Unionized teachers outnumber other government workers and run the schools in every state; why do we keep on accepting their decades of miserable results?
A careless airline pilot, a lazy waitress, a crash-prone cabdriver, an unproductive salesman, an innumerate cashier will all have to find other work; poor teachers keep teaching and receiving raises as years go by and kids don't learn. Of course; they, with their unions, run the show.
Adam Smith prophesied when he wrote The Wealth of Nations, saying of professors in 1776:
If the authority to which he is subject resides in the body corporate, the college, or university, of which he himself is a member, and in which the greater part of the other members are, like himself, persons who either are, or ought to be, teachers; they are likely to make a common cause, to be all very indulgent to one another, and every man to consent that his neighbor may neglect his duty, provided he himself is allowed to neglect his own.
Professor Smith didn't have to see teachers' unions to comprehend featherbedding.
Public schools are administered as though all teachers were similarly productive, an approach heavily reinforced by the unions. Evaluations of teachers have uniformly avoided including their students' test results; investigations suggest why.
The author's study of Federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) proficiency test data for 2009-2010 showed clearly that teachers aren't uniformly effective. The study included 1019 teachers in the Albuquerque Public Schools district, New Mexico. The three elementary schools listed below reported the highest, the median and the lowest percentages of students who tested proficient.
NCLB Percentages of Students Tested Proficient in Reading and Math by Teacher
Teacher No. At Top School At Median School At Bottom School
1 96% 61% 25%
2 97 62 44
3 100 43 43
4 83 68 23
5 94 46 31
6 92 60 47
7 96 47 30
8 91 73 19
9 77 66 23
10 0
Teachers were listed alphabetically by names, not by results. The maximum differences between teachers were 23 percentage points at the top school, 30 points at the median and 47 points at the bottom school. Teachers with good results were closer together than those with worse results; the differences remain materially significant in all three cases. Such differences between teachers and between schools seem to demand -- but have not received -- public investigation.
These findings were heavily reinforced by data reported by a similar Los Angeles Times study reported in August, 2010 in an article headed: Who's teaching L.A.'s kids?
The Times described its analysis as a look at data largely ignored by L.A. schools, data showing which educators help students learn and which hold them back. The analysis used 7 years of math and English test scores from more than 6,000 3rd through 5th grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. What the Times found can be summed up in its own words:
The fifth-graders at Broadous Elementary School come from the same world -- the poorest corner of the San Fernando Valley, a Pacoima neighborhood framed by two freeways where some have lost friends to the stray bullet of rival gangs. Many are the sons and daughters of Latino immigrants who never finished high school, hard-working parents who keep a respectful distance and trust educators to do what's best.
The students study the same lessons. They are often on the same chapter of the same book. Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the other down the hall. The difference has almost nothing to do with the size of the class, the students or their parents. It's the teachers.
With Miguel Aguilar, students have consistently made striking gains on state standardized tests, many of them vaulting from the bottom third of students in Los Angeles schools to well above average...John Smith's pupils next door have started out slightly ahead of Aguilar's but by the end of the year have been far behind.
In Los Angeles and across the country, education officials have long known of the often huge disparities among teachers. They've seen the indelible effects, for good or ill, on children. But rather than analyze and address these disparities, they have opted mostly to ignore them.
A few years ago, New Mexico installed a three-tier teachers' pay scale intended to improve teaching; additional education and training brought higher pay. An attempt to add student test results was quashed during a full-court press from the teachers' union. In 2006 and 2009 when nobody could produce data to correlate the teachers' higher pay with their results, the state's legislature recommended using student tests but again, as the Albuquerque Journal recently editorialized regretfully, that hasn't been done. The teachers getting merit pay can show more seniority but they can't show changes in their students' performances.
The Times, the Journal and the data are clear: There is one controlling reason the schools are as dismal as we see; the reason stated in Adam Smith's 1776 prediction: It's the teachers. There's additional responsibility in the politicians who fund the status quo with tax dollars because they receive services and cash from teachers' unions; they're enablers.
Teacher performance isn't all; administrators fall in here too. To complete the picture for any doubters, add Project Follow Through, a Congressionally-ordered (1967), nearly billion-dollar comparative evaluation of both progressive and old-style education methods in 120 communities involving 10 thousand elementary students for eight years. The study showed that the old-style teaching programs beat progressive education methods unequivocally in teaching the chosen subjects to children. Nevertheless at the requests of administrators, politicians have subsequently ignored the data to fund the less effective (but more expensive) progressive programs and assure the abandonment of the older -- and proven -- methods. Clearly, the efficient and effective education of children has not been the primary goal of U.S. educators at any level.
That makes sense; as Adam Smith also said:
In every profession, the exertion of the greater part of those who exercise it, is always in proportion to the necessity they are under of making that exertion.
The Times and the Albuquerque study found some outstanding teachers who push themselves -- but they're a minority and not in charge. In every state, teachers have the largest government unions; no one else is allowed to run public education. They have to accept responsibility.
If holding this mirror up to the public schools is troubling, take a good look; since it's certainly not the kids, there's only one presence to reflect. It's the teachers.
Friday, February 18, 2011
American Thinker: It's the Teachers, Stupid!
Think about what is going on in Wisconsin, as you read this...American Thinker: It's the Teachers, Stupid!
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Gotta love the old rust belt...
Dozens of U.S. Cities Lose Half Their Population In A Generation: A Record Last Set During The European Plague
By Richard A. McCormack
richard@manufacturingnews.com
Dozens of American cities throughout the industrial Great Lakes states and Midwest have lost half of their populations over the course of one generation -- places like Cleveland, Youngstown, Detroit, Warren, Buffalo and Flint. This is the first time that so many cities have lost half of their populations in such a short amount of time since the Plague struck Europe in 1348, according to Hunter Morrison, director of Youngstown State University's Office of Planning and Partnerships.
Morrison, former director of the Cleveland City Planning Department for 20 years, has studied the health of global cities over the centuries. He has looked for similar trends worldwide in which such a large number of cities have fallen into despair. He studied what happened in Great Britain when deindustrialization struck places like Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham, Sheffield and Belfast. He looked at what happened when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and tens of millions of people were expected to abandon dilapidated Eastern European cities.
None of those regions experienced what the U.S. Midwest has experienced because other countries understood how vital it was for their cities to remain healthy. They committed themselves and the resources required to keep their old cities vibrant.
No such attitude or policy prevailed in the United States.
In the Great Lakes region, each city and town felt that it was on its own facing its own unique dilemma -- that it was engaged in its own battle for survival -- as well they were, since the cities are not linked in a large megalopolis as they are on the East Coast.
"We all look at these places as separate places and what we are learning now is that it is like being in a family with alcohol or drug dependency," says Morrison. "When you go into intervention and recovery one of the first things you discover is that there are lot of other people who are dealing with the same thing."
That realization is now occurring in many of the "Forgotten Cities" (as they were described by MIT in 2007) or "Weak Market Cities" (as they were described by the Brookings Institute in 2006). But it has been a long time coming and with the current economic downturn it might be too late.
"As I sit in my apartment on Pennsylvania and Park [Avenues in Youngstown, Ohio] until three months ago I was looking out at six abandoned houses," Morrison explains. "Today I am looking out at six vacant lots because in November we had arsonists who burned down all six houses. This is the experience of Youngstown -- disinvestment, destruction of property and values, the weakening of our cultural systems -- the orchestra is struggling because it was dependent on wealthy industrialists and they have disappeared from the scene."
A pandemic of destruction that continues to be rationalized by economists has struck a "nation within a nation -- the entire Great Lakes Nation," says Morrison. This region "grew around a business model that created enormous wealth that rebuilt the postbellum South and built the West, the Northwest and the Southwest. If you go back to the 1930s and Roosevelt, the wealth of the industrial centers was transported via various [WPA] programs to create Charlotte Airport, Atlanta Hartsfield -- the new southern cities were funded by wealth created in the North."
Now that wealth is dissipating, and dozens of cities stretching from upstate New York down the Appalachians to St. Louis through the upper Mississippi to Lake Superior and Duluth, Minn., are in ruin. It is the industrial heartland, the old Northwest Territory -- the alternative to the slave economy of the South and the Anglo-centric economy of the East Coast. It is a section of the country that still maintains a certain class structure that the rest of the country does not have. It grew up around immigrants, industrialization and heavy investment in infrastructure to move products to more densely populated areas of the country: canals, locks, railroads and highways that fostered further industrial investment.
Cities grew up around mills and factories and along rivers. Most of them developed core industries and monocultures. But suburbanization in the 1950s started to drain the cities. Unionization and good wages allowed residents to live the American dream and move to the suburbs away from the smoke. In the 1960s, investment in capital equipment and productivity improvements started replacing workers with machines. Featherbedding rules (hiring more workers than is required) were revoked. The rush of immigrants from places like Poland and Ireland dried up and the cities emptied out. Today, young people leave and are never expected to return.
"I started to read histories of the Plague years and I realized in these accounts that in the course of a year or two, cities would lose half of their populations," says Morrison. "It happened all over Europe, from the Urals all the way to England. Nothing on that scale has occurred since except in the United States."
So Morrison went to England and visited Glasgow and Newcastle, cities that were facing similar difficulties of deindustrialization and abandonment. What he found was significant differences in national policies between those of Britain and the United States. "In the 1980s on a national level, the British government determined that inward investment was essential to keep the population of these cities from flooding into London and coming to the Southwest of England and overwhelming that infrastructure," he explains. "So there was a deliberate effort to make places like Cardiff, Birmingham and Newcastle viable. Is it perfect? No. But there was a clear understanding that the UK existed as a system of communities not as a beggar thy neighbor situation."
Similar policies were implemented by the European Community with the opening of Eastern Europe. Huge investments flowing eastward for more than a decade effectively transformed communities and allowed local people to accept change and "see a new future," says Morrison.
"So when you go to Newcastle and you talk to the Geordies up there, they are still working class, they still have Newcastle Brown Ale and they still speak their own language. They still love to party -- they promote Newcastle as the best party city in Europe. They love their football. They haven't ceased to be working class. They are tough as nails, but they are proud that their biomedical community is one of the best in Europe. They are proud that their universities have been transformed and they have come to a point where the value proposition is they have a proud past and a promising future. It didn't happen in isolation. What you see in the United States is individual communities trying to figure this out on their own. But individual communities can't do it on their own."
America is more interested in building Baghdad and Kabul than it is in assuring the viability of its own cities. "I grew up in Cleveland," says Morrison. "It is disheartening. There is a lot of energy, hope and faith. But it's disheartening. It's like having diabetes or lupus. It's a chronic condition that never seems to get better. You take one step forward and two steps back. If there are going to be another 100 million people in this country by 2050 and they are all going to the coasts and Florida, how are those places going to accommodate that growth in fragile ecosystems? You have to step back and ask if it is in the national interest to continue to pump more people into a place like Florida to accommodate that growth."
What needs to be done to turn the situation around?
"A way to address a problem is to recognize that you have one," says Morrison. "It's not Cleveland's problem or Elyria's problem. It's not saving Cleveland. It's the way we operate as a nation -- a nation of places. What has been brought to the table is that deindustrialization is something that is good because it is cleaner. But it is nothing of the sort. It is a diminution of wealth creation. If deindustrialization was such a good thing, then why is China industrializing? The reason you do manufacturing is to create wealth by adding value. It's real simple. We've gone away from that."
By Richard A. McCormack
richard@manufacturingnews.com
Dozens of American cities throughout the industrial Great Lakes states and Midwest have lost half of their populations over the course of one generation -- places like Cleveland, Youngstown, Detroit, Warren, Buffalo and Flint. This is the first time that so many cities have lost half of their populations in such a short amount of time since the Plague struck Europe in 1348, according to Hunter Morrison, director of Youngstown State University's Office of Planning and Partnerships.
Morrison, former director of the Cleveland City Planning Department for 20 years, has studied the health of global cities over the centuries. He has looked for similar trends worldwide in which such a large number of cities have fallen into despair. He studied what happened in Great Britain when deindustrialization struck places like Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham, Sheffield and Belfast. He looked at what happened when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and tens of millions of people were expected to abandon dilapidated Eastern European cities.
None of those regions experienced what the U.S. Midwest has experienced because other countries understood how vital it was for their cities to remain healthy. They committed themselves and the resources required to keep their old cities vibrant.
No such attitude or policy prevailed in the United States.
In the Great Lakes region, each city and town felt that it was on its own facing its own unique dilemma -- that it was engaged in its own battle for survival -- as well they were, since the cities are not linked in a large megalopolis as they are on the East Coast.
"We all look at these places as separate places and what we are learning now is that it is like being in a family with alcohol or drug dependency," says Morrison. "When you go into intervention and recovery one of the first things you discover is that there are lot of other people who are dealing with the same thing."
That realization is now occurring in many of the "Forgotten Cities" (as they were described by MIT in 2007) or "Weak Market Cities" (as they were described by the Brookings Institute in 2006). But it has been a long time coming and with the current economic downturn it might be too late.
"As I sit in my apartment on Pennsylvania and Park [Avenues in Youngstown, Ohio] until three months ago I was looking out at six abandoned houses," Morrison explains. "Today I am looking out at six vacant lots because in November we had arsonists who burned down all six houses. This is the experience of Youngstown -- disinvestment, destruction of property and values, the weakening of our cultural systems -- the orchestra is struggling because it was dependent on wealthy industrialists and they have disappeared from the scene."
A pandemic of destruction that continues to be rationalized by economists has struck a "nation within a nation -- the entire Great Lakes Nation," says Morrison. This region "grew around a business model that created enormous wealth that rebuilt the postbellum South and built the West, the Northwest and the Southwest. If you go back to the 1930s and Roosevelt, the wealth of the industrial centers was transported via various [WPA] programs to create Charlotte Airport, Atlanta Hartsfield -- the new southern cities were funded by wealth created in the North."
Now that wealth is dissipating, and dozens of cities stretching from upstate New York down the Appalachians to St. Louis through the upper Mississippi to Lake Superior and Duluth, Minn., are in ruin. It is the industrial heartland, the old Northwest Territory -- the alternative to the slave economy of the South and the Anglo-centric economy of the East Coast. It is a section of the country that still maintains a certain class structure that the rest of the country does not have. It grew up around immigrants, industrialization and heavy investment in infrastructure to move products to more densely populated areas of the country: canals, locks, railroads and highways that fostered further industrial investment.
Cities grew up around mills and factories and along rivers. Most of them developed core industries and monocultures. But suburbanization in the 1950s started to drain the cities. Unionization and good wages allowed residents to live the American dream and move to the suburbs away from the smoke. In the 1960s, investment in capital equipment and productivity improvements started replacing workers with machines. Featherbedding rules (hiring more workers than is required) were revoked. The rush of immigrants from places like Poland and Ireland dried up and the cities emptied out. Today, young people leave and are never expected to return.
"I started to read histories of the Plague years and I realized in these accounts that in the course of a year or two, cities would lose half of their populations," says Morrison. "It happened all over Europe, from the Urals all the way to England. Nothing on that scale has occurred since except in the United States."
So Morrison went to England and visited Glasgow and Newcastle, cities that were facing similar difficulties of deindustrialization and abandonment. What he found was significant differences in national policies between those of Britain and the United States. "In the 1980s on a national level, the British government determined that inward investment was essential to keep the population of these cities from flooding into London and coming to the Southwest of England and overwhelming that infrastructure," he explains. "So there was a deliberate effort to make places like Cardiff, Birmingham and Newcastle viable. Is it perfect? No. But there was a clear understanding that the UK existed as a system of communities not as a beggar thy neighbor situation."
Similar policies were implemented by the European Community with the opening of Eastern Europe. Huge investments flowing eastward for more than a decade effectively transformed communities and allowed local people to accept change and "see a new future," says Morrison.
"So when you go to Newcastle and you talk to the Geordies up there, they are still working class, they still have Newcastle Brown Ale and they still speak their own language. They still love to party -- they promote Newcastle as the best party city in Europe. They love their football. They haven't ceased to be working class. They are tough as nails, but they are proud that their biomedical community is one of the best in Europe. They are proud that their universities have been transformed and they have come to a point where the value proposition is they have a proud past and a promising future. It didn't happen in isolation. What you see in the United States is individual communities trying to figure this out on their own. But individual communities can't do it on their own."
America is more interested in building Baghdad and Kabul than it is in assuring the viability of its own cities. "I grew up in Cleveland," says Morrison. "It is disheartening. There is a lot of energy, hope and faith. But it's disheartening. It's like having diabetes or lupus. It's a chronic condition that never seems to get better. You take one step forward and two steps back. If there are going to be another 100 million people in this country by 2050 and they are all going to the coasts and Florida, how are those places going to accommodate that growth in fragile ecosystems? You have to step back and ask if it is in the national interest to continue to pump more people into a place like Florida to accommodate that growth."
What needs to be done to turn the situation around?
"A way to address a problem is to recognize that you have one," says Morrison. "It's not Cleveland's problem or Elyria's problem. It's not saving Cleveland. It's the way we operate as a nation -- a nation of places. What has been brought to the table is that deindustrialization is something that is good because it is cleaner. But it is nothing of the sort. It is a diminution of wealth creation. If deindustrialization was such a good thing, then why is China industrializing? The reason you do manufacturing is to create wealth by adding value. It's real simple. We've gone away from that."
Friday, November 26, 2010
Cargo-Cult Keynesians
Cargo-Cult Keynesians
November 23, 2010
Cargo-Cult Keynesians
By J.R. Dunn
For the second time in my life, the U.S. has descended into cargo-cult Keynesianism
Cargo cults were a product of WWII. The centuries-long isolation of the South Pacific's native Melanesian peoples ended with the coming of war. The islanders got along well with American GIs (far better than with the imperious and arrogant Japanese troops), who willingly shared their rations and other items. The Melanesians became used to the good life in the form of Spam, Lucky Strike cigarettes, and beer in the can -- the basic elements of true civilization.
When the war ended, so did the stream of American goods. But the islanders had a plan. Constructing fake airplanes on the abandoned landing strips, they entered the rickety control towers and spoke into objects similar in form to microphones in order to persuade the Gooney Birds to return with their largesse. It was a concrete example of the ancient magical formula that like begets like, and it worked the same as it ever does. For all I know, they're still waiting.
Fast-forward several steps in civilization to John Maynard Keynes. There exists a misunderstanding about Keynes and his economic theories. These comprise no formula for gross evil or the undermining of democracy. In fact, they are serious attempts to create something on the order of a unified field theory for the economic universe. As such, they are marked by serious flaws, the most critical originating in a profound misunderstanding of human nature. As an upper-class Englishman, Keynes had little grasp of the concept that human beings will use any excuse to act badly, even if it's an abstruse economic theory. (The Keynes dictum that our current predicament is derived from, by the way, goes like this: "run surpluses in good times so that you can run deficits in bad times." Nobody but nobody ever pays attention to the first phrase. With modern "Keynesians," it's all deficits, all the time.)
So take these two concepts -- run surpluses and like begets like -- and mingle them. The product is cargo-cult Keynesianism -- the notion, promoted by such witch doctors as Benjamin Bernanke and Paul Krugman, that if you print or otherwise create vast amounts of false money, then the real money (like attracted to like!) will return to the economy, like cans of Spam magically winging their way toward remote Pacific islands.
This is the precise monetary policy now being followed by the Obama administration. At the beginning of the third millennium, with every planet in this solar system reconnoitered and our probes slowly gliding into the galaxy beyond, with a worldwide communications and information network shrinking the globe until it fits into the palm of your hand, with gentech and nanotech promising wonders and horrors beyond the ready imagination, contemporary financial policy is being derived from a desiccated Edwardian economic theory on the one hand and prehistoric sorcery on the other. So don't smirk too widely about our friends in the feather headdresses impatiently tapping their feet down by the old airfield. They're a lot closer to us than you might care to think.
At least the good shamans of the Pacific probably gave up after it failed to work. Not so late-modern America. This particular perversion of liberal economic theory was first inflicted on the country during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, a man who never met a spending bill he didn't like. In 1965, Johnson was faced with a conundrum: he needed to finance both a medium-sized war in Vietnam and a plan for a national welfare state he called the "Great Society." Though often characterized as an attempt to fulfill certain goals first set during the New Deal, the Great Society was in fact an effort to establish a universal nanny state on the European social-democratic model. As such, it required what we would today call an obamiad of ready cash. Johnson was stymied. He had no interest in raising taxes -- for one thing, his immediate predecessor, John F. Kennedy, had triggered a potent boom by doing the exact opposite.
It was here that his economic advisors (among them John Kenneth Galbraith), backed by the contemporary conventional knowledge, stepped in to assure Johnson that deficits were no problem under Keynesian theory. This was all Johnson had to hear. Beginning in the summer of 1965, the Treasury presses began roaring like never before, creating the dollars that would carry us to victory in Vietnam and a social paradise at home.
For a short time, the Johnson deficits heightened the '60s boom. The money was at first taken at face value. For a year or two, everybody felt rich. Then inflation inevitably kicked in, and monetary value started to evaporate. From the public's point of view, "prices began to rise." (It's actually the exact opposite -- monetary value falls, and prices kick up to match it.) The '60s boom faltered and then faded into nostalgia.
Johnson's successor, Richard M. Nixon, complicated things by dumping another batch of cargo-cult money into the economy in 1971 for the express purpose of jolting the economy during the run-up to the 1972 elections. It worked just fine until a mild recession caused by tightening the money supply afterward frightened everyone into opening the spigots once again. That established the status quo for the rest of the decade, resulting in a slumbering economy alongside double-digit inflation -- that two-headed monster, "stagflation," a kind of dynamic stasis in which each distinct economic malady served to reinforce the other. Any attempt to improve matters threatened to unleash economic chaos. Economists were stymied -- most considered such a state an impossibility. And in the natural run of things, they were quite correct. It was continual governmental interference that created the '70s slump.
Ronald Reagan at last bit the bullet, cut off the money flow, and purged the economy by means of the 1982 recession. That brief slump was followed by an unprecedented twenty years of prosperity.
Fast-forward to 2010. We will no more than mention the original "Stimulus," which can be characterized as conventional Keynesianism mismanaged to the point of comedy. The vast bulk of that three-quarters of a trillion (at least, the part that we know about) was handed to the unions and the financial industry, both legendary for their efficiency, economic effectiveness, and public-spiritedness. This money had no measurable effect on the economy. (Obama claims that the slump would have been deeper and unemployment far higher without it. You'll find the salt shaker in the kitchen.) Its failure brings us to QE2, or Stimulus, the Sequel.
QE2, which means Quantitative Easing, is evidently Bernanke-speak for "running a deficit." The current run of liberal economists is more sophisticated than that surrounding poor LBJ (Johnson, depressed and with no idea of what had hit him, essentially drank himself to death by 1973) in the sense that Keynes, with his walking stick and his gentleman's tweeds, was more sophisticated than the Melanesian chief with his grass skirt. Rather than pump up the money supply directly, the government is going through a complex charade of selling Treasury bonds, evidently in the hopes that this will fool the economy into accepting the new money as the real thing. It will, of course, do nothing of the sort. Bernanke and Geithner and company -- with the avid support of Krugman, most of the media, and the financial industry, who will all make out no matter what happens -- are repeating the Johnson administration's mistake. What matters is the infusion of virtual cash flooding the economy, not the means by which it was introduced. It will serve the same role and lead to the same results. (Bernanke claims that there will be no inflationary effect, which is nonsense.)
What will the consequences be? Bernanke has stated that "[w]e have no idea what the hell is going to happen." The hell we don't. The first result will be economic stagnation and serious inflation, and possibly the return of that fearsome, unlikely beast, stagflation, and for the same reasons. I will leave further economic questions to the professionals. (Recent claims that inflation is at "the lowest level since 1957" are simply bizarre. Walmart is only one major company that has already noted inflation in its supplier costs, which means that price jumps are right around the corner for the rest of us.)
For the country as a whole, it means truncated influence and presence on the world stage in both the diplomatic and economic spheres. Numerous problems and difficulties will arise that would not otherwise have arisen, and the American ability to confront and solve them will be unquestionably limited. Consider the rise of fascism in the 1930s. It is easily possible that we will see the millennial equivalent over the next twenty years.
For business, many opportunities will be forgone, much research will not occur, many breakthroughs and new products and services will not reach the market -- at least from the United States.
But the impact on individuals is what matters most. A nation comprises individuals and nothing else. Economists and financial types tend to view the world only through figures -- so we're told that the current recession ended over a year ago, although we can clearly see misery and distress deepening all around us. I was an eyewitness to the years of the Johnson Depression (as it should be called but for some reason is not). What individuals are facing, as we faced and endured in the 1970s, is a lost decade.
Advanced education will become something of a luxury, certainly for those who are financing their own way, and even for those in more privileged groups. (I can testify to this personally -- I was awarded a scholarship for outstanding marks in the state college entry examination, only to be told on registration that the New York State Regents had gone bankrupt.) Fewer educational qualifications means less in the way of opportunity, not to mention a shrinkage of skilled workers in the labor force.
Wages and salaries will stagnate further. Squalid, low-level jobs will be the rule, and people will be happy to get them. It will be an era of small hopes and minor achievements. Possibilities will close; people will give up on dreams and goals, settling for less than they deserve. It will break many people. We will see an inevitable rise in mental illness and suicides. In Japan, the Aokigahara Forest at the foot of Mt. Fuji has long been known as the "Suicide Forest." The number of bodies discovered there nearly tripled after the country's economic slump in the 1990s.
Life will become a little more ragged and less attractive than it has been. People today have no idea how clean and pleasant most American cities were up until the 1970s. Then it got worse, and we never quite recovered. It will get worse again. Less money will be spent on keeping up on all levels, from government through business down to individual homeowners. For some it will be even more desperate -- homelessness first arose as a serious problem in the 1970s.
Crazy fads will appear (both disco and punk arose during the 1970s), along with a rise in strange cults and movements (the 1970s effectively began with the Manson murders and climaxed with the Jonestown massacre). The frenetic and self-destructive will move to the fore, as always occurs when the worthwhile is put out of reach. Think of life in Weimar Germany during the 1920s.
All this and worse occurred during the 1970s. Much of it will be news to younger readers. Those years aren't discussed much, sandwiched as they were between the boom years of the '60s and the '80s. To those of us, the late boomers, who reached our majorities during this period, the claim that this latest slump is the "worst since the Depression" is more than a bit of a joke. There's a reason that the late cohort didn't have the same impact as those who came up during the '60s. We had a decade cut out of our lives, in a society becalmed and adrift.
We can't avoid all of it. We are locked in for the next few years. It's too late to turn back. But we can avoid a full decade of this level of grief if we make the right moves. Because the sad thing is that all this is unnecessary. The formula for ending a slump is well-understood. No massive "stimuli," no QE ad infinitum, no megalomaniacal efforts of any kind. There's nothing magical about it. Merely lower taxes, loosen credit, and above all, provide a secure business environment. Time will do the rest. This is how both Reagan and W accomplished it. The fact that this solution is being ignored for purely ideological reasons is nothing less than shameful. It's the exact equivalent of those odd religious sects that would rather see a child die than be subject to an operation -- with the single difference that the cult preachers can't quit and take up a professorship in one of the Ivies.
This past midterm election is a good sign in more ways than one. It will help assure business leaders that a more stable, less intrusive governmental order has returned. We will witness no more arbitrary takeovers of private companies at the whim of the Oval Office. Now we need to see that the Bush tax cuts -- yet another of his accomplishments that has outlasted him -- is not phased out early in the new year, and scuttle any further Obamite schemes for raising taxes. A less stringent credit regime may well follow (and perhaps already has, if recent signs are any indication). Carried out over the next year to eighteen months, such actions will stabilize the economy and allow it to begin crawling back over a two- to three-year period. This is probably the best we can hope for, and compared to the '70s (which for our purposes lasted from 1969 to 1982), it is not bad at all.
Having lived through it once, I wouldn't wish the Great Inflation on anybody, not even with the knowledge that most of the people in this country have it coming. There's a Spanish proverb that covers this: "Take what you want -- but pay for it." Most of the voters, using the same level of thinking as the poor postwar Melanesians, decided that they wanted an incompetent adolescent narcissist for president. Now that the bill has come due, they've concluded that they don't want to pay for it. They're lucky the rest of us don't, either.
J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker and will edit the forthcoming Military Thinker.
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November 23, 2010
Cargo-Cult Keynesians
By J.R. Dunn
For the second time in my life, the U.S. has descended into cargo-cult Keynesianism
Cargo cults were a product of WWII. The centuries-long isolation of the South Pacific's native Melanesian peoples ended with the coming of war. The islanders got along well with American GIs (far better than with the imperious and arrogant Japanese troops), who willingly shared their rations and other items. The Melanesians became used to the good life in the form of Spam, Lucky Strike cigarettes, and beer in the can -- the basic elements of true civilization.
When the war ended, so did the stream of American goods. But the islanders had a plan. Constructing fake airplanes on the abandoned landing strips, they entered the rickety control towers and spoke into objects similar in form to microphones in order to persuade the Gooney Birds to return with their largesse. It was a concrete example of the ancient magical formula that like begets like, and it worked the same as it ever does. For all I know, they're still waiting.
Fast-forward several steps in civilization to John Maynard Keynes. There exists a misunderstanding about Keynes and his economic theories. These comprise no formula for gross evil or the undermining of democracy. In fact, they are serious attempts to create something on the order of a unified field theory for the economic universe. As such, they are marked by serious flaws, the most critical originating in a profound misunderstanding of human nature. As an upper-class Englishman, Keynes had little grasp of the concept that human beings will use any excuse to act badly, even if it's an abstruse economic theory. (The Keynes dictum that our current predicament is derived from, by the way, goes like this: "run surpluses in good times so that you can run deficits in bad times." Nobody but nobody ever pays attention to the first phrase. With modern "Keynesians," it's all deficits, all the time.)
So take these two concepts -- run surpluses and like begets like -- and mingle them. The product is cargo-cult Keynesianism -- the notion, promoted by such witch doctors as Benjamin Bernanke and Paul Krugman, that if you print or otherwise create vast amounts of false money, then the real money (like attracted to like!) will return to the economy, like cans of Spam magically winging their way toward remote Pacific islands.
This is the precise monetary policy now being followed by the Obama administration. At the beginning of the third millennium, with every planet in this solar system reconnoitered and our probes slowly gliding into the galaxy beyond, with a worldwide communications and information network shrinking the globe until it fits into the palm of your hand, with gentech and nanotech promising wonders and horrors beyond the ready imagination, contemporary financial policy is being derived from a desiccated Edwardian economic theory on the one hand and prehistoric sorcery on the other. So don't smirk too widely about our friends in the feather headdresses impatiently tapping their feet down by the old airfield. They're a lot closer to us than you might care to think.
At least the good shamans of the Pacific probably gave up after it failed to work. Not so late-modern America. This particular perversion of liberal economic theory was first inflicted on the country during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, a man who never met a spending bill he didn't like. In 1965, Johnson was faced with a conundrum: he needed to finance both a medium-sized war in Vietnam and a plan for a national welfare state he called the "Great Society." Though often characterized as an attempt to fulfill certain goals first set during the New Deal, the Great Society was in fact an effort to establish a universal nanny state on the European social-democratic model. As such, it required what we would today call an obamiad of ready cash. Johnson was stymied. He had no interest in raising taxes -- for one thing, his immediate predecessor, John F. Kennedy, had triggered a potent boom by doing the exact opposite.
It was here that his economic advisors (among them John Kenneth Galbraith), backed by the contemporary conventional knowledge, stepped in to assure Johnson that deficits were no problem under Keynesian theory. This was all Johnson had to hear. Beginning in the summer of 1965, the Treasury presses began roaring like never before, creating the dollars that would carry us to victory in Vietnam and a social paradise at home.
For a short time, the Johnson deficits heightened the '60s boom. The money was at first taken at face value. For a year or two, everybody felt rich. Then inflation inevitably kicked in, and monetary value started to evaporate. From the public's point of view, "prices began to rise." (It's actually the exact opposite -- monetary value falls, and prices kick up to match it.) The '60s boom faltered and then faded into nostalgia.
Johnson's successor, Richard M. Nixon, complicated things by dumping another batch of cargo-cult money into the economy in 1971 for the express purpose of jolting the economy during the run-up to the 1972 elections. It worked just fine until a mild recession caused by tightening the money supply afterward frightened everyone into opening the spigots once again. That established the status quo for the rest of the decade, resulting in a slumbering economy alongside double-digit inflation -- that two-headed monster, "stagflation," a kind of dynamic stasis in which each distinct economic malady served to reinforce the other. Any attempt to improve matters threatened to unleash economic chaos. Economists were stymied -- most considered such a state an impossibility. And in the natural run of things, they were quite correct. It was continual governmental interference that created the '70s slump.
Ronald Reagan at last bit the bullet, cut off the money flow, and purged the economy by means of the 1982 recession. That brief slump was followed by an unprecedented twenty years of prosperity.
Fast-forward to 2010. We will no more than mention the original "Stimulus," which can be characterized as conventional Keynesianism mismanaged to the point of comedy. The vast bulk of that three-quarters of a trillion (at least, the part that we know about) was handed to the unions and the financial industry, both legendary for their efficiency, economic effectiveness, and public-spiritedness. This money had no measurable effect on the economy. (Obama claims that the slump would have been deeper and unemployment far higher without it. You'll find the salt shaker in the kitchen.) Its failure brings us to QE2, or Stimulus, the Sequel.
QE2, which means Quantitative Easing, is evidently Bernanke-speak for "running a deficit." The current run of liberal economists is more sophisticated than that surrounding poor LBJ (Johnson, depressed and with no idea of what had hit him, essentially drank himself to death by 1973) in the sense that Keynes, with his walking stick and his gentleman's tweeds, was more sophisticated than the Melanesian chief with his grass skirt. Rather than pump up the money supply directly, the government is going through a complex charade of selling Treasury bonds, evidently in the hopes that this will fool the economy into accepting the new money as the real thing. It will, of course, do nothing of the sort. Bernanke and Geithner and company -- with the avid support of Krugman, most of the media, and the financial industry, who will all make out no matter what happens -- are repeating the Johnson administration's mistake. What matters is the infusion of virtual cash flooding the economy, not the means by which it was introduced. It will serve the same role and lead to the same results. (Bernanke claims that there will be no inflationary effect, which is nonsense.)
What will the consequences be? Bernanke has stated that "[w]e have no idea what the hell is going to happen." The hell we don't. The first result will be economic stagnation and serious inflation, and possibly the return of that fearsome, unlikely beast, stagflation, and for the same reasons. I will leave further economic questions to the professionals. (Recent claims that inflation is at "the lowest level since 1957" are simply bizarre. Walmart is only one major company that has already noted inflation in its supplier costs, which means that price jumps are right around the corner for the rest of us.)
For the country as a whole, it means truncated influence and presence on the world stage in both the diplomatic and economic spheres. Numerous problems and difficulties will arise that would not otherwise have arisen, and the American ability to confront and solve them will be unquestionably limited. Consider the rise of fascism in the 1930s. It is easily possible that we will see the millennial equivalent over the next twenty years.
For business, many opportunities will be forgone, much research will not occur, many breakthroughs and new products and services will not reach the market -- at least from the United States.
But the impact on individuals is what matters most. A nation comprises individuals and nothing else. Economists and financial types tend to view the world only through figures -- so we're told that the current recession ended over a year ago, although we can clearly see misery and distress deepening all around us. I was an eyewitness to the years of the Johnson Depression (as it should be called but for some reason is not). What individuals are facing, as we faced and endured in the 1970s, is a lost decade.
Advanced education will become something of a luxury, certainly for those who are financing their own way, and even for those in more privileged groups. (I can testify to this personally -- I was awarded a scholarship for outstanding marks in the state college entry examination, only to be told on registration that the New York State Regents had gone bankrupt.) Fewer educational qualifications means less in the way of opportunity, not to mention a shrinkage of skilled workers in the labor force.
Wages and salaries will stagnate further. Squalid, low-level jobs will be the rule, and people will be happy to get them. It will be an era of small hopes and minor achievements. Possibilities will close; people will give up on dreams and goals, settling for less than they deserve. It will break many people. We will see an inevitable rise in mental illness and suicides. In Japan, the Aokigahara Forest at the foot of Mt. Fuji has long been known as the "Suicide Forest." The number of bodies discovered there nearly tripled after the country's economic slump in the 1990s.
Life will become a little more ragged and less attractive than it has been. People today have no idea how clean and pleasant most American cities were up until the 1970s. Then it got worse, and we never quite recovered. It will get worse again. Less money will be spent on keeping up on all levels, from government through business down to individual homeowners. For some it will be even more desperate -- homelessness first arose as a serious problem in the 1970s.
Crazy fads will appear (both disco and punk arose during the 1970s), along with a rise in strange cults and movements (the 1970s effectively began with the Manson murders and climaxed with the Jonestown massacre). The frenetic and self-destructive will move to the fore, as always occurs when the worthwhile is put out of reach. Think of life in Weimar Germany during the 1920s.
All this and worse occurred during the 1970s. Much of it will be news to younger readers. Those years aren't discussed much, sandwiched as they were between the boom years of the '60s and the '80s. To those of us, the late boomers, who reached our majorities during this period, the claim that this latest slump is the "worst since the Depression" is more than a bit of a joke. There's a reason that the late cohort didn't have the same impact as those who came up during the '60s. We had a decade cut out of our lives, in a society becalmed and adrift.
We can't avoid all of it. We are locked in for the next few years. It's too late to turn back. But we can avoid a full decade of this level of grief if we make the right moves. Because the sad thing is that all this is unnecessary. The formula for ending a slump is well-understood. No massive "stimuli," no QE ad infinitum, no megalomaniacal efforts of any kind. There's nothing magical about it. Merely lower taxes, loosen credit, and above all, provide a secure business environment. Time will do the rest. This is how both Reagan and W accomplished it. The fact that this solution is being ignored for purely ideological reasons is nothing less than shameful. It's the exact equivalent of those odd religious sects that would rather see a child die than be subject to an operation -- with the single difference that the cult preachers can't quit and take up a professorship in one of the Ivies.
This past midterm election is a good sign in more ways than one. It will help assure business leaders that a more stable, less intrusive governmental order has returned. We will witness no more arbitrary takeovers of private companies at the whim of the Oval Office. Now we need to see that the Bush tax cuts -- yet another of his accomplishments that has outlasted him -- is not phased out early in the new year, and scuttle any further Obamite schemes for raising taxes. A less stringent credit regime may well follow (and perhaps already has, if recent signs are any indication). Carried out over the next year to eighteen months, such actions will stabilize the economy and allow it to begin crawling back over a two- to three-year period. This is probably the best we can hope for, and compared to the '70s (which for our purposes lasted from 1969 to 1982), it is not bad at all.
Having lived through it once, I wouldn't wish the Great Inflation on anybody, not even with the knowledge that most of the people in this country have it coming. There's a Spanish proverb that covers this: "Take what you want -- but pay for it." Most of the voters, using the same level of thinking as the poor postwar Melanesians, decided that they wanted an incompetent adolescent narcissist for president. Now that the bill has come due, they've concluded that they don't want to pay for it. They're lucky the rest of us don't, either.
J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker and will edit the forthcoming Military Thinker.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/11/cargo_cult_keynesians_1.html at November 26, 2010 - 07:28:53 AM CST
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Guest Blogger: Re-imagining America’s Business School Curriculums | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.
Guest Blogger: Re-imagining America’s Business School Curriculums | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.
Approximately 90 percent of America’s infrastructure is privately owned and yet the primary focus of homeland security educational programs in the U.S. has been directed toward local, state, federal government, and military employees. In addition, most of the homeland security educational programs on college campuses are located within the criminal justice or security studies degree programs. The challenge we must now face is how to best develop a culture of critical infrastructure preparedness within the private sector—one that will allow us to effectively mitigate, prevent, prepare, respond to, and recover from all hazards including acts of terrorism.
The question we must ask ourselves is: Who provides the leadership to direct the spending of resources of the multiple entities that compose our privately owned infrastructure? The answer of course, is the CEOs, CFOs, and COOs of American businesses and nonprofit organizations.
How have they prepared themselves for these traditional roles? Most have earned undergraduate degrees and advanced degrees/MBA’s in business, finance, accounting, IT, and marketing. These academic credentials help them develop the traditional knowledge, skills, and abilities required to succeed in leading a business or nonprofit entity. As an adjunct professor who has taught both business management courses and security courses for over 15 years, I continue to find it shocking to observe that it is still possible to earn an undergraduate or graduate degree in business without ever taking a course in business continuity, crisis management, terrorism, security management, or homeland security. Ironically, it is the graduates of these business programs who one day will be the senior decision-makers deciding on how the organization will use its resources and finances to protect the people, properties, profits, and assets of their own organization/segment of America’s infrastructure. How can they be expected to make the proper decisions on infrastructure preparedness without the proper education?
The Department of Homeland Security has attempted to address the issue of critical infrastructure preparedness by sending government liaison employees to the private sector. These employees endeavor to not only make organizations more aware of their responsibilities for emergency preparedness/infrastructure protection, but to discuss how they can best realize this goal. It’s always a challenging role for government employees without any private sector business management experience to advise private business leaders on how to best incorporate security practices into existing business processes and operations. DHS has also advocated the use of ICS/NIMS as the standard emergency response system for both the public and private sectors. The system emphasizes the strategic roles of operations, logistics, planning, finance, and administration. These are the exact elements traditionally addressed in business degree programs. Again, I would challenge anyone to find a business management course that incorporates ICS/NIMS into its course design or business curriculum!
In order to develop a true culture of homeland/hometown security and critical infrastructure preparedness within the private and nonprofit sectors, it is imperative that America’s colleges and universities re-imagine their business school curriculums by integrating business continuity, crisis management, and homeland security courses and modules into existing business courses. Additionally, these curriculums should require a basic understanding of critical infrastructure preparedness prior to graduation.
As an adjunct professor who has taught both business and security management courses I’m recommending that the following courses incorporate emergency preparedness and homeland security content:
1. Strategic management courses must include modules that address threat and vulnerability assessments. SWOT analysis would have a new meaning;
2. International business courses must address the impact of terrorism and all hazards preparation and response in their design;
3. Logistics and supply chain courses must have modules on supply chain security and compliance with U.S. and international security requirements;
4. Human resource courses must integrate security management issues into their curriculum to include workplace violence, domestic and international terrorism, and emergency management;
5. There should be mandatory courses in business continuity, crisis management, and the basic principles of homeland security to include ICS/NIMS. Business schools that do not have qualified faculty members to address these special topic courses should allow business students the opportunity to take these courses within other departments(criminal justice, security studies, and homeland security programs) located either within the university or at nearby educational institutions; and
6. In order to better protect business entities from cyber attacks, students should be required to complete a basic course in IT security/information assurance.
The benefits of requiring America’s business schools to take a leadership role in integrating critical infrastructure preparedness courses into existing business curriculums should be obvious. This return on investment will allow the private sector to develop a new group of leaders who are better prepared to make well-informed decisions on the allocation of corporate resources and monies needed to better protect the private infrastructures of the United States. Leading practitioners from the field of applied behavioral science and organizational development have estimated that it takes approximately 5 years to change the culture of an organization. If we could convince the deans of America’s business schools to take the actions necessary to re-imagine business management curriculums with the previously prescribed homeland security oriented courses we would be well on our way to developing a culture of critical infrastructure preparedness and protection by the year 2020.
Ed Piper is an Adjunct Professor Johns Hopkins University/Carey School of Business.
The views expressed by guest bloggers on the Foundry do not necessarily reflect the views of the Heritage Foundation.
Monday, November 08, 2010
The State-Level Tsunami
The State-Level Tsunami
I really did see November from my house and boy did she look GREAT!! :)
November 06, 2010
The State-Level Tsunami
By Bruce Walker
Was the 2010 midterm election a Republican tsunami? Although pundits waffle because a few Senate races were not won, the clearest proof of a Republican tsunami is found in state legislative elections. On November 2, 2010, Republicans and Democrats vied for seats in 87 state legislative chambers. (Nebraska has a nonpartisan legislature; Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Jersey did not have state legislative elections this year; and Kansas, New Mexico, and South Carolina did not hold elections for seats in the upper chamber of their state legislatures.) There were about 6,115 state legislative elections this November in those 87 chambers.
In those 6,115 state legislative elections, Republicans picked a net gain of 998 seats from Democrats. Republicans captured seats held by Democrats in a mind-boggling 16% of these races. A post-election map from Tim Storey at the National Conference of State Legislatures gives an eye-popping idea of the geographical spread of Republican control in state legislatures. Look at that map. Consider that there were no state legislative elections in Louisiana, Virginia, Mississippi, or New Jersey and that there was no election in the New Mexico Senate. If there had been races in those states, nearly all of America, except for the Northeast and the West Coast, would be red.
Republicans now hold 3,735 state legislative seats to 3,119 state legislative seats held by Democrats, a stunning reversal of power from 2006 and 2008. Republicans have more seats in state legislatures than at any time since Reconstruction. These gains in state legislative seats led to a number of state legislative changes flipping from Democrat to Republican. In those 87 state legislative chambers contested on November 2, Republicans captured control from Democrats in at least nineteen chambers. In stark contrast, Democrats failed to gain a single state legislative chamber from Republicans.
How broad were Republican gains across America? Republicans increased their numbers in 73 state legislative chambers of the 87 up for election. Democrats did get one or two seats in six states: California House (+1), Pennsylvania Senate (+1), Delaware House (+2), Hawaii Senate (+1), Washington State Senate (+1), and West Virginia Senate (+2.)
Compare these tiny gains with the massive Republican gains in many state legislative chambers, like these: Texas House (+24), Pennsylvania House (+14), Ohio House (+14), Ohio Senate (+11), Michigan House (+18) and Michigan Senate (+5), North Carolina House (+15) and North Carolina Senate (+11), Wisconsin House (+26) and Wisconsin Senate (+16), Iowa House (+16) and Iowa Senate (+6), Missouri House (+18), Alabama House (+15) and Alabama Senate (+6), Arkansas House (+12) and Arkansas Senate (+8), Tennessee House (+14), Minnesota House (+26) and Minnesota Senate (+16), New Hampshire House (+117), Maine House (+21) and Maine Senate (6), Connecticut House (+16), Montana House (+18), North Dakota House (+10), and Massachusetts House (+17).
Several of these states in which Republicans won sweeping state legislative victories are vital to Obama's reelection, like Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. Some of these states also have Democrat senators who saw Dorgan and Bayh retire and then saw Feingold and Lincoln lose. Some of these states have one or two Democrats in the Senate who will surely feel even more skittish about following doctrinaire leftism. In these states, there are fifteen Senate Democrats who could lose their seats if they are not careful: Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan (two senators), Minnesota (two senators), Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Missouri, New Hampshire, Montana (two senators), and North Dakota.
Political power in state legislatures, as many pundits have already noted, combined with the election of many Republican governors in this vital post-census redistricting legislative session, will mean big Republican gains in the House of Representatives after 2010 redistricting even if the vote in the 2012 congressional elections are exactly the same for every voter as in 2010. This will mean that the 240 or so Republicans in the House rise to 260 or more for most of this decade.
But congressional redistricting is only half of the problem that Democrats will face in the next decade. Republicans in state legislatures will also be drawing state legislative districts. That means the majorities which Republicans enjoy in state legislative chambers will grow even if every American in 2012 voted exactly the same way he did in 2010.
State legislatures are also the farm teams for the two political parties. Principled conservative Republicans will have the chance as majority party members of state legislatures to gain name recognition and to achieve meaningful reforms, providing us with proven and competent candidates for future elections to Congress and to governorships. The State Legislative Republican tsunami was real and massive. At the lowest level of constitutional government, State Legislatures, Democrats faced utter and complete routs. The long-term political consequences for Democrats are profound.
Bruce Walker is the author of a new book: Poor Lenin's Almanac: Perverse Leftists Proverbs for Modern Life.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/11/the_statelevel_tsunami.html at November 08, 2010 - 02:29:50 PM CST
I really did see November from my house and boy did she look GREAT!! :)
November 06, 2010
The State-Level Tsunami
By Bruce Walker
Was the 2010 midterm election a Republican tsunami? Although pundits waffle because a few Senate races were not won, the clearest proof of a Republican tsunami is found in state legislative elections. On November 2, 2010, Republicans and Democrats vied for seats in 87 state legislative chambers. (Nebraska has a nonpartisan legislature; Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Jersey did not have state legislative elections this year; and Kansas, New Mexico, and South Carolina did not hold elections for seats in the upper chamber of their state legislatures.) There were about 6,115 state legislative elections this November in those 87 chambers.
In those 6,115 state legislative elections, Republicans picked a net gain of 998 seats from Democrats. Republicans captured seats held by Democrats in a mind-boggling 16% of these races. A post-election map from Tim Storey at the National Conference of State Legislatures gives an eye-popping idea of the geographical spread of Republican control in state legislatures. Look at that map. Consider that there were no state legislative elections in Louisiana, Virginia, Mississippi, or New Jersey and that there was no election in the New Mexico Senate. If there had been races in those states, nearly all of America, except for the Northeast and the West Coast, would be red.
Republicans now hold 3,735 state legislative seats to 3,119 state legislative seats held by Democrats, a stunning reversal of power from 2006 and 2008. Republicans have more seats in state legislatures than at any time since Reconstruction. These gains in state legislative seats led to a number of state legislative changes flipping from Democrat to Republican. In those 87 state legislative chambers contested on November 2, Republicans captured control from Democrats in at least nineteen chambers. In stark contrast, Democrats failed to gain a single state legislative chamber from Republicans.
How broad were Republican gains across America? Republicans increased their numbers in 73 state legislative chambers of the 87 up for election. Democrats did get one or two seats in six states: California House (+1), Pennsylvania Senate (+1), Delaware House (+2), Hawaii Senate (+1), Washington State Senate (+1), and West Virginia Senate (+2.)
Compare these tiny gains with the massive Republican gains in many state legislative chambers, like these: Texas House (+24), Pennsylvania House (+14), Ohio House (+14), Ohio Senate (+11), Michigan House (+18) and Michigan Senate (+5), North Carolina House (+15) and North Carolina Senate (+11), Wisconsin House (+26) and Wisconsin Senate (+16), Iowa House (+16) and Iowa Senate (+6), Missouri House (+18), Alabama House (+15) and Alabama Senate (+6), Arkansas House (+12) and Arkansas Senate (+8), Tennessee House (+14), Minnesota House (+26) and Minnesota Senate (+16), New Hampshire House (+117), Maine House (+21) and Maine Senate (6), Connecticut House (+16), Montana House (+18), North Dakota House (+10), and Massachusetts House (+17).
Several of these states in which Republicans won sweeping state legislative victories are vital to Obama's reelection, like Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. Some of these states also have Democrat senators who saw Dorgan and Bayh retire and then saw Feingold and Lincoln lose. Some of these states have one or two Democrats in the Senate who will surely feel even more skittish about following doctrinaire leftism. In these states, there are fifteen Senate Democrats who could lose their seats if they are not careful: Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan (two senators), Minnesota (two senators), Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Missouri, New Hampshire, Montana (two senators), and North Dakota.
Political power in state legislatures, as many pundits have already noted, combined with the election of many Republican governors in this vital post-census redistricting legislative session, will mean big Republican gains in the House of Representatives after 2010 redistricting even if the vote in the 2012 congressional elections are exactly the same for every voter as in 2010. This will mean that the 240 or so Republicans in the House rise to 260 or more for most of this decade.
But congressional redistricting is only half of the problem that Democrats will face in the next decade. Republicans in state legislatures will also be drawing state legislative districts. That means the majorities which Republicans enjoy in state legislative chambers will grow even if every American in 2012 voted exactly the same way he did in 2010.
State legislatures are also the farm teams for the two political parties. Principled conservative Republicans will have the chance as majority party members of state legislatures to gain name recognition and to achieve meaningful reforms, providing us with proven and competent candidates for future elections to Congress and to governorships. The State Legislative Republican tsunami was real and massive. At the lowest level of constitutional government, State Legislatures, Democrats faced utter and complete routs. The long-term political consequences for Democrats are profound.
Bruce Walker is the author of a new book: Poor Lenin's Almanac: Perverse Leftists Proverbs for Modern Life.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/11/the_statelevel_tsunami.html at November 08, 2010 - 02:29:50 PM CST
Friday, August 27, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
I do not like this Uncle Sam (apologies to the late Theodore Gisel)
This little poem is a winner!!
I do not like this Uncle Sam,
I do not like his health care scam.
I do not like these dirty crooks,
or how they lie and cook the books.
I do not like when Congress steals,
I do not like their secret deals.
I do not like this speaker Nan ,
I do not like this ‘YES, WE CAN’.
I do not like this spending spree-—
I’m smart, I know that nothing’s free.
I do not like your smug replies,
when I complain about your lies.
I do not like this kind of hope.
I do not like it. Nope, Nope, Nope!
Go green - recycle Congress in 2010!
I do not like this Uncle Sam,
I do not like his health care scam.
I do not like these dirty crooks,
or how they lie and cook the books.
I do not like when Congress steals,
I do not like their secret deals.
I do not like this speaker Nan ,
I do not like this ‘YES, WE CAN’.
I do not like this spending spree-—
I’m smart, I know that nothing’s free.
I do not like your smug replies,
when I complain about your lies.
I do not like this kind of hope.
I do not like it. Nope, Nope, Nope!
Go green - recycle Congress in 2010!
Monday, July 19, 2010
for those that REALLY don't get it...
Mike Adams
Intellectuals and Human Nature
Recently, several “intellectuals” convened to deal with a problem so serious it could not be tackled by just one college professor. The question was this: How can professors stop an epidemic of students missing their examinations without jeopardizing student grades by resorting to point deductions?
The problem was so serious that the handful of intellectuals who first noticed the problem – and noticed others noticing the problem – sent out a mass email inviting others to attend a “brown bag” luncheon to brainstorm. They were searching for “solutions”, which would stop short of actually punishing students for missing their examinations.
I certainly have no problem with professors getting together to find “solutions” to difficult “problems.” But I do have a “problem” with the way these professors were characterizing their “problem.”
A better description of their “problem” – one that better reflects its magnitude – would sound something like this: How can we retain the secular/ progressive view of human nature, which is needed to justify secular/ progressive policies, in light of a wealth of evidence to the contrary?
The thoughts of the professors responding to the mass email were enlightening. One complained that she wanted to give her students the benefit of the doubt, but they constantly pushed and tested her. The more she withheld punishment, the more prevalent the undesirable behavior.
Another observed that the more often she does nice things for students, the more often they take advantage of her. She seemed perplexed by the fact that rewarding a missed exam with another administration, thus giving the student more time to prepare, led to more missed exams.
The dilemma of the perplexed professors highlights the fundamental difference between the conservative and the progressive views of human motivation. The former suggests that you can sometimes threaten to do bad things to people and expect good things in return. The latter suggests that you can promise to do good things for people and expect good things in return.
In the 1960s, our government began to put the progressive view of human nature to the test. We launched a War on Poverty in an effort to build a Great Society. Soon, we began to see mountains of data refuting the secular/ progressive view of human nature.
By the end of the first decade of our efforts to build a Great Society, crime in America had skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. The 1960s saw record increases in crime rates, which have yet to be broken.
Progressives thought that giving people welfare, food stamps, and huge increases in the minimum wage would all be nice favors, which would be returned in the form of greater citizen conformity. The fact that it didn’t work has done little to shake the foundations of progressive faith in human decency.
Since the failed effort to build a Great Society there have been repeated calls to build more prisons in order to clean up the mess progressives have created. But, for years, progressives have fought tooth and nail to prevent or slow the expansion of prisons.
The result, of course, has been an increase in homicides and gang-rapes in prison due to prison overcrowding. In short, the progressive view of human nature has produced more violence among both free and captive populations. More people are dying everywhere but the progressive vision of human decency is immortal. It cannot be slain by any wealth of empirical evidence.
More recently, we have seen the effects of progressive gun control policies. Like prisons, guns are reminders of human depravity, which the progressive cannot accept. And so the progressive seeks to ban guns. Nonetheless, in 2008, the Supreme Court lifted a ban on handguns in Washington D.C., which resulted in a 25% decrease in homicides the next year.
The D.C. homicide data speak volumes about human nature. The presence of guns is a threat, which helps many depraved individuals conform to the dictates of the law. Nonetheless, progressives still fight the very reforms that have helped preserve innocent lives. They do so because it is more important that they preserve their vision of human decency.
It isn’t surprising that progressives who cannot manage a classroom cannot also manage “society.” It would be better if the progressive would confine her decision to accommodate, rather than punish, irresponsibility to the classroom. But intellectuals rarely keep their ideas to themselves. They are obliged to impose them on “society.”
Replacing the Judeo-Christian view of human nature with the progressive view of human nature has proven to be a bad idea. And bad ideas have bad consequences for fallen human beings. But progressive hope for the secular transformation of human nature springs eternal.
Intellectuals and Human Nature
Recently, several “intellectuals” convened to deal with a problem so serious it could not be tackled by just one college professor. The question was this: How can professors stop an epidemic of students missing their examinations without jeopardizing student grades by resorting to point deductions?
The problem was so serious that the handful of intellectuals who first noticed the problem – and noticed others noticing the problem – sent out a mass email inviting others to attend a “brown bag” luncheon to brainstorm. They were searching for “solutions”, which would stop short of actually punishing students for missing their examinations.
I certainly have no problem with professors getting together to find “solutions” to difficult “problems.” But I do have a “problem” with the way these professors were characterizing their “problem.”
A better description of their “problem” – one that better reflects its magnitude – would sound something like this: How can we retain the secular/ progressive view of human nature, which is needed to justify secular/ progressive policies, in light of a wealth of evidence to the contrary?
The thoughts of the professors responding to the mass email were enlightening. One complained that she wanted to give her students the benefit of the doubt, but they constantly pushed and tested her. The more she withheld punishment, the more prevalent the undesirable behavior.
Another observed that the more often she does nice things for students, the more often they take advantage of her. She seemed perplexed by the fact that rewarding a missed exam with another administration, thus giving the student more time to prepare, led to more missed exams.
The dilemma of the perplexed professors highlights the fundamental difference between the conservative and the progressive views of human motivation. The former suggests that you can sometimes threaten to do bad things to people and expect good things in return. The latter suggests that you can promise to do good things for people and expect good things in return.
In the 1960s, our government began to put the progressive view of human nature to the test. We launched a War on Poverty in an effort to build a Great Society. Soon, we began to see mountains of data refuting the secular/ progressive view of human nature.
By the end of the first decade of our efforts to build a Great Society, crime in America had skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. The 1960s saw record increases in crime rates, which have yet to be broken.
Progressives thought that giving people welfare, food stamps, and huge increases in the minimum wage would all be nice favors, which would be returned in the form of greater citizen conformity. The fact that it didn’t work has done little to shake the foundations of progressive faith in human decency.
Since the failed effort to build a Great Society there have been repeated calls to build more prisons in order to clean up the mess progressives have created. But, for years, progressives have fought tooth and nail to prevent or slow the expansion of prisons.
The result, of course, has been an increase in homicides and gang-rapes in prison due to prison overcrowding. In short, the progressive view of human nature has produced more violence among both free and captive populations. More people are dying everywhere but the progressive vision of human decency is immortal. It cannot be slain by any wealth of empirical evidence.
More recently, we have seen the effects of progressive gun control policies. Like prisons, guns are reminders of human depravity, which the progressive cannot accept. And so the progressive seeks to ban guns. Nonetheless, in 2008, the Supreme Court lifted a ban on handguns in Washington D.C., which resulted in a 25% decrease in homicides the next year.
The D.C. homicide data speak volumes about human nature. The presence of guns is a threat, which helps many depraved individuals conform to the dictates of the law. Nonetheless, progressives still fight the very reforms that have helped preserve innocent lives. They do so because it is more important that they preserve their vision of human decency.
It isn’t surprising that progressives who cannot manage a classroom cannot also manage “society.” It would be better if the progressive would confine her decision to accommodate, rather than punish, irresponsibility to the classroom. But intellectuals rarely keep their ideas to themselves. They are obliged to impose them on “society.”
Replacing the Judeo-Christian view of human nature with the progressive view of human nature has proven to be a bad idea. And bad ideas have bad consequences for fallen human beings. But progressive hope for the secular transformation of human nature springs eternal.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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