G.M.’s Electric Lemon

G.M.’s Electric Lemon
Government subsidies distort another market into stupidity and waste, as the Obama administration's Three Stooges economic policies pour truckloads taxpayer money down another yawning rat hole.

If GM had gone bankrupt as it should have, the market would have quickly and efficiently re-allocated its assets to where they could be put to best use. But no, the UAW, the greediest, most self-destructive union of them all, had to be pandered to by Democrats for political reasons, so Obysmal puked up a $50 Billion tax-payer bail-out. Not paid for, of course, just piled onto the deficit.

The first one of us GM owners who starts getting dividend checks, please let the rest of us know. We're counting on those GM checks to help pay our increased taxes.

Byron

ObamaCare in a nutshell

A portrait of Obamacare, courtesy of the minority in the Joint Economic Committee:

Texas Republican Rep. Kevin Brady says in a release that committee analysts actually couldn't fit everything in: “This portrays only about one-third of the complexity of the final bill. It’s actually worse than this.”

Enjoy it in an easy-to-grasp larger size here.

From Obama fiscal commission co-chair pans health bill’s impact on costs:

The Democratic co-chair of President Obama’s fiscal commission said Wednesday that the president’s health care bill will do very little to bring down costs, contradicting claims from the White House that their sweeping legislation will dramatically impact runaway entitlement spending.

“It didn’t do a lot to address cost factors in health care. So we’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Erskine Bowles, former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, speaking about the new health law, which was signed into law by Obama this past spring after a nearly year-long fight in Congress.

Bowles, speaking at an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said that even with the passage of Obama’s legislation, health care costs are still going to “really eat us alive” unless dramatic changes are made.

Bowles badly understates the truth, which is that ObamaCare will raise costs astronomically, just like every other program of its sort has done, until draconian rationing becomes necessary, like it always does.

Obama, of course, blatantly lied about this from day one, because ObamaCare was never about saving money, and the fanciful promise that it would never had an ounce of credibility in any serious quarter. Everybody knows costs will explode. From the beginning the only goal was to socialize the medical care system, and if that meant destroying it in the process, well that's just too bad.

The wealthy and connected (including of course the Obama family and the rest of our political aristocracy), will always buy the best medical care money and travel can buy. But the great mass of the people eventually will be forced into a government system that's equally bad across the board. That's what success looks like for a socialist ideologue like Obama.

Byron

Clarity begins to dawn

America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution has gone viral on the web. Much of it is extremely good. Worth being aware of, even if you don't read it.

The true dividing line in American politics is the Political Ruling Class vs. the citizenry. The Tea Party movement represents the suddenly growing realization that the division between Democrat and Republican politicians is trivial by comparison, and that "bipartisan" can have a sinister meaning. The Political Class is bipartisan in the true and degenerate sense of the term -- cooperative collusion by both parties against non-government institutions and the tax-paying citizenry. Give me genuinely divided government, or gridlock, any day.

The survey below finds the Political Class favors (Surprise!) a government managed economy. Well, of course. A government managed economy puts the Political Class in control, a free market gives them no special privilege. Control and privilege are what the Political Class is all about, its reason for being.

The development of a Political Class is precisely what the Framers tried to prevent with all their emphasis on Separation of Powers. The question we face is the vastly more difficult one of how to de-legitimize and dismantle a huge, privileged Political Class that's already in place and largely in control.

Byron

POWER LINE: The Great Divide

The current state of American politics can be summed up in this poll data, published today by Rasmussen Reports:

75% of Likely Voters prefer free markets over a government managed economy. Just 14% think a government managed economy is better while 11% are not sure.

Well, one would hope so. But here is the kicker:

America’s Political Class is far less enamored with the virtues of a free market. In fact, Political Class voters narrowly prefer a government managed economy over free markets by a 44% to 37% margin.

That strikes me as a rather stunning finding.

Yes, and one that perhaps explains why so many voters think the current setup lacks the consent of the governed.

Nothing new here

Breitbart hits NAACP with promised video of racism

The video is interesting only for showing the hypocrisy of the NAACP, which has been foolishly throwing the raaacism epithet at the Tea Party folks.

Otherwise, what's shown in the video is just standard-issue affirmative action: Limited resources are refused to a white applicant, so they can be preferentially awarded to minority applicants instead. No different than squeezing out white applicants by favoring minorities for college admissions, fire department jobs, etc.

The reality is that we have reached the sad point where NOT allocating by race -- going strictly by relevant test scores, or some other race-blind selection mechanism -- is considered raaacist. Once the 14th Amendment got interpreted as applying to groups, this kind of anti-meritocratic nonsense that sacrifices equal protection of the individual on the altar of group identity and grievance, was the inevitable result. The Orwellian notion of race neutrality as raaacism is simply the social policy imperative that's fully implied by the identity politics of entitlement.

Byron

The Team

I thought nut-case Dan Rather going down in flames pushing his obviously phony anti-Bush documents might be the permanent all-time low, but here's an altogether sickening new level of media dishonesty and collaboration: Media mogul Mort Zuckerman says he wrote one of Obama's speeches.

Media mogul and Democrat lap dog. Obama's Minister of Propaganda.

Mort Zuckerman Admits He Helped Write One Of Obama's Speeches

What a disgrace. No matter how biased and bad you think the liberal media are, they always turns out to be even worse. The media got Obama elected, and now their Job One is to prop him up. Why would anyone now believe that a word Zuckerman says could be the objective truth? Why would anyone believe the reporters and columnists who work for him -- they surely know where their boss stands.

Unless and until proven otherwise in each particular case, I think the default position toward the liberal media has to be the one Mary McCarthy took with respect to commie tool Lillian Helman:

"Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'.

Byron

Winding down

U.S. defense spending subsidizes European free-riding welfare states

In the past few years, especially since the onset of the global economic crisis, the problem has become much worse as European nations struggle to deal with increasingly burdensome social welfare states. Military spending in Europe has moved from the realm of inadequate to the realm of pathetic

.

Yes, European welfare states exist because of decades of subsidy by US taxpayers, but the important thing is the obvious larger lesson. The lesson is that if Obama Democrats want to reconfigure the US as a Euro-style welfare state -- which they do -- they will have to drastically cut military spending. If there are compelling reasons not to cut military spending by half or more -- which there are -- they will instead have to bankrupt the country. Which is what Obama Democrats are now in the process of doing. There is no third alternative for doing what they want to do.
The best anyone can do, and the best anyone has ever done, is to establish conditions that produce an expanding economy that creates large amounts of wealth. America became affluent because when it was taken for granted that "The business of America is business." But today's Democrats are all about redistribution of wealth, not wealth creation. That would require lower taxes and freer markets, and government that uses its powers to encourage and facilitate the private sector. People like Obama (under the spell of an ideology with an unbroken worldwide record of demonstrated failure), see the private sector as a necessary evil at best; they operate under the delusion that, somehow, government is the source of wealth, rather than merely the primary consumer of wealth. The inevitable result of that view is a government, like Obama's, that spends more wealth than there is, and more even than there will be.

The accumulated fruits of the labor and ingenuity of generations, past and future, are being squandered. The great Winding Down of America, entirely self-inflicted. How's that for a proud legacy?

Byron

Katrina silver lining

Katrina's Silver Lining: The School Choice Revolution in New Orleans

Wonderful story.

All that stands in the way in other inner cities is the self-serving, vicious alliance between administrative bureaucracy and teachers unions.

The resulting sheer, unnecessary waste of generations of minority youth is the greatest scandal in American society, by far. Nothing else comes even remotely close. Nothing that even approximated the endless failure of inner-city school systems would ever be tolerated in any other area of American life.

Byron

Once a liar?

Croce defined the task of the historian as making the past meaningful to the present. But not making it up.

Bellesiles does appear to be teaching where he claims. Well, that's something, I guess. With his history, you wouldn't think any publication would take him at his word about anything. He appears to specialize in telling tales that a certain audience badly wants to be true. That can lead them to make fools of themselves, as Garry Wills did in his NYT review of Bellesiles' fraudulent book, Arming America. Its story was just too, too good to be examined critically by Wills, or by academic historians, who awarded it the prestigious Bancroft Prize. (Amateur history buffs subsequently exposed the book as a fraud, it was withdrawn by its publisher, its Bancroft Prize was rescinded, and Bellesiles was fired from Emory.)

Bellesiles, having found a position as a lecturer at Central Connecticut State, has an Iraq story in the 6/27 Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here we go again?

Disgraced ‘Historian’ Michael Bellesiles’ Fishy War Story

Interesting reversal

Why liberals should support gun rights -- on Daily Kos, of all places. The comments are interesting, too -- heavily supportive, and obviously influenced by Justice Thomas's (!) concurring opinion in the McDonald case just decided.

Why Liberals Should Love the Second Amendment

Simple as this: Gun control turned out to be toxic for Democrats at the ballot box, and it is therefore dead, expunged from the issue agenda.

The gun control position was based on a good-hearted impulse but it suffered from one basic flaw: It never made an ounce of rational sense.

The path of its demise is ironic, because the gun control movement's strategy had always been to take advantage of the emotional aftermath of high-profile shooting incidents, hysteria that outfits like the Brady Campaign did their best to whip up. But it was finally a horrific shooting incident, the mass killing at Virginia Tech, that caused most people to recognize the folly of that approach. Once people looked at the issue rationally, it was the beginning of the end for what had always been a very bad idea.

Byron

Resentment: Socialism's Bitter Core

Robert Heinlein:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

Nietzsche thought that resentment is the ultimate basis for conventional morality. Human societies, he said, were once theocratic, under the control of a priestly class that mediated between the gods and men. But this hegemony was periodically threatened by exceptional individuals, persons intensely motivated by some grand vision of accomplishment.

In response, the priests promulgated one or another version of what Nietzsche called "slave morality": All men are equal, turn the other cheek, those who suffer are morally superior, etc. This is the morality of the weak who resent the capabilities of the strong. It's the morality of the unexceptional majority, of the herd, driven by resentment of the exceptional. The priests claim divine sanction for this version of morality, and thus do they maintain their own power.

Nietzsche had in mind the warrior-conqueror, like Alexander the Great, who embodied the set of heroic virtues that defined nobility. Slave morality turned the ideal of nobility on its head: it re-defined noble virtues, and even the notion of nobility itself, as evil, and established their opposites as the moral Good.

In the modern world, the same applies to the founder of a business empire. John D. Rockerfeller, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, etc., were once looked up to as ideals of energy and accomplishment. Modern liberalism devalues and stigmatizes the personal characteristics and behavior that made those men successful, and it defines morality by their opposites. Resentment is why the fact of "trickle down," the explosive expansion of societal wealth produced by capitalism, comes to be vilified as "trickled on." Resentment is why the socialist ant hill is exalted on moral grounds, while its unbroken record of economic failure goes unremarked or denied.

Critiques of socialism almost always land wide of the mark. Every critique of socialism must begin with the recognition that socialism is fundamentally a moral system, not an economic one. It is the secular embodiment of slave morality, and resentment is its bitter, irreducible core.

Byron