Category: ideological culture

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free trade & free markets ideological culture insider corruption

Billions and Billionaires

Where do billionaires come from?

Douglas French, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, reminds us where the term “millionaire” came from. It was

coined in 1720 during John Law’s “Mississippi Bubble” to describe those making vast fortunes in Law’s Mississippi Company stock that rose from 150 livres to 10,000 in the matter of months. But just as quickly, the stock and the currency wildly inflated by Law’s Banque Royale, crashed and Law was forced into exile.

Today’s plethora of billionaires — which in 15 years has increased fivefold — is (argues French) at least in part the result of Ben Bernanke’s monetary manipulations. He’s the John Law of our time. “What were once Law’s millionaires are now Bernanke’s billionaires. . . . Bernanke has been on the job for six years, and the Gates, Buffetts, and Slims of the world are reaping the benefit. But for how long?”

Keeping track of today’s billionaires has become both a form of popular entertainment (Forbes’s list) as well as a topic for careful study. The political “philanthropy” of George Soros and Charles Koch inspires both enthusiasm and dread in activists, left and right; Warren Buffett has become something of a hero to the 99 percenters, what with his repeated pitches for higher taxes on the rich.

But Buffett is a sly one. He makes his money in a variety of ways — one of which Peter Schiff recently explained: “Buffett actually stated in September 2008 that he would not have invested in Goldman Sachs if not for the implicit guarantee of federal assistance. As a result, he profited at the expense of taxpayers at the very time when they were losing their savings in the markets.”

Not all billionaires are created equal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Into Each Life, a Little Romney Falls

Some things I just “don’t get.”

How can either pro-lifers or Obamacare opponents trust Mitt Romney? Sure, he says he’s pro-life and he pledges to repeal the Democrats’ health care reform package. But for years he said he was for abortion rights; he switched in what’s been called a “flip-flop-flip” while governor of Massachusetts. Further, he signed into law the state’s health care program that served as Obamacare’s blueprint.

Not exactly a resumé upon which to build trust.

It’s tough to change the status quo. Perhaps that very fact drives many to such improbable avatars as Mitt.

But it’s even tougher to change the weather, and that’s also in the news.

Pat Robertson says that if we’d pray more, we’d be hit with fewer tornadoes.

I understand that prayer can have healing powers; I recognize that the theory of Divine influence on natural phenomena has a long, august history. But I learned, long ago, that rain (along with other natural occurrences) falls upon both the just and the unjust.

I read that somewhere.

But then, proponents of anthropogenic global warming think driving cars, burning coal and raising cows causes harsher storm weather, too — and that if we’d all just ride bicycles to work, we’d have Robertson’s promised “fewer tornadoes” — so perhaps implausible-to-me meteorological causation has a fairly universal appeal.

When left and right converge on the weather, it’s time to return to subjects I know more about. (Stay tuned. I’ll be here.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture

A Nickel’s Worth of Freedom

“If we are going to pay for your contraceptives,” said Rush Limbaugh on air, referring to Ms. Sandra Fluke’s congressional testimony, “and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

In my Townhall column this weekend, “’Tis a Pity He’s a Boor,” I responded with a “No, thanks.” But I did defend what I took to be the point Rush was trying to make: “The issue isn’t about contraceptives, but the right to choose . . . on your own nickel.”

The flak Rush received became an avalanche of advertiser pull-outs from his show. And an apology.

And this all points to something interesting about freedom.

Rush has freedom of speech. He would still have it if every advertiser in the world refused to touch him and he took to blogging. His freedom requires no one to support him. Free speech doesn’t force anyone to listen – or advertise.

Similarly, Ms. Fluke has freedom of association, sexually and otherwise, including her relationships with the university in question and its contracted insurance company. But such freedom doesn’t obligate her school or insurance company or other consumers (through passed-on costs) to pay for her contraceptives. We all have freedom.

The same freedom of contract that allows advertisers to drop Rush’s show also allows businesses to choose employee benefit plans, workers to choose where they will work, and insurance companies to decide what terms they will offer.

Or it should. And in the specific case of contraception coverage did, until the Obama Administration dictated otherwise.

Several nasty words ago, that’s what started this brouhaha.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies video

Video: Nick Gillespie Interviewed by Jon Caldara

There’s a lot of interesting talk here at “The Devil’s Advocate”:

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ideological culture

Fizzle-Gate

When documents from Heartland Institute went public, showing strategy and funding for various climate-related research and advocacy projects, some folks immediately hailed it as a scandal to compare with the “Climate-gate” email embarrassment of sometime back. “Denier-gate” and even “Heartland-gate” were the hastily suffixed monikers for the news story.

But then it was discovered that the leak was the result of an inquiry made by a major climate-change activist, Peter Gleick, who had been slipped some allegedly damning documents and asked Heartland for more information . . . posing as a member of the group’s board of directors.

Even more discrediting to Gleick is the fact that he published the original anonymously supplied documents — some of which appear to be fabrications — along with documents he obtained from Heartland, as if they all had the same provenance.

Worse yet? His own defense. Saying that “rational public debate is desperately needed,” he confesses that his own “judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”

Absurd: Gleick’s opponents were not preventing debate, they were insisting on real debate rather than automatic, quasi-religious acceptance of “scientific findings.” Worries about who supports what may be interesting, especially in a political context, but are not relevant to the search for truth or to scientific debate. Relying on who supports what and whom commits the ad hominem fallacy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture local leaders

Choosing Liberty

At 5:00 pm today, I’ll close my office door and take a few minutes to quietly reflect upon heroism, honor, courage and fealty to truth.

I’ll grieve for those who’ve suffered the sometimes tragic consequences of correctly answering Patrick Henry’s historic question: “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?”

Sixty-nine years ago today, at 5:00 pm Munich time, three German youths — Sophie Scholl, her brother, Hans, and their friend Christoph Probst — were put to death by the Nazis. They were decapitated, guillotined, within hours of being found guilty in a show trial.

Their crime? Standing up against the most evil crime imaginable.

The charge was treason — treason committed courageously against the Third Reich. Richard Hanser’s 1979 book on the subject is aptly titled, A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students Against Hitler. Sadly, it’s now out of print, but thankfully still available.

The Scholls had a history of standing up to the Nazis. Hans was arrested in 1937 for involvement in the German Youth Movement, an unapproved group. In 1942, Hans and Sophie’s father, Robert, the former mayor of Forchtenberg, was imprisoned for several months for telling his secretary, “This Hitler is God’s scourge on mankind.”

So, perhaps it was no surprise that the Scholls helped organize a group known as The White Rose, comprised mainly of students at the University of Munich. These young people saw Hitler and the Nazis as pure, unadulterated evil — as a threat to all that is good and true.

They were convinced that most Germans felt the same way. But they knew folks were too afraid to speak up, to stand up, and to resist the evil in front of them. After all, the price would almost assuredly be death, and life is mighty dear.

The White Rose dissidents found the courage to put the “lovely intangibles” of justice and decency and truth ahead of safety and even life itself. In addition to painting “Down with Hitler” graffiti on buildings in Munich, the group produced six pamphlets from June 1942 until February 1943 urging Germans to rise up against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The leaflets were distributed to students at the University, where they caused quite a stir, as well as throughout Germany — some even making their way to occupied countries.

The White Rose leaflets and anti-Nazi graffiti unnerved the Gestapo. After all, this brazen public rebuke to their authority might inspire others to rise up in opposition. In a state otherwise tormented into silence, the totalitarians were frustrated in their inability to find and crush this resistance.

Then, on February 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie were caught distributing leaflets at the University, and promptly arrested. Hans was only 24 years old, Sophie just 21. Hans was carrying a note from Christoph, a 22-year old medical student, who was quickly arrested as well.

Afraid of public sympathy for these young people, the Nazi state moved quickly, putting the three on trial just four days later, on February 22. Roland Freisler, chief justice of the People’s Court of the Greater German Reich, came in to preside, and to lambast and scream at the three “traitors.” At one point, the judge asked how the three could turn against the country that reared them. Sophie stoically responded, “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare to express themselves as we did.”

The judge sentenced all three to death. Hours later, after the Scholls’ parents had visited, but before Christoph Probst’s wife, who was in the hospital having their third child, could see her husband one last time, the three were taken to the guillotine. Hans Scholl’s last words were: “Es lebe die Freiheit!” (Long live freedom!).

The Scholls and Probst were not the last of The White Rose activists to die for speaking truth to tyranny. Co-conspirators Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf were put to death later in 1943, as was University of Munich Professor Kurt Huber, in whom the students had confided. Others involved in the effort were sent to prison.

Professor Huber, believing, unlike his young friends, that Germany would still win the war, said at his trial, “We do not want to fritter away our short lives in chains, even if they are golden chains of prosperity and power.”

Today, I’ll think about the Munich students’ revolt against Hitler. And thank them. And thank all those, today and throughout history, who have risked, suffered, or died, because they chose liberty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture too much government

Moving to China?

Venture capitalist Eric X. Li, in an op-ed for the New York Times, “Why China’s Political Model Is Superior,” credits the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre with producing the “stability” that “ushered in a generation of growth and prosperity.”

As for America, Li explains that our problem is an “expanded” political franchise, “resulting in a greater number of people participating in more and more decisions.”

“Elected representatives have no minds of their own and respond only to the whims of public opinion as they seek re-election,” Li informs, and “special interests manipulate the people into voting for ever-lower taxes and higher government spending, sometimes even supporting self-destructive wars.”

Mr. Li points to California and predicts an American “future” of “endless referendums, paralysis and insolvency.”

But wait a second . . . Americans have no initiative or referendum powers at the national level. The people didn’t vote for this level of taxes, spending, war or massive debt – our elite political leaders did that. Too much control by the people? Hardly. Too little.

Note that the national government most affected by initiatives and referendums is Switzerland, which also has the world’s highest per capita income.

But, as Li tells us, “China is on a different path. Its leaders are prepared to allow greater popular participation in political decisions if and when it is conducive to economic development and favorable to the country’s national interests . . .” After all, “political rights . . . should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on the needs and conditions of the nation.”

Those negotiations have left Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo in a Chinese prison.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture video

Video: The Importance of Institutions

You can’t free up society all on your lonesome:

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First Amendment rights ideological culture national politics & policies

Contra Mandated Contraception Coverage

Regulators spawned by “Obamacare” have mandated that employer-provided medical insurance plans provide contraception as a benefit. 

The problem, as currently reported and debated, is that only churches are exempted — church-run or -affiliated hospitals, for example, are not. And so Catholic hospitals, along with other religious-based charitable endeavors, must conform, despite their commitment to age-old ideas about the sanctity of life, which they say contraception and abortifacients, especially (some contraceptive methods are de facto abortion-inducing), abridge.

Many conservatives argue that the mandate thus runs afoul of the First Amendment. But it turns out that many Republican politicians have supported similar mandates in several states.

Mike Huckabee signed one such mandate into law in Arkansas.

No big news that GOP politicians are often just as bad as Democrats, of course. But forget, if you can, the First Amendment angle. The mandate runs afoul of something even more fundamental: common sense.

Adding an umpteenth mandate to the list of regulations government places on contracts amongst employers, employees, and insurance companies hardly passes the smell test. The more benefits that government insists you contract for, the higher your insurance rates. The higher the rates, fewer are those who would willingly buy, thus scuttling the whole point of “health care reform.”

We ostensibly want more people to purchase major medical insurance. Not fewer.

It’s possible that some reformers seek precisely that, to put insurance companies out of business, leaving only government to take up the slack, as a “single payer.”

In the case of Republican reformers, however, is there a hidden agenda or just mere foolishness?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Food Stamp Stimulus

Yesterday, we discussed the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare’s new rule testing the financial assets of food stamp recipients to determine whether or not they qualify for the benefit.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack recently traveled to the Keystone State to caution against restricting access to food stamps — officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — on the basis of a person’s financial assets. He contended that implementing the means test would cost money and that it wouldn’t “save the Commonwealth a single dime.”Tom Vilsack points a finger

State officials suggest Secretary Vilsack is way off on the cost of implementation. Moreover, it seems odd to argue there will be no savings at a new conference stuffed full of shrill warnings that too many poor people would lose assistance.

But two of Vilsack’s other arguments really caught my attention. First, he claimed the SNAP program is an “economic extender,” which creates agricultural jobs and positions at grocery stores and convenience marts. Second, he asserted that for each food stamp dollar provided by government an additional $1.80 to $1.90 in economic activity is generated.

In other words, food stamps stimulate the economy. It’s almost as if, even if there were no folks down on their luck, we’d still want to spread around some food stamp money for all the good it does.

Vilsack made absolutely no mention of the economic activity interrupted when government took that same dollar from the person who earned it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.