the press conference, Beyonce made just about every excuse possible for her decision to lip-synch, except blaming George Bush. But perhaps the White House will put out a statement correcting that oversight.

The inconsistent treatment of Armstrong and Beyonce for identical conduct seems odd. But then, maybe it’s not so odd after all. Beyonce’s deception took place during Obama’s inauguration, and it’s accepted among liberals that a lie here or a lie there is okay as long as the lies are done in the service of the liberal vision. Liberals will either deny the lie, or as Hillary Clinton did in her recent appearance before Congress, simply dismiss the issue entirely by asking, “What difference does it make?” Hopefully Americans understand the difference it makes, but these days such optimism is probably misplaced.

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Wishful Thinking About Healthcare Costs

Posted on January 23, 2013 by alsanblog

Liberals are counting on Obamacare to generate efficiencies that they believe will contain healthcare costs. One of the more celebrated initiatives is the adoption of electronic medical records, but hold on, the significant efficiencies expected from electronic record keeping might not be forthcoming after all.

According to a new study by the RAND Corporation, “electronic medical records have failed to live up to expectations for reducing costs.” Obviously, it’s too soon to know the ultimate impact of electronic record keeping, and most likely computerization will generate some efficiencies (healthcare shouldn’t be an exception to the benefits of computers). But these expectations still seem to be a good example of liberals’ wishful thinking about centrally planned health-care.

Obamacare does not encourage competition in provider markets, and so, even if some record keeping efficiencies do materialize, it’s unlikely the savings will be passed on to consumers in the absence of competition. And if at that point, the liberals in charge decide to get to those savings by implementing price controls for all of healthcare, then the game will be over. We can look forward to low quality, stagnation, and eventual decline of the system.

Blogger Mickey Kaus uses the news of the RAND study to raise what he calls the epistemo-logical mystery of Ezra Klein, who writes for the Washington Post and continually touts the benefits of electronic records. As Kaus himself is a liberal, it’s nothing short of remarkable to see him wonder if Klein is “deluding himself and his readers” about the efficacy of electronic record keeping and follows up by asking:

Hoaxer, self-hoaxer, or just confused? When they are through with Manti Te’o  maybe the nation’s amateur detectives can turn to Klein.

In fact, the nation’s amateur detectives need only read a few of Klein’s articles and posts to realize that he worships centralized, authoritarian government, and it’s especially refreshing to see someone like Kaus call him on it.

P.S. – Kaus is a liberal worth paying attention to as he actually thinks and reasons about issues, even if his reasoning leads to conclusions that might upset other liberals. So, the real mystery isn’t so much about Ezra Klein as it is about Mickey Kaus:  why did he ever vote for Obama?

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