Recently in Ayn Rand Was Right Category

Very little surprises me about the ever more nonsensical, illogical, and incompetent Obama Administration. Two of the latest examples of this dysfunction: federal fines placed upon fuel companies for failure to blend certain biofuels in gasoline and diesel even though those biofuels don't exist; and new regulations imposed by NOAA that seriously cripple the New England fishing industry even though the need for those restrictions cannot be justified.

With every move Obama and his minions make we move closer to the dystopian hell of Atlas Shrugged. I figure it's only a matter of time before something like Directive 10-289 is handed down by executive order from Obama. (Don't think it won't happen. One clueless leftist on the WSJ Forums suggested stopping the economic abandonment of California by otherwise viable businesses by making it illegal for them to relocate out of state or to trim jobs. Others on the forum informed this idiot that such a thing is tantamount to slavery and illegal seizure of private property without due process or just compensation - the 13th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution, respectively. But then the Left doesn't really like the Constitution, does it?)

Because stupid things like this have been happening a little bit at a time, most of the people in the US don't realize it's happening. But if Obama tried to shove his agenda down our throats overnight there would be armed rebellion by the states and a Second Civil War could result. Except this time it wouldn't be North versus South but Red versus Blue.

Over at Ace of Spades is a list of the things the Left fears should Obama lose the election come next November. Are their fears unfounded? In some areas, yes. But for the most part they are right to fear that much of the damage done by the Congressional Democrats since 2007 and President Obama since 2009 will be undone should Obama lose in November. When you come right down to it, the upcoming elections are about the wholesale damage perpetrated by the Left's minions over the past 6 years. Will the American people allow the ongoing dismantling of a great nation all in the name of some vague sense of "fairness"? And just who defines what is fair? (Of course the Left believe they are the only arbiters of fairness, even though many I have debated with really have no idea what 'fair' really is.)

The problem is that many on the Left don't see the actions that have damaged the economy as bad. They only see it as 'fair'. (I'm still waiting for someone on the Left to show me where it says life is supposed to be fair. So far, they haven't, nor do I expect them to.) Through observation over the years I have come to see that the Left's ideology is both economically and morally bankrupt. Never mind history's lesson showing it to also to be a murderous ideology, in the end.

There are plenty of examples of the fairness of socialism going back over 400 years to show just how bad their ideology can make it. One of their first forays into 'fairness': the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts.

During the initial years of the colony, the Pilgrims tried a social experiment, one that predated Marx by almost 300 years, that experiment being "From each according to his ability. To each according to his need." The results? Famine. Everyone wanted from the common larder, but no one wanted to work to fill it. In the end the colonists abandoned the experiment as a failure and from that point on the colony thrived.

Did the Left learn from that experiment? No, of course not. They've tried that experiment again and again (Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, Venezuela, etc.) with the results being the same: economic and social collapse, and in some cases, mass murder. Such failures haven't dissuaded them from trying to pull that here. I have little doubt their reasoning is something along the lines of "But we'll do it better this time because we're better than the others were!" They've become a living example of Einstein's axiom about insanity.

So now we come back to present day and the Left's push to drive America in a direction of oft proven failure. Again we return to the so-called fairness doctrine as an excuse to justify large scale theft and interference in our day to day lives. Where does this call for fairness derive?

I figure it goes back to the egalitarian movements that drove things like the French Revolution. An egalitarian society sounds like a great thing, in theory. But in practice, such societies tend to be anything but, usually devolving to the lowest common denominator - mob rule. The French Republic after the Revolution didn't earn the sobriquet "Reign of Terror" for nothing. Of those that did not devolve into mob rule, it was a totalitarian government that drove everyone to be equal - equally poor, equally miserable, and equally terrified of their government. I doubt that was the dream of the egalitarians, but that's what their dream ended up being - a nightmare.

The problem with such egalitarian ideals comes down to this: they are based upon two concepts that are poor at best and base at worst, those being human emotion and a false understanding of human nature. Let's take a look at both of these to see where the Left got it wrong and continues to do so.

The first of these two, emotion, is the most troublesome. While a sense of fairness may be an admirable thing and something to which we can aspire, it should not be something based upon envy or greed. Unfortunately the Left's sense of fairness is derived from that very source. All you have to do is listen to their rhetoric in regards to fairness and I think you'll find it has nothing to with actual fairness and everything to do with envy. Oh, they won't admit to it, but when you think about it it makes sense. It all comes down to "Hey, that guy/girl/person has something I don't and can't afford right now! That's not fair! We/I should take it away from them because they don't deserve it!" But if they earned the money to pay for it then why shouldn't they be allowed to have whatever it is? Again, envy comes into play, this time in regards to the money earned to pay for whatever it is. Why should one person make more for their job than someone else for their job? Never mind that one job may be worth far more than another, may create more goods, services, or jobs than another. It just doesn't seem fair. But it is. Too bad far too many of the Left are incapable of seeing this.

The second of the concepts that lead the Left astray is their decision to ignore human nature. Or perhaps I should say their decision to ignore it as it happens to be rather than as they wish it to be. Of the two, the second is based upon pure fantasy. It seems one of the biggest fantasies that endure on the Left is that you can change human nature with enough education, indoctrination, or terror. It's been tried in a number of places, but has never yielded the expected results. The USSR tried for over 5 generations to create the New Soviet Man, a human with none of the ideological weaknesses attributed to capitalists. They wanted someone that would put the needs of The State (or The Good Of The People) ahead of those of their own, ahead of those of their own families. But that way lies slavery, where the individual is merely a replaceable cog in the machinery of state, without free will, to be sacrificed at whim and without a thought to their own welfare. But that goes against millions of years of existence, against millions of years of human nature. You can't overturn something so basic to human existence with education, indoctrination, or terror. Human nature wins out in the end. And in the end that's why Leftist 'paradises' have collapsed and disappeared into history. We're watching that happen now in Venezuela, a once prosperous nation turned into a land of want, broken down infrastructure, and the inability to even feed itself, all done in the name of 'fairness'. And this is what the Left wants to do here?

Thanks, but no thanks.

We've been hearing about the financial turmoil in the EU, with Greece just this side of total bankruptcy, and Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and Spain no too far behind. There's lot's of finger pointing, with very few pointing the finger at Brussels and he unaccountable EU Parliament.

One of those doing willing to do so is the CEO of Ryan Air, Michael O'Leary. He slams the EU bureaucracy, the politicians, the rent seekers, and those trying their hardest to kill off any innovation that might make things better rather than maintaining the status quo, as bad as it is.


O'Leary tells them some hard truths, truths they'd rather not hear. But then he's helped create more jobs than all of the EUcrats combined.

I promised myself I wasn't going to give any more coverage to the Occupy Wall Street protests, but this was too good to pass up. This came by way of my friend at work, Cathy.

Adam Corolla nails it when it comes to the OWS protesters. As Cathy writes, "This is what happens when you have a generation of 'No one is wrong, no one loses, and we all get trophies.' " (Warning: Strong Language.)



A few highlights of Adam's rant, all of which with I happen to agree.

"They're feeling shame. They've been shamed by life because they haven't been prepared for life. They've had so much smoke blown up their...collective asses, by the time they get out in the real world and they realize the real world doesn't give a f**k about where you're from or about what your mommy said you were, or how pretty you are, or what you do."

"All those lies that were told to you by your parents about how special are and how no one was created like you...doesn't mean s**t when you get to the real world and you're just looked at as Peon #27 who's putting in an application."

"Now your plan is to come back and throw a brick at my window. That's your plan...it's this envy and shame and there's going to be a lot more of it."

"We are creating a group of self-entitled monsters."

Indeed.

After weeks of hullabaloo about the various OWS protests across the nation, it appears the whole thing was much ado about nothing.

Between unfocused or contradictory messages, hypocrisy, mob violence, rape, murder, theft, drug overdoses, totalitarian 'councils' confiscating donated money, and just plain foolishness, the Occupy Wall Street protesters have proven one thing to the public at large: they're spoiled children filling the role of useful idiots, showing the worst side of society, not the best as they have claimed.

What have they accomplished other than showing the rest of the country that they're mean-spirited wackos with little understanding of history, economics, or human nature?

It shows in hundreds of different ways, with one of the overriding themes I noticed being "We want you to pay for our stuff even though we could pay for it ourselves, but we don't want the rest of you freeloaders to take our stuff that someone else paid for!" This theme has recurred at more than one protest location, with the protesters not recognizing the hypocrisy of their demands.

Some want to replace capitalism with socialism, even though the socialism they're promoting has never lived up to the promises made and usually end up creating nothing but poverty, misery, and terror. It isn't until countless lives are sacrificed that the socialist utopias implode.

Some seem to think that anarchy is the answer, but all that ever leads to is destruction, lawlessness, and in the end, tyranny.

They claim they represent the 99%, but 99% of what? 99% of the spoiled privileged children of the 1%? 99% of the clueless drones feeling entitled to what others have earned through hard work? They sure as hell don't represent 99% of the American people.

In the end, OWS has been about nothing but selfishness, greed, and a sense of entitlement. In other words, a world class FAIL.

I find it interesting that President Obama sincerely believes that those of us Americans still working have gotten lazy.

WTF?

I don't know about you, but all three of us here at The Manse are working our butts off. Deb is working at the local veteran's home and going to nursing school. BeezleBub is going to school, taking part in some extracurricular activities, and working at the farm. Me, I'm working, working, and..umm...working.

What it comes down to is that he doesn't think we're working hard enough to support his socialist agenda. This requires people to give selflessly by working harder to support those who can't work and more specifically, those who won't work.

When productivity from those of us starts falling off it's somehow our fault. Never mind that all he's done is given those of us still working more than enough incentive to not work nearly as hard as we have in the past. After all, why should we? All he's going to do is take it away from us.

How do we know this? Because he's said as much during the beginning of his still ongoing presidential campaign. (Remember Joe the Plumber?)

It must be remembered that socialism is based upon two principles: envy, and the belief in altruism.

Of the first, it is envy by those who actually produce little or nothing who have been told that those actually producing the wealth are somehow beholden to them. It usually takes the form of class warfare egged on by the very people who see themselves above all of that. (They aren't.)

The Left sells the idea that the best way to make sure everyone has what they need is to take it away from those who actually provide it. The problem is that eventually the providers will decide it's no longer worth it to do so and they'll stop doing it. Then who benefits? Obviously, no one.

Second, socialist believe big time in altruism, that human condition where individuals put aside their own wants and needs for the benefits of others. There's a problem with this belief: no one can be altruistic all the time because by nature humans are altruistic only now and then, and then only under very specific and limited conditions for a very limited amount of time. Once their 'altruism' starts hurting them and their families it fades away. If we need any proof of that all we need to do is look at the two biggest experiments in socialism to see how well the belief in altruism fared: the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

Both tried it for generations. Both failed to live up to the ideal. One utterly collapsed when their socialist economy collapsed like the house of cards that it was. The other one gave up on the idea when they watched what happened to their neighbor and decided they didn't want to suffer the same fate. They backed away from the socialist 'ideal' and embraced a limited form of capitalism, and so were saved (at least for now).

But now we have a president who has been working very hard to take us towards an ideology that has failed by appealing to ideals that have been proven to be false, and in the end, deadly. And he baits those who actually provide jobs, goods, and services by telling them they aren't working hard enough?

What a putz.

It is said the truly smart will learn from the harsh lessons of others' failures. I can say that one member of the WP clan is that smart, that being the youngest of the WP sisters. (As she says, she made her own mistakes while growing up that our parents never found out about.)

It would be great if the political class presently ruling the US was as smart as my youngest sister. Unfortunately they are not.

They see the economic meltdown occurring in the Euro-zone, yet refuse to learn the lessons countries like Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain are teaching us, the primary one being that eventually you will run out of other people's money to fund all the wonderful social programs that have been used to bribe the electorate.

Italy is the latest to teeter on the brink of insolvency, and should it go over the edge it is quite likely it will pull the rest of the Euro-zone with it. Greece's default damaged the European economy yet it has only a fraction of the GDP of Italy. Should Italy default Europe will take an additional $2 trillion hit it cannot afford. Is it any wonder Germany is considering abandoning the Euro and going back to the mark? Can anyone deny that this problem has been driving the British public to demand a referendum about whether or not to remain in the EU? At least those two countries see the problem and realize they'll have to bankrupt themselves in a doomed effort to prop up economic policies from Brussels.

But too many of our own politicians at the state and federal level, regardless of party, seem oblivious to the fact that unless we make some drastic changes in how our federal government taxes and spends we will be headed down the same path. Labor leaders ignore the fact that neither businesses or taxpayers are a bottomless source of funds, shortchanging their own members by making promises no one can keep.

Should the US fail to put its financial/economic house in order, and right quick, it will pull the world economy down with it into a depression unlike any we've seen before.

I saw this the other day but waited until I had a chance to show it to a friend who, like the fellow in this video, grew up in the old Soviet Union. His opinion of the people advocating the elimination of capitalism and replacing it with socialism: "Useful idiots, just as Lenin and Stalin labeled them!"


As my friend pointed out, these people are insane. Because they have allowed themselves to be brainwashed about the so-called "evils of capitalism" and are no longer capable of thinking for themselves, they should be put away into an asylum. When I asked why he thought them insane, he said this:

You would agree that Albert Einstein was a brilliant man, yes? He said that insanity is doing the same thing again and again, hoping the results would be different this time. What these folks want has been proven not to work, time and time again. It has killed millions upon millions of people. Yet these crazy people want to do it again. See? Insanity!

What these folks don't realize is many of those socialist paradises only lasted as long as they did because of capitalism, not in spite of it. Without funds from the capitalist countries and the thriving underground capitalist economies operating in those socialist worker's paradises, they would have collapsed far sooner than they did. Why do they think China has abandoned socialist economics and embraced capitalism? It's simple: socialism doesn't work, and the Chinese knew it.

If these useful idiots want to try living in a socialist society, there are still enough around for them to go to to give it a try. I suggest Venezuela or Cuba, two bastions of socialist paradises.

Venezuela, a country with the wealth of abundant oil, has devolved into a poverty-stricken socialist dictatorship where infrastructure has broken down. The only ones benefiting from Chavez's socialist ideologies are his cronies. Everyone else there has suffered, seeing their livelihoods destroyed all in the name of socialism.

Cuba is an economic basket case and has been since Castro took over. It became even worse once the Soviet Union collapsed because there were no more socialist subsidies flowing from the always almost empty socialist coffers (usually filled by way of aid from capitalist countries).

Socialism is an ideology of envy and greed, as history has proven more than once. Many claim it is an egalitarian ideal, but the only thing shared equally in those egalitarian socialist societies is misery and terror. Some of the more radical socialists say that unless everyone can have X, Y, or Z, then no one should have X, Y, or Z. The problem with that is that it is an unrealistic vision because no one will ever have anything new, except misery and terror. (Actually, I must correct myself. Only the ruling elite will be able to have X, Y, and Z. Everyone else is screwed.)

If nothing else the Occupy Wall Street protests are showcasing the radical beliefs of these fringe lunatics and showing them to be the insane purveyors of unrealistic and totalitarian ideologies.

The Jawa Report has a handy dandy checklist comparing the Tea Party folks to the #Occupy folks. Again, it's no surprise the OWS folks come out on the short end of this one.

There are also a couple of related links at the bottom of the list you should check out.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

Is it possible the Occupy Wall Street protests might succeed where indoctrination has failed?

While the OWS protests are obstensively supposed to show "the people" the evils of capitalism, it is having an unexpected side effect. It's teaching the OWS protesters the evils of socialism up close and personal, by way of Ayn Rand.

Not surprisingly, Occupy Wall Street has become a magnet for thieves and con-men. As one organizer complains, "Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment."

Then there are the bums. Originally, from what I can tell, street people were actively recruited by the Occupiers as a way of adding to their somewhat anemic numbers. But the naïve young hippies who make up the bulk of the movement are quickly discovering what the rest of us, with the benefit of actual life experience, already know about "the homeless."

Over at Occupy Boston, a protester complains, "It's turning into us against them. They come in here and they're looking at it as a way of getting a free meal and a place to crash, which is totally fine, but they don't bring anything to the table at all." Another report concludes with a similar sentiment.

"We have compassion toward everyone. However, we have certain rules and guidelines," said Lauren Digioia, 26, a member of the sanitation committee. "If you're going to come here and get our food, bedding and clothing, have books and medical supplies for no charge, they need to give back," Digioia said. "There's a lot of takers here and they feel entitled."

These kids had better watch out. If they start thinking that like this, pretty soon they might find themselves at a Tea Party rally.

"There's a lot of takers here and they feel entitled." Gee, that sounds familiar. Could it be because the very ones complaining about the takers are themselves takers of a higher order? What hypocrites. They're finding out that the socialist/marxist creed of "From each according to his ability. To each according to his need," does nothing but create a large amount of 'needy' while diminishing the number filling the needs. It's right out of Atlas Shrugged, where the takers (looters) take more and more while creating a huge disincentive for those producing what is taken to keep working. At some point the producers end up becoming nothing more than slaves to the takers, as Rand outlined in her novel.

It seems the OWS protesters are "dominated by 20-year-old white middle-class college boys ." What the hell do these college boys know of real life and how economies actually work? From what they're showing the world, not much. But they're sure as heck learning the hard way that nothing free is actually free. Someone else has to pay for it. This time around, it's them.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

I saw this by way of Instapundit. It reveals some harsh truths the #OWS folks won't admit to, but something We The 53% understand completely.

We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money. Whether it's a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn't matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn't hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone's 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I've never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work until 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that. For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime, and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we're going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it's really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply...will he? and will they?"

So if the OWS folks get their way and kill off Wall Street and the corporations, what they'll get in return is an economic collapse that will make the Great Depression look like a minor market correction in comparison. But what do you expect from economically illiterate and spoiled children who feel entitled to what the rest of us earned?

As the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests continue, the media still tries to paint them as something entirely grass roots despite the fact that many of them are anything but grassroots. As Bruce Kesler put it, they are nothing more than "Potemkin" protests.

[Occupy Wall Street] is a big media promoted event, one that fits its liberal-left memes, organized by radical "community organizers", funded and added manpower from government-union thugs (just look at the size of the OWC (sic) bouncers).

--snip--

As Glenn Reynolds comments about major media coverage of OWC protests, "When lefties want to make the Tea Party fit their preconceptions, they have to make things up. When righties want to exercise their preconceptions about the Occupy movement, on the other hand, they just have to take a picture."

The contrast is telling. As Mary Grabar notes from her observations of the Occupy Atlanta protests:

As I watched the ragtag group file in, escorted by police, I remembered a Tea Party rally in front of the state capitol in downtown Atlanta, only a few blocks away. There the police and state troopers were omnipresent amidst a group of suburbanites occupying flag-adorned lawn chairs on the sidewalk and listening to speeches about politically legitimate efforts in overturning health care legislation and enforcing immigration laws. Complaints from the podium were specifically about government actions, like taking over the private company, General Motors.

Back then, amidst the flags and bunting, the police were omnipresent, with prison vehicles at the ready and parked along the streets that were the pathway to the prearranged site. Police were omnipresent as the Pledge of Allegiance was recited. They were quite visible as the National Anthem and America the Beautiful were sung, and as prayers for our country were sent up to heaven.

The police stood around, looking relaxed.

The Tea Partiers never blocked a street, and left quietly down the sidewalks after their allotted time, leaving no traces, picking up trash that may have been dropped inadvertently.

The Tea Party never occupied public land illegally. They assembled peacefully with permits arranged beforehand. Yet the media repeatedly characterized them as "angry," "extremist," and "racist."

Tea Party protestors didn't defecate on police cars, didn't disrespect men and women in uniform, didn't try to foment confrontations with police, didn't turn public parks into pig sties, and they didn't use the restroom facilities of local businesses as if they were nothing more than public restrooms.

At least Tea Party protestors abide by the law (for the most part). If they don't like a law they'll try to change it as the Founders intended, by using the ballot box rather than ignoring it as if it didn't apply to them. Tea Party supporters understand where the money comes from to pay for all the "free stuff" many the OWS folks are demanding. A majority of Tea Party supporters are part of the 53% who actually pay income taxes. Most of the young OWS protestors are not. That they believe they are entitled to receive that "free stuff" the rest of us pay for shows us they've been cheated, either by parents that indulged them far too much or schools that filled their heads with that nonsense. And when reality finally slaps them up side their heads it's somehow the fault of the people who make it possible for them to live their indigent lifestyle and they demand that they be "given" jobs they really don't want (because then they'd actually have to work) or aren't qualified to perform.

And so it goes.

Way to go, Mister Hoffa! Let's see about bringing the unions back to their head-bashing, leg-breaking hey-days, shall we?

I guess he didn't get the memo about being more civil during political discourse. But then the unions are on the ropes and not finding much in the way of support from the public these days, so perhaps violent rhetoric is the only tool he and other union leaders have left.

It didn't help that Obama's Labor Day speechifying took place in that bastion of decades long Democrat machine politics and union hegemony, Detroit. As one wag put it, it appears Obama wants to do for the rest of the country what has been done for/to Detroit.

Thanks, but no thanks. I think we'll do much better without that kind of help.

Listening to the plans President Obama has made to address the jobs problem, it is no surprise to anyone that he really doesn't have a plan, or at least not a new one.

If his $878 billion stimulus program had been used to actually address a number of problems within the country, those primarily being our crumbling infrastructure, rather than using it for political patronage, we might not have as much of an economic problem as we presently face. But far too many of us knew very little of that money would be used to stimulate anything but the growth of the federal government.

Will Obama's September 8^th speech try to make a case for spending even more money we don't have to pay for more political patronage? If history is any indication, then the answer is likely yes.

What the president really needs to do (but won't) is to rein in his renegade agency heads (NLRB or EPA, anyone?) who are making sure it's damn difficult for anyone to create jobs...except for government jobs.

What the president needs to do is to get the government out of the way of free enterprise to let it do what it does best - create jobs.

What the president needs to do is fire all his czars and advisers because, quite frankly, they have no idea what they're doing. Most of them are academics with little, if any, real world experience doing things like running businesses or meeting payrolls or dealing with an ever increasing avalanche of government regulations and paperwork that does nothing but cost time and money to deal with yet add little of benefit to anyone except bureaucrats.

What the president needs to do is realize that one of his predecessors, Ronald Reagan, was right when he said to America "Government isn't the solution. Government is the problem."

What the president needs to understand that no one in government, and I mean no one is either smart enough or wise enough to run the American peoples' lives. After all, everyone in government is having a hard enough time running their own lives, let alone those of 300,000,000 other people in this country. Every government that has tried to do so has ultimately failed, resulting in widespread misery. Quite often those governments end with fatal results for members of those governments.

What the president needs to understand that no one in government, and I mean no one, is either smart enough or wise enough to run the American economy. History is littered with plenty of examples to show this is true. Unfortunately the president and many in Congress have ignored this truth, figuring that this time they'll get it right. (They won't.)

All I expect from the president during his speech is more of the same old crap he's taken from the FDR, LBJ, and Karl Marx playbooks, just put in new wrappings and hyped by the Lame Stream Media.

In other words, "There's nothing to see here, folks. Move along!"

I think this cartoon illustrates the thinking of those rioting in the UK all too well.


For more head to Spider and Scorpion.

One of the things said about blogging is that bloggers shouldn't apologize for not blogging. Normally I would agree with that, but not this time.

It isn't that I haven't had anything to write about (quite the contrary). It isn't that I've lost interest (I haven't). It's merely that life has intruded, leaving me with far less time to write anything worthwhile.

Over the past couple of weeks or so I have been getting home late, usually from some kind of meeting of a town committee or board, though once because I had to make an unexpected trip to the WP In-Laws to pick up BeezleBub and we didn't get back until 10:30PM. At that point I was just too darned tired to do anything but go to bed.

It's been these little things that have contributed to my lack of posting anything inciteful, witty, or outright offensive (at least offensive to the Left). I've resorted to borrowing heavily from humorous e-mails or Facebook postings to make sure this blog stays active. I'm going to have to do that one more time as I had yet another late evening. But at least this is educational in that it makes our nations' fiscal problem a little easier to understand.

Received via e-mail:

Federal Budget 101

The U.S. Congress sets a federal budget every year in the trillions of dollars. Few people know how much money that is so we created a breakdown of federal spending in simple terms. Let's put the 2011 federal budget into perspective:

U.S. income: $2,170,000,000,000

Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000

New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000

National debt: $14,271,000,000,000

Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000 (about 1 percent of the budget)

It helps to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to. Let's remove eight zeros from these numbers and pretend this is the household budget for the fictitious Jones family.

Total annual income for the Jones family: $21,700

Amount of money the Jones family spent: $38,200  

Amount of new debt added to the credit card: $16,500  

Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710

Amount cut from the budget: $385

So in effect last month Congress, or in this example the Jones family, sat down at the kitchen table and agreed to cut $385 from its annual budget. What family would cut $385 of spending in order to solve $16,500 in deficit spending? 

It is a start, although hardly a solution. 

Now after years of this, the Jones family has $142,710 of debt on its credit card (which is the equivalent of the national debt). 

You would think the Jones family would recognize and address this situation, but it does not. Neither does Congress. 

The root of the debt problem is that the voters typically do not send people to Congress to save money. They are sent there to bring home the bacon to their own home state. 

To effect budget change, we need to change the job description and give Congress new marching orders. 

It is awfully hard (but not impossible) to reverse course and tell the government to stop borrowing money from our children and spending it now. 

In effect, what we have is a reverse mortgage on the country. The problem is that the voters have become addicted to the money. Moreover, the American voters are still in the denial stage, and do not want to face the possibility of going into rehab. 

Yup. I'd say the above pretty much explains it in terms we can all understand.

The irony of this? I received this by way of the very liberal parent of a friend of mine. It's a shame she hasn't been able to integrate this little bit of education into her view.

This rant by a small business CEO tells it like it is, something the folks inside the Beltway no longer seem to understand. Do they really think "incentives" to hire will induce business to hire anyone? Businesses hire only when they need more people, not because the government provides some kind of lame incentive to do so.


If the government really wants to give businesses an incentive to hire, then maybe it should get the hell out of the way. Maybe government should stop sucking so much money out of the economy that there's less available to invest or to buy goods and services that create the demand for more jobs. Maybe rogue government agencies should be reined in before they do irreparable damage to the businesses that actually create the jobs.

After all the dire predictions 'they' made about what would happen if Congress didn't raise the debt limit, it turns out they were wrong.

The President got his debt limit increase, but the stock market and at least one financial institution - Standard & Poor's - apparently didn't see it as a solution, and rightfully so. The stock market headed downwards, wiping out a year's worth of gains. Standard & Poor's is still threatening to drop the government's credit rating from AAA to AA or AA+ because of the government's continuing spendthrift ways.

The increase in the debt limit didn't solve the problem we're facing. It merely delayed the inevitable. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee offered an analogy that illustrated the problem perfectly.

Raising the debt limit solves the government's spending problem like raising the maximum legal blood alcohol content will solve the drunk driving problem.

I'd say he nailed it.

Over the past year and a half I've listened to a large number of people disparaging the Tea party movement. Most of them have been card-carrying Democrats (or at least those with the belief they know how to spend my money better than I do). Others have been RINOs or part of the so-called "Establishment" Republicans.

The Tea party has been excoriated in the press, with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a number of other media organs of the Left leading the way. Washington politicians and other Beltway insiders have derided the Tea party as "hobbits", "terrorists", "Nazis", "racists", "jack-booted thugs", and a whole host of other derogatory labels.

As the volume of hateful rhetoric aimed at the Tea party and its supporters has increased, it has made me and others realize that the groups making these accusations must be really getting nervous. As one commenter to this piece wrote, "If you're getting a lot of [flak], you must be over the target." And so it must be as the Tea party gains supporters throughout the country at a local, state, and national level because they're tired of being ignored by the Coastal elite and the Beltway intellectuals.

My most memorable run in with an unabashed Tea party hater took place at our business when one of our customers went on a rant about "those goddamn Tea partiers wanting to take everything away from us!" There was no way I could not respond, so I asked her where she'd gotten that idea. Apparently she'd read it in the paper, in this case the Boston Globe. (One must remember, the Globe is owned by the NYT and has the same editorial policies as its parent corporation.) I calmly informed her that if her opinion was based solely on what she'd read in the Globe, then she'd been misinformed and lied to. She saw the Tea party as a bunch of religious fundamentalists bent on depriving the poor, doing away with Social Security and Medicare, and undoing decades of civil rights advances. I had to remind her that many of the civil rights advances came from the GOP, not her sainted Democrats. I reminded her the KKK were primarily Southern Democrats, not Republicans. I reminded her it was the Democrats who started us down this path of unsustainable spending going all the way back to FDR. I reminded her that it was LBJ who decided his Great Society was the answer to all of our society's problems, that it had failed miserably, and that it was funded by stealing from the Social Security trust fund.. I reminder her it was the Democrat majorities in Congress going back to 2007 that multiplied the annual deficits to many times that of all of Dubya's deficits combined.

I gave her the URL for the Contract From America website which explains the Tea party platform, none of which deals with social issues she claims the Tea party is involved with. She wasn't interested. Instead she chose willful ignorance and adherence to libelous propaganda from those who do not have her best interests at heart.

Maybe she will care when the country is unable to pay its bills and all of the government support she is 'owed' ends because there's no money left to pay for it all. Maybe she will care when all "the rich" she's constantly complaining about are either driven into bankruptcy or flee with their wealth to friendly climes and no one is left to pay for everything she is owed.

But I'm not holding my breath.

UPDATE:It appears Senator John Kerry has decided to add fuel to the fire by expressing his opinion that the media should not give equal time to those "absolutely absurd notions" voiced by the Tea Party because their opinions "are not factual."

What a putz.

It's no secret I'm a fan of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In both I've seen far too many parallels to what's been happening in our country, particularly since 2007.

The seeds for our self-destruction were laid a long time ago and now, in some places, are bearing fruit. All one needs to do is look at the state of Illinois and the city of Detroit. Both illustrate exactly what Rand wrote about over 50 years ago.

As Dan Mitchell explains, plans for a number of Detroit neighborhoods outlined in a CNBC report sounded familiar.

But there was also something about this story that rang a bell. It took a few minutes, since I'm getting old and decrepit, but then I realized that "blighted areas" was an eerily familiar term. Didn't Ayn Rand use that term in one of her books?

Indeed, she did. Thanks to the miracle of Google Books, here is one of several passages in Atlas Shrugged that references Detroit--oops, I mean "blighted areas":

No railroad was mentioned by name in the speeches that preceded the voting. The speeches dealt only with the public welfare. It was said that while the public welfare was threatened by shortages of transportation, railroads were destroying each other through vicious competition, on "the brutal policy of dog-eat-dog." While there existed blighted areas where rail service had been discontinued, there existed at the same time large regions where two or more railroads were competing for a traffic barely sufficient for one. It was said that there were great opportunities for younger railroads in the blighted areas. While it was true that such areas offered little economic incentive at present, a public-spirited railroad, it was said, would undertake to provide transportation for the struggling inhabitants, since the prime purpose of a railroad was public service, not profit.

Fifty years ago, the book was viewed as a dystopian fantasy. Today, Greece, Illinois, and Detroit are making Ayn Rand seem like a prophet.

When I reread Atlas Shrugged a couple of years ago, the hairs on the back of my neck rose. Everything Rand had created in her novel was happening at that moment. (I have to admit I had little appreciation for the book when I read it the first time over 35 years ago. I guess history gives one a little more perspective.) Many of our present day "betters" are characters right out of the novel. What makes matters worse is that their ignorance of how the economy works is not so much a lack of exposure to it so much as willful ignorance on their part. They don't want to know how things work in the real world because they know better how to remake things into their version of utopia. Too bad they're wrong because their version of utopia is hell on earth for everyone else.

As mentioned earlier, all we have to do is look to Detroit to see how well that's all worked out. There are plenty of other examples of this just in the US alone, like Newark and Jersey City in New Jersey, and Gary, Indiana. If you need larger examples then states like Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and California should suffice. All are suffering under decades of enlightened rule by our betters (though New Jersey has a glimmer of hope in the form of Governor Chris Christie). If that isn't enough for you then look to Greece and Portugal to see how things have worked out there.

We see example after example after example of how our supposed "betters" are no such thing, being no better than what Rand called "looters" in Atlas Shrugged, for that's what they are.