Dakota Beacon

Originally at American Thinker

Within the last few years, we have been treated to attempts by government to control our food intake with regulatory “nudges” and legislative edicts. Sugar, salt, trans-fats, fats in general, fast foods, and school lunches are just a few ingredients and food types which have come under assault by sanctimonious busybodies seeking to dictate “healthy” eating to everyone.

New York Times food writer  provides the latest in we-know-what’s-best-for-you babble. In a Times op-ed, Bittman complains, “WHAT will it take to get Americans to change our eating habits?”

The question itself makes a fundamentally flawed assumption and exhibits arrogance. Why is it anyone’s job to “get Americans to change [their] eating habits?” By posing the question in the first place, Bittman implicitly considers himself to be among a select minority tasked with providing guidance to the majority.

It doesn’t take long for Bittman to shift the blame for unhealthy eating habits from eaters to providers of that which is eaten. Only six sentences into the article, he laments that “the food industry appears incapable of marketing healthier foods.”

The statement exhibits an elemental misunderstanding of human nature and sound business practice–knowledge voids common to food totalitarians. In fact, Bittman gets cause and effect bass-ackwards. Successful businesses comprehend people’s desires and market products designed to satisfy those desires. But our food writer thinks that clever advertising can alter human biology, that 175,000 years of DNA-programmed craving for calorie- and taste-laden fats can be erased from Homo sapiens. TV commercials featuring impossibly slender, scantily-clad carrots will entice the masses to give up Whoppers and Big Macs and clamor for the sensual mouth-feel of Brussels sprouts and cauliflower.

How does Bittman propose to convince America to eat more healthily? He gets specific:

The average American consumes 44.7 gallons of soft drinks annually. (Although that includes diet sodas, it does not include noncarbonated sweetened beverages, which add up to at least 17 gallons a person per year.) Sweetened drinks could be taxed at 2 cents per ounce, so a six-pack of Pepsi would cost $1.44 more than it does now. An equivalent tax on fries might be 50 cents per serving; a quarter extra for a doughnut.

Bittman exclaims, “It’s fun–inspiring, even–to think about implementing a program like this.”

But who will decide which foods are healthy and which foods are not? Who will set the penalties for eating the wrong stuff? Bittman supplies the answer.

We have experts who can figure out how “bad” a food should be to qualify, and what the rate should be; right now they’re busy calculating ethanol subsidies. Diet sodas would not be taxed.

Ah, there it is, “the vision of the anointed,” to use Thomas Sowell’s words. Sowell points out that self-anointed visionaries, who see a mostly dumb humanity as moldable by a smart few, assign themselves “a special state of grace.” In fact, “Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane.”¹ Sowell expands further, for implicit in the vision of the anointed,

…is the notion that the potential is very different from the actual, and that means exist to improve human nature toward its potential, or that such means can be evolved or discovered, so that man will do the right thing for the right reason, rather than for ulterior psychic or economic rewards.²

To food totalitarians, the “right thing” is the consumption of foods specified by “experts.” The “right reason” is because food totalitarians decree that their decree is infallible.

Here we have the folly of big-government liberalism on grand display. How long before some starry-eyed but angry-faced Democrat proposes legislation to force “healthy food” advertising? Food totalitarians think that human nature can be remolded by anointed administrators using food rules concocted by anointed experts, that “psychic or economic rewards” can be rendered irrelevant, that humans will then crave organic beet juice and bean sprouts instead of beer and hot dogs. Liberals think that the impossible can be willed into existence by force of law.
________________________

¹ Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed, Basic Books, 1995, pp.2-3.
² Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions, Basic Books, 2007, p. 18.

Originally at American Thinker

By exaggerating the severity of poverty in America, progressives attempt to justify higher levels of wealth redistribution. By over-classifying people as “poor,” progressive politicians further enable the dependency which got those politicians elected in the first place. Worst of all, encouraging dependency yields more dependency.

A new study by Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield of the conservative Heritage Foundation finds that:

In discussions about poverty… misunderstanding and exaggeration are commonplace. Over the long term, exaggeration has the potential to promote a substantial misallocation of limited resources for a government that is facing massive future deficits. In addition, exaggeration and misinformation obscure the nature, extent, and causes of real material deprivation, thereby hampering the development of well-targeted, effective programs to reduce the problem.

Rector and Sheffield point out the need for an accurate portrayal of poverty in order to craft “public policy.”

It is disturbing to observe the ease with which some conservatives fall in line with the progressive notion that government should engage in “crafting public policy.” Governmental public policy ends up being dogma-pushing by the elitists who happen to be in control at the time when said “public policy” is enacted. The Heritage Foundation and other conservatives should not fall for progressive nonsense.

Poor people’s best hope is for America to return to its libertarian roots. The best “help” for the poor comes from private enterprise. And private enterprise thrives when government gets out of its way.

Millions of “poor” people will never work at the U.S. Forest Service or the CIA. Those same millions will never have more money and services than the nanny-state can fund by confiscating wealth from the non-poor unless those millions stop accepting the ill-gotten “help.” Millions could and would work for the Burger Kings, Taco Bells, Brake Masters, KinderCares, and Walmarts of America if government regulation was stripped back, taxes reduced, and minimum wages eliminated to stimulate the economic growth that would demand more Burger Kings, Taco Bells, Brake Masters, KinderCares, and Walmarts.

The most inspired “public policy” in the world will not lift the poor from poverty. Private enterprise provides just enough “help” to set people on the path to helping themselves.

Coercion: the practice of compelling a person or manipulating them to behave in an involuntary way (whether through action or inaction) by use of threats, intimidation, trickery, or some other form of pressure or force. These are used as leverage, to force the victim to act in the desired way.

Extortion (also called shakedown, outwresting, and exaction) is a criminal offence which occurs when a person unlawfully obtains either money, property or services from a person(s), entity, or institution, through coercion. Refraining from doing harm is sometimes euphemistically called protection. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime groups. The actual obtainment of money or property is not required to commit the offense. Making a threat of violence which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence is sufficient to commit the offense. Exaction refers not only to extortion or the unlawful demanding and obtaining of something through force,[1] but additionally, in its formal definition, means the infliction of something such as pain and suffering or making somebody endure something unpleasant.[2]


So, people, how is last night’s speech of President Obama NOT “extortion”?  Has this not, in fact, been his preferred method all along?  We see him in full make-up, glowering threateningly at us over his teleprompter and through the camera lens.  He tells us he “cannot guarantee” that seniors will receive their Social Security checks.  He “cannot guarantee” that our military will be compensated, now that he has them bombing Libya and moving by stealth into other Middle Eastern and Balkan areas.  The obvious effect, and I would imagine a fairly predictable one, is to light up the switchboards of Congress with frantic callers of 62+ years, panicking and urging their representatives in Washington to buckle. 

The only problem with this is that these senior citizens might succeed in securing Obama’s mission to scuttle spending reform only to receive their checks – written on worthless currency.  When it takes a truckload of dollars to buy the week’s meager groceries and won’t cover the soaring energy bills (also guaranteed by Obama’s EPA), who will they call and what will they say?  The issue is not that we can’t afford Social Security.  The issue is that we can’t afford this president and his programs and his spending habits.  We are dealing with a spoiled brat here, who figures that our financial problems are everyone’s but his. 

“Tax the corporate jet owners!  Make them pay!  Share the burden!”  Okay, Mr. President.  Let’s look at that option.  How much do we tax them?  Here’s my proposal.  We tell them that if they still own their jets by January 1 we will tax 100% of their net worth.  That ought to take care of them.  It will also put out of business a lot of employed pilots, a bucketload of union factory workers, a large number of salesmen and mechanics.  But it’s worth it to end this “abuse”, right?  And then let’s take a look at PUBLIC jet usage.  As a part of this effort to empty the skies of corporate jets, let us require that Obama apply for special permission any time he deems it necessary to take Air Force One (and One-A) out of the hangar.  No more little trips to India or Paris for Michelle and the kids.  No more Guinness swilling in Dublin.  No more trips to Brazil or Martha’s Vineyard, or anywhere else.  In this age of instantaneous electronic communication, let this man sit at his desk, where he belongs while on the public clock.  Let him use the miracles of modern day communication.  He can conference call, just like the other executives.  His wife can stay home and read or supervise the home these people inhabit at our expense.  Let her do her duties as the White House hostess.  She has been elected to do nothing.  Until she is, she is merely a calf of the system, an adjunct.  If this is not suitable, let her pursue a career for which she is trained, if she does have one. I am all about liberating women.

It is long past time to put the President and First Family on a budget.  The president of a company might have a generous expense account.  He must, however, account for it and show that his expenditures are indeed related to his office.  If the company can’t afford $1 million for this he won’t have it at his disposal.  He will have what the company can afford.  This is how we must begin to run the White House.  There should be minimal staff, few if any “vacations” and the only ones we should pay for are the weekends at Camp David, if we feel that, given our financial status we can even afford to maintain that.  No more pizzas flown in from St. Louis if the account is used up.  The girls should go to a public school like the other children of working people in Washington, whose wish to continue the voucher system was scotched by this man. 

We have as the Head of our government a man who believes himself to be a member of some kind of “elite”, or ‘nobility”.  In America we don’t have this, Mr. President.  If you are successful and earn a good living you can spend it on jets, yachts, trips, $500 sneakers, fly in pizza from St. Louis to Washington (because, of course, no one can make pizza in Washington) or fly lobster into the woods of Montana.  But you, sir, are a public SERVANT.  The operative word is “servant”.  You are doing whatever extravagant thing you do on our backs.  Don’t talk to us about “fairness” or “sharing the burden”.  Don’t you dare. 

And don’t believe for a moment that you will be forgiven for your insult to the working people, to elderly Americans retired after a lifetime of contributing, and to our valiant military families.  You are none of the above.   You have no business extorting phone calls to Washington from us by threatening to withhold government checks or default on the debt.  We are in trouble because you and others like you have spent our money irresponsibly.  It is time to fold up “Obamacare”.  We can’t afford it if you can’t “guarantee” disbursement of checks.  We can now finally get rid of the Department of Energy, before if racks up the extra promised burden of $184 billion.  We can close the Department of Education while we still have a few literate people left.  We can shut down the ATF before they run any more guns to gangsters.  We can defund the stupid wars you are involving our young soldiers in, in places like Libya.  We can shut down the myriad programs of profligacy such as the Metropolitan Planning Organizations across the nation.  We can deprive the perverts of employment in the TSA.

You are a colossal fraud, sir.  You talk to us as though we are children.  You scold and insult the people we sent to Washington to stop you in your maniacal spending spree.  You intone threateningly, Chicago-style, that the poor will pay.  News flash: the poor will pay either way.  We’ve already been paying for your four-year vacation.  Enough already.  Don’t attempt to extort cooperation from senior citizens, don’t try to coerce Congress.  Don’t make another speech to us until you have something new to say, something along the lines of what you are cutting in the way of spending.  And, by the way, it might be a good idea to start packing.

Sally Morris is a member of Americans for Constitutional Government and the Executive Committee of the Valley Tea Party Conservative Coalition.

Grassroots gleanings on the debt ceiling imbroglio may be a dime a dozen but, for the record, here are my two cents worth extracted from the passing scene.

            The print and electronic media cabal gives President Obama all the cover necessary in his attempt to ensure his re-election is paved with gold -- literally. For this reason, in principle, the major media sources are unreliable and not to be trusted. That said, the cabal offers a fascinating collidescope of misleading factoids and disinformation.

            Ostensibly, the furor is all about the debt ceiling. Everything else is noise. If the debt ceiling is denied, then what? Why can’t America live within its means?

            In fact, the debt ceiling is not the real issue. The real issue is DEBT piled upon DEBT without restraint. Either we face the music now by controlling our national spending habit or we increase the debt limit and continue spending without resources into oblivion. Raising the debt ceiling doesn’t solve the problem. It perpetuates it. The problem with kicking the can down the road is that we’re running out of road. Besides, what’s so terrible about insisting that spending be reduced more than the debt limit is raised?

            We have no constitutional spending limits such as a constitutional amendment to impose restraint by law.

            We have no firm ceiling or limits on outlay. Like our spending habit, the debt ceiling adjusted upward whenever congress felt like it -- until the Tea Party contingent stopped it.

            We have no fiscal discipline. America has been operating without a budget for 2 1/2 years.

            We have no written scorable plan from the White House or the Senate for a debt ceiling increase. To their credit, the House Republicans produced the only two plans on the table. The first was the Ryan Budget for 2012 prepared by Congressman Paul Ryan in April 2011. It passed the House but was defeated in the Democrat-controlled Senate. The second was the Cut, Cap and Balance bill passed by the House, condemned by the media and tabled by the Democrat-controlled Senate without a hearing. It provided the debt ceiling increase Obama requested. The White House and the Senate have produced nothing in writing. By “nothing” is meant a proposed balance sheet with spending items listed in the left-hand column and associated dollar figures listed in the right-hand column. All must be balanced against revenue.

            Non-transparency is the way the Obama wants it. The White House prefers the authority to spend more money without a budget and not be held accountable in the 2012 elections.

            And, what’s all this talk about compromise? How do you compromise with a debt thief?

            Spend-aholic insanity is a lot like alcoholism. There is no question America is already financially bankrupt with a debt burden of trillions of dollars. We’re just not ready to admit it. To ease the pain we raise the shield of denial.

            A dose of reality will shatter that denial. Whether the senate and the president get their wish to raise the debt ceiling at this point matters little. The risk is not “default” on our national debt. That would only happen if Treasury Secretary Geithner chose not to pay the interest to creditors holding our national debt. We have the monthly tax revenue to pay that interest.

            The real risk is the downgrading of America’s financial rating by Moody’s and by Standard & Poor’s, the major credit rating agencies. If America’s debt ceiling is increased but congress and the president do not show a willingness to restrain the skyrocketing spending, America’s credit worthiness will still be downgraded. Downgrading America’s AAA rating would ruin our financial standing around the world which may take years to regain. These agencies, by the way, are the same agencies that gave Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac a AAA status when they were insolvent and needed a bailout.

            The financial constraints and regulations congress is so fond of imposing on the private sector should apply equally to government departments. The biggest monopoly and money waster in America today is the federal government. The price we pay for cavalier spending is bankruptcy.

            This is what America gets for electing a community organizer with no private enterprise experience and only 142 days in the US Senate.

            My guess? Obama does not want to be Jimmy Carter II. Obama will cave in and, if he does, God bless America.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at P. O. Box 337, Stanley, ND 58784 or (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Should a 13-year-old be able to purchase a school-shooting simulator without parents’ knowledge or consent?

The Supreme Court says that freedom of speech requires that 13-year-olds have that opportunity. In a 7-2 decision, the court struck down a California law barring the sale of graphically violent video games to people under 18.

I have not seen legal minds commenting on what seem (to me) to be obvious consequences of this decision. If the First Amendment requires that minors be able to purchase graphically violent video games, does this mean minors may attend R-rated movies without an adult or purchase pornography? We have longstanding traditions and laws which regulate the speech to which minors may be exposed without the consent of their parents.

The research on the effects of violent video games shows that parents and society have reason to be concerned. Today, we are not talking about the games from my youth like Space Invaders or games that involved a cartoon-like image of a person falling over. We are talking about games with graphic, movie-quality images of death and dismemberment. Unlike a movie, however, which is viewed passively, game players are actively causing the scenes which unfold before them.

Yes, video games are pretend. Of course, they are. Even young teenagers who play the games know they are pretend. Yet, even passively viewing pretend images affects the way people think. Television commercials are pretend. We all know they are pretend. The reason some of the most successful businesses in the world advertise—even paying over $2,000,000 for a 30-second Super Bowl spot—is not to generously provide free television for us; it is because they have data showing that advertising changes consumers’ attitudes and behavior. Active participation, like playing a video game, changes attitudes and behavior more efficiently than passively watching TV.

Will most kids who play games that simulate school shootings live out the roles they are playing? Will most kids who play Grand Theft Auto steal cars? No. Very few kids who play violent video games will perform those acts in real life. The changes most kids will experience as a result of playing violent video games are more subtle than mass murder, but are still quite measurable.

For example, greater exposure to violent media desensitizes people to the effects of violence and aggression. What would have been abhorrent, or should be, becomes not so bad or perhaps even funny. Violent video games cause users to think more violent thoughts. Typical behavioral effects from these changes in thinking might range from not being appropriately moved by images of real human suffering to being more argumentative and disrespectful.

Space does not allow for a full consideration of the effects of using violent video games. I spend an entire class period in my course on child development discussing violent media. Among the well-established effects is that users of violent media are more likely to believe that crime victims deserved their fate. In addition, users of violent media have a distorted view of the world, believing life to be significantly less safe than it is.

It is true that people who are prone to aggressiveness are more likely to use violent media. It is also true that people who use violent media become more aggressive. None of us want to believe that we will acquire a taste for the distasteful, but if we consume enough of what began as distasteful, it becomes satisfying.

Make no mistake about it; video games can be a great use of free time. Research shows that kids who play video games develop better spatial skills and hand-eye coordination. They are also just plain fun. Yet the benefits of video games do not require gruesome images.

We endure a lot of ugliness to protect our right to free speech. Like Justices Clarence Thomas and Steven Breyer, I do not believe that restricting the sale of violent video games to people 18 and older would have strained the First Amendment. With or without laws that require adult involvement for kids to have questionable material, parents must be parents. Laws are no substitute for parental monitoring. While I find the Court’s decision disappointing, it highlights the need for parents to be proactive and willing to make tough decisions.

— Dr. Joseph J. Horton is professor of psychology at Grove City College and a researcher with The Center for Vision & Values.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared at National Review Online.

It was 20 years ago this summer that the final disintegration of the Soviet Union rapidly unfolded. In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin was freely elected president of the Russian Republic, with Mikhail Gorbachev clinging to power atop the precarious USSR. In August, Communist hardliners attempted a dramatic coup against Gorbachev, prompting a stunning succession of declarations of independence by Soviet republics, with seven of them breaking away in August alone, and four more following through mid-December.

The writing was on the wall—not the Berlin Wall, which had collapsed two years earlier, but the graveyard of history, which would soon register the USSR as deceased. It was December 25, 1991, the day the West celebrates Christmas—a celebration the Communists had tried to ban—that Gorbachev announced his resignation, turning out the lights on an Evil Empire that had produced countless tens of millions of corpses.

Historians debate the credit that goes to various players for that collapse, from Gorbachev to Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel, to name a few. These are the people who get books written about them. But there were many behind-the-scenes players who performed critical roles that have never seen the light of a historian’s word processor. Here I’d like to note one such player: Herb Meyer. Specifically, I’d like to highlight a fascinating memo Meyer wrote eight years before the Soviet collapse.

From 1981 to 1985, Meyer was special assistant to the director of central intelligence, Bill Casey, and vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. In the fall of 1983, he crafted a classified memo titled, “Why Is the World So Dangerous?” Addressed to Casey and the deputy director, John McMahon, it had a larger (though limited) audience within the intelligence community and the Reagan administration, including President Reagan himself. Later, it would earn Meyer the prestigious National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal. Even so, the memo has eluded historians, which is a shame. It ought to rank among the most remarkable documents of the Cold War.

Meyer began his eight-page memo of November 30, 1983, by describing a “new stage” that had opened in the struggle between the free world and the Soviet Union. It was a “direction favorable” to the United States. He listed positive changes in America that suddenly had the USSR “downbeat.” Not only was the U.S. economy “recovering,” but Meyer foresaw a “boom” ahead, “with the only argument” having to do with its “breadth and duration.”

Meyer listed seven signs of America’s surge before providing even more symptoms of Soviet decline—a decline that was unrecognized by most pundits and academic Sovietologists. His insights into what he saw as an imminent Soviet collapse were prescient. After 66 years of Communist rule, the USSR had “failed utterly to become a country,” with “not one major nationality group that is content with the present, Russian-controlled arrangement.” It was “hard to imagine how the world’s last empire can survive into the twenty-first century except under highly favorable conditions of economics and demographics—conditions that do not, and will not, exist.”

“The Soviet economy,” Meyer insisted, “is heading toward calamity.”

Meyer nailed not only the Soviet Union’s economy but also its “demographic nightmare.” Here, he was way ahead of the curve, reporting compelling information on Russian birthrates, which were in free-fall. He recorded an astounding figure: Russian women, “according to recent, highly credible research,” “average six abortions.”

As for the Soviet Bloc, Meyer didn’t miss that either. “The East European satellites are becoming more and more difficult to control,” he wrote, emphasizing that it wasn’t merely Poland that was in revolt. “[O]ther satellites may be closer to their own political boiling points than we realize.”

“In sum,” concluded Meyer, “time is not on the Soviet Union’s side.”

He summed up with two predictions, nearly identically worded, as if to let the reader know he knew the magnitude of what he was saying: (1) “if present trends continue, we’re going to win the Cold War;” and (2) “if present trends continue we will win.” He quoted President Reagan’s May 1981 Notre Dame speech, where Reagan proclaimed that history would dismiss Soviet Communism as “some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.” Meyer felt that Reagan was “absolutely correct,” adding that the USSR was “entering its final pages.” His memo projected a window no longer than 20 years.

Herb Meyer was dead on. I know of no other Cold War document as accurate as this one.

I recently talked to Meyer about his memo. He had no idea it had been declassified until someone sent it to him last month. “I was astonished,” Meyer wrote me in an e-mail, “and it’s a weird feeling to read something you’d written decades ago and hadn’t seen since.”

Meyer remembered well certain elements of the memo, particularly the Cold War predictions. He also had not forgotten the memo’s reception. Within the intelligence community, there was a general feeling that Meyer had lost his mind. That was just the start of the backlash.

The memo was leaked to syndicated columnists Evans & Novak, who devoted a column to it. There was subsequent uproar throughout Washington, which made Meyer very nervous. He was summoned to his boss’s office.

“Herb, right now you’ve got the smallest fan club in Washington,” Bill Casey told him grimly. As Meyer turned pale, Casey laughed: “Relax. It’s me and the president.”

Today, Meyer says with a chuckle: “If you’re going to have a small fan club—that’s it.”

CIA director Casey, like President Reagan, was committed to placing a dagger in the chest of Soviet Communism. He was pleased, and he encouraged Meyer. Meyer recalls: “My orders were, in effect, to keep going.”

Meyer particularly remembers Reagan’s being shaken by the statement about Russian women averaging six abortions. To Meyer’s knowledge, Reagan “never went public with that astounding statistic.... Come to think of it, no one—except some Russians—ever talked about it.”

Of all the items in the memo, that one remains the most far-reaching. Demographers today foresee Russia plummeting in population from 150 million to possibly 100 million by 2050. Meyer’s memo is a prophetic warning that isn’t finished. For Russians, the internal implosion isn’t over.

When we look back at the Cold War, we remember big names and big statements and documents. There’s nary a college course on the Cold War that excludes George Kennan’s seminal “Long Telegram,” sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow in February 1946. Kennan’s memo prophetically captured what the free world faced from the USSR at the start of the Cold War, forecasting a long struggle ahead. Herb Meyer’s November 1983 memo likewise prophetically captured what the free world faced from the USSR, but this time nearing the end of the Cold War, uniquely forecasting a long struggle about to close—with victory.

George Kennan’s memo is remembered in our textbooks and our college lectures. Herb Meyer’s memo merits similar treatment.

— Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values. His books include "The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism" and his latest release, "Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century."

Earlier this month, Moody’s downgraded Irish government debt to junk. Which left the Irish somewhat peeved. The Department of Finance pointed out that it had met all the “quantitative fiscal targets” imposed by the European Union, and the National Treasury Management Agency said that Ireland was sufficiently flush “to cover all its financing requirements until the end of 2013”.

Which is more than the Government of the United States can say.

That’s not the only difference between the auld sod and America. In Europe, austerity is in the air, and in the headlines: “Italy Fast-Tracks Austerity Vote.” “Greek Minister Urges Austerity Consensus.” “Portugal To Speed Austerity Measures.” “Even Queen Faces Funding Squeeze In Austerity Britain.” The word has become so instantly ubiquitous that leftie deadbeats are already opposed to it: “Austerity
Protest Takes Place In Dublin.” For the rentamob types, “austerity” is to this decade what “Bush” and “Iraq War” were to the last. It can’t be long before grizzled old rockers are organizing some all-star Rock
Against Austerity gala.

By contrast, nobody seems minded to “speed austerity measures” over here. The word isn’t part of the conversation - even though we’re broke on a scale way beyond what Ireland or Portugal could ever dream of. The entire western world is operating on an unsustainable business model: If it were Borders or Blockbuster, it would be hoping to close the Greek and Portuguese branches but maybe hold on to the Norwegian one. In hard reality, like Borders only the other day, it would probably wind up
shuttering them all. The problem is structural: Not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. Developed nations have 30-year old students and 50-year old retirees, and then wonder why the shrunken rump of a “working” population in between can’t make the math add up.

By the way, demographically speaking, these categories – “adolescents” and “retirees” – are an invention of our own time: They didn’t exist a century ago. You were a kid till 13 or so. Then you worked. Then you died. As Obama made plain in his threat to Gran’ma last week that the August checks might not go out, funding non-productivity is now the principal purpose of the modern state. Good luck with that at a time when every appliance in your home is manufactured in Asia.

As I said, these are structural problems. In theory, they can be fixed. But, when you look at the nature of them, you’ve got to wonder whether they ever will be this side of societal collapse. Blockbuster went
bankrupt because it was wedded to a 1980s technology and distribution system. In government, being merely a quarter-century obsolete would be a major achievement. The ruling party in Washington is wedded to the principle that an 80-year old social program is inviolable: That’s like Blockbuster insisting in 2011 that there’s no problem with its business model for rentals of silent movies with live orchestral accompaniment. To be sure, there are some problems parking the musicians’ bus in residential streets, but nothing that can’t be worked out.

But “political reality” operates to different rules from humdrum real  reality. Thus, the “debt ceiling” debate is regarded by most Democrats and a fair few Republicans as some sort of ghastly social faux pas by boorish conservatives: Why, everyone knows ye olde debt-limit vote is merely a bit of traditional ceremonial, like the Lord Chancellor walking backwards with the Cap of Maintenance and Black Rod shouting “Hats off, strangers!” at Britain’s Opening of Parliament. You hit the debt ceiling, you jack it up a couple trillion, and life goes on – or so it did until these GOP yahoos came along and decided to treat the vote as if it actually meant something.

Obama has done his best to pretend to take them seriously. He claimed to have a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. The court eunuchs of the press corps were impressed, and went off to file pieces hailing the President as “the grown-up in the room”. There is, in fact, no plan. No plan at all. No plan whatsoever, either for a deficit reduction of $4 trillion or $4.73. As is the way in Washington, merely announcing that he had a plan absolved him of the need to have one. So the President’s staff got out the extra-wide teleprompter and wrote a really large number on it, and simply by reading out the really large number the President was deemed to have produced a serious blueprint for trillions of dollars in savings. For his next trick, he’ll walk out on to the stage of Carnegie Hall, announce that he’s going to play Haydn’s Cello Concerto No 2, and, even though there’s no cello in sight and Obama immediately climbs back in his golf cart to head for the links, music critics will hail it as one of the most moving performances they’ve ever heard.

The only “plan” Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt.

How about Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader? Has he got a plan? No. The Democrat Senate has shown no interest in producing a budget for two-and-a-half years. Unlike the President, Senator Reid can’t even be bothered pretending he’s interested in spending reductions. But he is interested in spending, and, if that’s your bag, boring things like budgets only get in the way.

It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the President is willing to cut. You begin to see why the Europeans are a little miffed. They’re passing austerity budgets so austere they’ve
spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street – and yet they’re still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more – and nobody’s downgrading them.

Well, don’t worry. It’s coming. The domestic media coverage of this story has been almost laughably fraudulent: To the court eunuchs, a failure to raise the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion would signal
to the world that American government was embarrassingly dysfunctional. In reality, raising the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion without any spending cuts would confirm to the world that American government is terminally dysfunctional.

In the debt-ridden treasuries of Europe, they’re talking “austerity”. In the debt-ridden treasury of Washington, they’re talking about more spending (Kathleen Sebelius is touting new women’s health programs to be made available “without cost”.) At the risk (in Samuel Johnson’s words) of settling the precedence between a louse and a flea, I think Europe’s political discourse is marginally less deranged than ours. The President is said to be “the adult in the room” because he is reported to be in
favor of raising the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67. By the year 2036.

If that’s the best offer, there isn’t going to be a 2036, not for America. As the Europeans are beginning to grasp, eventually “political reality” collides with real reality. The message from a delusional Washington these last weeks is that it won’t be a gentle bump.

©MARK STEYN 2011

    Dogged readers of this space will observe that I habitually quote a handful of classic writings, chiefly the Shakespeare works, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, and The Federalist Papers. If those readers suspect that these few masterpieces pretty much exhaust my learning, they are correct.

    When I was young, I bought the whole set of Mortimer Adler's Great Books of the Western World, intending to read them all. But somehow I never got around to more than a few of them. Ditto the works of Dickens and Balzac.

    I'm a voracious reader, but most of what I read is the most perishable kind of literature, journalism. After all, journalism is my racket, and that means keeping up with things that will soon be forgotten. So I start the day with several newspapers, but seldom finish it with a classic I haven't read before.

    In Mark Twain's famous definition, a classic is a book everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read. Gulp! But those daunting all-time must-reading lists are a little misleading. It can take years to master a single great author. Much of what we "know" about the classics is what we've heard about them in advance, and we may not get beyond their reputations until we've read them several times.

    Yet the few classics I know thoroughly have been invaluable, even in my work as a journalist. To know a single old book well, even if it hasn't been canonized as a "classic," is to have a certain anchorage you can't get from most contemporary writing.

     There are no particular classics, not even Shakespeare, that you "must" read. But you should find a few meritorious old writers you find absorbing and not only read them, but live with them, until they become voices in your mind - a sort of internal council you can consult at any time.

  When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with its fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us remain fad-proof.

       The modern world is like a perpetual Nuremburg rally: everything that was wrong with Nazi Germany is more or less typical of other modern states, even those states that imagine they are the opposite of Nazi Germany. Political enemies usually turn out to be cousins, whose most violent differences are essentially superficial, masking deeper agreements in principle. Stalin, Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill were closer to each other than they realized; so are Bill Clinton and Slobodan Milosevic.

       When confronted with a new topic or political issue, I often ask myself what Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, or James Madison - or, among more recent authors, George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, or Michael Oakeshott - would have thought of it. Not that these men were always right: that would be impossible, since they often disagree with each other. The great authors have no specific "message."

  But at least they had minds of their own. They weren't mere products of the thought-factory we call public opinion, which might be defined as what everyone thinks everyone else thinks. They provide independent, poll-proof standards of judgment, when the government, its schools, and the media, using all the modern techniques of manipulation, try to breed mass uniformity in order to make us more manageable.

        It's up to us to maintain some detachment, and the literature of the past helps make this possible. That's why tyrannical governments usually try to control, marginalize, or even abolish that literature, especially religious literature. This need not be achieved by overt censorship; it can be done through school curricula, or in the name of "the separation of church and state."

        The classics are those books that discerning readers, over time, have recognized as offering fresh ways of seeing the world - "news that stays new," as someone has put it. It might also be called news that stays urgent.

        And stays delightful. There's nothing quite like the joy of falling in love with an old book, finding a mentor who speaks to you across the centuries.

###

The Reactionary Utopian by Joe Sobran is

copyright (c) 2011 by

the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation,

http://www.fgfbooks.com.

All rights reserved.

        This column was published originally by Griffin Internet Syndicate on April 6, 1999.

This column may be forwarded if attribution is

given to the author and fgfBooks.com.

For permission to publish or post this column,

contact Fran Griffin at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Subscribe or Renew a Subscription to the FGF E-Package

http://www.fgfbooks.com/FGFe-package.html

Joe Sobran (1946-2010) was an author and

a syndicated columnist.

See his bio and archive of some of his writings at

http://www.fgfbooks.com/Sobran-Joe/Sobran-bio.html

 ###

Originally at American Thinker

Knowingly stating a falsehood constitutes lying. Unintentionally misrepresenting reality displays a careless lack of knowledge. Our President appears to be engaged in a curious combination of both activities.

Economist and Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy analyzes three debt “default” distortions being advanced by Barack Obama and his administration lackeys.

Myth 1: If a deal is not reached by August 2, the U.S. will default on its debt.

Fact 1: The Treasury Department can prioritize payments in order to avoid a default.

[In fact,]

…after paying $30 billion in interest payments in August, Treasury could, if it ceased all other functions (see page 13 of this document), also pay for Social Security, Medicare, unemployment benefits, and payments to defense contractors.

In other words, there is absolutely no need to default as a result of not achieving a debt ceiling agreement by August 2.

Again from de Rugy:

Myth 2: If the debt ceiling isn’t raised the government won’t be able to pay Social Security benefits.

Fact 2: There are approximately $2.6 trillion dollars in the Social Security Trust Fund. Those assets can be used to pay benefits. Furthermore, there is already trillions of dollars of interagency debt that counts toward the $14.29 trillion debt limit. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner could convert that interagency debt into publicly-held debt, preventing not only a technical default but also preventing any delay in government payments.

So then, Obama’s threat that seniors will be cut off by granny-hating Republicans constitutes needless fear mongering. “Lie” would be a strong word to apply to a claim made by a sitting President. But when one states something that one knows to be untrue, one has lied. Granted, Obama may simply be clueless as to the possible rearrangements described by de Rugy. If cluelessness is the excuse, then Obama is something worse than a liar. He is an irresponsibly blind agenda-pusher.

Finally from de Rugy:

Myth 3: The Treasury cannot use the Social Security Trust Fund to delay a default past August 2.

Fact 3: While the Treasury cannot use money from the Social Security Trust Fund, it can “disinvest” from other trust funds to pay for benefits.

The “disinvestment” solution boils down to a surprisingly straightforward scenario. Instead of investing payroll tax revenues in the customary manner, the Treasury Department can redirect some of the intake to pay off existing bills and provide IOUs to the Social Security trust fund. The IOUs wouldn’t count against the debt ceiling. Then later, after the ceiling has been raised, the accounting would be settled, the IOUs paid off, and no default will have occurred.

Treasury confirms that the process was used in past debt crises. Geithner surely know this. Obama should know. If the President is aware of the workaround process, then he is revealing himself to be a liar by making bogus Social Security nonpayment threats to Seniors. If Obama is unaware of the accounting solution, then he is, once again, ignorant.

Neither the dishonesty nor bewilderment scenario should surprise the American people at this point.

Most educated readers are aware of certain basic fallacies - the non sequitur, the straw man argument, the ad hominem argument, and inferring causation from sequence (post hoc ergo propter hoc). But there is one common fallacy or debater's trick that I've never seen identified.

  Let's call it the argument from social status. It takes the form "All the experts agree that proposition X is true." Put this way, it may be a legitimate appeal to authority. It doesn't exclude the possibility that all the experts are wrong; it merely presumes that they are probably right, putting the burden of proof on those who disagree. Fair enough.

      But the argument from status comes into play when the advocate says or implies that his opponents are lowlifes. In the Shakespeare authorship debate, for instance, defenders of the traditional view say, "Professional Shakespeare scholars agree that there is no real doubt that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays bearing his name." Fine.

  But then they go on to sneer that those who doubt Shakespeare's authorship are "snobs," "eccentrics," and so forth, usually adding that such people are "ignorant" and "resentful." For good measure, they often throw in a bit of unflattering psychoanalysis of the dissenters.

       This argument is false, of course, since Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, and other great authors have disputed Shakespeare's authorship. That's bad enough.

      But the real point is that the argument attempts to bully the reader. It says in effect: "Never mind the merits of the case. Rest assured that if you question Shakespeare's authorship, you will be put in low company and convicted of bad taste! You don't want that, do you?"

       This is enough to deter most readers from pursuing the question, since most people care less about the truth than about what may happen to them if they take an unfashionable position. They aren't afraid of torture and prison, which are remote possibilities; they are much more afraid of the faint derision of the "best people."

        This kind of argument can be seen on a much larger scale in politics. Since the early twentieth century, "liberal" and "progressive" political views have claimed the moral, intellectual, esthetic, and social high ground. Some of the greatest modern intellectuals and artists have espoused such views, often flirting with or embracing communism or socialism: Picasso, Einstein, Hemingway, Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Charlie Chaplin, to name a few.

   In its heyday, this "intellectual class" - an odd but instructive term - enjoyed a prestige that is hard to imagine now. It managed to create a cultural atmosphere in which aspiring intellectuals and artists, however mediocre, sought to establish left-wing credentials, and in which right-wing became a synonym for philistine.

  Never mind that communism had killed tens of millions of people: communist sympathies were signs of good taste, while anti- communism was vulgar, silly, and vicious. Most liberals could always forgive a communist, but never a Joe McCarthy. "McCarthyism" signified not only tyranny, but, worse, low company and bad taste. Nowhere was this truer than in the prestigious universities of the Ivy League, where the nominal egalitarians of the Left enlisted snobbery as their weapon of choice against the reactionary Right.

   This is a facet of America's ideological wars that has received surprisingly little attention. It began to change with the growth of a conservative intellectual movement, led by the brilliant young polemicist William F. Buckley Jr. Others (Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, James Burnham) did the heavy thinking, but Buckley was the indispensable public figure, sneering back at the liberal intellectuals and getting the better of them with caustic wit.

        Buckley was called many things, but nobody could call him a redneck. As the first conservative intellectual celebrity, he was bitterly accused of snobbery by the people who were used to doing all the snubbing. His patrician style disarmed the liberals' argument from status.

        Today there are other conservative celebrities: Tom Wolfe (the satirist of status who memorably nailed "radical chic"), George Will, Pat Buchanan, and Rush Limbaugh, not to mention Ronald Reagan. Liberalism still has its media and academic strongholds, but it's no longer the philosophy of all the "best people."

###

The Reactionary Utopian by Joe Sobran is

copyright (c) 2011 by

the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation,

http://www.fgfbooks.com.

All rights reserved.

        This column was published originally by Griffin Internet Syndicate on January 19, 1999.

This column may be forwarded if attribution is

given to the author and fgfBooks.com.

For permission to publish or post this column,

contact Fran Griffin at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Subscribe or Renew a Subscription to the FGF E-Package

http://www.fgfbooks.com/FGFe-package.html

Joe Sobran (1946-2010) was an author and

a syndicated columnist.

See his bio and archive of some of his writings at

http://www.fgfbooks.com/Sobran-Joe/Sobran-bio.html

 ###

The Socialist Democratic Party needs more of your children’s and grandchildren’s money to buy votes for 2012. They are demanding that Republicans raise our nation’s debt limit. Democrats are threatening a government shutdown and putative measures.

 Democrats and President Obama have suggested that they intend to stop social security payments to seniors and that they will default on the debt unless they get their way by warning of such consequences that have never been seen in any past shutdown.

When Republicans forced President Clinton to balance the budget by shutting down the government in the 90’s, debt payments were made and social security payments went out. In fact, the sun came up the next day and the shutdown really didn’t affect anyone. Based on their words, it appears that Democrats are considering holding seniors and America hostage to get their way. This is who they are. You don’t need to review much world history to see how ruthless the left can be.

Bloated federal entitlement spending has wrecked our economy.  History proves that tax increases result in less tax revenue and fewer jobs. Borrowing money is just a deferred tax hike. It’s reasonable for Americans to expect deep cuts to federal spending. We have borrowed enough to fund the Democrat’s failed welfare state.

Democrat Senate Budget Chair Senator Kent Conrad and the Democrats have not offered the American people a budget in over two years as required by law. Over that period they have increased spending by trillions on programs that we cannot afford like Nationalized Healthcare. Now that the adults are in charge and trying to write a budget, Democrats are throwing a temper tantrum. Democrats have done everything but show us their plan.

As our nation nears bankruptcy, Americans must watch and learn. We must realize why the left needs to be thrown out of power for good. That includes “Republicans in name only”.

The "wrench" that the tea party caucus throws into the Washington political machine is its understanding that "politics as usual" must end... and the sooner the better.

15% of Solution is Income Tax Reform

The move that would solve the current debt stalemate involves an initially “revenue neutral” change to federal personal and corporate income taxation to eliminate ALL special interest income tax deductions and ALL other income tax breaks (including the home mortgage interest deduction, essentially considered by the general public to be an "entitlement") together with "across the board" lowering of rates. Such a move would initially be revenue neutral but would become very lucrative in terms of tax revenue in the future as economic recovery accelerates. It would satisfy both sides of the aisle by keeping income tax revenues at current levels in the short term while greatly increasing revenues in an improving economy.

85% of Solution is Spending Cuts

Of course, the economy will not improve unless government spending is seriously cut… in the range of $5 Trillion.

And Entitlement Reform Before the End of 2011

Reform of entitlements must then be accomplished before the end of the year if any of the clowns in Washington that are up for re-election next year expect to have a prayer of winning.

It’s the Special Interest Spending, Stupid!

The "old guard" is having as much trouble with a "fair and equal" approach to income taxation as they did with the elimination of earmarks. That is why it was so important to eliminate earmarks, not because they amount to much spending reduction but that it is the RIGHT thing to do. The old guard is not used to doing what is RIGHT, only what gets them re-elected. Soon they will realize that those days are gone...

© 2011 Lynn A. Bergman