More Government Incompetence

Posted on January 18, 2014 by alsanblog

Anyone who has plans to visit the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in D.C. (the world’s second most visited museum) to view the museum’s dinosaur hall will be out of luck beginning April 28. At that time, the hall will close for – wait for it – five years for a $48 million “makeover” (see here).

Five years to remodel 31,000 square feet? Are we still on Earth or have we disappeared into some alternate universe? The Empire State building only took 15 months to build after excavation started in 1930. But don’t worry, according to museum director, Kirk Johnson, the five years are “going to fly by.” And rest assured, the good director himself will be traumatized by the closure.

The Fossil Hall renovation may replace Healthcare.gov rollout as the poster child for incompetent government. The Washington Post makes a point, however, of listing other recent closures in D.C.:  the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool (2 years), National Museum of American History (2 years), National Portrait Gallery (6 years), and the Washington Monument (almost 3 years). Seems like the Post is implying that past incompetence justifies future incompetence.

But it’s not just websites, remodeling, and reconstruction. Governments today can’t even do simple road construction within any reasonable time period. One very small bridge replacement project near where I live has taken almost three years so far for what should have taken no more than six months.

So just what is going on with government projects? Is this pure incompetence or do the officials behind the projects have some theory in mind when planning the time line? Of course, the officials in charge are liberals, so we probably shouldn’t count on or believe any explanations. But all things considered, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that these people are out of their minds.

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“Empirically Driven” Liberals

Posted on January 7, 2014 by alsanblog

Writing in the New Republic (see here), Noam Scheiber counsels liberals such as Michael Moore not to despair about Obamacare’s start-up problems because Obamacare “paves the way” toward a single-payer system that is beloved by liberals, one and all.

According to Scheiber, increasing insurance coverage through Obamacare will create a constituency for additional reform, eventually leading to a single-payer system. So Obamacare’s initial troubles don’t worry Scheiber – they simply herald better things to come. Sort of like religion.

Not surprisingly, Scheiber doesn’t exactly explain how a single-payer system will bring about this bright future. (Again, sort of like religion). So maybe it’s time to review a basic fact about how the world works – one that liberals ignore despite their incessant claims to be “empirically driven.”

As an empirical generalization, centrally directed and planned economies never outperform those based on competitive markets. Knowledge is fragmented and widely dispersed in society and the strength of markets is to mobilize and coordinate knowledge for the good of everyone better than any central government. And competition creates efficiencies far better than central planning.

A single-payer system obviously is one that would be managed and controlled by none other than a central authority. So Scheiber’s future is shaping up as one that features relative economic stagnation and decline not only for the healthcare sector, but eventually the entire economy.

Those who really are empirically driven should favor an approach that fosters more genuine competition in all healthcare product and geographic markets. (Some of these markets are competitive, but too many are not.) But Scheiber and liberals cannot bring themselves to follow the facts to this conclusion.

By ignoring markets and competition, it’s as if liberals have decided to run a foot race with their legs tied together. Although they see other runners do better without their legs tied together, liberals continue to hop along the track, all the while producing charts and exhorting each other to “creatively” develop more efficient ways to hop. And they call this progress.

Scheiber finds private health insurance to be “on some level morally offensive,” and lists a few examples of insurer shenanigans. Never mind that competitive markets operating within a proper legal framework would eliminate such issues. What’s truly morally offensive is Scheiber’s liberal ideology and its guarantee of stagnation and decline for all of us, including those whom liberals pretend to want to help.

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Pajama Boy Is Why The Islamists Will Win

Posted on January 3, 2014 by alsanblog

We’ve all heard of “Pajama Boy” by now and seen the tweet, in which Pajama Boy sits, wearing his tartan jammies, holding a cup of hot chocolate, and suggesting that we talk about getting health insurance.

For those who have not been paying attention, here is our smirking hero:

PJB

 

 

 

 

 

 

This image and the tweet in question is the brain-child of Organizing for Action, a nonprofit with close ties to the Obama administration that serves as an arm of the Democratic Party. Obviously, OFA is a great supporter of Obamacare.

Much has been written about Pajama Boy, mostly to mock him and liberals, although some have suggested that conservatives have been “trolled” by Pajama Boy. But liberals are too involved in the feminization of America to think that they aren’t serious about Pajama Boy.

Liberals most likely see Pajama Boy as the ideal of masculinity. And if so, then America is doomed as long as liberals remain in charge. Does anyone think, for example, that this liberal vision of “manliness” will prevail against the Islamists?

The mullahs in Iran and elsewhere surely are salivating at the prospect of pouncing on Pajama Boy like a wolf on a sheep. Our national decline will not be a pretty sight.

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Punishing Bad Thoughts

Posted on December 23, 2013 by alsanblog

So now liberals, led by GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign, are seeking again to punish someone for their speech and impure thoughts (as defined, of course, by the would-be punishers themselves in all their intellectual and moral brilliance).

This time, the target for punishment is Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson who, during an interview with a writer from GQ, apparently made certain comments about gays (see here), calling homosexuality a sin and even comparing it to bestiality. And predictably, Robertson’s network, A&E, responded to criticism from GLAAD by suspending Robertson indefinitely from filming.

There are a couple of points one might make in this controversy that have not already been made by others. First, liberals seem especially offended by the comparison of homosexuality to bestiality. But doesn’t their indignation imply that liberals may have a moral problem with bestiality? Evidently the idea of the open-minded, tolerant, and non-judgmental liberal is a myth.

Rather, liberals appear to have a judgmental streak in them after all, and with respect to bestiality, have even drawn, dare I say, a “red line.” Of course, who knows about liberals and their red lines, but this one must be considered an insult to everyone in a committed, loving relationship with his or her animal. At this rate, liberals will next be insulting polyamory.

Second, punishing the speaker for comments made during an interview is misguided. The justification for punishment is that the bad words constitute an actual assault on the targeted group. In some way, as the argument goes, the offensive words and the bad thoughts behind the words place individuals within the targeted group in fear of bodily harm, or at least subject to psychological harm.

According to this theory then, it makes no sense to go after Person A who utters an unapproved statement to Person B in the course of an interview. Such a statement can never be a threat to the targeted group because it’s one made in private.  The statement can only be harmful if it is published to the world at large.

So according to liberal logic, the people more deserving of punishment for bad words and thoughts would be Person B and his editors – that is, the people who actually make the decisions to publish the bad words and in so doing, inflict the harm (along with those who republish the statement).

And don’t forget those who create and maintain the infrastructure by which the words are disseminated in the first place. A woman named Justine Sacco recently lost her job after posting an ill-advised AIDS joke on Twitter (see here).  She published the comment on her own, but obviously had help from everyone at Twitter who provided the means for her harmful conduct.

So it seems that if we want to prevent harm to the targeted group, the state must control the media. This sounds like something we would expect from a police state, and indeed, we are talking about a police state. Camille Paglia, the openly gay social critic, points out (see here) that Robertson’s suspension from the network is “utterly fascist” and “utterly Stalinist.”

And because no self-respecting police state can allow the media to run free, let us place the media, and those who aid and abet it, under government control and in so doing move onward and upward. We will at last take our place beside the likes of Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and all other similar states, for this is the brave new world to which liberal logic leads us.

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Clinging to Central Planning In Healthcare

Posted on December 15, 2013 by alsanblog

The Washington Post continues its support of the central planning that is engulfing one-sixth of the world’s largest economy, also known as “Obamacare.” The latest efforts include an editorial extolling the virtues of a thing called the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) (see here) and an article attacking a drug firm in the private sector (see here).

The government has begun throwing taxpayer dollars at PCORI, to the tune of $3 billion by the end of the decade. According to the Post, these grants will allow PCORI to set up a “research network” to pull in data on “patient experiences” throughout the country. The Post’s editors are almost giddy about the use of digital records to get “thousands of data points.” The idea is that the central planners will use this data to determine “what works and what doesn’t” among treatments.

Sounds sort of reasonable:  basing decisions on data and evidence gathered from many sources. Knowledge in society is fragmented and widely dispersed, so it seems that PCORI will serve the central planners well. Except that central planning, unfortunately, destroys markets and competition, which is the very process through which dispersed knowledge is most effectively mobilized and coordinated (through prices) in the first place. Oops.

PCORI may gather information that initially might be useful to central planning. But once treatments based upon that evidence are mandated and become standard, there will be less to learn from the data (due to less experimentation), and the possibility of further evolution will be greatly diminished. In the absence of markets, the development of alternative treatments will depend solely upon the limited knowledge and intellectual capacity of the central planners. Not good.

Not content to simply admire and cling to their central planning, liberals at the Post also attacked the private sector, by criticizing a drug company called Genentech and two of its products. You see, Genentech somehow managed to develop not one but two drugs that treat macular degeneration, one of which costs significantly more than the other.

The cheaper drug, however, is approved only for cancer treatment and because of safety questions, Genentech discourages doctors from prescribing it “off-label” for use in the eyes. Choosing the more expensive drug costs Medicare an “extra $1 billion or more annually.” And the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services can do nothing about this because it has no authority under current law to “dictate treatment based on cost” or to negotiate drug prices with companies.

So the liberals at the Post play up the Genentech story as an example of a greedy drug industry seeking to profit from the more costly treatments and use it to justify placing healthcare under the central planners. Of course, history proves that competitive economies are superior to centrally-directed ones, but never mind that. Just say hello to stagnation and decline.

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More WSJ Hypocrisy

Posted on November 30, 2013 by alsanblog

Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal is upset that the Federal Trade Commission is enforcing the antitrust laws (see here).  This from a writer at a publication that often rails against the lawlessness of the Obama administration and the administration’s lack of respect for the rule of law.

Evidently, the FTC is moving against an association of 22,000 music teachers who agreed previously to a code of ethics that restricts competition for each others’ students. Strassel claims that the provision is “common enough” among professional organizations, e.g., that represent doctors and lawyers, almost suggesting that the provision is not illegal.

Yet the FTC insists that the association remove the anticompetitive provision from its code and educate its members about the law. Enforcing the law seems reasonable, but Strassel calls the FTC’s action bizarre, absurd, and ludicrous. Not to mention an abuse of power from an administration that has a “tendency toward an abuse of power.”

And Strassel doesn’t stop there, but compares enforcement of the antitrust laws to IRS targeting conservatives, DOJ hounding Gibson Guitar, and the EPA conducting an armed raid in Alaska. Talk about ludicrous.

To set the record straight, the FTC is not part of the Obama administration, but is an independent agency.  Strassel is also apparently unaware that the FTC has acted against anticompetitive codes of conduct of both doctor and lawyer associations, as well as others, going back, oh, at least several decades.

So we now see a WSJ that supports the concept of rule of law, except when it doesn’t. Ignoring the law is okay after all, at least when it suits the political agenda of the ignorer (gee, sounds like a certain someone we know).

The WSJ also claims to speak for free and competitive markets, yet almost never supports enforcement of any antitrust laws. The concentration of power doesn’t seem to bother the WSJ as long as it’s concentrated in private hands.

So all we get from the WSJ and its writers is lip service about competition. When it’s time to enforce the law, we can count on the editors and writers to run away like a little mouse or is it more like the Three Stooges (as in the old Seinfeld joke)? Indeed, Adam Smith must be spinning in his grave.

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Liberals Will Always Lie

Posted on November 17, 2013 by alsanblog

Lately, Americans have endured a steady and tiresome stream of lies from the Obama administration:  lies about IRS targeting conservative groups, NSA surveillance practices, and the cause of the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, including the American ambassador to Libya.

And of course, there’s the repeated lie, coming from President Obama, administration officials and politicians, about the ability of Americans to keep their health insurance after implementation of Obamacare. Period.

Some conservatives are exasperated not only by the lies themselves, but by the cavalier attitude that liberals exhibit after the lies are exposed. Indeed, it’s hard to forget Hillary Clinton’s testimony before Congress and her “what difference does it make” statement and attitude during the hearing. And it’s standard practice for liberals to explain their lies with additional lies.

But liberals’ attitude toward the truth shouldn’t surprise us – it is a result of their unbounded arrogance and this arrogance will always lead liberals to lie.

Liberals believe their big government “vision” for America is absolute truth. Of course, some people don’t get this vision:  for example, those who cling to their guns and religion, those who don’t think clearly because they’re afraid (mostly of black people), or those who think they’re “so smart” and actually built their businesses.

The stupidity of the rest of us means that liberals must, no doubt reluctantly and after much soul-searching, impose their truth upon society. Rational argument is useless against the stupid, so liberals are required to employ a number of, ahem, other methods to get what they want.

The techniques that authoritarian use to cram their agendas down the throats of resisters cover a range of practices along a continuum:  from deception and propaganda to refusal to recognize or enforce the law to intimidation and violence and finally, to outright killing of those who disagree with the vision (the Victims of Communism Memorial in D.C. claims 100 million dead).

Lies and deception occupy the less odious end of the cram down spectrum, so such methods will be the first that liberals employ to get their way. Deception represents the low-hanging fruit of liberal tactics and the moral certainty with which liberals view their truth will not allow them to forego this tactic.

Lying is as natural to liberals as breathing is for the rest of us. So we should be used to it by now, but that still doesn’t lessen the shock at the blatancy of the lies in the Obama administration.

And it will only get worse when the Benghazi Liar (a.k.a. Hillary Clinton) and her perjury-committing husband take over the White House in 2016.

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She’s Baaack.

Posted on November 7, 2013 by alsanblog

So the Benghazi Liar a.k.a. Hillary Clinton is back in the public eye, joining the speaking circuit, striking book deals, and staking out positions on issues. Clinton is spectacularly unaccomplished, yet liberals sing her praises and consider her the leading Democratic presidential candidate for 2016.

Dan Balz of the Washington Post claims that Clinton is a draw on the speaking circuit on the “strength of her impressive resume and her achievements during decades in public service.” But he doesn’t tell us what these achievements are. Evidently they’re are so well known that readers need no reminding or perhaps they really don’t exist. Don’t bet against the latter.

Forbes magazine exults that Clinton has a CV “full of firsts.” Unlike Balz, however, Forbes at least provides some additional information:

She is the only first lady to become a U.S. senator turned viable presidential candidate turned secretary of state.

A good try, but it amounts to nothing more than highlighting that Clinton rode her husband’s coattails from first lady to the Senate to presidential candidate and Cabinet member.

When Clinton retired as secretary of state, liberals tried to find something good about her tenure in office, but came up empty. They ultimately settled on praising her for traveling “almost one million miles.” So now travel = accomplishment. But Clinton’s travel is better viewed as an “attempted accomplishment” and praising it is the liberals’ version of giving Clinton a participation ribbon.

In a recent post on his blog, the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple criticized Clinton for shutting out the media during her speeches, but couldn’t help adding:

Clinton is known as a woman who adores challenges: She took on the country’s healthcare crisis. She took on the Senate. She took on Barack Obama. She took on the frayed foreign relations of the United States.

Taking a cue from Dan Balz, Wemple neglects to elaborate on these challenges, so let’s fill in the gaps. The healthcare crisis apparently refers to Clinton’s effort to head up healthcare reform in the mid-1990s.  Gee, that only turned into such a fiasco that Congress never voted on it. Never mind about overcoming challenges, at least Clinton adores them.

It’s hard to say what Wemple has in mind when he claims that Clinton took on the Senate. Of course, Clinton rode the aforementioned coattails to get elected to the Senate in the first place from a state where she didn’t even live previously. But her election only proved that New York voters have no self respect as they elected a carpetbagger.

Although Wemple claims that Clinton took on Barack Obama, I recall that Clinton was the front runner in 2008. Which is to say that it was Obama who took on Clinton, not the other way around. Obama took her on and cleaned her clock, but never fear, Clinton put “18 million cracks” in the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” in the world.

Finally, foreign relations. Forget about America’s diplomatic incompetence with Russia, Iran, and the Arab Spring. Clinton will be forever discredited because of the death of four Americans in Libya, her lies about the cause of their deaths, and her utter contempt for the truth (“what difference does it make”) before Congress. To paraphrase Neil Young: “Jihadists and Clinton coming. Four dead in Benghazi. Four dead in Benghazi.”

Yeah, what a legacy.

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The New Tories Part 2

Posted on October 30, 2013 by alsanblog

Don’t liberals ever tire of calling people racists who disagree with them? This has been going on for five years now – ranging from Wise Boy’s (aka Ezra Klein) old JournoList forum to Chris Matthews at MSNBC to writers at The New Republic.  And the practice is going strong today at the Washington Post with Colbert King (a few weeks ago) and recently Harold Meyerson (see here). Evidently, liberals really get off on the strategy.

People who resort to name calling and insults are out of ideas or their ideas are so dubious in the first place that they feel the need to hide them. Rather than insult those who dare question authority, maybe Meyerson and King can explain how the liberal effort to place 315 million people under the thumb of the central authority for just about every activity under the sun, including local activities such as healthcare, is such a great idea.

But Meyerson and King don’t seem inclined to use rational argument – they prefer to simply insult their opponents by calling them Stalinists, Jacobins, and Confederates. Okay, but if that’s how we’re going to do it, then we can fairly describe Meyerson and King themselves as nothing other than pathetic Tories. Given their love of central authority, had they been around in the 1770s, we surely would have seen them writing pamphlets supporting British despotism.

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Bob Costas Clinging To His Political Correctness

Posted on October 15, 2013 by alsanblog

And now NBC sports anchor Bob Costas has stepped forward to add his wrong-headed views to the controversy about the Washington Redskins team name (see here).

During the Cowboys-Redskins game on Sunday night, Costas asked viewers to “consider equivalent terms about other ethnic minorities.” When viewed in this way, Costas claims that the name “Redskins” can’t be considered a neutral term. Rather, it’s “an insult, a slur, no matter how benign the present day intent.” Evidently, Costas believes the name should be changed, but he didn’t actually say so.

In his speech, Costas admitted that a majority of Native Americans are not offended by the name. But he neglected to specify that this majority is over 90% in some polls, which means that the name is not objectively offensive. This is another way of saying that the name is not an insult or a slur, yet that doesn’t stop Costas from insisting on the opposite and stubbornly clinging to his version of the truth.

Although “Redskins” is not objectively offensive, some people still may not like the name for whatever subjective reasons they may have. Okay, but there are more people who do like the name, and their views should prevail in so far as our society is organized around the concept of majority rule. But I suspect that reasoning of this sort will not cut through liberal/left political correctness.

So the team name controversy will continue, until Bob Costas and other activists wear everybody down and eventually impose their subjective likes and dislikes on the rest of us.

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