In general, I don’t put any stock in what an actor says about politics. The following video with Janeane Garofalo {via} is nothing I haven’t read in the leftist blogospere; what makes it unique is having it all in one place and making Keith Olbermann seem cool-headed in comparison:
I enjoy these things because it reminds me how impotent and ignorant our opponents are. (Warning: there’s some vulgar innuendo, naturally.)
I had not planned on attending the Tea Party at the Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona because of conflicting dinner plans. Mere hours before the event, those plans fell through so I had to put something together as quickly as possible. I printed out Myrhaf’s excellent analysis and made 100 copies to pass out. If I had had time, I would have brought a table and handed out the cases of literature I got from the Ayn Rand Institute when I ran a campus club a decade ago.
I don’t know what I was expecting but I wasn’t prepared for the sight of thousands of people waving signs and listening to passionate defenses of liberty and freedom. For a few moments, it was heady times. It reminded me of the only other time I took part in a public political event: volunteering for the Steve Forbes primary run in 1996.
A recent poll by the Rasmussen Reports indicates that support for “capitalism” has dropped to 53% of those surveyed. Given the pillorying the “free market” has endured by President Obama, I am honestly surprised that that many Americans would admit to believing in capitalism.
The problem with this survey is that most Americans haven’t the faintest notion of what “capitalism” means. When Obama can say “I strongly believe in a free-market system” and no one disputes that, I think it’s safe to say that the definition of capitalism has become too inclusive.
Capitalism is the political system that protects the individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property. That definition is sufficient to distinguish it from all the other political systems that ever were or ever will be. Capitalism is not “the political system that has markets” or “the political system where lots of industries are private” or the tautologous “the political system of the United States.” European socialism fits many of those descriptions, and that’s what the leftists are counting on.
Words and definitions are important. We defenders of freedom have let “liberalism” and “progressive” slip out of our grasp, but we must not let them take “capitalism.” It gives statists the guise of respectability, of being descended from a tradition of freedom, individualism, and independence that made this country great. They know that and they use it at every opportunity. We must call them on it.
[UPDATE: Added definition paragraph as an obvious oversight.]
Watch this video (sorry, but I can’t embed) and read this transcript. Really makes you appreciate Daniel Hannan even more, doesn’t it?
I predicted last year that outrage over executive pay wouldn’t stop at the top:
Whether or not executives are worth their pay is not a social issue; making it one puts all contracts in peril.
Sure enough, within four months of that blog entry, there is a proposal in Congress to extend retroactive government control over pay to all employees of companies that accept government money and President Obama has fired General Motors’ CEO.
Further, the president has told a group of bankers that he summoned to the White House that his administration is “the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” He also rejected several attending CEOs’ desire to return the TARP money that has enabled the federal government to exercise unprecedented prerogative.
It is growing exceedingly hard to remain optimistic in these troubling times. With the amount of chaos and expansion that have taken place in his first two-and-a-half months in office, the two years until the next set of Congressional elections seems like an eternity. Luckily, we have the power of the blogosphere to spread the word about his fascist interventions—at least, for now.
In a recent town hall meeting, President Obama said the following:
This is what Americans’ success demands and this is what our budget will do. And I’m under no illusions that a better day will come about quickly or easily. It’s going to be hard. But as I said the other night at my press conference, I’m a big believer in the idea of persistence—the idea that when the American people put their mind to something and keep at it, without giving up, without turning back, no obstacle can stand in our way, and no dream is beyond our reach.
He’s made such statements before. At every opportunity, he’s let the American people know that he expects a lot from them. He’s going to need them to bring his notion of persistence to bear on the obstacles that stand in Obama’s way, to achieve the dream that has thus far proven “beyond our reach.”
The obstacles he cites should not be news to readers of this blog. His stimulus plan and upcoming budget have demonstrated an egalitarian streak that rivals anything from the European socialists. The demagoguery is nothing new in American politics, but in Obama it is as if the envy and class hatred has been distilled to its purest form yet. Each successive administration has shed a few bits of the characteristic American spirit of independence, self-reliance, and freedom.
Many blogs do a caption contest every Friday wherein the blogger posts a picture and then visitors leave their take on an appropriate and funny caption for that photo. I really enjoy contributing to those sorts of things, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for TNC so how about a comment contest on Fridays. We select an article—nothing too lengthy—and you supply a comment analyzing it. Our commenters thus far have been exceedingly insightful so I’ll be most interested to read your take. Winner gets a free RSS subscription to TNC!
Many blogs do a caption contest every Friday wherein the blogger posts a picture and then visitors leave their take on an appropriate and funny caption for that photo. I really enjoy contributing to those sorts of things, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for TNC so how about a comment contest on Fridays. We select an article—nothing too lengthy—and you supply a comment analyzing it. Our commenters thus far have been exceedingly insightful so I’ll be most interested to read your take. Winner gets a free RSS subscription to TNC!
Many blogs do a caption contest every Friday wherein the blogger posts a picture and then visitors leave their take on an appropriate and funny caption for that photo. I really enjoy contributing to those sorts of things, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for TNC so how about a comment contest on Fridays. We select an article—nothing too lengthy—and you supply a comment analyzing it. Our commenters thus far have been exceedingly insightful so I’ll be most interested to read your take. Winner gets a free RSS subscription to TNC!
Moderation in life is a good thing. We must balance our long-term plans with the need for short-term rewards. So we forego spending today so we can save for a vacation six months from now. Many of us drink alcohol but we stop before we get drunk. Life is about taking an expansive view of our interests in these and countless other ways.
Along the same lines, there is value in keeping an open mind about subjects. Dogmatism, which means the refusal to think, leads one away from a reality orientation by turning a blind eye towards contradictory facts. But an open mind is not a wide-open mind, considering each new proposition devoid of context. And it also does not mean that there are no absolutes; you can achieve certainty about particular conclusions you have reached through careful deliberation.
But there are fundamental distinctions about which you cannot be silent. There are fundamental decisions you simply must make. The nature and existence of God is one such decision. Another is freedom versus slavery. These types of choices demand confrontation and it is one or the other that must prevail. Admixtures are unpalatable at best and fatal at worst.
That is why I view the political moderate as a despicable creature. Like agnostics, faced with a choice between two fundamentally conflicting viewpoints, he shrugs and says, “Who am I to know?” David Brooks’s recent manifesto is a bold statement of a lack of boldness, a defense of an indefensible position.
The political fecklessness and intellectual vapidity Brooks laments about the centrists stem from an inherent lack of principle. The two camps are principled: the liberals believe that the state is supreme and should be able to do whatever is necessary to further its aims; the capitalists believe that individual rights are sacrosanct and that government is instituted to secure and protect those rights. The man in the middle—Brooks in this case—objects only to the rigidity of both positions. He seeks a “vision that puts competitiveness and growth first, not redistribution first.” Redistribution is not out of the question; it just should not be the first priority.
In this political calculus, it is only the capitalist vision that must capitulate. Once the sanctity of the individual’s right to life, liberty, and property is conceded, then it is just a matter of degree—the state is supreme, it faces no limit in principle. If you get a group in power that is more oriented towards freedom, then people might get more of what they earn or face less strictures on their activities. But there is nothing to stop the next group from rolling back those concessions or tightening the handcuffs.
This is no time for moderation of our appetite for liberty. Let us be immoderate! We must not be open to the ideas of slavery. Let us be close-minded! Circle the wagons, truck no compromise, revel in their failures. To paraphrase Churchill, we shall fight them on the blogs, we shall fight them in the newspapers, we shall fight them in the town halls; we must never surrender.
President Barack Obama delivered a speech before both houses of Congress last Tuesday and Lousiana governor Bobby Jindal gave the Republican response shortly afterwards.
Given the gravity of the moment, we at TNC decided to collect our thoughts on the speeches as a panel discussion.
Many blogs do a caption contest every Friday wherein the blogger posts a picture and then visitors leave their take on an appropriate and funny caption for that photo. I really enjoy contributing to those sorts of things, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for TNC so how about a comment contest on Fridays. We select an article—nothing too lengthy—and you supply a comment analyzing it. Our commenters thus far have been exceedingly insightful so I’ll be most interested to read your take. Winner gets a free RSS subscription to TNC!
In researching African development for my entry on Ethiopia, I came across a startling fact about a neighboring country that I had never encountered before.
When one thinks of Somalia, one thinks of pirates, the civil war (and Clinton’s disastrous humanitarian intervention in 1993), extreme poverty, and anarchy. From the perspective of the Western democracies, Somalia’s situation is untenable and incomprehensible: it lacks a central government.
The remarkable fact that I mentioned earlier is that it’s doing as well as or better than ever. The dictatorship of Siad Barre was of a Stalinist, socialist bent so it’s not a particularly high threshold to meet, but conventional wisdom—at least among international aid types—is that the more state the better. According to their notions, Somalia should be utter chaos where life is “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Many blogs do a caption contest every Friday wherein the blogger posts a picture and then visitors leave their take on an appropriate and funny caption for that photo. I really enjoy contributing to those sorts of things, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for TNC so how about a comment contest on Fridays. We select an article—nothing too lengthy—and you supply a comment analyzing it. Our commenters thus far have been exceedingly insightful so I’ll be most interested to read your take. Winner gets a free RSS subscription to TNC!
The birth of octuplets to a single mother of six children caused a significant stir in the United States. Outrage boiled over when it was discovered that she was on welfare and unemployed. Bloggers and talk show radio callers second-guessed the choices she’s made in her life, questioning the wisdom of her fertility treatments, her parenting skills, and even diagnosing her presumed psychological problems. Anything in her life was fair game for comment and discussion.
Meanwhile on the other coast, Barack Obama was assailing executive compensation on Wall Street. He described the bonuses executives received as “shameful” and renewed his finger wagging at the bank that dared to buy a corporate jet. His outrage over these incidents led him to limit executive salaries at financial institutions accepting bailout money to $500,000 per year. (And some would have him go further still.) {via}
These two incidents are normally private issues. If a woman wants to have a litter of babies, it’s her option so long as she does not mistreat them. Similarly, companies pay their CEOs whatever they want without having to answer to anyone but the shareholders. Ostensibly, however, Nadya Suleman and Bank of America have given up that power by accepting money from the government. It’s a doctrine used to justify meddling in areas as diverse as family planning, highway construction, and education. Seemingly, few contest this strings-attached notion.
To my mind, it is all a red herring. Rather than quibbling about the specific decisions that a Board of Directors made, we should be questioning why the federal government is taking our money to give to any companies at all. Instead of arguing that a salary cap would hinder CEO retention and recruitment, we must get the government out of the market entirely. Hesitation about interfering in the employment contract didn’t last much longer than Lochner and is enshrined in current minimum wage laws. So the real issue to address isn’t one of micromanagement, but the idea of management as such.
Welfare, whether corporate or personal (in the case of Miss Suleman), eliminates the negative half of the right to liberty. The underlying principle is that you can do whatever you think it takes to succeed in life but you’re on your own if you were wrong. The sooner we get this principle ensconced anew into our system, the sooner the Sulemans and Geithners of the world can stop impinging (and infringing) on our lives and our pursuit of happiness.
This is a guest post by Joseph Kellard, a journalist and commentator living in New York. You can visit his blogs at josephkellard.blogspot.com and theamericanindividualist.blogspot.com.
On Saturday I was enticed to the Nassau County Museum of Art for the exhibit: “Poetic Journey: Hudson River Paintings from the Grey Collection.” (The next day, the New York Times gave it a well-deserved positive review: “For Serene Transport, Hudson River School Paintings.”)
I enjoy some paintings from this school, particularly those of Albert Bierstadt, for their panoramic landscapes of valleys and mountains and their stylized recreation of nature, especially their brilliant colors and sharp contrasts between light and dark (e.g. The Oregon Trail). When men appear in these paintings, I view them mainly as a means for the artist to accentuate the vast landscapes and to lend them some perspective.
Unfortunately, my positive experience at the exhibit was undercut, slightly, by some of the descriptions of the paintings (which, I was told, are usually written by the curator):
The Trout Pool by T. Worthington Whittredge, 1870
“… The man fishing in the background is symbolic of the smallness of humanity compared to the grandeur of nature. The fisherman seems so inconsequential next to the enormous trees and beautiful, glittering steam that he almost vanishes into the wilderness.”
View of Yosemite Valley by Thomas Hill, 1887
“ … On the left-hand side, there is a man riding a horse, but he almost blends into the earth, which conveys the smallness of humanity against the rising cliffs and the great, never ending expanse of nature.”
Here I was reminded of the passage from The Fountainhead when Dominique asks Wynand if he’d never felt how small he was when looking at the ocean:
“Never. Nor looking at the planets. Nor at mountain peaks. Nor at the Grand Canyon. Why should I? When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man. I think of man’s magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of airplanes.”
At the exhibit, the curator described another landscape, Sunset by George Inness, 1878-79, as follows:
“ … There are no people in this image, though in the background there is a building with smoke of the increasing human presence and the negative impact industrialization has on the Earth’s natural resources.”
Perhaps, the curator recognizes that the smoke stack represents man’s “magnificent capacity” to conquer nature, thus demonstrating how inconsequential nature is next to man’s rational mind.
Many blogs do a caption contest every Friday wherein the blogger posts a picture and then visitors leave their take on an appropriate and funny caption for that photo. I really enjoy contributing to those sorts of things, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for TNC so how about a comment contest on Fridays. We select an article—nothing too lengthy—and you supply a comment analyzing it. Our commenters thus far have been exceedingly insightful so I’ll be most interested to read your take. Winner gets a free RSS subscription to TNC!
From the “whatever-works-makes-for-strange-bedfellows” department:
But no matter how much money we invest or how sensibly we design our policies, the change that Americans are looking for will not come from government alone. There is a force for good greater than government. It is an expression of faith, this yearning to give back, this hungering for a purpose larger than our own, that reveals itself not simply in places of worship, but in senior centers and shelters, schools and hospitals, and any place an American decides.
In December, I visited Ethiopia to pick up my newly-adopted son (proud father link, if you’ll bear with me) and I was struck by the prevalence of commerce throughout the capital city, Addis Ababa. Ethiopia is known as a Third World country with widespread poverty; with a per-capita income of $780, there are few countries in the world poorer than it. But everywhere I looked there were entrepreneurs of every stripe selling goods, services, and capital goods. I struggled to understand this seeming paradox of highly-visible capitalism in one of the poorest nations.
Many blogs do a caption contest every Friday wherein the blogger posts a picture and then visitors leave their take on an appropriate and funny caption for that photo. I really enjoy contributing to those sorts of things, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for TNC so how about a comment contest on Fridays. We select an article—nothing too lengthy—and you supply a comment analyzing it. Our commenters thus far have been exceedingly insightful so I’ll be most interested to read your take. Winner gets a free RSS subscription to TNC!
