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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; economics</title>
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		<title>What Is Income Redistribution?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/what-is-income-redistribution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-is-income-redistribution</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/what-is-income-redistribution/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Aug 2014 04:56:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew Klavan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income redistribution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Thomas Piketty]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238592</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/LUuDw6-sUes" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In which our host explains the leftist fantasy that is income redistribution to himself.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<blockquote><p>I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p>Thomas Picketty’s new book Capital in the 21st Century has excited leftists with its call for more income redistribution.  The Financial Times and others say the books’ data are suspiciously skewed but the New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman says he’s received confirmation of Picketty’s numbers on an interplanetary communication device that you can make yourself out of ordinary tinfoil you find at home.</p>
<p>Today, to clarify the underlying issues, the Revolting Truth presents this helpful Q&amp;A.</p>
<p>Q: What is income redistribution?</p>
<p>A: Income redistribution is when you go to work or start a business or make an investment — and earn money — and the government takes the money away from you and gives it to someone else.</p>
<p>Q: So you mean it’s stealing?</p>
<p>A:  No, it’s income redistribution.</p>
<p>Q:  But what if I won’t give them my money?</p>
<p>A:  Then armed men come to your house and take it.</p>
<p>Q: So then it’s armed robbery?</p>
<p>A:  No, it’s income redistribution.</p>
<p>Q:  Well, when the men try to take my money at gunpoint, what if I call the police?</p>
<p>A:  The men are the police.</p>
<p>Q:  The police are robbing me at gunpoint???</p>
<p>A:  It’s income redistribution!</p>
<p>Q:  What if I have a gun too?</p>
<p>A:  That would be wrong.</p>
<p>Q:  If they’re robbing me at gunpoint, why is it wrong for me to defend myself with a gun?</p>
<p>A:  Huh?</p>
<p>Q: Look, instead of taking my money away to give to other people, why not just give those other people jobs?</p>
<p>A:  It’s because there aren’t enough jobs to go around.</p>
<p>Q: Why not?</p>
<p>A:  Because people aren’t spending enough or creating enough businesses or investing enough.</p>
<p>Q:  But that’s because you took their money away!</p>
<p>A:  Right!  That’s income redistribution!</p>
<p>Q:  Let me get this straight.  We need more income redistribution because there’s too much income redistribution?</p>
<p>A:  Congratulations.  Now you’re smarter than Thomas Picketty.</p>
<p>Q:  That’s it.  I’m buying a gun.</p>
<p>A:  But it’s income redistribution!</p>
<p>Q:  Pound sand, you Communist thug.</p>
<p>Well, I hope this handy guide has been helpful in understanding Capital in the 21st Century.</p>
<p>Q:  Come near me again and I’ll blow your head off!</p>
<p>I’m Andrew Klavan with the Revolting Truth.</p></blockquote>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<item>
		<title>A Latin American Leftist&#8217;s Second Thoughts</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/a-latin-american-leftists-second-thoughts/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-latin-american-leftists-second-thoughts</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Jun 2014 04:40:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eduardo Galeano]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hugo Chavez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Latin America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[manifesto]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[renounce]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wrong]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233265</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Eduardo Galeano disavows his leftist-beloved manifesto. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/6a00d8341c575d53ef0148c7f2992c970c.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233266" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/6a00d8341c575d53ef0148c7f2992c970c.jpg" alt="6a00d8341c575d53ef0148c7f2992c970c" width="297" height="292" /></a>“This brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America,” reads the <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Veins-Latin-America-Centuries/dp/184668742X"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Amazon description of Eduardo Galeano’s <i>The Open Veins of Latin America</i></span></a>, the book Venezuelan leftist Hugo Chavez presented to U.S. President Barack Obama in 2009. “It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.”</p>
<p>Published in 1971, <i>The Open Veins of Latin America</i> was a bestseller and has become a keystone of the left-wing canon on American college campuses. Trouble is, the book’s 73-year-old Uruguayan author now considers the book’s rhetoric “extremely leaden” and concedes that back in the day he didn’t know much about economics or the way the world works.</p>
<p>“I know it took real courage — even gallantry — for Galeano to publicly correct himself,” wrote exiled Cuban journalist <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/379158/idiots-lose-their-religion-carlos-alberto-montaner"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Carlos Alberto Montaner in <i>National Review</i></span></a>. “It’s not easy to admit when you are wrong. And it is even more difficult when you are a hero to so many, as Galeano has been.”</p>
<p>In 1996 Montaner teamed with Peruvian author Alvaro Vargas Llosa and Colombian journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Perfect-Latin-American-Idiot/dp/156833236X"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot</i></span></a>. One chapter, “The Idiot’s Bible,” Montaner says,</p>
<blockquote><p>“was devoted to explaining what Galeano himself now confirms: that the author knew very little about economics, and what little he thought he knew was totally wrong.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The authors’ summary of Galeano’s book, “We’re poor; it’s their fault” even showed up in a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/books/eduardo-galeano-disavows-his-book-the-open-veins.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>New York Times</i> piece by Larry Rohter headlined “Author Changes His Mind on ’70s Manifesto: Eduardo Galeano Disavows His Book ‘The Open Veins.’”</span></a> The article noted that <i>The Caviar Left</i> author Rodrigo Constantino had blamed Galeano’s analysis for many of Latin America’s ills and said the Uruguayan “<span style="color: #272727;">should feel really guilty for the damage he caused.”</span></p>
<p style="color: #272727;">But the caviar left thought otherwise.</p>
<p>Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, who authored a foreword for <i>Open Veins</i>, told Rohter that Galeano “may have changed, and I didn’t notice it, but I don’t think so.” Michael Yates, of the leftist Monthly Review Press, told the <i>Times</i> that “the book is an entity independent of the writer and anything he might think now.” So in the style of Hillary Clinton, “what difference does it make” if the author changed his mind about his central thesis? Several professors told the <i>Times</i> that they would take account of Galeano’s views but others discount his change of mind.</p>
<p>“Rather than disavowing the book entirely,” University of Pennsylvania graduate student <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2014/05/27/much-ado-about-nothing-the-times-non-story-about-eduardo-galeanos-non-apology/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Adam Goodman wrote</span></a>, “it would seem Galeano offered a critique of it and its young author, with the benefit of hindsight and forty-plus years of experience, both lived and learned.” However, discussion of the book’s limitations, <span style="color: #424242;">“whether based on content, style, or in the framing, is admirable and potentially productive for the Latin American left.”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Andy Baker, political scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of <i>The Market and the Masses in Latin America</i>, weighed in with a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/06/02/latin-americans-are-embracing-globalization-and-their-former-colonial-masters/"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Washington Post</i> blog</span></a>. Baker noted that “</span>Latin America is the region that spawned dependency theory, which was the neo-Marxist body of scholarly thought that informed Galeano’s critique of international trade.” But despite Galeano, data shows that many Latin Americans are favorable toward international trade, multinational corporations, and the United States. “The most pro-American countries,” says Baker, “are those most victimized by U.S. military forays,” the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, for example.</p>
<p>When it comes to their economic ills, Baker explains, Latin Americans do not blame Spain, the IMF, Warren Buffett “or even the U.S. military, as Galeano did in his previous life.” Instead “voters in Latin America exact retribution against governments that oversee sluggish economies, and the ham-fisted attempts by Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, to continue blaming Venezuela’s downward spiral on the United States are increasingly falling on deaf ears.” So for the University of Colorado political scientist, “Galeano’s decision to recant his old work in the face of a new reality and new evidence on globalization was intellectually brave and admirable. As it turns out, Latin American citizens were way ahead of him.”</p>
<p><span style="color: #212121;">So were authors such as Carlos Alberto Montaner and Alvaro Vargas Llosa, author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Liberty-Latin-America-Hundred-Oppression/dp/0374185743"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression</i></span></a></span>. So was Hernando De Soto, author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Other-Path-Hernando-Soto/dp/0465016103"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism</i></span></a>. American professors willing to reconsider Galeano’s <i>Open Veins</i> should open their courses to works like this.</p>
<p>President Obama has not responded to Eduardo Galeano’s critique of the book Hugo Chavez gave him in 2009. Like Galeano, Obama shows little knowledge of economic classics such as F.A. Hayek’s <i>The Road to Serfdom</i>.  Obama already believed that the United States was essentially a colonial looter but unlike Galeano the president shows the inability to change his mind based on facts and history.</p>
<p>To publicly correct oneself, as Carlos Alberto Montaner noted, takes “real courage – even gallantry.” The President of the United States just doesn’t have it.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Why the Left Doesn&#8217;t Care about Bad Economic News</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dennis-prager/why-the-left-doesnt-care-about-bad-economic-news/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-the-left-doesnt-care-about-bad-economic-news</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 14 May 2014 04:15:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[California]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prosperity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225462</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Americans' financial losses are the Democratic Party's gain. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/unemployment-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225463" alt="unemployment-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/unemployment-1.jpg" width="298" height="197" /></a>This perception is wrong. It is their goals that are irreconcilable. And until conservatives, independents and the Republican Party understand this, it will not be possible to defeat the left.</p>
<p>Take economic indicators. Most conservatives talk and act as if bad economic news disturbs the left as much as it disturbs them. It doesn&#8217;t.</p>
<p>Almost everywhere the left is in control — in California, for example — the economic news is awful. But this has no effect on the ruling Democrats, the Los Angeles Times editorial page, New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman or others on the left.</p>
<p>There is one overriding philosophical reason and one political reason for this. But before I identify them, permit me to note some of the economic facts of life in California.</p>
<p>Unless otherwise noted, the following data have been culled by Chapman University Professor Joel Kotkin, and published in the Wall Street Journal, the Orange County Register and elsewhere. (For the record, Kotkin is a self-described &#8220;Truman Democrat&#8221; who voted for the Democrat governor Jerry Brown of California.)</p>
<p>—In the last 20 years, about 4 million more people have left California than came in from other states. Most of those leaving are young families.</p>
<p>—In the last 15 years, one-third of California&#8217;s industrial employment base has disappeared. That&#8217;s 600,000 jobs that have disappeared.</p>
<p>—California has the 48th-worst business tax climate. (The Tax Foundation)</p>
<p>—California&#8217;s electricity prices are 50 percent higher than the national average.</p>
<p>—Middle-class workers, those who earn more than $48,000, pay a top income tax rate of 9.3 percent. That&#8217;s higher than what millionaires pay in 47 other states.</p>
<p>—California&#8217;s unemployment rate is fourth highest in the nation.</p>
<p>—From 2010-13, California produced fewer than 8,000 jobs, while the country added 510,000.</p>
<p>California faces enormous underfunded public employee pension obligations. (Bloomberg)</p>
<p>—An estimated 25 billion barrels of oil are sitting untapped in the Monterey and Bakersfield shale deposits. California is therefore sending billions of dollars to Texas, Canada and elsewhere to buy natural gas and oil that it could have produced itself.</p>
<p>—Twitter, Adobe, eBay and Oracle, among other major California tech companies, have moved many operations to Salt Lake City.</p>
<p>—Hollywood is doing more and more of its filming in Louisiana, Canada and elsewhere to avoid California taxes.</p>
<p>—Toyota just announced that it is moving its U.S. headquarters from Los Angeles to Dallas. This will eliminate 3,000 or more generally high-wage jobs.</p>
<p>—Occidental Petroleum recently announced that it is moving its headquarters from Los Angeles to Houston.</p>
<p>—Until relatively recently, half of the country&#8217;s top 10 energy firms — ARCO, Getty Oil, Union Oil, Occidental and Chevron — were based in California. Today, only Chevron remains, and it is gradually relocating in Houston. (Reuters)</p>
<p>—Houston has added nine million square feet of new office space. Los Angeles has added one million.</p>
<p>—Tesla will likely locate its proposed $5 billion battery factory, which would employ upward of 6,500 people, in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico or Texas. According to greentechmedia.com, California &#8220;didn&#8217;t make the short list because of the potential for regulatory and environmental delays.&#8221;</p>
<p>—California&#8217;s Monterey Shale offers a potential employment bonanza for workers needing access to entry-level jobs in the high-paying energy sector. But California&#8217;s green lobby is striving to deny them that opportunity. (John Husing, chief economist of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership, Los Angeles Daily News)</p>
<p>Now back to our riddle. Why do these state-crushing economic statistics — nearly every one of which is the result of left-wing policies — have no effect on California&#8217;s Democrats, the Los Angeles Times editorial page, New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman or almost anyone else on the left?</p>
<p>The answer is that they don&#8217;t care. Yes, of course, as individuals with a heart, most people, right and left, care about people losing their jobs. But in terms of what matters to the left and the policies they pursue, they don&#8217;t care. The left and the political party it controls do not care if their policies force to companies to leave the state (or the country). They don&#8217;t care about the coming high inflation caused by Quantitative Easing (printing money) — Krugman calls it The Inflation Obsession — or the job-depressing effects of high taxes, or energy prices that hurt the middle class, or compelling businesses to leave.</p>
<p>They don&#8217;t care because the left is not interested in prosperity; the left is interested in inequality and in the environment. Furthermore, the worse the economic situation, the more voters are likely to vote Democrat. The worse the economic situation, the greater the number of people receiving government assistance; the greater the number of people receiving government assistance, the greater the number of people who will vote Democrat.</p>
<p>Therefore, both philosophically and politically, the left has no reason to be troubled by bad economic news. And it isn&#8217;t. It is troubled by inequality and carbon emissions.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>White House Cites Economist Who Praised &#8220;Model of Socialism Pioneered by the Soviet Union”</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/white-house-cites-economist-who-praised-model-of-socialism-pioneered-by-the-soviet-union/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=white-house-cites-economist-who-praised-model-of-socialism-pioneered-by-the-soviet-union</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Feb 2014 18:46:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219972</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["Only socialism can assure everyone material comfort, individual security"]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/101221125024.jpg"><img class="alignnone  wp-image-219973" alt="101221125024" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/101221125024.jpg" width="470" height="312" /></a></p>
<p>You can see why <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/26/report-look-whos-on-wh-touted-list-of-pro-minimum-wage-hike-economists/">he would be a good choice for this administration</a> when promoting a minimum wage hike.</p>
<blockquote><p>After a proposed minimum wage increase ran into economic objections, the liberal Economic Policy Institute collected the names of economists who defend the measure. Since the organization released the list, the White House, Democratic elected officials, liberal organizations and various media outlets have cited the list of 602 as evidence it will be economically beneficial to boost the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10.</p>
<p>The Employment Policies Institute has examined the list. According to their analysis, of the signatories who actually hold a Ph.D. in economics, 259 (45 percent) did not specialize in labor economics.</p>
<p>Researchers concluded that ten people on the list do not even hold a Ph.D. in economics. One of them appears to be an undergraduate at Queens College who, according to his LinkedIn account, is seeking employment as a security guard.</p></blockquote>
<p>It could be worse. At least he&#8217;s not Paul Krugman.</p>
<blockquote><p>One of the list’s members defined a rogue state as “a fierce and dangerous animal, like an elephant, that separates itself from its herd,” and labeled the United States “the world’s number one rogue.” Another called former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez “a great leader.” A third wrote a paper in which he praised the “particular model of socialism pioneered by the Soviet Union.”</p></blockquote>
<p>That last fellow was Dr. Kotz, who wrote that,</p>
<blockquote><p>This paper will argue that socialist reform need not lead to a restoration of capitalism. The experiences of the Soviet Union and of China hold lessons which can help in devising a strategy for transforming a Soviet-type system into a viable socialism that will bring renewed social and economic progress without abandoning the core socialist values of equality, solidarity, cooperation, and democracy</p></blockquote>
<p>and&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p>Only socialism can assure everyone material comfort, individual security, and a guaranteed opportunity to participate in productive labor, without some exploiting others. Only socialism can build a society based upon the better aspects of human nature, rather than its baser aspects, and finally enable people to become the real masters of their fate.</p></blockquote>
<p>But it gets worse&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p>Another signer, Paul Zarembka, edited the book,“The Hidden History of 9/11.”</p></blockquote>
<p>A 9/11 Truther and a Math Truther in one.</p>
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		<title>Refuting Robert Reich</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/refuting-robert-reich/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=refuting-robert-reich</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/refuting-robert-reich/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Feb 2014 05:55:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food stamps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[moveon org]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Robert Reich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Seven tired left-wing arguments and why they fail. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/6a012876c6c7fb970c019b00336fea970b-500wi.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-218824" alt="6a012876c6c7fb970c019b00336fea970b-500wi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/6a012876c6c7fb970c019b00336fea970b-500wi-279x350.jpg" width="279" height="350" /></a>Former Clinton Labor Secretary and lifelong leftist Robert Reich has just released a new <a href="http://front.moveon.org/war_on_the_poor_reich/#.UvzUvV5CD1y">video</a> for MoveOn.org, <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">alleging that there is a &#8220;war&#8221; being waged on the poor and working families. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;What are they really after?&#8221; Reich begins, never bothering to explain who &#8220;they&#8221; are. His rant connects &#8220;seven dots&#8221; that point to a conspiracy of class oppressors who are &#8220;sinking&#8221; the poor with their opposition to big-government dependency programs, such as Food Stamps and long-term unemployment benefits. And once &#8220;they&#8221; get their way, &#8220;you&#8217;ll do exactly as they tell you,&#8221; Reich says. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Reich&#8217;s seven spurious claims, as over-worn and tired as they are, deserve to be responded to individually. It should be no surprise that each of Reich&#8217;s proposed &#8220;solutions&#8221; does its own damage to the poor, while offering little in the way of genuine social improvement.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>1.</strong> <em>&#8220;They&#8217;re against extending unemployment benefits for people who have been out of work for more than six months.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The framing of this issue is dishonest at best. On first inspection, someone unfamiliar with the recent history of unemployment compensation extensions on Capitol Hill might sympathize with the idea of extending benefits for those out of work for &#8220;more than six months.&#8221; Six months, after all, is not an unimaginable amount of time to be chronically unemployed in the Obama economy. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The problem is, the recent benefit extension fight in Congress was not targeted just at workers who find themselves still treading water after six or seven months. Combined with state emergency benefits that usually last 26 weeks, federal add-ons initiated after the 2008 recession </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">raised that total to 73 weeks, meaning people were eligible to collect benefits for almost a year and half. This was an unprecedented extension of the unemployment compensation program, and many Americans justifiably question the wisdom of such exceedingly long durations of unemployment benefits. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One reason for this skepticism has to do with the indisputable capacity of benefit extensions to exacerbate long-term unemployment. <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/01/05/unemployment-insurance-extensions-competitive-enterprise-institute-editorials-debates/4330603/">Analyses</a> </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) concluded that such extensions over the past five years have kept more than 600,000 out of the labor force by paying people not to work. Those claims were echoed in a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://ideas.repec.org/e/pmu176.html">survey</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of recently unemployed people in New Jersey commissioned by Alan Krueger of Princeton University and Andreas Mueller of the University of Stockholm. They discovered that after a burst of initial activity, people slack off on their job search and wait for something to happen. Moreover, it is likely more workers have been drawn into the mire of unemployment due to the benefit extensions: Another <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/368047/study-extending-unemployment-benefits-increased-unemployment-more-3-percentage-points">study</a> from the NBER concluded that unemployment benefit extensions have increased overall unemployment by over 3 percent. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Workers are not benefited by being encouraged to remain unemployed for such long periods of time. Long-term unemployment dulls skill sets and makes workers less attractive to potential employers. The longer workers are enticed to stay unemployed, prolong the job hunt, or even dismiss jobs with lower pay, the weaker their resumes become when they inevitably reenter the job market. </span></span></p>
<p>Leaving this aside, if Reich&#8217;s &#8220;they&#8221; bogeymen are meant to refer to Republican congressional leadership, his claim that &#8220;they are against&#8221; the benefits extension is also untrue. Republicans have approved renewal of the extension numerous times. This year, Republican lawmakers, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, requested that the renewal of the extension be <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303595404579321010229177576">offset</a> elsewhere in the budget and accompanied by job-creations measures, which Democrats refused. If Democrats had conceded to these commonsense compromises, it is more than likely unemployment insurance extension would have been approved for 2014.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>2.</strong> <em>&#8220;They don&#8217;t want to raise the minimum wage.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A 2007 </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=961374">survey</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">100 studies</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on the effects of raising the minimum wage was conducted David Neumark and William Wascher at the National Bureau of Economic Research. It revealed that a &#8220;sizable majority&#8221; of those studies, including those with the &#8220;most credible evidence,&#8221; concluded that raising the minimum wage produced &#8220;negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries.&#8221; Even more tellingly, &#8220;the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Furthermore, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.ibtimes.com/most-benefits-minimum-wage-increase-would-not-go-poor-households-1541342">according</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) only 5 percent of hourly U.S. workers made the federal minimum wage or less in 2012. Among those earning it, 63 percent were second- or third-wage earners from households with incomes equal to three times the poverty line or more. Only 11.3 percent of workers who would experience the increase live in households officially designated as poor. As the BLS survey also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/who-earns-the-minimum-wage-suburban-teenagers-not-single-parents">reveals</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, most minimum wage earners are young, part-time workers with an average family income of $53,000 per year. If Reich wishes to help teenage, middle class burger-flippers he might have a point. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>3.</strong> <em>&#8220;They&#8217;re against extending Medicaid benefits.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately, the disaster known as ObamaCare is doing precisely this. More than </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://freebeacon.com/factcheck-obamacare-and-the-state-of-the-union/">double</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the number of people who have signed up for healthcare via the exchanges have enrolled in Medicaid. Since Medicaid is government-subsidized insurance, it is paid for by a combination of funds from state and federal budgets. </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Prior</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to its expansion under ObamaCare, Medicaid had already become the largest line item in a typical state&#8217;s budget, exceeding such items as public safety, infrastructure, roads and, since 2009, education spending for kindergarten-through-12th-grade.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet there is a far bigger problem. Since Medicaid payments are 61 percent </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/11/physicians-hesitant-medicaid-patients.html">less</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that what private insurance pays, an increasing number of doctors </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/26/doctor-wont-see-analysts-warn-obamacare-plans-could-resemble-medicaid/">refuse</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to accept new Medicaid patients. &#8220;About half of the physicians in many communities refuse to take Medicaid patients because the payment system is just too low,&#8221; reports James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Many doctors are still willing to take a certain percentage of such patients in order to fulfill a moral obligation, but they are not willing to put themselves out of business to do so. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In other words, many Americans enrolled in Medicaid are going to discover a reality that invariably eludes people like Robert Reich: &#8220;extending Medicaid benefits&#8221; isn&#8217;t remotely the same thing as getting actual healthcare. The end result will be rationing and denial of care for the millions of poor sold empty promises.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>4.</strong> <em>&#8220;They want to cut food stamps.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As with much of the progressive lexicon, &#8220;cut&#8221; is a euphemism. In reality, food stamp usage has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/record-20-households-food-stamps-2013">exploded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, with a record-setting one-in-five American households on the program in 2013, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/16SNAPpartHH.htm">according</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Furthermore, the cost of the program has increased a whopping 164 percent over the last decade, and 36.8 percent since the Obama administration assumed control in 2009. Thus a program that cost the nation $58.2 billion in 2009 cost $79.6 billion last year. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The latest Farm Bill under which the food stamp program operates does cut food stamp spending, but those cuts </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.latinpost.com/articles/7126/20140211/president-obama-signs-farm-bill-what-will-the-cut-to-food-stamps-mean-for-you.htm">amount</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to $800 million per year, or approximately one percent of the overall total &#8212; a total that has grown exponentially, even as America remains saddled with a national debt of more than $17 trillion, along with unfunded liabilities that exceed $85 trillion. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>5.</strong> <em>&#8220;They refuse to invest in education and job training.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In reality the federal government alone </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/16/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-said-there-are-49-different-federal-jo/">has</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 47 job-training programs run by nine different agencies, according to the the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). These programs </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/17/senator-questions-18b-spent-on-job-training-as-study-suggest-rampant-waste/">cost</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the taxpayer $18 billion per year, and a 2011 report by the same GAO concluded that some of them are riddled with mismanagement, waste, fraud, abuse and corruption. The report further noted that since 2004, only 5 of the 47 agencies involved kept tabs on whether participants had actually secure jobs. &#8220;Little is known about the effectiveness of most programs,&#8221; the GAO concluded.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for education, the federal government </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/education-federal-budget">spent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> $138 billion in FY2013. In both real dollars and as a percentage of GDP, the United States </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/">outspent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> most of the world&#8217;s developed nations in education. When one factors in vocational training and college as well, the United States outspends all of them. Yet if bang for the buck counts, America comes up woefully short, routinely scoring well below other nations on international exams. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But this is only part of the story. Every one of America&#8217;s true educational wastelands &#8212; namely, most of our major inner cities where graduation rates hover around 60 percent or less, where budgets are routinely on the verge of bankruptcy or already there, and where teachers unions fight tooth and nail for the miserable status quo &#8212; are Democrat </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/atrocity/">strongholds</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. If Reich were truly interested in helping the poor and working class Americans he professes to care so deeply about, he&#8217;d be far more interested in challenging that status quo, which revolves around the unholy alliance of education unions and a Democratic Party beholden to their campaign contributions and marching orders.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>6.</strong> <em>&#8220;They don&#8217;t want to rebuild America&#8217;s crumbling infrastructure.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Reich has an exceedingly short memory. The American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, more familiarly known as the stimulus bill, was supposed to target the lion&#8217;s share of its $787 billion appropriation (</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://useconomy.about.com/od/candidatesandtheeconomy/a/Obama_Stimulus.htm">increased</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to $840 billion in 2012) on &#8220;shovel-ready jobs.&#8221; One year later, President Obama </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17obama-t.html?_r=3&amp;ref=magazine&amp;pagewanted=all%22">admitted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> “there&#8217;s no such thing.&#8221; To be fair to Reich, infrastructure spending has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/24/u-s-infrastructure-spending-has-plummeted-since-2008/">taken</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a nosedive since its peak before the recession began, but it&#8217;s not because the state and local governments that provide the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/why-cant-we-just-leave-infrastructure-spending-to-the-states/2012/03/21/gIQAjpYBSS_blog.html">vast majority</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of infrastructure spending don&#8217;t want to spend the money. It&#8217;s because they </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">can&#8217;t</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> afford to do so.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet even in the midst of such cuts, America </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2013/04/01/infrastructure-gap-look-at-the-facts-we-spend-more-than-europe/">spends</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> more on infrastructure than the progressive stronghold known as the European Union, at 3.3 percent of our GDP from 2006-2011, compared to only 3.1 percent for the EU. The clamor for increased spending is all about doing it with more borrowed money, with the American Society of Civil Engineers (hardly a neutral entity) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/">calling</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for a $3.6 trillion &#8220;investment&#8221; between now and 2020. Congress&#8217;s most recently passed budget </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://news.agc.org/2014/01/18/congress-passes-spending-bill-to-fund-government-in-2014-2/">allocates</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> $108 billion for federal construction accounts.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The only way we will likely see more infrastructure spending is with a growing economy. Obama could contribute to that growth if he would approve the Keystone pipeline, among other things. Perhaps he could explain why he won&#8217;t to Robert Reich.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>7.</strong> <em>&#8220;They&#8217;re out to bust unions.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unions are doing a good job of busting themselves. Nothing speaks louder to this reality than the debacle Big Labor perpetrated in Wisconsin, where their thug-like tactics were rejected by both Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the voters themselves. As a result of Walker&#8217;s triumph, a projected $3 billion-plus deficit </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/hey-who-wants-to-talk-about-wisconsins-economic-miracle/?singlepage=true">turned</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> into a projected $300,000 surplus in 2011. Much of it was accomplished by getting government union members to pay for a portion of their own healthcare and pensions and eliminating automatic pay and benefit increases that are strangling states like New York, Illinois and California.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On the national level, a recent </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.mackinac.org/19051">study</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by the Mackinac Center reveals that right-to-work states have seen greater improvements in employment rates, income, and population growth than non-right-to-work states over the last 60 years. Critics attempt to obscure this reality by pointing to the fact that states with right-to-work laws have lower per capita incomes. Yet they </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/18222">fail</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to factor in the cost of living, which is far more expensive in states where union monopolies push government budgets, and the taxes that pay for them, ever higher. When cost of living is factored in,  people in right-to-work states have 4.1 percent higher per-capita personal incomes than those in non-right-to-work states.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Furthermore, in cities that have gone bankrupt, such as Stockton, and Detroit, the primary drivers of that bankruptcy were out-of-control legacy costs for government union workers. Of Detroit&#8217;s $12 billion in outstanding debt, $9.2 billion of it is comprised of health and pension benefits owed to retired workers. When the city filed for bankruptcy, it </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/07/24/detriot-mess-why-future-stalled-in-motor-city/">had</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 47 different public employee unions, and a worker at the Water and Sewer Department who collected $56,000 in pay and benefits for his job as a horse-shoer despite the department having no horses. Detroit also has three retired municipal workers collecting a pension for every two that are still working.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to Heritage Foundation&#8217;s chief economist Stephen Moore, more than 60 American cities may be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2014/02/us-is-going-bankrupt-one-city-at-time.html">facing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the same fate as the Motor City. “Keep an eye on ‘too big to fail’ cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York,” he warns.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Moore goes on to cite the progressive ideology in general championed by Reich and others as the primary impetus for such failure. “For at least the last 20 years major U.S. cities have been playgrounds for left-wing experiments—high taxes on the rich; sanctuaries for illegal immigrants; super-minimum wage rules; strict gun-control laws; regulations and paperwork that makes it onerous to open a business or develop on your own property; crony capitalism with contracts going to political donors and friends; and failing schools ruled by teacher unions, with little competition or productivity.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If Robert Reich had any intellectual honesty, he would answer his question, &#8220;What are they really after?&#8221; by examining who really benefits from</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> large swathes of the population kept mired in poverty and being sucked into the mentality of dependency. It is no accident that every major American city </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-dem-cities-big-dem-poverty/">besieged</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by poverty, crime, economic disfunction and failing schools is a Democratic stronghold. </span>Reich&#8217;s proposals offer more of the same. They merely reassert a long-held belief by the American left that success is measured by how many people they get <i>on</i> government programs, not <i>off</i> government programs. Americas would do well to &#8220;connect the dots&#8221; regarding the utter bankruptcy of such ideology.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>David Brooks&#8217; Historical Revisionism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-gottfried/david-brooks-historical-revisionism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=david-brooks-historical-revisionism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-gottfried/david-brooks-historical-revisionism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Feb 2014 05:25:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Gottfried]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[David Brooks]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218202</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A misguided defense of the values of the defunct Whig Party. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Whig_20Party.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218203" alt="Whig_20Party" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Whig_20Party.gif" width="225" height="240" /></a>As an historian, I‘ve always been struck by how political journalists resort to an inappropriate use of history to sell their pet projects. Advocates of government expansion insist we need a “second New Deal,” as if we’ve wandered away from the much more ambitious planning practiced by Franklin Roosevelt. Actually our federal and state governments are much larger and more intrusive than they were in the 1930s, and the level of government control that our two national parties accept reflects increases in bureaucratic power since the 1960s. Most New Dealers, if they returned from the dead, would be surprised at how government intervention and social engineering, especially in the name of protecting an expanding list of minorities, have taken off.</p>
<p>The latest anachronism I’ve encountered by someone trying to sell government snake oil is the appeal by the New York Times-official conservative David Brooks to the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/31/opinion/brooks-the-opportunity-coalition.html?_r=0">“third ancient tradition”</a> in American political history. In addition to the “liberal tradition that believes in using government to enhance equality” and the non-Brooks conservatives who “believe in limiting government to enhance freedom,” we can now celebrate the Whigs who worked at “enhancing opportunity and social mobility.” Represented by Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and (before he switched to the infant Republican Party) Abraham Lincoln, the Whigs got their start in the 1830s when they “fought the divisive populist Jacksonians” and “argued it is better to help people move between classes than to pit classes against each other.”</p>
<p>The Whigs, according to Brooks, were “interventionist in economics while they were traditionalist and family-oriented in their moral and social attitudes. They believed America should step boldly into the industrial age, even as they championed large infrastructure projects and significant public investments, even as they believed in sacred property rights.” In the name of the Whigs, who dissolved into the Republican Party in the mid-1850s, Brooks wishes to have government “expand early childhood education,” help get “young men wage subsidies so they are worth marrying,” and search for ways “to train or provide jobs for middle-aged, unemployed workers.” How about the government providing Plain Jane with a date in the name of Henry Clay or Daniel Webster?</p>
<p>I don’t know where to begin to correct this appeal to the supposed lessons of the past. The Whigs were certainly not less “divisive” than the Jacksonian Democrats. Whig politicians inflicted burdensome tariffs on farmers and workers to protect the interests of their merchant- industrialist donors. Their special interest politics aggravated sectional divisions between the industrialized North and the largely agrarian South, and even without slavery, sectional hostility would have risen, thanks to Whig economic policy. But the Whigs’ public projects amounted to exceedingly little next to the massive managerial state that Brooks takes as a given. Neither Clay nor Webster nor Lincoln (before he was faced by internal war) advocated a government in any way as large as the one that Brooks wants to expand. And what are those “traditional” family values that Brooks, who endorses gay marriage, claims to be taking from Victorian Christians? From his rhetoric it would seem that government-run, early education and jobs-programs was the family morality that the Whigs had in mind.  Perhaps it took Brooks to discover their real message.</p>
<p>The Whigs may have collapsed because of their moderateness. They opposed slavery but not boldly enough to please those abolitionists who formed the Republican Party. And though they favored high tariffs, these tariffs were not high enough to accommodate people like Pennsylvania iron magnate Thaddeus Stevens. This later Republican congressman from Lancaster combined violent opposition to slavery with a call for government protection against foreign industrial competition.  Stevens found the Whigs to be inadequate for either of his concerns.</p>
<p>Allow me to observe that Brook’s column exemplifies the cultural and historical illiteracy of many of our journalistic celebrities. People who know very little about the past are writing for those who know even less. And when they decide to push a big-government program, they identify it with some long-dead figure or movement, in order to impress the yokels. This false display of learning may be particularly tempting for someone who is billed as a “conservative,” at a paper not known to be favorable to the Right. Words like “tradition,” “family-oriented” and “sacred property rights” help set the mood for what turns out to be a conventional Times’ advocacy piece. What could Brooks invent as a follow-up, providing his recent appeal to non-existent history resonates with his readers? Perhaps in his next call for new government initiatives, he could depict Francis Drake battling the Spanish Armada (unless that’s considered a politically incorrect comparison). What about the image of Washington crossing the Delaware, which may be a less offensive image than blowing up Spanish sailors, unless the reader happens to be descended from a Hessian?</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Magical Thinking of the Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-magical-thinking-of-the-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-magical-thinking-of-the-left</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2014 05:30:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Inside the minds of the rescued Antarctic global warming researchers. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1228_World_-AntarcticaShip_full_600.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214541" alt="1228_World_-AntarcticaShip_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1228_World_-AntarcticaShip_full_600-450x341.jpg" width="315" height="239" /></a>The Supreme Court of Iceland has ordered a halt to road construction because of the environmental impact on the elves. Most of the modern world no longer believes in elves, fairies or gnomes; but environmentalists still do.</p>
<p>Members of the environmentalist terrorist group Earth Liberation Front refer to themselves as &#8220;elves&#8221; and to their acts of sabotage and vandalism as &#8220;elving&#8221; or &#8220;pixieing.&#8221; Environmentalist eco-pagans divided themselves into &#8220;fairies&#8221; and &#8220;trolls&#8221; with the fairies sticking to non-violence while the trolls were more apt to get physical.</p>
<p>The Dragon Environmental Network, which in its own words “links environmental action with magical practice,” is one of the more successful environmental neo-pagan activist groups. DEN boasts of using &#8220;eco-magic&#8221; to stop progress and “channel positive energy.” The basic principles of their environmental activism include “honoring the fair folk”; better known as the fairies.</p>
<p>Trolls, fairies, goblins and elves are easy enough to laugh off and those who believe in them can be dismissed as irrational; but the fairy hunters fool more people when they slip out of their tunics and pointed ears and slip on their white lab coats and parkas.</p>
<p>The “Australasian Antarctic Expedition” set off to another cold place not in search of elves, but in search of melting ice.  Unlike the original expedition it knew exactly what it wanted to find. One of the purposes of the expedition was to “determine the extent to which human activity and pollution has directly impacted on this remote region of Antarctica.”</p>
<p>Considering the shortage of human activities in Antarctica, the reasonable answer would be zero, but the elves in parkas weren’t interested in being reasonable. They were out to provide a few more reels of propaganda showing that human industry was destroying the planet.</p>
<p>The AAE was supposed to provide supporting evidence that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet was on the verge of collapsing and melting. Instead it got trapped in the ice that wasn’t supposed to exist. A blizzard set in surrounding their vessel with pack ice and an expedition member who took off his gloves to write an email couldn’t move his fingers as they turned white.</p>
<p>The Snow Dragon, a Chinese icebreaker dispatched to save the AAE expedition vessel, MV Akademik Shokalskiy, from its own stupidity was forced to turn back because of the heavy ice. A French ship, L&#8217;Astrolabe, also had to pull out. Now the fate of the Warmist expedition rests with the Australian icebreaker, the Aurora Australis.</p>
<p>It’s not the first time that Warmists went looking for warming in the coldest places on earth and found only frozen ice.</p>
<p>This summer, MainStream Last First attempted to bring attention to the threat of melting ice by crossing the Northwest Passage in a rowboat. The effort was dubbed as a voyage made possibly only by climate change. Instead it also ran up against the ice that wasn’t there.</p>
<p>“This has been the coldest season with the most ice since we started Arctic Watch in 2000,” the expedition’s final entry quoted. “Almost no whales. The NWPassage is still blocked with ice. Some of the bays still have not melted!”</p>
<p>But true believers in elf magic and cow flatulence don’t give up easily even when surrounded by acres of evidence to the contrary. The entry concluded: “Our message remains unaffected though, bringing awareness to the pressing issues of climate change in the arctic.”</p>
<p>In the spring, another Warmist expedition set out to cross Antarctica and “make a decisive contribution to our understanding of the effect of climate change upon the poles.” It lost its leader, the explorer Ranulph Fiennes, who came down with frostbite and whose evacuation was delayed by a blizzard. Then the expedition had to be halted due to the difficulty and announced that it was turning its attention to science education instead.</p>
<p>Science education might have helped avoid the whole fiasco, but Warmists never learn from science or from recent history. No matter how often they freeze off their toes or have to be airlifted from the ruins of their ridiculous publicity stunts, they insist that the warming is there.</p>
<p>If you just click your green mukluks together three times and wish upon a Carbon economy.</p>
<p>In March, a Congressional hearing on global warming was snowed out. In February, a &#8220;Forward on Climate&#8221; rally in Washington complete with idiots in polar bear costumes waving signs reading, “Hands Off the Arctic” shivered through the cold. And finally, the White House convened its Task Force on Climate Preparedness this winter while the nation’s capital was shut down by a blizzard.</p>
<p>“You don’t need a weatherman/To know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan famously sang. But unlike their more famous scientific peers, the weathermen actually do know which way the wind is blowing. A quarter of them say that global warming is a scam. Only a third believe in man-caused global warming, or cow-caused, as the case may be.</p>
<p>The professional Warmist PhDs sneer at the weathermen, but unlike the theoretical experts, the local weatherman actually has to get the weekend forecast right. If he doesn’t, there will be real people angry at him for telling them that the sun would shine when instead it rained for three days straight. He can’t refuse to release his data or lecture angry viewers that the rain they’re experiencing is only an anomaly.</p>
<p>The Warmist PhDs are as detached from the vicissitudes of real weather as the Dragon Environmental Network is from the laws of physics. They make their money from grants financed by special interests hoping to ram through a carbon tax and turn their investments into a massive carbon economy. They don’t care about accurate weather predictions. Instead they hide their data and reinterpret it so that the sky is always falling and the ice is always melting even in the coldest of blizzards.</p>
<p>Every now and then an Arctic expedition into the ice that isn’t supposed to be there comes face to face with the fact that the polar ice doesn’t seem to be aware of their settled science. But just as the lack of elves never disproves the need for elf environmental impact studies, all the ice in the arctic can’t stop the wannabe elves in their expensive parkas from believing that technology is destroying the world.</p>
<p>The left likes to claim that it’s part of the reality-based community. But the reality that it’s based on exists only in the human imagination. The unreal left lives in an imaginary world of fantasy economics where money is infinite, in a world of fantasy science where cow flatulence is the greatest threat to mankind and in a world of imaginary politics where everything is possible if only they believe it is true.</p>
<p>A sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, but the left’s ideological eco-magic is no substitute for science.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Economics and Peace in the Palestinian Authority</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/economics-and-peace-in-the-palestinian-authority/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=economics-and-peace-in-the-palestinian-authority</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Dec 2013 18:30:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinian authority]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Muslims do better economically in non-Muslim countries. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/israel-may-18-2.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-214042" alt="israel-may-18-2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/israel-may-18-2-450x322.jpg" width="450" height="322" /></a></p>
<p>Professor <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14304#.Ur2787SE7Ab">Paul Eidelberg makes the cogent argument that </a>focusing on the economy, as Kerry is, is completely meaningless.</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="yui_3_13_0_ym1_1_1387667377502_257703">During this period when the West Bank and Gaza were run by Israel, the territories received little foreign aid. [Nevertheless] the economy boomed, and the Palestinians increased their business activity and their standard of living rose dramatically. Here is George Gilder’s assessment:</p>
<p id="yui_3_13_0_ym1_1_1387667377502_257701">&#8220;At the inception of the occupation, conditions in the territories were quite dire. Life expectancy was low; malnutrition, infectious diseases, child mortality were rife; fewer than 60 percent of all male adults had been employed, with unemployment among refugees running as high as 83 percent. Within a brief period after the war, Israeli occupation had led to dramatic improvements…improvements …[The number of Palestinians working in Israel rose from zero in 1967 … 109 thousand by 1968, accounting for 35 percent of the employed population of the West Bank and 45 percent in Gaza. Close to two thousand industrial plants employing almost half the work force, were established in the territories under Israeli rule.</p>
<p>&#8220;During the 1970s, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest growing economy in the world … with per capita GDP expanding tenfold between 1968 and 1991… Life expectancy rose more than 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000.…By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population … had electricity around the clock, as compared to 20.5 percent in 1967… (Similar advances occurred in hygiene, child mortality, immunizations, and communications, which all rose to levels equal or exceeding other Middle Eastern countries]. The number of school children … grew by 102 percent … Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. [From zero in 1967] by the early 1990s, there were even [universities] boasting some 16,500 students.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I don&#8217;t agree that the economic issues are meaningless in this conflict. They just don&#8217;t work the way that the Western model of a rising tide floats all boats expects it to.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>1. The conflict has made the creation of controlled alternative economy based around monopolies, whether it is the Palestinian Authority&#8217;s monopoly on cigarettes or Hamas&#8217; monopoly on smuggling tunnels, possible.</p>
<p>These monopolies are one more reason to perpetuate the conflict in order to prevent free trade. Hamas wants an Israeli blockade. The Palestinian Authority wants constant economic insecurity.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&#8230; and this is an important one</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>2. <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/islams-universal-economic-failure/"> Christians and Jews out-compete Muslims economically</a> in every country. That&#8217;s why the Muslim Brotherhood with its network of businesses wants to drive Coptic Christians out of Egypt.</p>
<blockquote><p>Muslims invariably have lower levels of education, skill and employment than their non-Muslim counterparts. They only win, as they always have, by killing their competitors or reducing them to second-class status.</p>
<p>Israel has 1.2 Muslims inside the Green Line who account for 52 percent of its social benefits. Israel’s national unemployment rate is 5.6 percent. The Arab unemployment rate is 27 percent. Only 59 percent of Muslim men and only 19 percent of Muslim women are officially part of the workforce.  That’s compared to 56 percent of Jewish women and 52 percent of Christian women.</p>
<p>The average Israeli family has double the monthly income of the average Arab family. Half the Arab sector officially lives in poverty. The Israeli Jewish GDP is nearly three times higher than the Arab-Israeli GDP.</p>
<p>Israel within the Green Line only has about 150,000 Christians and about as many Druze, and both groups perform better economically. Christian Arabs have a higher employment rate and a better rate of higher education than Muslims.</p></blockquote>
<p>You can see the same numbers when you compare Muslims to Buddhists or Hindus. Islam is hostile to education and competence. Its theocracy strives to keep its followers backward.</p>
<blockquote><p>Muslims do better economically in non-Muslim countries. Muslim countries with non-Muslim minorities perform better than 100 percent Muslim countries.</p>
<p>The non-oil Muslim countries who are closest to Israel are Malaysia and Lebanon, 32 and 33 places behind Israel. Both countries also have sizable non-Muslim populations. Muslims make up only 50 percent of Lebanon and only 60 percent of Malaysia. No Muslim country without oil has a better GDP Per Capita than a Muslim country with sizable Christian or Buddhist minorities.</p>
<p>Within India, Muslims are at the bottom of the economic ladder. Their per capita GDP is lower, their literacy rate is lower and they perform worse than Hindus. And yet the average Indian Muslim annual income at 513 dollars is still higher than the average annual income in Pakistan at 420 dollars. This remains consistent with the higher Arab-Israeli income and lower Jordanian Arab income model meaning that Muslims in non-Muslim countries will earn less than the majority, but more than they would in a majority Muslim country.</p></blockquote>
<p>Now if you think rationally, this is a reason for Muslims to keep non-Muslims around. But if you think tribally, the only way that Muslims can get ahead is by getting rid of the non-Muslims.</p>
<p>You can&#8217;t fix Muslim economic inequality without fixing Islam. And you can&#8217;t fix Muslim violence without fixing Islam. And you can&#8217;t fix Islam.</p>
<p>The economic issues are certainly there, but they derive from a religious problem.</p>
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		<title>Ben Affleck Lives on $1.50 Per Day</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/ben-affleck-lives-on-1-50-per-day/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ben-affleck-lives-on-1-50-per-day</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:35:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Ben Affleck]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why celebrities can't overcome the myth that one's socioeconomic condition is random.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/1220-Ben-Affleck-mass-senate-seat-dems-scramble_full_600.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187025" alt="1220-Ben-Affleck-mass-senate-seat-dems-scramble_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/1220-Ben-Affleck-mass-senate-seat-dems-scramble_full_600-450x328.jpg" width="270" height="197" /></a>One of the left’s favorite linguistic touchstones is differentiating between the economically “lucky” and the economically “unlucky.” Sometimes, they substitute “blessed” for lucky; other times, they substitute “unfortunate” for unlucky. The underlying notion is clear: economics are random. On average, anyone, regardless of intelligence, initiative and decision-making ability, can be poor. So, too, anyone can be rich in the lottery of life.</span></p>
<p>Nowhere is this myth more closely guarded than in Hollywood. When it comes to Tinseltown, the elites who live in posh mansions off of Sunset Blvd. believe that they could just have easily ended up in a one-bedroom hole-in-the-wall in Pacoima, waiting tables at the nearest Chipotle.</p>
<p>So when Ben Affleck announced this week that he would attempt to spend no more than $1.50 on food and drink in one day, he raised few eyebrows in the self-important liberal Mecca that is Los Angeles. Sure, this multimillionaire wears expensively tailored clothes to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. Sure, he earns millions per movie. But he can eat like a poor person!</p>
<p>This is a logical maneuver for a follower of Howard Zinn: Affleck thinks he’s rich because he exploits poor people, even if he’s never actually exploited a poor person. He lives in the greatest country in human history, and is rich because he is a talented writer, director, and actor (he’s progressed somewhat since <i>Reindeer Games</i>). But to assuage his guilt, he’ll tell the lie that millions of Americans are barely able to consume their minimum calorie requirements each day thanks to the cruelty of capitalism.</p>
<p>According to OMG!, the Yahoo Hollywood blog, the director and star of <i>Argo</i> will be raising cash for the Global Poverty Project. Other celebs joining the quixotic quest to get skinny include Sophia Bush, Josh Groban, Debi Mazar, and Hunter Biden.</p>
<p>So, how many Americans are living on $1.50 per day? Virtually nobody. According to a study by the University of Michigan, about 1.7 million households in the United States were living in extreme poverty based on their cash income. That number was just 700,000 when you include welfare and food stamps. When state benefits are included, that number drops precipitously.</p>
<p>But we shouldn’t be fooled by the notion that millions of Americans are just a food stamp away from starvation. Private charities continue to care for the hungry. The costs of these government programs are staggeringly large, and represent taxpayer money better served by reinvestment into the economy and charitable giving.</p>
<p>Beyond that, decision making counts. While Hollywood likes to portray those who are permanently poor as universally hard-working, moral, excellent decision makers, the permanently poor (not counting those who truly cannot take care of themselves like the disabled and mentally ill) are largely poor because they make poor decisions. Those poor decision are often incentivized by the government.</p>
<p>The good news is that at least Affleck is raising money for a private charity. Mayor Corey Booker of Newark, New Jersey tried a similar stunt last year in order to stump for more government spending.</p>
<p>Affleck will no doubt cite his heroic gesture as evidence that America’s government must do more for the “unlucky.” But if liberals actually wanted to help with poverty, they might try focusing on incentivizing personal success. They might make an effort to use their celebrity to encourage childbearing within marriage, since unwed motherhood is the single most correlative factor in poverty. They might try to push for school choice since the poor suffer most from our catastrophic public education system . They might even work to start businesses and work with them in areas that have historically taken government money rather than building industry.</p>
<p>But it’s easier to eat three bananas a day in front of the cameras. That makes for good imagery and for a self enhancing sense of personal morality as well. Encouraging good decision making sounds preachy and judgmental. It implies that people like Ben Affleck are rich for a reason. And Hollywood can’t live with that reality. It would force them to try to help others in a material way. It would force them to stop condemning everyday Americans, middle class people who can’t afford the luxury of spending a day posing for TMZ while tearing down the philosophy of capitalism that provides true opportunity.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Supporters of Obamacare Admit It Hurts the Poor</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/howard-hyde/supporters-of-obamacare-admit-it-hurts-the-poor/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=supporters-of-obamacare-admit-it-hurts-the-poor</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2012 04:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The laws of economics take hold. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/howard-hyde/supporters-of-obamacare-admit-it-hurts-the-poor/supreme-court-health-care32712-1jpg-977994d4a8539545-620x437/" rel="attachment wp-att-167123"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-167123" title="supreme-court-health-care32712-1jpg-977994d4a8539545-620x437" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/supreme-court-health-care32712-1jpg-977994d4a8539545-620x437-450x340.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="204" /></a>Some supporters of Obamacare are honest enough to admit a few of its warts. Would that they would take those admissions to their logical conclusions.</p>
<p>David Gamage is an assistant professor of Law at UC Berkeley who has worked on the tax provisions of Obamacare for the Treasury Department. In an October 30 article in the Wall Street Journal (&#8220;<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203335504578086702676417058.html">ObamaCare&#8217;s Costs to the Working Class</a>&#8220;), he expresses sincere concern over the presumably unintended consequences of the Obamacare law as written. Instead of repenting of his support for the law however, he advocates &#8220;further reform,&#8221; failing which dire consequences will ensue. What needs to be understood by ordinary citizens who are not privileged enough to be paid by the government to help the government command other people&#8217;s lives and money is that these consequences are predictable, were predicted, and that this is only the beginning of a vicious downward spiral.</p>
<p>The term &#8220;perverse incentive&#8221; appears seven times in Professor Gamage&#8217;s article. Accepting a higher-paid job could cost a citizen more on net balance than it is worth due to the loss of health-care subsidies. Employers now have every incentive to make as much of their workforce part-time (and thereby ineligible for health insurance benefits) as possible. &#8220;ObamaCare&#8217;s new subsidies may also create penalties for marriage and incentives for divorce.&#8221; People who have access to affordable individual coverage but NOT affordable family coverage through their employers will be disqualified from receiving family coverage from the Obamacare plan. And so on and on.</p>
<p>Yet he explicitly rejects any suggestion that the law is a lemon at best and that we should go back to the drawing board. Indeed, he opens with &#8220;It is time to move past the debate over whether ObamaCare was a good or a bad idea.&#8221; Really?</p>
<p>The second most-repeated phrase in the article is &#8220;further reforms&#8221; (which even appears once in the same sentence with the other winner, &#8216;&#8221;perverse incentives&#8221;):  &#8220;Without further reforms, the law will create unnecessary costs for working-class Americans.&#8221; &#8220;Without further reforms, many employers and employees will jointly benefit if employers make low-income employees part-timers rather than offering them health insurance.&#8221; &#8220;Even if these perverse incentives affect only a limited number of individuals, lawmakers should still strive to mitigate them through further reforms.&#8221; &#8220;Hence, whether we want to ‘repeal and replace’ ObamaCare, or ‘improve ObamaCare through further reforms,’ is merely a question of semantics.&#8221;</p>
<p>But &#8220;further reforms&#8221; is not a solution; it is merely continuing down the path to worse problems in response to problems created by the original legislation. Are we really supposed to believe that a 2,700-page bill and 10,000+ pages of derived regulations are fundamentally sound but merely insufficient, that we emphatically need more, more, further, further, further rules and regulations? Do we believe that more meddling and fiddling about to fix the first unintended consequences will have no unintended consequences of their own?</p>
<p>Government interventions in the market always create worse problems than the unsatisfactory original conditions they intend to solve. Maximum-price controls on milk to help poor mothers feed their babies lead to shortages of milk (and/or surpluses of butter, yoghurt and cheese) as marginal producers are unable to recoup their costs and go out of business and more people clamor for the lower-priced product, which leads the government to control the price of cattle feed in hopes of lowering dairy production costs, which leads to a shortage of cattle feed and an increase in the percentage of cows slaughtered for meat instead of being kept as milk producers.  It&#8217;s called Econ 101.</p>
<p>The only surprise in any of this is that people capable of passing the bar exam are unable to comprehend it.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Art Laffer Introduces Obama to Econ 101</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/art-laffer-introduces-obama-to-econ-101/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=art-laffer-introduces-obama-to-econ-101</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Oct 2012 04:15:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=147808</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Debunking the attacks against Romney-Ryan tax reform. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Dr. Art Laffer, economic theorist and former economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan, breaks down the lies being leveled against the Romney-Ryan tax reform proposals.</strong></p>
<p><iframe width="610" height="343" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/jGgpbPSexTM?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>What Economics Can’t Tell Us</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/what-economics-can%e2%80%99t-tell-us/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-economics-can%25e2%2580%2599t-tell-us</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/what-economics-can%e2%80%99t-tell-us/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jul 2012 04:05:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Better]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Discrimination]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=137228</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The difficulties of a subjective world. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/economics.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-137229" title="economics" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/economics.gif" alt="" width="375" height="242" /></a>One of the more difficult lessons to teach economics neophytes — and, many times, trained economists — is that economic theory cannot say anything definitive about subjective statements, such as what&#8217;s better, good, bad or worse. Let&#8217;s try a few examples to make the point.</p>
<p>Cabernet sauvignon wine is better than fume blanc. Turkey is better than pork. Matter in the solid state is better than the plasma state. Each of those statements begs the question: Where&#8217;s the proof? With subjective statements such as those, disagreements can go on forever. It&#8217;s simply a matter of personal opinion. One person&#8217;s opinion of what&#8217;s better or worse is just as good as another&#8217;s.</p>
<p>Contrast those statements with objective ones, such as: Water is 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part oxygen. Scientists cannot split the atom. The distance in degrees from the equator to the North Pole is 90. With positive statements such as those, if there&#8217;s any disagreement, there are facts to which one can appeal to settle the disagreement. For example, if one person says scientists can split the atom and another says they cannot, a trip to Stanford&#8217;s linear accelerator to watch atoms being split settles the matter. However, if you say fume blanc is better than cabernet sauvignon and I say cabernet sauvignon is better, our disagreement can go on forever because there are no facts or figures to which we can appeal.</p>
<p>A useful clue as to whether a statement is subjective is the use of words such as should, ought, better and worse. I tell my students that though it&#8217;s important for thinking properly to know whether a statement is subjective or not, by no means do I suggest they purge their vocabulary of subjective statements. Subjective statements are very useful in fooling others into doing something you want them to do; however, in the process of fooling others, one need not fool himself. For example, President Barack Obama said that college is &#8220;an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.&#8221; There&#8217;s absolutely no evidence to support such a claim, but it&#8217;s a good way to trick others into paying for someone else&#8217;s education.</p>
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		<title>The Mysticism of &#8216;Social Justice&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/the-mysticism-of-social-justice/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-mysticism-of-social-justice</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jun 2012 04:05:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=135942</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A phrase that has stopped many people from thinking for at least a century -- and counting. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/data-620x411.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-135944" title="data-620x411" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/data-620x411.gif" alt="" width="375" height="248" /></a>If there were a Hall of Fame for political rhetoric, the phrase &#8220;social justice&#8221; would deserve a prominent place there. It has the prime virtue of political catchwords: It means many different things to many different people.</p>
<p>In other words, if you are a politician, you can get lots of people, with different concrete ideas, to agree with you when you come out boldly for the vague generality of &#8220;social justice.&#8221;</p>
<p>Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catchword can stop thought for 50 years. The phrase &#8220;social justice&#8221; has stopped many people from thinking, for at least a century — and counting.</p>
<p>If someone told you that Country A had more &#8220;social justice&#8221; than Country B, and you had all the statistics in the world available to you, how would you go about determining whether Country A or Country B had more &#8220;social justice&#8221;? In short, what does the phrase mean in practice — if it has any concrete meaning?</p>
<p>In political and ideological discussions, the issue is usually whether there is some social injustice. Even if we can agree that there is some injustice, what makes it social?</p>
<p>Surely most of us are repelled by the thought that some people are born into dire poverty, while others are born into extravagant luxury — each through no fault of their own and no virtue of their own. If this is an injustice, does that make it social?</p>
<p>The baby born into dire poverty might belong to a family in Bangladesh, and the one born to extravagant luxury might belong to a family in America. Whose fault is this disparity or injustice? Is there some specific society that caused this? Or is it just one of those things in the world that we wish was very different?</p>
<p>If it is an injustice, it is unjust from some cosmic perspective, an unjust fate, rather than necessarily an unjust policy, institution or society.</p>
<p>Making a distinction between cosmic justice and social justice is more than just a semantic fine point. Once we recognize that there are innumerable causes of innumerable disparities, we can no longer blithely assume that either the cause or the cure can be found in the government of a particular society.</p>
<p>Anyone who studies geography in any depth can see that different peoples and nations never had the same exposure to the progress of the rest of the human race.</p>
<p>People living in isolated mountain valleys have for centuries lagged behind the progress of people living in busy ports, where both new products and new ideas constantly arrive from around the world.</p>
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		<title>The Road to Freedom</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/the-road-to-freedom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-road-to-freedom</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 08 May 2012 04:10:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Arthur Brooks]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[free enterprise]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Moral]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the road to freedom]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=131103</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How to win the fight for free enterprise.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/the_road_to_freedom.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-131107 alignleft" title="the_road_to_freedom" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/the_road_to_freedom.jpg" alt="" width="318" height="480" /></a>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Arthur Brooks,<strong> </strong>president of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and a celebrated conservative author, economist, and media personality. He was formerly the Louis A. Bantle Professor of Business and Government Policy at Syracuse University.  He is author of the new book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Road-Freedom-Fight-Enterprise/dp/046502940X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1335689629&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank">The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise</a></em><em>.</em></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Arthur Brooks, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>Let’s begin with you telling us what inspired you to write this book.</p>
<p><strong>Brooks: </strong>For years, the free enterprise movement has done an incredible job making the material case for free enterprise and explaining how economic freedom makes people better off. By the end of the Cold War, we had pretty much won that argument. Most mainstream liberals now publicly eschew “socialism,” and concede that the market economy is the best way to produce material prosperity in the aggregate.</p>
<p>But where the left has where—and where free enterprise advocates have failed to respond—is on the moral side of the ledger. Sure, the left says, free enterprise makes us better off, but at a huge cost to our society and our values.</p>
<p>This argument is incorrect, but it’s effective because we almost never show up to debate it. I wrote this book to explain why I believe free enterprise is not just an economic alternative, but a moral imperative.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Share with us your moral defense of the free enterprise; why is being free moral?</p>
<p><strong>Brooks:</strong> In a nutshell, it’s this: Free enterprise is the only system that allows us to earn our own success, is fundamentally fair, and meaningfully helps the poor. Let’s go through these one at a time.</p>
<p>First, free enterprise allows us to earn our success. This doesn’t mean just making money—it mean defining our success however we wish to measure it and going out and achieving success. This is what the Founders meant when they talked about the right to pursue happiness. Material goods may make us physically comfortable, but above the poverty level they don’t improve life satisfaction. This means that governments can’t make us happy. Only we can make ourselves happy, and only free enterprise lets us do it our own way.</p>
<p>Second, free enterprise is fair. If you believe that hard work and creativity should be rewarded, you believe in meritocratic fairness—not the redistributive “fairness” some politicians are offering today. All available data show that Americans basically believe that our country is a meritocracy and that meritocratic fairness is true fairness. Many on the left like to talk about fairness in terms of outcomes, suggesting that it’s somehow unfair that some people have more money than others. That’s a shallow, materialistic argument, and more importantly, it doesn’t match up with Americans’ understanding of fairness.</p>
<p>Third, free enterprise helps those in need. As Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has remarked, “the free enterprise system has lifted more people out of poverty than all the government anti-poverty programs combined.” The evidence shows that the senator is correct. But beyond that, the free enterprise empowers individuals to make a difference in their lives and the lives of those around them. And this means helping the poor in a meaningful sense, not just giving them handouts.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Your thoughts on higher taxes and on the belief that redistribution is moral?</p>
<p><strong>Brooks: </strong>When I was a college professor, many of my economics students complained that it’s “not fair” that the rich have so much more than the poor. So I cooked up a scheme to show them they were thinking about it the wrong way.<strong></strong></p>
<p>Halfway through the course, I could see big differences between students who were working hard and those who weren’t – call it grade inequality. So I made a modest proposal: take a quarter of the points earned by the top half and pass them on to the lower half. Everyone thought this was idiotic – even the students at the bottom. And they understood the broader point: Beyond providing for essential services and a minimum safety net, redistributing income just to get more equality is not fair&#8211;it&#8217;s completely <em>unfair</em>.</p>
<p>Redistributing wealth is no different. If income were handed out arbitrarily, it might be fair to pool and redistribute it. But it’s not, no more than grades are handed out at random.</p>
<p>Our society isn’t a perfect opportunity society, but to the extent it’s not, we should fix the real detriments to mobility: schools designed for adults and not kids, cronyism that privileges the well-connected over innovators, and a tax and regulatory system that prevents entrepreneurs from creating jobs. Redistribution doesn’t solve these problems. If anything, it makes them worse. There’s nothing moral about that.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Tell us a bit about how “earned success” brings people happiness and fulfillment while “learned helplessness” leaves unhappiness and un-fulfillment.</p>
<p><strong>Brooks:</strong> The data on entrepreneurs are instructive here. Entrepreneurs make less money and work longer hours on average than people who work for employers. They make almost twenty percent less money than government managers, just to take one example. But they’re much happier than almost any other profession. Why? Because they are creating something and becoming successful in the process. They’re in charge of their own lives. And that’s where true happiness comes from.</p>
<p>Reams of data show empirically what your mother probably told you: Money doesn’t buy happiness. But earning success, however you denominate it, does. What this means in practice is that, all else equal, someone earning a modest income that she feels she has truly earned is going to be much happier than a billionaire heiress who hasn’t earned her own success.</p>
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		<title>Presidential Nonsense</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/presidential-nonsense/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=presidential-nonsense</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:02:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afternoon Edition]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Obama once again reveals his economic ignorance. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/obama_confused2.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-119996" title="obama_confused2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/obama_confused2.gif" alt="" width="375" height="269" /></a></p>
<p>Last week, President Barack Obama, at a Capital Hilton fundraising event, told the crowd, &#8220;We can&#8217;t go back to this brand of you&#8217;re-on-your-own economics.&#8221; Throughout my professional career as an economist, I&#8217;ve never come across the theory of &#8220;you&#8217;re-on-your-own economics.&#8221; I&#8217;m guessing what the president means by — and finds offensive in — &#8220;you&#8217;re-on-your-own economics&#8221; is that it&#8217;s a system in which people are held responsible for their actions, that they take risks and must live with the results, that people can&#8217;t force others to pay for their mistakes, and that they can&#8217;t live at the expense of other people.</p>
<p>President Obama&#8217;s vision was shared by our Pilgrim Fathers of the Plymouth Colony in modern-day Massachusetts. They established a communist system. They all farmed together, and whatever they produced was put in a common storehouse. A certain amount of food was rationed to each person regardless of his contribution to the work. Many Pilgrims complained that they were too weak from hunger to do their share of the work. As deeply religious as the Pilgrims were, they took to stealing from one another. Gov. William Bradford, writing his history of the colony in &#8220;Of Plymouth Plantation,&#8221; said, &#8220;So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue, the next year also if not some way prevented.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 1623, after much debate, a new system was set up, in which every family was assigned a parcel of land, and whatever they produced belonged to the family. Gov. Bradford then observed, &#8220;The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.&#8221; After Gov. Bradford&#8217;s establishment of what Obama calls &#8220;you&#8217;re-on-your-own economics,&#8221; harvests were so bountiful that Bradford is credited with establishing what we now call Thanksgiving.</p>
<p>There are several seemingly immutable, hard-wired characteristics about humans that socialists, liberals and progressives find difficult to deal with and would like to change.</p>
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		<title>Suicide Bombing Puts a Rare Face on C.I.A.’s Work &#8211; NYTimes.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/suicide-bombing-puts-a-rare-face-on-c-i-a-%e2%80%99s-work-nytimes-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=suicide-bombing-puts-a-rare-face-on-c-i-a-%25e2%2580%2599s-work-nytimes-com</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:54:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[faith]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[faith traditions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Maine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[NYTimes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[question]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sept]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sept. 11]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[suicide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[suicide bombing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terrorist attacks]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[thesis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[work]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[World]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[In the fall of 2001, as an anguished nation came to grips with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a slender, soft-spoken economics major named Elizabeth Hanson set out to write her senior thesis at Colby College in Maine. Her question was a timely one: How do the world’s three major faith traditions apply economic principles? [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In the fall of 2001, as an anguished nation came to grips with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a slender, soft-spoken economics major named Elizabeth Hanson set out to write her senior thesis at Colby College in Maine. Her question was a timely one: How do the world’s three major faith traditions apply economic principles?</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/world/asia/07intel.html?hp">Suicide Bombing Puts a Rare Face on C.I.A.’s Work &#8211; NYTimes.com</a>.</p>
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