What Marco Rubio Should Have Said

Posted on February 10, 2016 by alsanblog

In last Saturday’s Republican presidential debate, Marco Rubio faltered when Chris Christie attacked him as an inexperienced, programmed candidate along the lines of an outclassed President Obama. Rubio almost proved Christie’s point when he repeatedly made the same point that Obama’s actions have not been the result of inexperience, but are the result of a specific plan intentionally implemented.

Obama may appear to be a rank amateur, most clearly seen in his management of foreign policy, but appearances can be deceiving. While it is true that America’s rivals, from Putin in Russia to the mullahs in Iran, have eaten Obama’s lunch since his first term in office, that is because Obama simply does not view Russia, Iran, radical Islam, etc. as enemies (as most rational people might see them).

Rather, Obama sees them as victims of America’s past actions and aggression and his answer is apologies and appeasement. This approach will not change the conduct of our enemies as Obama imagines, but will only encourage more bad behavior. But contrary to the conventional wisdom, this does not show that Obama is inexperienced, only that he is another half-witted liberal. And such liberal stupidity is unlikely to change with more experience – just look at the 74-year old Bernie Sanders as he clings to his socialist ideology.

So Rubio is correct about Obama and his intentions, but he missed a great opportunity to use Christie’s attack to explain how the executive branch is different from the legislature. Christie boasted of his experience as governor and seems to view himself as a “problem solver,” although he only mentioned problems such as clearing snow from the streets and keeping the schools open. Which is odd – one would think that a governor of a state does not micromanage such activities.

As a governor, Christie is supposed to execute the laws, not make them, which is what he seems to imply when he boasts about solving problems. We’ve already experienced seven years with a president who has ignored the Constitution, statutes, and Congress as he sees fit, no doubt believing that, like Christie, he is solving problems. Whenever Obama ignores the rule of law, he shows his absolute contempt for the American people and democracy and now we have the likes of Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie apparently promising to continue this practice.

In truth, elected officials like Obama and Christie do not solve any problems. Problems are solved by individuals and groups of individuals operating in free competitive markets. The proper role of government is to maintain the framework that maximizes freedom for individuals to produce and innovate. Rubio screwed up in a major way when he failed to point out that this election is about reestablishing the rule of law and the proper role of the executive and government in our lives.

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The Crazy Liberal Attacks On Scott Walker

Posted on March 4, 2015 by alsanblog

In 2010, while insulting Americans who vote for Republicans, President Obama explained that “we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.” Perhaps Obama’s Can’t-Think-Clearly-Because-Scared theory accounts for the spate of recent attacks by liberals on Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, as he emerges as a leading Republican candidate for president in 2016. Nothing else makes any sense.

Recently, the Washington Post published a front page article about Walker, detailing how – gasp! – Walker never graduated from college, but dropped out after three years. Walker himself has explained he left college to take a job, thinking that he would eventually go back and finish, but never got around to it. Yet the liberals at the Post, even though they know the reason for Walker’s decision, still characterize it as a “lingering mystery.”

Taking up the baton on MSNBC, Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont and a failed candidate for president in 2004 (he of the infamous “Dean Scream”), questioned Walker’s fitness to be president because he lacked a college degree, which according to Dean, makes Walker “unknowledgeable.”

It’s hilarious that someone like Dean is questioning Walker’s educational credentials. Dean may have taken more undergraduate coursework than Walker, but his background is only marginally broader than Walker’s. And although Dean completed medical school, those studies are too specialized to add to the breadth of his general experience.

Both Dean and Walker have served as governors of states, but Dean served as governor of a politically and demographically homogeneous Vermont, a state with only one-tenth the population of Wisconsin. Voters in Wisconsin twice elected Walker governor and he survived a recall election led by public-employee unions. Walker also faced a politically motivated prosecution by a Democratic district attorney that the court finally shut down as abusive. As a governor, Dean can’t hold a candle to Walker.

Dean’s comments about Walker reek of arrogance and nastiness, but they also serve to remind us of how liberals (mis)understand knowledge and its role in society. Liberals like Dean define knowledge as mostly scientific or expert knowledge, of the sort that doctors like Dean might possess. And they ignore knowledge of particular circumstances which we all possess in favor of expert knowledge and the Rule of Experts (hello, Jonathan Gruber).

Knowledge is the foundation of economic progress and prosperity, yet the knowledge of Dean’s experts is limited and harmful when allowed to direct an economy or govern a society. As economist Thomas Sowell has noted:

the limited knowledge and insights of those leaders become decisive barriers to the progress of the whole economy. Even when leaders have more knowledge and insight than the average member of the society, they are unlikely to have nearly as much knowledge and insight as exists scattered among the millions of people subject to their governance.

Last week, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee announced it will no longer recommend that cholesterol intake be limited to 300 milligrams per day. Apparently, the evidence now shows no link between dietary cholesterol and cholesterol present in the blood. In the view of the committee, cholesterol is no longer a “nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” After almost half a century, the experts are now telling us “never mind.” So much for the “knowledgeable” Howard Dean and the experts.

The attack on Walker’s college experience is incoherent on more than one level, but that hasn’t stopped liberals from continuing to make fools of themselves over Walker in other ways. The Washington Post published an editorial holding Walker responsible for  statements made by – wait for it – Rudy Giuliani, during a private fundraiser for Walker.

During the fundraiser, Giuliani suggested that Obama might not love America. This is mostly true, but it would have been more accurate if Giuliani had said that Obama hates half the people in America – i.e., those who vote for Republicans. Obama makes this clear every few years when he mocks Americans who “cling to their guns and religion,” “can’t think clearly,” or believe they built their own businesses.

Walker did not respond to Giuliani’s statements, which the Post’s editors and opinion writers characterized as “spineless” and “cowardly.” Really? Dana Milbank even went so far as to suggest that Walker’s silence “ought to disqualify him as a serious presidential contender” (whereas a lying Hillary Clinton is a most excellent candidate). Perhaps liberals think Walker should have challenged Giuliani to a duel, or something.

There is no doubt that Walker’s opponents in Wisconsin have searched far and wide for anything that might embarrass him. Obviously, nothing has shown up and if anything, liberals are embarrassing themselves in their latest feeble-minded attempts to criticize Walker.

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FCC Regulation Of Broadband Is Unnecessary

Posted on February 16, 2015 by alsanblog

At the end of this month, the Federal Communications Commission will meet to consider whether to issue new rules to regulate the Internet. Under the pretense of maintaining “net neutrality,” the rules would prevent broadband suppliers from blocking the Internet, slowing down service, or creating “fast lanes” for those who pay for faster service. The FCC received over four million comments on the FCC’s proposed rules, most of them supportive.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is proposing that the FCC reclassify the Internet as a communications service under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act (no, that’s not a misprint). Heretofore the FCC has treated the Internet as an information service and the switch to communications would allow it to treat the Internet as a public utility, although Wheeler promises the agency would “forebear” from exercising all of the power it would hold under Title II (insert laugh here).

Advocates of net neutrality are mostly liberals who love the idea of aggressive regulation, and no doubt salivate at the prospect of taxing the Internet. Such advocates argue that government regulation is needed to keep barriers to the Internet low for new websites and applications and to foster innovation. The innovation argument is especially funny coming from liberals whose ideology all but guarantees a stagnant economy and society.

It is doubtful that Internet providers are blocking or slowing down Internet service to the extent imagined by net neutrality supporters, so the FCC’s proposed rules seem to be a solution in search of a problem. Questions about slowing or prioritizing Internet traffic, however, imply that broadband congestion may be a genuine problem. Which is to say that broadband is a scarce resource that appears to be in short supply.

But appearances can be deceiving:  scarcity doesn’t necessarily create shortages. As we learned in Econ 101, government price controls usually cause shortages by keeping prices below the level that would otherwise exist in the market. Artificially low prices increase consumer demand at the same time they induce sellers to reduce supply and, as these incentives work themselves out, say hello to a shortage. Scarce resources are best shared through a market system where prices truly reflect supply and demand.

Broadband providers operate in (mostly) free markets, but their pricing practices lead to the same shortages as government price controls. Customers typically pay providers a flat monthly price instead of paying for the actual amount of data they use each month. Under flat-rate pricing, heavy broadband users have little incentive to control their consumption so as to save some broadband for the rest of us.

The answer to the broadband congestion problem isn’t heavy-handed regulation by the FCC, but a simple rule that requires broadband providers to charge customers for the amount of data they use. We pay for almost everything we consume in our daily lives on a per-unit basis, and Internet usage should be treated the same. Under a metered-pricing rule, market forces would still determine prices, not the FCC.

Of course, the broadband hogs will throw a fit at the idea of paying for the data they actually use. Heaven forbid that heavy users should moderate their streaming of movies, videos, and games (not to mention their porn videos and, ahem, related activities). And we might also expect the liberal tech companies to join the outcry. Perhaps Wikipedia will threaten to shut itself down again in protest.

But if broadband suppliers switched to a metered-pricing approach, the congestion problem and net neutrality concerns would disappear almost immediately. At some point, however, increasing demand would cause prices to rise as capacity is squeezed. Heavy users may not like this, but as pointed out above, increasing prices would provide an incentive for suppliers to increase capacity, which would ease the pressure on price.

No one could legitimately complain about metered-pricing. Heavy broadband users have no grounds for demanding that light users subsidize their movies, videos, and gaming, which is one result of flat-rate pricing. And heavy users would respond to metered-pricing by incrementally reducing the number of movies and videos they view. No one, not even low-income users, would be deprived of email, shopping or reading the news or gossip on-line because these are not the marginal activities.

Although a simple solution to the broadband congestion problem exists, the Democratic majority at the FCC will probably vote to impose regulations anyway. Like the broadband hogs, liberals are unable to restrain themselves. No sector of the economy is safe from them and our lives are worse off for it.

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Minimum Wage Incoherence

Posted on January 12, 2015 by alsanblog

As of the beginning of 2015, twenty-one states raised their minimum wage levels, ranging from 15 cents an hour in Washington state to $1.25 in South Dakota, and liberals are celebrating. As Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post sees it, and he imagines that almost everyone else agrees with him (no doubt because his views are sooo reasonable and correct), the increases serve “economic justice,” whatever that means (see here).

As Pearlstein points out, the economic case against the minimum wage is that an increase (above the value of what workers produce) reduces employment of low-skilled workers due to the “iron law” of downward sloping demand. This results in a misallocation of resources and lessens market efficiency (although Pearlstein doesn’t mention this point). But Pearlstein questions this conventional view, claiming there are “countless” studies showing that minimum wage laws have no or negligible effect on low-wage employment.

The evidence supporting minimum wage laws is not as convincing as Pearlstein and other liberals like to suggest. In fact, the opposite is true. In a 2006 survey of the new research beginning in the early 1990s, economists David Neumark and William Wascher found that

A sizable majority of the studies surveyed in this monograph give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages. In addition, among the papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries.

But never mind. After ignoring this evidence, Pearlstein reviews how business owners might deal with an increase in the minimum wage. For example, fast-food restaurants may pass along much of the wage increase to consumers in the form of higher prices, which in turn would reduce sales and employment. Pearlstein points out, however, that consumers who don’t buy more costly Big Mac meals would instead buy more Kraft macaroni and cheese, so employment at Kraft would increase.

Employment at Kraft may increase, not to mention that employment at firms producing automated equipment would also increase as low-skilled workers lose their jobs when replaced by automated equipment. Overall employment levels may not change much, but the question is what happens to low-skilled workers. And it’s unlikely that equipment manufacturers, or even Kraft, would add low-skilled workers as demand for their products increases.

Pearlstein goes on to suggest that workers who don’t lose their jobs as the minimum wage increases would have more money that they would spend on goods and services produced by other low-skilled workers, thus maintaining employment levels. But when the wage increase is passed along in the form of higher prices, the extra money that low-skilled workers would receive comes from the pockets of consumers who could just as well spend that money in the same way. So this point adds nothing to Pearlstein’s argument.

According to Pearlstein, business owners who are unable to pass on the minimum wage increase to consumers might offset the increase by reducing pay for supervisors or other higher-paid workers. But this is delusional. Any business that reduces pay for workers to below market levels will quickly lose those employees to its competitors. Pearlstein also believes that increased pay would enhance worker productivity because, after all, increased pay works as an incentive for “bonus-laden” CEOs. This is simply more delusion because a minimum wage increase is not a bonus.

Surprisingly, Pearlstein neglects to tout the minimum wage as an effective antipoverty tool, something that liberals from FDR to Ted Kennedy have emphasized. But in this case, the omission is appropriate because the typical beneficiary of the minimum wage is a part-time worker who is not a member of a poor family or the head of a household. As Jason Riley points out in his book Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed:

Most poor families don’t have any workers. Raising the minimum wage does nothing for them, and to the extent that it reduces their employment opportunities, it’s a net negative. Reducing the number of entry-level jobs keeps people poor by limiting their ability to enter or remain in the workforce, where they have the opportunity to obtain the skills necessary to increase their productivity and pay, and ultimately improve their lives.

The minimum wage is not an effective antipoverty tool, so Pearlstein instead claims that the ultimate reason for raising the minimum wage is that “fairness matters.” Yes it does, but only a liberal would rely on “fairness” to justify government interference in the labor market that reduces entry-level jobs for those who especially need them (such as young African-American men) in favor of wage increases for middle class workers above the value of what they produce.

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New Rules Of Engagement For The Police

Posted on December 31, 2014 by alsanblog

In response to the deaths in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, N.Y., liberals are calling for new rules of engagement for the police in the United States. Writing in the Washington Post, Ian Ayres and Daniel Markovits, two law professors at Yale, argue that police should not be permitted to initiate force when “confronting misdemeanors and other less serious crimes” (see here). The authors believe that a forcible arrest for a misdemeanor is not proportional to the crime and can lead to bad outcomes.

Before considering the law professors’ proposal, however, we should note how Ayres and Markovits characterize the incident in Ferguson. Michael Brown committed a strong-arm robbery, assaulted a police officer, and resisted arrest, and yet Ayres and Markovits can see nothing more than “jaywalking” in all of this. Not only do they misunderstand what jaywalking is (walking in the middle of the street so that cars are forced to drive around goes beyond jaywalking), but they are clearly prejudiced and maybe even delusional.

In any event, rather than using force to make an arrest, Ayres and Markovits suggest that police officers who wish to take someone into custody issue a warning “like the Miranda warning.” Police would inform a suspect that if he does not voluntarily come to the station with the officer, the suspect will have committed yet a second crime for which he may be punished. If the suspect still refuses to consent to the arrest, then the officer must obtain a warrant from a judge before a forcible arrest would be permitted for both of the crimes.

Okay, but there appears to be a wee flaw in the authors’ suggestion:  what if the suspect refuses to identify himself to the police? Failure to identify oneself may or may not be a crime, depending on the state, but even if it were a crime, it would surely rank as only a misdemeanor, given that the original crime would be a misdemeanor. So we seem to be up to three crimes for which forcible arrest would not be permitted because they are all misdemeanors. And a suspect who refuses to identify himself would prevent the police from obtaining an arrest warrant or even writing a ticket for the infraction.

Ayres and Markovits cannot possibly believe that any suspects would disclose their names and addresses when a refusal would allow them to walk away free and clear. So Ayres and Markovits are simply calling for repeal of misdemeanors and other minor crimes, at least when committed in urban minority areas, and are only pretending to call for modification of policing procedure.

Many of the protesters in Ferguson and New York have carried signs demanding the end to “broken windows” policing. Under broken windows theory, a community refuses to tolerate small crimes and works to prevent deterioration of physical conditions in the neighborhood, an effort which is thought to reduce more serious crime. The protesters claim that such policing doesn’t work, and when Ayres and Markovits suggest reform, they agree with the broken windows claim, but in a way that avoids addressing the substance of the issue.

Ayres and Markovits claim that their new rules of engagement would promote “law and order.” We will learn whether or not this is true soon enough, after liberals put an end to broken windows policing, which is already happening to some extent in New York City and across the country. This means that liberals will use minority neighborhoods as laboratories for their experiment and African-Americans will serve as guinea pigs (shades of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment).

So the question really is:  have the African-Americans who will be the future victims of the new policing experiments in their neighborhoods given their consent?

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Obama Foreign Policy

Posted on December 23, 2014 by alsanblog

Appeasing America’s enemies has been a mainstay of American foreign policy for the last six years and now President Obama has the gall to criticize Sony Pictures for its decision to cancel the release of the film The Interview. America won’t stand up to anti-American tyrants, but a private company should stand up to the North Koreans. O, the hypocrisy.

Obama declared that Sony “made a mistake” in its decision to shelve the film and pledged that America would respond to the North Korean hack attack on Sony “in a place and manner and time that we choose.” No doubt the North Koreans are shaking in their boots. At the rate he’s going, Obama will probably end up extending diplomatic recognition to North Korea, following his new approach with Cuba.

On December 17, Obama announced that the U.S. will begin to normalize relations with Cuba. The Washington Post criticized the decision in an editorial, accusing Obama of giving the Castro regime an undeserved bailout (see here). This is true, but as the paper also printed an article in which reporters tripped over themselves in their haste to praise the decision (see here), it seems the editors at the Post can’t make up their minds about the issue.

Calling the Cuba deal a “breakthrough,” the Post article reports that the new policy “emphasizes pragmatism over ideology, engaging enemies rather than isolating them and setting aside historic grievances in order to reshape the future.” According to the Post, Obama’s speech “read like his entire foreign policy philosophy in microcosm.”

Okay, but let’s review that policy. Soon after Obama took office in 2009, the Benghazi Liar a/k/a Hillary Clinton gave Russia’s foreign minister a mock “reset” button (Obama’s version of the Staples “Easy” button) to symbolize the start of a new era of relations between the U.S. and Russia. Obama later scrapped missile defense projects in Poland and the Czech Republic because of Russian objections and entered into a new nuclear arms reduction treaty that generally favored Russia.

As we know, dealings with Russia have not been easy at all, despite the button. Russia responded to Obama’s “pragmatism” and “engagement” by taking Crimea from Ukraine, creating other unrest in eastern Ukraine, and opposing American positions on Syria and Iran’s nuclear program. And now, Putin apparently is courting Kim Jong Un of North Korea in the wake of the Sony hacking incident.

After taking office, Obama also pursued engagement with Iran’s mullahs. During this courtship, he looked away when Iranians demonstrated for democracy and ignored deadlines for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Evidently, Obama believed his personality would cause the mullahs to slap themselves on the forehead and realize they were wrong all along. Time to stop the nuclear program, accept the right of Israel to exist, and become buddies with the Great Satan. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

True, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Iran, but that was mostly the doing of Congress, which dragged Obama along kicking and screaming all the way. Obama has not kept the pressure on Iran with either sanctions or negotiation deadlines and it’s all but certain that Iran will soon have nuclear weapons or at least possess quick “breakout” capability.

Given Obama’s track record, we shouldn’t expect much from his “engagement” with Cuba or his vow to respond to North Korea. Perhaps Obama or Joe Biden will lecture North Korea like they lectured Russia, explaining that we now live in the 21st century and that nations should not act like it’s the 19th century. But that will be hard to do as the Internet and hacking didn’t even exist in the 19th century.

Obama’s critics think he is either incompetent or naïve. The latter is more likely as Obama seems to believe that America’s enemies are not enemies, but victims of past American aggression. Thus, America must become a better international citizen, which for liberals means that, as Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, American policy should be “subservient to, dependent on, constricted by the will – and interests – of other nations.”

This may be true, but based on Obama’s recent unilateral and heavy-handed actions on domestic matters, he may sympathize with authoritarian regimes simply because the authoritarian impulse lies deep within him. The ability of a leader to impose his will on others with little hindrance may explain his attraction to and appeasement of Russia, Iran, and now Cuba.

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Thousands Rally For Self-Improvement

Posted on December 17, 2014 by alsanblog

It appears that alternative universes in fact do exist. Experts have determined that the following news item, describing last Saturday’s “Justice For All” rally in Washington D.C., is from another dimension. Well, it may not be our universe, but at least some people in some reality are moving in the right direction (see  here for our world’s version of the events):

Washington (AP) – In a great display of unity, thousands of black marchers joined a rally in Washington with calls to stop blaming others for the conditions under which many African-Americans live.

Speaking in the cold afternoon air, passing the microphone like a baton, one speaker after another urged the crowd to accept that internal cultural sources may account for many of the problems of the black community.

Mothers and fathers declared it time to acknowledge that crime rates are too high in too many black communities. “It is not surprising that the increased police presence required in high crime areas leads to confrontations that might turn out badly,” said one demonstrator.

“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, sensing the desire of the crowd to state the truth about the black underclass after decades of denial and to commit to gaining the knowledge, skills, and habits necessary for African-Americans to fully participate in the prosperity of the nation.

The march in D.C. was one of many that took place across the nation. Under the slogan “National Day of Humility,” rallies were also held in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Bloomington, Ind., and Lexington, Ky., among other places.

In D.C., as well as other cities, police declared the rallies peaceful with no arrests.

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Grand Juries and Racial Profiling

Posted on December 7, 2014 by alsanblog

First, a St. Louis county grand jury declined to indict a white police officer in the shooting death of Michael Brown, and now a grand jury in Staten Island has also declined to indict a white police officer in the death of Eric Garner.

Josh Voorhees of Slate magazine finds it impossible not to pair the two cases:  white officers, black suspects, unarmed, public demonstrations, and no indictment (see here). Except Voorhees forgets to mention that both men resisted arrest and both Brown and Garner were as large or larger than an NFL offensive lineman (the liberal Washington Post cannot even bring itself to use the words “resisting arrest,” instead calling the interaction an “encounter”).

Yet these facts help explain what happened. When a police officer faces resistance from a suspect that outweighs him by 100 to 150 pounds, it’s not hard to understand why he might quickly use lethal force. The uncertainty surrounding these circumstances creates the policing equivalent of the “fog of war.” And a suspect who continues to walk toward an officer, even with hands raised, is not surrendering. He is only creating more confusion that makes it even more likely that something bad will happen.

Although the evidence indicates that Michael Brown did not have his hands up, the hands-up gesture has become the symbol of protesters everywhere, including several members of Congress. Recently, five players on the NFL’s St. Louis Rams raised their arms in the hands-up gesture as they walked onto the field. By continuing to move forward instead of standing still, they at least got part of Brown’s action right. Maybe next time, the players will light a joint and reenact the strong-armed robbery portion of Brown’s activities on that morning.

Many people who support the Ferguson grand jury’s decision are surprised and upset by the Staten Island decision. Voorhees is not surprised that neither grand jury voted to indict because, as he explains, the default setting in our criminal justice system is to believe that an “on-duty officer who takes another citizen’s life was justified in doing so.”

Voorhees believes that this basic assumption should be changed, but given the difficulty of police work, the “justified” presumption is a reasonable starting point. Although the presumption sets up an obstacle, it is rebuttable, so strong evidence can overcome it. The Staten Island grand jury obviously found the evidence insufficient to overcome the presumption for a criminal action, which requires some degree of intent (although the case will continue through civil proceedings that are sure to follow).

Both grand juries did their job – the easiest thing in the world for the jurors would have been to wash their hands by indicting the police officers and letting someone else make the ultimate decisions. Unfortunately, liberals are already pointing to these cases as additional examples of system-wide racial profiling and mistreatment of minorities and the Obama administration is ready to announce new racial profiling regulations.

With a population of 315 million, individual incidents of police misconduct are bound to pop up in this country, but large scale racial profiling is unlikely. Liberals call it profiling if members of a group are disproportionately stopped by the police when compared with the proportion of that group in the general population. But as many have pointed out, the proper comparison is between the proportion of those stopped by the police with the proportion of the group in question engaged in the behavior for which the police stop people.

A famous study of racial profiling on the New Jersey turnpike in the late 1990s illustrates the proper approach. The study showed that although African-Americans comprise 13% of the population, they accounted for 25% of the speeders on the turnpike. Profiling could be claimed only if African-Americans accounted for more than 25% of the stops, not 13%. In fact, they accounted for only 23% of the stops so they were under-stopped.

Skepticism about systemic profiling is based on understanding that crime rates are not the same for all ethnic and racial groups. But liberals cannot accept this fact and continue to assume that profiling is rampant and widespread. They are deniers who will work to undercut law enforcement wherever they can, to the detriment of African-Americans who make up the majority of the victims of crime.

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Never Mind Bill Cosby, What About Bill Clinton?

Posted on November 22, 2014 by alsanblog

A number of women have stepped forward recently to claim that Bill Cosby sexually assaulted them, or rather they have re-stepped forward, since the claims are old, some of them dating back almost half a century. The attacks on Cosby could be another example of America’s privately operated police state, but as Arnold Schwarzenegger famously observed in connection with his own sexual misconduct allegations: “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

The media is obsessed with Cosby, but there is another Bill whose behavior deserves renewed scrutiny. This would be the perjurer and former president Bill Clinton and his alleged sexual harassment of women throughout his political career. Yes, we’ve heard the claims against Clinton and they received some publicity in the 1990s. But the claims against Cosby are also not new, yet here we are, covering the same ground with him.

It would be more important for the media to rehash the claims against Clinton because he is still married to the Benghazi Liar, a.k.a. Hillary Clinton (which doesn’t speak well of her, by the way), who unfortunately may be America’s next president. When campaigning for president in the 1990s, the Clintons told Americans that voters would get “two presidents for the price of one.” Hillary would not be baking cookies, but would serve as an unelected co-president.

If Hillary served as co-president in Bill’s administration, then we might expect to have two presidents for the price of one again in the White House if Hillary wins the election in 2016. Voters ignored Bill’s serial escapades the first time around and we saw him add to the list as he took advantage of a 22-year-old White House intern in the Oval Office. That voters might bring him back to the WH for a second go around is appalling.

Some might resent the comparison of Cosby, who allegedly used drugs and alcohol to confuse his victims, with Bill Clinton, who presumably relied on his good old boy charm. But who needs drugs and alcohol when you have the Oval Office and the title Leader of the Free World? The intoxicating effect of the White House trumps any chemical – Monica Lewinsky never stood a chance.

NBC and Netflix have canceled projects with Cosby and TV Land has yanked episodes of “The Cosby Show” from its lineup indefinitely, so Cosby’s career is over. In contrast, Bill Clinton is flying high as a speaker, averaging almost $250,000 per speech. Bill has earned more than $100 million since leaving office which places him and his wife among the wealthiest 1% of Americans. Evidently, sexual harassment (not to mention perjury) isn’t such a big deal after all.

The disparity in the media’s treatment of individuals engaged in the same conduct is not new. One annoying example of a few years ago is when the media endlessly attacked cyclist Lance Armstrong for using performance enhancing drugs to win bicycle races while giving a pass to Beyoncé Knowles who used a performance enhancing recording to guarantee a winning performance at the 2012 presidential inauguration.

Armstrong and Beyoncé both misrepresented themselves in the same way for the same reasons. Yet the media defended Beyoncé, and fawned over her after she called a press conference and sang the national anthem for the attendees. Liberals especially loved that stunt with one writer from Slate praising her as a “bad-ass.” Maybe if Armstrong had called a press conference to ride around on his bicycle, he would still be competing today, at least in triathlons.

The media’s indignation to bad conduct is inversely related to the liberal nature of the bad actor’s views. Eugene Robinson, liberal columnist for the Washington Post, let the cat out of the bag in a column in which he writes about Cosby, but is unable to do so without also referring to and dismissing as “shrill” and “overboard” Cosby’s conservative views on African-American issues (see here).

Liberal media hypocrisy will protect Bill Clinton, and in the case of CBS, liberals have even created Hillary propaganda disguised as a television program (i.e., “Madame Secretary”). One can only stand by slack-jawed as liberals work to inflict the Clintons on America once again.

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The Significance of Jonathan Gruber

Posted on November 19, 2014 by alsanblog

By now most people have heard of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, one of the so-called architects of Obamacare, and his statements about the stupidity of American voters in connection with healthcare policy (five videos have surfaced so far). Of course, there are those who pretend they don’t know Gruber, such as Nancy Pelosi and President Obama, despite the existence of past video and audio recordings in which both Pelosi and Obama refer to Gruber and his work.

Gruber believes he’s smarter than the average American voter (and perhaps smarter than everyone else in a big room of smart guys). Such arrogance would almost be acceptable if Gruber, for example, were Joe Namath, who could guarantee a Super Bowl win and back it up with a victory. But Gruber is just another central planning hack in the liberals’ vision of Big Government. The central planning that liberals stand for today will not outperform the markets that central control replaces, so liberals could never back up any guarantees to the contrary.

While it is true that human beings are ignorant (not stupid – there is a difference), the liberal conclusion that experts should therefore govern the rest of us does not follow. Rather, according to Nobel Prize winning economist, Friedrich Hayek, it is our ignorance that calls for individual freedom:

The case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends.

For Hayek, liberty is essential because “we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.” Competition brings greater experimentation, but the benefits of experimentation are canceled out as more of the economy is placed under the central control of experts. As Hayek explains:

It is only when such exclusive rights are conferred on the presumption of superior knowledge of particular individuals or groups that the process ceases to be experimental and beliefs that happen to be prevalent at a given time may become an obstacle to the advancement of knowledge.

Knowledge such as that possessed by experts is indispensable for the advancement of civilization, but the unorganized knowledge of “particular circumstances of time and place,” which is decentralized knowledge that we all possess, is equally important. Hayek points out that the economic problem is “mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place.”

Economies centrally directed by people like Gruber have not fared well over the last century. The difference between market-based economies and centrally planned ones is keenly illustrated in the famous nighttime satellite photo of the Korean Peninsula, showing an illuminated south and a darkened north (see here). And the stagnation experienced by Japan and Western Europe doesn’t bode well for the milder forms of the centrally directed welfare state.

Despite the experience of the last century, liberals refuse to accept the case against economic centralization. Perhaps money from consulting fees (Gruber has earned millions) or advising those who govern the most powerful nation on earth trumps the facts for many liberals. Some liberals may support centralization because they believe that America’s central planners will be the best ever in the whole wide world – the liberals’ mistaken version of American exceptionalism.

Whatever their reasons for calling Americans stupid and ignoring the harm of economies directed by experts, liberals are not impressing anyone with their own intellectual and moral failings. Additionally, Gruber is an ingrate and a boor when he calls voters – who as taxpayers also pay his consulting fees – stupid and his words and views are nothing less than disgraceful.

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