Garbanzo Toons

Another Reason Public Education Will Never Improve

Public school administrators still take advice from those who are still stuck on stupid. Here is a prime example.

More recently, a coalition of community leaders proposed an Excellent Schools Detroit initiative that includes the expansion of charter schools to improve graduation rates for Detroit students.

As these various initiatives will likely increase Michigan’s already large charter enrollment, inserting civil rights standards into the legislation authorizing these schools – and more completely understanding students’ outcomes in charter schools and nearby traditional public schools – is crucial.

Concerns about racial isolation are largely absent from the burgeoning charter school movement, which has instead recast school choice as the central civil rights issue. A new report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA finds that nearly 80% of Michigan’s black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority schools. Even in a state infamous for the segregation of its black students, that percentage is extraordinarily high.

Charter school segregation is not just an issue for the city of Detroit – more than 70% of Michigan’s charter school students attend school outside of the city limits.

Why does this matter? Research shows that attending racially diverse schools significantly improves students’ academic achievement, graduation and college attendance rates.

B*llsh*t. I don't believe you. That is idiotic. Show me the research. The authors of this article have replaced real world facts with their own prejudices. So students from wealthy monoracial school districts will increase their college attendance if they're in class with students of other colors? Explain how and why, please. It makes no sense to me.

Such provisions would require charter schools to make themselves truly open to students of all backgrounds by providing services such as the school lunch program, instruction for English language learners and free transportation. These provisions are especially important in highly segregated places like the Detroit metro area, where locating charter schools near boundaries with suburban communities, providing transportation and conducting metro-wide outreach to students could help create diverse educational options.

And this will cost how much? And we are to pay for it how? Oh, that's right, tax the rich. Redistribute their wealth. Isn't that the solution to everything that ails racist American society?

Michigan’s Legislature could follow the example of states like Colorado or Rhode Island and require charter schools to stipulate how they will attain a diverse student body before they gain approval. The Michigan Department of Education could also provide technical assistance to charter operators to help them better structure their outreach and admissions policies to attain a more diverse student enrollment.

Great! More senseless regulation to inhibit the growth of charter schools. Isn't that the real reason behind this moronic plan? If these boneheaded idiots were truly interested in improving schools, charter or otherwise, they would be screaming for a stronger phonetic-based curriculum that is rich in content.

In fairness to the authors of this fiasco, they did author a 130 page PDF document called Choice Without Equity Somewhere in that mess, there may be a good argument for what they are proposing, but after skimming a few dozen pages, (yes, I'm too lazy to wade through the whole thing) I couldn't find anything that makes any educational sense. What the authors are missing due to their stupid obsession with race and segregation, is that so many minority students attend segregated charter schools because they aren't being served by public schools. Their parents are making sacrifices in order to get them to a school that they hope will be good for their children. They understand that the color of the student sitting next to their child has no bearing as to whether or not their child excels. But according to the authors (skimming quickly) minority students need more access to white students. Is this racism? I don't know, but if Rush Limbaugh stated that minority students needed white kids in their classes in order to succeed, he'd be called racist.

To counter the stupidity of Choice Without Equity, read Thomas Sowell's "The Education of Minority Children". Sowell says,

Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but, as he put it, "all the things we know that ain't so." Nowhere is that more true than in American education today, where fashions prevail and evidence is seldom asked or given. And nowhere does this do more harm than in the education of minority children.
The quest for esoteric methods of trying to educate these children proceeds as if such children had never been successfully educated before, when in fact there are concrete examples, both from history and from our own times, of schools that have been sucessful in educating children from low-income families and from minority families. Yet the educational dogma of the day is that you simply cannot expect children who are not middle-class to do well on standardized tests, for all sorts of sociological and psychological reasons.
Those who think this way are undeterred by the fact that there are schools where low-income and minority students do in fact score well on standardized tests. These students are like the bumblebees who supposedly should not be able to fly, according to the theories of aerodynamics, but who fly anyway, in disregard of those theories.
While there are examples of schools where this happens in our own time-- both public and private, secular and religious-- we can also go back nearly a hundred years and find the same phenomenon. Back in 1899, in Washington, D. C., there were four academic public high schools-- one black and three white.1 In standardized tests given that year, students in the black high school averaged higher test scores than students in two of the three white high schools.2
This was not a fluke. It so happens that I have followed 85 years of the history of this black high school-- from 1870 to 1955 --and found it repeatedly equalling or exceeding national norms on standardized tests.

Read the whole thing. Sowell is always worth the time.

Labels: charter schools, education, racism, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 3:40 PM 2 comments

More Reasons to Appreciate Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is one of the great minds in the world today. If the MSM and the rest of those who control the output of information in this country weren't so stupidly "progresssive" he would get the recognition he deserves. It's a loss to our nation that he isn't more widely recognized and pushed on readers by the idiots running our MSM.

Labels: economics, education, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 8:12 PM 1 comments

The Housing Boom and Bust

If, like me, you're tired of listening to and arguing with know-nothing-know-it-alls who insist that the current economic downturn is the fault of deregulation, the failure or excesses of capitalism, you might be interested in Thomas Sowell's latest, The Housing Boom and Bust. As always, Dr. Sowell writes for the layman, who may not know much about economics, you know, like the know-it-alls. It's a short book, 148 pages of text, and another 30 pages of notes. And if you've been following Sowell's regular columns, you will have already read some of what he says in the book.

You should still read the book. He explains the entire problem beginning at the beginning. And it doesn't even take the entire book to explain how we got into this fix. He also explains some of the failed government interventions of the past, some of which led to, and extended the Great Depression, and Obama's failure to learn from the past as he attempts to lead us into a greater depression.

While the problem began with government intervention and good intentions, to help more people afford to own their own homes, others helped along the way. And yes, some of them were Wall Street investors. Some of them were Republicans. George Bush has his share of blame in this, and so do the people who knowingly bought more house than they knew they could afford.

The simple, yet biggest lesson Dr. Sowell tries to teach, and one that he tries to teach in many of his columns is that government intervention, no matter how well meaning, almost always ends up causing more harm than good, which leads to the government rushing in to fix the problem, which, because of the universal and unbreakable Law of Unintended Consequences, and the fact that government officials have little or no knowledge or experience in the businesses they intend on "fixing", they only make things worse, which leads to still more government, etc. It's a lot like the debate on Obamacare. We've had government intervention that has led to changes in our health care and in the insurance industry since World War II. Nobody remembers that far back. Very few people look back and track the government policies and mandates that, over the years and decades, have forced the price of health care to the level it's at today. We only know what's happening now and we're not happy with it. So, here comes Obama and the Democrats with their multi-trillion dollar solution.

As Dr. Sowell demonstrates in book after book and in column after column, the free market is still the best path toward economic growth and freedom.

Labels: books, Obamacare, The Housing Boom and Bust, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 8:09 PM 0 comments

Things I had to Respond to

There were a few articles in today's Free Press that commanded my attention. Usually it's the ridiculous that draws me in and makes the bile rise, but there were some good things too.

First the dumb stuff:

Why is Congress still out to apologize for slavery?

Lawmakers are learning the hard way that trying to apologize for historic injustices isn't as easy as saying sorry.
Advertisement

Two weeks ago, the Senate passed a resolution calling on the country to apologize formally for more than three centuries of enslavement and segregation of African Americans. Senators thought they had done the right thing.

The feel-good moment was short-lived, however, after several members of the Congressional Black Caucus vowed to fight the measure when it reached the House of Representatives.

They object because it contains a disclaimer saying that the resolution can't be used to support legal claims against the United States by those seeking reparations or cash compensation for the suffering endured by black people.

No apology will ever be enough for some. They will always demand more. We know that. The smartest course in this case is to give them nothing. Encourage them to shut up already. At one time slavery was universal in human society. It was western civilization that fought to end it. The United States fought a war against slavery.

"It opens up a discussion, an opportunity for Americans to start a healing process,"

No it doesn't, it wastes time and energy. It creates demands for something that nobody living today is entitled to. I teach elementary school. Most of my students are black. Until they get to my class and I fill them in on the facts of the history of world-wide slavery, they think that slavery was a uniquely American institution. If our nation hasn't been healed yet, it's due to dopes who insist on continuing the focus on American slavery and its alleged continuing effect on Black Americans. If you read Thomas Sowell though, you can better understand that the current pathologies in the Black community have little to do with the legacy of slavery and everything to do with the breakdown of the family and the insistence on living a self-destructive culture. And why should I pay reparations? While blacks in the south were being used as slaves, my ancestors were being raped and murdered by Cossacks. Obviously, I never met these people, but still - can I have reparations? Since my ancestors suffered, don't I deserve them?

When it comes to political art, it always seems to me to be more politics than art. And the politics expressed are predictably on the left side of the aisle. If that's where your sympathies lie, you can introduce your article with sentences like,

Knit one, purl two. Fight the power.

Lisa Anne Auerbach knits charged political works stitched with slyly provocative slogans. They can be amusing, angry, quirky. One sweater says "My Jewish Grandma is Voting for Obama. Is Yours?" The back says "Chosen People Choose Obama." Another sweater says "When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire." Her "Body Count Mittens" are adorned with casualty figures from Iraq.

Oy vey, another liberal Jew, who, if she were as politically astute as she thinks she is, would never have voted for or supported Obama. And since Obama is the president, what power is she fighting?

For a much better understanding of Obama, Jews, and Israel, read this important piece by Melanie Phillips. (I found it at American Digest.) She gets it. I thought Dershowitz did. It's sad how politics can blind one to reality.

Here is an interesting letter to the Free Press clearly and simply demonstrating the unbreakable (especially when it comes to political solutions) Law of Unintended Consequences:

News of the cash-for-clunkers program is greatly distressing. I am a low-income, single mother with two teenage daughters. One is 17 and is saving up for her first vehicle. She will not be permitted to get her license until she can afford the car. The other is 15 and chomping at the bit already, eager for the independence she will achieve with her own ride.

More than once I have purchased what is being called a "clunker" because it is in the price range I can afford -- both the purchase price and the insurance costs without collision coverage. Several times I have purchased cars whose owners have told me they were asking the price because it was what they could get on a trade-in. What am I to do now that the incentive will be $4,500 for a trade-in on a car that may have been traded in for $1,000 in the past? I can't afford $4,500 for a vehicle.

What you might consider a clunker, I consider affordable transportation.

How many millions of other working poor will be financially slammed by our current one party ruling bodies?

Finally, here is a test. How much do you know about the founding principles of our nation? Just for the record, I scored 8 out of 10.

Labels: American Digest, art, Cash for Clunkers, Detroit Free Press, Jews, Obama, reparations, Thomas Sowell, United States

posted by Harry @ 3:46 PM 5 comments

The Politics of Fear

Hasn't it been the Republicans, over the 8 years of the Bush administration who were accused of using the "politics of fear" to maintain control over the American people? We were warned about scary terrorist guys who were out to murder us and our children. How silly.

It's certainly a good thing that nice Obama fellow came along to save us from the politics of fear. He's out warning us about real dangers to our lives, like the absence of socialized medicine in the United States.

President Barack Obama asked skeptical doctors Monday to get behind an overhaul of the nation's health care system, declaring it a "ticking time bomb" for the budget that could force America to "go the way of GM."

Ooooh, that's scary! But,

The difficulty of his task was evident when he said he's against capping awards in malpractice lawsuits, a top priority for doctors, and earned a smattering of boos — a remarkable public response to a popular president accustomed to cheering audiences.

Gasp! What? Obama booed? Horrors! Those greedy doctors, those profiteers, those kulaks just don't know what's good for them. Of course, our Dear Leader, Hussein Obama struck back forcefully,

Flying to his hometown to speak at the annual meeting here of the American Medical Association, Obama struck back forcefully at those speaking out against his efforts to reshape the health care delivery system to bring skyrocketing health care costs under control and expand coverage to the millions of uninsured.

He had his sharpest rhetoric yet for critics, calling them "naysayers," "fear-mongers" and peddlers of "Trojan horse" falsehoods who should be ignored. He warned interest groups and lobbyists not to use "fear tactics to paint any effort to achieve reform as an attempt to socialize medicine."

"There are those who will try and scuttle this opportunity no matter what," Obama said.

If you read the rest of the article, you notice (or at least I noticed) two things. First, all of the advocacy groups have jumped in to demand that their constituents be taken care of under Obama's plan. We regular folks don't have advocacy groups, well, at least we don't have groups that can purchase the ear of the president, or members of Congress.

Second, Obama, as always, makes promises to all of the pressure groups except for the doctors, who shouldn't expect caps on medical malpractice suits. But so what. Doctors are all wealthy, right? And we certainly don't want to hear about all of the sacrifices these greedy doctors made to get their medical education. All we need to know is that they make a lot of money and that makes them greedy. Obama is going to reign in spending, but he's also going to make sure that everyone gets the medical care they need. So, while a vast new bureaucracy will be created, we, the consumer, will save money on our free medical care. And the only alternative to Obama's plan is the complete and total destruction of our country.

How do we know this? Because Obama says so. And if this isn't the politics of fear I don't know what is. To scare you even more, let me just say, "global warming", or is it "climate change"? Which ever one it is, I hope you didn't read this scary post before bedtime.

In the interest of intelligent commentary, go read some of that scare-monger, Thomas Sowell's thoughts on socialized medicine, which I suppose we can now refer to as Obamacare.

Labels: Obama, politics, Thomas Sowell, Universal Health Care

posted by Harry @ 5:56 PM 1 comments

Thoughts on Cuba and Other Stuff

Yes, I'm really too busy to blog, and this is not the post I was going to post. But when I'm too busy go toss off thoughts at an unsuspecting (and uncaring)Blogosphere, I use other people's thoughts. First, here are some thoughts on Cuba from Nat Hentoff, and them some that are more succinct from Michael Ramirez. I love the way he can portray such strong emotion in just two hands. The man can draw!

New Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, who has made 10 reporting trips to Cuba, writes (April 14) that the Congressional Black Caucus delegation was either naive or disingenuous "not to notice ... or acknowledge that Cuba is hardly the paradise of racial harmony and equality it pretends to be."


If these Black Caucus members — so lauded by Fidel for being accompanied by King's "aura" — had asked him and Raul for permission to look around Cuba on their own, they would have


heard considerable evidence from Afro-Cubans about their lower status in Michael Moore's paradise. However, adds Eugene Robinson, "maybe they were too busy looking into Fidel's eyes."

And I was going to comment on the fact that Earth Day is on Lenin's birthday. But that's been taken care of at People's Cube.

Meanwhile, at the Free Press, there are the usual calls for more government intervention to "help the poor".

Personal finances are not traditionally the purview of public officials. But in these tough times, government certainly has an interest in helping constituents protect their assets and create financially stable households. The life savings of many New Orleans residents were washed away during Hurricane Katrina. In some cities, a cash economy has become a public safety problem, with people becoming "walking ATMs" on days when pay or government checks are issued.

That's why the National League of Cities and the Cities for Financial Empowerment Coalition are working with many of their members, including Detroit, to ensure that consumers are financially literate and that banks offer deposit, payment, credit and electronic products that meet the needs of the unbanked. The league's "Bank on Cities" campaign includes education and outreach efforts that partner with local banks.

Thomas Sowell sees through the sloppy thinking of the Free Press and everyone else who wants more government intervention in order to force check cashing offices out of business while also forcing banks to give loans to people whether or not they can pay them back.

Words are not the only things that enable political rhetoric to magically transform reality. Numbers can be used just as creatively — and many voters are even more gullible about statistics than they are about words, apparently because statistics seem more objective.

The latest congressional crusade is to clamp down on small finance companies that provide “payday loans” and check-cashing services in many low-income neighborhoods, where there are few banks.

A common practice in making small loans of a few hundred dollars for a few weeks is to charge about $15 per hundred dollars lent. Politicians, the media, community activists, and miscellaneous other busybodies are able to transform these numbers into annual percentage charges of several hundred percent, thereby creating moral melodramas and demands that the government “do something” about such “abuses.”

Of course, these loans are seldom borrowed for a year. They are often loans for a couple of weeks or less, to meet some difficulty of the moment, suffered by people who live from payday to payday, whether they are being paid by a job or are receiving checks from Social Security, unemployment compensation, or welfare.

The alternative to getting a payday loan may be having the electricity cut off or not having money to buy some medication. It is worse to borrow from illegal loan sharks, who have their own methods of collecting.

While $15 per hundred dollars may sound like a high rate of interest, it is not all interest. The finance company incurs costs just to process a loan, and these costs are a higher proportion of the total cost for a small loan than for a large loan.

When Oregon imposed a limit of 36 percent annual interest on what a finance company could charge, that meant charging less than $1.50 for a $100 loan for a couple of weeks. A dollar and a half would probably not even cover the cost of processing the loan, much less the risks of default.

Not surprisingly, most of the small finance companies making payday loans in Oregon went out of business. But there are no statistics on how many low-income people turned to loan sharks, or had their electricity cut off, or had to do without their medicine.

This is just one of the many ways in which self-righteous busybodies leave havoc in their wake while going away feeling noble.

Labels: Cuba, Detroit Free Press, economics, Michael Ramirez, Nat Hentoff, The People's Cube, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 6:16 PM 0 comments

Witch Hunt

From a recent article in the Detroit Free Press

Top executives of the five biggest U.S. oil companies were pressed today to explain the soaring fuel prices amid huge industry profits and why they weren’t investing more to develop renewable energy source such as wind and solar.

and

“On April Fool’s Day, the biggest joke of all is being played on American families by Big Oil,” Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said as his committee began hearing from the oil company executives.

With motorists paying a national average of $3.29 a gallon at the pump and global oil prices remaining above $100 a barrel, the executives were hard pressed by lawmakers to defend their profits.

“The anger level is rising significantly,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., relating what he had heard in his district during the recent two-week congressional recess.

however

“I heard what you are hearing. Americans are very worried about the rising price of energy,” said John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., echoing remarks by the other four executives from Exxon Mobil Corp., BP America Inc., Chevron Corp., and ConocoPhillips.

But the executives rejected claims that their companies’ earnings are out of step with other industries and said that while they earn tens of billions of dollars, they also invest tens of billions in exploration and oil production activities.

“Our earnings, though high in absolute terms, need to be viewed in the context of the scale and cyclical, long-term nature of our industry as well as the huge investment requirements,” said J.S. Simon, Exxon Mobil’s senior vice president.

and remember

The prices are of concern, Hofmeister said at the time, adding a note of optimism: “Our industry is extremely cyclical and what goes up almost always comes down,” he told the skeptical senators on a day when oil cost $60 a barrel.

About six months later, when the cost of the same barrel reached $75, the executives were grilled again on Capitol Hill on their spending and investment priorities.

There have been no charges of wrong doing, no allegations of wrong doing, no suspicion of wrong doing, yet oil company executives are once again being hauled in front of Congress to be publicly humiliated in order to mollify the anger of the American public. What did they do that was so wrong? Oh yeah, they earned a lot of money. They did it honestly, but according to Congress and other witch hunters, they've earned too much. It's not fair. The oil companies must be punished for earning too much money by providing the product that keeps the world's economy afloat.

Due to rules passed by Congress, at the behest of their environmentalist friends, no oil company has been able to build a new refinery in the United States in almost thirty years. Oil has to be refined so some of our oil has to be refined outside of the U.S. Many areas in the U.S. with proven oil reserves are off limits to drilling thereby increasing our demand for foreign oil. All of this drives up the cost of oil, which leads to increased profits for the oil industry. Which causes the idiots in Congress to add insult to injury by scapegoating the oil industry and putting on glorious show trials in order to escape their responsibility for forcing the sickening, wallet-busting rise in oil prices.

Isn't this the exact tactic used by communist dictatorships throughout the last century in order to avoid blame for their own destructive economic policies? Blame the "kulaks" and other enemies of the people. It's a good bet that right now, government lawyers are looking for any kind of law or rule that they can twist to accuse oil executives of some kind of "crime against the people." Rather than cheer on this kind of sick charade, we the people should be up in arms that Congress can publicly abuse American citizens. We accept this because the oil executives like tobacco executives before them, are very wealthy, and throughout history the wealthy have garnered the jealousy of the middle class and poor. We are still trained today to hate the rich. We are supposed to enjoy seeing the rich and powerful knocked down a few notches, whether it's done honestly or not.

My advice is: don't gloat about the oil executives being dragged through the congressional mud. It begins with the rich, who are easy to scapegoat, but as we've seen Russia, China, N. Korea, Venezuela, and other "people's republics" eventually this kind of harassment works its way down to you and me and we are much worse off for it. And even if it doesn't go that far, punitive measures aimed at oil companies will reduce the gasoline supplies and raise costs for us all. We saw that under President Carter.

But as always, Thomas Sowell knows best.

Labels: Congress, Detroit Free Press, energy, Oil, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 9:57 AM 4 comments

Basic Economics, Part 2

Well, I finally finished the book, Basic Economics . . . about a week ago. It's just taken me this long to find the time to write a brief post on it.

After finishing it, I think that it's even more worth reading than I did in the first post. Yes, Sowell does repeat himself at times, using the same story to illustrate more than one point, but the fact remains that he makes a great case for free markets over a controlled economy. But we've seen that. Think of the differences between East and West Germany, North and South Korea, Eastern and Western Europe, Cuba and the United States. Don't forget Taiwan and Hong Kong vs. China. Which way were people running? Who was killing people in order to stop their escape from workers' utopias? And then there's the rise of Singapore, while the countries around it remain mired in poverty. The fact that there are some in government and media who still want us to believe that the economy can be brought under control without destroying it, makes me wonder if these intellectuals are half as smart as they think they are. Who are they trying to kid?

The chapters on "Market Myths" and government meddling are worth rereading. Except you (or at least I did) end up getting angry that special interests are allowed to feed off of the rest of us in the interest of "fair trade" and "preserving American jobs". Why do special interests have so much power anyway? It's because the government has too much control over the economy as it is. They have created a system that fosters corruption, that has industries battling each other for government largess. In creating tariffs in order to protect jobs in the American steel industry, more jobs were lost than were protected due to artificially high steel costs. Why is sugar so expensive? Because of tariffs leveled against foreign sugar? Remember the gas lines under Jimmy Carter in the late 70s? They were because of laws capping the price of gasoline. Power shortages in California? Same cause, different politicians. Why do our leaders do this? In order to buy votes of course. Their first loyalty is to themselves.

Both Obama and Hillary are out to kill the goose that laid the golden egg in their rush to redistribute wealth from those who earned it to those who want it. They're going to kill us with Universal "Health Care." One of the biggest points Sowell makes is that all of these schemes to "level the playing field" and to end "exploitation" of the poor by the rich, price controls, wage controls, have all been tried numerous times throughout history, and they've led to increased misery and suffering every time. A major theme throughout the book is that there is a reason that things have prices. And if we allow the government or any organization, even if they pretend that they are benevolent, to raise or lower prices or wages according to whim, they will skew the market and cause shortages and worse chaos than there was before the meddlers began "fixing" things. You know what else? The Great Depression was not a failure of Capitalism, It was a failure of government. These are all facts and concepts that aren't taught in our schools, so people don't know. They're open to every demagogue who promises to make life easier and increase their wealth at the expense of the "evil greedy capitalist."

OK, that's it. No more posts on this book. I've said everything I have to say . . . I think. Now go out and read it.

P.S. Over at American Digest, there is an interesting post that relates directly to all of this and gives another reason . . . not . . . to . . . vote . . . for . . . O - b - a - m - a. Or will it be O'Bama for St. Patrick's Day?

And who is more of a Lady Macbeth? Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama?

Labels: American Digest, books, economics, Obama, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 7:14 PM 1 comments

Basic Economics

I just happen to be reading Thomas Sowell's book, Basic Economics. It's the updated and expanded third edition. He's added new information and entire chapters since the second edition. There are also quizzes on each chapter at the end. I like the quizzes because if I were studying this the way I should be studying it, taking these quizzes would help me remember what I've read. Page numbers are given to help one find the answers to the questions. And it's not even like the questions are that difficult if you've read the book. The way Sowell explains things, a lot of this stuff is common sense.

Maybe I'm weird, but I'm finding most of this book fascinating. It could be because I'm interested in the subject. Or maybe I enjoy learning new things. Perhaps it's because I like seeing self-defeating myths smashed with a healthy dose of rationality and intelligent thought. There are a lot of real life examples in the book demonstrating how and why some economic theories work and others don't. One reviewer on Amazon simplistically titled his review, Capitalism Good, Communism Bad. He then went on to trash the book. Some people don't like it when their cherished irrational beliefs can't handle the reality of life. Sowell does compare the success of Capitalism to the failures of Communism, but due to the general disdain among our elite opinion makers of Free Market Capitalism, I think Sowell was right to make these comparison as often as possible. Not that it will quiet the free market haters, but it does offer lessons to those who will read and listen honestly. And it shows why people who still believe in Socialism and Communism just don't get it.

Reading this book helped me appreciate two articles in the current issue of City Journal. The first one is Hearts of Darkness by Michael Knox Beran.

Paternalism was supposed to be finished. The belief that grown men and women are childlike creatures who can thrive in the world only if they submit to the guardianship of benevolent mandarins underlay more than a century’s worth of welfare-state social policy, beginning with Otto von Bismarck’s first Wohlfahrtsstaat experiments in nineteenth-century Germany. But paternalism’s centrally directed systems of subsidies failed to raise up submerged classes, and by the end of the twentieth century even many liberals, surveying the cultural wreckage left behind by the Great Society, had abandoned their faith in the welfare state.

Yet in one area, foreign aid, the paternalist spirit is far from dead. A new generation of economists and activists is calling for a “big push” in Africa to expand programs that in practice institutionalize poverty rather than end it. The Africrats’ enthusiasm for the failed policies of the past threatens to turn a struggling continent into a permanent ghetto—and to block the progress of ideas that really can liberate Africa’s oppressed populations.

The intellectual cover for the new paternalism comes from economists like Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs, who in his recent bestseller The End of Poverty argues that prosperous nations can dramatically reduce African poverty, if not eliminate it, by increasing their foreign-aid spending and expanding smaller assistance programs into much larger social welfare regimes. “The basic truth,” Sachs says, “is that for less than a percent of the income of the rich world”—0.7 percent of its GNP for the next 20 years—“nobody has to die of poverty on the planet.”

Sachs headed the United Nations’ Millennium Project, created in 2002 by Secretary-General Kofi Annan to figure out how to reverse poverty, hunger, and disease in poor countries. After three years of expensive lucubration, the project’s ten task forces concluded that prosperous nations can indeed defeat African poverty by 2025—if only they spend more money. “The world already has the technology and know-how to solve most of the problems faced in the poor countries,” a Millennium report asserted. “As of 2006, however, these solutions have still not been implemented at the needed scale.” Translation: the developed nations have been too stingy.

We’ve heard this before. The “response of the West to Africa’s tragedy has been constant throughout the years,” observes NYU economist William Easterly. From Walt Rostow and John F. Kennedy in 1960 to Sachs and Tony Blair today, the message, Easterly says, has been the same: “Give more aid.” Assistance to Africa, he notes, “did indeed rise steadily throughout this period (tripling as a percent of African GDP from the 1970s to the 1990s),” yet African growth “remained stuck at zero percent per capita.”

All told, the West has given some $568 billion in foreign aid to Africa over the last four decades, with little to show for it. Between 1990 and 2001, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa below what the UN calls the “extreme poverty line”—that is, living on less than $1 a day—increased from 227 million to 313 million, while their inflation-adjusted average daily income actually fell, from 62 cents to 60. At the same time, nearly half the continent’s population—46 percent—languishes in what the UN defines as ordinary poverty.

Yet notwithstanding this record of failure, the prosperous nations’ heads of state have sanctioned Sachs’s plan to throw more money at Africa’s woes. In July 2005, G-8 leaders meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, endorsed Sachs’s Millennium thesis and promised to double their annual foreign aid from $25 billion to $50 billion, with at least half the money earmarked for Africa. This increased spending, the Gleneagles principals proclaimed, will “lift tens of millions of people out of poverty every year.” No doubt, too, Africans will soon be extracting sunbeams from cucumbers.

Using logic, reason, and the 60 year record of failure of other African poverty reduction programs that have consisted of throwing money at Africa, he shows why the people involved in the current scheme are either deluded or are self-serving liars.

The other article is, Criminalizing Capitalism by Nicole Gelinas.

Politicians and business pundits saw Enron’s collapse as an unprecedented market failure that cried out for a new remedy. Hadn’t the country’s best stock analysts believed the Enron “story”—permanently high growth through dazzling innovation? Hadn’t the nation’s bond-rating agencies awarded Enron a rating implying that prudent investors could lend to the doomed company? Hadn’t Enron’s “independent” auditors and outside counsel signed off on its crazy financial statements? And hadn’t Enron employees who had invested heavily in company stock seen their life savings evaporate?

Yet Enron was actually an example of how markets work—messily, sometimes tardily, but in the end with ruthless efficiency. Even as most Wall Street analysts bought Enron’s sales pitch and accepted its financial statements, investors slashed the value of the company’s shares in half—far surpassing declines in the broader market—during the year before the accounting scandal broke. Investors had begun to withhold money before the government launched investigations. When Enron declared bankruptcy in December 2001, the regulators were left only to certify the market’s verdict. Those investors and lenders who hadn’t scrutinized the company lost money, as they should have.

Though Enron didn’t signal a market failure, it was a business failure, of course. The company overvalued its assets while undervaluing its liabilities—the oldest trick in the fraud book but also sometimes an honest mistake. In the 1930s, Samuel Insull, a utility entrepreneur who created the modern power grid, did the same thing; so did savings and loan banks in the 1980s. Enron’s chief financial officer, Andy Fastow, did it by vastly overstating the company’s assets and hiding liabilities, such as off-the-books sums owed to outside “investment partnerships” (he stole cash on the side, too). It was easy for Enron to perform accounting hocus-pocus because many of its assets, such as a one-of-a-kind power plant in India and speculative broadband ventures, were difficult to value. Enron’s assets were worth what Enron said they were—until the market decided otherwise. By booking future profits right away, Enron worsened its predicament; a mistake or a lie compounded over 20 years is far greater than one that covers only one year. What’s more, the company didn’t disclose clearly enough, in hindsight, that it was funding those precarious investment partnerships with its own stock—which it might have to replace with cash if the stock price fell.

In its effort to clean up and micromanage the market, the government only makes things worse. As Sowell points out repeatedly in his book, controlling the market is an impossibility. Others have tried and failed. We have examples of these failures both throughout history and in today's world. But for some reason, people still think the market can be reigned in and made to behave, that it can be forced to be kind and gentle to "the people."

Sowell's book, these articles, and reality all show that it can't.

All of this should be read in their entirety. In fact, I'm thinking about buying extra copies of Basic Economics for some family members.

Labels: books, City Journal, economics, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 1:40 PM 5 comments

Diversity at All Costs

When Proposal 2 was passed by the voters of Michigan by a margin of 16% (58% to 42%), it was supposed to end racial and other preferences at Michigan's public universities. As stated,

Proposal 2...

• Reflects the colorblind language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act -- because equal treatment is the essence of civil rights.

• Ends discrimination against groups and individuals based on race or sex for state employment, university admissions, and public contracting.

• Bans quotas and set-aside programs giving every person a fair chance to compete for good paying jobs and college admissions.

Proposal 2 DOES NOT...

• Affect public health facilities, including breast cancer screening centers, fair housing programs, or private scholarships.

• Eliminate outreach or true equal opportunity programs.

• Eliminate Title IX or girls' sports.

The fact that Michigan voters voted overwhelmingly in favor of it doesn't matter to the Proposal's opponents. To them, anyone who voted for it is the stereotypical right-wing, racist, sexist, homophobic, idiot who didn't know enough to vote for what was good for them and what mainstream America wants. And they are still trying to find ways around discriminating against anyone who doesn't fit the current "victim" template, especially at the University of Michigan and other public universities. At the hallowed halls of U. of M. diversity is the order of the day, education be damned.

The Detroit Free Press, another opponent of Proposal 2, ran an editorial, thinly disguised as a news article on the tribulations of U. of M.'s and Wayne State University's efforts to discriminate - uh - I mean diversify. They destroyed their own pro-diversity argument however, with this quote:

Deneshea Richey, 17, a student at Cass Tech High in Detroit, is going through the process now and has a list of about 10 schools she is applying to.

U-M was once on her list, but she has decided she won't "waste the application fee." Before, a relatively low grade-point average might have been offset by her work history, the fact that she lives alone and other factors, including the fact she is African American.

Maybe I'm naive, but wouldn't a low high school GPA dim her chances for success at an academically rigorous university like U. of M.? Wouldn't it make more sense for her to go somewhere where standards weren't quite so high so she had a better chance of graduation and a lesser chance of flunking out? The factors that kept her high school GPA low probably wouldn't change for the better at U. of M. and in fact might even change for the worse. She'd be moving away from home into a much more highly competitive environment. She'd have more responsibilities and more distractions. She would be even more on her own than she is now.

Why are so many engaged in an open conspiracy to make education even more difficult for people like Richey? Who are they trying to fool?

Thomas Sowell has written on and condemned affirmative action in many articles and in an entire book. Rather than depend on platitudes and emotion, he offers logic, reason, and the past experience of affirmative action programs. Deneshea Richey and university officials in Michigan should read what Dr. Sowell has to say.

Of course, they won't.

Labels: Affirmative Action, Thomas Sowell, University of Michigan

posted by Harry @ 8:02 PM 2 comments

Fascinating Links

I found some others who are going to speak for me. I didn't mean for this to happen, they just happened to say some things that don't need to be rewritten, they only need to be read.

First up is Dr. Sanity presenting valid reasons why there is so little that qualifies as Islamic science. Read the links in her post too.

In October, Malaysia's first astronaut will join a Russian crew and blast off into space. The news of a Muslim astronaut was cause for celebration in the Islamic world, but then certain questions started popping up. How will he face Mecca during his five daily prayers while his space ship is whizzing around the Earth? How can he hold the prayer position in zero gravity? Such concerns may sound absurd to us, but the Malaysian space chief is taking them quite seriously. A team of Muslim scholars and scientists has spent more than a year drawing up an Islamic code of conduct for space travel.

This story illustrates the obstacles that face scientists in Muslim countries. While it's always risky to draw generalizations about Islam, even conservative Muslims admit that the Islamic world lags far behind the West in science and technology. This is a big problem for Muslims who envy the economic and military power of the United States.

What's so striking about the Muslim predicament is that the Islamic world was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy.

Next we have two articles, one by Thomas Sowell that I linked to previously, but I'm doing it again because it follows the same line of thought from a Walter Williams post on how environmentalism has killed thousands if not millions of human beings over the past 50 - 60 years. Thomas Sowell says,

The other recent tragedy that has held the nation's painful attention — the mine cave-in in Utah — also has implications that few seem to notice.


We could have far fewer men going down into those mines in the first place if we could use other readily available and economically viable substitutes for coal, such as nuclear power or more of our own oil.


Here too, politics is the problem. The only "alternative energy sources" that are on the political agenda are those few very expensive options that environmentalist zealots approve.


Nuclear power is not on the green zealots' approved list, even though nuclear power is widely used in other countries.


Some say nuclear power is not safe. But nothing is categorically "safe." The only serious question is how its safety compares to that of alternative ways of generating energy.


Ask the families of the trapped miners if they think mining is safe. Ask them if they would rather face the grim reality of a death in their family or the hypothetical possibility of inconveniencing some caribou in Alaska.

Walter Williams says,

In the wake of Hurricane Betsy, which struck New Orleans in 1965, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed building flood gates on Lake Pontchartrain, like those in the Netherlands that protect cities from North Sea storms. In 1977, the gates were about to be built, but the Environmental Defense Fund and Save Our Wetlands sought a court injunction to block the project.


According to John Berlau's recent book, "Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism is Hazardous to Your Health," U.S. Attorney Gerald Gallinghouse told the court that not building the gates could kill thousands of New Orleanians. Judge Charles Schwartz issued the injunction despite the evidence refuting claims of environmental damage.

And even more importantly,

Environmental extremists see DDT in a different light. Alexander King, co-founder of the Club of Rome, said, "In Guyana, within almost two years, it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time, the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem." Jeff Hoffman, environmental attorney, wrote on grist.org, "Malaria was actually a natural population control, and DDT has caused a massive population explosion in some places where it has eradicated malaria. More fundamentally, why should humans get priority over other forms of life? . . . I don't see any respect for mosquitoes in these posts."

Speaking of placing ideology over human life here is another one by Williams on the stifling of dissenting opinions on the global cooling - I mean global warming - I mean climate change front.

Finally, here is the story, in three parts of a Montana woman who hunts Islamic terrorists on the Internet. She's worked with the FBI to help capture and prosecute some of these clowns. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

It's 3 a.m., early May 2002. By now, she is continuing physical therapy, but she's done with the pain pills and the cane. The jihadists, though, have become central in her life.

Go on, I dare you, she murmurs as she finds her way to a new Web site, The Arab Castle. OK, she says. Watch this.

"Death to America," she types in Arabic, a phrase now as familiar as "Good morning."

It has been eight months since 9/11, and Rossmiller is well on her way toward completing online Arabic courses from the Arab Academy in Cairo and from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She waits for a reply.

An answer comes quickly enough: "I wish someone would blow up the American base in Afghanistan," a person writes in Arabic.

"It would be great," another responds.

No one corrects her, which must mean Rossmiller has said it right, in the right spot. She's elated. They're buying me as one of them.

Having digested a clutch of Arab novels, Rossmiller uses the devices of fiction to invent characters she can be on the Web.

She must be specific and nuanced to be believed, she thinks, but one persona is not enough.

It's a control thing, she decides. If I can have an effect on them, then maybe I can stop the evil they do.

Rossmiller begins to fill notebooks with detailed aspects of her made-up characters - names, photos, occupations. Some are good at bomb-making. Others are facile with small weapons.

I've got some real doozies here, Rossmiller says to herself as she reviews her ensemble of grim operators, her own fictional collection of serial killers.

Soon Rossmiller has created around three dozen "people." She searches Web sites for obituaries with pictures, then alters the images so relatives wouldn't recognize them.

The photos are mostly for herself, to keep a picture in her head of whom she's supposed to be, a sense of her character. Once in a while, someone asks to see whom he's talking to, and Rossmiller can oblige.

She researches mosques in Jordan and Pakistan to learn their street locations and the names of their imams. This way, she can make authentic references during online chats.

After several months, she has developed quite a correspondence with dozens of people who seem to believe she is whoever she says she is.

Labels: Dr. Sanity, environment, Shannon Rossmiller, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams

posted by Harry @ 6:34 PM 6 comments

Raise Taxes?

Our infrastructure is crumbling. The only reason any of us noticed this was due to a bridge collapsing in Minnesota. What should we, excuse me, I mean, what should our elected officials do? One of the standard answers to all that is ailing our country from the left side of the aisle is: Raise taxes! Those fool Republicans and their "tax cuts for the rich" are causing our country's roads, bridges, and power grid (remember the black out a couple of years ago?) to crumble into dust around us. It's all being held together by the cobwebs that remind us of the years of neglect.

Fortunately for us, there is Thomas Sowell. And Thomas Sowell says,

The real problem is that the political incentives are to spend the taxpayers' money on things that will enhance politicians' chances of getting re-elected.

There may be enough money available to maintain bridges and other infrastructure but that same money can have a bigger political pay-off if spent building something new instead of maintaining and repairing existing structures.


When money is spent building a new community center, a golf course, or anything that will be newsworthy, there will be ribbon-cutting ceremonies and the politicians who cut the ribbons can expect to see their pictures in the newspapers and on TV.


All that keeps their name before the public in a positive role and therefore enhances their prospects of being re-elected.


But there are no ribbon-cutting ceremonies when bridges are being repaired or pot-holes are being filled in. These latter activities may be more valuable than a community center or a golf course, but they are not nearly as photogenic.


The preference for showy projects that will enhance a politician's career prospects is not peculiar to current politicians. Adam Smith pointed out the same thing about politicians in 18th-century Europe.


We can vote the rascals out but the new rascals who replace them will face the same incentives and in all likelihood will respond in the same way.


A pattern that has persisted for more than two centuries is likely to continue unless something fundamental is changed.

Sowell also says,

Those who live by talking points now have a great one: "How can we fight an expensive war and repair our neglected infrastructure without raising taxes?"


Plausible as this might sound, tax rates are not tax revenues. The two things have moved in opposite directions too many times, over too many years, for us to take these clever talking points at face value.


This administration is not the first one in which a reduction in tax rates has been followed by an increase in tax revenues. The same thing happened during the Reagan administration, the Kennedy administration and the Coolidge administration.


Tax rates and tax revenues have moved in opposite directions many times, not only at the federal level, but also at state and local levels, as well as in foreign countries.


How many times does it have to happen before people stop equating tax rates with tax revenues? Do the tax-and-spend politicians and their media supporters not know any better — or are they counting on the rest of us not knowing any better?

Besides, we know how readily and how easily our government wastes our tax dollars. From the Citizens Against Government Waste website, we have this choice tidbit,

Members of the Senate Transportation/Treasury Appropriations subcommittee paved the way for another year of reckless spending by adding 874 pork projects totaling $1.28 billion in the fiscal 2006 Senate Transportation, Treasury, Judiciary, and Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Act. Not satisfied with grabbing money for parochial projects, the appropriators also included $5 billion for 18 programs that the president suggested eliminating or reducing. Programs resurrected from the scrap pile of presidential cuts include $150 million for the Revitalization of Severely Distressed Public Housing account (the HOPE VI Program), $25 million for the National Defense Tank Vessel Construction Program, and $24 million for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Rural Housing and Economic Development.

That of course is only the beginning, and it's only one bill. They've been doing this for years . . . with our money.

Of course, there's more. There's always more. We taxpayers provide our elected representatives a bottomless well in which to dip from. According to John Stossel,

By now you've probably heard that a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report states:


From 1999 through 2005, the USDA "paid $1.1 billion in farm payments in the names of 172,801 deceased individuals. ... 40 percent went to those who had been dead for three or more years, and 19 percent to those dead for seven or more years." One dead farmer got more than $400,000 during those years.

But wait, it gets better,

An amendment that would have withheld subsidies from farmers with incomes of $250,000 or more was rejected by the House.

Hmm, maybe I didn't mean better. I'm sure there's another word for what I really meant, but I try to watch my language.

CONCLUSION: Congress already has the money. If they thought more about working for the country rather than pandering in order to get reelected, this wouldn't be an issue. If Progressives who hate Capitalism would take the time to learn a bit about real world economics, there wouldn't even be this stupid debate.

Labels: Citizens Against Government Waste, Congress, economics, government waste, John Stossel, Minnesota bridge, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 9:40 PM 5 comments

Airbags in Cars Kill Babies

According to an article in the Detroit Free Press,

Since the mid-1990s, the number of children who have died inside hot vehicles has risen dramatically, totaling about 340. One reason was a change parent-drivers made to protect their kids after juvenile air-bag deaths peaked in 1995 -- they put them in the back seat, where they are more easily forgotten.

That wasn't the point of the article, but it made me think. Weren't passenger side airbags mandated by the government? Of course they were, in order to save lives. But do they? Not according to this report.

Government airbag policy looks more and more like the emperor with no clothes. Increasingly bizarre pronouncements are offered to conceal its nakedness, including: Don’t place infants in front seats. Don’t allow children under twelve to sit in front seats. If you are short, move your seat back and add blocks to the pedals so you can still reach them. Such actions are not merely inconvenient, they can reduce safety. Infants and children in rear seats divert driver attention from the road ahead. By moving seats back, short drivers reduce their already compromised forward view, and make braking more difficult.

The mandate requiring airbags was supported by government claims, documented in the 1977 Federal Register, that they would save over 90,000 lives per decade -- an absurd claim relative to technical data then available. The current (far too optimistic) claim is that they have saved 1700 lives from 1986 to 1996, less than two percent of the original claim, and an even smaller percent of the over 400,000 traffic deaths that occurred in this period.

The three best technical studies consistently find that airbags reduce the risk of death in a crash by 9% for belted drivers. To interpret a 9% effectiveness, think of 100 belted drivers killed in cars without airbags. If the cars had airbags (everything else being equal), then 91 would still die and 9 would survive, usually with severe injuries. I am unaware of any intervention approved by the FDA with an effectiveness as low as 9%. Even for those driving without safety belts, which is illegal in all states except New Hampshire, airbags reduce fatality risk by only 13%.

So not only aren't airbags not saving very many lives, they are actually causing the deaths of small children due to the fact that the airbags are forcing parents to change their driving habits . . . in order to protect their children from the airbags that may kill them if they're in the front seat . . . where parents can see them.

The busybodies who inflicted this bit of madness on the American driving public and don't have to live with the consequences of their actions have obviously never read Thomas Sowell. Thomas Sowell is an economist, college professor, columnist, and one of the most level headed intelligent thinkers this country has, which is probably why he is roundly ignored by the elite and the decision makers in this country. One point he's made repeatedly over the years is that politicians, and other busy-body, do-gooders never examine the results of the policies they force on the rest of us. They never ask for results after a policy has been implemented. So when some high sounding, progressive law is passed "for the good of the people," no one ever asks beforehand, "Is this really good for the people?" And no one examines the results afterward to ask, "Was this effective in the way we wanted it to be effective?"

340 children died, trapped inside hot vehicles. Don't forget the Progressive mantra, "if it saves even one life . . ." But this is a case of a policy taking lives of the youngest and most vulnerable. And none of the fools responsible for passing the laws that killed these children is held accountable. No one has even bothered to examine the evidence that airbags maybe are not worth the cost in money or in lives. That's a crime.

Labels: airbags, Detroit Free Press, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 6:00 PM 3 comments

A Book to Not Read

I've never read any of Orson Scott Card's books. That's either because he came along after I left my Science Fiction cocoon sometime in the early 80s or because I wasn't aware of him while I was reading Science Fiction. I have nothing against the genre, I still have a lot of my old books and some day I may reread some of my old favorites by Lafferty, Dick, Ellison, Heinlein, Asimov, Sheckley, Sturgeon, Farmer, etc.

I do however, always read Card's columns at The Ornery American. His latest is called "Evil Fiction".

Let me tell you about an audiobook that I hated.

I didn't hate it because it was badly written -- it was mediocre in the way that mediocre thrillers usually are, and that means it would ordinarily have been tolerable.

No, the reason I stopped listening to Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link is that this book is evil.

I don't mean it's about evil. I don't even mean that it is evil-porn, like those horror books whose authors are pervertedly devoted to thinking up cool ways to torture and kill people.

I mean that this book, to the degree that it is read by people ignorant of history (i.e., practically everybody), will move us closer to a future in which our society permits or even approves of the murder of Jews and the destruction of the state of Israel.

Wait! This book is fiction! How could it have such an effect?

Well, it can't -- not all by itself. Its effect is incremental. But it's real.

Here's how it works.

Read the rest of the column. Then think about some of the current movies beloved by our current intellectual establishment like Syriana and Paradise Now. The entertainment we consume puts ideas in our head and colors our world view whether we want to admit it or not.

Naturally, the book also loathes the Bush administration -- that's a requirement in fiction today. (When I wrote a thriller in which American soldiers actually approved of the war against Terrorist nations and groups, and actually respected President Bush, I was attacked by Leftists as if I had created a piece of intolerable propaganda -- never mind that the real American military is full of people with those views, and the point of the novel, if it had one, was to deplore extremism on either side. Actual tolerance toward conservative views is regarded as a crime by America's "tolerant" and "freedom loving" intellectuals today.")

So why do so many intellectuals love what they claim to hate; theocracy (if it's Islamic) and totalitarianism? The answer to that might be in the writings of one of my favorite thinkers, Eric Hoffer, as written about by another one of my favorite thinkers, Thomas Sowell, here and here.

Among Hoffer's insights about mass movements was that they are an outlet for people whose individual significance is meager in the eyes of the world and — more important — in their own eyes. He pointed out that the leaders of the Nazi movement were men whose artistic and intellectual aspirations were wholly frustrated.

Hoffer said: "The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."

People who are fulfilled in their own lives and careers are not the ones attracted to mass movements: "A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding," Hoffer said. "When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."

What Hoffer was describing was the political busybody, the zealot for a cause — the "true believer," who filled the ranks of ideological movements that created the totalitarian tyrannies of the 20th century.

and

Eric Hoffer never bought the claims of intellectuals to be for the common man. "A ruling intelligentsia," he said, "whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed and wasted at will."

One of the many conceits of contemporary intellectuals that Hoffer deflated was their nature cult. "Almost all the books I read spoke worshipfully of nature," he said, recalling his own personal experience as a migrant farm worker that was full of painful encounters with nature, which urban intellectuals worshipped from afar.

Hoffer saw in this exaltation of nature another aspect of intellectuals' elitist "distaste for man." Implicit in much that they say and do is "the assumption that education readies a person for the task of reforming and reshaping humanity -- that is equips him to act as an engineer of souls and manufacturer of desirable human attributes."

Of course highly recommend that you read both Sowell and Hoffer. I may go out and buy one of Card's novels.

Labels: books, Eric Hoffer, intellectuals, Orson Scott Card, Science Fiction, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 11:24 AM 0 comments

From the Socialist Utopia of Venezuela

People clamor for it over and over, even people who should know better. It's failed every time it's been tried and yet, even among intellectuals who can read and who do know their history, it remains popular. BDS sufferers and socialist true believers throughout the world cheer whenever their latest Socialist darling, Hugo Chavez thumbs his nose at President Bush. And yet in this report we discover,

Faced with an accelerating inflation rate and shortages of basic foods like beef, chicken and milk, President Hugo Chavez has threatened to jail grocery store owners and nationalize their businesses if they violate the country's expanding price controls.

Food producers and economists say the measures announced late Thursday night, which include removing three zeroes from the denomination of Venezuela's currency, are likely to backfire and generate even more acute shortages and higher prices for consumers. Inflation climbed to an annual rate of 18.4 percent a year in January, the highest in Latin America and far above the official target of 10 percent to 12 percent.

And yet,

Chavez, whose leftist populism remains highly popular among Venezuela's poor and working classes, seemed unfazed by criticism of his policies. Appearing live on national television, he called for the creation of "committees of social control," essentially groups of his political supporters whose purpose would be to report on farmers, ranchers, supermarket owners and street vendors who circumvent the state's effort to control food prices.

But,

"It is surreal that we've arrived at a point where we are in danger of squandering a major oil boom," said Jose Guerra, a former chief of economic research at Venezuela's central bank, who left Chavez's government in 2004. "If the government insists on sticking to policies that are clearly failing, we may be headed down the road of Zimbabwe."

And,

Shortages of basic foods have been sporadic since the government strengthened price controls in 2003 after a debilitating strike by oil workers. But in recent weeks, the scarcity of items like meat and chicken have led to a panicked reaction by federal authorities as they try to understand how such shortages could develop in a seemingly flourishing economy.

Entering a supermarket here is a bizarre experience. Shelves are fully stocked with Scotch whisky, Argentine wines and imported cheeses like brie and camembert, but basic staples like black beans and desirable cuts of beef like sirloin are often absent. Customers, even those in the government's own Mercal chain of subsidized grocery stores, are left with choices like pork neck bones, rabbit and unusual cuts of lamb.

With shoppers limited to just two large packages of sugar, a black market in sugar has developed among street vendors in parts of Caracas.

None of this is new. All of this has happened in other during other attempts to subvert the marketplace. Some people just don't pay attention.

"There seems to be a basic misunderstanding in Chavez's government of what is driving scarcity and inflation," said Francisco Rodriguez, a former chief economist at Venezuela's National Assembly who teaches at Wesleyan University.

"There are competent people in the government who know that Chavez needs to lower spending if he wants to defeat these problems," Rodriguez said. "But there are few people in positions of power who are willing to risk telling him what he needs to hear."

So the climate of fear keeps Chavez in power and protects him from the truth.

Suggestion for the fearful; buy the following books. Secretly place them under Hugo's pillow before he goes to bed. Maybe he will get curious enough to read them:
Free to Choose, by Milton and Rose Friedman
Applied Economics, by Thomas Sowell.
While your at it, read them both yourself. Then you and Hugo can discuss them.

Labels: Milton Friedman, Socialism, Thomas Sowell, Venezuela

posted by Harry @ 9:43 AM 2 comments

Perspective on Israel vs Hezbollah

I don't like reading columns by Carolyn Glick. They're usually depressing. She's spent a lot of space pointing out the weaknesses in Israeli policies that have emboldened the terrorist groups and states surrounding Israel. And she's usually right. I can't remember if she's always been right, but she's been right an awful lot. Reading Carolyn Glick, you wonder if some Israelis have been trying to commit national suicide. I liked reading this column though. She is still writing the truth and analyzing the situation in a clear unapologetic manner. But now that the feces have been flung at the fan by those fanatical folk at Hezbollah, there is hope. Now Israel has been forced to fight rather than dither. The situation has been clarified - fight or die. Israelis, whose vain hopes for a negotiated peace have finally been exposed as fantasy are fighting back with a vengence. When they say "Never again!" they mean it.

As Ms. Glick points out in her column, there are still those on the extreme, insane left who still try to block Israel's campaign to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas, but there are finally enough people in Israel and the West who are getting the message that the terrorists and their sponsors in Syria and Iran cannot be reasoned with. The only way to contain them is to destroy them on the battlefield. And according to Glick, the terrorists have now given Israel, and the United States, and any other country with enough intestinal fortitude to join the battle, the kick in the ass they needed to get the job done.

FINALLY, the campaign in Lebanon is indeed the opening salvo of Iran's war against the free world. But this works both ways.

Iran and Hizbullah believe that the ferocity of the attacks against Israel will deter us all from taking action against Iran's nuclear facilities. But by giving the West the opportunity to fight it first in Lebanon, Teheran is providing the US, Israel and others with critical intelligence about its own installations. The subterranean bunkers in south Lebanon that IDF ground forces are now conquering were built by Iranian Revolutionary Guards units and designed by Iranian engineers — the same forces that conceived and constructed Iran's nuclear installations.

IN 1982, when Israel destroyed the Syrian Soviet-made and trained air force in Lebanon, it was able to provide the US with critical information about the Soviet Air Force and its air defense systems that enabled the US to outstrip both in a manner that all but sealed the fate of the evil empire. Today, by fighting Iran's proxy, Hizbullah, Israel is amassing information that will be critical for planning a successful strike against Iran's nuclear installations.

All the West needs is the will. As Glick points out, Iran is giving us the way.

Thomas Sowell, on the other hand, shows us how this war should not be fought. A lot of writers and political cartoonists have used the WWII analogy and asked, "What if we would have tried the same tactics we are using today against the Nazis and the Japanese?" Sowell, as usual, writes with exceptional clarity with his take on the subject.

What about the great cry of the hour, a cease fire?


It so happens that World War II had the biggest cease fire in history. It was called "the phony war" because, although France was officially at war with Germany, the French did very little fighting for months, while the bulk of the German army was in Poland and France had overwhelming military superiority on the western front.


Famed correspondent William L. Shirer reported on the "unreal" western front, with soldiers "on both sides looking but not shooting." German soldiers bathed in the Rhine and waved to French soldiers on the other side, who waved back.


During this period Hitler offered to negotiate peace with France and England.


Kofi Anan would have loved it.


On November 19, 1939, Shirer's diary reported: "For almost two months now there has been no military action on land, sea, or in the air." On January 1, 1940, he wrote, "this phony kind of war cannot continue long." But it was now exactly four months since war was declared. How is that for a cease fire?


Did this de facto cease fire lead to peace? No. Like other cease fires, it helped the aggressor.


It gave Hitler time to move his divisions from the eastern front, after they had conquered Poland, to the western front, facing France.


Now that military superiority along the Rhine had shifted in favor of the German armies, the war suddenly went from being phony to being devastatingly real.


Hitler attacked and France collapsed in six weeks.

You can't argue with historical fact. Those who try to will either engage in name calling or attempt to rewrite history.

I'm just sitting here, following the news day by day, hoping that the United States will allow Israel the time they need to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. That is what will bring peace to the Middle East. A few airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities wouldn't hurt either, at least in the long run.

Do we have the nerve? We'd better.

Labels: Carolyn Glick, Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 8:21 PM 0 comments

Fox News and Thomas Sowell

Is Fox News fair and balanced as they claim? Or are they really part of the vast right wing conspiracy as those on the left complain? I don't care. They just ran an hour long interview with Thomas Sowell, so they're alright by me!

Labels: Fox News, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 5:16 PM 0 comments

As Katrina Turns - Contrasting Columnists

In Rochelle Riley's first Detroit Free Press column on Katrina, which ran on September 7, she, like so many other sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome blasts the president unmercifully.

President George W. Bush is so out of touch with folks who don't live like he does, so disconnected from average Americans, that he doesn't understand that people with no savings can't afford a limit on Social Security; that people without jobs cannot count on employer-funded health insurance; that people without means, without cars, without family, cannot simply walk away from their homes.

People who are poor do not live like you, Mr. President. It is those people, poor and black, poor and white, poor and Cajun, who were left to drown in New Orleans.

Part of Bush's problem is his friends. He appointed Michael Brown as Federal Emergency Management Agency chief after Brown was forced out of his previous job as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. Brown's greatest strength: being friends with Joe Allbaugh, manager of Bush's 2000 campaign, according to the New York Daily News.

[ . . .]

Forget politics. Forget race. Forget the 2008 presidential election. This isn't Bush-bashing. This is an American tragedy, an avoidable one. And when we have re-raised an American city, somebody should pay for the dead.

Not Bush-bashing? Who is she trying to kid?

She does change her tune a bit in her September 9 column. I think some facts were beginning to roll her way. She does work in a newspaper office. In theory, there should be lots and lots of facts at her disposal. What she does with them is anyone's guess. Her focus in this, her second column is totally different.

Television, which once kept us informed, has now made us voyeurs, living every moment that we can in moments that we wouldn't wish on anyone. Why would we want to be in the flood? Why do we want to sit and watch images shot as if we're in boats floating in toxic water, walking down streets with armed officers searching for those who would interfere with rescues?

Unlike 9/11, which was shocking, unexpected and quickly overtaken by thoughts of revenge, Katrina was expected, poorly received and quickly overtaken by thoughts of congressional hearings and accusations of who is most to blame. And every charge spurs debate, most of which can be found day or night -- on television.

And here's a thought: Why does America continue to broadcast its weaknesses, showing every enemy what we do and don't know how to do and protect against? Could we be more naive than to think the world is ignoring this? At what point is our safety more important than our curiosity?

In the days before unlimited coverage, bad news after a hurricane or flood or mine disaster came by telephone, and bodies were rarely seen before funerals.

Hmmm, broadcasting our weaknesses to our enemies? Has she become a "neocon"?

By her September 14th column, she writes like someone who wants her readers to forget her previous hysterical ranting.

You cannot predict the wind. You cannot predict the precise place a hurricane will hit. But you can predict the duties that come after. You can predict the work that must be done.

And the problem with the very necessary analysis of what went wrong with the response to victims of Hurricane Katrina is that we live in America, where we've made it impossible to talk about how to protect each other as Americans without raising our divisiveness first, riding it like horses, with our red or blue flags raised higher than our red, white and blue one.

If we don't take politics out of the discussion and look instead at how local, state and federal officials failed in New Orleans, we will not respond more effectively next time.

And the only people excited about our continuing chaos and inability to have a discussion are those who would potentially harm us more, not with natural disasters but with man-made ones.

We look silly for refusing to discuss what went wrong for fear of political fallout.

She now sounds downright reasonable. It's too bad she couldn't have begun that way.

For an example of someone who thought BEFORE he wrote, here is Thomas Sowell.

Whatever later investigation may turn up about the mistakes of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in New Orleans, it is unlikely to show the shrill charges of "racism" to be anything other than reckless political rhetoric.

FEMA has bungled other emergencies where most of the victims were white and in previous administrations. Like many government bureaucracies, FEMA is an equal-opportunity bungler.

Many people who think that government is the answer to our problems do not bother to check out the evidence. But it can be eye-opening to compare how private businesses responded to hurricane Katrina and how local, state and national governments responded.

Well before Katrina reached New Orleans, when it was still just a tropical depression off the coast of Florida, Wal-Mart was rushing electric generators, bottled water, and other emergency supplies to its distribution centers along the Gulf coast.

Nor was Wal-Mart unique. Federal Express rushed 100 tons of supplies into the stricken area after Katrina hit. State Farm Insurance sent in a couple of thousand special agents to expedite disaster claims. Other businesses scrambled to get their goods or services into the area.

Meanwhile, laws prevent the federal government from coming in without the permission or a request from state or local authorities. Unfortunately, the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana are of a different party than President Bush, which may have something to do with their initial reluctance to have him come in and get political credit.

In the end, there was no political credit for anybody. There was just finger-pointing and the blame game.

And days before that column, Mr. Sowell wrote this:

Government cannot solve all our problems, even in normal times, much less during a catastrophe of nature that reminds man how little he is, despite all his big talk.

The most basic function of government, maintaining law and order, breaks down when floods or blackouts paralyze the system.

During good times or bad, the police cannot police everybody. They can at best control a small segment of society. The vast majority of people have to control themselves.

That is where the great moral traditions of a society come in — those moral traditions that it is so hip to sneer at, so cute to violate, and that our very schools undermine among the young, telling them that they have to evolve their own standards, rather than following what old fuddy duddies like their parents tell them.

Now we see what those do-it-yourself standards amount to in the ugliness and anarchy of New Orleans.

In a world where people flaunt their "independence," their "right" to disregard moral authority, and sometimes legal authority as well, the tragedy of New Orleans reminds us how utterly dependent each one of us is for our very lives on millions of other people we don't even see.

Thousands of people in New Orleans will be saved because millions of other people they don't even know are moved by moral obligations to come to their rescue from all corners of this country. The things our clever sophisticates sneer at are ultimately all that stand between any of us and utter devastation.

Any of us could have been in New Orleans. And what could we have depended on to save us? Situational ethics? Postmodern philosophy? The media? The lawyers? The rhetoric of the intelligentsia?

No, what we would have to depend on are the very things that are going to save the survivors of hurricane Katrina, the very things that clever people are undermining.

New Orleans can be rebuilt and the levees around it shored up. But can the moral levees be shored up, not only in New Orleans but across America?

Which writer makes more sense to you? I suppose that depends on the depth of your Bush-hatred, vs how much or if you are willing to discuss the real situation surrounding Katrina.

Labels: BDS, female genital mutilation, Hurricane Katrina, Rochelle Riley, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 9:10 PM 0 comments

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell turned 75 yesterday. I hope he keeps writing for another 75 years (well, maybe he can take a year or two off for good behavior). One of the good things the The Detroit News has done is carry one of his columns every Saturday for the past many years. The ones they don't run, I read at Jewish World Review. I've also read some of his books. He has a wonderful way of cutting through the common misconceptions, prejudices, and plain lies that plague our society. He does it (with nothing up his sleve) using documented facts and logical arguments based on those facts. It's amazing what can be learned if you're willing to open your mind.

I wasn't always willing to listen. In the beginning, he enraged me with his condemnation of public education. Being a public school teacher, I took it personally. When I did some research though, into educational practices that actually work and brought those practices to the attention of my colleagues and administrators, I discovered the awful truth that Dr. Sowell was right. Most of my colleagues weren't interested, and the administrators brushed me off, even when they saw my results. You can read about that here, and here.

As long as he keeps writing, I'll keep reading him. Besides, I haven't read all of his books yet.

Labels: Detroit News, education, Jewish World Review, Thomas Sowell

posted by Harry @ 3:56 PM 0 comments