Occupy Wall Street Now Protesting Against Math
via Big Journalism by Mark Polege on 10/20/11
- Those supporting the Occupy Wall Street Movement are up in arms as 30-year Democratic Campaign Consultant Doug Schoen reported his polling data in the Wall Street Journal on Oct. 18th. Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at Schoen's firm, polled about 200 OWS members at New York's Zuccotti Park on Oct. 10th and 11th.
- Schoen described his findings as:
"Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence."- Here is a breakdown of the polling data gathered by Schoen's research. Tell me if this sounds like the way in which the Occupy Wall Street, as well as those in cities around the country, are promoting themselves:
- Schoen summarized his polling data with this statement:
- (52%) have participated in a political movement before
- (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals
- (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda
- A vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%)
- An overwhelming majority of demonstrators supported Barack Obama in 2008
- (51%) disapprove of the president while 44% approve, and only 48% say they will vote to re-elect him in 2012, while at least a quarter won't vote
- (32%) call themselves Democrats, while roughly the same proportion (33%) say they aren't represented by any political party
- (65%) say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost.
- Protesters are divided on whether the bank bailouts were necessary (49%) or unnecessary (51%)
What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.- On the same day Judd Legum at Think Progress came out with his view on Schoen's polling data. One point of contention was Question 17 where Schoen described 4% of the polled OWS members believing in "radical redistribution of wealth."
Schoen did not specify in the WSJ article that 35% of those polled would like to "influence the Democratic Party like the Tea Party did with the GOP." Though I can understand Legum's concern for that 35% figure not being included in the WSJ article, I am more alarmed by the other answers of the "Open Ended" Question 17. With the exception of a Flat Tax, all the other answers definitely tilt Left. What is even more intriguing is that two words are completely absent from this open-ended question in what the OWS movement wants to achieve; "Constitution" and "freedom." Oddly enough even "Not Sure" got a greater mention as an answer than either of those two words.
What does this mean? It could be open to interpretation but what it appears to me is that those two words are neither in OWS' mindset or even their vernacular. This further illustrates the clear difference in the OWS crowd and the Tea Party.
Legum also highlights Question 16, however he misrepresents Schoen's data as it is presented in the WSJ article.
Schoen did not specifically and solely say that a "large majority express opposition to free-market capitalism." Instead, Schoen described the information in a list of ideologies that "binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education." The rest of that list is "support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas."
First off, the polling data already documented that (32%) admitted to being Democratic, while (33%) say they aren't represented by any political party. In addition, (65%) said they believe "government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost." [my emphasis] In order to defend his argument I can only guess that Legum must believe that these ideologies are something other than "Left-Wing," because that sure looks like a majority to me.
The article on Think Progress is representative of the radical Left's frustration in trying to sell the astro-turfed "grassroots" movement as a mass, wide-spectrum People's movement. In addition to failing to convince many Americans that they share our nation's goals with some lost souls who are part-time activists & part-time street bums, the quantitative data exposes the facade of just how radical are the views of the OWS groups –and ironically, another WSJ piece shows that 48% of those protesting Wall street would vote for the Wall Street President. Lastly, if you have to call in the "rent-a-thugs" of big labor unions in order to try to give your movement momentum, then you really need to ask yourself, "If you are not motivated enough to leave the park when the owners want to clean it, then why should ANYONE follow you?"
Friday, October 21, 2011
Occupy Wall Street Now Protesting Against Math
Thursday, October 20, 2011
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
via Largehearted Boy by david on 10/17/11Every day I offer 10 free and legal mp3 downloads and bonus live recordings in this blog's Daily Downloads feature. In almost 10 years of music blogging, I have gathered quite a collection of bookmarks to repositories of free and legal music downloads.
These sites range from the huge (the Free Music Archive and Live Music Archive each hosts tens of thousands of mp3s) to the tiny (They Might Be Giants offers a single track a week), but all are free and legal sources, and great places to discover new music and beef up your music library.
Do you have a favorite site for free and legal music downloads? What sites have I missed? Feel free to leave a comment.
The list of 100 online sources for free and legal music downloads:
3hive - music blog
Alina Simone - singer-songwriter
Amazon MP3- online store with albums
Aquarium Drunkard - live sessions
Barsuk Records - record label
The Bay Bridged - live sessions
Beat the Indie Drum - record label
Better Looking Records - record label
Better Propaganda - music site
Big Ugly Yellow Couch - live sessions
Boompa Records - record label
Bradley's Almanac - live concerts
Caught in the Carousel - music site
Cloud Chapel Records - record label
Daytrotter - live sessions
Deep Elm Records - record label
Donewaiting - live sessions
Drag City - record label
EardrumsPop - record label
Epitonic - music site
Fat Wreck Chords - record label
Fingertips - music blog
Free Albums Galore - music blog
Free Music Archive - music site
Free Music Is Awesome!!! - music site
Fuel/Friends - live sessions
Green Label Sound - music site
Guided By Voices - band
Halfway House Music - live sessions
Hallelujah the Hills - band
HearYa - live sessions
Hometapes - record label
Hush Records - record label
Indiecater Records - record label
Insound - music store with free mp3s
Insubordination Records - record label
Jagjaguwar - record label
Jane Siberry - singer-songwriter
Jealous Butcher Records - record label
John Vanderslice - singer-songwriter
Josh Ritter - singer-songwriter
The Key - live sessions
Kill Rock Stars - record label
La Societe Expeditionnaire - record label
Labrador Records - record label
Lapdance Academy - music collective
Largehearted Boy - music blog
Last.fm - social music community
LaundroMatinee - live sessions
Live Music Archive - live concerts
Lujo Records - record label
Lullabyes - live concerts
Magnet Magazine - music magazine
Mashable - technology blog
Matablog - record label blog
McGuinn's Folk Den - Roger McGuinn's folk covers
Misra Records - record label
MountainGoats.net - Mountain Goats fansite
Nels Cline - guitarist
New Weird Australia - record label
No Idea Records - record label
No Sleep Records - record label
NoiseTrade - music site
nyctaper - live concerts
The Occasional Archivist - live concerts
Old 97's - band
Pitchfork - music site
Planet Claire - live sessions
Radiohead Not for Profit - live Radiohead downloads
RCRD LBL - music blog
Recording LA - live concert downloads
Records on Ribs - record label
Robert Pollard - singer-songwriter
Rock Proper - record label
Secretly Canadian - record label
Serious Business Records - record label
Sigur Ros - band
Silber Records - record label
Sinewave - record label
Song, by Toad - in-studio sessions
Song, by Toad Records - record label
Sound as Language - music blog
Southern Shelter - live concert downloads
SPIN - music magazine
Spinner - music blog
Stereogum - music blog
Strange Attractors - record label
SubPop - record label
Sweet Adeline - Elliott Smith official website
The Switchboard Sessions - live sessions
Team Love - record label
They Might Be Giants - band
Thrill Jockey - record label
Tim Fite - singer-songwriter
Triple J - Australian indie rock radio station
True North Records - record label
Urban Outfitters - free indie rock compilations
Violitionist - live sessions
Visible Voice - live concert downloads
XO Publicity - indie rock publicity firm
also at Largehearted Boy:
other lists at Largehearted Boy
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
Book Notes (authors create music playlists for their book)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
Raymond Ibrahim: The Closing of the Muslim Mind (Book Review)
Raymond Ibrahim: The Closing of the Muslim Mind (Book Review)
via Jihad Watch by Raymond on 10/20/11Last week, "Saudi Arabia's religious police arrested an Indonesian housemaid for casting a magic spell on a local family and 'turning its life upside down.'" The maid "confessed" to using sorcery, and "commission experts took the magic items to their office and managed to dismantle and stop the spell."
Far from being absurd aberrations to be dismissed, such accounts, which are becoming better known thanks to the Internet, are stark reminders of the incompatibility between the Western and Muslim worldviews, or, more to the point, the difficulty Western peoples have transcending their own paradigms and understanding the Muslim worldview in its own right—above and beyond the issue of sorcery.
In his book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind, Robert Reilly, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, helps explain the Muslim worldview by thoroughly documenting the historic and doctrinal roots behind it; by refreshingly bypassing the overly dramatized question of "what went wrong," he explains the more pressing "why it went wrong."
The book is a reminder of the importance of epistemology: before understanding Muslim acts, one must understand the Muslim mind that initiates them. We discover that Shakespeare's dictum "Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," in Islam becomes "nothing good or evil but Allah says so."
The author sheds light on the struggles of the different schools of Islam, showing how by the 10th century, the fatalistic, deterministic schools triumphed, delivering the death blow, not only to the notion of free will, but natural law as well: "a theological deformation … produced a dysfunctional culture." From here one can understand the full impact of the popular assertion "the doors of ijtihad [intellectualizing] closed in the 10th century."
Reilly chronicles how the giants of Muslim philosophy, such as Ghazali and Ashari, concluded that knowledge was unknowable, that moral truths can only be ascertained through revelation. Accordingly, all knowledge—the very bounds of reality—came to be limited to the words of the Quran and its pronouncer, Islam's prophet Muhammad.
The ramifications of such intellectual calcification are immense: "All acts are in themselves morally neutral"; "Allah does not command certain behavior because it is good; it is good because he commands it. Likewise, he does not forbid murder because it is bad; it is bad because he forbids it."
Equivocations, such as the following by Ashari, become commonplace: "Lying is evil only because Allah has declared it to be evil…. And if he declared it to be good it would be good; and if he commanded it, no one could gainsay him." Of course and as Ashari knew, the Islamic deity and his prophet are on record permitting and even encouraging Muslims to deceive.
Similarly, the spirit of inquiry perishes: "the only thing worth knowing is whether a specific action is, according to Shari 'a: obligatory, recommended, permitted, discouraged, or forbidden. The rest is irrelevant." It is precisely for this reason that in Islam, the law—what is right or wrong, how one should live—trumps "theology," the latter designated as kalam, that is, mere "words." This is also why in the last millennium Spain alone has produced more books than the Arab world in its entirety.
Likewise in the realm of science: Reilly cites a Pakistani physicist—not an uneducated, impoverished "radical"—saying it is un-Islamic to believe that combining hydrogen and water makes water; rather, Muslims are "supposed to say that when you bring hydrogen and oxygen together then by the will of Allah [which need not always be consistent] water was created."
The Closing of the Muslim Mind explains the singularity of Muslim epistemology and its antithesis to Western sensibilities: it explains why a maid is arrested and charged with sorcery and the dread of bewitched animals; explains why adult "breastfeeding" and habitual lying pose no moral problems; explains why top Muslim clerics insist the world is flat and ingesting the feces and urine of Muhammad is salutary; explains why jihadists believe their terror is pious and a libidinous paradise awaits them.
All these "alternate" ways of thinking make sense when one accepts that, in the purely Muslim mind, intuitive reasoning, the human conscience, and even common sense take a backseat to the literal words of Allah and his prophet, seen as the founts of all truth and reality—or, inevitably from a non-Muslim perspective, the words of a deluded or deceiving 7th century Arab.
Raymond Ibrahim, a widely published Islam-specialist, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. He writes a weekly column for Jihad Watch.
A Marine, Occupy Wall Street, And NYPD
A Marine, Occupy Wall Street, And NYPD
via Big Peace by Kerry Patton on 10/20/11A video has gone viral on YouTube prompting well over one million viewers to debate heroism, the Marine Corps, Occupy Wall Street, and the New York City Police Department. Some may believe the video as moving, inspirational, and even possibly patriotic. There is so much to dissect here to bring about some understanding towards this situation—One Marine versus 30 Police Officers.
First and foremost, NYPD is one of, if not, the world's greatest police department. When confronted with a belligerent, loud, obnoxious, and disrespectful individual who calls himself a Marine, they showed the utmost restraint and professionalism. They are trained in countering such episodes of unruliness and succeeded in defusing this situation perfectly.
Protestor tactics are unique and alarming but only the best of the best law enforcement understand these tactics. As witnessed throughout the video, the antagonizing Marine knew a video camera was filming. He dressed in a way that bystanders would respect him by wearing the Marine Corp Combat Utility Coat. He utilized terminology to depict himself and his family as combat seasoned patriots. And it is highly probable that with the video rolling, this tactic was to set up to depict NYPD as the bad guys—and it would have worked if they handled the situation any other way.
Marine or not, the U.S. Defense Department has strict guidelines about the wear of the uniform for those active and retired service members. These directives follow 10 U.S.C.772, Executive Order 10554 and state specifically in this case that current or former service members are prohibited in wearing the uniform "when participating in activities such as public speeches, interviews, picket lines, marches, rallies or any public demonstration (including those pertaining to civil rights), which may imply Service sanction of the cause for which the demonstration or activity is conducted."
All service members, no matter their individual political ideologies must maintain honor and respect for authority and those they serve alongside. This is taught on day one in each service branch's boot camp or basic training. Those appointed above us, our superiors, the law, and GOD shall all receive the utmost respect. The Marine in question failed in this endeavor by blatant austere dialog towards the NYPD.
Some may claim this was a coordinated hoax by Occupy Wall Street. Others believe this was not a hoax at all rather a disgruntled Marine unleashing his Constitutional Rights of freedom of speech and expression. And many such as me simply believe none of the aforementioned matters as this Marine failed in upholding his military service principles–period. In the end, no matter the reason for this harangue, all current and former service members should never forget who we are and what we have been instilled through our years of service.
As a combat service disabled veteran, I am appalled by this Marine's disrespect to his service uniform, authority, and his negligence in upholding the dignity instilled among each and every service member. Because we are veterans does not give us the right to breach the morals, values, codes of honor, nor directives instilled within us. As the saying goes, "Once a Marine—always a Marine." Similarly, "Once a Veteran—always a Veteran." Times are tough for everyone but let's not forget who we are as past or present service members.
Kerry Patton is a Senior Analyst for WIKISTRAT. He has worked in South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, focusing on intelligence and security interviewing current and former terrorists, including members of the Taliban. He is the author of "Sociocultural Intelligence: The New Discipline of Intelligence Studies" and the children's book "American Patriotism." You can follow him on Facebook.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Are the poor getting poorer?
Are the poor getting poorer? - YouTube
People often say that "the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer." Economics professor Steve Horwitz explains why in the United States, this characterization is largely a myth.
What Kind of Inequality Matters to You?
What Kind of Inequality Matters to You?
via John Goodman's Health Policy Blog by John Goodman on 10/19/11Here are 19 kinds of inequality, courtesy of Scott Sumner:
Of these 19, how many do you think economists ever talk about? How about health policy wonks? Is that because economists and health policy wonks are incredibly narrow? Full Scott Sumner piece is worth reading every word.
- Inequality of disability. Some people are blind, paralyzed, etc.
- Inequality of talent. Some people are blessed with the ability of a Michael Jordon, or a Brad Pitt.
- Inequality if liberty. I know one Chinese person who used to listen to Russian classical music very quietly, least the neighbors overheard. It was viewed as counter-revolutionary, and she could have gotten in a lot of trouble. Least we think America doesn't have these problems, think of the many 100,000s of people in prison for using drugs.
- Inequality of money (i.e. income/wealth/consumption.)
- Inequality of personality. I know one part time instructor who always looks happy. He always whistles while he walks, and greets people with enthusiasm. He's about 85. And I know lots of grouchy professors making 5 times more money.
- Inequality of mental health–actually just a more extreme version of point 5–but a big driver of utility.
- Inequality of access to health care. Often assumed to overlap with money inequality, but the Medicaid program suggests it's more complex.
- Inequality of power. My Marxist friends would say I have a blind spot for this one. I think I do.
- Inequality of location. Were you born in sad Moldova, or happy Denmark?
- Inequality of luck. Of course if there's no free will, then it's all luck.
- Inequality of family situation. Are you living with an extremely difficult family member (an abusive spouse, an elderly person with Alzheimer's, or a troubled teen.) This has a big effect on utility.
- Inequality of disease. Do you have AIDS, or cancer?
- Inequality of preferences. I am cursed with expensive taste. If I walk into a rug store, my eyes are immediately attracted to the most expensive oriental carpet. My daughter just bought a teal shag carpet from Target that she likes. Lucky her.
- Inequality of pain. A hugely underrated factor in utility. And let's not forget the poor hypochondriacs. There is no statement more stupid in the entire English language than "it's all in your head." Everything is all in your head, including pain. See the studies of phantom limbs. Pain is pain.
- Inequality in social setting. Do you live in a neighborhood terrorized by crime. Again, only partially correlated with income.
- Racial/ethnic/gender/sexual preference inequality
- Inequality of nerdiness/awkwardness. A huge driver of utility for teenagers. (Would a poor but "cool" and popular teen trade places with a middle class nerdy teen?)
- Inequality of job desirability
- Inequality of appearance (beauty, obesity, etc.) Michel Houellebecq says this is the greatest source of inequality in rich countries
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Wealth redistribution in action
ROFLMAO!!! Well, you libturd dolts wanted the wealth redistributed? You got it!
: God, I love reading this. The dimwitted commie lib pieces of crap who are OWS are pissed because members of their group are robbing them of their expensive Apple stuff- I-pads, I-Phones, and Macbooks, and their cash, also. This is too damn funny! Hey libtard morons, how’s this wealth redistribution and hope and change working [...]
Monday, October 17, 2011
What is Poverty? by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Spring 1999
What is Poverty? by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Spring 1999
What do we mean by poverty? Not what Dickens or Blake or Mayhew meant. Today, no one seriously expects to go hungry in England or to live without running water or medical care or even TV. Poverty has been redefined in industrial countries, so that anyone at the lower end of the income distribution is poor ex officio, as it were—poor by virtue of having less than the rich. And of course by this logic, the only way of eliminating poverty is by an egalitarian redistribution of wealth—even if the society as a whole were to become poorer as a result.
The English poor live shorter and less healthy lives than their more prosperous compatriots. Even if you didn't know the statistics, their comparative ill health would be obvious on the most casual observation of rich and slum areas, just as Victorian observers noted that the poor were on average a head shorter than the rich, due to generations of inferior nourishment and hard living conditions. But the reasons for today's difference in health are not economic. It is by no means the case that the poor can't afford medicine or a nourishing diet; nor do they live in overcrowded houses lacking proper sanitation, as in Mayhew's time, or work 14 backbreaking hours a day in the foul air of mines or mills. Epidemiologists estimate that the higher rate of cigarette consumption among the poor accounts for half the difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest classes in England—and to smoke that much takes money.
Notoriously, too, the infant mortality rate is twice as high in the lowest social class as in the highest. But the infant mortality rate of illegitimate births is twice that of legitimate ones, and the illegitimacy rate rises steeply as you descend the social scale: so the decline of marriage almost to the vanishing point in the lowest social class might well be responsible for most of its excess infant mortality. It is a way of life, not poverty per se, that kills. The commonest cause of death between the ages of 15 and 44 is now suicide, which has increased most precipitously precisely among those who live in the underclass world of temporary step-parenthood and of conduct unrestrained either by law or convention.
Yet nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England. In a kind of pincer movement, therefore, I and the doctors from India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul.
How Rare Is Voter Fraud?
via Power Line by John Hinderaker on 10/13/11(John Hinderaker)
Conservatives are generally concerned about voter fraud, while liberals, almost universally, are not. That in itself tells you something. Of course, liberals don't explicitly come out in favor of voter fraud; rather, they argue that lax enforcement of election laws is no problem because voter fraud hardly exists.
The problem with this easy assurance is that we have no clear way to know how prevalent voter fraud is. By definition, those who perpetrate it seek to go undetected, and it is a circular argument to say that there is no need for better law enforcement because our current lax enforcement hasn't caught many violators.
Here in Minnesota, a group called Minnesota Majority has done an excellent job of digging into the voter fraud issue. Today, Minnesota Majority sent out an email announcing its report on criminal convictions that have resulted from its efforts here in Minnesota. It said, in part:
The report finds that 113 individuals who voted illegally in the 2008 election have been convicted of the crime, "ineligible voter knowingly votes" under Minnesota Statute 201.014.Are a few thousand illegal voters a big deal? When a U.S. Senate race can be decided by 300 votes, they certainly are. In my opinion, there is little doubt that in the famous 2008 Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken, more legal votes were cast for Coleman. Yet it is Franken who now sits in the Senate, and Franken cast the vote the Democrats needed to pass Obamacare.
"As far as we can tell, this is the largest number of voter fraud convictions arising from a single election in the past 75 years," said Minnesota Majority president Jeff Davis, "Prosecutions are still underway and so there will likely be even more convictions."
The highest number of convictions ever recorded in the United States came from the 1936 Jackson County, Missouri elections in which 259 individuals were convicted of voter fraud. A more recent five-year probe by the United States Department of Justice identified just 53 convictions for voter fraud nationwide.
"It's mind-boggling to me that as a tiny non-profit corporation, we netted more than double the number of convictions in one year than the US Department of Justice was able to find in five," said Davis.
Minnesota's recent charges and convictions stem from research initiated by Minnesota Majority. The research identified upwards of 2,800 ineligible felons believed to have unlawfully voted in Minnesota's 2008 general election.
"These convictions are just the tip of the iceberg," said Davis. "The actual number of illegal votes cast was in the thousands. Most unlawful voters were never charged with a crime because they simply pled ignorance. We have evidence of these people casting illegal ballots, but in Minnesota, ignorance of election law is considered to be an acceptable defense."
At the time of this report, nearly 200 additional cases are still pending trial.
Minnesota Majority is doing a great job not only of uncovering the crime of voter fraud, but of deterring its future commission. I am not sure whether similar efforts are underway in other states, but if they aren't, they should be.
How to Lie With Statistics: Tax Rates
How to Lie With Statistics: Tax Rates
via Ideas by David Friedman on 10/16/11A good deal of the recent rhetoric in support of Democratic proposals for raising taxes is designed to make it sound as though rich people pay federal taxes at a lower rate than everyone else. That, as one can easily check by looking at the published figures from the Congressional Budget Office, is not only false but wildly false. Most people in the bottom half of the income distribution pay no federal income tax at all, although they do pay payroll taxes and, arguably, some of the cost of corporate income tax passed on in higher prices or lower wages. On the CBO calculations, the ratio of total federal tax paid to income rises pretty much monotonically with income.The less extreme claim, which has been getting a good deal of press of late, is that a quarter of the households with an income of at least a million dollar a year pay taxes at a lower rate than the ten percent of those with incomes of under $100,000 who pay at the highest rate.I have not seen any detailed explanation of how those numbers are calculated, but presumably they are based on income and tax for a single year. If so, although the claim may be literally true, it is also highly misleading—an elegant example of how to lie while telling the truth.Income and tax liability vary for each individual from year to year. If you take a large capital loss one year, part of it carries over to reduce your taxes, but not your income, in the next year. If you have a large capital gain in one year, your taxes go up for that year but your average tax rate goes down, since capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income.Some of the 25% of high income taxpayers paying at the lowest rate are people who regularly pay less taxes than most, some are taxpayers who happen to be paying a lower rate than average this year. Some of the 10% of middle income taxpayers paying at the highest rate are people who regularly pay more taxes than most, some are people who happen to be paying a higher rate this year than most years. So the widely reported calculation overstates, by how much I have no way of knowing, the spread of both distributions, both the number of middle income taxpayers who on average, year after year, are taxed at a higher rate than the bottom 25% of high income taxpayers and the number of high income taxpayers who on average are taxed at a lower rate than the top 10% of middle income taxpayers.If the logic is not clear, consider betting on the races. Each day, a significant fraction of the bettors—say a quarter—make money. A few of them make money because they really are much better than most at guessing which horse will win. Most of them make money because that was the day that they happened to be lucky. If you looked only at the day's results, you would conclude that the top quarter make money at the races. If you looked at the year's results, you would come up with a much smaller number.Just as, if you looked at the tax rates paid by any group of taxpayers over a period of years, you would get fewer paying a rate that was unusually high or unusually low than if you look at them for a single year.
And for readers interested in a more general account of how to lie with statistics, I have a book to recommend.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
A Letter to the Lazy
via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Ben Stein on 10/13/11Dear Demonstrators,
What a great time you must be having. I used to demonstrate a lot myself. In the 1950s and 1960s we marched and picketed for civil rights for black Americans and we accomplished a lot. In the late '60s and '70s we demonstrated to end the war in Vietnam and "bring it on home to Babylon..." as we often said. The results were a catastrophe for the Cambodians but probably good for the U.S., which was caught in a meat grinder there in Asia.
My wife and I also danced and screamed and sang for the Black Panther Party. That was a bit of a mistake but we were at Yale and we didn't know any better.
But we always had specific goals: voting rights. Equal housing and accommodations. Bringing the troops home.
What are your specific goals? It means zero to be against greed. Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating. It means nothing.
And, what does it mean to be against corporations? Corporate ownership is by far the most efficient, responsible way of organizing industrial production there has ever been. It is a billion times more democratic that the Marxist forms of organization some of your speakers are advocating. Marxism is so much uglier than capitalism it's not even in the same universe. Marxism is just systemized envy, violence, and repression.
Besides, your parents and grandparents are the owners of those corporations through their retirement investments. Do you want to impoverish your own parents and grandparents? Do you want to impoverish yourselves?
I agree that there are some bad apples on Wall Street. I spent about ten years exposing corporate and financial fraud for Barron's magazine and I found a lot to write about.
But the overwhelming majority of the people on Wall Street get up early, work an incredibly long, hard honest day, mostly trying to make money for your parents and grandparents and for the endowments of your universities -- and for a very few wealthy people who often leave their money to your schools.
To tar all of Wall Street with the same brush is outrageously unfair and false.
Look, many of you have educations. If you want to fight the evil you see in finance and industry, get to work reading the corporate filings, see if there has been fraud, and where you find it, report it to the SEC or write about it or blog about it.
But don't just whine and beat drums about people you don't know and don't mock the best political and economic system there has ever been. Do something specific and constructive, and if you are willing to work as hard as the people on Wall Street, you might just accomplish something.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
No More Servants
No More Servants: The other day, Arnold Kling asked a sort of interesting question: why hasn't rising inequality resulted in in the much-predicted oligarchy? Or to put it as he does: with so many unemployed, and income increasing faster among the affluent, why aren't people hiring more servants?
In an economy where some folks are very rich and many folks are unemployed, why are there not more personal servants? Why don't Sergey Brin and Bill Gates have hundreds of people on personal retainer?Some possible answers (some of them culled from, or inspired by, his comments section. I encourage you to read it through.)
1. Various forms of public assistance, and wealthier families, have increased the reservation wage. A servant in 1900 worked at least 10 hours a day, at least 5.5 days a week, and according to our archives, cost at least $25 a month for a "passable" one. Many middle class people could probably afford to pay about $500 a month, plus a room and some food, for someone who would take care of all the housework, all the time. But how many Americans would work for such a sum? Our house was built in that era, and either they didn't have live-in servants, or the help was sleeping in a pretty gnarly unfinished basement. You'd have to be fairly desperate to take the equivalent job today, and almost no one is that desperate.
2. There's a tax wedge. If servants were more common, the IRS would be more assiduous about auditing for payroll taxes, etc. (Already a problem for working women with nannies who end up in public service). My mother actually paid taxes for her cleaning lady, and it was not only expensive, but an administrative nightmare--somehow, the numbers never added up right, the paperwork got lost, etc. Taxes reduce the differential between the value of your labor and someone else's, because you don't have to tax you.
3. Regulatory overhead See above. The modern labor regulatory system is set up to deal with corporations, not individuals contracting for informal labor. Either the work ends up in the gray economy (illegals), or it's contracted out to companies that can amortize the regulatory overhead over a lot of workers (Merry Maids)
4. Management Workers have to be managed. They leave. (Hance Saki's memorable epigram: "She was a good cook, as cooks go. And as cooks go, she went.") They need to be replaced. Sometimes the replacement doesn't work out. All of this takes time. For the mistress of a house in the era before labor-saving appliances, managing servants was undoubtedly more pleasant than scrubbing the coal scuttles. But it was a job. And many high-paid women in the sub-Gates class have full-time jobs; they don't have the time to take on full time employees. A large servant class may have presupposed the existence of a large class of women at home.
5. Labor saving devices Servants were often standing in for things that machines now do more cheaply, and without stealing the silver.
6. Cultural mores We have a much greater affection for personal space than people did in the era of large families and small heating appliances. Most people don't want anyone else in their personal space.
7. Liability These days, you're liable for the actions of your employees in a surprisingly wide variety of circumstances. Safer not to have employees.
8. Communications, tools, and transportation increased the efficiency of outsourcing I don't need a gardener; I need to pay a landscaping company to come by once every few weeks and run their high-octane power mower around the lawn. In effect, we rent servants by the hour, and some of them are mechanical.
Gay marriage is not as simple as David Cameron believes - Telegraph
Gay marriage is not as simple as David Cameron believes - Telegraph
For the entire history of civilisation, marriage has been defined as being between a man and a woman. Throughout that history, almost all civilisations have regarded marriage as central to their survival.
So if you say that marriage should, in fact, be differently defined, you are saying something very big and bold. The onus of proof should surely not be on those who justify the status quo, but on you. You must show that you are right and that everyone else, for thousands of years, has been wrong.
Friday, October 07, 2011
Tea Party favorite in Congress is okay with civil unions
via GayPatriot by B. Daniel Blatt on 10/6/11It's always fascinating to see how liberals perceive conservatives. They tend to define us not by our ideas or our most accomplished or eloquent leaders, but by the fringe extremists who cling onto our movement hoping to mean some meaning there. Yesterday on his eponymous CNN show, Piers Morgan suggested that Tea Party folk harbor [...]
Texas & Wages
Texas & Wages
via Clayton Cramer's Blog by Clayton on 10/7/11Super-Economy points out that while Texas has low wages, compared to the rest of the United States, it actually has high wages compared to the rest of the United States--a curious example of Simpson's Paradox. (And this from someone who does not think much of Governor Perry.)
It turns out that whites, blacks, and Hispanics in Texas have higher wages than whites, blacks, and Hispanics in the U.S. as a whole, but because Texas' population is disproportionately black and Hispanic (which groups have generally lower wages than whites), Texas is a low wage state on average, and yet whites, blacks, and Hispanics all have higher wages in Texas than they do elsewhere.
As Mr. Spock would say, "Fascinating."
The Top 1%
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via Cafe Hayek by Russ Roberts on 10/7/11Robert Lieberman, a political scientist at Columbia University writes in Foreign Affairs:
The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams. Unemployment remains at nearly ten percent, the highest level in almost 30 years; foreclosures have forced millions of Americans out of their homes; and real incomes have fallen faster and further than at any time since the Great Depression. Many of those laid off fear that the jobs they have lost — the secure, often unionized, industrial jobs that provided wealth, security, and opportunity — will never return. They are probably right.I'm not sure where he gets that statistic from. In the Census data (here, Table F-3, ) scroll down for the numbers in 2010 dollars, corrected for inflation) this is the mean income for the top 5%:
And yet a curious thing has happened in the midst of all this misery. The wealthiest Americans, among them presumably the very titans of global finance whose misadventures brought about the financial meltdown, got richer. And not just a little bit richer; a lot richer. In 2009, the average income of the top five percent of earners went up, while on average everyone else's income went down.
2010 Dollars 2010 14,991 37,066 60,363 91,991 187,395 313,298 2009 15,541 37,657 60,896 92,464 192,614 330,388 2008 16,107 38,607 62,361 93,326 192,809 331,064 2007 16,896 40,279 64,612 96,618 196,146 332,943 2006 16,804 39,762 63,245 95,589 202,641 358,700 2005 16,492 39,243 62,797 93,921 196,891 344,699
The first five columns are the various quintiles. The last column is the mean income of the top 5%. This is family income. Maybe Lieberman has it for individuals. But for families, the richest 5% have seen their income fall on average for the last four years. Much or maybe all of that is the people at the very top taking a hit, pulling down the mean. We don't know, but I'd like to see Lieberman justify the figure. Or maybe he means the share going to the top 5%. Lieberman continues:
This was not an anomaly but rather a continuation of a 40-year trend of ballooning incomes at the very top and stagnant incomes in the middle and at the bottom. The share of total income going to the top one percent has increased from roughly eight percent in the 1960s to more than 20 percent today.The death of Steve Jobs is a useful reminder of the fact that much wealth is not winner-take-all but winner makes everybody better off. Steve Jobs's estate is estimated to be something between $6 billion and $7 billion. About 2/3 of that is Disney stock he received when Disney acquired Pixar. The rest if Apple stock. This is clearly a fraction, maybe a small fraction of the wealth Jobs created for the rest of us.Yes, he made a lot of money. But he made it by making the rest of us better off. He didn't take it from us. He shared it with us.
This is what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call the "winner-take-all economy." It is not a picture of a healthy society. Such a level of economic inequality, not seen in the United States since the eve of the Great Depression, bespeaks a political economy in which the financial rewards are increasingly concentrated among a tiny elite and whose risks are borne by an increasingly exposed and unprotected middle class. Income inequality in the United States is higher than in any other advanced industrial democracy and by conventional measures comparable to that in countries such as Ghana, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan. It breeds political polarization, mistrust, and resentment between the haves and the have-nots and tends to distort the workings of a democratic political system in which money increasingly confers political voice and power.
One reason that the top 1% only earned 8% of the income in the 1960′s vs. 20% now is that our economy has changed in ways that are good for all of us. I pause here to mention the obvious–the bottom 99% can be better off with a smaller share of the pie if the pie is getting sufficiently bigger which is what has happened over the last 50 years. But the top 1% gets a bigger share not because they are hoarding more of the pie. The top 1% gets a bigger share because the opportunity to create a lot of wealth for everyone has changed.
Think of it this way. The IBM Selectric was a wonderful improvement in the typewriter market. The people who created it and ran IBM made a lot of money from that improvement. And that's nice. But improving the personal computer makes you a lot richer now than it did then. It creates more wealth. So the most creative people in technology today (Brin, Jobs, Page, Gates, Zuckerberg) make a lot more money than they did in 1960. That's good.
Here is another way to see it. I often point out that the top 1% is not a club with a fixed number of people. There is considerable movement in and out of the different parts of the income distribution. But the fact is that once you are in the top 1%, if you fall out, you often don't fall far. But there is a more important aspect of it not being the same people. Think of it this way. A great NBA player today earns a lot more than a great NBA player of 30 years ago. Magic Johnson, at the peak of his career made a little over $3 million dollars, annually, plus some endorsement money. LeBron James makes over $15 million and a lot more money from endorsements. Why? Because basketball, via technology and expanded wealth around the world, is a more popular sport than it was in the 1980s. That's good. That's why Lebron James captures a bigger share. He makes more people happy and they have more money to spend on basketball than people did in Magic Johnson's day.
The top 1% are different people and the share that goes to the most talented people at the top has grown.
But not everyone in the top 1% earns their money as Steve Jobs did and LeBron James does by making other people's lives better. As I have said many times, and will continue to say, the financial sector has made lots of money for executives in that sector because of government policies bailing out creditor which allows leverage to grow artificially large. That in turn, makes it easier for investment banks to profit and justifies large salaries for executives. That in turn, ratchets up earnings of people in related fields–hedge fund managers and even professors of economics who must be paid more now to keep them in academia and away from Wall Street.
Some of those gains to the financial sector are literally zero sum–bonuses paid for with my money and yours.
If we stop bailing out creditors–socializing the losses of the financial sector–the top 1% numbers will become "healthier."
If we fail to distinguish between ill-begotten gains and those gains that enrich all of us, we are headed down a very dangerous path.
Pat Condell: The great Palestinian lie
Pat Condell: The great Palestinian lie
via Jihad Watch by Robert on 10/6/11
"This is not about territory, and it certainly isn't about justice or human rights, because Arab societies don't know the meaning of those words. It's about Jew-hatred, as mandated by the Qur'an and as preached in the mosques and taught to the children in Arab countries day in and day out, generation after poisoned generation."
Be sure to watch it all. There is a special note for pro-Palestinian Leftists toward the end. (Video thanks to Cheryl.)
Thursday, October 06, 2011
The genesis of Occupy Wall Street distilled to two words: student loans
Read the last paragraph.
via Bookworm Room by Bookworm on 10/6/11
I hated UC Berkeley. Loathed it. Despised it. Couldn't shake the dust off my feet fast enough after I graduated. But graduate I did, and pretty well too, if my Phi Beta Kappa key has anything to say about it. Knowing my feelings about UCB, my daughter asked a good question: "Why didn't you transfer out?"
I had an equally good answer, although one that was virtually impossible for a well-to-do suburban kid, in a day and age of vast student loans, to understand: "I didn't have the money." My parents had no wealth; I had no wealth; my scholarships were real, but small; and — this is the important point — my student loans were minimal. The latter reflected the fact that, because I knew that my parents had no wealth, I had no wealth, and my career options as a history major were limited, I was unwilling to hunt around for a different school that would, inevitably, have been more expensive.
It never occurred to me to take on a debt load that I might not be able to repay. My college choice and student loans were calibrated to my expectations. I even chose an affordable (albeit marvelously wonderful) law school. By the time I graduated, after 7 years of higher education, I had only $15,000 in debt, which I paid off within three years.
For me, being prudent in my financial obligations was a no-brainer. I mean that. My brain never raised the possibility of taking on a larger debt load than I could reasonably handle. Instead, when I needed more money for pesky little things like tuition and textbooks, I got a job. Several jobs. Summer jobs. School year jobs. Evening jobs. Whatever. I also lived at home when I could, which wasn't fun (although my Mom, bless her heart, did my laundry). My parents charged me rent (don't ask), but I paid them less than I would have a third party landlord. All in the name of going to school the old-fashioned way: affordably.
Nowadays, of course, student loans are de rigueur. How do I know that? Because it seems as if every one of the loopy Occupy Wall Street dudes and dudettes interviewed complains about those students loans. (See here, for example.) Two out of thirteen of the demands on the Occupy Wall Street website focus on student loans:
Demand four: Free college education.It's pretty clear that a core issue animating these protesters is the ridiculous debt obligations that they voluntarily assumed. It's therefore almost funny to see the working class union types leaping on board to help out kids whose demands, if acceded to, will pile ever greater debt on the ordinary working stiffs in America.
[snip]
Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.
Student loans started out as a good idea. The GI Bill got the whole thing started, by having the government create a program that provided higher education for those who would otherwise be unable to afford it. The end result was a dynamic, educated group of former military people (trained, disciplined, seasoned and responsible) who helped sweep the country to great prosperity during the 1950s and early 1960s.
What most people forget now is that the GI Bill was payment for services rendered. In that way, it differed dramatically from student loans, which are payments for . . . what? It's questionable whether those students currently getting "educated" at America's top propaganda institutions . . . er, colleges and universities, will contribute anything to the economy — and we know that render any services to the American people, in the cause of American freedom, in exchange for those cash handouts.
Nor are student loans analogous to any other types of loans, all of which require security, in the form of a tangible item (your house, your car, your engagement ring) or in the form of a guarantee from someone other than the federal government. Guarantees from someone other than the federal government mean that some knows the borrower really well, and is willing to gamble on the debtor's success and integrity.
In addition to sending a message to the lender ("this person is a good risk for loan purposes"), personal guarantees also impose a moral obligation on the debtor, who might well feel constrained to pay back a loan before the bank takes Mom's house away. By contrast, those federal government guarantees are nothing more than debt shifting. Just as the navel-gazing student feels no obligation to pay back the bank, he doesn't feel any obligation to pay back the government, either.
Free money for entitled young people has created all sorts of problems. First, of course, it's driven up college tuition costs. With the government writing the check, there's no reason not to have creeping tuition inflation.
Second, the student loan program has given young people the completely unfounded and unreasonable belief that their current economic situation and future earning potential are irrelevant to their academic choices. You can just see them thinking "So what if I'm broke now and am going on to become a womyn's study or GLBT major and future barista. Society still owes me $200,000 to enjoy a few years at Harvard."
Third, the loans have expanded greatly the number of young people who can be indoctrinated in Marxist crap by grossly overpaid professors at America's "finest" schools. On that subject, the Occupy Wall Street demand I referenced above is a perfect example of the product emerging from these overpriced academies of indoctrination. The demands are unicorn and fairyland stuff, made possible only by immersion in the academic world of Marxist fantasy.
And fourth, the loans have created a self-entitled group of people who, rather than pay off their debt, feel that it's totally appropriate for them to attack others' financial livelihood, as they're doing now when they try to interfere with our nation's economic core.
Here's something to think about when you think of those college and post-college debtors swarming America's financial centers: Back in the 1960s, college campuses were awash with anti-War protesters. They spoke, yelled, and screamed about American imperialism, about downtrodden Vietnamese villagers, and about blood-thirsty American soldiers. These vehement, and often violent, protests ended abruptly in 1973. In a way, this was rather surprising, because American imperialism, downtrodden Vietnamese villagers, and blood-thirsty American soldiers were still topping the nightly news. What changed, though, was that the college kids no longer had skin in the game: the draft had ended.
Just as the Vietnam war protests had nothing to do with actual principles, and everything to do with a spoiled generation's fear of the draft; so too do today's protests in America's financial centers have nothing to do with concerns about America's economy, and everything to do with deadbeat kids who willingly took on an unreasonable amount of debt, and are now facing the financial consequences for their cupidity and stupidity.
Davis execution
http://ftp.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/52/52.F3d.907.94-8224.html
is the holding in a federal appeals case, not trial transcriptsor the record of the FOIA
is the holding in a federal appeals case, not trial transcriptsor the record of the FOIA
The Official Manual for Spice Cadets: Now available on Amazon Kindle
Two types of (fiscal) crazy
The first was short-term and charged by contemporary partisanship—a sort of temporary political insanity. Debt limit brinkmanship from both parties revealed exactly how difficult it would be for America's political system to resolve even the most basic fiscal policy disputes, much less make substantial fiscal changes. When debt deal talks began, S&P announced that it expected Congress to work out a deal worth a minimum of $4 trillion in deficit reduction—the minimum necessary to stabilize the country's debt over the medium term. But after months of bickering, Congress only managed to come up with about $2.5 trillion in cuts—and only at the very last minute. Which explains why S&P now believes that "the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges."
But the S&P's downgrade notice also pointed to a more fundamental form of crazy: the long-term build-up of federal debt scheduled to come from America's entitlement system—and the broad refusal to do anything about it. It's not just that the deal failed to knock the minimum dollar-figure off the deficit. It's that it failed to address its root cause: "The plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability." Entitlements—and their unsustainable financing systems—in other words, are the core of the long-term problem.
The latest attack on Michelle Bachmann
One of my Facebook contacts posted a link to a piece from the L.A. Times blogs. It referred to the New Yorker piece. If she hadn't posted that link and suggested sterilization for Evangelical Christians, I would not have been primed to follow the link below.
Good work, Bachmann haters!
Lesson #1: Make sure your quotes say what you claim they say — If you put words in quotes and credit them to a speaker, make sure you understand the context.Lesson #2: Ensure that you use reliable sources — As I mentioned, Schaeffer has been the subject of numerous studies. There are dozens of qualified and reputable scholars who would be willing to explain his thought and influence. Unfortunately, while Lizza did find a PhD to provide a quote, he chose one that is known for being an unreliable source.Lesson #3: If you claim something is said in a book, make sure it is said in that book — This is related to Lesson #1. It's not that hard to track down sources when they are in print.Lesson #4: Don't rely on fact-checkers to save you – If you lack journalistic integrity and basic research skills, even the world-renowned New Yorker fact-checking department can't save you from embarrassing yourself.
Steve Jobs Succumbs to Alternative Medicine
Steve Jobs Succumbs to Alternative Medicine
via Skepticblog by Brian Dunning on 10/6/11
I'm sad that today I'm adding a slide to one of my live presentations, adding Steve Jobs to the list of famous people who died treating terminal diseases with woo rather than with medicine.
Seven or eight years ago, the news broke that Steve Jobs had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but considering it a private matter, he delayed in informing Apple's board, and Apple's board delayed in informing the shareholders. So what. The only delay that really mattered was that Steve, it turned out, had been treating his pancreatic cancer with a special diet and other alternative therapies, prescribed by his naturopath.
Most pancreatic cancers are aggressive and always terminal, but Steve was lucky (if you can call it that) and had a rare form called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which is actually quite treatable with excellent survival rates — if caught soon enough. The median survival is about a decade, but it depends on how soon it's removed surgically. Steve caught his very early, and should have expected to survive much longer than a decade. Unfortunately Steve relied on a naturopathic diet instead of early surgery. There is no evidence that diet has any effect on islet cell carcinoma. As he dieted for nine months, the tumor progressed, and took him from the high end to the low end of the survival rate.
Eventually it became clear to all involved that his alternative therapy wasn't working, and from then on, by all accounts, Steve aggressively threw money at the best that medical science could offer. But it was too late. He had a Whipple procedure. He had a liver transplant. And then he died, all too young.
My whole family loves Apple devices. Steve made our lives better, and I think I can say that pragmatically and without any Apple heroin in my veins. Note only that, he created my profession.
His lifelong friend Bill Gates tweeted:
For those of us lucky enough to get to work with Steve, it's been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely. b-gat.es/qHXDsUI saw another tweet today from @DamonLindelof that I thought was beautifully worded:
Steve Jobs. On behalf of every dreamer sitting in his or her garage who is crazy enough to try to change the world, you will be missed.We can't say for sure that Steve would still be alive and making lives better were it not for the alternative therapy, but the statistics suggest it very strongly. If you insist on unproven therapies, fine; but also try the proven ones. Nobody likes to either write or read a post such as this one.
A pyromaniac in a field of straw men
. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."A pyromaniac in a field of straw men
via PrairiePundit by Merv on 10/6/11George Will:
Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and former Obama administration regulator (for consumer protection), is modern liberalism incarnate. As she seeks the Senate seat Democrats held for 57 years before 2010, when Republican Scott Brown impertinently won it, she clarifies the liberal project and the stakes of contemporary politics.
The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual's zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism's instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual's own good, it says. Warren says:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own
Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.
...There is much more.
The thing I do not like about Warren is that she is a control freak. She has the same view of business as the fascists . She is worse than a socialist who wants to own all the business enterprises. She is content to let others own the businesses as long as she is allowed to run them. That si the Obama Dodd-Frank model.
They Were Never Really My Friends: Facebook Revelations
via Big Government by Lawrence Meyers on 9/5/11
"There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin." – Linus van Pelt in "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"
Facebook has been great for me. I've reconnected with many people I haven't seen in years, made many new friends, and have found yet another method of procrastination. The downside — or maybe it's an upside — is that it's revealed some very troubling things about the social media platform, and personal relationships.
I refer to the not-yet-codified protocol for political posts.
If a friend posts something political, you might reasonably assume that (absent prior agreements not to discuss politics), that dissenting views are welcome. After all, this is your friend. Friends can, and often do, disagree. If your friend only wanted to hear views that concur with her own, then one might reasonably assume that she would announce this.
So imagine my surprise, and subsequent disappointment, that twelve Facebook friends have de-friended me because I dared disagree with their posts. Now, in real-life, when I have disagreements with friends on matters of politics, we may yell and scream and jump up and down, but when all is said and done, we pat each other on the back and say, "I don't agree with you, but I love you. Let's not discuss politics anymore", and we have a beer.
But in cyberspace, there is a dual sociological phenomenon at work. The first was posited by Dr. Stanley Milgram in his famous obedience experiment, which effectively showed that one is able to do something they might not normally do if they can do it anonymously. While de-friending is not exactly an anonymous act, the fact that it can be done remotely, without warning, without hearing an appeal, demonstrates how cyberspace contributes to the dehumanization of mankind. A de-friended friend is not a person. They are nothing more than a button that can be pressed and — POOF — they're gone.
Can you imagine a more cowardly act? Before Facebook, before Email, if you got angry with a friend, you would actually have to have a conversation with them.
But now? Poof!
The second sociological phenomenon is discussed in David Mamet's The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. Mr. Mamet reminds us that we are quite like rats in a lab experiment. When asked a question or given a task by an authority figure, a correct answer or action yields a reward. Perhaps the reward is praise, or a coin, or approval from a parent, or a pellet of food, or status, or position. Once we leave the lab, or "college", and enter the real world, we come to prize the idea whose repetition rewards.
The reward in the real world, Mr. Mamet posits, is safety in the group.
I give you the Liberal.
Or, rather, I give you my de-friending Liberals. Because there are people of all political persuasions who unwittingly engage in the same behavior. The point is the same: do not leave the herd! To leave the herd is to risk status and position!
Thus, when my de-friending friends are confronted with a dissenting opinion, they are placed in a pickle. For the most part, Liberals are not capable or interested in hearing dissenting opinion. They prefer to quash it altogether. Barring that, the cognitive dissonance engendered by a reasonable and logical analysis of a Liberal's unsupportable position, is often too great to bear. Rather than admit to the fact that their dearly-held world view may actually not hold up, and therefore face the horrible thought of leaving the herd, they instead rush back into the stampede, joining the clown car of Keynesians over the Cliffs of Insolvency.
However, there is an even greater impetus at play. The herd witnesses that an outsider strolls among them — He of The Dissenting Opinion. The herd stares disapprovingly at the One Who Invited The Dissenter. Sensing his status in the herd threatened, the Inviter assassinates the interloper. "There, see, I don't like him. I killed him." Status secured.
And so the Liberal becomes subservient to the group. He has handed over his power to others — answered correctly and been rewarded with a food pellet. The homogenous ideology takes even firmer root. All dissension shall be eliminated. The group shall be pure.
The final irony, thus, is that the Liberal who fears a totalitarian assault by the Right has created his own, from within, by his own actions.
So to my defriending Facebook friends — the one who defriended me because you asked what I though of Elizabeth Warren and I told you; because you attacked Rick Perry's faith and I challenged you; because I told you that all Americans got a tax cut under George Bush when you said only the rich did; because you said my posts were alienating your other friends; because you think Israel sits on occupied land and I suggested that wasn't the case; because you said collective bargaining is a right and I said it was a privilege; because you said the Tea Party is racist and I asked for proof; because you said the most vile and hateful things about a woman and I chastised you for your hateful rant –
You aren't my friend. You were never my friend.
Because if you really were my friend, we'd yell and scream and jump up and down, but when all was said and done, we pat each other on the back and say, "I don't agree with you, but I love you. Let's not discuss politics anymore", and we'd have a beer. And you'd be fine with that.
Because you know this is America, where we encourage debate and free speech, not shut it down.
So if you're going to stick up a political post on Facebook, then be ready to hear another side. Otherwise, let us all know ahead of time that you only want to hear praise, approval, and get a food pellet.
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