Judge Napolitano on why Bush's and the GOP's Patriot Act should be repealed (h/t Kenny's friend). Simple reason: it violates the Constitution, it makes us less free and it makes us unsafe.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Wall Street's $16 Million Job Offer to Robert McNamara
In his memoirs, In Retrospect, Democrat Robert McNamara reports (p. 312) that in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War that McNamara helped oversee on behalf of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, he received an offer for a Wall Street partnership that would have paid $2.5 million in 1967 dollars. In 2010 dollars that translates into $16,322,000. It seems that the government-bailout street is two way. Wall Street bails out failed government officials like McNamara and then failed politicians like Barack Obama bail out Wall Street. Of course, both the incompetent fools who run Wall Street and their equally incompetent friends in Washington could not pay each other a cent, because neither produces anything of value, if the Federal Reserve Bank did not finance their failed ideas.
Friday, February 11, 2011
America's Media, Advocating a Suppressive Ideology, Is Pravda's Cousin
Don't confuse Pravda with Prada. Pravda was the Soviet Union's newspaper, and its Orwellian name means truth. Prada, in contrast, is the Prada family's fashion label. It was publicized by David Frankel's The Devil Wears Prada.
The American news media is Pravda's cousin, even while it writes about Prada. Wall Street influences it as well as the federal government. It is not that the United States has a Pravda-style state controlled media, it is that Wall Street influences the media, the government and the university system so that American political debate is monotone: "Bailout, bailout, bailout." Progressivism, the variants of which are Rockefeller Republicanism and the Democratic Party's progressive-liberalism, is a totalitarian ideology that suppresses dissent in a more sophisticated way than the Soviets did. It permits but ignores dissent, suppressing dissenters through carrots such as academic jobs and sticks such as refusal to air dissidents' views.
Last night I was reading Robert McNamara's memoirs that focus on the Vietnam War, In Retrospect. McNamara paints a picture of government decision making that ought to be of interest to organizational scholars. He and his cabinet colleagues got strategy in Vietnam wrong because they were unable to think coherently. They reversed their assumptions in 1965 for no explainable reason. Prior to 1965 they believed, for good reason, that the South Vietnamese had to fight the war. In 1965 they took over the fighting for the South Vietnamese because the South Vietnamese would not fight, committing themselves to a conflict that would, in their own view, have the same ultimate outcome as retreat. They themselves did not see their own strategy as leading to success.
According to McNamara, the cabinet's inability to think rationally about Vietnam was not due to the military's manipulation, as David Halberstam claims in The Best and the Brightest, and it wasn't due to groupthink as Irving Janis speculates in Groupthink. Rather, it arose from inability to come up with an imaginative, effective strategy of the kind that Col. Thomas X. Hammes describes in The Sling and the Stone. In other words, the decision making was a failure attributable to bounded rationality that James G. March and Herbert Simon describe in Organizations.
This explanation differs from any that appeared in the news media at the time and from any that appears in the news media today concerning government policy making. The federal government is unable to solve problems because it is corrupt and because it lacks the ability. But progressivism is based on the assumption that government can solve problems.
News media personnel are educated in universities that respond to Wall Street's needs and then work in firms that Wall Street owns. To advance they must please managements whom Wall Street hires. The American news media, like Pravda, offers a steady stream of propaganda that defends the interests of a failed political establishment, a totalitarian state and a corrupt elite.
The American news media is Pravda's cousin, even while it writes about Prada. Wall Street influences it as well as the federal government. It is not that the United States has a Pravda-style state controlled media, it is that Wall Street influences the media, the government and the university system so that American political debate is monotone: "Bailout, bailout, bailout." Progressivism, the variants of which are Rockefeller Republicanism and the Democratic Party's progressive-liberalism, is a totalitarian ideology that suppresses dissent in a more sophisticated way than the Soviets did. It permits but ignores dissent, suppressing dissenters through carrots such as academic jobs and sticks such as refusal to air dissidents' views.
Last night I was reading Robert McNamara's memoirs that focus on the Vietnam War, In Retrospect. McNamara paints a picture of government decision making that ought to be of interest to organizational scholars. He and his cabinet colleagues got strategy in Vietnam wrong because they were unable to think coherently. They reversed their assumptions in 1965 for no explainable reason. Prior to 1965 they believed, for good reason, that the South Vietnamese had to fight the war. In 1965 they took over the fighting for the South Vietnamese because the South Vietnamese would not fight, committing themselves to a conflict that would, in their own view, have the same ultimate outcome as retreat. They themselves did not see their own strategy as leading to success.
According to McNamara, the cabinet's inability to think rationally about Vietnam was not due to the military's manipulation, as David Halberstam claims in The Best and the Brightest, and it wasn't due to groupthink as Irving Janis speculates in Groupthink. Rather, it arose from inability to come up with an imaginative, effective strategy of the kind that Col. Thomas X. Hammes describes in The Sling and the Stone. In other words, the decision making was a failure attributable to bounded rationality that James G. March and Herbert Simon describe in Organizations.
This explanation differs from any that appeared in the news media at the time and from any that appears in the news media today concerning government policy making. The federal government is unable to solve problems because it is corrupt and because it lacks the ability. But progressivism is based on the assumption that government can solve problems.
News media personnel are educated in universities that respond to Wall Street's needs and then work in firms that Wall Street owns. To advance they must please managements whom Wall Street hires. The American news media, like Pravda, offers a steady stream of propaganda that defends the interests of a failed political establishment, a totalitarian state and a corrupt elite.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Democratic Party Railroads America to National Socialism (Nazism)
Progressivism aims to institute totalitarian socialism step by step. Its method involves severing two forms of decision making: marginal and strategic. Marginal decision making is incremental. Strategic decision making is long term and concerns the whole.
Individualism had succeeded in the United States when elitist Americans first proposed social democratic institutions in the 1880s and 1890s. True, there was urban corruption and workers were not as well treated as they could have been. But 19th century America progressed at a faster pace than it did in the twentieth century and workers were better off here than in Europe where social democracy had been installed, as in Germany and France. Real wages had increased two percent per year and innovation due to the capitalist imagination led, by the 1920s, to most Americans' being able to afford a car.
To overcome popular resistance to social democracy, which led to Nazism in the nation where it was invented, Germany, Walter Weyl, co-founder of The New Republic, advocated its gradual adoption. Unlike most other Progressives, Weyl did not hide his belief in socialism. Note that Weyl's parents had left Germany for the United States around the time that Bismarck invented the mixed economy and America was still laissez faire. Assuming the nonsensical claim that the US had succeeded because of its frontier (ignoring that Russia still has a frontier today and so did Europe), social democrats like Weyl argued for institution of the European system in a country that outperformed Europe. In his book The New Democracy Weyl argues that those who favored socialism needed to gradually proceed on numerous fronts.
Weyl did not favor the social democracy of Germany but that of France. About two decades after Weyl's death in 1919 France capitulated to Hitler's occupation and cooperated in sending 76,000 Jews to concentration camps. Weyl was a Jew whose parents had left Germany and its social democracy for the United States.Yet, he lacked the imagination to grasp why someone might prefer the American system to Germany's or France's. Astonishingly, today's social democrats, calling themselves progressives as did Weyl's colleague, Herbert Croly, echo Weyl's argument in favor of the Franco-German social democratic philosophy that led directly to the holocaust.
Weyl's method has been applied by the Democratic Party since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. If anyone should argue that one half or more of decision making should be made by the state, then he would be seen to favor totalitarianism. But on any one issue an argument (usually silly but made to sound convincing) can be made to support expansion of government. That is the marginal decision. The public can be fooled by foolish reasoning on a single issue.
But if you ask anyone whether they would like one half or more of their economic lives to be dominated by the government, as it currently is in the United States, they would say no. That is the strategic decision.
Progressives like Weyl realized that in order to institute totalitarian rule they would need to win step-by-step on marginal arguments until the sum of the marginal arguments amounted to totalitarian rule. Their claim that this process involved "pragmatism" was nonsensical. As government policies failed in New York City, as Social Security turned out to be an inter-generational wealth transfer, as the National Labor Relations Act failed, social democrats rejected not one. The Democratic Party was never pragmatic; it was since Roosevelt a party of violent extremists using Weyl's deceptive, marginalist strategy.
With 50% or more of the upper middle class's income going to taxes, with Wall Street's strangling control of the economy, with massive bailouts to corrupt industries, with a failed Social Security and health care system, America is no longer free. It is a government-dominated, totalitarian nation where one's slightest move is subject to violent state control. One can no longer save to open a business. One can no longer open a school or start a business free of socialist violence.
An example of the Democratic Party's totalitarianism is President Obama's proposal for a high speed rail system. On the margin, through the usual style of sophistic argument, this proposal can be made to sound convincing. But if high speed rail is a good investment, private investors ought to be willing to make strategic investments in it. Who in the Democratic Party is willing to put their own money into this boondoggle?
If investors are willing to risk their own money in a high speed rail project, then it is convincing. If they are not, then it is unconvincing. Are Warren Buffett and George Soros, two of the Obama administration's chief beneficiaries, willing to stake their own billions on high speed rail? Or is the government going to violently extract tax money from foolish Americans who fail to grasp that an economic investment entails risks and costs. Unless there are investors who are willing to risk their own money there likely aren't customers willing to buy.
Then, it is through Weyl's gradualist philosophy that Americans' every move is increasingly dictated through government violence. If the National Socialist Democratic Party calls the Tea Party violent, they should be reminded that the state only exists through violence, and when 50 percent of one's income is stolen through violence, the thinking public has an obligation to resist.
Individualism had succeeded in the United States when elitist Americans first proposed social democratic institutions in the 1880s and 1890s. True, there was urban corruption and workers were not as well treated as they could have been. But 19th century America progressed at a faster pace than it did in the twentieth century and workers were better off here than in Europe where social democracy had been installed, as in Germany and France. Real wages had increased two percent per year and innovation due to the capitalist imagination led, by the 1920s, to most Americans' being able to afford a car.
To overcome popular resistance to social democracy, which led to Nazism in the nation where it was invented, Germany, Walter Weyl, co-founder of The New Republic, advocated its gradual adoption. Unlike most other Progressives, Weyl did not hide his belief in socialism. Note that Weyl's parents had left Germany for the United States around the time that Bismarck invented the mixed economy and America was still laissez faire. Assuming the nonsensical claim that the US had succeeded because of its frontier (ignoring that Russia still has a frontier today and so did Europe), social democrats like Weyl argued for institution of the European system in a country that outperformed Europe. In his book The New Democracy Weyl argues that those who favored socialism needed to gradually proceed on numerous fronts.
Weyl did not favor the social democracy of Germany but that of France. About two decades after Weyl's death in 1919 France capitulated to Hitler's occupation and cooperated in sending 76,000 Jews to concentration camps. Weyl was a Jew whose parents had left Germany and its social democracy for the United States.Yet, he lacked the imagination to grasp why someone might prefer the American system to Germany's or France's. Astonishingly, today's social democrats, calling themselves progressives as did Weyl's colleague, Herbert Croly, echo Weyl's argument in favor of the Franco-German social democratic philosophy that led directly to the holocaust.
Weyl's method has been applied by the Democratic Party since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. If anyone should argue that one half or more of decision making should be made by the state, then he would be seen to favor totalitarianism. But on any one issue an argument (usually silly but made to sound convincing) can be made to support expansion of government. That is the marginal decision. The public can be fooled by foolish reasoning on a single issue.
But if you ask anyone whether they would like one half or more of their economic lives to be dominated by the government, as it currently is in the United States, they would say no. That is the strategic decision.
Progressives like Weyl realized that in order to institute totalitarian rule they would need to win step-by-step on marginal arguments until the sum of the marginal arguments amounted to totalitarian rule. Their claim that this process involved "pragmatism" was nonsensical. As government policies failed in New York City, as Social Security turned out to be an inter-generational wealth transfer, as the National Labor Relations Act failed, social democrats rejected not one. The Democratic Party was never pragmatic; it was since Roosevelt a party of violent extremists using Weyl's deceptive, marginalist strategy.
With 50% or more of the upper middle class's income going to taxes, with Wall Street's strangling control of the economy, with massive bailouts to corrupt industries, with a failed Social Security and health care system, America is no longer free. It is a government-dominated, totalitarian nation where one's slightest move is subject to violent state control. One can no longer save to open a business. One can no longer open a school or start a business free of socialist violence.
An example of the Democratic Party's totalitarianism is President Obama's proposal for a high speed rail system. On the margin, through the usual style of sophistic argument, this proposal can be made to sound convincing. But if high speed rail is a good investment, private investors ought to be willing to make strategic investments in it. Who in the Democratic Party is willing to put their own money into this boondoggle?
If investors are willing to risk their own money in a high speed rail project, then it is convincing. If they are not, then it is unconvincing. Are Warren Buffett and George Soros, two of the Obama administration's chief beneficiaries, willing to stake their own billions on high speed rail? Or is the government going to violently extract tax money from foolish Americans who fail to grasp that an economic investment entails risks and costs. Unless there are investors who are willing to risk their own money there likely aren't customers willing to buy.
Then, it is through Weyl's gradualist philosophy that Americans' every move is increasingly dictated through government violence. If the National Socialist Democratic Party calls the Tea Party violent, they should be reminded that the state only exists through violence, and when 50 percent of one's income is stolen through violence, the thinking public has an obligation to resist.
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