The New Clarion

Over at Big Hollywood, Andrew Breitbart makes the oft-noted observation that modern-day bills such as the stimulus bill and the Cap and Trade bill just passed are huge (973 and 1200 pages, respectivel) — while the ostensive ultimate law of the land, the Constitution, is only 12 pages long.

Sadly, he does not grasp that the difference is due entirely to the fact that the Constitution was and is a magnificent expression of principled thought, while modern laws are expressions of pragmatism.  From an epistemological standpoint, the Constitution is like an artifact of a long-vanished, advanced civilization, incomprehensible in its nature, origins or workings to the primitives who venerate it without comprehending it.

I am reminded of the third and most famous of Arthur C. Clarke’s “three laws“:  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”   What we are seeing dramatized now, here and elsewhere, is the philosophical root of what Clarke said: any sufficiently advanced product of principled thought is, in the eyes of pragmatists, indistinguishable from luck.

Whatever the government estimates the deficit to be this year, the actual deficit will be bigger. First, government programs always turn out to be more expensive than they actually are.

But there is a second reason that is not being reported by the media. Federal receipts are down from last year. Tom Blumer figures that receipts for June 2009 will be at 90% or less than June 2008. The money is disappearing at a greater rate than the 3.2% contraction of the economy for the last three quarters.

Where is the money going?

Maybe people are saying something like, “I’m stopping that extra job I had on weekends because all it did was push me into a higher tax bracket; it wasn’t worth the effort.”

Or maybe they’re saying, “Screw it — I’ve got enough to be comfortable. Time to stop producing. I’m going to sit in my rocker and drink lemonade and let the rest of the suckers be Obama-Pelosi-Reid’s bitch.”

I can’t wait for some genius in Washington, D.C. to denounce people who stop working as “unpatriotic.” Then we’ll really be living Atlas Shrugged.

A senior EPA scientist was rebuffed after trying to distribute a report expressing doubts about a pending global warming policy. He was told that it would not be released since it might jeopardize the policy, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has discovered. The author took the EPA to task for relying on outdated research and for relying on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was a last-minute attempt to inject some caution into the incautious process by which the EPA was going to officially declare carbon dioxide a pollutant. After an online blizzard of indignation curiously absent from the media, he was relieved of all climate-related duties and advised to get an attorney.

A polar bear expert was told that he wasn’t welcome at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group because he has argued repeatedly that polar bear populations are actually increasing. The chairman of the group explicitly stated that his views “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful.” He had obtained funds to travel to the meeting but the members of the group voted down his attendance in spite of his unassailable expertise.

These two recent episodes are but the latest in a long series of denying dissent by the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Spend any time online researching global warming and you’ll quickly discover countless more examples of earnest dissenters citing a laundry list of reasons to doubt only to be derided as “deniers” and shouted down until they leave. The pattern plays out time and again. What the EPA scientist, the polar bear researcher, and these online denizens fail to realize is that the truth is utterly irrelevant to AGW advocates.

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As I’ve noted several times, Obama is remarkable for his ability to choose the wrong position on every issue. He has done it again with the turmoil in Honduras.

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Dr. Paul Hsieh wrote a great essay on how the Massachusetts experiment in Universal Health Care was wrong for Massachusetts and is still wrong for America. His essay by that title was printed in the Objective Standard and can be read on line here. On June 25th, Sandy Szwarc at JunkfoodScience reports a few more details on the disaster that is the Massachusetts plan and government provided health care in general by looking at the VA. This is the moral policy of government enforced altruism at its clearest and the epistemology of collective subjectivism.

When applied to medicine, the collectivist mentality doesn’t see real individual human beings. They only see groups and try to formulate one size fits all treatments for these groups. In my essay on mass preventive medicine I wrote:

“It is important here to understand how these collectivists think. By way of an analogy, collectivists see a barrel of 300 apples, (or 300 million people) and notice that 1 in 50 are bad. They see doctors treat each bad apple individually and return them to health. They see that the entire population has been improved. They wish to be as beneficial to mankind as those doctors are. But they seek a shortcut. Instead of treating individual apples to make them better, they look only at the whole population and dream of what it would be like to prevent those 6 apples from going bad. This would certainly be better for all of applekind wouldn’t it?

Studies are done and a ‘socially acceptable’ range of sizes and colors for healthy apples is politically established. All apples must conform to these new standards for their own good. There is only one problem with this behavior on the part of apple authorities. It ignores the nature of apples. According to this web site, there are about 7500 varieties of apples each having its own nature. It’s obvious that if any one-size-fits-all program of preventive medicine won’t work with apples, it sure as hell won’t work with humans. But this kind of thinking is what collectivists want to force or see forced on the public. Only this time the ‘public’ does mean every individual.

But the truth is they don’t care about those 6 apples, or the 294 others whose forced sacrifices are now required. The real ideal of the collectivists is sacrifice, the sacrifice of everyone to everyone all the time. And the tool that will help them achieve this goal is mass preventive medicine as permanent government policy.”

As Dr. Hsieh and Ms. Szwarc have shown, the Massachusetts experiment proves without a doubt that universal health care does not work and cannot work because it is based on false premises mainly, that someone’s good can be achieved by the forced sacrifices of others.

So if the Massachusetts failure is so obvious, why is Obama ignoring it and still insisting on implementing it nationally? Because whether it works or not is irrelevant. It does not matter to collectivists that people will not be helped in fact. It does not matter that people will be hurt. All that matters to a collectivist is that the ritual of sacrifice be performed. In his mind, good can only be achieved through sacrifice. There is no other way and no other way will be considered.

I heard that after the rule of FDR and Truman, Republicans regained power and one of their slogans was “Had enough?” We are about to get another dose of ‘enough’.

(For more info on the subject of universal health care I highly recommend the blog of FIRM, Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine.)

In the months before Farrah Fawcett died Amy Wallace had an email exchange with the actress about Fawcett’s communications with Ayn Rand. Fawcett’s emails show that she was most definitely not the airhead starlet she used to be considered.

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Is this the low point?

All my life the American state has been destroying freedom one law at a time. Some laws have been more idiotic, irrational and destructive than others. Nixon’s wage and price controls would be among the worst if they had not been quickly rescinded. Johnson’s Great Society was a huge step in the wrong direction.

Today the House passed Waxman-Markey, the “cap and trade” bill, also called a climate-change bill. The vote was 219-212, with eight Republican votes. The only good news is that the bill might not pass the Senate.

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There are some interesting pieces on Obama around the web. 

Commentary has two good ones. Decoding Obama by Peter Wehner looks at Obama’s lies. The man has no shame and will say anything. As we have learned from the 20th century totalitarian regimes, the truth is always their first victim — and those who destroy the truth as a matter of policy (as opposed to the occasional hypocrisy or moment of weakness) are capable of any enormity.

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Americans are a little less free this month than they were last month. Beginning June 1st Americans are required by law to take their passport to travel to Canada or Mexico.

Back in the olden days of, well, May, Americans could drive to Mexico or Canada without papers. That’s what free countries do: they leave people alone. It seems like some exotic concept now. An individual could go to a foreign country and come back without any permission from the state? Is this some romantic neverland you’re dreaming of?

Hollywood scriptwriters have little time to communicate situations and places. They develop little tricks to show things fast. For instance, a screenwriting teacher of mine said that if you want to show that a character is a good guy, have him pet a dog. For bad guys, have them kick a dog. One quick action, 1,000 words saved.

In the old days it was easy to show a totalitarian state such as Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. Just have some martinet in a uniform ask the hero, “Your papers, please?” That’s all you needed to show a dictatorship.

Now Americans must show their papers to get back into the country from Mexico or Canada.

We’re losing our freedoms, one step at a time. Under Obama the steps are getting bigger and bolder.

And you know some bureaucrat in the bowels of Washington, D.C. is thinking, “Wouldn’t it be easier to keep track of people if they had to take their passport from state to state? I mean, America is a big place…”

83 Talibani are reported killed in a Predator strike. Not all news is bad.

David Letterman has come under intense attack from the right over bad jokes he made about Governor Sarah Palin and her daughters. He mentioned Sarah Palin’s “slutty flight attendant look,” which made me laugh because it’s true. Then he made a joke about Alex Rodriguez knocking up Palin’s daughter. To me this is more a comment on Rodriguez’s philandering than on Palin’s daughter.

Letterman has apologized, more or less. He gave the old “misunderstanding” apology. I’m sorry you’re not smart enough to understand what I meant.

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The National Summit on the economy held at the Renaissance Center here in Detroit has ended on a sad note, provided by Nolan Finley, editor of the slightly conservative Detroit News. In his editorial Mr. Finley laments the fact that nobody seems to care about business and industry any more:

“Since January, corporate America has been a pariah in Washington. Business executives are saddled with the blame for the nation’s collapse, and no one in charge is much interested in hearing their ideas for fixing things. Corporate chiefs are the new disenfranchised class.

“They’ve been steamrolled by the popular express,” says Lou Anna Simon, president of Michigan State University.

And that’s a tragedy. Because there were some solid, common-sense solutions for reviving America put on the table this week in Detroit. The brain power gathered in the RenCen’s silos could have moved a mountain, if anyone had been listening.
“

Well, all true. But why hasn’t Mr. Finley’s editorial pages been championing those ideas and fixes? If the auto execs have been ‘steamrolled’ by the popular press, well, isn’t his Detroit News part of that press? And if nobody is listening, well, why aren’t they? Could it be all those past editorials claiming that some taxes, some emission regulations, some fuel economy regulations, some labor regulations and other government mandates were noble and virtuous goals, but we mustn’t over do it by trying to be too noble and virtuous. Could it be that people no longer believe that it’s virtuous to take poison with their food? He laments further:

“Business doesn’t matter in the upside-down world in which we live. Government has all the answers, all the money and all the muscle. Critical decisions are being made about the future of industry without the input of industrialists.

In a heartbeat we’ve moved from a nation that worships entrepreneurship, innovation and the freedom to succeed to one that craves the false security of an economy carefully contained by the government.”

Mr. Finley is wrong. The government doesn’t have all the answers. It doesn’t have any except the one that is available to all savages-physical force. Mr. Finley has never learned that once you give the government ‘all the muscle’, it doesn’t need answers and can counterfeit as much money as it wants (and is now doing). But what about the false security of a planned society? Who advocated that? Could it be all those editorials proclaiming Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Welfare State to be noble and well-intentioned-but we mustn’t allow ourselves to be extremely noble? Is it any wonder nobody is listening to such arguments?

I don’t know about other industries but I don’t think there are any auto CEOs who even know how to defend their industries or their rights. These guys are very submissive and ineffective now:

“The CEOs acknowledged their diminished status and the danger of making the word “corporate” as pejorative as communist was 60 years ago, particularly for a nation that must encourage its youth to become engineers, entrepreneurs and executives if it hopes to avoid becoming the servant of more enlightened economies.

“We’re (sic) got to make it cool again to be in business,” Ford CEO Alan Mulally said. “Industry is the source of all wealth creation for everybody.”

While that last sentence is profoundly true, look what Mr. Mulally is appealing to, feelings ! Never mind appealing to anyone’s mind, their reason, or their own moral and constitutional right to make the cars they want to make with the kind of fuel efficiency and emissions people are willing to pay for.
No. We must figure out a way to make life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the prosperity it brings, ‘cool’. In a culture where sacrificial emotions take precedence over reason, the more consistent emotionalists will prevail. That’s why Obama, Pelosi and Reid are now in charge.

Mr. Finley also has a blog where he informs that Michigan Sen Debbie Stabenow got a lesson in free markets at the summit:

“In the most polite way possible, Thomas d’Aquino, the chief executive of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, schooled U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan on how free markets work.

In their panel at the National Summit on economics in Detroit, d’Aquino warned against allowing “Buy American” sentiments to morph into protectionist policies.

Stabenow followed by saying she supports free trade as long as the playing field is level — the anti-traders’ favorite defense. Then she ticked off the list of protectionist ideas she advocates, along with a call for massive government spending on research and development.”

Again, Mr Finley doesn’t grasp that our political leaders aren’t interested in free trade but only hanging on to power over us. Auto workers have a lot more votes than businessmen so businessmen must be sacrificed for the workers. A non-sacrificial way of life–laissez faire capitalism–is alien to all our political leaders and evidently, most editors.

None have learned that “In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.”–Ayn Rand in ‘The Anatomy of Compromise’ in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

The New York Times had an article today about the claim that socialized medicine* will lead to health care rationing.  According to the writer, rationing is ”an inescapable part of economic life.” 

It is the process of allocating scarce resources. Even in the United States, the richest society in human history, we are constantly rationing. We ration spots in good public high schools. We ration lakefront homes. We ration the best cuts of steak and wild-caught salmon.

Missing from this explanation of rationing is any acknowledgement, let alone definition, of the difference between a free market and a centrally planned economy.  Rationing of spots in public high schools, done by government force, is equated with the free market’s rationing of lakefront homes and the best cuts of steak.  The writer began the article by saying that:

Access to medical care is a fundamental right.

Certainly, man has the right to the pursuit of medical care.  But there is no right to be given medical care by anyone.   Just as the government shouldn’t be involved in rationing property, so it shouldn’t be involved in rationing medical care.  To do so implies ownership of the property, in the first case, and of the doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals, in the second. 

Health care, I realize, seems as if it should be different. But it isn’t. Already, we cannot afford every form of medical care that we might like. So we ration.

We spend billions of dollars on operations, tests and drugs that haven’t been proved to make people healthier. Yet we have not spent the money to install computerized medical records — and we suffer more medical errors than many other countries.

Here the writer describes individuals deciding for themselves how to spend their money on health care.  This, he points out, is rationing.  It’s already being done.  So what’s the big deal?  For him, the only difference between this rationing, and the rationing of socialized medicine, is that the government bureaucrats will do a better job of rationing than individuals will do for themselves. 

The difference, of course, is that one is done under the system of freedom, in which a man’s rights are inalienable,  and the other under the compulsion of the state, in which man’s rights are abrogated.  That’s the difference between day and night, and yet the writer sees, or pretends to see, no political or ethical difference at all.  He simply believes one system is more efficient than the other:

 Milton Friedman’s beloved line is a good way to frame the issue: There is no such thing as a free lunch. The choice isn’t between rationing and not rationing. It’s between rationing well and rationing badly. Given that the United States devotes far more of its economy to health care than other rich countries, and gets worse results by many measures, it’s hard to argue that we are now rationing very rationally.

Finally, the writer suggests opposition to socialized medicine is a “utopian stand”:

But flat-out opposition to comparative effectiveness is, in the end, opposition to making good choices. And all the noise about rationing is not really a courageous stand against less medical care. It’s a utopian stand against better medical care.

It’s hard to say what he means by “utopian.”  Perhaps this is his oblique way of referring to that old fashioned concept, individual rights.  But there is nothing utopian about individual rights.  They are the sole basis of a just society.  Name calling and equivocations will never stop rational men from making a stand in defense of their inalienable rights.

* The article never identifies its position as socialized medicine, of course.  They don’t like that word.  It sounds too much like what it is.

If you have 18 minutes of free time, check out Yaron Brook’s keynote address at the Republican Party of Virginia 2009 State Convention. Great speech!

(HT: Forum For Ayn Rand Fans)

The American people are getting a dramatic look at what is wrong with their president. The Iranian people are protesting a fraudulent election. In response, the regime of the mullahs is shooting them in the streets.

Obama cannot be moved to condemn the regime. Politico reports,

“It’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling … in Iranian elections,” Obama said. “What I will repeat, and what I said yesterday, is when I see violence directed at peaceful protesters, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed … it is of concern to me and it is of concern to the American people. That is not how governments should interact with their people, and it is my hope the Iranian people will make the right steps in order for them to be able to express their voices.”

As Jennifer Rubin notes, even President Sarkozy of France issued a stronger response.

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Some weeks ago a reader of my blog, Galileo Blogs, posted the story of his father-in-law, who received treatment under Canada’s system of socialized medicine. With his permission, I reproduce his story below. As President Obama this week begins his congressional push for further socializing medicine in America, consider the story of his father-in-law, and think about what socialized medicine will mean for you. Consider the “human face of socialized medicine.” My response to him follows his story.

*****

“I was born in Canada and have taken Canada’s socialized health care system for granted all my life that it was good – until we needed it.

My father in law, a Filipino immigrant, wasn’t feeling well so we took him in for a check up. We waited for a few more months until the testing could be arranged, and then more waiting since there were, “complications.” He had a lung cancer and we would have to wait for “6 to 8 months” before scheduling treatment.

I think he knew he was going to die and took charge. After a few months of constantly coughing, we tried to pester the doctors to speed up the waiting time. He tried his own remedies to alleviate his worsening condition like drinking Ginger soup but he could delay no longer. He and his wife decided to go back to the Philippines for treatment. The doctors there had immediately started treating him with radiation but it was already too late. He had developed a fast growing form of lung cancer and died a few weeks later.

The doctors seemed concerned but wouldn’t change the waiting times due to limited available machines and Canada’s administrative central control in this field.

The fact the Canadian health care system pretends to be based on equality hides the fact it is a socialist experiment that destroys human life and can never be sufficient enough to heal life when needed. The carrot in Canada’s healthcare system is the so called “affordability for everyone” promise, but it is an inherently bad way to go due to its built in socialization. Lives are constantly lost. Ted Harlson (Toronto, Canada)”

*****

Galileo Blogs’ response to Mr. Harlson:

Your story saddened and angered me. It is criminal that your father-in-law had to die because of socialized medicine.

Socialized medicine harms everyone, doctors, patients, and their families. It is deadly to human health, as your story illustrates. Socialized medicine kills.

The alternative is to recognize that doctors have the right to freely charge for their services, just as patients have the right to freely select their doctors. No one has a “right” to medical care. That care must be paid for, and when government is the payer, it means rationing care and killing off the “excess” patients that “the system” cannot afford.

No one worries about there being a shortage of cars. People do not wait in line to buy cars, clothing, or houses. That is because those markets are largely free. Each party voluntarily deals with the other. The result is an abundance of these goods willingly bought and sold in the marketplace, at times and in quantities, and at quality levels that both parties mutually and voluntarily agree on.

Recall the long lines in the Soviet Union for bread, shoes, and toilet paper. That was because their entire economy was socialized. Those Soviet-style lines have now come to medical care, because it too has become socialized in Canada and, soon I fear, the United States. Your father-in-law died waiting in one of those lines.

Please take your grief and fight back by denouncing this injustice, as you have by sharing your story.

Please accept my condolences and best wishes.

This post was born as a huge comment to Myrhaf’s post here.

As Milton Friedman correctly wrote, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. By extension, therefore, so is deflation — which is why, contrary to mainstream economists, we are not in a truly deflationary period at present, insofar as there is no reduction in the supply of *money* that has happened over the last two years. Rather, it is demand destruction that has been happening, and that’s a horse of a different color.

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The inevitable has happened:

…the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here’s the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today — foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them and they’re reading them their rights — Mirandizing these foreign fighters,” says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.

Leftists do not think we are in a war. It’s all some regrettable misunderstanding. If America would just give up its capitalist imperialist foreign policy, then we could get the rest of the world to like us. Then terrorists would lose the support of the Arab “man on the street.”

In the meantime, I pity the folks at the Onion. How do they compete with the real life self-satire that is the Obama administration? Last year we were all joking that if Obama was elected, we would end up reading terrorists their Miranda rights. Last year’s joke is this year’s news.

This is stunning information from Arthur Laffer:

About eight months ago, starting in early September 2008, the Bernanke Fed did an abrupt about-face and radically increased the monetary base — which is comprised of currency in circulation, member bank reserves held at the Fed, and vault cash — by a little less than $1 trillion. The Fed controls the monetary base 100% and does so by purchasing and selling assets in the open market. By such a radical move, the Fed signaled a 180-degree shift in its focus from an anti-inflation position to an anti-deflation position.

The percentage increase in the monetary base is the largest increase in the past 50 years by a factor of 10 (see chart nearby). It is so far outside the realm of our prior experiential base that historical comparisons are rendered difficult if not meaningless. The currency-in-circulation component of the monetary base — which prior to the expansion had comprised 95% of the monetary base — has risen by a little less than 10%, while bank reserves have increased almost 20-fold. Now the currency-in-circulation component of the monetary base is a smidgen less than 50% of the monetary base. Yikes!

Scary stuff. And I don’t think Obama gives a damn if the economy goes off a cliff. Chaos and crises are just opportunities to expand the power of the state to him.

(HT: Powerline)

UPDATE: Stephen Malanga writes about how inflation changed America in the 1970′s.

There is almost an artistic selectivity to how bad a president Barack Obama is. If a fiction writer wanted to create a portrait of an altruist-collectivist-statist lefty in the White House, he could do little better than to copy the real life choices Obama has made.

Now in addition to everything else, Obama has quietly disavowed America’s strategy in fighting World War II. Of course, he doesn’t come out and state his opposition clearly — he is too shrewd a politician to set himself up for that kind of criticism. Like Bill Clinton, Obama knows that Democrats have to appear strong on defense — or at least muddy the issue enough that their courtier press can evade the issue — or else they get clobbered in elections. But his symbolic actions in Dresden were not lost on the Germans, and no doubt they are not lost on our enemies.

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