Reaching the top

Worth a look:

Early Obama Letter Confirms Inability to Write

I have no comment except to note an old distinction between "Contest Mobility" and "Sponsored Mobility."

Contest mobility occurs as individuals rise or fall in the education/occupation status system according to their individual performance in what is essentially a competition for positions. Society presumably is better off when the most competent and motivated man or woman wins. It is also widely believed a contest selection system is most fair to individuals being judged, because success is a matter of individual merit.

Sponsored mobility occurs to the extent that, instead of a free competition, elites select who will occupy favored positions in the status system, and do so according to criteria other than, or in addition to, individual performance.  Traditionally, sponsored mobility was seen, for example, in preferred admissions to elite universities for the children of alumni, and in quota systems that restrict admissions to elite colleges, law firms, etc.  Call it rigging the contest in favor of some (those receiving sponsorship) to the disadvantage of the rest.

Affirmative action was originally conceived as a way to increase equality of opportunity, to allow the previously disadvantaged to compete more successfully in an unbiased contest for more desirable positions in the status structure. But as goals were replaced by quotas, affirmative action rather quickly morphed into a system of sponsored mobility. If you read the American Thinker article above, and if you believe what it reports, it may seem difficult to imagine who could stand more fully as examples of sponsored mobility than Barack and Michelle Obama.

But George W. Bush was also a prime example of sponsored mobility.  And Al Gore would have been, had he won. Thinking about recent presidents, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton may be the biggest exceptions. We could argue about what the lesson in all this is, but I think it argues for President Perry.

Byron

Another one

Time Magazine: Duncan should worry about his mess in Chicago before messing with Texas


Another Obama Administration official, that is, who is nothing but an empty-suit political hack from Illinois.  In this case, it's his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who formerly ran the Chicago Public Schools, which are scandalously bad, perhaps the very worst urban school system in the nation, a union-dominated quagmire of criminal nonfeasance.  But that seems to be news to Arne, because he turns out, somehow, to know nothing about achievement levels in the Chicago school system he left behind. Clearly, this guy has the right level of incompetence to fit right into the Odumbo Administration.

Obysmal looked at Duncan and saw the pluperfect choice to run our U.S. Dept. of Education.  In other words, just the right guy to get the teachers unions into harness for the 2012 re-election campaign. Priority One!  But Arne is already fumbling the job with this (below) lame-brained misfire of an attempt at an attack on Perry's education record in Texas:

Byron

Labor Unions: Progressive?

Question: Are labor unions progressive or conservative organizations?

Answer: Labor unions are deeply conservative institutions, in the worst, reactionary sense of "conservative." Labor unions have aways fought technological change, going back to the Luddite machine wreckers destroying power looms at the turn of the 18th Century, and long before that as guilds resisted changes in production methods.

Labor unions exist to preserve and protect the technological status quo. If labor unions had their way, productivity and societal wealth would have been frozen long ago, at vastly lower levels than we now enjoy. Social and technological advance has required the defeat of these organizations at every step. Those defeats occurred because, fortunately, unions are no match for the efficiency of markets.

In the 1950s, Yugoslavia introduced a system that put factories under the managerial control of their workers, an old idea known as Syndicalism. The idea of putting workers in control was to avoid the exploitation of labor by management -- in Marxist terms to insure that workers receive the actual value of their production. (Of course, this involves assuming that the Labor Theory of Value makes any kind of sense, which it doesn't. Marx himself couldn't make it work, which is why he gave up and never completed the third part of Das Kapital.)

The Yugoslav experiment was eventually abandoned as a miserable failure. It failed because worker-managers refused to introduce changes that required lay-offs, or to close outmoded, inefficient, and failing factories. Productive resources became badly misallocated, in other words, which is what always happens when you try to do without the market.

So, putting the union in charge of the plant quickly made for an outmoded, non-competitive, failing operation. The point is that given the reactionary/conservative core function of labor unions, the outcome was perfectly predictable.

Byron

Fanning the flames

Obama sticks by crisis-causing policies

"Having managed to create an income-tax system in which fully half of the “taxpayers” pay no tax at all, the left is now trying to decouple the failing entitlement from its taxpayer base as well"



Well, it's Obama's One-And-Only Idea: Get ALL revenue from "the rich," who are portrayed as terminally greedy and undeserving, and have Government redistribute the booty to everybody else. If that sounds like something that can't work for long, you have 20/20 hearing. Why "the rich" would stand by to be milked like so many cows is not explained, and where investment capital and entrepreneurial risk-takers are supposed to come from is also a deep mystery.

Obama's "economics" is just a pastiche of Marxist baby-talk, wrapped in a naive theory of class warfare.  It's exactly how Europe has ended up on the brink of disaster, with mobs rioting in the streets demanding to be placated forever on somebody else's dime.  Obama's worldview is exactly what you'd expect from someone whose only experience in the non-academic world was as an Alinsky-inspired community organizer.  His only job-training was to learn how to peddle this tripe to the ignorant, and he's still got a head full of it.

It seems inconceivable that any such person would end up in charge of the US economy, but here we are.

Byron

Is Obama Smart?

Is Obama Smart?


The piece concludes "not very."  But "smart" is not defined, notice.  I think Obama is plenty smart in the sense of IQ points.  Political smarts are something else, though, and so is wisdom.  Those have to come through experience, and the making of mistakes that the trial-and-error of experience always provides. An over-confident Winston Churchill made a catastrophic mistake at Gallipoli, which very nearly ended his public career before it started. But that experience made him a much wiser man, and eventually a highly successful wartime leader.

Obama was not ready to be president because he badly lacked experience.  It's not that he isn't smart enough, it's that he doesn't know enough, and that's why he acts unwisely.  No matter how smart you are, without the wisdom of experience the best you can be is quick-witted, articulate, and shrewd.  Those can make you a successful car salesman, say, but for the Presidency, as has become obvious, they aren't enough.

Byron

Taking an America-hating Euro twit to the woodshed.

Taking an America-hating Euro twit to the woodshed.

This is how it's done:

An Anatomy of European Nonsense

If we are to survive the looming catastrophe, we need to face the truth


What Byron is learning is that he was wrong.

The argument I always made was that no economy can support both a socialist welfare state and a global military. I thought that Europe's social democracies could exist only because the U.S. was paying Europe's defense costs. (Which always made it galling to listen to smug Euro-talk about how pitifully inadequate the U.S. social safety net is compared with their cradle-to-grave support systems.)

But no. The economic collapse in Europe is demonstrating that the entitlement state is not supportable all by itself.  It simply cannot control the demand for ever-expanding services and their ever-ballooning costs, and it contains too many disincentives to economic productivity and wealth creation.

The longer-term results of Europe's great post-war experiment are finally coming in, and they tell us that what didn't work under communism doesn't work under capitalism, either. The socialist dream is over and done.

The politics of the coming transition are going to be extremely difficult. It was easy to introduce and expand entitlements, but reducing them won't be. I doubt it could be accomplished at all without a full-blown debt crisis that threatens economic collapse. Since that is where we now know socialism inevitably leads, we can also see that the system always contained the seeds of its own demise.

Obama? He's so far behind the curve that he's mostly irrelevant, his "tax the rich" rhetoric of class war laughably unserious and beside the point. He's still a believer that socialism can work. Obama has become a relic.

Byron

Rick Perry: I support constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage and abortion

"Two caveats to his otherwise strict support for the Tenth Amendment, both of which happen to serve the agenda of social conservatives whose votes he’s depending on. He backed away from his “states’ rights” defense of legalizing gay marriage last week; here’s the inevitable climbdown on abortion too, which he described as a states’ rights issue a few days ago."

Hmm.  I don't like this.  However:

Constitutional amendments cannot be imposed at the Federal level, requiring ratification by three-fourths of the states. So the fact that a President favors an amendment does not decide anything; it's still up to the states.  3/4 is a very tough hill to climb, as the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment demonstrated.

If this is Perry's strategic thinking, then it could be smart -- get credit from social conservatives for what is essentially lip service for something that has no chance of passing.

Is Perry playing the game at two levels?

He's known to be a shrewd operator.  But if social conservatives decide they are being gamed, it could backfire.

We shall see.

Byron

Denouenment

'Civility': The Denouement - The liberal elite grows even angrier and more desperate.

Socialism is driven by a moral-political vision of the Good Society, and it has a redistributive economic theory of how to achieve it. If the economic theory worked, the whole world would have become socialist long before now.

But, without exception, the economic theory of socialism has been demonstrated not to work, and so the moral-political vision never gets implemented. It exists only as an abstract ideal, the socialist dream.

And that's a good thing, because the moral-political vision of socialism, were it ever to be instituted, would be found not to work, either, because it's based on a deeply unrealistic view of human nature. Socialists know that, but they presume that if their dream could ever be made real, the Good Society would then produce people with a new and higher kind of human nature.

It has always been the socialist lament that they are forced to work with human beings as they are, not as socialists believe they should be. The various failed attempts to create the "New Socialist Man" have been noteworthy for their brutality and vast toll in human lives, what Lenin described as breaking eggs to make the omelet. What gets made in reality are wrecked societies and vast piles of corpses.

Market capitalism was a natural, evolutionary development, not a theory imposed. It grew from the realities of our human nature, as the economic expression of the hierarchical, competitive species that we are. Adam Smith provided its theory and rationale long after the fact; he and Ricardo merely described something that had already evolved on its own, as a natural consequence of trade, and the specialization trade encourages. Incredible increases in living standards, societal wealth, and human freedom are the natural result, as we've seen wherever markets are allowed to flourish.

Byron