Obama Praises Lincoln

Obama's Lincoln
02/14/09 - PowerlineBlog by Scott Johnson

[edited] Obama gave remarks on Lincoln's bicentennial in the Capitol rotunda. Obama struck a humble note at the opening, confessing that he "cannot claim to know as much about his life and works as many of those who are also speaking today." This humility quickly transformed into a personal tribute expressing a "special gratitude to this singular figure who in so many ways made my own story possible."

The medieval scholastics characterized themselves as dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants; they could see more and farther, not through any virtue of their own, but rather "because they were carried high and raised up." Obama omits any such self-assessment in his tribute to Lincoln. One wonders, does Obama think Lincoln is great because he made Obama possible?

A joke about some men on first dates.

Bruce had talked for ten minutes about his life, hobbies, and plans to move up at work.
Then, he paused and said: "Well, enough about me."
Sheila's eyes lit up in the hope that they could start a nice conversation.
He continued, "So, what you think about my plans?"

++++++++
Seduction and Politics
A politician on a first date.

Charming the Barbarians

President Obama Believes He Can Charm the Barbarians
02/11/09 - PajamasMedia by Phyllis Chesler

[edited] But what word other than “barbaric” describes the systematic incitement to violence that takes place in mosques and on television and which has led to mob rampages and episodes of “wilding”. Muslim girls and women are group-groped, gang raped, kidnapped into sexual slavery, set on fire, buried alive, and blinded by acid. This, for daring to go to school, work as a newscaster, a hairdresser, or for a foreign company, refuse to wear a shroud, or choose to marry someone of their own choice.

Beginning with President Obama, and including the American and western media, we had better start connecting the dots. We are not only facing “barbarians,” but we are facing barbarians who brilliantly and viciously employ non-conventional, asymmetrical, non-proportionate, and terrorist means of warfare–which unbelievably, our own media finds thrilling and romantic.

The western liberal media is terrified to further offend the rampaging Muslims whose religion is, presumably, one of peace. But not telling the truth and keeping one’s head deep in the sand does not abolish the barbarism. It only makes it more difficult for us to name it and to defend ourselves against it. For example, despite all the liberal media cautiousness, in 2009, a Polish engineer Piotr Stanczak was kidnapped, then beheaded on video in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan.

The “barbarism” is hardly confined to Muslim countries. In Scotland there is an alarming pattern of Muslim or “Asian” murderous attacks upon young white boys.

Trusted Public Bicycles

The Great Parisian Bike Experiment
02/13/09 - CafeHayek by Russell Roberts

From the BBC two summers ago

[edited] The local authority in Paris has deposited 20,000 heavy-duty bicycles in 750 racks around the city. Users swipe an ordinary travel card and pedal off wherever they want to go.

There was no deposit involved with the bikes, just an inexpensive user fee. The outcome isn't pretty (via Jeff Bliss).

[edited] Over half the original 15,000 specially made bicycles are presumed stolen. They have been used 42 million times since their introduction but vandalism and theft are taking their toll.

The company JCDecaux says it can not afford to operate the city-wide network. Nearly all of the original bicycles have been replaced at a cost of 400 euros ($519, £351) each.

-----
Trusted Bicycles 2
10/31/09 - Don Surber

New York Times [edited]: 80% of the initial 20,600 bicycles are stolen or damaged. The program has hired several hundred people to fix them. This has dented the Paris budget and the self image of its residents.

Many of the specially designed $3,500 bikes are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides with bent wheels and stripped tires. Many are vandalized without reason.

The company JCDecaux invested about $140 million to set up the system and pays a yearly fee of about $5.5 million to Paris, which also gets rental fees for the bikes. In return, JCDecaux may put up 1,628 billboards that it can rent.

Don Surber: There is a possibility that the company is making enough money from the billboards to offset the losses on the bikes.

That would make the city of Paris idealistic, and the JCDecaux company realistic.

How many utopian government programs have the same outline? Companies propose plans to achieve part of a glorious future. A "trusting" government grants money and privileges to those companies. The plan falls apart, but somehow the company and the politicians make money. Only the taxpaying public loses.

Audacity to Do Nothing

The Audacity of Doing Nothing
02/11/09 - Blogs.Law.Harvard.edu by Philip Greenspun
(via Peter G. Klein)

Our prosperous society is built on predictible law and consequences. This is already a shining accomplishment in an uncertain world. It does no good to, in effect, suspend the law and take extraordinary actions because some people made bad bets, lost money, and have political influence. Changing the rules and using naked government power makes things much worse. It removes predictability and rewards the people who took outrageous risks.

See also Rewarding Bank Management for Failure

[edited] The "real money" investors didn't want to invest alongside the government. If the bank loses money, they fear the government will take 100% of the value left in the bank and leave private investors with nothing, including recent ones. This happened to recent investors in Fannie Mae.

The "real money" investors didn't want judges to modify contracts, as when bankruptcy judges reset mortgage payments at a lower level and reduce the principal owed. A central tenet of the U.S. Constitution is that people are free to make contracts.

A foreclosure is greatly preferable to these folks than a modification. In a foreclosure, the most senior investors get what they expected, their money back. The holders of the most junior tranches [last to be paid], which carried a higher return and were known to be high risk, would get nothing. This is also what they expected. If mortgages are modified by government action, it is unclear how the obligations among the various private parties should be adjusted.

One money manager scoffed at the idea that the markets had failed. "The markets are working fine, but they're giving people answers that they don't like, so people cry market failure." Stocks and bonds low? That's because investors are afraid of a prolonged depression and continued government interference.

A house in a jobless region of Michigan is worth almost nothing. A place with 50% of its former jobs only needs 50% of its houses.

The government is a lot bigger and more powerful now than in prior recessions. Rich companies and people can put some of their wealth into lobbying. They demand that the government prevent them from getting wiped out or at least slow the process.

Non-Union Businesses Grow Faster

What Happened to American Unions?
02/12/09 - Econlog.Econlib.org by Bryan Caplan From Brink Lindsey's "Nostalgianomics":

[edited] Henry Farber of Princeton and sociologist Bruce Western of Harvard report that the main cause of declining union membership as a fraction of all workers, has been the slower growth of unionized workplaces compared to nonunionized.

Between 1973 and 1998, employment at
- nonunion companies grew at 2.8% a year
- unionized companies declined at 2.9% a year

Keeping up unions membership would have required organizing new workers at the rates of the early-1950s. But, organizing rates have declined steadily since then. Percent union membership has declined steadily since the 1970's.

Survive "Obama Care"

How to Survive "Obama Care"
02/11/09 - MDOD by 911DOC
A doctor in emergency medicine gives some advice about healthcare as specified by Obama and the "stimulus" bill.

[edited] Buried in the "stimulus" package is a bit on health care. It's not making the news in the way it should. It is the equivalent of a bomb threat to American Medicine.

Rationed care is on the way, and the folks who do the rationing will be government 'lifers' who can not be fired and just don't care. So here you go, get to work on these things quickly before the powers that be start watching you closely.

1. Obtain a second social security number and identification card that makes you ten years younger. Keep it well hidden and once you crack 70 years old, or whatever the new cut-off for 'extraordinary care' will be, you will not be kicked to the curb to die quietly at home.

The $500 you spend for this now may save your life later. And if you doubt that this will happen, I have a family member who left the UK twenty years ago because they would not do bypass surgery on her based on her age. She got it here.

(Read 2-5 at the link)

I can not conceive of the rationale for pushing this type of plan. It has been tried and has failed in the UK and, as we have detailed on this site, Canada has good primary care, but for those who do not get their brain cancer or breast cancer at a convenient time Canadians may wait until they die for their free care. They come here. That will stop.

Failure of the New Deal

Imitating Failure
02/08/09 - AmericanThinker by Nicholas J. Kaster

[edited]
Burton Folsom Jr. writes that the New Deal didn't work. He is a professor of history at Hillsdale College, and has published New Deal or Raw Deal? (Threshold Editions, 2008).

Folsom says the New Deal combined bad economic policy and a more corrupt central government.

Obama's so-called stimulus bill, a "new" New Deal full of massive spending, is based upon the conventional wisdom of the New Deal.It will ensure that today's bad economy stays with us for many years.

Henry Morgenthau was Secretary of the Treasury and a confidante of Roosevelt. He testified May 1939:

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot!

Unemployment was 20+ percent in April 1939. This was nearly a decade after the 1929 crash and more than 6 years after FDR's inauguration.

During that time, FDR tried everything to end the crisis: cartelizing industry (the NRA), subsizing farmers (the AAA), creating make-work projects (the WPA), promoting organized labor (the Wagner Act), and finally, launching the modern welfare state (social security, minimum wage laws, the AFDC). It was all funded by a combination of increased debt, excise taxes, and high progressive income taxation.

Most historians tend to overwhelmingly support the New Deal. Folsom says:

Historians sympathize with FDR's "progressivism" and judge him on his good intentions rather than on the results. In the progressive view, intentions and sincerity are among the noblest virtues a president can possess.

If we probe deeply into Roosevelt's popularity, we almost always discover the presence of patronage -- creating and manipulating federal jobs to strengthen his political support.

Friedman On Greed

Milton Friedman On Greed
02/0/09 - PowerLineBlog by John Hinderaker

The late economist Milton Friedman in a video snippet. He responds to a talk show question: how can you support Capitalism, which is based on personal greed, when there is so much poverty in the world?

[edited excerpt]
Donahue: When you see around the globe the mal-distribution of wealth, the desperate plight of millions of people in undeveloped countries ... when you see the greed and the concentration of power, do you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed is a good idea?

Friedman: The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the auto industry that way.

The only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade.

If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. The record of history is absolutely crystal clear: that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

Obama's Feet of Clay

The Fierce Urgency of Pork
02/06/09 - WashingtonPost by Charles Krauthammer (via JustOneMinute)
An excerpt, not a summary.

[edited] Yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

The Age of Obama began with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits for tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change "planted" to "ready to market" for a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The promised great ethical transformations would be seen as the usual fairy tale that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Spending Did Not Help Japan

What can we learn from Japan?
02/06/09 - CafeHayek by Russell Roberts

[edited] Most Japanese economists take a bleaker view of their nation’s track record, saying that Japan spent more than enough money, but wasted too much of it on roads to nowhere and other unneeded projects.

Dr. Ihori surveyed public works in the 1990s. The spending created almost no additional economic growth. Instead of spreading beneficial ripple effects across the economy, the spending led to declines in business investment by driving out private investors.

Critics said decisions on how to spend the money were made behind closed doors by bureaucrats, politicians and the construction industry, and often reflected political rather than economic considerations.

The Japanese Didn't Try Hard Enough?
02/07/09 - Blog.Mises.Org by Tim Swanson

[edited] This NY Times story discusses the Japanese government spending packages during the 1990's.

The story notes that most Japanese consider all of the plans to be resolute failures. Yet, a number of Western economists believe that Japanese taxpayers simply did not spend enough!

How much was not enough? Japan spent $6.3 trillion on construction-related public investment between 1991 and September 2008. [That is $6,300 billion.]

Read the "Stimulus Package Unveiled" from the WSJ and "Japan" by Benjamin Powell.