The Libertarian
Economics No Match For Politics
Richard A. Epstein, 12.08.09, 12:01 AM ET
Last year, even at the height of Obamamania, the president's ardent supporters questioned whether he possessed the technical skills or practical experience needed to deal with the domestic economy. My own view was that Obama's archaic New Deal world view was sure to lead him astray. Not to worry, I was told. He was a responsible and intelligent centrist, who would rely on good professional advisors to fill in the gaps in his knowledge and experience base.
The recent "upbeat" news is that the level of unemployment has leveled off at about 10% after its earlier climb this year. And just what has been the role of his professional advisors in the sorry performance of the last 10 months? To tell, it appears, the president exactly what he and his political advisors want to hear.
Exhibit A is Christina Romer's recent Wall Street Journal column, "Putting Americans Back to Work." Romer heads the president's Council of Economic Advisers. Her column rates as a bit of transparent propaganda that belongs in a fan magazine, not a serious newspaper. If she wrote it of her own volition, she should be fired for economic incompetence. If, as seems more likely, the White House wrote it for her, or told her just what to say, she should resign in protest.
Her column contains nine awestruck references to presidential omniscience and benevolence. Its opening sally places all the blame on the Bush administration, by claiming that Obama took office at "the height of the worst downturn since the great depression." Funny that she failed to mention the tumultuous events of September and October 2008 had cooled off before then. Nor, of course, did Obama "stop the economic free fall" in those tempestuous autumn days, unless Moses also parted the Red Sea.
Worse still, she blindly celebrates Obama's worst economic blunders as his greatest triumphs. The $787 billion stimulus package in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a bust. Its protectionist "Buy American" provisions remain a perpetual irritant to international trade. The warped Cash for Clunkers program created a short bubble via a massive public giveaway, while doing nothing to help the environment.
Why, one might ask, with all these supposedly farsighted maneuvers on the books, does the president still face a "weak" employment market? Romer offers no explanation for how Obama's wise decisions made matters worse. Instead she hyped Obama's inconclusive meeting with various community leaders that took place the next day.
High on its agenda was an investigation of public-private partnerships that could, at best, only usher in yet another round of economic gimmicks. No credible economist could think that "direct incentives of homeowners to retrofit their homes to improve energy efficiency" could place a dent in the ranks of the 15.4 million unemployed. Far more likely is a replay of the older story: subsidies for these programs sop up wealth and thus kill sensible job opportunities elsewhere.
Instead of her presidential genuflection, Romer should have given this blunt advice to the president:
You can only improve labor markets by freeing them up. Scrap the talk about goofy ad hoc subsidies, and tell the president, for the first time in his life, to think hard about deregulation. Roll back the three recent minimum-wage increases that have blunted job creation for low-skilled workers in a stagnant labor market. Announce he will veto any effort by Congress to pass the Employer Free Choice Act, whose uncertain threat of compulsory unionization has prompted many businesses to shelve any plans for expansion. Abandon the monstrous health care bills winding through Congress, whose panoply of taxes, subsidies and regulations are job killers of the first magnitude. Put a halt on legislation for carbon caps and taxes until the science gets sorted out. Don't let the EPA make a hasty endangerment finding on carbon dioxide.
Deregulation costs nothing to administer, increases jobs and adds to the tax base. It is only an added benefit that sound economics reduces presidential power.
So how then does Romer come to serve her readers such intellectual pabulum? Simply because Obama's policies are not shaped by his vaunted professional advisors but by political operatives who answer solely to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod. Their joint knowledge on economics is negligible at best. Their political agenda is to win elections by buying off enough of the electorate to form a winning political coalition. Any libertarian has to be dismayed (but not surprised) at this systematic misuse of political power.
The president's basic gut instinct is to offset every unwise market restraint with an equally foolish government subsidy. Romer should understand this basic point and fight it with every bone in her body. But that won't happen so long as professional advisors always take a backseat to the political ones.
Richard A. Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law, The University of Chicago, The Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, and a visiting professor at New York University Law School.
Read more Forbes opinions here.
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Thursday, December 03, 2009
I always knew global warming aka climate change aka fleece the west was politically motivated!!!
Democrats Censor Climate Skeptics in Congress
Jillian Bandes
Thursday, December 03, 2009
The Democratically-controlled Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing yesterday to examine the science behind global warming. Two climate experts from the Obama administration testified, but when Republicans asked to have a global-warming skeptic at the hearing, Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) refused to allow it.
Going Rogue by Sarah Palin FREE
Hosting a hearing on global warming with no dissenting opinions made Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the ranking Republican on the Committee, think the Democrats and the Obama administration were just as complicit in the global warming scandal sparked by Climategate as the Climategate scientists themselves.
“What the hearings showed is that the President’s science advisors are at the bottom of the whole climate change debate,” said Sensenbrenner.
Chairman Markey did not even hold the hearing for the purpose of exploring the Climategate scandal. Rather, it was held to explore the “urgent, consensus view on our planetary problem: that global warming is real, and the science indicates that it is getting worse” in advance of the President’s trip to Copenhagen.
Sensenbrenner said that totally missed the point.
“As policymakers, we should all be concerned when key climate scientists write in private correspondence that they found a ‘trick’ to ‘hide the decline’ in temperature data documented in climate studies,” he said.
Sensenbrenner made it clear that Climategate does not undermine all of global warming science. But the scandal does “read more like scientific fascism than the scientific process,” and very clearly necessitates additional consideration of the global warming issue.
“[Markey] has gone so far as to not provide a debate on the issue, when obviously the mail from the British university indicates that debate should be encouraged rather than suppressed,” said Sensenbrenner. He has formally requested an additional hearing, which Markey will be forced to entertain due to Committee rules. But exactly when that additional hearing will put it on the schedule is uncertain.
Sensenbrenner also complained that the two witnesses who were called, Dr. John Holdren, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Dr. Jane Lubchenco, an administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were not put under oath at the hearing. Markey said that the reason they were not put under oath was because it would be “grandstanding.”
But Markey insisted that oil executive be put under oath during hearings last month.
“Up until the last couple months, I think that Markey has been very fair in operating his Committee,” said Sensenbrenner. But as the whole scientific political argument is falling apart, he’s become increasingly intolerant.”
Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved. Democrats Censor Climate Skeptics in Congress
Jillian Bandes
Thursday, December 03, 2009
The Democratically-controlled Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing yesterday to examine the science behind global warming. Two climate experts from the Obama administration testified, but when Republicans asked to have a global-warming skeptic at the hearing, Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) refused to allow it.
Going Rogue by Sarah Palin FREE
Hosting a hearing on global warming with no dissenting opinions made Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the ranking Republican on the Committee, think the Democrats and the Obama administration were just as complicit in the global warming scandal sparked by Climategate as the Climategate scientists themselves.
“What the hearings showed is that the President’s science advisors are at the bottom of the whole climate change debate,” said Sensenbrenner.
Chairman Markey did not even hold the hearing for the purpose of exploring the Climategate scandal. Rather, it was held to explore the “urgent, consensus view on our planetary problem: that global warming is real, and the science indicates that it is getting worse” in advance of the President’s trip to Copenhagen.
Sensenbrenner said that totally missed the point.
“As policymakers, we should all be concerned when key climate scientists write in private correspondence that they found a ‘trick’ to ‘hide the decline’ in temperature data documented in climate studies,” he said.
Sensenbrenner made it clear that Climategate does not undermine all of global warming science. But the scandal does “read more like scientific fascism than the scientific process,” and very clearly necessitates additional consideration of the global warming issue.
“[Markey] has gone so far as to not provide a debate on the issue, when obviously the mail from the British university indicates that debate should be encouraged rather than suppressed,” said Sensenbrenner. He has formally requested an additional hearing, which Markey will be forced to entertain due to Committee rules. But exactly when that additional hearing will put it on the schedule is uncertain.
Sensenbrenner also complained that the two witnesses who were called, Dr. John Holdren, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Dr. Jane Lubchenco, an administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were not put under oath at the hearing. Markey said that the reason they were not put under oath was because it would be “grandstanding.”
But Markey insisted that oil executive be put under oath during hearings last month.
“Up until the last couple months, I think that Markey has been very fair in operating his Committee,” said Sensenbrenner. But as the whole scientific political argument is falling apart, he’s become increasingly intolerant.”
Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
Democrats Censor Climate Skeptics in Congress
Jillian Bandes
Thursday, December 03, 2009
The Democratically-controlled Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing yesterday to examine the science behind global warming. Two climate experts from the Obama administration testified, but when Republicans asked to have a global-warming skeptic at the hearing, Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) refused to allow it.
Going Rogue by Sarah Palin FREE
Hosting a hearing on global warming with no dissenting opinions made Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the ranking Republican on the Committee, think the Democrats and the Obama administration were just as complicit in the global warming scandal sparked by Climategate as the Climategate scientists themselves.
“What the hearings showed is that the President’s science advisors are at the bottom of the whole climate change debate,” said Sensenbrenner.
Chairman Markey did not even hold the hearing for the purpose of exploring the Climategate scandal. Rather, it was held to explore the “urgent, consensus view on our planetary problem: that global warming is real, and the science indicates that it is getting worse” in advance of the President’s trip to Copenhagen.
Sensenbrenner said that totally missed the point.
“As policymakers, we should all be concerned when key climate scientists write in private correspondence that they found a ‘trick’ to ‘hide the decline’ in temperature data documented in climate studies,” he said.
Sensenbrenner made it clear that Climategate does not undermine all of global warming science. But the scandal does “read more like scientific fascism than the scientific process,” and very clearly necessitates additional consideration of the global warming issue.
“[Markey] has gone so far as to not provide a debate on the issue, when obviously the mail from the British university indicates that debate should be encouraged rather than suppressed,” said Sensenbrenner. He has formally requested an additional hearing, which Markey will be forced to entertain due to Committee rules. But exactly when that additional hearing will put it on the schedule is uncertain.
Sensenbrenner also complained that the two witnesses who were called, Dr. John Holdren, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Dr. Jane Lubchenco, an administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were not put under oath at the hearing. Markey said that the reason they were not put under oath was because it would be “grandstanding.”
But Markey insisted that oil executive be put under oath during hearings last month.
“Up until the last couple months, I think that Markey has been very fair in operating his Committee,” said Sensenbrenner. But as the whole scientific political argument is falling apart, he’s become increasingly intolerant.”
Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved. Democrats Censor Climate Skeptics in Congress
Jillian Bandes
Thursday, December 03, 2009
The Democratically-controlled Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing yesterday to examine the science behind global warming. Two climate experts from the Obama administration testified, but when Republicans asked to have a global-warming skeptic at the hearing, Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) refused to allow it.
Going Rogue by Sarah Palin FREE
Hosting a hearing on global warming with no dissenting opinions made Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the ranking Republican on the Committee, think the Democrats and the Obama administration were just as complicit in the global warming scandal sparked by Climategate as the Climategate scientists themselves.
“What the hearings showed is that the President’s science advisors are at the bottom of the whole climate change debate,” said Sensenbrenner.
Chairman Markey did not even hold the hearing for the purpose of exploring the Climategate scandal. Rather, it was held to explore the “urgent, consensus view on our planetary problem: that global warming is real, and the science indicates that it is getting worse” in advance of the President’s trip to Copenhagen.
Sensenbrenner said that totally missed the point.
“As policymakers, we should all be concerned when key climate scientists write in private correspondence that they found a ‘trick’ to ‘hide the decline’ in temperature data documented in climate studies,” he said.
Sensenbrenner made it clear that Climategate does not undermine all of global warming science. But the scandal does “read more like scientific fascism than the scientific process,” and very clearly necessitates additional consideration of the global warming issue.
“[Markey] has gone so far as to not provide a debate on the issue, when obviously the mail from the British university indicates that debate should be encouraged rather than suppressed,” said Sensenbrenner. He has formally requested an additional hearing, which Markey will be forced to entertain due to Committee rules. But exactly when that additional hearing will put it on the schedule is uncertain.
Sensenbrenner also complained that the two witnesses who were called, Dr. John Holdren, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Dr. Jane Lubchenco, an administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were not put under oath at the hearing. Markey said that the reason they were not put under oath was because it would be “grandstanding.”
But Markey insisted that oil executive be put under oath during hearings last month.
“Up until the last couple months, I think that Markey has been very fair in operating his Committee,” said Sensenbrenner. But as the whole scientific political argument is falling apart, he’s become increasingly intolerant.”
Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Gotta love Science
November 30, 2009
The Ghost of Lysenko
By Bruce Walker
The imaginary science of man-made global warning can now be entered into the infamous history of politicized science, the results of which have threads in our lives today. Consider the residue of such frauds as Rachel Carson, Alfred Kinsey, and Margaret Mead. Carson's invented findings and unscientific methods led to the banning of DDT, which in turn cost the lives of tens of millions of children in undeveloped nations. Kinsey's tortuously doctored "sex research," as Dr. Judith Riesman has so amply demonstrated, was not only invented to sate his perverted lusts, but created scientific myths about normal and abnormal behavior which haunt us to this day. Mead also simply invented research to fit her idea of what the science of anthropology ought to be in order to justify her own immature and immoral behavior. Carson, Kinsey, and Mead had an agenda before they did any research, and this agenda governed everything else.
Science is supposed to be the impartial blend of data with theory that allows human knowledge to go wherever the evidence leads. Serious science must be firmly grounded in moral absolutes. This sounds untrue to modern ears because we have been indoctrinated with a false history of science. Without faith in an ordered universe according to discoverable principles, science cannot exist. The assumption that life and the universe are rational is religious in nature. There must be a belief in ultimate truth -- a faith, something which religion brings that is not found in a man-centered mindset. If man is all there is, then why can't truth be relative?
Those who hijack science, however, are not interested in truth. They have created a false history of science which asserts absurd lies like "medieval Christians believed the Earth was flat." (Not only is that not true, but the religious influence upon science tended to confirm that the Earth was a sphere, and Christians of the time had the truest calculation of the circumference of the Earth of anyone around.) The men who founded modern science -- Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Pascal, Napier, Newton, and others -- were much more religious than their contemporaries. Those who hijack science for personal and political reasons pretend that religion interfered with science, but this is no more than a power-hungry agnostic's narcotic delusion.
This fraud has left many ghosts. "Aryan" science pretended, for a time, to be rooted in real science. Many Nazis considered their vile rites to be steeped in pure science, and they condemned the religious sentimentality of those who thought that men are men and not livestock.
Perhaps the most egregious ghost is Trofim Lysenko, the man who ruled the life sciences of Soviet Russia from the late 1920s until the early 1960s. He had a theory which fit Marxism perfectly: acquired characteristics can be inherited. This is not true, of course, but Lysenko had the Politburo and Stalin behind him. It was science that fit the political needs of the Bolsheviks, and so it was science backed by the awful power of the party and the state.
Lysenko's experiments were heralded, although the experiments were never replicated. The Soviet Union was full of botanists, biologists, geneticists, and other life scientists, and it was obvious to anyone with a free mind that Lysenko was propounding nonsense. But it was not until 1962 that the Soviet government allowed a real critique of his cartoon science. Why?
Because in the Soviet Union, as in Nazi Germany, truth was never "objective." Science could literally be "Aryan," or "proletariat," or otherwise fit into some sort of sociopolitical mindset. God was dead in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, so no one was there to acknowledge the lies or account for the intellectual mischief. Honest scientists were imprisoned, tortured, and killed because they rested on the thin reed of the scientific method, which ill withstood the hurricane of politically correct science. Inconceivably, the life sciences of the largest nation in the world taught blatantly false "science" for decades. When criticism of Lysenko, an honored figure in Soviet "science" until 1964, was finally permitted, his acolytes realized that fear, bribes, lies, and false honors work much better than empiricism where science devoid of God is concerned. The ghosts spawned by Lysenko still haunt us today. The "science" of a modern Lysenko -- Albert Gore, Jr. (son of the famous racist, Albert Gore, Sr.) -- is totalitarian nonsense. The only question is this: How many good men must be consigned to the gulag before the dulled consciences of the administrators of academic "learning" smell Lysenko's stench?
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
32 Comments on "The Ghost of Lysenko"
The Ghost of Lysenko
By Bruce Walker
The imaginary science of man-made global warning can now be entered into the infamous history of politicized science, the results of which have threads in our lives today. Consider the residue of such frauds as Rachel Carson, Alfred Kinsey, and Margaret Mead. Carson's invented findings and unscientific methods led to the banning of DDT, which in turn cost the lives of tens of millions of children in undeveloped nations. Kinsey's tortuously doctored "sex research," as Dr. Judith Riesman has so amply demonstrated, was not only invented to sate his perverted lusts, but created scientific myths about normal and abnormal behavior which haunt us to this day. Mead also simply invented research to fit her idea of what the science of anthropology ought to be in order to justify her own immature and immoral behavior. Carson, Kinsey, and Mead had an agenda before they did any research, and this agenda governed everything else.
Science is supposed to be the impartial blend of data with theory that allows human knowledge to go wherever the evidence leads. Serious science must be firmly grounded in moral absolutes. This sounds untrue to modern ears because we have been indoctrinated with a false history of science. Without faith in an ordered universe according to discoverable principles, science cannot exist. The assumption that life and the universe are rational is religious in nature. There must be a belief in ultimate truth -- a faith, something which religion brings that is not found in a man-centered mindset. If man is all there is, then why can't truth be relative?
Those who hijack science, however, are not interested in truth. They have created a false history of science which asserts absurd lies like "medieval Christians believed the Earth was flat." (Not only is that not true, but the religious influence upon science tended to confirm that the Earth was a sphere, and Christians of the time had the truest calculation of the circumference of the Earth of anyone around.) The men who founded modern science -- Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Pascal, Napier, Newton, and others -- were much more religious than their contemporaries. Those who hijack science for personal and political reasons pretend that religion interfered with science, but this is no more than a power-hungry agnostic's narcotic delusion.
This fraud has left many ghosts. "Aryan" science pretended, for a time, to be rooted in real science. Many Nazis considered their vile rites to be steeped in pure science, and they condemned the religious sentimentality of those who thought that men are men and not livestock.
Perhaps the most egregious ghost is Trofim Lysenko, the man who ruled the life sciences of Soviet Russia from the late 1920s until the early 1960s. He had a theory which fit Marxism perfectly: acquired characteristics can be inherited. This is not true, of course, but Lysenko had the Politburo and Stalin behind him. It was science that fit the political needs of the Bolsheviks, and so it was science backed by the awful power of the party and the state.
Lysenko's experiments were heralded, although the experiments were never replicated. The Soviet Union was full of botanists, biologists, geneticists, and other life scientists, and it was obvious to anyone with a free mind that Lysenko was propounding nonsense. But it was not until 1962 that the Soviet government allowed a real critique of his cartoon science. Why?
Because in the Soviet Union, as in Nazi Germany, truth was never "objective." Science could literally be "Aryan," or "proletariat," or otherwise fit into some sort of sociopolitical mindset. God was dead in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, so no one was there to acknowledge the lies or account for the intellectual mischief. Honest scientists were imprisoned, tortured, and killed because they rested on the thin reed of the scientific method, which ill withstood the hurricane of politically correct science. Inconceivably, the life sciences of the largest nation in the world taught blatantly false "science" for decades. When criticism of Lysenko, an honored figure in Soviet "science" until 1964, was finally permitted, his acolytes realized that fear, bribes, lies, and false honors work much better than empiricism where science devoid of God is concerned. The ghosts spawned by Lysenko still haunt us today. The "science" of a modern Lysenko -- Albert Gore, Jr. (son of the famous racist, Albert Gore, Sr.) -- is totalitarian nonsense. The only question is this: How many good men must be consigned to the gulag before the dulled consciences of the administrators of academic "learning" smell Lysenko's stench?
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
32 Comments on "The Ghost of Lysenko"
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
November 24, 2009
The Wilding of Sarah Palin
By Robin of Berkeley
When I was in college, I read a book that changed my life. It was Susan Brownmiller's tome, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, which explained rape as an act of power, not just lust. What I found particularly chilling was the chapter on war -- how rape is used to terrorize a population and destroy the enemy's spirit.
While edifying, the book magnified the vulnerability I already felt as a female. Fear of rape became a constant dread, and I sought a solution that would help shield me from danger.
The answer: seek safe harbor within the Democratic Party. I even became an activist for feminist causes, including violence against women. Liberalism would protect me from the big bad conservatives who wished me harm.
Like most feminists, it was a no brainer to become a Democrat. Liberal men, not conservatives, were the ones devoted to women's issues. They marched at my side in support of abortion rights. They were enthusiastic about women succeeding in the workplace.
As time went on, I had many experiences that should have made me rethink my certainty. But I remained nestled in cognitive dissonance -- therapy jargon for not wanting to see what I didn't want to see.
One clue: the miscreants who were brutalizing me didn't exactly look Reagan-esque. In middle and high schools, they were minority kids enraged about forced busing. On the streets of New York City and Berkeley, they were derelicts and hoodlums.
Another red flag: while liberal men did indeed hold up those picket signs, they didn't do anything else to protect me. In fact, their social programs enabled bad behavior and bred chaos in urban America. And when I was accosted by thugs, those leftist men were missing in action.
What else should have tipped me off? Perhaps the fact that so many men in ultra left Berkeley are sleaze bags. Rarely a week goes by that I don't hear stories from my young female clients about middle aged men preying on them. With the rationale of moral relativism, these creeps feel they can do anything they please.
What finally woke me up were the utterances of bitch, witch, and monster toward Hillary Clinton and her supporters early last year. I was shocked into reality: the trash talk wasn't coming from conservatives but from male and female liberals.
I finally beheld what my eyes had refused to see: that leftists are Mr. and Ms. Misogyny. Both the males and the females don't care a whit about women.
Women are continually sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. If under Radical Islam women are enshrouded and stoned and beheaded, so be it.
My other epiphanies:those pony tailed guys were not marching for abortion rights because they cherished women's reproductive freedom. It was to keep women available for free and easy sex.
And the eagerness for women to make good money? If women work hard, leftist men don't have to.
Then along came Sarah, and the attacks became particularly heinous. And I realized something even more chilling about the Left. Leftists not only sacrifice and disrespect women.
It's far worse than that: many are perpetuators.
The Left's behavior towards Palin is not politics as usual. By their laser focus on her body and her sexuality, leftists are defiling her.
They are wilding her. And they do this with the full knowledge and complicity of the White House.
The Left has declared war on Palin because she threatens their existence. Democrats need women dependent and scared so that women, like blacks, will vote for liberals.
A strong, self sufficient woman, Palin eschews their protection. Drop her off in the Alaskan bush, and she'll survive just fine, thank you very much. Palin doesn't need or want anything from liberals, not hate crimes legislation that coddles her, not abortion, which she abhors.
Palin is a woman of deep and abiding faith. She takes no marching orders from messiah like wannabes, like Obama.
And so the Left must try to destroy her. And they are doing this in the most malicious of ways:
By symbolically raping her.
Just like a perpetuator, they dehumanize her by objectifying her body. They undress her with their eyes.
They turn her into a piece of ass.
Liberals do this by calling her a c___t, ogling her legs, demeaning her with names like "sexy flight attendant," and "Trailer Park Barbie," and exposing her flesh on the cover of Newsweek.
And from The Atlantic Magazine's Andrew Sullivan: "Sarah Palin's vagina is the font of all evil in the galaxy."
Nothing is off limits, not actress Sandra Bernhard's wish that Palin be gang raped or the sexualizing of Palin's daughters.
As every woman knows, leering looks, lurid words, and veiled threats are intended to evoke terror. Sexual violence is a form of terrorism.
The American Left has a long history of defiling people to control and break them. The hard core 60‘s leftists were masters of guerilla warfare, like the Symbionese Liberation Army repeatedly raping Patty Hearst. Huey P. Newton sent a male Black Panther to the hospital, bloodied and damaged, from a punishment of sodomy.
The extreme Left still considers themselves warriors, righteous soldiers for their Marxist cause. With Palin, they use sexual violence as part of their military arsenal.
Palin is not the only intended victim. As the book, Against Our Will described, the brutality is also aimed at men. By forcing men to witness Palin's violation, the Left tries to emasculate conservative men by rendering them powerless.
The wilding of any woman is reprehensible. But defiling a mother of five, with a babe in her arms, and a grandmother, is particularly obscene. It is, of course, Palin's unapologetic motherhood that provides fuel to the leftist fire.
Because, as a mother, and a fertile woman, Palin is as close to the sacred as a person gets. She is not just politically pro life. Palin's whole being emanates life, in stark contrast to the darkness of the left, the life despoilers.
These "progressives" are so alienated from the sacred that they perceive nothing as sacred. And they will destroy anyone whose goodness shines a mirror on their pathology. The spiritually barren must annihilate the vital and the fertile.
It has been almost two years since I woke up and broke up with liberalism. During these many months, I've discovered that everything I believed was wrong.
But the biggest shock of all has been realizing that the Democratic Party is hardly an oasis for women. Now that it has been infiltrated by the hard Left, it's a dangerous place for women, children, and other living things.
In the wilding of Sarah Palin, the Left shows its true colors. Rather than a shelter for the vulnerable, leftists will mow down any man, woman, or child who gets in their way. Not a movement of hope and change, it is a cauldron of hate.
From Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
In these dark times, with spiritually bankrupt people at the helm, thank God we have bright lights like Sarah Palin to illuminate the darkness.
A frequent AT contributor, Robin is a psychotherapist and a recovering liberal in Berkeley.
115 Comments on "The Wilding of Sarah Palin"
The Wilding of Sarah Palin
By Robin of Berkeley
When I was in college, I read a book that changed my life. It was Susan Brownmiller's tome, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, which explained rape as an act of power, not just lust. What I found particularly chilling was the chapter on war -- how rape is used to terrorize a population and destroy the enemy's spirit.
While edifying, the book magnified the vulnerability I already felt as a female. Fear of rape became a constant dread, and I sought a solution that would help shield me from danger.
The answer: seek safe harbor within the Democratic Party. I even became an activist for feminist causes, including violence against women. Liberalism would protect me from the big bad conservatives who wished me harm.
Like most feminists, it was a no brainer to become a Democrat. Liberal men, not conservatives, were the ones devoted to women's issues. They marched at my side in support of abortion rights. They were enthusiastic about women succeeding in the workplace.
As time went on, I had many experiences that should have made me rethink my certainty. But I remained nestled in cognitive dissonance -- therapy jargon for not wanting to see what I didn't want to see.
One clue: the miscreants who were brutalizing me didn't exactly look Reagan-esque. In middle and high schools, they were minority kids enraged about forced busing. On the streets of New York City and Berkeley, they were derelicts and hoodlums.
Another red flag: while liberal men did indeed hold up those picket signs, they didn't do anything else to protect me. In fact, their social programs enabled bad behavior and bred chaos in urban America. And when I was accosted by thugs, those leftist men were missing in action.
What else should have tipped me off? Perhaps the fact that so many men in ultra left Berkeley are sleaze bags. Rarely a week goes by that I don't hear stories from my young female clients about middle aged men preying on them. With the rationale of moral relativism, these creeps feel they can do anything they please.
What finally woke me up were the utterances of bitch, witch, and monster toward Hillary Clinton and her supporters early last year. I was shocked into reality: the trash talk wasn't coming from conservatives but from male and female liberals.
I finally beheld what my eyes had refused to see: that leftists are Mr. and Ms. Misogyny. Both the males and the females don't care a whit about women.
Women are continually sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. If under Radical Islam women are enshrouded and stoned and beheaded, so be it.
My other epiphanies:those pony tailed guys were not marching for abortion rights because they cherished women's reproductive freedom. It was to keep women available for free and easy sex.
And the eagerness for women to make good money? If women work hard, leftist men don't have to.
Then along came Sarah, and the attacks became particularly heinous. And I realized something even more chilling about the Left. Leftists not only sacrifice and disrespect women.
It's far worse than that: many are perpetuators.
The Left's behavior towards Palin is not politics as usual. By their laser focus on her body and her sexuality, leftists are defiling her.
They are wilding her. And they do this with the full knowledge and complicity of the White House.
The Left has declared war on Palin because she threatens their existence. Democrats need women dependent and scared so that women, like blacks, will vote for liberals.
A strong, self sufficient woman, Palin eschews their protection. Drop her off in the Alaskan bush, and she'll survive just fine, thank you very much. Palin doesn't need or want anything from liberals, not hate crimes legislation that coddles her, not abortion, which she abhors.
Palin is a woman of deep and abiding faith. She takes no marching orders from messiah like wannabes, like Obama.
And so the Left must try to destroy her. And they are doing this in the most malicious of ways:
By symbolically raping her.
Just like a perpetuator, they dehumanize her by objectifying her body. They undress her with their eyes.
They turn her into a piece of ass.
Liberals do this by calling her a c___t, ogling her legs, demeaning her with names like "sexy flight attendant," and "Trailer Park Barbie," and exposing her flesh on the cover of Newsweek.
And from The Atlantic Magazine's Andrew Sullivan: "Sarah Palin's vagina is the font of all evil in the galaxy."
Nothing is off limits, not actress Sandra Bernhard's wish that Palin be gang raped or the sexualizing of Palin's daughters.
As every woman knows, leering looks, lurid words, and veiled threats are intended to evoke terror. Sexual violence is a form of terrorism.
The American Left has a long history of defiling people to control and break them. The hard core 60‘s leftists were masters of guerilla warfare, like the Symbionese Liberation Army repeatedly raping Patty Hearst. Huey P. Newton sent a male Black Panther to the hospital, bloodied and damaged, from a punishment of sodomy.
The extreme Left still considers themselves warriors, righteous soldiers for their Marxist cause. With Palin, they use sexual violence as part of their military arsenal.
Palin is not the only intended victim. As the book, Against Our Will described, the brutality is also aimed at men. By forcing men to witness Palin's violation, the Left tries to emasculate conservative men by rendering them powerless.
The wilding of any woman is reprehensible. But defiling a mother of five, with a babe in her arms, and a grandmother, is particularly obscene. It is, of course, Palin's unapologetic motherhood that provides fuel to the leftist fire.
Because, as a mother, and a fertile woman, Palin is as close to the sacred as a person gets. She is not just politically pro life. Palin's whole being emanates life, in stark contrast to the darkness of the left, the life despoilers.
These "progressives" are so alienated from the sacred that they perceive nothing as sacred. And they will destroy anyone whose goodness shines a mirror on their pathology. The spiritually barren must annihilate the vital and the fertile.
It has been almost two years since I woke up and broke up with liberalism. During these many months, I've discovered that everything I believed was wrong.
But the biggest shock of all has been realizing that the Democratic Party is hardly an oasis for women. Now that it has been infiltrated by the hard Left, it's a dangerous place for women, children, and other living things.
In the wilding of Sarah Palin, the Left shows its true colors. Rather than a shelter for the vulnerable, leftists will mow down any man, woman, or child who gets in their way. Not a movement of hope and change, it is a cauldron of hate.
From Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
In these dark times, with spiritually bankrupt people at the helm, thank God we have bright lights like Sarah Palin to illuminate the darkness.
A frequent AT contributor, Robin is a psychotherapist and a recovering liberal in Berkeley.
115 Comments on "The Wilding of Sarah Palin"
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Jamaica vs. Singapore
By Josh Lerner Thursday, November 19, 2009
Filed under: Economic Policy, Boardroom, Government & Politics, World Watch
In 1965 the two nations were equal in wealth. Four decades later, their standing was dramatically different. What accounts for the difference?
Silicon Valley, Singapore, Tel Aviv—the global hubs of entrepreneurial activity all bear the marks of government investment. Yet, for every successful public intervention spurring entrepreneurial activity, there are many failed efforts, wasting untold billions in taxpayer dollars. When has governmental sponsorship succeeded in boosting growth, and when has it fallen terribly short? Should the government be involved in such undertakings at all? These issues are particularly timely, given the many billions of dollars governments spend worldwide to prop up troubled industries such as automobiles, as well as the urgent public efforts to encourage “green shoots” in areas such as clean-tech in hope of stimulating an economic recovery.
Programs to boost new ventures might seem like an esoteric corner of public policy, far less important than the big issues of war and peace and health benefits, not to mention the rescue of giant firms that are on the ropes. But this perception can mislead because of the magnitude of changes that can occur when venture programs are done well.
To understand their importance, we can contrast Jamaica and Singapore. Both are relatively tiny states, with under 5 million residents apiece. Upon Singapore’s independence in 1965—three years after Jamaica’s own establishment as a nation—the two nations were about equal in wealth: the gross domestic product (in 2006 U.S. dollars) was $2,850 per person in Jamaica, slightly higher than Singapore’s $2,650. Both nations had a centrally located port, a tradition of British colonial rule, and governments with a strong capitalist orientation. (Jamaica, in addition, had plentiful natural resources and a robust tourist industry.) But four decades later, their standing was dramatically different: Singapore had climbed to a per capita GDP of $31,400 (2006 data, in current dollars), while Jamaica’s figure was only $4,800.
The World Bank's analysis suggests that the total cost of complying with all tax laws in Jamaica amounts to just over one-half of gross profits for the typical entrepreneur.
What accounts for the amazing difference in growth rates? There are many explanations: soon after independence, Singapore aggressively invested in infrastructure such as its port, subsidized its system of education, maintained an open and corruption-free economy, and established sovereign wealth funds that made a wide variety of investments. It has also benefited from a strategic position on the key sea lanes heading to and from East Asia. Jamaica, meanwhile, spent many years mired in political instability, particularly the disastrous administration of Michael Manley during the 1970s. Dramatic shifts from a market economy to a socialist orientation and back again, with the attendant inflation, economic instability, crippling public debt, and violence, made the development and implementation of a consistent long-run economic policy difficult.
But in explaining Singapore's economic growth, it is hard not to give considerable credit to its policies toward entrepreneurship. The government has experimented with a wide variety of efforts to develop an entrepreneurial sector:
– Providing public funds for venture investors seeking to locate in the city-state
– Subsidies for firms in targeted technologies
– Encouraging potential entrepreneurs and mentoring fledgling ventures
– Subsidies for leading biotechnology researchers to move their laboratories to Singapore
– Awards for failed entrepreneurs (with a hope of encouraging risk-taking)
While much of the initial growth in Singapore can be attributed to sound macroeconomic policies, political stability, and various other factors, the nation’s entrepreneurship initiatives have played an increasingly important role in stimulating growth.
The contrast with Jamaica is striking. Jamaica has long had a high rate of subsistence entrepreneurship: for instance, the 2006 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey placed it among the highest of the 42 nations it examined in various rates of entrepreneurial activity. Yet other data collected by the Monitor—and corroborated in anecdotal accounts—suggests that early-stage entrepreneurship is translated into full-fledged business activity at a very low rate. On this measure, the island nation ranked among the lowest nations (28th among the 35 countries ranked by the Monitor in 2005).
Some of the reasons for the inability of Jamaican entrepreneurs to grow can be seen in the World Bank’s reports on the barriers to entrepreneurs. The "Doing Business" series assesses, across 178 countries, the obstacles faced by an entrepreneur in performing various standardized tasks (thereby avoiding some of the subjectivity associated with other attempts to rank entrepreneurship). In several critical indicators, Jamaica ranked extremely low in the World Bank’s 2008 analysis. These suggest some of the barriers that hold back the growth of entrepreneurial enterprises:
– Of the 178 countries studied, Jamaica ranked 170th in the burden of complying with tax regulations. The ranking reflects not just the cost of the taxes themselves, but also the administrative burdens associated with complying with the tax code. The World Bank's analysis suggests that the total cost of complying with all tax laws in Jamaica amounts to just over one-half of gross profits for the typical entrepreneur. Numerous studies have suggested that one of the most important sources of financing for the typical entrepreneur is cash flow generated by the business itself, which is plowed back into the business. If so much of entrepreneurs’ income is going to meet tax obligations, business owners are unlikely to have the resources to invest in their enterprises. By way of contrast, Singapore ranked second worldwide, with a burden of just 23 percent.
– Similarly, when the cost of registering property is compared, Jamaica ranked 108th out of 178: the cost of registering property equaled 13.5 percent of the value of the property. (By comparison, the ratio in the United States is 0.5 percent of the value.) The high cost of registering property means that fewer people register their holdings, which in turn leads to less-secure property rights. Most critically, entrepreneurs who do not hold a firm legal title to property are unlikely to be able to borrow against this holding from a bank. Once again, this comparison suggests that entrepreneurs have fewer resources for growing their enterprises.
One of the most visible manifestations of this lack of activity may be in Jamaica’s productivity: from 1973 to 2007, the nation actually experienced negative productivity growth. Even more striking about this poor performance is the fact that during this period developed nations experienced substantial growth through implementing information technology, and many developing markets experienced even faster growth as they caught up with technologies adopted earlier in the West.
While much of the initial growth in Singapore can be attributed to sound macroeconomic policies, political stability, and various other factors, the nation’s entrepreneurship initiatives have played an increasingly important role in stimulating growth.
This disparity may change in future years: Jamaica enjoyed a surge in income with the rise of energy and commodity prices, and the most recent prime ministers have shown a greater awareness of, and willingness to lower, barriers to entrepreneurship. But the disparate experiences of Singapore and Jamaica over the past four decades demonstrate why all of us should care about public efforts to stimulate entrepreneurship.
Thus, while the dollars spent each year on entrepreneurship programs—though significant on an absolute basis—pale compared to defense and healthcare expenditures, the picture changes when we consider the long-run consequences of policies that facilitate or hinder the development of a venture sector: that is, the impact on national prosperity of a vital entrepreneurial climate. In the long run, the significance of entrepreneurial policies looms much larger
What public policies are most effective in encouraging the growth of a venture economy? Three principles in particular seem critical as guideposts.
Remember that entrepreneurial activity does not exist in a vacuum. Entrepreneurs are tremendously dependent on their partners. Without experienced lawyers able to negotiate agreements, skilled marketing gurus and engineers willing to work for low wages and a handful of stock options, and customers willing to take a chance on a young firm, success is unlikely. But despite the importance of the entrepreneurial environment, in many cases government officials hand out money without thinking about other barriers that entrepreneurs face. In some cases, crucial aspects of the entrepreneurial environment may seem tangential: for instance, the importance of robust public markets for young firms to spur venture investment. It is critical to take a broad view and address not just the availability of capital, but other components of a productive arena in which entrepreneurs could operate.
When the cost of registering property is compared, Jamaica ranked 108th out of 178: the cost of registering property was equal to 13.5 percent of the value of the property. By comparison, the ratio in the United States is 0.5 percent of the value.
Let the market provide direction. Two successful efforts have been the Israeli Yozma program and the New Zealand Seed Investment Fund. While these programs differed in details—the former was geared toward attracting foreign venture investors; the latter encouraged locally based, early-stage funds—they shared a central element: each used matching funds to determine where public subsidies should go. In using the market for guidance, policy makers should keep in mind that these initiatives should not compete with independent venture funds or finance substandard firms that cannot raise private capital. Emulating successful initiatives in the past, programs should require a substantial amount of funds be raised from nonpublic sources. To be sure, in encouraging seed companies and groups, leaders should be aware that extensive intervention may be needed before they are “fund-able.” Programs may need to work closely with the organizations to refine strategies, recruit additional partners (perhaps even from other regions), and identify potential investors. But only through a market-based system are the critical flaws that have doomed so many earlier programs likely to be avoided.
Resist the temptation to over-engineer. In many instances, government requirements that limit the flexibility of entrepreneurs and venture investors have been detrimental. It is tempting to add restrictions on several dimensions: for instance, the locations in which the firms can operate, the type of securities venture investors can use, and the evolution of the firms (e.g., restrictions on acquisitions or secondary sales of stock). Government programs should eschew such efforts to micromanage the entrepreneurial process. While it is natural to expect that firms and groups receiving subsidies will retain a local presence or continue to target the local region for investments, these requirements should be as minimal as possible.
The promotion of new business ventures is of critical importance to all of us. While the challenges facing government initiatives may seem arcane and technical, well-considered policies are likely to profoundly influence our opportunities, as well as those of our children and grandchildren. Misguided policies, unfortunately, will also help determine the future. However challenging the encouragement of entrepreneurship may seem, it is truly too important to leave to the policy specialists!
Josh Lerner is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School.
This essay is adapted from Lerner’s book, Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed—and What to Do about It.
Image by Darren Wamboldt/Bergman Group.
By Josh Lerner Thursday, November 19, 2009
Filed under: Economic Policy, Boardroom, Government & Politics, World Watch
In 1965 the two nations were equal in wealth. Four decades later, their standing was dramatically different. What accounts for the difference?
Silicon Valley, Singapore, Tel Aviv—the global hubs of entrepreneurial activity all bear the marks of government investment. Yet, for every successful public intervention spurring entrepreneurial activity, there are many failed efforts, wasting untold billions in taxpayer dollars. When has governmental sponsorship succeeded in boosting growth, and when has it fallen terribly short? Should the government be involved in such undertakings at all? These issues are particularly timely, given the many billions of dollars governments spend worldwide to prop up troubled industries such as automobiles, as well as the urgent public efforts to encourage “green shoots” in areas such as clean-tech in hope of stimulating an economic recovery.
Programs to boost new ventures might seem like an esoteric corner of public policy, far less important than the big issues of war and peace and health benefits, not to mention the rescue of giant firms that are on the ropes. But this perception can mislead because of the magnitude of changes that can occur when venture programs are done well.
To understand their importance, we can contrast Jamaica and Singapore. Both are relatively tiny states, with under 5 million residents apiece. Upon Singapore’s independence in 1965—three years after Jamaica’s own establishment as a nation—the two nations were about equal in wealth: the gross domestic product (in 2006 U.S. dollars) was $2,850 per person in Jamaica, slightly higher than Singapore’s $2,650. Both nations had a centrally located port, a tradition of British colonial rule, and governments with a strong capitalist orientation. (Jamaica, in addition, had plentiful natural resources and a robust tourist industry.) But four decades later, their standing was dramatically different: Singapore had climbed to a per capita GDP of $31,400 (2006 data, in current dollars), while Jamaica’s figure was only $4,800.
The World Bank's analysis suggests that the total cost of complying with all tax laws in Jamaica amounts to just over one-half of gross profits for the typical entrepreneur.
What accounts for the amazing difference in growth rates? There are many explanations: soon after independence, Singapore aggressively invested in infrastructure such as its port, subsidized its system of education, maintained an open and corruption-free economy, and established sovereign wealth funds that made a wide variety of investments. It has also benefited from a strategic position on the key sea lanes heading to and from East Asia. Jamaica, meanwhile, spent many years mired in political instability, particularly the disastrous administration of Michael Manley during the 1970s. Dramatic shifts from a market economy to a socialist orientation and back again, with the attendant inflation, economic instability, crippling public debt, and violence, made the development and implementation of a consistent long-run economic policy difficult.
But in explaining Singapore's economic growth, it is hard not to give considerable credit to its policies toward entrepreneurship. The government has experimented with a wide variety of efforts to develop an entrepreneurial sector:
– Providing public funds for venture investors seeking to locate in the city-state
– Subsidies for firms in targeted technologies
– Encouraging potential entrepreneurs and mentoring fledgling ventures
– Subsidies for leading biotechnology researchers to move their laboratories to Singapore
– Awards for failed entrepreneurs (with a hope of encouraging risk-taking)
While much of the initial growth in Singapore can be attributed to sound macroeconomic policies, political stability, and various other factors, the nation’s entrepreneurship initiatives have played an increasingly important role in stimulating growth.
The contrast with Jamaica is striking. Jamaica has long had a high rate of subsistence entrepreneurship: for instance, the 2006 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey placed it among the highest of the 42 nations it examined in various rates of entrepreneurial activity. Yet other data collected by the Monitor—and corroborated in anecdotal accounts—suggests that early-stage entrepreneurship is translated into full-fledged business activity at a very low rate. On this measure, the island nation ranked among the lowest nations (28th among the 35 countries ranked by the Monitor in 2005).
Some of the reasons for the inability of Jamaican entrepreneurs to grow can be seen in the World Bank’s reports on the barriers to entrepreneurs. The "Doing Business" series assesses, across 178 countries, the obstacles faced by an entrepreneur in performing various standardized tasks (thereby avoiding some of the subjectivity associated with other attempts to rank entrepreneurship). In several critical indicators, Jamaica ranked extremely low in the World Bank’s 2008 analysis. These suggest some of the barriers that hold back the growth of entrepreneurial enterprises:
– Of the 178 countries studied, Jamaica ranked 170th in the burden of complying with tax regulations. The ranking reflects not just the cost of the taxes themselves, but also the administrative burdens associated with complying with the tax code. The World Bank's analysis suggests that the total cost of complying with all tax laws in Jamaica amounts to just over one-half of gross profits for the typical entrepreneur. Numerous studies have suggested that one of the most important sources of financing for the typical entrepreneur is cash flow generated by the business itself, which is plowed back into the business. If so much of entrepreneurs’ income is going to meet tax obligations, business owners are unlikely to have the resources to invest in their enterprises. By way of contrast, Singapore ranked second worldwide, with a burden of just 23 percent.
– Similarly, when the cost of registering property is compared, Jamaica ranked 108th out of 178: the cost of registering property equaled 13.5 percent of the value of the property. (By comparison, the ratio in the United States is 0.5 percent of the value.) The high cost of registering property means that fewer people register their holdings, which in turn leads to less-secure property rights. Most critically, entrepreneurs who do not hold a firm legal title to property are unlikely to be able to borrow against this holding from a bank. Once again, this comparison suggests that entrepreneurs have fewer resources for growing their enterprises.
One of the most visible manifestations of this lack of activity may be in Jamaica’s productivity: from 1973 to 2007, the nation actually experienced negative productivity growth. Even more striking about this poor performance is the fact that during this period developed nations experienced substantial growth through implementing information technology, and many developing markets experienced even faster growth as they caught up with technologies adopted earlier in the West.
While much of the initial growth in Singapore can be attributed to sound macroeconomic policies, political stability, and various other factors, the nation’s entrepreneurship initiatives have played an increasingly important role in stimulating growth.
This disparity may change in future years: Jamaica enjoyed a surge in income with the rise of energy and commodity prices, and the most recent prime ministers have shown a greater awareness of, and willingness to lower, barriers to entrepreneurship. But the disparate experiences of Singapore and Jamaica over the past four decades demonstrate why all of us should care about public efforts to stimulate entrepreneurship.
Thus, while the dollars spent each year on entrepreneurship programs—though significant on an absolute basis—pale compared to defense and healthcare expenditures, the picture changes when we consider the long-run consequences of policies that facilitate or hinder the development of a venture sector: that is, the impact on national prosperity of a vital entrepreneurial climate. In the long run, the significance of entrepreneurial policies looms much larger
What public policies are most effective in encouraging the growth of a venture economy? Three principles in particular seem critical as guideposts.
Remember that entrepreneurial activity does not exist in a vacuum. Entrepreneurs are tremendously dependent on their partners. Without experienced lawyers able to negotiate agreements, skilled marketing gurus and engineers willing to work for low wages and a handful of stock options, and customers willing to take a chance on a young firm, success is unlikely. But despite the importance of the entrepreneurial environment, in many cases government officials hand out money without thinking about other barriers that entrepreneurs face. In some cases, crucial aspects of the entrepreneurial environment may seem tangential: for instance, the importance of robust public markets for young firms to spur venture investment. It is critical to take a broad view and address not just the availability of capital, but other components of a productive arena in which entrepreneurs could operate.
When the cost of registering property is compared, Jamaica ranked 108th out of 178: the cost of registering property was equal to 13.5 percent of the value of the property. By comparison, the ratio in the United States is 0.5 percent of the value.
Let the market provide direction. Two successful efforts have been the Israeli Yozma program and the New Zealand Seed Investment Fund. While these programs differed in details—the former was geared toward attracting foreign venture investors; the latter encouraged locally based, early-stage funds—they shared a central element: each used matching funds to determine where public subsidies should go. In using the market for guidance, policy makers should keep in mind that these initiatives should not compete with independent venture funds or finance substandard firms that cannot raise private capital. Emulating successful initiatives in the past, programs should require a substantial amount of funds be raised from nonpublic sources. To be sure, in encouraging seed companies and groups, leaders should be aware that extensive intervention may be needed before they are “fund-able.” Programs may need to work closely with the organizations to refine strategies, recruit additional partners (perhaps even from other regions), and identify potential investors. But only through a market-based system are the critical flaws that have doomed so many earlier programs likely to be avoided.
Resist the temptation to over-engineer. In many instances, government requirements that limit the flexibility of entrepreneurs and venture investors have been detrimental. It is tempting to add restrictions on several dimensions: for instance, the locations in which the firms can operate, the type of securities venture investors can use, and the evolution of the firms (e.g., restrictions on acquisitions or secondary sales of stock). Government programs should eschew such efforts to micromanage the entrepreneurial process. While it is natural to expect that firms and groups receiving subsidies will retain a local presence or continue to target the local region for investments, these requirements should be as minimal as possible.
The promotion of new business ventures is of critical importance to all of us. While the challenges facing government initiatives may seem arcane and technical, well-considered policies are likely to profoundly influence our opportunities, as well as those of our children and grandchildren. Misguided policies, unfortunately, will also help determine the future. However challenging the encouragement of entrepreneurship may seem, it is truly too important to leave to the policy specialists!
Josh Lerner is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School.
This essay is adapted from Lerner’s book, Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed—and What to Do about It.
Image by Darren Wamboldt/Bergman Group.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Have you ever seen so much hatred for, and vitriolic criticism of, someone who had only a brief stint on the national political stage? More than a year after the presidential election in which Sarah Palin, as the GOP nominee for Vice-President, campaigned for about three months, she is still being pilloried by the left-wing loons as though she had been elected and were actively engaged in dismantling the liberal establishment. Not a day goes by in which we don't hear or read vicious attacks on a woman who represents the wholesome conservative values of Middle America -- values that have been insidiously and incrementally eroded during the last few decades.
There's an interesting contrast between Palin and Barack Obama. We keep hearing that she's not qualified to be president, but Obama is. Why? Some say it's because she didn't have enough experience in government. Yet as Governor of Alaska, Palin earned executive experience, while the current Oval Office resident had only a few years of legislative work. Others point to the interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson during the campaign last year.
Let's understand something: Couric and Gibson are liberal journalists who live for those gotcha moments when they can embarrass a conservative and get a round of high-fives at the next penthouse cocktail party on Central Park West. In contrast, Obama's interviewers seemed like they were more interested in dating him than they were in getting answers to questions. Obama's personal lapdog, MS-NBC's Chris Mathews, gets a thrill up his leg from the chosen one. It's obvious that Mathews has some sort of unresolved intimacy issues to deal with.
In the liberal mind, Obama can do no wrong, mainly because he's black. If he fouls up with a misstatement or a faux pas, they'll cover for him as though they were protecting a child with a debilitating disease. It reminds me of what Bush 2 used to refer to as "the soft bigotry of low expectations." When one of these sycophants asks Obama a question, it's not only a softball, but it comes with heavy breathing and dangling tongues.
Compare that to the lion's den that Palin walked into every time she sat down with one of Obama's obsequious panderers. Given the ideology of the interviewers, I already knew how things would turn out. What really impressed me was watching this woman muster the courage to face her liberal antagonists on national television. How much courage does it take for Obama to engage in one of those cozy love-fests with his fan club?
What this country needs is a strong conservative leader with the courage of her convictions. Sensing those qualities in Sarah Palin, the liberal left is becoming frantic because they can't seem to halt her popularity. The reason they're panicking is because they're afraid of her connection with regular folks who work for a living, pay their taxes, attend a religious worship service regularly, and believe that our country has lost the moral fiber that once united us. The book Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy covered several historical figures who stood up against the corruption surrounding them and defeated it. Sarah Palin did exactly that in her home state of Alaska. In a saner time in our history, she'd be a shoo-in for the White House.
But we're living in an era of in-your-face corruption, a time when elected officials rob us blind and dare us to do something about it. The powerful Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, New York Congressman Charles Rangel, is facing a growing investigation of ethics violations and tax scandals. When the man empowered with the responsibility to write our tax laws refuses to pay his own taxes, something terrible has happened to our country. With a laundry list of misbehavior attributed to him, Rangel boldly clings to his seat, his chairmanship, and his reelection bid.
This has become a pattern across the country. Whether the politicians get caught with their fingers wrapped around bribe money, or with their arms wrapped around someone else's spouse, they arrogantly tell the public that it will not deter them from running for reelection. Once upon a time in America, a politician might be unscrupulous, but if he got caught, he'd be history. Now, we have a president of the United States who appointed a tax cheat (Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner) to his cabinet and attempted to appoint another tax cheat (Tom Daschle) to lead Health and Human Services. Kathleen Sebelius, the Kansas Governor, ended up with her job only after paying about $8,000 in back taxes.
I could illustrate hundreds of other examples of rampant corruption by people in elective office. Pointing to government decay is the job of the free press. But are they hounding any of the power-hungry scoundrels that masquerade as symbols of decency and honor? No, they're engaged in a continuous merciless attack on a woman who has led the way in the fight against the very corruption being overlooked by those who have become blinded by ideology.
Sarah Palin is a threat because she symbolizes decency in a country taken hostage by moral degenerates. If she isn't stopped, this country might end up reclaiming some of the values that made us the envy of the world.
Bob Weir is a former detective sergeant in the New York City Police Department. He is the executive editor of The News Connection in Highland Village, Texas. E-mail Bob.
73 Comments on "Why the Left Fears Sarah"
There's an interesting contrast between Palin and Barack Obama. We keep hearing that she's not qualified to be president, but Obama is. Why? Some say it's because she didn't have enough experience in government. Yet as Governor of Alaska, Palin earned executive experience, while the current Oval Office resident had only a few years of legislative work. Others point to the interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson during the campaign last year.
Let's understand something: Couric and Gibson are liberal journalists who live for those gotcha moments when they can embarrass a conservative and get a round of high-fives at the next penthouse cocktail party on Central Park West. In contrast, Obama's interviewers seemed like they were more interested in dating him than they were in getting answers to questions. Obama's personal lapdog, MS-NBC's Chris Mathews, gets a thrill up his leg from the chosen one. It's obvious that Mathews has some sort of unresolved intimacy issues to deal with.
In the liberal mind, Obama can do no wrong, mainly because he's black. If he fouls up with a misstatement or a faux pas, they'll cover for him as though they were protecting a child with a debilitating disease. It reminds me of what Bush 2 used to refer to as "the soft bigotry of low expectations." When one of these sycophants asks Obama a question, it's not only a softball, but it comes with heavy breathing and dangling tongues.
Compare that to the lion's den that Palin walked into every time she sat down with one of Obama's obsequious panderers. Given the ideology of the interviewers, I already knew how things would turn out. What really impressed me was watching this woman muster the courage to face her liberal antagonists on national television. How much courage does it take for Obama to engage in one of those cozy love-fests with his fan club?
What this country needs is a strong conservative leader with the courage of her convictions. Sensing those qualities in Sarah Palin, the liberal left is becoming frantic because they can't seem to halt her popularity. The reason they're panicking is because they're afraid of her connection with regular folks who work for a living, pay their taxes, attend a religious worship service regularly, and believe that our country has lost the moral fiber that once united us. The book Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy covered several historical figures who stood up against the corruption surrounding them and defeated it. Sarah Palin did exactly that in her home state of Alaska. In a saner time in our history, she'd be a shoo-in for the White House.
But we're living in an era of in-your-face corruption, a time when elected officials rob us blind and dare us to do something about it. The powerful Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, New York Congressman Charles Rangel, is facing a growing investigation of ethics violations and tax scandals. When the man empowered with the responsibility to write our tax laws refuses to pay his own taxes, something terrible has happened to our country. With a laundry list of misbehavior attributed to him, Rangel boldly clings to his seat, his chairmanship, and his reelection bid.
This has become a pattern across the country. Whether the politicians get caught with their fingers wrapped around bribe money, or with their arms wrapped around someone else's spouse, they arrogantly tell the public that it will not deter them from running for reelection. Once upon a time in America, a politician might be unscrupulous, but if he got caught, he'd be history. Now, we have a president of the United States who appointed a tax cheat (Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner) to his cabinet and attempted to appoint another tax cheat (Tom Daschle) to lead Health and Human Services. Kathleen Sebelius, the Kansas Governor, ended up with her job only after paying about $8,000 in back taxes.
I could illustrate hundreds of other examples of rampant corruption by people in elective office. Pointing to government decay is the job of the free press. But are they hounding any of the power-hungry scoundrels that masquerade as symbols of decency and honor? No, they're engaged in a continuous merciless attack on a woman who has led the way in the fight against the very corruption being overlooked by those who have become blinded by ideology.
Sarah Palin is a threat because she symbolizes decency in a country taken hostage by moral degenerates. If she isn't stopped, this country might end up reclaiming some of the values that made us the envy of the world.
Bob Weir is a former detective sergeant in the New York City Police Department. He is the executive editor of The News Connection in Highland Village, Texas. E-mail Bob.
73 Comments on "Why the Left Fears Sarah"
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Why Markets Fail
Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
President Obama says he is a fan of the free market. Back in September, Obama spoke to Wall Street. He stated, "I have always been a strong believer in the power of the free market." He then explained that he wanted common-sense regulation of the market: "Common-sense rules of the road don't hinder the market, they make the market stronger. Indeed, they are essential to ensuring that our markets function fairly and freely."
To paraphrase Spanish dueler Inigo Montoya from "The Princess Bride": President Obama, you keep using the phrase "free markets." I do not think it means what you think it means.
Here is how the free market works: open competition among sellers, informed bidding among buyers. Sellers are responsible for competing; buyers are responsible for informing themselves. When the government pledges to increase competition or keep buyers informed, the market is no longer free. And when the government makes those pledges and then fails to enforce them, the free market is utterly perverted.
AUnfortunately, President Obama's favorite "common-sense" regulations attack both sides of the free market: they restrict competition among sellers while providing false guarantees to buyers. They require that sellers charge certain prices or meet certain conditions, and they incentivize buyers not to do their research -- after all, the government will ensure that no one puts bad products into the market place, right?
Wrong. Goldman Sachs is a perfect example of how the quasi-free market championed by Obama leads to chaos. On Monday, McClatchy Newspapers reported that Goldman Sachs, the nation's leading investment bank, profited handsomely from the downturn in the housing market by falsely selling mortgage-backed securities as triple-A rated investments. The securities were actually closer to junk. In 2006 and 2007, Goldman sold more than $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities, meanwhile betting against the housing market in shady ways.
The question isn't whether Goldman committed legal fraud here, although the indicators say that Goldman did. The real question is why buyers would buy these securities? The wizards of finance who bought the mortgage-backed securities while listening to Goldman's triple-A sales line must have been willfully blind -- many of these securities were backed by immensely hazardous subprime mortgages. So why did the buyers fall for it?
They fell for it because they assumed that the federal government would prevent fraud. They fell for it for the same reason that Bernie Madoff's investors fell for his scam -- the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to prevent these sorts of things. We pay our taxes so that a government agency will do our research for us and ensure that sales pitches are proper and accurate. We do not want to abide by the age-old aphorism "caveat emptor" -- buyer beware. We do not want to be self-informed buyers. We want to be spoon-fed information by our investment advisers, no matter how ridiculous the information.
The only problem is that the federal government has proved itself utterly incapable of preventing fraud. Instead, the federal government provides the illusion of security to buyers while allowing sellers to do anything until proven guilty in a court of law.
The easy solution would be to reinvigorate a healthy sense of self-reliance in investors and buyers -- tell Americans to do their own research, to do business with those they trust.
President Obama's solution is to create more regulations -- regulations that will undoubtedly be ignored by bad actors and that will undoubtedly hamper honest businessmen. On Tuesday, the Huffington Post reported that the House is considering legislation, backed by Obama, that would allow the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) to interfere in private derivatives contracts in cases of emergency. In short, if a company like Goldman Sachs were to buy a derivative from Morgan Stanley, and Morgan Stanley were to go under, the government could stop Goldman Sachs from collecting the derivative.
In theory, this sounds great. In practice, it creates an incentive for Morgan Stanley to sell too many risky securities. Then, if Morgan Stanley fails, the federal government would allow Morgan Stanley to skate on its financial obligations.
This all sounds far more complicated than it actually is. The bottom line is this: When the government assures market actors that they do not have to live up to their obligations -- basic obligations like research or paying their obligations -- the market collapses. That is not a failure of the free market. It is a failure of a government-perverted free market. Financial thieves are the same as all other thieves: they do not respect the law. More financial laws will not make financial liars more honest any more than gun laws prevent criminals from acquiring firearms. In fact, more financial regulations will only provide market participants the same false sense of security that brought about the current crisis.
Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
President Obama says he is a fan of the free market. Back in September, Obama spoke to Wall Street. He stated, "I have always been a strong believer in the power of the free market." He then explained that he wanted common-sense regulation of the market: "Common-sense rules of the road don't hinder the market, they make the market stronger. Indeed, they are essential to ensuring that our markets function fairly and freely."
To paraphrase Spanish dueler Inigo Montoya from "The Princess Bride": President Obama, you keep using the phrase "free markets." I do not think it means what you think it means.
Here is how the free market works: open competition among sellers, informed bidding among buyers. Sellers are responsible for competing; buyers are responsible for informing themselves. When the government pledges to increase competition or keep buyers informed, the market is no longer free. And when the government makes those pledges and then fails to enforce them, the free market is utterly perverted.
AUnfortunately, President Obama's favorite "common-sense" regulations attack both sides of the free market: they restrict competition among sellers while providing false guarantees to buyers. They require that sellers charge certain prices or meet certain conditions, and they incentivize buyers not to do their research -- after all, the government will ensure that no one puts bad products into the market place, right?
Wrong. Goldman Sachs is a perfect example of how the quasi-free market championed by Obama leads to chaos. On Monday, McClatchy Newspapers reported that Goldman Sachs, the nation's leading investment bank, profited handsomely from the downturn in the housing market by falsely selling mortgage-backed securities as triple-A rated investments. The securities were actually closer to junk. In 2006 and 2007, Goldman sold more than $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities, meanwhile betting against the housing market in shady ways.
The question isn't whether Goldman committed legal fraud here, although the indicators say that Goldman did. The real question is why buyers would buy these securities? The wizards of finance who bought the mortgage-backed securities while listening to Goldman's triple-A sales line must have been willfully blind -- many of these securities were backed by immensely hazardous subprime mortgages. So why did the buyers fall for it?
They fell for it because they assumed that the federal government would prevent fraud. They fell for it for the same reason that Bernie Madoff's investors fell for his scam -- the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to prevent these sorts of things. We pay our taxes so that a government agency will do our research for us and ensure that sales pitches are proper and accurate. We do not want to abide by the age-old aphorism "caveat emptor" -- buyer beware. We do not want to be self-informed buyers. We want to be spoon-fed information by our investment advisers, no matter how ridiculous the information.
The only problem is that the federal government has proved itself utterly incapable of preventing fraud. Instead, the federal government provides the illusion of security to buyers while allowing sellers to do anything until proven guilty in a court of law.
The easy solution would be to reinvigorate a healthy sense of self-reliance in investors and buyers -- tell Americans to do their own research, to do business with those they trust.
President Obama's solution is to create more regulations -- regulations that will undoubtedly be ignored by bad actors and that will undoubtedly hamper honest businessmen. On Tuesday, the Huffington Post reported that the House is considering legislation, backed by Obama, that would allow the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) to interfere in private derivatives contracts in cases of emergency. In short, if a company like Goldman Sachs were to buy a derivative from Morgan Stanley, and Morgan Stanley were to go under, the government could stop Goldman Sachs from collecting the derivative.
In theory, this sounds great. In practice, it creates an incentive for Morgan Stanley to sell too many risky securities. Then, if Morgan Stanley fails, the federal government would allow Morgan Stanley to skate on its financial obligations.
This all sounds far more complicated than it actually is. The bottom line is this: When the government assures market actors that they do not have to live up to their obligations -- basic obligations like research or paying their obligations -- the market collapses. That is not a failure of the free market. It is a failure of a government-perverted free market. Financial thieves are the same as all other thieves: they do not respect the law. More financial laws will not make financial liars more honest any more than gun laws prevent criminals from acquiring firearms. In fact, more financial regulations will only provide market participants the same false sense of security that brought about the current crisis.
Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
This is pure GOLD from Dr. Thomas Sowell:
We are incessantly being told that the cost of medical care is "too high"-- either absolutely or as a growing percentage of our incomes. But nothing that is being proposed by the government is likely to lower those costs, and much that is being proposed is almost certain to increase the costs.
There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like a pea in a shell game at a carnival. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor's office and more in taxes-- or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.
Costs are not reduced simply because you don't pay them. It would undoubtedly be cheaper for me to do without the medications that keep me alive and more vigorous in my old age than people of a similar age were in generations past.
Letting old people die would undoubtedly be cheaper than keeping them alive-- but that does not mean that the costs have gone down. It just means that we refuse to pay the costs. Instead, we pay the consequences. There is no free lunch.
Providing free lunches to people who go to hospital emergency rooms is one of the reasons for the current high costs of medical care for others. Politicians mandating what insurance companies must cover is another free lunch that leads to higher premiums for medical insurance-- and fewer people who can afford it.
Despite all the demonizing of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies or doctors for what they charge, the fundamental costs of goods and services are the costs of producing them.
If highly paid chief executives of insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies agreed to work free of charge, it would make very little difference in the cost of insurance or medications. If doctors' incomes were cut in half, that would not lower the cost of producing doctors through years of expensive training in medical schools and hospitals, nor the overhead costs of running doctors' offices.
What it would do is reduce the number of very able people who are willing to take on the high costs of a medical education when the return on that investment is greatly reduced and the aggravations of dealing with government bureaucrats are added to the burdens of the work.
Britain has had a government-run medical system for more than half a century and it has to import doctors, including some from Third World countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors' income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences.
Any one of us can reduce medical costs by refusing to pay them. In our own lives, we recognize the consequences. But when someone with a gift for rhetoric tells us that the government can reduce the costs without consequences, we are ready to believe in such political miracles.
There are some ways in which the real costs of medical care can be reduced but the people who are leading the charge for a government takeover of medical care are not the least bit interested in actually reducing those costs, as distinguished from shifting the costs around or just refusing to pay them.
The high costs of "defensive medicine"-- expensive tests, medications and procedures required to protect doctors and hospitals from ruinous lawsuits, rather than to help the patients-- could be reduced by not letting lawyers get away with filing frivolous lawsuits.
If a court of law determines that the claims made in such lawsuits are bogus, then those who filed those claims could be forced to reimburse those who have been sued for all their expenses, including their attorneys' fees and the lost time of people who have other things to do. But politicians who get huge campaign contributions from lawyers are not about to pass laws to do this.
Why should they, when it is so much easier just to start a political stampede with fiery rhetoric and glittering promises?
We are incessantly being told that the cost of medical care is "too high"-- either absolutely or as a growing percentage of our incomes. But nothing that is being proposed by the government is likely to lower those costs, and much that is being proposed is almost certain to increase the costs.
There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like a pea in a shell game at a carnival. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor's office and more in taxes-- or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.
Costs are not reduced simply because you don't pay them. It would undoubtedly be cheaper for me to do without the medications that keep me alive and more vigorous in my old age than people of a similar age were in generations past.
Letting old people die would undoubtedly be cheaper than keeping them alive-- but that does not mean that the costs have gone down. It just means that we refuse to pay the costs. Instead, we pay the consequences. There is no free lunch.
Providing free lunches to people who go to hospital emergency rooms is one of the reasons for the current high costs of medical care for others. Politicians mandating what insurance companies must cover is another free lunch that leads to higher premiums for medical insurance-- and fewer people who can afford it.
Despite all the demonizing of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies or doctors for what they charge, the fundamental costs of goods and services are the costs of producing them.
If highly paid chief executives of insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies agreed to work free of charge, it would make very little difference in the cost of insurance or medications. If doctors' incomes were cut in half, that would not lower the cost of producing doctors through years of expensive training in medical schools and hospitals, nor the overhead costs of running doctors' offices.
What it would do is reduce the number of very able people who are willing to take on the high costs of a medical education when the return on that investment is greatly reduced and the aggravations of dealing with government bureaucrats are added to the burdens of the work.
Britain has had a government-run medical system for more than half a century and it has to import doctors, including some from Third World countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors' income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences.
Any one of us can reduce medical costs by refusing to pay them. In our own lives, we recognize the consequences. But when someone with a gift for rhetoric tells us that the government can reduce the costs without consequences, we are ready to believe in such political miracles.
There are some ways in which the real costs of medical care can be reduced but the people who are leading the charge for a government takeover of medical care are not the least bit interested in actually reducing those costs, as distinguished from shifting the costs around or just refusing to pay them.
The high costs of "defensive medicine"-- expensive tests, medications and procedures required to protect doctors and hospitals from ruinous lawsuits, rather than to help the patients-- could be reduced by not letting lawyers get away with filing frivolous lawsuits.
If a court of law determines that the claims made in such lawsuits are bogus, then those who filed those claims could be forced to reimburse those who have been sued for all their expenses, including their attorneys' fees and the lost time of people who have other things to do. But politicians who get huge campaign contributions from lawyers are not about to pass laws to do this.
Why should they, when it is so much easier just to start a political stampede with fiery rhetoric and glittering promises?
Will the Entrepreneur Boom Miss the U.S.?
As we marvel (or worry) about the Dow reaching 10,000, let's look again at how closely the crash and recovery are tracking the 1970s. From January 1973 to December 1974--23 months--stocks fell 48%. Over 17 months (October 2007 to March 2009) stocks dropped 54%--a little faster and more dramatically, but comparable. In 1975 stocks rose 38%, in 1976 another 24%. The bounce from this year's Mar. 9 low is nearly 60%. Again, faster and bolder but roughly the same, so far.
The 1975--76 rally didn't last. What torpedoed stocks from 1977 to 1982? I would argue it was the 1976 election, which elevated an unknown, underqualified reformer named Jimmy Carter to the presidency. The 1976 election also produced 61 Democratic seats in the Senate, along with a two-thirds majority in the House.
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There wasn't much pro-market advocacy in Washington during the late 1970s. Thus, it was no surprise when the worrisome inflation that had erupted under Gerald Ford took a turn for the worse. The Carter Administration and Congress believed the Federal Reserve's job was to ensure stable employment. The result? Inflation kicked into hyperdrive and pushed up taxes by way of bracket creep. Economic activity was distorted by a witches' brew of inflation and high taxes, which meant that speculators and tax lawyers got rich while the rest scrambled.
Looks scarily familiar, doesn't it?
The saving grace of the 1970s was entrepreneurship and innovation. During that otherwise rotten decade we saw the creation of startups that remain mighty today: FedEx ( FDX - news - people ), Southwest Airlines ( LUV - news - people ), Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ), Apple ( AAPL - news - people ), Genentech ( DNA - news - people ), Charles Schwab ( SCHW - news - people ), Oracle. In 1971 Intel ( INTC - news - people ) introduced the microprocessor, which technology futurist George Gilder calls the most important invention in the last 50 years. Silicon Valley-style venture capital emerged during the 1970s, as did venture debt, better (and unfortunately) known as junk bond financing.
Will entrepreneurs and innovation bail us out again? They're already doing so. The rub is that most of this entrepreneurship and innovation is occurring outside the U.S. Americans--the mainstream media and the political class, especially--are terribly parochial regarding this. For example:
--How many Americans have heard of Huawei, the Chinese rival of mighty Cisco ( CSCO - news - people )? Huawei was started in 1988 and will sell $30 billion in telecom gear in 2009. Cisco was started in 1984 and will do $40 billion in sales. But Huawei's recent sales trajectory is steeper. It's possible Huawei could pass Cisco during the next few years.
--Did you know that Korean automaker Hyundai achieved record sales numbers in the lousy month of August? The J.D. Power quality ratings put Hyundai solidly in the top half, which belies the image of junky Korean cars.
--Did you know that Brazil's aircraftmaker Embraer ( ERJ - news - people ) has taken the airplane press by storm with its innovative light jets, the Phenom 100 and 300? In my Oct. 5 column I quoted Cessna's CEO, Jack Pelton, as saying he's "scared to death" of Embraer.
--Are you aware that outcomes of heart bypass surgeries are as good in India as anywhere else in the world?
--Or that Singapore is willing to pay U.S. research stars in biotechnology about $715,000 in annual salary?
Entrepreneurs and innovation will once again save the economy. But this time the miracle won't happen predominantly in the U.S. Policymakers seem not to care.
Apple the Outlier
Apple is now 33 years old, yet it seems like a perpetually new company. The company's blowout performance in its fiscal Q4--and really since the iPod's launch in 2001--has everything to do with Apple's keen sense of cultural shifts, which keeps the company at the edge of new. The genius of Steve Jobs has always been to marry his solid layman's understanding of technology to his world-class design eye and preternatural understanding of cultural moods.
Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) always seems one step ahead, even when it comes from behind. Apple didn't invent the personal computer, but it made the computer personal. It didn't invent the MP3 player, but the iPod put it all together. Smart phones existed before the iPhone. The forthcoming Apple iPad (or whatever it's called) will stand on the shoulders of the Amazon Kindle.
The lesson of Apple is to think deeply about what touches customers in an enduring way. What endures is great design and product coherence--stuff that looks cool, works well and, thus, justifies higher prices. This formula works even in a recession. Apple is a secular company with a religious following. It understands that people want transcendence and hope, especially during a difficult period. Apple's products have a quality that reaches beyond the economic dirge and reminds us of what is possible.
Movies did that in the 1930s. Apple is doing it now. Which is why Apple is an outlier.
Read Rich Karlgaard's daily blog at http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules or e-mail him at publisher@forbes.com. See Rich Karlgaard’s new TalkBack video series at http://forbes.com/talkback.
As we marvel (or worry) about the Dow reaching 10,000, let's look again at how closely the crash and recovery are tracking the 1970s. From January 1973 to December 1974--23 months--stocks fell 48%. Over 17 months (October 2007 to March 2009) stocks dropped 54%--a little faster and more dramatically, but comparable. In 1975 stocks rose 38%, in 1976 another 24%. The bounce from this year's Mar. 9 low is nearly 60%. Again, faster and bolder but roughly the same, so far.
The 1975--76 rally didn't last. What torpedoed stocks from 1977 to 1982? I would argue it was the 1976 election, which elevated an unknown, underqualified reformer named Jimmy Carter to the presidency. The 1976 election also produced 61 Democratic seats in the Senate, along with a two-thirds majority in the House.
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There wasn't much pro-market advocacy in Washington during the late 1970s. Thus, it was no surprise when the worrisome inflation that had erupted under Gerald Ford took a turn for the worse. The Carter Administration and Congress believed the Federal Reserve's job was to ensure stable employment. The result? Inflation kicked into hyperdrive and pushed up taxes by way of bracket creep. Economic activity was distorted by a witches' brew of inflation and high taxes, which meant that speculators and tax lawyers got rich while the rest scrambled.
Looks scarily familiar, doesn't it?
The saving grace of the 1970s was entrepreneurship and innovation. During that otherwise rotten decade we saw the creation of startups that remain mighty today: FedEx ( FDX - news - people ), Southwest Airlines ( LUV - news - people ), Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ), Apple ( AAPL - news - people ), Genentech ( DNA - news - people ), Charles Schwab ( SCHW - news - people ), Oracle. In 1971 Intel ( INTC - news - people ) introduced the microprocessor, which technology futurist George Gilder calls the most important invention in the last 50 years. Silicon Valley-style venture capital emerged during the 1970s, as did venture debt, better (and unfortunately) known as junk bond financing.
Will entrepreneurs and innovation bail us out again? They're already doing so. The rub is that most of this entrepreneurship and innovation is occurring outside the U.S. Americans--the mainstream media and the political class, especially--are terribly parochial regarding this. For example:
--How many Americans have heard of Huawei, the Chinese rival of mighty Cisco ( CSCO - news - people )? Huawei was started in 1988 and will sell $30 billion in telecom gear in 2009. Cisco was started in 1984 and will do $40 billion in sales. But Huawei's recent sales trajectory is steeper. It's possible Huawei could pass Cisco during the next few years.
--Did you know that Korean automaker Hyundai achieved record sales numbers in the lousy month of August? The J.D. Power quality ratings put Hyundai solidly in the top half, which belies the image of junky Korean cars.
--Did you know that Brazil's aircraftmaker Embraer ( ERJ - news - people ) has taken the airplane press by storm with its innovative light jets, the Phenom 100 and 300? In my Oct. 5 column I quoted Cessna's CEO, Jack Pelton, as saying he's "scared to death" of Embraer.
--Are you aware that outcomes of heart bypass surgeries are as good in India as anywhere else in the world?
--Or that Singapore is willing to pay U.S. research stars in biotechnology about $715,000 in annual salary?
Entrepreneurs and innovation will once again save the economy. But this time the miracle won't happen predominantly in the U.S. Policymakers seem not to care.
Apple the Outlier
Apple is now 33 years old, yet it seems like a perpetually new company. The company's blowout performance in its fiscal Q4--and really since the iPod's launch in 2001--has everything to do with Apple's keen sense of cultural shifts, which keeps the company at the edge of new. The genius of Steve Jobs has always been to marry his solid layman's understanding of technology to his world-class design eye and preternatural understanding of cultural moods.
Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) always seems one step ahead, even when it comes from behind. Apple didn't invent the personal computer, but it made the computer personal. It didn't invent the MP3 player, but the iPod put it all together. Smart phones existed before the iPhone. The forthcoming Apple iPad (or whatever it's called) will stand on the shoulders of the Amazon Kindle.
The lesson of Apple is to think deeply about what touches customers in an enduring way. What endures is great design and product coherence--stuff that looks cool, works well and, thus, justifies higher prices. This formula works even in a recession. Apple is a secular company with a religious following. It understands that people want transcendence and hope, especially during a difficult period. Apple's products have a quality that reaches beyond the economic dirge and reminds us of what is possible.
Movies did that in the 1930s. Apple is doing it now. Which is why Apple is an outlier.
Read Rich Karlgaard's daily blog at http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules or e-mail him at publisher@forbes.com. See Rich Karlgaard’s new TalkBack video series at http://forbes.com/talkback.
More good stuff in the era of hope n change...
Blue State Exodus
Joel Kotkin, 11.03.09, 12:01 AM ESTWhy the middle-class are fleeing for the hills.
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For the past decade a large coterie of pundits, prognosticators and their media camp followers have insisted that growth in America would be concentrated in places hip and cool, largely the bluish regions of the country.
Since the onset of the recession, which has hit many once-thriving Sun Belt hot spots, this chorus has grown bolder. The Wall Street Journal, for example, recently identified the "Next Youth-Magnet Cities" as drawn from the old "hip and cool" collection of yore: Seattle, Portland, Washington, New York and Austin, Texas.
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It's not just the young who will flock to the blue meccas, but money and business as well, according to the narrative. The future, the Atlantic assured its readers, did not belong to the rubes in the suburbs or Sun Belt, but to high-density, high-end places like New York, San Francisco and Boston.
This narrative, which has not changed much over the past decade, is misleading and largely misstated. Net migration, both before and after the Great Recession, according to analysis by the Praxis Strategy Group, has continued to be strongest to the predominately red states of the South and Intermountain West.
This seems true even for those seeking high-end jobs. Between 2006 and 2008, the metropolitan areas that enjoyed the fastest percentage shift toward educated and professional workers and industries included nominally "unhip" places like Indianapolis, Charlotte, N.C., Memphis, Tenn., Salt Lake City, Jacksonville, Fla., Tampa, Fla., and Kansas City, Mo.
The overall migration numbers are even more revealing. As was the case for much of the past decade, the biggest gainers continue to include cities such as San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. Rather than being oases for migrants, some oft-cited magnets such as New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago have all suffered considerable loss of population to other regions over the past year.
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Much the same pattern emerges when you look at longer-term state demographic patterns. A recent survey by the Empire Center for New York State Policy found that the biggest net losers in terms of per capita outmigration between 2000 and 2008 were, with the exception of Louisiana, all blue state bastions. New York residents lead in terms of rate of exodus, closely followed by the District of Columbia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and California.
An even greater shock to the sensibilities of the insular, Manhattan-centric media, the report found that most of the movement from the Empire State was not from the much-dissed suburbia, but from that hip and cool paragon, New York City. This can not be ascribed as a loss of the unwanted: According to the report, those leaving the city had 13% higher incomes than those coming in.
How can this be, when everyone who's smart and hip is headed to the Big Apple? This question was addressed in a report by the center-left, New York-based Center for an Urban Future. True, considerable numbers of young, educated people come to New York, but it turns out that many of them leave for the suburbs or other states as they reach their peak earning years.
Indeed, it's astonishing given the many clear improvements in New York that more residents left the five boroughs for other locales in 2006, the peak of the last boom, than in 1993, when the city was in demonstrably worse shape. In 2006, the city had a net loss of 153,828 residents through domestic out-migration, compared to a decline of 141,047 in 1993, with every borough except Brooklyn experiencing a higher number of out-migrants in 2006.
Dugg on Forbes.com
Timken, United Steel Workers in tentative pact - Forbes.com
America's 40 Most Toxic Cities
Of course, blue state boosters can point out that the exodus has slowed with the recession, as opportunities have dried up elsewhere. True, the flood of migration has slowed across the nation. Yet it has only slowed, not dried up. When the economy revives, it's likely to start flowing heavily again.
More important, the key group leaving New York and other so-called "youth-magnets" comprises the middle class, particularly families, critical to any long-term urban revival. This year's Census shows that the number of single households in New York has reached record levels; in Manhattan, more than half of all households are singles. And the Urban Future report's analysis found that even well-heeled Manhattanites with children tend to leave once they reach the age of 5 or above.
The key factor here may well be economic opportunity. Virtually all the supposedly top-ranked cities cited in this media narrative have suffered below-average job growth throughout the decade. Some, like Portland and New York, have added almost no new jobs; others like San Francisco, Boston and Chicago have actually lost positions over the past decade.
In contrast, even after the current doldrums, San Antonio, Orlando, Houston, Dallas and Phoenix all boast at least 5% more jobs now than a decade ago. Among the large-narrative magnet regions only one--government-bloated greater Washington--has enjoyed strong employment growth.
The impact of job growth on the middle class has been profound. New York City, for example, has the smallest share of middle-income families in the nation, according to a recent Brookings Institution study; its proportion of middle-income neighborhoods was smaller than that of any metropolitan area except Los Angeles.The same pattern has also emerged in what has become widely touted as America's "model city"--President Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago.
The likely reasons behind these troubling trends are things rarely discussed in "the narrative"--concerns like high costs, taxes and regulations making it tough on industries that employ the middle class. One clear culprit: out of control state spending. State spending in New York is second per capita in the nation (anomalous Alaska is first); California stands fourth and New Jersey seventh. Illinois is down the list but coming up fast. Over the past decade, while its population grew by only 7%, Illinois' spending grew by an inflation-adjusted 39%.
The problem here is more than just too-large government; it lies in how states spend their money. Massive public spending increases over the past decade in California, New Jersey, Illinois and New York have gone overwhelmingly into the pockets and pensions of public employees. It certainly has not flowed into such basic infrastructure as roads, bridges and ports that are needed to keep key industries competitive.
The American Association of State Highway Transportation, for example, ranked New York 43rd in the country and New Jersey dead last in terms of quality of roads. Some 46% of the Garden State's roads were rated in poor condition, compared with the national average of 13%, even as the state's spending reached new highs. The typical New Jersey driver spends almost $600 a year in auto repairs necessitated by the poor conditions of the roads.
In contrast, states in the South and parts of the Plains tend to pour their public resources into productive uses. Cities like Mobile, Ala., Houston, Charleston, S.C., and Savannah, Ga., have been investing in port facilities to take advantage of the planned widening of the Panama Canal. The primary goal is to take business away from the increasingly expensive, overregulated and under-invested ports of the Northeast and West Coast. Similarly, places like Kansas City and the Dakotas are looking to boost their basic rail and road networks to support export-heavy industries.
Even in the face of the Obama administration's strongly urban-centric, blue state-oriented economic policy, these generally less than hip places appear poised to grow as the economy recovers. Virtually all the top 10 economies that have withstood the recession come from outside the "youth-magnet" field: San Antonio; Oklahoma City; Little Rock, Ark.; Dallas, Baton Rouge, La.; Tulsa, Okla., Omaha, Neb.; Houston and El Paso, Texas. The one exception to this rule, Austin, also benefits from being located in solvent, generally low-tax Texas.
This continued erosion of jobs and the middle class from the blue states and cities is not inevitable. Many of these places enjoy enormous assets in terms of universities, strategic location, concentrations of talented workers and entrenched high-wage industries. But short of a massive and continuing bailout from Washington, the only way to reverse their decline will be a thorough reformation of their governmental structure and policies. No narrative, no matter how well spun, can make up for that reality.
Joel Kotkin is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is executive editor of newgeography.com and writes the weekly New Geographer column for Forbes. He is working on a study on upward mobility in global cities for the London-based Legatum Institute. His next book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, will be published by Penguin early next year.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Energy Tribune - Scientifically Illiterate and Innumerate: Why Americans Are So Easily Bamboozled About Energy
Energy Tribune - Scientifically Illiterate and Innumerate: Why Americans Are So Easily Bamboozled About Energy
Posted on Aug. 21, 2009
By Robert Bryce
Scientifically Illiterate and Innumerate: Why Americans Are So Easily Bamboozled About Energy
Two years ago, I interviewed Vaclav Smil, the prolific author and energy thinker. I asked Smil, a distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba, why Americans are so easily swayed by politicians and others when it comes to energy matters. His response: scientific illiteracy and innumeracy. “Without any physical, chemical, and biological fundamentals, and with equally poor understanding of basic economic forces, it is no wonder that people will believe anything,” he told me.
Finding evidence to support Smil’s claim is all too easy. A 2007 study by Michigan State University determined that just 28 percent of American adults could be considered scientifically literate. In February, the California Academy of Sciences released the findings of a survey which found that most Americans couldn’t pass a basic scientific literacy test. The findings:
* Just 53% of adults knew how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
* Just 59% knew that the earliest humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.
* Only 47% of adults could provide a rough estimate of the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water. (The Academy decided that the correct answer range for this question was anything between 65% and 75%.)
* A mere 21% were able to answer those three questions correctly.
In July, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released the results of a survey of 2,001 adult Americans regarding science issues. Among the findings: just 46% knew that electrons are smaller than atoms.
Those findings shouldn’t be surprising. Ignorance of the sciences and the natural world has plagued the world for centuries. This centuries-long suspicion of science, which continues today with regular attacks on Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, was recognized by British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow in the 1950s when he delivered a famous lecture called “The Two Cultures.” Snow argued that there was a growing disconnect between the culture of the sciences and the culture of the humanities, and that bridging that gap in understanding was critical to understanding and addressing the world’s problems. Snow placed “Literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists…Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” Snow then laid out a critical point about the general public’s lack of understanding of energy and thermodynamics. As Snow put it:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
Indeed, while most moderately cultured people will be familiar with the Bard’s A Comedy of Errors or The Merchant of Venice, the laws of thermodynamics -- the rules that ruthlessly police the world of energy -- are considered by most people to be the domain of nerds and wonks. Thus, the first law of thermodynamics: energy is neither created nor destroyed; and the second law: energy tends to become more random and less available -- are relegated to the realm of too much information. For most people, basic physics is seen as nerdy, beyond their ken, too troublesome to learn.
This apathy – or perhaps it’s antipathy -- towards science makes it laughably easy for the public to be deceived. Alas, this apathy toward science in America is matched – or perhaps even exceeded – by the lack of interest in mathematics. Over the past few years, the US has been inundated with depressing data about the state of our country’s mathematical skills. A 2008 study published by the American Mathematical Society put it bluntly: “it is deemed uncool within the social context of USA middle and high schools to do mathematics.” It went on to explain that “Very few USA high schools teach the advanced mathematical skills, such as writing rigorous essay-style proofs, needed to excel.” Another report issued in 2008, this one from the Department of Education’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel declared that math education in the U.S. “is broken and must be fixed.” The report found “that 27% of eighth-graders could not correctly shade 1/3 of a rectangle and 45% could not solve a word problem that required dividing fractions.” The report also found poor math skills among adults:
* 78% of adults could not explain how to compute the interest paid on a loan.
* 71% couldn’t calculate miles per gallon on a trip.
* 58% were unable to calculate a 10% tip for a lunch bill.
Given these disheartening numbers, there’s little reason to be surprised that so many Americans are ready to embrace fallacious claims by the many energy charlatans who insist that the US could quit using hydrocarbons if only there were more political will to do so. Those claims ignore the vast scale of US energy consumption. On an average day, the US consumes about 41 million barrels of oil equivalent in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal. That’s nearly five times as much energy as is produced by Saudi Arabia in the form of oil on an average day. (Since 1973 the Saudis have pumped an average of about 8.3 million barrels per day).
It has taken the US more than a century to build a $14 trillion economy – an economy that is based almost entirely on abundant supplies of oil, coal, and natural gas. No matter what energy technologies come along in the near future – electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, etc. -- moving the US and world economies away from hydrocarbons will take most of the 21st century.
That’s the reality – and it doesn’t take a calculator to confirm it.
Posted on Aug. 21, 2009
By Robert Bryce
Scientifically Illiterate and Innumerate: Why Americans Are So Easily Bamboozled About Energy
Two years ago, I interviewed Vaclav Smil, the prolific author and energy thinker. I asked Smil, a distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba, why Americans are so easily swayed by politicians and others when it comes to energy matters. His response: scientific illiteracy and innumeracy. “Without any physical, chemical, and biological fundamentals, and with equally poor understanding of basic economic forces, it is no wonder that people will believe anything,” he told me.
Finding evidence to support Smil’s claim is all too easy. A 2007 study by Michigan State University determined that just 28 percent of American adults could be considered scientifically literate. In February, the California Academy of Sciences released the findings of a survey which found that most Americans couldn’t pass a basic scientific literacy test. The findings:
* Just 53% of adults knew how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
* Just 59% knew that the earliest humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.
* Only 47% of adults could provide a rough estimate of the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water. (The Academy decided that the correct answer range for this question was anything between 65% and 75%.)
* A mere 21% were able to answer those three questions correctly.
In July, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released the results of a survey of 2,001 adult Americans regarding science issues. Among the findings: just 46% knew that electrons are smaller than atoms.
Those findings shouldn’t be surprising. Ignorance of the sciences and the natural world has plagued the world for centuries. This centuries-long suspicion of science, which continues today with regular attacks on Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, was recognized by British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow in the 1950s when he delivered a famous lecture called “The Two Cultures.” Snow argued that there was a growing disconnect between the culture of the sciences and the culture of the humanities, and that bridging that gap in understanding was critical to understanding and addressing the world’s problems. Snow placed “Literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists…Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” Snow then laid out a critical point about the general public’s lack of understanding of energy and thermodynamics. As Snow put it:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
Indeed, while most moderately cultured people will be familiar with the Bard’s A Comedy of Errors or The Merchant of Venice, the laws of thermodynamics -- the rules that ruthlessly police the world of energy -- are considered by most people to be the domain of nerds and wonks. Thus, the first law of thermodynamics: energy is neither created nor destroyed; and the second law: energy tends to become more random and less available -- are relegated to the realm of too much information. For most people, basic physics is seen as nerdy, beyond their ken, too troublesome to learn.
This apathy – or perhaps it’s antipathy -- towards science makes it laughably easy for the public to be deceived. Alas, this apathy toward science in America is matched – or perhaps even exceeded – by the lack of interest in mathematics. Over the past few years, the US has been inundated with depressing data about the state of our country’s mathematical skills. A 2008 study published by the American Mathematical Society put it bluntly: “it is deemed uncool within the social context of USA middle and high schools to do mathematics.” It went on to explain that “Very few USA high schools teach the advanced mathematical skills, such as writing rigorous essay-style proofs, needed to excel.” Another report issued in 2008, this one from the Department of Education’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel declared that math education in the U.S. “is broken and must be fixed.” The report found “that 27% of eighth-graders could not correctly shade 1/3 of a rectangle and 45% could not solve a word problem that required dividing fractions.” The report also found poor math skills among adults:
* 78% of adults could not explain how to compute the interest paid on a loan.
* 71% couldn’t calculate miles per gallon on a trip.
* 58% were unable to calculate a 10% tip for a lunch bill.
Given these disheartening numbers, there’s little reason to be surprised that so many Americans are ready to embrace fallacious claims by the many energy charlatans who insist that the US could quit using hydrocarbons if only there were more political will to do so. Those claims ignore the vast scale of US energy consumption. On an average day, the US consumes about 41 million barrels of oil equivalent in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal. That’s nearly five times as much energy as is produced by Saudi Arabia in the form of oil on an average day. (Since 1973 the Saudis have pumped an average of about 8.3 million barrels per day).
It has taken the US more than a century to build a $14 trillion economy – an economy that is based almost entirely on abundant supplies of oil, coal, and natural gas. No matter what energy technologies come along in the near future – electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, etc. -- moving the US and world economies away from hydrocarbons will take most of the 21st century.
That’s the reality – and it doesn’t take a calculator to confirm it.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Want To Curb Market Speculation? - Forbes.com
Want To Curb Market Speculation? - Forbes.comPolitical Economy
Want To Curb Market Speculation?
John Tamny, 08.24.09, 12:01 AM ET
Want To Curb Market Speculation?
John Tamny, 08.24.09, 12:01 AM ET
Back in 2002 and in the aftermath of the Enron and Worldcom implosions, former Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., and former Rep. Mike Oxley, R-Ohio, created the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, meant to curb allegedly funny accounting and business practices. As President George W. Bush asserted in signing the bill, "There will not be a different ethical standard for corporate America than the standard that applies to everyone else."
Nice political theater for sure, but then reality set in.
Fast-forward four years, and the joke was on politicians naïve enough to believe that corporations with aspirations of going public would lie prostrate before tough new accounting rules. Most--to the extent that they did go public--just floated their shares overseas.
Indeed, as Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg observed in a 2006 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, "In 2005, only one out of the top 24 IPOs was registered in the U.S., and four were registered in London." In particular, they cited "auditing expenses for companies doing business in the U.S. [that] have grown far beyond anything Congress had anticipated," along with "a worrisome trend of corporate leaders focusing inordinate time on compliance minutiae rather than innovative strategies for growth, for fear of facing personal financial penalties from overzealous regulators."
So while the political class was eager to turn company CEOs into accountants rather than innovators, public-company heads had different ideas. Not excited by the idea of suffering under overdone legislation made in politicized haste, they simply went public on non-U.S. exchanges.
What Washington misunderstood back in 2002 was that finance is very much global, with the dollar the world’s currency. Two-thirds of all dollars are presently overseas, so if restraints are put on stateside investment--and those invested stateside--overseas markets are more than willing to take business that politicians and bureaucrats drive away with excessive rules.
This is important now when we consider the growing desire in Washington to impose curbs on commodity speculation, short-selling, high-frequency trading, derivatives and executive pay. While some of us might see the appeal of greater oversight in certain areas, new regulations will do little to change what we don’t like, while driving a great deal of business overseas.
Commodities have been both rising and volatile much of this decade, thanks to a weak and unstable dollar. With commodities priced in dollars, the greenback’s weakness and undefined nature has made commodity prices expensive and a moving target in terms of price.
Seeking to shift attention away from its unwillingness to follow its constitutional mandate when it comes to issuing a stable dollar, Congress has empowered regulators to enact curbs on commodities "speculators," as though the latter somehow control the prices of gold, oil, copper and natural gas (to name a few). This act will no doubt please some of the voters back home, but it will be toothless when it comes to making commodities cheaper and less volatile.
If U.S. regulations succeed in inhibiting commodity speculation on U.S. exchanges, the trades will simply move elsewhere. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, the U.S. Natural Gas Fund, a $4.5 billion exchange-traded fund, "is considering moving to offshore energy exchanges or further into unpoliced over-the-counter swaps markets to avoid Commodity Futures Trading Commission rules that would limit the size of its natural-gas positions." In short, foreign and unregulated exchanges will gladly take the trades regulators seek to drive away.
Short-sellers have similarly garnered a lot of criticism in a difficult two years for stocks. Despite the fact that short-sellers put a floor under bear markets for closing short positions when stocks decline, certain politicians, regulators and company CEOs want their activities banned to varying degrees. Even if we ignore how unfortunate the banning of short-sellers would be for the markets that need to be efficiently priced, we shouldn’t worry too much. Once again, foreign exchanges will gladly bring rationality to prices where U.S. exchanges will not.
High-frequency trading has also attracted a lot of attention. The biggest investors are able to complete purchases and sales of shares ahead of the small investor, so critics say. It is, however, rarely mentioned that large institutions frequently invest the funds of the little guy, but whatever the origin of their funds, this is much ado about nothing. Assuming politicians succeed in taxing away a trading technique that makes markets more efficient, the trades, according to former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, will simply move "to foreign markets."
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has made a lot of noise about restricting derivatives trading, not to mention Wall Street’s compensation structure. But Geithner’s efforts will prove as wanting as others meant to blunt natural market forces. Indeed, Wall Street is no longer a location as much as a worldwide symbol of finance. Attempts to rein in trading or compensation only mean esoteric transactions will move to foreign markets, while workers in the financial space will shift their skills to firms, in the U.S. and elsewhere, not regulated by Treasury.
What all of this means is that a dollar in New York is the same as a dollar in London or Shanghai. So while regulators and politicians may have designs to regulate and legislate away what they don’t like, the fungible nature of finance means their efforts will always amount to nothing. At best, these vain efforts to restrain market forces will backfire, given the certainty that others uninhibited by Washington will gladly do what we’re not allowed to do.
John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, a senior economist with H.C. Wainwright Economics and a senior economic adviser to Toreador Research and Trading. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Watch it Sucka!!!
May 20, 2009
Revolution
By Herbert E. Meyer
During the last 30 years we Americans have been so politically divided that some of us have called this left-right, liberal-conservative split a "culture war" or even a "second Civil War." These descriptions are no longer accurate. The precise, technical word for what is happening in the United States today is revolution.
Because of our country's history, we tend to think of revolutions as military conflicts, and of the revolutionaries as the good guys; the image of Minutemen fighting valiantly against the British forces at Lexington and Concord lies deep within our DNA. But sometimes -- quite often, actually -- revolutions aren't military conflicts, and the good guys are the ones trying to keep the revolution from happening. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by its elected president; he would spend the next two years consolidating his power with the legislative connivance of his political allies in the Reichstag. In October 1917, Lenin and his Bolsheviks took control of Russia from Kerensky and his Social Democrats -- who had overthrown the Czar earlier that year -- entirely through parliamentary maneuvering in Russia's fledgling Duma.
What defines a revolution -- and this is the crucial point to grasp -- is that when it's over a country has changed not merely its leaders and its laws, but its operating system.
Since most of us think of computers when we hear the phrase "operating system" let me use this analogy to illuminate my point: Every computer has an operating system, and most of us are using either the Microsoft or the Apple operating system. If you want to do something with your computer -- send an email, watch a DVD, read an online essay like this one -- you must do it the way your computer's operating system is designed to work.
No operating system is perfect, which is why Microsoft and Apple send updates to their customers from time to time. And every so often these companies launch new versions of their operating systems that incorporate a lot of modifications at once. Can you change the operating system you use? Of course you can. Two years ago I threw out every Microsoft-based machine in our company's office and replaced them with Apple products. Last month I met a corporate CEO who had just done the opposite, and replaced the Apple computers in his office with ones that run on the Microsoft operating system.
Democracies and Dictatorships
Now, just as computers have operating systems so too do countries. In fact, countries have dual operating systems - one political and the other economic. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of each: Politically you can be a democracy or a dictatorship, and economically you can have either a free market or a command economy. Because countries don't buy their operating systems off the shelf, the way we buy our computer operating systems, each country develops its own versions. This is why our country's democracy is somewhat different from Canada's, which in turn is slightly different from Australia's, and so forth. These countries all have free-market economies, but again they aren't quite the same. Still, the similarities among democracies and free-market economies are more striking than the differences. Likewise, while no two dictatorships are the same, and no two command economies work in exactly the same way, the differences among them are comparatively trivial.
Since no country's operating systems are perfect, can they be improved? Of course they can. Every time our Congress passes a new law, or enacts a new regulation -- or whenever the Supreme Court issues an opinion -- that's the equivalent of an update to our political or economic operating system. Can you change a country's operating system? Yes, you can. And the precise, technical word for replacing one political or economic operating system with another is -- revolution.
When politics in a democracy is normal, the political parties all agree to preserve the operating system while they compete to improve it. This is what is actually happening when one party in Congress introduces a new piece of healthcare or education legislation and the other party opposes it or introduces its own healthcare or education bill, or when two candidates for the Senate argue over whether or not to change our immigration laws. Honorable people often will disagree about what to do -- sometimes quite strongly, just as the software engineers at Microsoft and Apple will sometimes argue through the night about whether a proposed change in the operating system's code is an improvement or just "kludge." But in normal politics the outer limits of all these disagreements are marked by a shared commitment to preserving and improving the operating system.
In abnormal politics, the objective of one party isn't to improve the operating system, but to overthrow it.
With this analogy in mind, now we can see clearly what's been happening in the United States during the last three decades. While conservatives have been working to improve our democracy and our free-market economy, liberals have been working to replace our democracy with a dictatorship, and our free-market economy with a command economy controlled by the government. The liberals couldn't say this aloud, because if they did the American people would have tossed them out of office on their ears. So the liberals worked covertly, feigning support for democracy and for the free market while working diligently to undermine both.
This is why our politics has been so partisan, so vicious, and so deadlocked. This is why words have lost their meaning in Washington, why we can never get to the bottom of anything, why we lurch from one manufactured scandal to another. It's all been part of a decades-long effort by the liberals to throw sand in our eyes -- to keep us from seeing clearly where they really want to take us. (And this explains why, when we question their judgment on some issue, they go berserk and accuse us of questioning their patriotism. They're afraid we're on the verge of catching on. If you want to have some fun, the next time you're chatting with a liberal and he goes nuts when you call him a socialist, say to him: "I'm so sorry you're offended. Please tell me, what is there about socialism you don't like?" You won't get a coherent answer; he'll just accuse you of a hate crime.)
Obama's Two-Front Offensive
With the election of Barack Obama as president, the liberals have launched a massive, two-front offensive they believe will end in victory. They have judged that our public education system is so degraded that only a few Americans are left who even understand what a democracy is, and how the free market actually works. They are convinced that the majority of Americans are too frightened by the current recession to care about preserving the principles that made us the most powerful, productive and innovative country the world has ever known. In short, the liberals are reaching for victory because they believe that history now is on their side.
The speed of their offensive is breathtaking.
At the core of democracy is the rule of law, and we have already lost it. The liberals lecture us incessantly that everything is "relative," but that's not true; some things are absolutes. You cannot claim to be faithful to your spouse because you never cheat on her -- except when you're in London on business. And you cannot claim to have the rule of law if the government can set aside the rule of law when it decides that "special circumstances" have arisen that warrant illegality. When the President and his aides handed ownership of Chrysler Corp. to the United Auto Workers union, they tried to avoid sending that beleaguered company into bankruptcy by muscling its bondholders into accepting less money for their assets than the law entitled them to collect. These contracts, and the law under which they were signed, were mere obstacles to a thuggish President bent on paying off his political supporters.
It's going to get much worse, fast. President Obama has told us time and again that among his criteria for choosing Federal judges will be "empathy." Empathy is a wonderful quality in any human being, but a judge's job is to rule according to the law. Once our courts are presided over by judges who will reach verdicts based on how they feel about an issue -- such as abortion or the right of citizens to bear arms -- the law will be whatever the judges wish it to be; the rule of law will become an empty phrase rather than the architecture of our civilization.
We have lost our free-market economy as quickly as we have lost the rule of law. Money is to an economy what blood is to a body; life and death resides within the organ that controls its flow. The government already owns our country's leading banks, which means the government now controls our economy. (And in all fairness to President Obama, it was the Bush administration that started us down this ghastly road.) One indicator of the Obama administration's real objective: When some banks that had taken federal money attempted to repay their loans, the Treasury Department refused to accept repayment and step aside. This shows the government's goal isn't to prop up the banks, but rather to control them.
Here, too, things are going to get much worse, fast. The government now owns General Motors Corp., is reaching for control of insurance companies, and has launched plans to take over our country's healthcare industry. It even wants authority to set the salaries of executives in industries that, at least for now, aren't being subsidized or underwritten by the government.
Put all this together, and what we have in our country today isn't a democracy and it isn't a free-market economy. Reader, what we have now is a revolution.
This revolution won't be stopped, and our country won't be rescued, by the Republicans in Washington. This isn't because they lack the votes. It's because most of them are careerist hacks who've been playing footsie with the Democrats for too long; with very few exceptions they lack the intellectual firepower to articulate the present danger, and the political courage to stand up to this Administration and really fight. But for the absence of frock coats and pince-nez glasses, these Republicans in Washington remind me of those bumbling Weimar Republic politicians in Berlin who never grasped where Hitler and the Nazis were going until it was too late to stop them, or of those hapless Mensheviks in Moscow's Duma who let themselves be tossed into history's dustbin by Lenin and his Bolsheviks. (Yes, of course I realize it's explosive to keep bringing up the Nazis and the Bolsheviks in an essay about the Democrats. I'm not doing this to be incendiary; I'm doing this to be accurate.)
The Future's in Our Hands
Our country's future now lies within our own hands -- yours, mine, all of us who comprise what the Washington insiders sneeringly call the grass roots. Good, because unless I'm very much mistaken the liberals have over-estimated their strength. There still are more of us than there are of them. I mean ordinary, decent Americans from across the political spectrum who may disagree about specific issues, but who understand who we are and how we became who we are; who love our country, have a genius for self-organizing, and won't let the United States go down without a fight.
We need to launch a counter-offensive, so to speak, and the place to start is at the local level. Working with our county and state political parties when we can -- or working around them when we must -- our objective will be to elect as many people as we can to public office who understand what a democracy is and how the free market works. This will include city council members, county commissioners, school board members, judges, sheriffs and even members of the local parks commission. With the strength and political momentum their elections will provide, we can surge to the state level and then -- before it's too late -- take back the power in Washington DC.
I know this isn't the kind of battle most of us want to fight; we would rather watch the talking heads slug it out on Fox News than stand on a street corner handing out campaign flyers. And given our country's history, for a while it will be uncomfortable to find ourselves fighting against the revolution and for the status quo. But we'll get used to this as we make our case over and over again -- to our friends, our neighbors, at barbeques and PTA meetings and at public rallies like those marvelous April tea parties that drove the liberals insane. And we'll draw strength as our ranks swell with new recruits.
The alternative to launching this kind of peaceful and political counter-attack is horrific. Right now sales of guns and ammunition are rising sharply. This reflects an intuitive grasp by grass-roots Americans of what history teaches may lie ahead. It was only after the Nazis had secured their grip on power in Germany, and only after the Bolsheviks had seized control of Russia, that they set out to disarm and destroy the vast numbers of ordinary citizens who - to the astonishment and fury of the revolutionaries -- just wouldn't go along.
That's when the real shooting started, and when blood began flowing in the streets.
Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. He holds the U.S. National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, which is the Intelligence Community's highest honor. He is author of The Cure for Poverty and How to
About Us | Contact © American Thinker 2009
Revolution
By Herbert E. Meyer
During the last 30 years we Americans have been so politically divided that some of us have called this left-right, liberal-conservative split a "culture war" or even a "second Civil War." These descriptions are no longer accurate. The precise, technical word for what is happening in the United States today is revolution.
Because of our country's history, we tend to think of revolutions as military conflicts, and of the revolutionaries as the good guys; the image of Minutemen fighting valiantly against the British forces at Lexington and Concord lies deep within our DNA. But sometimes -- quite often, actually -- revolutions aren't military conflicts, and the good guys are the ones trying to keep the revolution from happening. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by its elected president; he would spend the next two years consolidating his power with the legislative connivance of his political allies in the Reichstag. In October 1917, Lenin and his Bolsheviks took control of Russia from Kerensky and his Social Democrats -- who had overthrown the Czar earlier that year -- entirely through parliamentary maneuvering in Russia's fledgling Duma.
What defines a revolution -- and this is the crucial point to grasp -- is that when it's over a country has changed not merely its leaders and its laws, but its operating system.
Since most of us think of computers when we hear the phrase "operating system" let me use this analogy to illuminate my point: Every computer has an operating system, and most of us are using either the Microsoft or the Apple operating system. If you want to do something with your computer -- send an email, watch a DVD, read an online essay like this one -- you must do it the way your computer's operating system is designed to work.
No operating system is perfect, which is why Microsoft and Apple send updates to their customers from time to time. And every so often these companies launch new versions of their operating systems that incorporate a lot of modifications at once. Can you change the operating system you use? Of course you can. Two years ago I threw out every Microsoft-based machine in our company's office and replaced them with Apple products. Last month I met a corporate CEO who had just done the opposite, and replaced the Apple computers in his office with ones that run on the Microsoft operating system.
Democracies and Dictatorships
Now, just as computers have operating systems so too do countries. In fact, countries have dual operating systems - one political and the other economic. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of each: Politically you can be a democracy or a dictatorship, and economically you can have either a free market or a command economy. Because countries don't buy their operating systems off the shelf, the way we buy our computer operating systems, each country develops its own versions. This is why our country's democracy is somewhat different from Canada's, which in turn is slightly different from Australia's, and so forth. These countries all have free-market economies, but again they aren't quite the same. Still, the similarities among democracies and free-market economies are more striking than the differences. Likewise, while no two dictatorships are the same, and no two command economies work in exactly the same way, the differences among them are comparatively trivial.
Since no country's operating systems are perfect, can they be improved? Of course they can. Every time our Congress passes a new law, or enacts a new regulation -- or whenever the Supreme Court issues an opinion -- that's the equivalent of an update to our political or economic operating system. Can you change a country's operating system? Yes, you can. And the precise, technical word for replacing one political or economic operating system with another is -- revolution.
When politics in a democracy is normal, the political parties all agree to preserve the operating system while they compete to improve it. This is what is actually happening when one party in Congress introduces a new piece of healthcare or education legislation and the other party opposes it or introduces its own healthcare or education bill, or when two candidates for the Senate argue over whether or not to change our immigration laws. Honorable people often will disagree about what to do -- sometimes quite strongly, just as the software engineers at Microsoft and Apple will sometimes argue through the night about whether a proposed change in the operating system's code is an improvement or just "kludge." But in normal politics the outer limits of all these disagreements are marked by a shared commitment to preserving and improving the operating system.
In abnormal politics, the objective of one party isn't to improve the operating system, but to overthrow it.
With this analogy in mind, now we can see clearly what's been happening in the United States during the last three decades. While conservatives have been working to improve our democracy and our free-market economy, liberals have been working to replace our democracy with a dictatorship, and our free-market economy with a command economy controlled by the government. The liberals couldn't say this aloud, because if they did the American people would have tossed them out of office on their ears. So the liberals worked covertly, feigning support for democracy and for the free market while working diligently to undermine both.
This is why our politics has been so partisan, so vicious, and so deadlocked. This is why words have lost their meaning in Washington, why we can never get to the bottom of anything, why we lurch from one manufactured scandal to another. It's all been part of a decades-long effort by the liberals to throw sand in our eyes -- to keep us from seeing clearly where they really want to take us. (And this explains why, when we question their judgment on some issue, they go berserk and accuse us of questioning their patriotism. They're afraid we're on the verge of catching on. If you want to have some fun, the next time you're chatting with a liberal and he goes nuts when you call him a socialist, say to him: "I'm so sorry you're offended. Please tell me, what is there about socialism you don't like?" You won't get a coherent answer; he'll just accuse you of a hate crime.)
Obama's Two-Front Offensive
With the election of Barack Obama as president, the liberals have launched a massive, two-front offensive they believe will end in victory. They have judged that our public education system is so degraded that only a few Americans are left who even understand what a democracy is, and how the free market actually works. They are convinced that the majority of Americans are too frightened by the current recession to care about preserving the principles that made us the most powerful, productive and innovative country the world has ever known. In short, the liberals are reaching for victory because they believe that history now is on their side.
The speed of their offensive is breathtaking.
At the core of democracy is the rule of law, and we have already lost it. The liberals lecture us incessantly that everything is "relative," but that's not true; some things are absolutes. You cannot claim to be faithful to your spouse because you never cheat on her -- except when you're in London on business. And you cannot claim to have the rule of law if the government can set aside the rule of law when it decides that "special circumstances" have arisen that warrant illegality. When the President and his aides handed ownership of Chrysler Corp. to the United Auto Workers union, they tried to avoid sending that beleaguered company into bankruptcy by muscling its bondholders into accepting less money for their assets than the law entitled them to collect. These contracts, and the law under which they were signed, were mere obstacles to a thuggish President bent on paying off his political supporters.
It's going to get much worse, fast. President Obama has told us time and again that among his criteria for choosing Federal judges will be "empathy." Empathy is a wonderful quality in any human being, but a judge's job is to rule according to the law. Once our courts are presided over by judges who will reach verdicts based on how they feel about an issue -- such as abortion or the right of citizens to bear arms -- the law will be whatever the judges wish it to be; the rule of law will become an empty phrase rather than the architecture of our civilization.
We have lost our free-market economy as quickly as we have lost the rule of law. Money is to an economy what blood is to a body; life and death resides within the organ that controls its flow. The government already owns our country's leading banks, which means the government now controls our economy. (And in all fairness to President Obama, it was the Bush administration that started us down this ghastly road.) One indicator of the Obama administration's real objective: When some banks that had taken federal money attempted to repay their loans, the Treasury Department refused to accept repayment and step aside. This shows the government's goal isn't to prop up the banks, but rather to control them.
Here, too, things are going to get much worse, fast. The government now owns General Motors Corp., is reaching for control of insurance companies, and has launched plans to take over our country's healthcare industry. It even wants authority to set the salaries of executives in industries that, at least for now, aren't being subsidized or underwritten by the government.
Put all this together, and what we have in our country today isn't a democracy and it isn't a free-market economy. Reader, what we have now is a revolution.
This revolution won't be stopped, and our country won't be rescued, by the Republicans in Washington. This isn't because they lack the votes. It's because most of them are careerist hacks who've been playing footsie with the Democrats for too long; with very few exceptions they lack the intellectual firepower to articulate the present danger, and the political courage to stand up to this Administration and really fight. But for the absence of frock coats and pince-nez glasses, these Republicans in Washington remind me of those bumbling Weimar Republic politicians in Berlin who never grasped where Hitler and the Nazis were going until it was too late to stop them, or of those hapless Mensheviks in Moscow's Duma who let themselves be tossed into history's dustbin by Lenin and his Bolsheviks. (Yes, of course I realize it's explosive to keep bringing up the Nazis and the Bolsheviks in an essay about the Democrats. I'm not doing this to be incendiary; I'm doing this to be accurate.)
The Future's in Our Hands
Our country's future now lies within our own hands -- yours, mine, all of us who comprise what the Washington insiders sneeringly call the grass roots. Good, because unless I'm very much mistaken the liberals have over-estimated their strength. There still are more of us than there are of them. I mean ordinary, decent Americans from across the political spectrum who may disagree about specific issues, but who understand who we are and how we became who we are; who love our country, have a genius for self-organizing, and won't let the United States go down without a fight.
We need to launch a counter-offensive, so to speak, and the place to start is at the local level. Working with our county and state political parties when we can -- or working around them when we must -- our objective will be to elect as many people as we can to public office who understand what a democracy is and how the free market works. This will include city council members, county commissioners, school board members, judges, sheriffs and even members of the local parks commission. With the strength and political momentum their elections will provide, we can surge to the state level and then -- before it's too late -- take back the power in Washington DC.
I know this isn't the kind of battle most of us want to fight; we would rather watch the talking heads slug it out on Fox News than stand on a street corner handing out campaign flyers. And given our country's history, for a while it will be uncomfortable to find ourselves fighting against the revolution and for the status quo. But we'll get used to this as we make our case over and over again -- to our friends, our neighbors, at barbeques and PTA meetings and at public rallies like those marvelous April tea parties that drove the liberals insane. And we'll draw strength as our ranks swell with new recruits.
The alternative to launching this kind of peaceful and political counter-attack is horrific. Right now sales of guns and ammunition are rising sharply. This reflects an intuitive grasp by grass-roots Americans of what history teaches may lie ahead. It was only after the Nazis had secured their grip on power in Germany, and only after the Bolsheviks had seized control of Russia, that they set out to disarm and destroy the vast numbers of ordinary citizens who - to the astonishment and fury of the revolutionaries -- just wouldn't go along.
That's when the real shooting started, and when blood began flowing in the streets.
Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. He holds the U.S. National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, which is the Intelligence Community's highest honor. He is author of The Cure for Poverty and How to
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I think it's great. If there's a silver lining to all the yankees moving south, it's that it turned North Carolina and Florida blue in 2008. The Republicans are in serious trouble in national elect....
