Tag: New York Times

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Common Sense folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

Evil Capitalists Hook Brazil On Eating

Brazil, junk food, capitalism, free markets, New York Times, folly

Have you heard the latest?

More and more peoples around the world these days have the unfortunate misfortune of having adequate food — not merely vegetables either!! — thanks to the ruthlessly profit-seeking food producers and their unconscionable engagement in the division of labor, capital accumulation, and international trade.

It’s right there in The New York Times, which is, as you know, the paper of record.

“DealBook: How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food.”

Dastardly! Those Big American Businessmen must have kidnapped the Brazilians, strapped them into chairs, and pumped Doritos into those poor souls with a syringe. Heaven knows, the fecklessly irresponsible Brazilians can’t be held responsible for their own diets.

How bad is it?

This bad: “As growth slows in wealthy countries, Western food companies are aggressively expanding in developing nations, contributing to obesity and health problems.”

One expert quoted in the story (no hungry people consulted) says, “Part of the problem . . . is a natural tendency for people to overeat as they can afford more food.”

Worse than Hurricane Irma!

Thanks to the Times’s aggressive investigative journalism, we know that these brazenly food-selling companies do not even nag their international customers to be careful about their diets. Ergo, it’s chips and other indiscriminately convenient snacks for everybody, no strings attached.

It’s become all too easy to be well-fed and overfed and mis-fed.

Thanks a lot, capitalism.

Oh for the good old hunting-and-gathering days when human beings spent much of their time starving, and the world had the human population of Binghamton. No problem with anyone gorging on Twinkies and Doritos back then. No problem of epidemics of corpulence.

We’ve lost that swell paradise . . . perhaps forever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration based on original photo by David Goehring on Flickr.

 

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets general freedom local leaders media and media people nannyism national politics & policies porkbarrel politics responsibility tax policy too much government

Ballots & Books

New York Times, taxes, tax, libraries, tax cuts, big government, public services, free markets

The people of Roseburg, Oregon, aren’t paying enough in taxes. That’s the upshot of Kirk Johnson’s recent New York Times article, “Where Anti-Tax Fervor Means ‘All Services Will Cease.’”

“For generations in America,” readers are informed, “small cities . . . declared their optimism and civic purpose with grand libraries that rose above the clutter of daily life and commerce.”

And then, the unthinkable: “last fall, Douglas County residents voted down a ballot measure that would have added about $6 a month to the tax bill on a median-priced home and saved the libraries from a funding crisis.”

How dare voters so vote? Didn’t they know the Times wanted those libraries fully funded? Where was the “optimism and civic purpose” of Roseburgians?

“We pay enough taxes,” said auto mechanic Zach Holly.

“The trust is gone from people who are paying the bills,” acknowledged an elected commissioner one county over.

Even Jerry Wyatt, who voted for the library tax, decried that, “There’s no end of waste” in government, adding, “We need less people on the county payroll.”

Meanwhile, the Times reporter explained that “few places” are confronting “the tangled implications . . . more vividly than in southwest Oregon.” It’s not merely “lights out, one by one, for the [library] system’s 11 branches.” There have also been “cuts to the sheriff’s budget . . . [ending] round-the-clock staffing.”

“If a crime is reported after midnight there,” Johnson wrote, “best not hold your breath for a response.”

This is “what happens when citizens push the logic of shrinking government to its extremes.”

To the extreme, eh? Hmmm. Doesn’t seem bad at all.

Douglas County voters made a free choice about libraries and taxes.

Close the book on it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* There have also been worthwhile innovations in county government due to the budget cuts. Nearby Curry County combined its juvenile justice department with its parks department to save scarce funds. Then, the parks department began using juvenile offenders to clean up the parks. By engaging teenagers in meaningful work, the policy pushed recidivism rates way down and now Curry County has one of the lowest rates of youths committing a second offense.

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Accountability ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

Gray Lady Casts Shadow

Gray Lady, New York Times, NYT, political correctness, free speech, illustration

Earlier in the week, I noted how media manipulation of presidential poll results by not considering the Johnson and Stein campaigns distorting the race. I speculated why journalists would do such a thing, but didn’t have space for an exhaustive list.

But it’s clear that one of the things journalists aim to do is retain their once-vaunted position as gatekeepers, as the idea-people and fact-dispersers who define the terms of allowable debate.

By ignoring the competition, they narrow the terms of this year’s presidential campaign, allowing their inexplicable favorite, Hillary Clinton, an advantage going to the polls.

But poll taking and reporting is not the half of it. Tim Graham, writing at Newsbusters, notes how the Gray Lady rigs the intellectual field. “The New York Times appears to be playing games again with conservative authors, trying to keep them off its vaunted (and secretively manipulated) Best Sellers list. This has happened to Ted Cruz, to Dinesh D’Souza, and to David Limbaugh.”

And now, Graham tells us, it’s happening to Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel, whose new book, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech, has been doing gangbusters on BookScan’s bestseller list.

The new exposé is sixth on BookScan’s hardcover list. But it’s not even made an appearance on the Times’ “list of the top 20 hardcover bestsellers, despite outselling books that did make the list.”

Would the Gray Lady dare manipulate the figures . . . just to suppress an idea it doesn’t like?

That is, the idea that the Left suppresses speech.

It’s almost too rich to be true.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Gray Lady, New York Times, NYT, political correctness, free speech, illustration

 

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folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people

Nazi by Association

Koch brothers, Nazi, New York Times, shame, Common Sense, illustration

Do haters of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire philanthropists, know no bounds of decency?

Monday’s New York Times squib, “Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says,” is a grand case in point. The article is basically pre-release gossip about a book that hasn’t been published yet: Dark Money, by Jane Mayer, a New Yorker writer. The author focuses on the Kochs and other rich folks who, the article says, served as “the hidden and self-interested hands behind the rise and growth of the modern conservative movement.”

As usual with “progressive” minds, she just assumes that all the billionaires and foundations who have supported her causes over the years cannot also (or: better) be described as “self-interested.”

Her main charge, that the Koch brothers’ father had helped build “the third largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine,” is nothing more than guilt by association. As Dave Robertson, President and Chief Operating Officer of Koch Industries, notes in his official response, the plant in question was built before Hitler had proven himself a tyrant. It’s ridiculous to insinuate that the business deal demonstrates that a family of limited government proponents were somehow in favor of the big government tyrant, Adolf Hitler.

Calumny!

But once made, we may return volley.

Partisans often accuse their enemies of their own worst faults. I’m sure Ms. Mayer is not a Nazi, as such, but her economic ideas are a lot closer to the actual policies of the National Socialist Party than are the Kochs’.

Hence her need to smear first.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Koch brothers, Nazi, New York Times, shame, Common Sense, illustration

 

Categories
folly free trade & free markets

Prophecy Failed

Eggs, New York Times, Economics, collage, photomontage, http://cognitivebiasparade.prosite.com/

In the first week of June we were told to expect egg shortages. The avian flu had infected millions of hens: egg production would plummet.

This was news, reported as “Egg Rationing in America Has Officially Begun.” The Washington Post cited a few signs in Texan retail groceries warning customers that the stores were not in the wholesale biz, supplying eggs for restaurants and the like.

And then the follow-up: On Tuesday the New York Times reported, “Bird Flu Sends Egg Prices Up, but Slowing Demand Prevents Shortages.”

Author Stephanie Strom is probably not responsible for the title. Her copy was not horrible.

It’s hard to get over the title, though. Economist Mike Munger offered his reaction headline: “NY Times Causes Head of Mungowitz to Explode.”

Why?

One word: “but.”

The title should have read, “Bird Flu Sends Egg Prices Up, So Naturally Slowing Demand Prevents Shortages.”

Why that “slowing demand”?

I’ll let Munger explain it:

There can never, NEVER be a shortage if prices are free to adjust. Because a shortage is insufficient supply at current prices. Lagniappe: This was in the “Science” section. Yes, it was.

People buy less when prices rise. So those who value eggs less cede those humpy dumpties to folks who want them more. Fitting. Harmonious!

So the title was witless, Munger insists, “on the order of ‘Water:  Still Wet!’ or ‘That Crazy Sun:  Rising in the East Again This Morning.’”

I like “good news” stories. Too bad the Times wasn’t quite up to delivering the good news that was clearly fit to print.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Eggs

 

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people Second Amendment rights

Times Misfires

NYT-NRA

Time to revise the Times’s motto? Should “all the news that’s fit to print” read “misprint” instead?

Maybe, after the New York Times’s latest editorial snafu, charging the NRA with hypocrisy for banning arms-bearing at its April convention.

According to the editorial, “none of” the attendees were allowed to “come armed with guns that can actually shoot. After all the N.R.A. propaganda about how ‘good guys with guns’ are needed to be on guard across American life . . . the weekend’s gathering of disarmed conventioneers seems the ultimate in hypocrisy. . . . So far, there has been none of the familiar complaint about infringing supposedly sacrosanct Second Amendment. . . .”

But after first hitting print, the text has changed. It was too quickly and conspicuously confirmed that “anyone with a permit valid in Tennessee can ‘come armed [to the convention] with guns that actually shoot,” that “the NRA had no problem with gun owners with the proper gun permits bringing their weapons inside.”

So the Times editorial was edited after initial publication, nixing the reference to “the ultimate in hypocrisy.” The revised online editorial now merely professes dismay that guns won’t be allowed in one of the convention venues . . . but doesn’t mention that this is because of the policy of that particular venue, not the NRA’s.

The editorial still complains that nobody is complaining about alleged Second Amendment infringement no longer attributable to the NRA. Whose alleged hypocrisy was the Times’s original point.

It’s like somebody’s shooting at random and just hoping to hit something.

This is Common Sense. (I mean this, not the Times editorial, is Common Sense.) I’m Paul Jacob.

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NYT-NRA

 

Categories
Accountability media and media people too much government

Belching Cows and Gassy Assumptions

Give New York Times reporter Robert Pear, or perhaps an editor, credit for a provocative headline: “In Final Spending Bill, Salty Food and Belching Cows Are Winners.” This to explain a $1.1 trillion dollar spending bill.

Where’s the money going?

Not to salty food or belching cows. The Times explains that, “like many of its predecessors,” the bill bulges with provisions “to satisfy special interests.” For example?

Pear quickly highlights how “ranchers were spared [from] having to report on pollution from manure,” schools from having to reduce salt or increase whole grain in their lunches, insurance companies from relinquishing tax breaks. These provisions, which incur no new spending, are lumped with one that does involve spending at taxpayer expense, a subsidy for promoting Nevada.

There’s something odd about this sampling of budgetary ingredients. Isn’t there a difference between being left alone and receiving a subsidy or other favor at the expense of others? Because that’s the kind of fundamental distinction blurred or obliterated when all budgetary things applying to particular groups are treated as “stuff to satisfy special interests.”

Politicians concoct zillions of ways to burden and bully people; proposed targets are, sure, “special interests” who may then beg for reprieves. But unlike the beneficiaries of specific subsidies or competitor-stomping regulations, we’ve all got a stake in not being harassed.

Protecting our lives and freedom is what government is properly for. And minding our own business is the opposite of interfering with somebody else’s.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

My Simpler Solution

Merry Election Day! Despite this weekend’s proposal, in the New York Times, to “Cancel the Midterms.” The authors, David Schanzer and Jay Sullivan, begin by lamenting the predictable pattern of midterm elections, especially in second-term presidencies. And then they say the very existence of midterms — the mere possibility of the House and a third of the Senate reshuffling every two years — “is harmful to American politics.”

The main impact of the midterm election in the modern era has been to weaken the president, the only government official (other than the powerless vice president) elected by the entire nation. . . . The realities of the modern election cycle are that we spend almost two years selecting a president with a well-developed agenda, but then, less than two years after the inauguration, the midterm election cripples that same president’s ability to advance that agenda.


The nut of the argument comes down to the notion that it would be best to rig the game to avoid conflict and dispute for as long as possible so that an “agenda” — whatever that may be — can be firmly put in place.

It’s the very opposite idea of the Founding Fathers’, who were trying to set up a system of checks and balances to preclude big, barely popular change. And who feared a powerful executive.

The Midterm Cancellation proposal gets absurd towards the end, where the authors tack on legislative term limits — an awfully generous 24 years — to counteract the extended terms their proposal requires.

Counteroffer: let’s start with term limits. Real ones.

Break up the incumbency power in our sclerotic Congress; don’t rob the people of biannual input.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

The Missing Source

The New York Times says something is missing from comments by President Obama on how government has funded scientific research. What is it? The fact that the research can be, has been, and increasingly is funded privately.

Sometimes private efforts have immediate application, as is often true in the firms of electronics, pharmaceutical and other innovative industries.

But scientific research is also funded by wealthy individuals — James Simons, David Koch, Bill Gates, and Eric Schmidt come to mind immediately — without prospect of immediate financial payoff. Such wealthy men have financed investigations of disease, “hunts for dinosaur bones and giant sea creatures,” and “innovative ships, undersea craft and giant telescopes — as well as the first private mission to deep space.”

Good thing or bad thing, these privately inquiring minds?

In light of the billions too often splurged on wasteful or bad (but politically faddish) research programs, all without the assent of the source of those billions — us taxpayers — I see private inquiry into Nature and Nature’s laws as only a good thing.

We needn’t agree about the value of any particular private project. Maybe if you and I were funding research, we’d have different priorities from Bloomberg, Gates or whomever. But when they waste their money, it’s their money being wasted, not ours. And if the research we prefer is important enough to us, what’s to stop us from raising funds from like-minded others to enable the inquiries we want scientists to pursue?

In a free society, nothing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people

Countdown to Zero

The New York Times has a timeline of the progress of Obamacare.

It’s okay as far as it goes. Which is not too far, since only the most recent dates seem readily accessible. And since the Times editors blindly favor the Obama-assault.

But sure, labor leaders have both criticized and praised Obamacare (9/12/13), some states have fought it (or “moved to undercut” it) (9/18/13); Pennsylvania State University has decided not to fine employees $100 a month for being too reticent about personal details on “wellness” questionnaires (9/19/13). Etc.

A headshake-worthy aspect of the chronology, however, is its showcasing of opinion published in the Times itself — as if each Times-punditarian rebuke of opposition to medical serfdom were another epochal event in the steady march of the wonderful Obamacare. So Gail Collins “chastises Republicans” for jeopardizing global stability to oppose Obamacare (9/19/13). Paul Krugman avers that the GOP, “hysterical” over Obamacare, is changing from stupid party to crazy party (9/20/13).

Fine, fine. But toss in some pro-free-market, anti-socialist and anti-Krugman events also, okay? Like the first publication of Ludwig von Mises’s comprehensive, devastating critique of Socialism (1922). The publication of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, sweeping saga of social collapse as feverish proto-Krugmaniacs stamp freedom out of existence (1957). The day Mike Tanner elaborated “Why Freedom Is the Key to Health Care Reform” (9/5/09). And let’s not forget John Goodman’s seminal post, “When It Comes to Healthcare Issues, Paul Krugman Is Wrong 100% of the Time” (5/30/13).

All that being said, a timeline is one thing, “progress” quite another. The word implies a good goal. Though hey, doctors do sometimes speak of the “progress” of a cancer or a fatal disease.

In the end, a timeline of Obamacare must include its own demise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.