The New Clarion

This last Wednesday I happened to flip channels (while the Mrs was on our only computer, which fact is going to change sometime this year) and caught the beginning of Geraldo At Large on Fox. He was covering a tea party convention where Sarah Palin was about to give the keynote speech. So I watched. (more…)

Ever since Obama was elected president the conservative press has been referring to him as the ‘Messiah,’ the ‘anointed one,’ the ’savior,’ and so on largely in response to how the liberal press fawned and cooed over him and was loath to question or mention any criticism of him. (more…)

A clear example of the mainstream media’s hatred for capitalism, free markets, bankers and lenders in general is found in the Jan 13th Detroit Free Press’s editorial titled “It’s Bankers’ turn for the 3rd degree.” (more…)

The Sunday, 1/3/10, Detroit Free Press has an article by Associated Press writer Don Babwin titled “Firms skimping on jobs are losing their tax breaks”. It could just as easily read “Extortion victims trying to hold on to their money are making thieves angry.” It starts with: (more…)

Usually at year’s end it is customary to look back and take inventory of all the events that impacted us for good or ill. I sometimes cut out an article or two of special interest to me and file it.

But today I want to take a lighter approach and look forward to headlines I would like to see in 2010. There is no particular order to these. Of course readers are free to add their own preferences in the comments. First, in the 2010 election I would like to see these headlines:

1>”Democrats lose 60 seat majority in Senate.”

2>”Senator Harry Reid out.”

3>”Democrat congressman Sander Levin (my congressman) ousted by fellow Democrat and fiscal conservative Mickey Switalski. Party still hopping mad at Mickey.”

4>”Liberal Dems take beating in election along with a few liberal Republicans.”

5>”Democrats promising to abandon needs based legislation in favor of rights protecting legislation win by landslides.”

6>”Conservative Rupublicans promising mega-compassion lose in record landslides.”

And in non-election news:

7>”In test case Supreme Court rules Obamacare unconstitutional.”

8>”Cap and trade bill dies in congress. Obama threatens to give EPA executive powers. New congress vows to cut off EPA funding. Obama livid.”

9>”Congress opens hearings on Climategate. Mann, Bradley, Hughes et al on hot seat regarding connections to Hadley email scandal. Value of IPCC Assessment Reports questioned.”

10>”Copies of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead flying off shelves faster than in 2009.”

11>”More CEOs defending themselves and capitalism.”

12>”NYT and WAPO circulation and stock price hit new lows, more layoffs loom.”

13>”Another Al Gore lecture on GW cancelled due to extreme cold.”

14>”George Soros and/or Michael Moore file for bankruptcy.” ( this is a perennial for me.)

15>”New student rebellion protesting campus censorship and lack of diverse ideas is gaining momentum.”

Well that’s it for the wishful thinking for now but if just 4 of these 15 actually happen, it will bode well for the future.

I see Associated Press science reporter Seth Borenstein is in the news again. This time it’s Anthoney Watts at Watts Up With That (WUWT). Mr Watts is calling for the AP to divorce it self of Mr. Borenstein’s services due to obvious reporting bias. I couldn’t agree more. In fact I thought Obama might appoint him PR Czar for the GW doomsday bunch. (more…)

Because the two main newspapers in Detroit, the News and the Free Press, have cut home delivery from 7 days to 3 days and raised newsstand prices from 50 cents to 1 dollar to stop losing money, a new paper has sprouted in this city called the Detroit Daily Press. (more…)

In Monday’s 11/09/09 Detroit Free Press is a typical but unflattering to Detroit article by writer Mark W. Smith which demonstrates the lack of understanding by Detroit’s leaders of the concept of property rights and particularly what property rights are for.

The article focuses on a WSJ article about an old truck that was pushed off the fourth floor of the long abandoned Packard building by people referred to as “urban explorers.” It even has a video of the event and a link the the WSJ article.

Reading this story is like watching insects crawling through the skeletal remains of what was once a living, thriving organism, the City of Detroit. According to the WSJ article:

“Detroit has 80,000 abandoned lots and buildings, according to the city’s planning department. Old housing projects, homes, strip malls and even high-rise buildings sit empty across much of the city. Motown has more vacant office, retail and industrial space than nearly every other big city in the country.”

But the Packard plant is just the latest example of Detroit’s political leaders not understanding the nature and purpose of property rights.

The purpose of property rights is to transform the ideal of individual rights, the ‘right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ into practical reality. To survive, a man must have the right to use and dispose of the fruits of his labor as he judges best while respecting the same rights of others. The fruits of his labor are his property. Without property rights there can be no other rights.

Where there are no humans there is no property, only nature. Where there are humans, property rights identify, define and protect the fruits of each man’s labor. The basic, fundamental purpose of property rights then is to serve human survival in some objective way. That is why there should be a time limit on how long an owner can let a property sit completely idle not serving any purpose whatsoever.

The details of what kind of limits should be placed on what kind of property are not important here and can be worked out by those schooled in property rights law. What’s important here, and needs to be recognized by our laws, is the principle that property must serve some human purpose and cannot be held idle in perpetuity.

The future of Detroit can be either the nation’s biggest ghost town or a thriving metropolis again. But Detroit’s rebirth will not happen until Detroit and Lansing discover the real nature of property rights and enact policy accordingly. Right now all governments view property as a source of income instead of a source of human survival. That is what really has to change.

For about 80 yrs now the government has been trying to be everything to everyone, trying to provide everyone with their daily bread and failing miserably. Why?
Because the government has nothing to offer. All it has is its monopoly on physical force. All it can do is stand over the productive members of society with the club of physical force and compel obedience. Case in point: An editorial in today’s New York Times champions the new House health care bill saying in part:

“The bill requires employers, except for small businesses, to offer health coverage to their workers and pay a substantial share of the premiums or face a big penalty. That would be a useful prod to make insurance more available and affordable to employees.” (bold mine)

No Senator, Congressman, judge or member of the executive branch is going to insure anyone. All they can do is point a gun at the insurance companies, doctors and other health care professionals and decree ’sacrifice or else.’ Then point another gun at the heads of citizens and decree ‘accept these sacrificial offerings or else.’

It is really sad to see an establishment of professional intellectuals like the Times advocating the government initiate force against citizens. It’s even sadder that professional organizations like the AMA and the ANA (American Nurses Assoc.) are willing to go along with the sacrifice of its members. But as long as people think sacrifice itself, for any reason, is virtuous, the destruction of medicine and our society will continue. It is trade not sacrifice that is virtuous. Trade represents voluntary relationships. Sacrifice requires force because it is contrary to human nature. Sacrifice is not the giving up of a value for some desired result. The loss of the value is the desired result.

I see Obama is still insisting on his original Obama care legislation instead of some watered down compromise. I think this is a last ditch effort to put a socialized medicine over on the American people. My response to that is a few more lyrics added to a recent post which I repost in part below. (more…)

Amy Mossoff at The Little Things has a post titled “These children are not my future” in which she links to a post at Scribbit. The ladies are fed up with teenagers going door to door selling stuff, mostly magazines, by appealing to the customer’s altruism. They pitch their need instead of their product which annoys a lot of people including me.

“I’m working my way through college, could you help me by purchasing…” is one I’ve heard a couple of times. I wanted to tell him that he can make more money at Burger King than soliciting D2D but I was so sure it was a scam that I just said “NO thanks” and closed the door. Others like “My class is trying to raise money for such and such so would you buy some of this (candy or whatever)? are getting more common. I want to step outside and say “Listen, if you want to make money then sell your product not your needs. You have to present your product as a value to the customer that will improve his life in some way. Never ever try to sell your product on the grounds that it will make the customer feel noble and virtuous.” Then again, I don’t think some of these kids would understand my words.

Who is telling these youngsters to sell like this? Their parents? School teachers? Does the promotional material for the product advocate this? Or are they just given a product and told ‘Here, go sell this’ without any guidance? Have they been so badly indoctrinated with altruism that they cannot comprehend the idea of appealing to some one’s self interest but must appeal to their guilt feelings? I’m not talking about elementary school kids on charitable fund raisers who really don’t understand the concepts of selling. I’m referring to teenagers who should know something about offering a value.

Anyway I recommend reading both posts at both sites.

Sandy Szwarc at JunkfoodScience has an in-depth look at a health science topic. Although it’s titled “The Myth About Unhealthy Belly Fat” the article’s theme is, ‘the importance of null findings’, and properly laments the fact that the media seldom reports them. This is very true and also very important. That’s because:

“Null findings enable true scientists to know they’re looking in the wrong direction and that it’s time to go back to the drawing board and develop a different hypothesis. They also enable us to stop needlessly worrying about something that doesn’t matter.”

Also, many if not most studies that purport to show a health problem actually turn out to be false and these revelations are often not published as well. (more…)

Principles in Practice, the blog of The Objective Standard, has an excellent analysis of some key elements in the health care bill now before the House, by Dr. John David Lewis. One case in point is the question ‘Will the Plan increase the government’s ability to scutinize our private affairs?’ His evaluation is:

“1.This section amends the Internal Revenue Code 2.The bill opens up income tax return information to federal officials.
3.Any stated “limits” to such information are circumvented by item (v), which allows federal officials to decide what information is needed.
4.Employers are required to report whatever information the government says it needs to enforce the plan.”

Basically, your right to privacy is gone.

Stella at Reason Pharm has another tidbit of info on this health care bill HR 3200. Evidently this bill won’t go into effect untill 2013, after the next election. Obviously, the plan is to get re-elected then bring the hammer down on the American public’s head.

JunkfoodScience has another great article on health care. She takes a long look at one provision of Obama care bill now before congress, the part about end of life planning. The article starts with quoting verbatim the provision on ending life. You don’t have to read it all. I only read half of it at which point it was getting unintelligible. One thing I did notice was that the phrase ‘as defined by the Secretary’ was repeated many times, i.e. lots of subjectivism.

The article gives a fascinating history of the managed death movement which details I didn’t know before. But the fact that epistemology is of critical importance, that ideas rule the world, is given in these two paragraphs, among others:

“During the six decades after this first legislative attempt, “euthanasia proponents have learned a lot about public relations,” they wrote. “One lesson is that all social engineering is preceded by verbal engineering. If words or their meaning can be changed, the quest to change hearts and minds will be achieved.”

This important article, traces how the meanings of words have shifted, forming new patterns of thinking — words like ‘terminal’ (which laypeople wrongly think means that death is unavoidable and very close); ‘treatment’ (which has morphed from care given in efforts to cure or ameliorate a medical condition to come to mean prescribing fatal overdoses and lethal injections); and ‘comfort care’ (where a prescription for a “drug overdose, legally prescribed” is now called “comfort care” and, according to Oregon’s Medicaid director, is covered under Oregon’s Health Plan).”

(This is what happens when a society has no objective theory of concepts and why it is important to study philosophy, especially Objectivism which provides one.)

This article reads like a nightmare.I will only say though that I would support assisted suicide if the patient freely consents and no one is compelled to administer it. The dying process is part of life. If quality of life is important, I would think that quality of dying would be important also.

I posted on how some witch doctor wannabes are planning who gets to live and die in a pandemic as part one of a two part post here.I noted in part:

“If you’re wondering why would anyone want such a policy? Power. The lust for control over others. There is no mistake about it. The desire by some to regulate the lives of others is the desire to control all of it including the end points, birth and death.”

This proves the point that there is no such thing as partially accepting a principle (like government regulating your life). Once accepted it must be accepted in its entirety (total dictatorship) or totally repudiated. It is time to totally repudiate government control of medicine and proclaim man’s right to live for his own sake with a free market in medicine.

I just finished reading The Blue Wound, a 1921 novel by Garet Garrett and boy what an enjoyable read. I found a 2008 paperback reprint, 109 pages, at Barnes and Noble. Now I want to get copies of his other writings.

The story is about a writer who goes on a journey to find the man who started World War 1. He meets a man named Mered who takes him around the world of the past and present with a glimpse of the future of 1950 showing how civilizations keep destroying themselves and giving his reasons why. It’s scary how many ideas that were popular then are again so now.

I won’t mention any spoilers here and I recommend this site for a good in-depth review of the book.

Mered’s thought processes are sometimes loaded with juicy mental somersaults as in this paragraph where he explains to the writer about a union meeting of miners deciding whether to go on strike for more money and benefits:

“Again,” said Mered, “listen rather to what they mean than what they say. The question here is whether the state has still the strength to say on what terms half a million shall continue to perform the drudgery of digging coal. Their dilemma is that the coal diggers are politically free. Therefore they cannot be chained to their work. But on no account can they be allowed to stop; nor can they be permitted to name their own terms. Thus you approach involuntary servitude under conditions of political freedom.”

Wow! Sounds like political science professors of today instead of 1921.

I recommend this book.

ARCTV has a 2min. video by Yaron Brook on the subject of sacrifice vs trade. While this subject needs a lot more coverage in today’s culture, Mr. Brook as usual, nails the essentials.
*******************************************

I know this is a few days old but I think it’s noteworthy anyway. The newest burden you will be asked to carry is provided by the Sec. of Commerce Gary Locke who says that Americans must be made to pay for some of the carbon emissions of–the Chinese! Read the WSJ blog article here. You see, the Chinese factories are making lots of inexpensive products that make our lives better, so we are the cause of their CO2 emissions.
*******************************************

An alert relative sent to me a link to this story. Evidently, Nashville Tenn. is experiencing new record lows for July. They didn’t mention his name but Al Gore lives in the Nashville area. Love it.

Well, they’ve done it. According to this Washington Times report, the US Senate passed the hate crime legislation that was attached to the DOD appropriations bill. The Senate is supposed to be the more deliberative, more cerebral, more intellectual of the two congressional bodies. HAH! What a joke! As I wrote in a letter to Senator Carl Levin; “Hate is an emotion, it is insane to try and outlaw emotions. To do so is to open wider the door to censorship.”

(more…)

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.)

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.

How not to defend free markets is once again demonstrated in the 6/02/09 Detroit News in an op-ed by Oskari Juurikkala, an adjunct scholar at the Acton Institute of Grand Rapids, Mi., a think tank devoted to the ’study of religion and liberty.’ It’s the same conservative argument calling for less controls and regulations but this time it’s because:

“Human motivation is too complex to be controlled by policymakers.”

Well, it’s true that humans are complex beings. But it is not true that this is a good reason for humans to avoid authoritarian government. It makes no sense to say that some complex beings shouldn’t dictate to other complex beings because of their complexity. Presumably, if humans were more simple, dictatorship would be practical. Mr. Juurikkala continues:

“In a recent seminar on the financial crisis in Finland, a capital markets partner argued that the tightening regulation of financial markets has fostered a mentality in which market participants only comply with rules when necessary and think that anything is acceptable as long as it is not expressly forbidden.”

This is partly true. Regulations do create a mindset to meet regulatory requirements, not a good reputation’s requirements, and no more. But it isn’t the “tightening” of regulations that does it. It’s the existence of the regulations themselves that is the cause. Here we see that the author believes regulations are ok as long as we don’t ‘tighten’ them. This is like saying that you can get better motivation from your slaves if you don’t put too many chains on them, though chains are necessary. A chainless society is evidently alien to the author. Also missing is any recognition that regulations represent initiatory force while objective laws, intended by the founders, represent retaliatory force. The theme of the article is how best to manage reward and punishment in order to keep the producers producing? The next sentence:

“In “Not Just for the Money,” economist Bruno Frey explains why. The use of monetary incentives and threats of punishment crowds out other motivations, he writes.”

What other motivations?

“For example, giving monetary compensation to a child for doing household chores is likely to result in decreasing contributions made without compensation. Similarly, given that some university professors work harder than others, imposing strict working hour regulations often will provoke better workers to reduce their efforts.

This is what Frey calls the hidden cost of reward or regulation: When people feel they are being forced to act in a certain way, they have less motivation to do the right thing by themselves.”

Notice that it’s not a matter of people actually being forced to act in a certain way, but a matter of people feeling like their being forced. So while we can force people to do what is right, we don’t want them to feel forced. We need to convince them they still have some freedom to choose to do the right thing.

The evasions and contradictions in this op-ed are many. Consider this sentence: “Human motivation is too complex to be controlled by policymakers.” with this one:

“Is lighter regulation the solution to economic crises? It depends. Some over-the-counter financial derivatives are practically unregulated, so there is nowhere to cut regulation. It might be more appropriate to cover such clear gaps in existing rules in a principled manner so as not to lead people to the temptation of recklessness.”

The author has endorsed every argument used by the statists to destroy free markets but wants a kinder, gentler destruction.