Author: Redactor

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

New-Fashioned Racism

“A deeply divided Supreme Court squared off Wednesday over the future of affirmative action in college admissions,” reports the Washington Post, covering the admissions policy of the University of Texas. The arguments for and against race-based admissions preferences were mostly old hat, but got weird when Justice Alito noted a policy of preferring the children of minority professionals over more-qualified, but poorer, non-minorities:

“I thought the whole purpose of affirmative action was to help the disadvantaged,” Alito said. He asked why a minority child of the “1 percent” should get a “leg up against, let’s say, an Asian or a white applicant whose parents are absolutely average in terms of education and income?”

State universities are allegedly all about equality of opportunity. Favoring the under-performing children of wealthy minority folks doesn’t exactly qualify. As a friend of mine put it, “If the elites have to choose between rubbing elbows with the poor or hanging out with the under-performing children of upper middle class professionals, there’s no contest: administrators much prefer racial diversity over a diversity of economic class and ideas.”

What we have here is a new classism using “anti-racism” as a wedge.

But it is itself racism. It’s just not “old-fashioned racism.”

Barack Obama, way back in 1994 — in the earliest recording of our current president arguing policy — used that phrase (“good old-fashioned racism”) to attack Charles Murray and defend reverse discrimination and massive increases in welfare programs. So, in keeping with his terminology, perhaps we should call today’s race-based “compensatory” policies “new-fashioned racism.”

After all, these policies favor some over others not based on their relevant qualifications — or on the “content of their character” — but, instead, based on their race.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

George Washington

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence; true friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

Categories
government transparency

Dum, Dum Datum

President Obama immediately ballyhooed the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September unemployment rate of 7.8 percent as the logical outcome of the good work he has done.

But the BLS was promoting B.S. . . . according to many conservatives. 

NPR’s talking heads immediately pooh-poohed the idea that there was a conspiracy going on at the BLS. “That’s not how Washington works,” they informed us. And as if of one voice, Washington insiders rallied to the BLS.

Former GE CEO Jack Welch, one of the doubters, defended his skepticism in the Wall St. Journal. BLS data are decidedly not “handled like the gold in Fort Knox, with gun-carrying guards watching their every move, and highly trained, white-gloved super-agents counting and recounting hourly.” His basic take on the allegedly sacrosanct numbers? “Get real.” Welch provided more than a little reason to suspect “the possibility of subjectivity creeping into the process.” And he noted that skepticism is not just a right-wing trait:

I’m not the first person to question government numbers, and hopefully I won’t be the last. Take, for example, one of my chief critics in this go-round, Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers. Back in 2003, Mr. Goolsbee himself, commenting on a Bush-era unemployment figure, wrote in a New York Times op-ed: “the government has cooked the books.”

Truth is, unemployment figures are not tallies of surefire data, but statistical extrapolations based on surveys. They are more like Gallup Poll results — but perhaps less reliable.

And Welch is right to conclude that “the coming election is too important to be decided on a number,” especially that kind of number.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling First Amendment rights free trade & free markets

Demanding Demands

Logic and evidence? Or bullying and intimidation?

A member of a local Pennsylvania teachers union has demanded the resignation of the vice president of the West Chester Area School Board, Heidi Adsett, for suggesting in a letter to the editor that, instead of threatening to strike, teachers unsatisfied with hefty compensation packages try their luck elsewhere.Free Speech Zone

Adsett had also said that Pennsylvania should ban teacher strikes.

The member of the West Chester Education Association spoke up at the school board meeting after the letter had been published, objecting to Adsett’s statement on the grounds that it expressed “publicly venomous animosity [against] our teachers,” and clashed with support for public education. Other union members applauded. Others professed confusion about whether Adsett was speaking officially for the whole board.

In his report on the fracas, Ben Velderman quotes the president of Stop Teacher Strikes, Simon Campbell, who observes that congressmen “are interviewed all the time. None of them say, ‘Well, I want to make it clear that I’m not representing the whole of Congress.’”

Union defenders “can’t argue the facts,” says Adsett, “so they have to try and argue by bullying and intimidation.”

Whether public employees should be permitted to strike is debatable. Were education privately run and unions not free to bully persons crossing picket lines, then parents, taxpayers and schools wouldn’t have to worry about being pushed into paying teachers far above market rates. But that’s not the current situation. We have public schools, and our democratically elected school board members should be just as free to speak — to debate — as voters are.

Democracy, after all, requires free speech. And public education, for all its problems, surely doesn’t require democracy’s suppression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Ludwig von Mises

Law did not leap into life as something perfect and complete. For thousands of years it has grown and it is still growing. The age of its maturity — the age of impregnable peace — may never arrive.

Categories
incumbents term limits

Chavez Shocker

Having chucked presidential term limits, Venezuela dictator Hugo Chavez recently won re-election to a third six-year term in office. Not surprising.

What is surprising, according to Francisco Toro writing in the New Republic, is that the election was so close.

Toro, writing before election day, wasn’t surprised that the failings of Chavez’s socialistic and repressive policies have been getting harder for the public to evade. But in an “increasingly autocratic petrostate, the advantages of incumbency are so deep, [re-election] really ought to be a walk.”

Toro saw Chavez’s own campaign as awkward and unpersuasive, the challenger’s as smart and effective. Come October 7, though, the former tramped across the finish line with 54 percent, a comfortable if smaller margin than he had enjoyed in previous elections.

Chavez’s advantages included rules for political ads permitting each candidate to advertise only three minutes a day on each broadcast outlet — even as the incumbent ran frequent “institutional” ads promoting the government’s doings that looked an awful lot like campaign ads. During the campaign, his government often claimed emergency to take over the air waves to spout campaign pitches. All this is in the context of years of efforts to increase the number of state-owned media and browbeat private media into uncritical silence.

The more tyrannical a government becomes, the more urgently a citizenry needs term limits in self-protection. Yet the more tyrannical a government becomes, the more easily it can get rid of such safeguards.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Ludwig von Mises

It is not true that the masses are vehemently asking for socialism and that there is no means to resist them. The masses favour socialism because they trust the socialist propaganda of the intellectuals. The intellectuals, not the populace, are moulding public opinion. It is a lame excuse of the intellectuals that they must yield to the masses. They themselves have generated the socialist ideas and indoctrinated the masses with them. No proletarian or son of a proletarian has contributed to the elaboration of the interventionist and socialist programmes. Their authors were all of bourgeois background. The esoteric writings of dialectical materialism, of Hegel, the father both of Marxism and of German aggressive nationalism, the books of Georges Sorel, of Gentile and of Spengler were not read by the average man; they did not move the masses directly. It was the intellectuals who popularized them.

The intellectual leaders of the peoples have produced and propagated the fallacies which are on the point of destroying liberty and Western civilization. The intellectuals alone are responsible for the mass slaughters which are the characteristic mark of our century. They alone can reverse the trend and pave the way for a resurrection of freedom.

Categories
Thought

Arthur Goldberg

If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies

China Syndrome, 2012

The two major presidential candidates, incumbent Obama and challenger Romney, must spend their final weeks of the campaign appealing to

  1. Members of their respective parties disappointed enough to stay home on election day — or vote the dreaded “Third Party” ticket;
  2. Independent voters apt to find something distasteful about both candidates;
  3. The apathetic and the uninformed.

How to appeal to all three groups simultaneously? Well, go for the old standby: fear and hatred of foreigners.

This year, it’s the Chinese.

Romney started the China-bashing by calling our Chinese trading partners “cheaters.” Apparently he is much vexed about how the Chinese don’t respect established intellectual property rights, “stealing” our technology, “everything from computers to fighter jets.” Of course, this mainly happens after “we” set up manufacturing plants for that technology there. He charged that President Obama has not deigned to “stand up to China.”

Earlier, he had accused China of manipulating its money in its favor. He seems to have dropped that, perhaps out of embarrassment — our own Fed’s monetary manipulations, after all, dwarf China’s.

The Obama campaign responded by avoiding the intellectual property issue just as Romney now avoids the monetary one, calling Romney himself a “cheater.” You see, in his Bain Capital days, Romney invested in firms that relocated jobs to “low wage countries like China.” Romney, we are told, has “never stood up to China.”

By which is meant: Romney engaged in globalism and opposed protectionism.

Is Mr. Obama really suggesting that prosperity will come if we shrink from global competition and enact barriers to international trade in goods and services?

The biggest problem the U.S. economy faces isn’t Beijing; it’s Washington.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
links

Townhall: United We Term-Limit

Over at Townhall, a defense of term limits. Read the column (in which I reference a conference I attended yesterday, see image at right), and come back here. If you don’t find the links, below, satisfying, search the archives of This Is Common Sense (this very site) and you’ll find quite a lot about term limits.

  • U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton is the Supreme Court case that badly decided federal limits, and limited the term-limits movement, by denying to the states the power to regulate the terms of their own representatives.
  • The ballot initiative is explained, also, at Ballotpedia.
  • Term limits remain overwhelmingly popular, as shown by a recent poll of Illinois voters.