Is Barack Obama an Evangelical?
Is Barack Obama an Evangelical?
Read it at the link.
Dec 10 2008
Nothing new here
Here’s a twenty year old article that could have been written yesterday. The money quote:
Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek has provided the answer: “It is through the mutually adjusted efforts of many people that more knowledge is utilized than any one individual possesses or than it is possible to synthesize intellectually; and it is through such utilization of dispersed knowledge that achievements are made possible greater than any single mind can foresee.”[9]
The market brings together the information possessed by all individuals in the market and, therefore, is able to make better decisions on questions of optimal resource allocation than can any group of bureaucrats. To try to identify “winners” and “losers” beforehand is folly.
Read the entire article, and ponder the fact that congress is about to get into the automobile manufacturing business. Other businesses will follow.
Are we about to learn, the very, very hard way, what European socialists already proved, namely that governments can’t run businesses and make them work? What they CAN do, of course, is interfere with business, and make it fail. That, in fact, is what happened in the recent mortgage finance debacle, and a large part of the reason for American automaker’s difficulties, namely the legal props for union muscle, and the requirements for various aspects of automobile design.
Dec 10 2008
Dividing the promised land part 1
This is about our adventures in dividing a 5 acre lot into two 2.5 acre lots, in San Bernardino County in southern California. It will include human folly, financial folly, governmental folly, economic folly, and environmental folly. Plenty of folly to go around.
My family and I live on the south half of the 5 acre lot. The lot is defined as “sub-dividable” by the county. We bought it 6 years ago, had a house built on it, assuming that we could subdivide it when we chose, and either sell the other half, or build on the other half, then sell it.
You know what they say about assumptions.
We moved into the house a little more than 4 years ago. As you may recall, the go-go real estate market was in full swing. When we began to check into it, we discovered that the cost to subdivide the property into two separate lots was estimated at $14,000 – $15,000. Wow. Who knew? We asked why, and were told about all the things that “had to be done” before the lot could be divided.
“But,” we protested, “we just bought the lot, and built on it. Environmental studies were already done. Drainage has been determined. Percolation tests have been done.” (Those are necessary to determine that the ground will tolerate a septic tank, since it’s a pretty remote area.) We continued, “And the survey was just done to determine the exact limits of the property before we were allowed to buy it. All you have to do is draw a line down the middle of it. Nothing has changed in the last six years.”
The county employee smiled condescendingly and explained that it all had to be done again. I asked why, and was told, “It’s the state law for part of it, and county regulations for the rest of it.” Did I mention that it was going to be $14,000 – $15,000 to get all this stuff done again?
Basically, we were staying in Judah, and wanted to sell Israel. Unfortunately, the Assyrians run the county, and the Babylonians run the state. We could wait for Sharia Law to take over, and pay the jizya, or we could just bite the bullet and pay tribute now.
Dec 10 2008
Pro-business isn’t the same thing as “free market”
An article by Eric-Charles Banfield, from 1995, on Business–Government Collusion
Back when first cutting my teeth on the concepts of free-market economics, I was impressed by the argument that business firms have to satisfy their customers to survive. Firms have strong, natural disincentives against performing poorly or acting immorally because they would risk losing customers and going out of business. For some time thereafter, I defended “business” on those grounds. Business is not an evil, I argued; indeed, businesses are almost “slaves” to the shifting and elusive passions of the sovereign consumer.
But over the years, I found myself forced to refine my views regarding business firms. Three lessons stand out. First, being “pro-business” is not the same as being “free-market.” Second, regulation, which presumably works “against” business, goes hand-in-hand with special privileges and artificial protections “for” business. Third, the phenomenon of active and routine collusion between business and government made the business world seem less than the pure and benevolent social agent I once perceived. In short, I began to recognize that the concept of “the corporate welfare state” goes a long way to describe some of the problems we observe in the complex nexus between the market sector and the government sector. All too often, businesses lobby government for special privileges they would not have in a true, free market.
Read it all. We haven’t had “free market” capitalism in this country for a long time, if we ever did, as is made clear here. If we ever do get it, we won’t just rent the world with option to buy, as we do now, we’ll own it.
As it is, this 13 year old article is disturbingly relevant today.
Dec 09 2008
What will Obama do to forestall a nuclear Iran?
A couple years ago there were speculations in many quarters that George Bush would not allow a nuclear Iran. I read more than one column suggesting that he would take military action against Iran’s nuclear program, sometime before the end of his presidency, especially if a Democrat was elected. That seems less and less likely, based on any reasonable reading of the tea leaves. If he still plans such a thing, it is the best kept secret of his administration.
So, what will Obama do to stop Iran from getting the bomb? Make no mistake: if Iran has the bomb, the world is changed, hugely. When Iran has the bomb, we won’t know which terrorist organization has been given the bomb. We won’t know when or if Iran plans to destroy Israel, even at the price of the enormous retaliation that would follow. Iran will surely shake its nuclear stick at Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, et. al., and Iran probably has, or will have soon, missiles capable of reaching large parts of Europe. Within 10-20 years, it is likely to have missiles that can reach the USA.
Even more concerning, if terrorists got a nuke from Iran and destroyed a US city, how would we prove the origin of the nuke? Would our response be paralyzed?
Continue reading “What will Obama do to forestall a nuclear Iran?”
Dec 09 2008
A nation of pistoleros? Well, maybe.
Knowing my neighbors, it might be good not to try to stage a terrorist takeover in my town. But there are lots of “gun free” zones in Los Angeles, meaning that only criminals have guns.
Of Arms and the Law: Massacre in Mumbai
It’s hard to envision hundreds of American civilians or dozens police standing by while four guys shot up a hotel full of people, encountering no resistance.
Dec 09 2008
When the feds take over McDonalds, will they serve fried rice?
News Analysis – Washington Takes Risks With Its Auto Bailout Plans – NYTimes.com
In the short term, Democrats are floating the idea of linking $15 billion in immediate loans to the designation of a “car czar” who, in doling out the money, could require or veto big transactions or investments, essentially a one-man board of directors. The White House indicates that President Bush, who has spent his entire presidency proclaiming that the government’s role is to create an environment that spurs free enterprise and minimizes government regulation, would very likely sign the rescue plan.
The first $15 billion and the car czar who oversees it, however, are only the beginning. “After that, we’re in uncharted water,” said Malcolm S. Salter, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School who has studied the auto industry for two decades and, until a few years ago, was an adviser to General Motors and Ford. “Think about this: Who in the federal government would have the tremendous insight needed to fix this industry?”
Depending on how the longer-term revamping of the industry proceeds, Washington could become a major shareholder in the Big Three, it could provide loans, or, in one course that Mr. Obama seemed to hint at on Sunday, it could organize what amounts to a “structured bankruptcy.” In that case, the government would convene the creditors, the unions, the shareholders and the company’s management, and apportion a share of the hit to each of them. If that “consensus building” sounds a lot like the role of the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry in the 1970s and the 1980s, well, it is.
To promote the Japanese car industry on the way up, the trade ministry nudged companies toward consolidation, and even tried to mandate which parts of the market each could go into. (Soichiro Honda, the founder of the company, rebelled when bureaucrats told him he was supposed to limit himself to making motorcycles.) By the 1980s, Congress was denouncing this as “industrial policy,” and arguing that it put American makers at a competitive disadvantage, and polluted free enterprise.
Now, it is Congress doing exactly that, but this time as emergency surgery. Other nations will doubtless complain, or begin doing the same for their own companies. “We’re at this moment in history, in which the Chinese are touting that their system is better than ours” with their mix of capitalism and state control, said Mr. Garten, who has long experience in Asia. “And our response, it looks like, is to begin replicating what they’ve been doing.”
The rest of the world has already proved that in the long run “nationalized” industries do worse than private ones. But, of course, the essence of science is the ability to duplicate results, proving the correctness of a theory.
Looks like we’re about to try to prove (reprove? improve?) the laws of economics…. as if they needed proof.
Dec 09 2008
Obama: not born in Bethlehem
Court: No review of Obama’s eligibility to serve – Yahoo! News
The Supreme Court has turned down an emergency appeal from a New Jersey man who says President-elect Barack Obama is ineligible to be president because he was a British subject at birth. The court did not comment on its order Monday rejecting the call by Leo Donofrio of East Brunswick, N.J., to intervene in the presidential election.
….At least one other appeal over Obama’s citizenship remains at the court. Philip J. Berg of Lafayette Hill, Pa., argues that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii as Obama says and Hawaii officials have confirmed.
Does anybody know of any reason why Obama doesn’t simply authorize the Hawaii authorities to release the original birth certificate for public viewing and examination? Wouldn’t it be better to just put this to rest in a completely transparent way, instead of playing the court technicality game?
Dec 09 2008
If it comes from a pig, it’s pork
Obama: Days of ‘pork … as a strategy’ are over – CNN.com
“You know, the days of just pork coming out of Congress as a strategy, those days are over.”
Except that the unprecedentedly HUGE public works plans our president-elect has are one big giant piece of pork. “Pork” usually means things tacked onto a bill by a legislator to get some money back into his or her home district or state. But who needs “extra pork”, when the main bill is going to bring a multi-billion dollar project into the home district?
I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the Democrat caucus, as legislators have fist fights over who gets the most money. Just imagine: the Dick Durbin Memorial Wind Farm, the Barbara Boxer Interstate Canal, the Harry Reid Interstate Canal (it’s named something different in each state, you see), the Chris Dodd Dam and Real Estate Office, and my personal favorite, the Barack Obama Solar Power Generating Station and National Park (haven’t you always wanted to camp next to a huge solar power converter?).
Forget that “other white meat” stuff. They’ll all be eatin’ pretty high on the hog.
Dec 08 2008
The Imam’s new clothes: naked Jihad is apparently still beyond notice
In his usual brilliantly entertaining way, Mark Steyn points out the apparently un-point-outable in a piece called “Silence = Acceptance”, in which he reminds us that, at some point, acqueisance to evil IS evil:
Silence=Acceptance
Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush’s foreign policy.
Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline: “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.”
Indeed. And so it goes. This time round, Bombay, it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims “found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.”
Oh, I don’t know about that. In fact, you’d be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” to any religion, least of all one beginning with “I-” and ending in “-slam.” In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations, “Islamic terrorists,” “Muslim extremists”, and by the time of the assault on Bombay found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators “militants” or “gunmen” or “teenage gunmen,” as in the opening line of this report in the Australian: “An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok…”
Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.
Read the whole thing, and try to grapple with the questions it raises. Why do our media and government agencies try so hard to avoid saying the obvious?
If you doubt any of Steyn’s perspective on this (it is, after all, only a brief article, and perhaps you think he’s cherry picked a few anecdotes), you should consider reading his book, America Alone. I know, all you jihad deniers think that “most muslims” wouldn’t do such things, but would they acquiesce to them? What kind of data would you need to have that demonstrated to you? At what point do about a zillion “anecodotes” start to add up to real data?
The “moderate Muslims” in our communities know who the extremists are in their own orbit. If they don’t, they are being willfully blind and ignorant. Why don’t they report them?
I am prolife. I positively despise abortion, and think it is the greatest contemporary stain on American culture. If I attended a meeting somewhere in which some yahoo talked glowingly about maybe blowing up an abortion clinic as the only moral thing to do, and God’s will to punish the ungodly, I’d be on the phone with the cops in about three seconds out of the meeting. And I’d be doing the fool a favor. Better to be watched closely than to become a murderer.
Talk similar to that is directly quoted from the Koran and Hadith, and effusively praised, in mosques every week in non-majority-Muslim countries. Jihadists who do horrible things are routinely held up as objects of praise. How many phone calls do you think are made alerting authorities? Free speech is supposed to stop at conspiracy to murder or incitement to terrorism, isn’t it?
« Previous Page — Next Page »
