An Inconvenient Truth: Bill Maher Resembles a Rat

I've not watched the comedian Bill Maher for more than a few minutes, but HBO has been running advertisements about his show.  The advertisements make me want to cancel HBO.  The material on Netflix, such as Zoey Barnes's murder on House of Cards, is at least as good as the HBO programming. Who needs HBO?

Why have television and the entertainment industry, which have always emphasized attractive appearance over substance, elevated an announcer as ugly as Maher? After looking at his ad a few times, I thought of a deeper philosophical question:  Why does a television network sponsor an announcer who  looks like a rat?

Maher's predictable, politically correct views are the obvious answer.  Other commentators who have the patience and stomach to watch his show have described his tasteless humor and his bigoted remarks about others' religious beliefs. Putting an announcer on HBO who makes distasteful remarks about Blacks or Jews is unthinkable, and rightfully so.  Putting an anti-Catholic bigot like Maher on television is acceptable to the ignorant left-wingers at HBO.

HBO's programs  aren't good enough to compensate for Maher, and in addition to the outlandish cost of Comcast's services, Maher offers an excellent reason to terminate cable television service. Many of the left-wing and pro-Fed blogs consider Maher to be "brilliant."  In the same way the coarse, realist art under communism and the cliched neoclassical art under Hitler were held up as "brilliant" in those totalitarian lands. When media is state controlled, the coarse, ugly and mediocre are elevated, especially when they serve the state.

Scott Harrington Interviews Langbert and Marnell

Lincoln Eagle publisher Mike Marnell and I appeared on Scott Harrington's Speak Out show on WKNY in Kingston, NY.  It aired on March 29, 2014. The discussion concerned education and politics.  Scott's a great guy, and we had a ball.

The Fallacy of Whig Libertarianism

Writing in Reason, Alex Stevenson reviews a debate about continued UK participation in the European Union (EU).  Stevenson gives a useful overview of a new British political party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, and he questions whether participation in the EU is relevant to libertarianism. Stevenson holds on to an antiquated left-right dichotomy: He reasons that in the past the left opposed the EU, so there is no reason for libertarians to oppose it now. He claims that centralization is not a libertarian issue.

Bertrand de Jouvenal's On Power outlines the emergence of the unitary state from the decentralized fiefdoms of the Middle Ages.  De Jouvenal shows that a decline in freedom coincided with the growth of the unitary state under Louis XIV, the Sun King, and Henry VIII, and continued centralization led to further diminution of freedom. In his Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, Murray Rothbard shows that 17th century mercantilism in Spain, France, and the UK led to inefficient, anti-libertarian outcomes.

The dream of a centralized Europe goes back to the Romans, the inventors of the mixed economy and government-business partnerships.  Today's European and American economies are modernized versions of Rome, and the blessings of modernity were largely developed in the United States and Great Britain before the current, antique levels of centralization emerged.

Looking at the big picture, Charlemagne's conquest of much of Europe and Hitler's Third Reich were halting attempts to reestablish Rome. The EU is a third attempt.  No attempt, including the EU, has been libertarian in nature. Centralization of power is neither left nor right, but it is anti-libertarian because  centralization of power leads to abuse of power. It does so because citizens in a large, centralized state face high costs of organization, so protest becomes difficult.  In contrast, compact special interests with access to the central bank and high benefits per capita from organization can organize efficiently.  Centralization leads to skewed outcomes that benefit elite interests.  Smaller scale increases the benefit per capita from organization by general citizens.  Citizens' monitoring of and resistance to special interests increases as the scale of government decreases.

In the UK the Whigs began as the country party, and they originated many libertarian ideas.  In the US the Whig Party, which used the country party's name, was a court party and a reaction to Andrew Jackson's democratic and libertarian views.  By Jackson's time the courtly Federalists and country anti-Federalists were gone, but remnants of the anti-Federalists' views survived, including in the South, so when South Carolina threatened to secede in 1832 over its demand to nullify the Tariff of Abominations, Jackson threatened them with military force.

Jackson, then, was no libertarian, but he was too libertarian for the remnant of the Federalist Party, which Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln's mentor, led by the 1820s.  In 1832 Clay founded the Whig  Party, the party of  a centralized bank, centralized power, subsidized banks, subsidized railroads, increased tariffs, big government, public works, and government waste.

The American Whigs have always claimed to be for freedom: Today's Republicans, like Mark Levin and Mitt Romney, continue to claim so just as today's Democrats continue to call themselves "liberals," a term that had been applied to libertarians in America until the 1890s.

While claiming to favor freedom, the Whigs--both today's Democrats and today's Republicans--are anti-libertarian, while a minority of decentralizers has tended to be libertarian.  The reason that decentralization fosters liberty even when some of the smaller units adopt anti-libertarian policies is that government cannot be measured as just a quantity.  The government that governs least is not the most libertarian government if it is imposed by force; it is fundamental to Lockean libertarianism that government be derived from the consent of the governed.

A government that governs an increasingly large population finds that it has a decreasing ability to derive consent from the governed.  If America had conquered the heart of Mexico instead of just California and Texas, it would have imposed less government on the Mexicans than they have since imposed on themselves. Nevertheless, as Thoreau points out in Civil Disobedience, such an action would not have been libertarian because it would have involved force rather than consent.  As the scope of a governed territory grows, the likelihood of consent diminishes.  A single government cannot represent the diverse needs of a large number of people.  In 1787 America had three million, mostly Christian, mostly white, mostly English citizens. The governments of about half of today's states govern larger, more diverse populations.

In economic terms there is only one real-world governmental utility curve; it reflects the sum of public choices about government's use of violence.  At the same time each citizen has his own utility curve, and culturally convergent groups, nations, communities, and peoples share utilities, so the distance from each individual's utility curve to the government curve is smaller under self-rule than it would be if strangers were to impose their values from without.

The imposition of an American state, albeit with a lesser quantity of government, would have been more divergent from the Mexicans' preferences than the Mexicans' own government has been even though there would have been less government under American imperialism. Hence, less can be more.  In the same way, the imposition of a centralized state on diverse Europeans leads to greater divergence from each group's preferences than would exist under decentralized, nationalist rule.  Scale increases coercion.

Decentralization not  only leads to freedom because it leads to competition among governments, but it  also leads to freedom because of a greater likelihood that a given government will reflect its citizens' preferences. The EU, like Rome, imposes a unitary set of preferences on all of its citizens. The sum of the distances of the preferences from the stated policy is greater than would be under a greater number of decentralized states.

As the power of Brussels increases, additional threats to liberty will emerge. The centralization of power will lead, as it did in the United States, to suppression of consent.  Suppression of consent in the United States led, within four decades after the Civil War, to suppression of  a wide range of rights, and within five decades to the founding of a central bank, an income tax, and an imperialistic foreign policy linked to the central bank and the income tax.

The Whigs, who in the post-Civil War, Mugwump era claimed to be libertarians, had ended government by the consent of the governed through the Civil War; they have since relentlessly extended the scope and power of the state, just as de Jouvenal describes. (De Jouvenal discusses FDR toward the end of his monumental work.)  For the past 120 years Whig liberalism has amounted  to government by experts who shape and control public opinion through a centralized media and enforce special interests' dictates  to a manipulated majority.

Millionaires Thank Krugman, Yellen, Obama, and the Democratic Party

As the Dow Jones industrial average nears its all-time high, those who are rich need to take a moment to praise the Democratic party and its supporters.  It is advantageous to have clever advocates, and who can be a better advocate for millionaires than those who claim that they dislike them?

The elite Democrats of academia, those who advocate taxes out of one side of their mouths and monetary expansion out of the other, are  the millionaire's best friend.  The Republicans aren't because they claim to favor the wealthy and those who work, and the public and many of the wealthy have yet to understand that the wealthy are not so because they work; they are wealthy because they own.

When Janet Yellen and the Fed reduce interest rates, the value of assets is increased, and the rich become richer.  What else can matter to the wealthy? Do gay rights, global warming, great  causes, gross income inequality, or a stagnant real wage matter?

All are distractions to the one issue that matters, the one issue about which the news will ever remain silent: the expansion of the money supply, the reduction of interest rates, the inflation of asset values, the suppression of  real wages, and the increment to the  portfolio.

On behalf of the world's millionaires, I thank Paul Krugman; I praise Janet Yellen; I sing hallelujah to Barack Obama.

Donald Trump Says "Yes" to the Second Amendment

New York is too far gone for it to matter much, but it's nice to hear Mr. Donald Trump tell New York's politicians that they're bad guys and to tell Andy Cuomo, "You're fired!"  H/t Mert Melfa.

The Science Is Settled: What's Interesting about the American Media Is What It Doesn't Talk About

I was privileged this past Saturday to join Lincoln Eagle publisher Mike Marnell on Scott Harrington's Speak Out show on WKNY, Kingston, NY.  We discussed education and politics; I posted the interview here.  WKNY is a great local music station that plays close-to-nonstop soft rock.  Since they had me on the air, I've been listening to their programming. The soft-classic rock format is great, but the station is an affiliate of ABC News.  As a result, I've inadvertently heard a few of the ABC newscasts, which breaks one of my personal moral rules: Do not listen to the media.  Most of what ABC discusses is irrelevant.  What caught my attention was their blaring claim: "The debate is settled: There is global warming." Well, that's all well and good because there has been a global warming for the past 10,000 years, since the last Ice Age, as the chart below shows.

As I mentioned on the radio show, the useful information to be gained from listening to the media is to learn what it doesn't talk about.

Technology Heals All Wounds

Dr. Bruce Cordell writes an excellent overview of space exploration and technological trends in 2014. Dr. Cordell makes a number of wonderful observations and predictions about space exploration in terms of what he calls the Maslow window, the appearance out of every five or six decades of an optimistic, technologically expansive one that appears because of exuberant public opinion.

From a policy standpoint, the gist of Dr. Cordell's essay is that the force of technology is so substantial that it can even overcome government's restriction, suppression, and misallocation of economic resources. I don't tend to be so optimistic, but Dr. Cordell may have a point.

As an investor in natural gas pipelines and infrastructure (in firms and Master Limited Partnerships like Chicago Bridge and Iron, Kinder Morgan, Vanguard Natural Resources, Oneok, and Dominion Resources) I am betting on a natural gas boom.  The implications of America as an energy exporter are that the costs of misallocation of resources through regulation, monetary expansion, a subsidized banking system, and government mismanagement can be overcome by significant energy revenues that  open up because of shale oil,  fracking, and other new energy technologies.

Back in 2009, when I last taught an evening course at NYU's Stern School of Business, I got into a friendly argument with a student who was obtaining his MBA to further his career as an energy trader.  The student insisted that, based on Matthew Simmons's thesis in his Twilight in the Desert, oil production had peaked.   I countered that rising prices will stimulate new technologies.

At the time, I knew of a firm that had invented technology to extract the remaining oil in existing oil wells. The current technology depends on water, but that fails to get at the large amount of oil still in depleted wells. Since then, fracking and shale oil technologies have exploded the potential for energy production in the US.  Investors in energy stocks are speculating that America will become the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.  If so, the American economy may turn out to be resilient despite Washington's insane economic policies.

When the Ignorant Opine: the Case of EJ Dionne

Writing in Forbes, George Leef has analyzed EJ Dionne's Washington Post article about Austrian economics.  I logged on to Dionne's article out of morbid curiosity.   I was surprised that many people still read the Washington Post.  Given how wrong the pro-bailout media has been on so many subjects, from Viet Nam to the tech bubble of '99 to Obama's healthcare reform (no, it didn't reduce costs), the readers must be true believers who, like Dionne, voice opinions about authors they've never read and maintain religious faith in government. No matter how badly or how often the government fails, Dionne and The Washington Post will stand ready to generate lies to defend it.

Anyone who questions the "state activist liberal" religion is subject to angered attack. Hence, Dionne concocts a series of lies: Ron Paul's ideas have been adopted throughout the Republican Party,  those ideas are associated with the Republican Congress, and Austrian economics is influential within the Republican Party.  Dionne seems to be unaware that Paul lost the primary election to a Progressive, Mitt Romney. I very much doubt that more than five or six Republican congressmen can explain or have even read about Austrian ideas.  Since Dionne can't explain them and hasn't read about them either, his explanations fit the crime. An idiot Democrat attacking idiot Republicans about a subject he doesn't understand. How characteristic of Obama's dumbed-down America.

Dionne accuses the Austrians of not understanding history, but in doing so he reveals a lack of understanding of, for example, the reconstruction of Europe after World War II, which was led by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who repeatedly said that he was influenced by von Mises and the Austrians and so adopted a market-based economy for Germany rather than the socialistic one that Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi) Party had created. (See Guenter Reimann's firsthand account of the socialistic Nazi economy, much like the American economy of the Obama years, in his book The Vampire Economy.)

The reason for Dionne's and his fellow "state activist liberals'" religious fanaticism about big government goes back to Richard T. Ely, the economist who brought the ideas of the German historical school, which contested the Austrian viewpoint of von Mises's predecessor, Carl Menger, to America.  Followers of "state activist liberalism" like Dionne are, from an historical perspective, heirs to Ely and Ely's predecessors in Germany. American liberals are mouthpieces of the German historical school economists, whose ideas were transmitted here via Ely, John R. Commons, and the Hegelian John Dewey.

The last proponent of the German historical school, Werner Sombart, became increasingly nationalistic in his socialism; his last important work was about "German socialism."  He collaborated with the Nazis and signed the letter than evicted Ludwig von Mises, a Jew, from the German Sociological Association.  Thus, there is a direct link between American state-activist liberalism and Nazism; the link affected von Mises personally.  It is not surprising that von Mises, a victim of Nazism who was forced to flee Europe, might see in his opponents' followers in America similar tendencies.

Moreover, von Mises was right.  I see little difference between the totalitarianism that evolved in Germany between 1880 and 1930 and the evolution of Progressivism toward totalitarianism here.   The willingness of propagandists like EJ Dionne to concoct lies about Austrian economists whom he has not read is very much like the propaganda that appeared in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The great public choice theorist Mancur Olson outlines in his Rise and Decline of Nations how the destruction of economic special interest groups, the destruction of the infrastructure of big government, led to the economic growth in postwar Germany and Japan.  The public choice debate does not trouble Dionne, who is unread on many subjects, so he blithely and ignorantly attributes the recovery in Europe to government spending.  Such explanations fly when a totalitarian state is supported by a collaborative media that serves as a mouthpiece to gangsters like Obama.

The Social Register: An Artifact of Progressivism's Failure

I last heard of the Social Register in the 1970s when I had a college friend named William Golightly who was interested in that sort of thing.  Since then American society has become increasingly fragmented, and the idea that anyone would care to call themselves the upper class of an idiot-led nation is a puzzle.  I have been doing some research on the Forbes 400, and it seems likely that there is scant overlap between the 400 wealthiest and New York's Finest--or were New York's Finest the police force?--the 400 New York families whom the Social Register deems upper class.    I've requested a subscription to the Social Register to find out whether there's much overlap.  It seems evident to me that the American power elite does not coincide with either the Forbes 400 or the Social Register, but I suspect if you beat down enough hedges you'll start to find a few hedge hogs.

The bottom line is that the nation is in decline.  If the social elite has any power, then they are at fault.  It turns out that the Social Register's publication coincided with the Progressive era: It began in New York and Boston in 1890.  Of course, there was interest in distinguishing the social upper class from mere parvenus a century earlier,  by 1800 or so according to C. Wright Mills in his Power Elite, but American society may not have been concrete and stable enough until the printing of the greenbacks during the Civil War and the advent of Progressivism to permit a rigid listing that, from the 1920s to the 1950s, varied only a few percent (10-20 members) a year. The idea of a firm American aristocracy goes into print at the beginning of Progressivism, and it intensifies a century later.

If the Social Register has any meaning at all, any meaning beyond that of a mutual admiration society or an academic learned society, for I am dubious that it does, then its members must take responsibility for the great American devolution of 1950 to 2014.   If so, then I feel no qualms in calling the Social Register a listing of mental retards who have allowed a once-great nation to decline.  Of course, and this is more likely, social status is in the mind, and most Americans don't have the Social Register in their minds, so it doesn't have much meaning either way.  In either case, it is an artifact of Progressivism's failure.

Obama and the Jay Leno Firing: Will Comcast Comment?

From: Mitchell Langbert

Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2014 12:02 PM

To: katherine_finn@comcast.com ; katherine_finn@comcast.com

Cc: Michael Marnell ; ThePresident@Whitehouse.gov

Subject: Jay Leno Firing

Dear Comcast Media Department:

I write for a newspaper in Kingston, NY, The Lincoln Eagle, and the publisher is interested in a story about the link between Comcast’s contribution to the Obama campaign and the firm’s decision to fire Jay Leno following his Obama jokes.  I would be interested in a comment from Comcast. There has been coverage of this claim in several blogs ( http://politicaloutcast.com/2014/02/jay-leno-dumped-political-reasons-kind-regime-live/  , http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/02/17/tonight-show-writer-hosts-obama , and http://www.infowars.com/was-jay-leno-canned-by-nbc-for-criticizing-obama/ ). 

My day job is that of a college professor, but I am a libertarian.  I haven’t watched television news  or commercial television outside of the premium channels on demand since 2008. I have  been intending to terminate my cable service, but my wife has deterred me until now.  However, her brother, a physics professor, has terminated his.   In my case my motivation for wanting to terminate cable service is a combination of cost and politics.  I watch on demand because I can screen out the Progressive programming and the propaganda-cum-news. I consider American news to have the same content value that Pravda and Izvestia had in the Soviet Union. I haven’t watched television news, including NBC, since 2008. 

Amazon.com and Netflix have sizable on-demand portfolios, yet there is little reason for me to catch the latest episodes of the premium stations’ videos, so your business model and my $350-per-month bill to Time Warner are likely ephemeral.  I would rather watch Hitler’s Nuremburg rally than NBC news, and I don’t see a distinction between Obama and Hitler or between the Soviet news service and NBC.

I would appreciate your comments on the stories about the Jay Leno firing and any other points that may address my concerns about persistent bias and the laughable responsiveness of NBC to  Washington's totalitarians.

Thanks,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Key Files Motion to Stay in April Jones Case

Mitchell,

Just a reminder that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on April's case on Friday. This is just an application to stay the competency hearing and get her case back on course to getting resolved. The Supreme Court doesn't grant these very often, so although her case is strong, I am going to have to remain pessimistic about the ruling. 

Here is the link to the docket: http://www.supremecourt.gov/Search.aspx?FileName=/docketfiles/13a654.htm

(I uploaded this via Scribd.--ML)

About a week ago, I filed a supplement to that application. It is attached. 

I'm also concurrently dealing with a nursing home director who is removing the people who have assisted April the most. So she is now isolated even further. Of course this is a violation of federal law, but fighting a nursing home where someone is confined by a hostile guardian is about the most difficult situation imaginable. It is beyond words.

Thanks always for listening,

Earl

 2-20 Motion to Supplement Supreme Court Application for Stay by langbert

Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Technological Elite

 David Rothkopf makes an interesting point in his 2008 book Superclass.  In Dwight Eisenhower's famous military-industrial-complex speech, he comments not only on the rise of the military-industrial complex but also on the rise of universities as centers of power.  This is what Eisenhower said in January 1961, 53 years ago:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist...

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades...

 Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. 

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

While, as Rothkopf points out in his 2008 book, the influence of the arms industry and the absolute size of the military have waned since the Cold War, the threat of terrorism poses a new complex that mingle military with civil power.  Also, both the 1960s complex and the 2010s complex have relied on finance, which as an institutionalized power center was old in Eisenhower's day but since 1971 has exponentially expanded in influence.

Universities are crucial to the new power complex, just as they were to the military-industrial complex,  not because universities' research is of crucial importance to technological progress--most important technological innovation comes from for-profit sources--but because university professors, who benefit from university endowments that special interests fund, lend an illusive patina of legitimacy and impartiality to federal policy.

Sadly, and this is the truly tragic development since Eisenhower's speech, the American public has shown itself to be incapable of the alertness to the global elite's acquisition of power that Eisenhower thought would be essential to maintain freedom.  The reasons include apathy and an unwillingness to, as Benjamin Franklin put it, question authority.   Another reason is the eagerness of Americans to conform to the norms that the mass media presents to them, and part of the reason is their indoctrination in elementary school, high school, and college.  Americans are increasingly unwilling to take risks and to think for themselves; the unwillingness is both a cause and effect of the increasing power of the nation's technological elite.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand Advocates the Sacrifce of Liberty for Security

James Rieker has forwarded an email about Kirsten Gillibrand's proposal for a law that would violently compel employers to give paid leave for family reasons.   The ones who  would pay were this proposal to pass would be the high school and college grads whose employment prospects will be diminished by higher costs and loss of flexibility. Monitoring of cheaters and conflict will raise costs; employees who otherwise would have avoided employment will seek jobs in order to file parental claims. That is not new; bank tellers have long sought employment right before or after pregnancy.  The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 has  prevented employers from discriminating against pregnant job seekers: They have to treat pregnancy like any other disability.  Gillibrand's proposed leave law takes the incentive to cheat employers one step further. A natural response for employers will be to hire the elderly, who cannot afford to retire because of America's mismanaged social security-and-pension system, and exclude younger job seekers. Discrimination in favor of those over 40 is legal under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. 

 

In any case, the chief people hurt by compulsory family leave are young job seekers.  Since they are Obama’s chief supporters, they will pay for their ideological choices.  Frequently, my students insist that access to public housing and welfare is more important to them than freedom.  As Franklin put it, “Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither.”

 

Rieker writes:

 

Proposed on Jan 23, 2014 at a News Conference at a YMCA on long Island 3 months paid leave to all workers, The Kingston Freeman also carried it on page 5 Jan 24, 2014- Friday. The Conference was by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand stating that the Senator and other progressive democrats have a plan to expand Family Leave to All American Workers.

 

Currently the law offers 3 months unpaid leave to about half of all American Workers in a Family Emergency. Senator Gillibrand and other Social Democrats want 3 MONTHS PAID LEAVE FOR ALL UNITED STATES WORKERS. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand suggest that  the Average cost would amount to one cup of coffee a week!!

 

Once you offer paid leave it will cost more than a cup of Coffee a week as Gillibrand suggests.  I suppose they based it on the current usage of Unpaid  Family Leave,  But that usage will soon snowball when it becomes Paid Leave. I bet even Gillibrand will use it!! Everyone Will Abuse It!! and the plan is not written for just medical emergencies, but as a Family crisis, that takes a lot under its family abuse wing!

 

Senator why don't you have every worker contribute 2 cups of coffee money a week into a family leave emergency policy run by Social Security,  that pays interest on the money, and the worker can Get All His Money Back when he has an emergency, after all   Everyone is entitled to it and everyone should receive it.  I think up to half the workers will abuse the Senators Plan and will do it year in and year out!!  It will cause a new government freeloader class for three months out of every year.  The Cost will be staggering to the Nation in more ways than one.

 

We heard Kristen's Sob Story that all other industrial ( socialists) Nations have Paid Family Leave and alluded that we should too. It reminds me of a kid saying Andrew gets a $100 a week allowance and I should too.  NO Kristen you have to do chores around the house, then you can get an allowance!!

 

Here are the fun examples of what can and probably will happen!

Mom is getting old and doesn't feel confortable driving since dad passed away. I plan to comfort her and drive her to her appointments.  {So Family Leave consists of  a Daughter helping in a Family Crisis.} The Crisis would be driving to the  Doctor and Dental appointments and going to the hair dresser and shopping with her mom this winter in Miami Beach. Mom always goes to Miami Beach every winter. As her daughter it is my duty to help her every year for the few remaining years my 62 year old mom has left. 

 

My mother is going through a Divorce and she is moving to Myrtle beach. I must offer my help, after my Family Leave expires please continue  my 5 weeks vacation time, as I plan on taking my vacation after this and the Bahamas are so close, so my mother and I will take a needed vacation, and do some dating!

 

My brother has extremely high blood pressure and uneven heart beat, he is taking pills for anxiety and I must spend time with him, to help him through this dangerous time. we will be meeting in Las Vegas. 

 

You will see Supervisors and Union officials disappear every year for three months on your dime. perhaps one third of the work force will disappear in the busy season on Paid Family Leave. employees are paid for family leave by the other two thirds who are still working,  I bet they will work much harder with a smaller work force during the busy time with happy faces!!  Oh yes!!

 

The government may have to hire new workers to replace those on Family Crisis leave, some Real businesses  will close, unable to operate on these uncertain terms, as some businesses  have trouble with just vacation and sick time now!

 

These Hair Brained Progressive Democratic Schemes always give to those who don't earn it .  When our Country borrows $40 for every $100 it spends .  Spending more money is Ludicrous. that is why we have T axed    E nough   A lready     party.                    

Andrew Cuomo's Totalitarianism

(H/t Carl Paladino.)  Establishing an ideological litmus test for citizenship is an element of totalitarianism, and New Yorkers might consider whether, under Cuomo, their form of government has deteriorated into a totalitarian form.  I have considered leaving the state all my life, and I chiefly remain here because of my late parents, my sister, and my wife's health problems.  Nevertheless, hearing an extremist remark like Cuomo's marks a new low.What is the difference between Cuomo and a dictator who tells the public which beliefs are acceptable?

Shining Light on the Shadows of Power: An Interview with James Perloff

I just submitted this piece to The Lincoln Eagle in Kingston, NY. 

Shining Light on the Shadows of Power: An Interview with James Perlofff

 Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

James Perloff has written four books on the elite governing America, on Darwinism, and on the relationships among institutions that dominate American politics from behind the scenes. In The Shadows of Power Perloff traces the history of the Council on Foreign Relations. In his most recent book, Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, Perloff analyzes how history and current events are leading us toward a world government dictatorship. Perloff’s website is http://jamesperloff.com/. The Lincoln Eagle (TLE) interviewed Perloff by email.

TLE: In your work you refer to the Establishment. What does that mean? Who controls America?

Perloff: In America’s Sixty Families Ferdinand Lundberg wrote: “The United States is owned and dominated by a hierarchy of its sixty richest families…” He was talking about names like the Rockefellers, Morgans, Mellons, Vanderbilts, Du Ponts, Astors and Warburgs, and he showed their control was such that they preselected the presidential candidates before the nominating conventions took place. Things haven’t changed today. Voting gives us the illusion that power belongs to the people, but it really belongs to the rich and the few.

TLE: The media contributes to that process. Whose views does the media reflect?
 
Perloff: That of the media’s ownership. Lundberg documented in 1937 that a plutocracy owned nearly all of the major media organs. We have diverse outlets but not diverse ownership. Today, Time Warner owns CNN, AOL, Time magazine, People, Money, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, New Line Cinema – the list goes on and on. Similar with News Corp. You have maybe a dozen giant multinationals owning all the major media.

TLE: How can Americans obtain information about current events given that their media, such as ABC, MSNBC, The New York Times, and Time are controlled by banking-and-corporate interests?

Perloff: People should investigate alternative media: magazines like The New American, radio shows like Deanna Spingola’s, websites like henrymakow.com, and books like my own Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, published in Kindle and paperbound last year.

TLE: What is the biggest problem facing Americans today?

Perloff: Of course the problems are innumerable: political, economic, and social. If they were boiled down to one, I would say it is a self-serving shadow government that runs the country from behind the scenes of our democratic trappings.

TLE: A related issue is that of education, which works in tandem with the media to indoctrinate rather than inform or educate. How can parents eliminate indoctrination from their children’s education?

Perloff: The best alternative is home schooling; if not home schooling, private religious schooling; where these alternatives are not possible, give them information resources as an antidote to media indoctrination. Truth is more powerful than lies.

TLE: Why is there a trend toward increasing centralization and government authority?

Perloff: That is a means of consolidating power. The Founding Fathers understood that centralized power leads to tyranny, which is why they gave us limited government with numerous checks and balances.

TLE: What is the link between the Federal Reserve Bank and the money center banking interests, the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Warburgs, and more recently Henry Paulson, Goldman Sachs, George Soros, and other bailout beneficiaries?

Perloff: The Rockefeller, Morgan and Warburg interests were all represented at the secret 1910 meeting on Jekyll Island where the Fed was planned. Paul Warburg was the Fed’s first vice chairman. Henry Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs immediately before he became treasury secretary and then oversaw, with Bernanke, the 2008 $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, which included billions for Goldman Sachs. The Fed is a golden goose for the private banks.

TLE: What has been the role of the Council on Foreign Relations with respect to the relationships in the prior question?

Perloff: The role of the Council is to formulate foreign policy, but that policy is cohesive with the wishes of bankers and the Fed. The Council was founded by the very same people who founded the Fed; the Council’s first president was J. P. Morgan’s personal attorney; David Rockefeller was the Council’s chairman for many years.

TLE: What has been the link between the Council and the presidents?

Perloff: The Council dominates the cabinets of presidents whether Democratic or Republican. When my book went to press last year, the count was 21 Secretaries of Defense, 19 Treasury Secretaries, 18 Secretaries of State, and 16 CIA directors have been members of the Council. This is why foreign policy changes very little, if at all, from one president to the next. In the meantime, how many Americans have even heard of the Council?

TLE: Do the Council and the Establishment favor one-world government? Why?

Perloff: The Council on Foreign Relations was founded in 1921 for the express purpose of creating a one-world government. In the immediate context, it was founded as a reaction to the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, which would have entangled us with the League of Nations. The plans for the UN were drawn up by Council members. The EU and NAFTA are regional stepping stones. World government would be the consolidation of all power on the planet and thus invoke tyranny on a global scale. This is predicted in the Bible, by the way, in the book of Revelation.

TLE: What is the link, if any, among Agenda 21 and the trends that you describe in your books?

Perloff: Environmentalism, as expressed in Agenda 21 and other programs, is a pretext for controlling people. Up until the 1960s, war was considered the best means of controlling populations, but with the advent of nuclear weapons, the Establishment was concerned that war might no longer be a viable option, so the environment was chosen to succeed war as the new primary threat to survival. Global warming and other false scares have been dreamed up and promoted in order give government the excuse to micro-regulate our lives. Now they’re even talking about giving the government remote control of home thermostats. 

TLE: What has been the role of the US government in financing its own enemies, including Stalin, Mao, al Qaeda, and the Ayatollah Khomeini?

Perloff: It is well documented that Stalin’s predecessors, Lenin and Trotsky, were financed by the Rothschilds and US banking firms like Kuhn, Loeb. During World War II, When Stalin was threatened with destruction by the Axis powers, he was rescued with billions of dollars’ worth of American Lend-Lease. Mao would not have risen to power without the help of the U.S. State Department: Google my article “China Betrayed.” Regarding the Ayatollah, google my article “Iran and the Shah: What Really Happened.” Of course, there’s quite a bit on the Internet on al Qaeda being a creation of Western intelligence services.

TLE: Will the future bring a one-world government with a violent dictator at its head?

Perloff: From the Bible, from Orwell, from the trend of events and from the internal documents of the plutocracy we are talking about, that appears to be the case, but for the sake of righteousness, which is obedience to God, we should resolutely oppose it.

Thank you, Mr. Perloff. I hope that readers will buy your books and wean themselves from the mass media.

John McCain's War Powers Act of 2014

H/t Constitutional Clayton and Mike Marnell

Dear Senator McCain:

Although I don't live in Arizona, I contributed $500 to your 2008 presidential campaign. I was surprised to hear you propose a revision to the War Powers Resolution, the War Powers Act of 2014.

Giving the authority to declare war to the executive branch is unconstitutional; it is also a mistake from a political standpoint. Presidents have been  stupid about declaring unnecessary wars.  Some examples are the the Vietnam War and the War in Iraq. The errors have been declaring too many wars, not declaring an insufficient number of wars.

American foreign policy since 1918, when the Council on Foreign Relations began, has been badly conducted.  Quacks dominate foreign policy to an even greater degree than they dominate economics.  Experts who might counsel a president to conduct a  war are likely to be specialists in the arrogation of power; it is unlikely that they know more about foreign policy than the average American. Foreign affairs is a junk science, a field without findings, laws, general rules, or knowledge beyond the common sense accessible to anyone schooled in nations' cultures and political systems.

 I oppose the War Powers Act, and I can no longer support you or a Republican Party that produces a scam like this.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

The Twilight of Cable Television

Cable television has existed since the 1950s, and it is one of the more regulated, expensive, and left-wing media.  Shows like The Newsroom and Bill Mahr outnumber shows with alternative views. Libertarian views are mostly unknown, with one or two exceptions like Reason TV and John Stossel.

The unregulated Internet has a greater diversity of views, and not surprisingly, innovation has occurred at a faster rate on the unregulated Internet than on regulated cable television.  In my rural township, Olive, New York, there is only one cable provider that can come to my home, Time Warner, and its prices are high.  The high prices may not be surprising because of my area's sparse population, but in the more competitive Internet field prices are not so high, even where I live. Government regulation harms rather than helps consumers.

Websites like Amazon.com and Netflix are increasingly offering  online video that works better than cable, at least in my area, and Netflix makes new programs.  Amazon has a collection that is available for free to its Prime subscribers.  The last time I looked Prime cost $79 per year or so while my cable subscription, which includes a premium package and some purchases of on-demand videos, costs over $300 per month or $3,600 per year.  ISP subscriptions run $29 per month or so, and Netflix costs $16 per month.  If you add $7 per month for Amazon Prime (which includes free shipping on Amazon-based sales, so the real cost is much less and most likely zero), $16 for Netflix, plus $29 for an ISP service, the cost of home entertainment only needs to be $52, rather than the astronomical $300 cable bill I pay each month.  My cable bill is almost enough to lease a new Lexus ES 350.

Netflix series like Lilyhammer with The Sopranos' Steven van Zandt (Silvio) and a cameo appearance by Tony Sirico (Pauli Gualtieri) and House of Cards with Kevin Spacey are as good as the HBO and Showtime series.

I don't mean to detract from the excellent TV on cable, both on prime time television and on the premium channels, but cable television's business model doesn't work. It is a financial drain on the consumer, and it takes advantage of a regulated market that prevents entry and competition--with the result of exploiting consumers.  My brother-in-law has discarded both his land line and his cable subscription, so he relies on a cell phone and the Internet.  He's a professor of physics, a smart guy, and I think he has the right idea.

Doctors Without Borders

I give  small donations each year to charities that focus on children, the third world, military veterans, and education.  One is Doctors Without Borders. They sent this video.

More College Does Not Beget More Economic Prosperity

In a recent Forbes column George Leef of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy points out that, contrary to President Obama's claim, higher education does not improve economic performance.  The claim that it does improve the economy arises from an error: the belief that correlation implies causation.  Countries with more wealth have more college graduates because they can afford to send more students to college.  They are not more wealthy because they have more graduates, for college attendance is a consumption good.  My guess is that the number of automobiles per capita contributes more to national wealth than do college degrees.

The claim that education leads to wealth is based on human capital theory. Human capital theory goes back to Adam Smith''s 1776 Wealth of Nations and Alfred Marshall's 1890 Principles of Economics.  The economist most closely associated with the human capital theory is Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics.

Labor economists contrast the human capital theory with  Michael Spence's signaling theory, to which Leef alludes in his article.  Spence also won a Nobel Prize in economics.  Signaling theory suggests that ability is correlated with education, so years of education signal underlying ability.  A difference between human capital theory and signaling theory is that the former suggests that the material learned in school is relevant to economic performance while signaling theory does not.  Completion of a course in abstract mathematics suggests a high level of underlying ability even if the graduate ends up working in an unrelated field.  If signaling theory is right, then a simple IQ test and completion of a US Marines or Navy Seals boot camp training will predict as much as a college degree, maybe more.

I prefer a third alternative:  institutionalist theory.  Institutionalist  thinking places weight on mimesis in the creation of cultural patterns that are often irrational.  College is popular because of imitation.  In his 1978 book Culture of Professionalism, Burton Bledenstein shows that the impulse toward professionalism was a crucial foundation of the Progressive movement and that Americans have had a preference for professional status over and above wealth, fame, and learning.  Education is a sign of professionalism, so it is desired as a consumer good.  Likewise, American firms have preferred college graduates because degrees imbue their managements with professional status.  There is no evidence that higher education has contributed to firms' economic success.  To the contrary, the rise in the number of college graduates in America after World War II paralleled the ascendance of Japanese industry and the decline of Detroit.  

In his important work on productivity differences around the world, William Lewis of the McKinsey consulting firm showed, in the early 1990s, that production workers in the third world could be made to be about as productive as American workers through improvement in the organization of work and workplace training.  Third world workers can produce economic results that equal those of high school and college graduates.  Producing them requires insight as to the organization of work.  This was achieved in postwar Japan through innovative thinking at Toyota.  More generally, the individuals most responsible for workplace innovation have been Frederick Winslow Taylor, who chose not to attend college, Henry Ford, who did not go to college, W Edwards Deming, who held a Ph.D. in physics but never got a job related to his degree, and Taiichi Ohno, the inventor of lean manufacturing and the Toyota production system.  Ohno held a degree from Nagoya Technical High School. An exception is Sam Walton, who held a BA from the University of Missouri.

The chief contributions of business schools to business practice have been through the human relations movement, job redesign, the marketing concept, the capital asset pricing model, and other financial theories.  These are minor contributions.  The human relations school, for example, has contributed to Japanese management practice, but it has been ignored in the US as the Marxist critic (and Brooklyn College dropout) Harry Braverman points out in his Labor and Monopoly Capital.  The finance field, which is the one to which academics have made the most contributions, has been a canker sore on the American economy, requiring a multitrillion dollar bailout and ongoing subsidization from the Federal Reserve Bank; it has produced little of value in return.  Without college education Henry Ford invented the assembly line; Taiichi Ohno reinvented it.

In After Virtue, a classic work on ethics, Alisdair MacIntyre claims that there are three fraudulent figures of the modern world:  the aesthete, the psychiatrist, and the manager.  There is a fourth: the business professor who claims to raise productivity but knows nothing about the substance of management.  I am not the first to make this claim:  Abraham Zaleznik, in his Managerial Mystique, argues that business schools have lost touch with the substance of business.  As a critique of business education, Zaleznik's point is right, but its implications go further.  If business schools do not teach students how to succeed in business, why do they exist?

During America's period of most innovative and rapid economic growth, from 1840 to 1920, only about five percent of Americans attended college.  There is no evidence that much of the innovation of that period, chronicled in David Ames Wells's 1889 Recent Economic Changes, came from people with college degrees.  During that period college degrees were associated with professional careers, notably law, although doctors and lawyers often lacked undergraduate degrees. College was mostly associated with careers in the clergy until the 20th century.  It wasn't until well into the Progressive era that the claim that college education had anything to do with business success gained traction.  By then, most of the innovation associated with the modern world had occurred; even television and radio had been invented, by Nikola Tesla, in the 19th century.   Tesla, incidentally, had thought of AC electricity before attending a technological college in Europe, and his professor discouraged his pursuit of the AC motor, which created the modern world.

Barack Obama has done much harm to the nation through his  ill-conceived health reform and common core.  His claims about higher education, as Leef points out, will contribute to American economic decline.