Front and Center Comment...

I thought this comment by Julie A of AZ to my post on "reality" deserved to be front and center...

When did 'profit' become such an ugly word and misunderstood concept? And how is it that we can live in the one society that has benefited most from a capitalistic approach and not understand capitalism at all? It seems that the government can attack any industry (drug companies, insurance companies, oil companies, etc) by pointing out that they are motivated by 'profit' (boo, hiss).

Doesn't the average American realize that almost all of the drugs that exist to increase our lifespan and quality of life are there solely because it was profitable to invest in research and create them? The irony is that are people today writing and blogging about the evils of a profit driven system that would probably be deceased if creating amazing new life-extending drugs was not a profitable business (Michael Moore, perhaps?) And what about the insurance companies? Insurance has to be a profitable business for insurance companies to exist. Which of course is the true market destroying threat behind any type of government funded public health insurance option.

If the government (the universe's largest non-profit organization) offers health insurance they won't have to worry about being profitable...why should they? They obviously have no problem spending more than they have and running on a huge deficit. So in the "public interest" they will offer free or almost-free health insurance and undercut every other insurance company out there. Soon, the average insurance company won't be able to compete with the public option and still make a decent profit, so they will opt to take their business talents to a more rewarding industry and close their doors. Soon, there will be less and less insurance companies...until, all we have left are the government-tun public option and a handful of government-subsidized 'private' companies to keep up the myth of private health insurance. That is the real threat of any 'public' option.

Once you drive the profit out of an industry, you drive out innovation, talent and, eventually, the industry itself.

I Am Incredulous

In today's WSJ I was shocked to read the results of an NBC/WSJ Poll that says that 73% of the populace wants "some sort of public option."  (link below)

Really?

73% of the populace wants to have the government run the healthcare system in an action that will by almost all accounts either run the private insurance out of business or shift a large percentage of costs to those who wish to have private insurance?  I am incredulous.

A majority wants to pattern match their healthcare on the high levels of service currently experienced by those healthcare system in the veterans administration, or the service in the US postal system or the service with Amtrak?  Really?

A large majority of people are willing to let the US healthcare system "scare" away the best and the brightest, and to encourage that talent to flock to other industries, eventually putting the level of talent in US healthcare  equal to the talent (and effort and incentive) put forth in the government entities mentioned above?  I don't believe it.

Are you telling me that most Americans have not heard the calls for REAL healthcare reform that is tort reform and the reform of removing the government from the areas of healthcare they currently control and that these government interventions are fingered by many as being the true cause of expensive healthcare?  How is this possible?

This poll is saying that most of the people that buy all types of valuable goods and services in the markets every day, including hundreds and thousands of creative and valuable insurance products that protect every item of value and every contingency in our lives, don't believe that the free market can solve the insurance for healthcare problem efficiently and justly?  After all this evidence they cannot see that the free market does not solve problems only when it is blocked from doing so by agency problems and from mandated, mis-aligned incentives, usually from statists and interventionists?  Again, I am incredulous.

All this on the day when the public option has (hopefully) died from lack of support from an independent minded senator from Connecticut?

Either the American people are a lot less wise than I thought or I WANT TO SEE THAT POLL AND THE WORDING OF THE QUESTIONS.    I call on all "polls" to make transparent the nature and exact wording of the questions asked and the audience that participated -- because I cannot believe that this poll is accurate.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/10/27/wsjnbc-news-poll-public-attitudes-on-the-public-option/

Prophetic?

I thought (or hoped) this post was too EXTREME when it was first posted.  Now I look silly.  I hope this blogger (excellent) doesn't mind me reposting what looks darn smart....

Births and Deaths: Congratulations Mr. & Mrs. GOP, it's an Objectivist....?; Conservatism R.I.P.


What we've just witnessed is sad confirmation that at least 50% of the American voting population are too stupid to value their liberty, and though I'm trying not to be too negative here, a fact is a fact. As of the year 2008, there remains no plausible excuse for an embrace of shopworn Marxism, other than a vast and comprehensive ignorance of philosophy, economics and history. But tempting though it is, I can't really tap into the newly-popular phrase "For the first time in my adult... lifetime, I'm... really ashamed of my country."

Just part of it.

Sincere congrats are due to Obama and the Democrat-Socialist Party however, for a successful campaign that, unlike the Republicans', based its success on fidelity to core principles, albeit evil ones. [Note of emphasis to the GOP "leadership": I just made an evaluation of political ideology based on Ethics. Try it sometime, presumably for what would be your very first.]

Silver linings to the 2008 McCain trouncing:

- John McCain will never be a candidate for American President again;

- The fact of President-elect Obama's ethnicity is a devastating blow to all of America's racists: Black supremecists no longer have the last shred of plausibility in claiming America is a "racist nation," and white supremecists have just gotten the mother of all body-slams. Unfortunately, racism will never be eradicated on an institutional or societal basis until there is an explicit, widespread embrace of individualism. That goal remains a long, long way off, particularly given four years ahead under an American government largely dedicated to individualism's polar antithesis, collectivism;

- The Obama Administration and the Democrat-Socialist majority in Congress face an economic debacle entirely of their own making and a geopolitical situation that can only be described as a powder keg - and have absolutely nobody else upon whom to heap blame for any of the catastrophes their policies will initiate;

- The chaos that will result from Obama's neo-Marxian economics and the certain loss of liberty under his Orwellian government model will, assuming America as a nation survives to tell the tale, bestow upon a catastrophically-maleducated generation (read on,) a gargantuan lesson in economics, politics and history that they ought to have gotten in school, but all-too-clearly did not.

As to the valuation of liberty among the general American population, you may have missed it but we all had a kind of preview or "miner's canary" bellwether back in spring of 2000 with the polls on Clinton/Reno's forced de-liberation of Elian Gonzalez. It's no stunning insight to conclude that when a majority of a nation's people no longer understand and/or value liberty in the midst of such a horrific violation of it, that that nation will likely lose it, and even vote enthusiastically for a politician sworn to the systematic destruction of it.

More to the cause of the situation America finds itself in in November 2008 is the adage that "All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." What I'm talking about here is the simple truth that a Marxist American Presidency as late as the 21st century is something that could only have happened via the intellectual default among the ostensible defenders of Americanism, the conservatives.

There is a lengthy chain here and for brevity (hah) I'm only going to touch on key links of it.

The reason more than half of the voting population of America are ignorant enough to have repeated the potentially-catastrophic choice of collectivist government is because...more than half of the voting population of America were educated in the collectivist cesspool that is American public education.

The reason that American education has become a collectivist cesspool is because the conservatives have nonchalantly conceded that entire institution's control to the hardcore Left over the last two decades. By default. Maybe it was just too much of a bother for them. As I posted earlier, if you've conceded the education of at least one entire generation of Americans to a system inundated with Leftwing ideologues from daycare classrooms up to "prestigious" post-graduate institutions, it is flatly irrational to expect that the products of that system will magically turn out to be something other than...budding Leftwing ideologues.

That vote.

That run for office.

That run newsrooms.

That print newspapers.

That run influential businesses.

That write screenplays and make movies consumed by tens of millions.

Similarly, the takeover of the Republican Party by RINOs, by 'neocons' and by 'social' conservatives more interested in theology than in the fundamentals of individual rights, was not a product of any cohesive effort, it was the filling of a void.

That void is the space where the Republican Party's core philosophy once stood. Every rank-and-file Republican I've spoken with and every one I've heard call in to talk radio and every one whose posts I've read online, has expressed a justifiable dismay at the intellectual rootlessness of today's Republican Party "leadership." Not of the GOP as a whole, mind you, but of its ostensible leaders - the ones who are running the show.

What Should Be Done

I've heard a number of commentators from within the GOP today repeating the same post-rout refocus on goals: "What should the GOP do now?"

1. Well, the first priority, clearly, is to toss out all of the current "leaders" of the Republican party's key organs - the RNC, the NRCC, the NRSC-M.O.U.S.E., etc.

2. The second priority, just as clearly, is for the GOP as a whole to perform a comprehensive head-shed and rediscover - or simply, discover - its core principles.

A mandatory springboard for that journey of discovery is an invaluable set of critiques published in the wake of the 2006 Congressional election rout, titled "Straight Talk About the Soul of the Republican Party. [Note that the "Straight Talk" title is coincidental, not to be confused with McCain's campaign slogan.] Excerpted from that booklet are some articles of vital importance to the GOP, if it is ever to regain a future as the champion of Americanism and of individual liberty:

- Edward L. Hudgins' landmark analysis The Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party;

- Robert J. Bidinotto's Folio Gold Award winner Up From Conservatism;

- Hudgins' amusing yet vital 12-Step Cure for Big-Government Conservatism.

Beyond those worthy introductions, one question looms large, and it goes just like this:


Now is it time to have a look at the philosophy of Ayn Rand?

If the Republican Party - and by extension the future of individual liberty and civilized society - are to recover, strengthen and prosper once again, they will require no less than a second Renaissance and Enlightenment, a.k.a. the intellectual context of America's Founding. To achieve this, they will of necessity need to study and adopt the key elements of objectivist philosophy, which means the explicit embrace of:


- Reason rather than faith as the bedrock of Americanism;

- the ethics of egoism rather than altruism;

- the supremacy and ethical propriety of Individualism and rejection of collectivism in politics;

- the imperative of government strictly limited to the purpose explicitly stated in the Declaration: the defense of rights;

- the moral, not merely pragmatic, defense of capitalism, together with the proper definition of capitalism as laissez faire;

- the moral and intransigent defense of America as a just, sovereign nation - as opposed to the entire edifice of "multicultural" relativism and the continuing atrocity that is the "United Nations."

- the entire philosophic chain that links all of the above into a cohesive intellectual whole, and the ability to defend it, in whole or in part, in rational debate.

The Republican Party has been in the grip of factions far removed from core American principles for at least fifteen years - chief among them that hazy fluff that calls itself "conservatism"; the gaping political void they've left where those principles and principled practice ought to have been has just been filled - by the most radical collectivist politician ever to reach the White House, backed by an equally-militant hard-Left Congressional majority.

After the blatant, altruistic cave-in by the "Freshman" GOP Congress in late 1995 over the "heartless" government shutdown; after the contemptible rewarding of Bob "What am I doing here" Dole with the GOP candidacy only months later and his subsequent trouncing by Clinton; after the steady election-by-election downward spiral of GOP Congressional numbers since, culminating in the loss of both houses to the Demo-Socialists in 2006; after the slap in the face of the GOP base that was the 2008 McCain nomination; after the shellacking of that candidate by the lunatic-fringe Left's candidate yesterday - one would hope that the message might at last have sunk in with our Party's conservative "leaders": Your habitual default on core GOP philosophy is destroying America and placing the very survival of America and of Western Civilization itself at risk.

Come to think of it, maybe you ought to just start with Rand's March 6, 1974 West Point address "Philosophy: Who Needs it?" The answer to that question ought to be amply clear at this point.

It's time for you to step down, and to return the Republican Party to... Republicans.

Fun Quote

Lets get away from politics for a minute and talk about culture, at least the culture here in the US (and Europe and Canada, I suspect).  This quote is attributed to Jay Leno, and I thought it had some brilliant "captures" -- I welcome your thoughts.

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE
1930's, 40's, 50's,
60's and 70's!!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered
With bright colored lead-base paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes,
We had baseball caps
Not helmets on our heads.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes.

Riding in the back of a pick- up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and no one actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes made with Lard, white bread, real butter and bacon. We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar. And, we weren't overweight. WHY?

Because we were always outside playing...that's why!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on..

No one was able to reach us all day. And, we were OKAY.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps
And then ride them down the hill,
Only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem

We did not have Play stations, Nintendo's and X-boxes. There were no video games, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD's,

No surround-sound or CD's,

No cell phones,

No personal computers,

No Internet and no chat rooms.

WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We would get spankings with wooden spoons, switches, ping pong paddles, or just a bare hand and no one would call child services to report abuse..

We ate worms and mud pies
Made from dirt, and
The worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and 20 tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team.
Those who didn't had to learn
To deal with disappointment.

Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best
Risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever.


The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. What can kids today do besides push buttons.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all..

If YOU are one of them, CONGRATULATIONS!


You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good.


While you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave and lucky their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it ?

GREAT Post from Mark Steyn

OK, Mark Steyn really nailed this one (Mark, if you are reading this and I owe you money for reposting, just comment below and I am good for it).  They HYPOCRISY of those in charge at this time is simply stunning.

 -- Storm

Friday, October 16, 2009


Mark Steyn: Limbaugh bad, Mao good

Lies cost the talk-show host a shot at NFL ownership; a White House honcho praises a murderer of millions to schoolkids.

Mark Steyn



Here is a tale of two sound bites. First:

"Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back; I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark."


Second:

"The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa. Not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is: You're going to make choices. ... But here's the deal: These are your choices; they are no one else's. In 1947, when Mao Tse Tung was being challenged within his own party on his own plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army. … They had everything on their side. And people said 'How can you win? How can you do this against all of the odds against you?' And Mao Tse Tung says, 'You fight your war, and I'll fight mine.' You don't have to accept the definition of how to do things. … You fight your war, you let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path."

The first quotation was attributed to Rush Limbaugh. He never said it. There is no tape of him saying it. There is no transcript of him saying it. After all, if he had done so at any point in the past 20 years, someone would surely have mentioned it at the time.

Yet CNN, MSNBC, ABC and other networks and newspapers all around the country cheerfully repeated the pro-slavery quotation and attributed it, falsely, to Rush Limbaugh. And planting a flat-out lie in his mouth wound up getting Rush bounced from a consortium hoping to buy the St. Louis Rams. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the talk-show host was a "divisive" figure, and famously nondivisive figures like the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson expressed the hope that, with Mr. Divisive out of the picture, the NFL could now "unify."

The second quotation – hailing Mao – was uttered back in June to an audience of high school students by Anita Dunn, the White House communications director. I know she uttered it because I watched the words issuing from her mouth on "The Glenn Beck Show" on Fox News. But don't worry. Nobody else played it.

So if I understand correctly:

Rush Limbaugh is so "divisive" that to get him fired Leftie agitators have to invent racist sound bites to put in his mouth.

But the White House communications director is so undivisive that she can be invited along to recommend Chairman Mao as a role model for America's young.

From my unscientific survey, U.S. school students are all but entirely unaware of Mao Tse Tung, and the few that aren't know him mainly as a T-shirt graphic or "agrarian reformer." What else did he do? Here, from Jonathan Fenby's book "Modern China," is the great man in a nutshell:

"Mao's responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 million to 70 million lives brands him as a mass killer greater than Hitler or Stalin."

Hey, that's pretty impressive when they can't get your big final-score death toll nailed down to within 30 million. Still, as President Barack Obama's communications director says, he lived his dream, and so can you, although if your dream involves killing, oh, 50-80 million Chinamen you may have your work cut out. But let's stick with the Fenby figure: He killed 40-70 million Chinamen. Whoops, can you say "Chinamen" or is that racist? Oh, and sexist. So hard keeping up with the Sensitivity Police in this pansified political culture, isn't it? But you can kill 40-70 million Chinamen, and that's fine and dandy: You'll be cited as an inspiration by the White House to an audience of high school students. You can be anything you want to be! Look at Mao: He wanted to be a mass murderer, and he lived his dream! You can, too!

The White House now says that Anita Dunn was "joking." Anyone tempted to buy that spin should look at the tape: If this is her Friars Club routine, she needs to work on her delivery. But, for the sake of argument, try a thought experiment:

Midway through Bush's second term, press secretary Tony Snow goes along to Chester A. Arthur High School to give a graduation speech. "I know it looks tough right now. You're young, you're full of zip, but the odds seem hopeless. Let me tell you about another young man facing tough choices 80 years ago. It's last orders at the Munich beer garden – gee, your principal won't thank me for mentioning that – and all the natural blonds are saying, 'But Adolf, see reason. The Weimar Republic's here to stay, and, besides, the international Jewry control everything.' And young Adolf Hitler puts down his foaming stein and stands on the table and sings a medley of 'I Gotta Be Me', '(Learning To Love Yourself Is) The Greatest Love Of All' and 'The Sun'll Come Out Tomorrow.' And by the end of that night there wasn't a Jewish greengrocer's anywhere in town with glass in its windows. Don't play by the other side's rules; make your own kind of music. And always remember: You've gotta have a dream, if you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?"

Anyone think he'd still have a job?

Well, so what? All those dead Chinese are no-name peasants a long way away. What's the big deal? If you say, "Chairman Mao? Wasn't he the wacko who offed 70 million Chinks?," you'll be hounded from public life for saying the word "Chinks." But, if you commend the murderer of those 70 million as a role model in almost any schoolroom in the country from kindergarten to the Ivy League, it's so entirely routine that only a crazy like Glenn Beck would be boorish enough to point it out.

Which is odd, don't you think? Because it suggests that our present age of politically correct hypersensitivity is not just morally unserious but profoundly decadent.

Twenty years ago this fall, the Iron Curtain was coming down in Europe. Across the Warsaw Pact, the jailers of the Communist prison states lost their nerve, and the cell walls crumbled. Matt Welch, the editor of Reason magazine, wonders why the anniversary is going all but unobserved: Why aren't we making more of the biggest mass liberation in history?

Well, because to celebrate it would involve recognizing it as a victory over Communism. And, after the Left's long march through the institutions of the West, most are not willing to do that. There's the bad totalitarianism (Nazism) and the good totalitarianism (Communism), whose apologists and, indeed, fetishists can still be found everywhere, even unto the White House.

Rush Limbaugh's remarks are "divisive"; Anita Dunn's are entirely normal. But don't worry, the new Fairness Doctrine will take care of the problem.

©MARK STEYN

Thinking Clearly on the Role of Goverment...

Recently, the "government" (specifically the FCC and our current speech happy administration) declared 'Net Neutrality' helps the state "mandate" for increased bandwidth.  "Net Neutrality" is a nice term which masks nationalism, but really is a decree that if YOU build any infrastructure your competitors can use it at any price set by the government.  (wave good bye to incentives, and say hello to a new fleet of well paid lobbyists now landing inside the beltway).  I recently read a dim bulb from the LA Times (Hazlitt I believe) in a piece about "how government created the Internet" which, besides from being completely untrue and juvenile, was used to defend a claim that  "not everything goverment does is bad!"  How inspiring!

While the US goverment, that is DARPA (defense technology spending), gets credit for funding research that lead to the pioneering work by Dr. Len Kleinrock in wide network packet protocol, that was where the research grant left off.  When it comes to the Internetand all we use it for, it is a classic case of capitalism -- of innovation, copycats, efficiency improvement, competitive situations and oligopolies (mostly by delivering superior products) and most of all it is a case of progress created by capital seeking the profit motive.  No profit motive = no investment (of $ or talent) = no progress. 

I struggle why that is so hard to get for many.  However, MR, a well-known serial entrepreneur based in San Diego CA recently had the following post in an email thread which sums it up well, at least in the telecom industry....


"Just to comment on the "Obama mandate" of faster bandwidth comment. We're getting faster bandwidth every day along with faster processors, bigger storage, and better online services. There isn't a bandwidth provider who doesn't have a plan to dramatically increase bandwidth pipes. The free market is bringing this to us not a government mandate. The government will just slow down the process and make it more expensive and they surely don't deserve any of the credit for improvements in these areas."



"I know the free market and capitalism ain't fashionable but I hope people on this list have the intellectual independence to avoid the ridiculous sentiment that the government (which produces nothing) can improve the state of our nation if we only appoint a few hundred more czars who champion a few more laws declaring that everyone is a millionaire, gets 1GB net access to their home and has unlimited free health care. "


"-- MR"

Krauthammer in Washington Post Today

This is apolitical, not a party thing, but really important.  For all the talk this President gives to the "seriousness" of war (hooray for him), this is WIERD.  Treating a war as a political plank is extremely bothersome to me.  I am getting the feeling this leader is all about comforting words and inspirational speeches.....



Young Hamlet's Agony



By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, October 9, 2009


The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious -- particularly about things like war, about which until Jan. 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious.


When the Iraq war (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly antiwar. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.


"I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as 'the right war' to conventional Democratic wisdom," wrote Democratic consultant Bob Shrum shortly after President Obama was elected. "This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy."


Which is a clever way to say that championing victory in Afghanistan was a contrived and disingenuous policy in which Democrats never seriously believed, a convenient two-by-four with which to bash George Bush over Iraq -- while still appearing warlike enough to fend off the soft-on-defense stereotype.


Brilliantly crafted and perfectly cynical, the "Iraq war bad, Afghan war good" posture worked. Democrats first won Congress, then the White House. But now, unfortunately, they must govern. No more games. No more pretense.


So what does their commander in chief do now with the war he once declared had to be won but had been almost criminally under-resourced by Bush?


Perhaps provide the resources to win it?

You would think so. And that's exactly what Obama's handpicked commander requested on Aug. 30 -- a surge of 30,000 to 40,000 troops to stabilize a downward spiral and save Afghanistan the way a similar surge saved Iraq.


That was more than five weeks ago. Still no response. Obama agonizes publicly as the world watches. Why? Because, explains national security adviser James Jones, you don't commit troops before you decide on a strategy.

No strategy? On March 27, flanked by his secretaries of defense and state, the president said this: "Today I'm announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." He then outlined a civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And to emphasize his seriousness, the president made clear that he had not arrived casually at this decision. The new strategy, he declared, "marks the conclusion of a careful policy review."

Conclusion, mind you. Not the beginning. Not a process. The conclusion of an extensive review, the president assured the nation, that included consultation with military commanders and diplomats, with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with our NATO allies and members of Congress.

The general in charge was then relieved and replaced with Obama's own choice, Stanley McChrystal. And it's McChrystal who submitted the request for the 40,000 troops, a request upon which the commander in chief promptly gagged.

The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm's-length use of cruise missiles, Predator drones and special ops.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of "counterterrorism" in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world's expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy -- "counterinsurgency," meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge -- you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he'll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand Gen. David Petraeus, the world's foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world's foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Less than two months ago -- Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans -- the president declared Afghanistan to be "a war of necessity." Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?

Markets are markets...even when you don't want them to be...

I thought the following post by Steven Malanga (posted below this commentary) is a good example of how Markets behave like markets, and always will, regardless of what people wish for or hope to regulate.  Lately, some of the more Libertarian writers out there have been referring to the "pro-government" faction as "Statists" or "Interventionists" rather than as the "Right" or "Left"  -- which I find to be a positive development.  I believe this  more clearly defines the political positions on "government regulation" as "anti-reality" or "pro-reality."  

The best and brightest intellectuals out there are rapidly recognizing that markets are  indeed "reality" and no matter what you throw at these markets they rapidly adjust to the new reality and remain markets, but then often trade on  less transparent and more "undesireable" attributes.  Part in parcel to this view is the realization that markets that have to react to less artificial variables are MORE healthy than those that have to react to more.  In others words...."Perverted Markets Pervert."

Think of a marketplace as water flowing down a hillside.  You can place obstacles in its path, but each action will result in a reaction as water obeys gravity -- its reality and guiding principle.  All the pointificating, promoting and legislating will not, in any way, change the reality of the water's desire to  flow down a hill.  When a government declares that the 'minimum wage' will not be below $X, then the market reacts; by hiring less, moving to off-shore outsourcing,  using consultants, etc.  When the goverment decides "water is a public good, will be controlled by public utilities, and must not be allowed to take on the characteristics of a market" then the market exists, as it did before, but becomes perverted as people use much much more of subsidized, sub-market priced water (or gasoline, or electricity) and must be encouraged and threatened and fined to conserve.  Properly priced markets lead to rational, efficient decisions, while perverted markets lead to the opposite.  As you observe the world around you, I encourage you to hold in your consciousness the phrase famous in some of the better economic departements around the country; "There is no such thing as a surplus or shortage of anything -- just the wrong price."



Tax the Rich? How's That Working?



By Steven Malanga

When David Paterson became governor of New York after Eliot Spitzer's hooker escapades, the former state senator from Harlem shocked New Yorkers by declaring that taxes were too high and that he had many friends who had left the state because there were better opportunities elsewhere. New York had to grab control of its spending rather than continue raising taxes, said the former state senator with a long tax-and-spend track record, in what amounted to the equivalent of ideological heresy.

Still, as a political lightweight and accidental governor, Paterson quickly got rolled by the big-government wing of his own party, who passed a budget for this year with $6.1 billion in projected new taxes and fees, led by sharply higher rates starting for those earning more than $200,000 a year. Asked if the budget made sense in the recession an outgunned Paterson said, "None of this makes sense."

I suppose it is cold comfort to New Yorkers that Paterson is now giving his political enemies the "I told you so" treatment. Speaking to reporters recently in Albany, Paterson noted that revenue from tax increases was running 20 percent below projections and that, in particular, the wealthy were not paying up. So far, the state had only collected about half of an expected $1 billion in income tax revenues from the state's wealthiest residents. "You heard the mantra, 'Tax the rich, tax the rich,"' Paterson said. "We've done that. We've probably lost jobs and driven people out of the state."

In a story about New York's tax woes, the Associated Press noted that other states that had enacted so-called millionaires' taxes (most of which, like New York's, start well under $1 million in annual income) were squirming upon hearing the New York's numbers. Actually, some of these states have been squirming for a while.

New Jersey enacted its half millionaire millionaires' tax in 2004. Pitched by the state's unions as the cure for Jersey's budget woes, the state collected $9.5 billion in personal income taxes in fiscal 2005. Last year, four budget cycles later, the state collected only $10.3 billion and this year it's estimating just $9.4 billion from the same tax. Revenues have fallen so far below projections that Jersey has actually had to cut its spending (not just its rate of spending, like most states) by more than $3 billion this year despite $2 billion in federal stimulus aid for the state budget. And even so, Jersey had to skip payments to its pension system. If it were a business Jersey would be insolvent, a remarkable achievement in a place whose residents boast the highest personal income in the nation.

Maryland enacted its millionaires' tax in the fall of 2007. Earlier this year the state scrambled to enact mid-year budget cuts because of a sharp shortfall in revenues. Year-to-date personal income tax collections are off by about $650 million, and the Maryland comptroller has said, "It seems reasonable to assume...that there will be a significant decline in the number of returns with taxable income over $1 million and a substantial decline in the income reported on those returns."

In each of these states there has been a debate about whether high taxes have driven the rich to relocate. Shortly after the New York State budget passed, Tom Golisano, a former Independent Party candidate and the owner of the Buffalo Sabers hockey team, said he was moving to Florida to escape the Empire State's high taxes, which amounted to $13,000 a day in his case. The head of the Working Families Party, the New York party founded by the state's unions and Acorn that had lobbied for the tax increases, said good riddance to Golisano. The New York Times, meanwhile, observed that people don't relocate because of high taxes, although at $13,000 a day the motivation for leaving seems pretty high.

But the issue goes beyond very rich guys like Golisano with a big nest egg and lots of personal mobility. Many small and mid-sized businesses that organize as sole proprietorships, partnerships and s-corporations report their earnings through the personal income taxes of the partners or owners, and hence they pay taxes at individual income tax rates. In fact, small business owners and partners are the main target of tax increases at the top rates. A 2003 study by the Tax Foundation found that two-thirds of taxpayers in the highest tax bracket report income from businesses on their tax forms. So it's not surprising that high individual tax rates discourage entrepreneurship, reduce investment and slow hiring at small firms. You don't have to scour a state to find rich people mad enough to leave in order to understand the impact of high income tax rates on a local economy.

Still there's more bad news for the states with the highest rates, which include California and Ohio. At the very least we are about to see the top two federal brackets boosted to 36 percent and 39.6 percent, and who knows what other federal tax increases are on the way. Those rises will almost certainly depress adjusted gross income among high-earners who either seek to shelter more of their income or simply work less because their next dollar earned is being taxed at a significantly higher rate. That will make it even harder for states with high tax brackets to hit future income tax projections.

In most states with double-digit (or near double-digit) top tax brackets, the combined federal and state tax bite will thus soon reach 50 percent of income, especially when you consider that the federal alternative minimum tax excludes many deductions by higher income households (including big, fat deductions for hefty state and local taxes). Add to that the fact that some states have further raised taxes by excluding some traditional deductions (New Jersey, for instance, has eliminated the property tax deduction for most households, a cruel irony in a state with the highest property taxes in the nation), and the result is a whole new definition of what even constitutes taxable income.

The pain might not be so intense if residents of these states were getting something for all of this extra taxation. But in fact the state motto in some of these places could be "High taxes, lousy government." Jersey, with the highest state and local taxes, has one of the worst performing governments in the country, according to Governing Magazine, and it invests so little in its infrastructure its roads have been rated the worst in the nation. New York, which spends much of its state budget on a Medicaid program that is twice as large as any other, doesn't have a healthier, better-cared for low-income population. California, which spent billions of dollars to lower public school class-sizes, has seen no payoff in higher test scores or graduation results.

The really bad news, however, is that there is no easy way out of this for many of these states. Their budget problems are structural and long-term and can't be fixed merely by trimming a little waste and pork here and there. Most of these states have wracked up huge debts, for instance, so that bond payments are now weighing down their balance sheets. Their bondholders must be fed or chaos will ensue.

These states also suffer from huge public employee pension and benefits obligations that are often guaranteed by law. In fact, the pension funds of these states are so underfunded they make the Social Security Trust Fund look solvent by comparison.

These long-term structure problems are one reason why prospects for local tax revolts of the type we saw in the late 1970s and early 1990s have been slow to materialize. Any reformer who looks closely at these budgets understands that the only way out are service cuts that will be felt by virtually everyone in the state.

Faced with unpalatable choices, these states sit and hope that the answer comes in the former of even more stimulus money from the Obama administration given directly to states to spend on government operations. But rising anger from politicians and citizens in states that have been fiscally responsible will make that harder.

In the next few years, it seems, we will truly test the notion of whether people will get up and move simply because of high taxes. Oh, and bad government.



Steven Malanga is an editor for RealClearMarkets and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute