Self-Defense: It's Not Just a Freakin' Hobby

More than a few times, I have read people pontificating on why they study martial arts. Some will tell you that they study to cope with stress, for physical fitness, for the cultural aspects, for the mental/spiritual effects, and so forth. Those are all valid reasons, too, and I don't wish to denigrate them, and yet...

It's amazing to me how many people study martial arts and are apparently utterly unconcerned (or else outright delusional--as in the case of people who study "martial arts" but spend most of their time on point sparring and so forth) about their applicability in real-world self-defense situations. It's like they just don't see a need to prepare themselves for conflict. It's like they think martial arts is a hobby, like tap or jazz dance, or ballet, or golf.

It's not. At least, it's not intended to be.

Let me suggest to you, if it hasn't occurred to you already, that you live in a world where people will cheerfully threaten you over your political views, as described by the father of one young lady, emphasis mine:

Kristen wrote this editorial (No thanks, Mrs. Obama ..) for her high school newspaper in February of this year. After the article was published, she underwent attacks from African-American students, parents, local church groups, and members of the community. She was called a racist, threatened with a knife, attacked verbally and physically in the hallways at school, and her vehicle tires were slashed in the school parking lot. Members of some local minority organizations even met to discuss how to retaliate against her and a boycott of her school newspaper was launched.

If you're interested, I believe that this is the text of article she wrote.

You live in a world where, through no fault of your own, you may, like a co-worker of mine, wind up the object of some drug-addled, bi-polar weirdo's obsession.

You live in a world where someday, they may be coming for you...

and you may find it vitally necessary to be able to break the grips of people attempting to take you somewhere you don't want to go, or to put a man on the ground with one technique.

And so many of you just don't seem to care. Frankly, you people freak me out.

Tax Information

Overall, I haven't found Red State Uprising to be an exceptionally useful book. I am pretty sure that most people who keep up with, say, the Drudge Report, Townhall, and a few other websites would be at least slightly familiar with most of the material in it.

There is one section, though, that I wish everyone were familiar with. Some of its contents are familiar to anyone who's read The Fair Tax Book, but it's worth repeating here.

Despite our nation being founded out of a rebellion over taxes, with the cry, "Taxation without representation is tyranny," we've been saddled with more tyranny than what we threw off. England's taxation of the colonies was paltry compared to our current tax load.

When our nation was founded, the federal government spent the equivalent of about $3 million a year--about $1 per person. By 1910, after 120 years of operation, our federal government spent just over $600 million--about $6.75 per person. (There had been modest inflation in the intervening years.) But that's pocket change compared to today. By contrast, now the federal government spends $10 billion every day (almost $12, 000 per person per year). How did this come to pass?

[snip]

Taxation with representation has turned into a nightmare. Government is the "senior partner" in every American business, and its tax burden is the largest item in every working man's budget. Americans pay more for "being governed" than for food, clothing, and shelter combined. In 1929--the last year before massive federal expansion under Franklin Delano Roosevelt--federal, state, and local taxes equaled about 10 percent of our GDP. Today, combined taxes are over 26 percent of the economic earnings, but because governments are running such huge deficits, there is another 12 percent of our economy that the government is spending, which is essentially "deferred taxes" imposed on the next generation of young Americans. Total "current" plus "deferred" taxes were about 38 percent of the economy in 2009.

[snip]

Obama and other liberals would like you to believe that high-income earners in the United States are under-taxed and do not pay their "fair share." Obama's campaign promise was that he would increase taxes on couples earning more than $250, 000 per year and give tax breaks to those earning less. The reality is that the top 1 percent of taxpayers already pays almost 40 percent of all personal income taxes, and that share has nearly doubled over the last quarter-century. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers pay less than 5 percent of federal personal income taxes.

[snip]

Shifting taxes to corporations is a fantasy. Businesses do not pay taxes; only people pay them. An increase in corporate income tax, for example, is paid by customers in the form of increased prices, employees in the form of lower wages and shareholders in decreased dividends. So we the people pay for the tax increase, but the politicians like it because the taxes are rendered less visible to us.

[snip]

Consider the fiscal problems of European countries such as Greece, Britain, and Spain these days. They have massive and growing piles of government debt even larger than our own (although we are heading in that direction). Yet every European country has income and payroll taxes, as we do, plus a Value Added Tax (VAT) that rakes in even more cash for the government. The average VAT rate in Europe--20 percent!--means that every purchase a European citizen makes hands a chunk of change over to the government, making everything at least 20 percent more expensive. History confirms that high taxes don't solve a deficit problem; they just encourage politicians to spend more money.

As Brutus, the Anti-Federalist writing during the debates on ratifying the Constitution, warned:

The power to tax, exercised without limitation, will introduce itself into every corner of the city, and country--it will enter the house of every gentleman, watch over his cellar, wait upon his cook in the kitchen, follow the servants into the parlor, preside over the table, and note down all he eats and drinks; it will take cognizance of the professional man in his office, or study; it will watch the merchant in the counting house, or any store; it will follow the mechanic to his shop, and in his work, and will haunt him in his family, and in his bed; it will be a constant companion of the industrious farmer in all his labor...it will penetrate into the most obscure cottage; and finally it will light upon the head of every person in the United States. To all these different classes of people, and in all these circumstances, in which it will attend them, the language in which it will address them, will be GIVE, GIVE.

The American Thinker on Unchecked Executive Power

The whole article is worth reading, and I strongly recommend you do so. Here's the end:

Never in the history of man has a government with highly centralized powers and minimal checks and balances ended well. Today, the executive branch in the USA has the power to do almost anything it wants. The legislature is all but powerless, having ceded all their authority to the executive-appointed bureaucracy. The judicial branch is still alive and kicking feebly, but the death or retirement of one conservative justice will put a stop to that. The law enforcement political appointees have become arbitrary in their enforcement of the law and politically motivated. Never has America faced such troubling times. All of this has been accomplished slowly and cautiously to avoid raising the alarm, because the powers involved definitely do not want to raise that alarm.

The only weapon left against the rise of the autocracy is the light of truth. If the vast majority of Americans, your neighbors and coworkers, knew all of this was going on, they wouldn't stand for it. Constitutional amendments would be passed, politicians would be dismissed, and corrupt politicians would be tried and jailed. We can only hope that the sword of truth can yet prevail. However, there is not much time left, and it is time we get to work in earnest.

My caveat: rather a lot of Americans simply either do not want to know the truth, or do not care to make even a minimal effort to discover it, or even listen when it is explained to them. They are pathetically consumed with whatever sort of vapid, mass-market entertainment happens to catch their fancy at the moment.

Farmageddon?

You need to watch this. If you have any interest in genuine capitalism, genuine free-market economics, real food, liberty, and so forth, you need to watch this trailer.

Farmageddon Trailer from Kristin Canty on Vimeo.

Via Cheeseslave

I Vaguely Remembered Something About Chile...

...and Star Parker, bless her soul, reminded me. Emphasis is mine:

Chile stands out as an example of achievements only possible when people commit to freedom and free markets.

It boasts the highest per capita GDP in South America and the third highest in the Western Hemisphere. Last December it became the first South American country to be invited to join the exclusive club of the world’s top industrialized nations, the OECD – Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

But back just a little less than 40 years ago, Chile was a typical, poor South American nation, with intrusive government and sluggish growth.

How was it transformed?

Read a short essay called “How the Power of Ideas Can Transform a Country,” by one of the leaders that made it happen – Jose Pinera.

He relates how, in the mid- 1950s, the Catholic University of Chile signed a cooperation agreement with the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago, then home to the world’s top free market economists, including the legendary Milton Friedman.

Thus began the education of a generation of young Chileans in the wisdom of economic freedom. Beginning in the late 1970s, these young leaders, with newly minted PhDs, helped implement new economic reforms in Chile protecting private property and promoting free trade.

A graph showing annual economic growth in Chile over the last hundred years looks like a hockey stick. From the early part of the twentieth century until 1980, the line is flat, averaging less than one percent growth per year. But beginning 1980, growth takes off in a vertical surge, averaging over 4% per year.

One of the most sweeping reforms, done by Jose Pinera, then Chile’s Minister of Social Security, was the transformation of Chile’s government Social Security system, identical to what we now have in the U.S., to a system of individually owned private retirement accounts. Chile’s payroll tax based government system was broken and bankrupt, as ours is today.

The reform, enacted in November 1980, restored the solvency of Chile’s retirement system and brought personal ownership and wealth to Chilean workers. After 30 years, these personal accounts have averaged annual returns of 9.2% above inflation.

Now, not that George Bush was so hot, he wasn't, God knows, but do you remember what happened when he noted the obvious, that Social Security was on the ropes, and proposed to privatize a little, just a little, of the system? Do you remember how he was demonized for that? Do you remember how that tiny bit of privatization was denounced as a "risky scheme?"

Tell it to the Chileans. Their retirement system appears to be working. Ours is in the red, so I understand, this snappin' year!

Just to drive the point home: leftist crap doesn't work. Never has, never will.

On the other hand, if a person's ever considered trying to emigrate to a country where economic freedom is not an epithet, Chile has to be considered.

Accidentally Stumbling Upon Greatness

No, not my greatness, dear reader, I would not be so foolish as to make such a claim. I refer to the greatness of Garet Garrett, or at least the greatness of his forward to his book, The People's Pottage.

Y'see, Mrs. MOTW brought home, quite unbidden, a library book she thought I might like. It was titled The Conservative Bookshelf, and I quickly found that the author thereof had political ideas very similar (not identical) to mine own. In them, he recommended the work of Garet Garrett, of whom I do not believe I had heretofore heard. So I looked to our local library, and much to my surprise, I found that they had something by Mr. Garrett.

I have only just started the book, but I must confess myself duly impressed. The forward alone, written in 1953, is a thing of greatness. I wish everyone would read it. I reproduce most of it here and ask you, gentle reader, to consider what Mr. Garrett says in light of the last two years of political history.

I will provide more quotes later on. Anything in bold (including bolded italics) reflects my emphasis.

A time came when the only people who had ever been free began to ask: What is freedom?

Who wrote its articles--the strong or the weak?

Was it an absolute good?

Could there be such a thing as unconditional freedom, short of anarchy?

Given the answer to be no, then was freedom an eternal truth or a political formula?

Since it was clear to reason that freedom must be conditioned, as by self-discipline, individual responsibility and many necessary laws of restraint; and since there was never in the world an absolute good, why should people not be free to say they would have less freedom in order to have more of some other good?

What other good?

Security.

What else?

Stability.

And beyond that?

Beyond the sympathies of we, and all men as brothers, instead of the willful I, as if each man were a sovereign, self-regarding individual?

Well, where there is freedom doubt itself must be free. You shall not be forbidden to interrogate the faith of your fathers. Better that, indeed, than to take it entirely for granted.

So long as doubts such as these were wildish pebbles in the petulant waves that gnaw ceaselessly at any foundation, perhaps only because it is a foundation, no great damage was done. But when they began to be massed as a creed, then they became sharp cutting tools, wickely set in the jaws of the flood. That was the work of a disaffected intellectual cult, mysteriously rising in the academic world; and from the same source came the violent winds of Marxian propaganda that raised the waves higher and made them angry.

Even so, the damage to the foundations might have been much slower and not beyond simple repair if it had not happened that in 1932 a bund of intellectual revolutionaries, hiding behind the conservative planks of the Democratic party, seized control of government.

After that it was the voice of government saying to the people there had been too much freedom. That was their trouble. Freedom was for the strong. The few had used it to exploit the many. Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, boom and bust, depression and unemployment, economic insecurity, want in the midst of plenty, property rights above human rights, taking it always out of the hide of labor in bad times--all of that was what came of rugged individualism, of free prices, free markets, free enterprise and freedom of contract. Let that be the price of freedom, and who would not say it was too dear?

So, instead of this willful private freedom, trust the government to administer freedom, for all the people alike, especially the weak. To begin with, the government would redistribute the national wealth in an equitable manner. Then its planners would plan production and distribution in perfect balance, and thus no more boom and bust; the government then would see to it that everybody had always enough money to buy a decent living, and beyond that it would provide for the widows and orphans, the sick and disabled, the indigent and the old.

To perform these miracles it would require more freedom for itself--that is, freedom to intervene in the lives of people for their own good, freedom from old Constitutional restraints that belonged to our horse-and-buggy days, and freedom to do as it would with the public purse. And if it should be said that this increase in the government's own sphere of freedom meant a curtailment of the individual's freedom, it came to this--that the individual was asked to surrender only the freedom to starve and what he received in return was freedom from want. Was that not a good bargain?

What the people did in fact surrender was control of government.

They did not intend to do that. For a long time they did not realize they had done it, and when at last it came to them they were already deeply infected with a virus that devours the copy book virtues, creates habits of dependence and destroys the valiant love of self-responsibility.

The crisis was moral.

Happily for their designs, the New Deal physicians found the patient in a state of economic pain, extreme but not fatal, and proceeded to administer imported narcotics, all habit forming, such as:

(1) Repudiation of the United States Treasury's promises to pay.

(2) Confiscation of the people's gold by trickery.

(3) Debasement of the currency.

(4) Deliberate inflation.

(5) Spoilation of the savers, whose little rainy day hoards melted away.

(6) Deficit spending to create buying power by conjury.

(7) Monetization of debt.

(8) The doctrine of a planned economy.

(9) A scheme of taxation, class subsidies and Federal grants-in-aid designed ostensibly to redistribute the national wealth for social justice, but calculated in fact to reduce millions of citizens to subservience, to bring forty-eight sovereign states to the status of provinces and to create in the executive principle a supreme government with extensive new powers, including the power to make its own laws by simply publishing from its bureaus rules and regulations having the force of law, disobedience punishable by fine or imprisonment.

These physicians kept saying to the patient, "Now aren't you feeling better?" Many, very many, were feeling immediately better, and because they were feeling better and because the government offered to provide them all with economic security forever, they were easily persuaded to exchange freedom for benefits, until at last they had surrendered, almost unawares, the most elementary freedom of all, namely, the right to receive in your pay envelope the full reward for your labor and do with it what you will.

Thus the Welfare State was built. The facade was magnificent; the cornerstone rested on quicksand; the moral cost of it may be reckoned in terms such as these:

If the great Government of the United States were a private corporation no bank would take its name on a piece of paper, because it has cynically repudiated the words engraved upon its bonds.

The dollar, which was long the most honored piece of money in the world, became an irredeemable scrap of paper, with no certain value.

The executive power of government was exalted to be the paramount power, uncontrollable, and the exquisite Constitutional mechanism of three co-equal powers--the Congress to make the laws, the President to execute the laws and the Supreme Court to interpret the laws--no longer functioned.

The symbol of Executive Government is the President. Actually, Executive Government became a vast system of bureaus and commissions writing 90 per cent of our laws, touching our everyday lives to the quick.

The purse and the sword were in one hand, which is solemnly forbidden by the constitution. In fact this was so. True, Congress still appropriated the money, but it could no longer pretend to understand the budgets that came from the White House and bitterly complained that it could not appropriate money intelligently. And as for the sword, the State Department, speaking for Executive Government, held that to be an obsolete provision of the Constitution which says only the Congress hsall have the power to declare war. The President alone could make war, as he did in Korea.

In these twenty years a revolution took place in the relationship between government and people. Formerly government was the responsibility of people; now people were the responsibility of government.

This change was silently geared to the popular idea of Social Security, for which the money was to come from a law of compulsory thrift imposed upon the individual and a pay roll tax imposed upon employers, all to be managed by a paternal Federal government. But this Social Security is delusive. In the first place, you have no surety that the money the government takes currently out of your income or your wage envelope as a social security tax will be worth as much when you get it back as it was when the government took it. Indeed, it is now worth only half as much as it was when the government began to take it a few years ago. With one hand it held out the apple; with the other hand it introduced the worm that was going to devour it. The worm was inflation. Secondly, as fast as the government receives those social security taxes it spends the money and puts in place of it a paper promise to pay you when you are entitled to receive it back, so that the only security behind all this Social Security scheme is more government debt. The right way would be to meet the cost of Social Security currently by an annual tax on the national income.

Nor is that all.

As the religious apostate seems to pass under a kind of emotional necessity to revile the symbols and images of his abandoned faith, so in the last twenty years the popular meaning of old American words has undergone enormities of semantic change and are scourged accordingly. The word freedom itself has come to be regarded as a reactionary word, if you use it to mean, freedom from the coercions and compulsions of government, even when they might be benign. Individualism is a word that will class you with the greedy few who wish to exploit the many for profit. The honorable word capitalism is anathema. Likewise nationalism and sovereignty. And the mere thought of America first, associated as that term is with isolationism, has become a liability so extreme that politicians feel obliged to deny ever having entertained it. But if you use the word freedom to mean freedom for mankind, that is all right.

It does occur to me that some readers may not understand what Mr. Garrett means by:

...the power to make its own laws by simply publishing from its bureaus rules and regulations having the force of law, disobedience punishable by fine or imprisonment.

and

...Executive Government became a vast system of bureaus and commissions writing 90 per cent of our laws, touching our everyday lives to the quick.

It is not so hard to understand. Think about our government and our country today.

How much of what the FDA holds companies responsible for is law passed by the Congress and signed by the President?

How much of what OSHA holds companies responsible for is law passed by the Congress and signed by the President?

How much of what the EPA holds companies and individuals responsible for is law passed by the Congress and signed by the President?

It would not be difficult to multiply examples. The reality today is that much of what has the force of law in our country has never been passed by Congress and signed by the President. Congress long ago abdicated much of its law-making (and repealing) responsibility. Instead, too often we create bureaucracies with the power to make rules and regulations and the power to punish people for disobedience. It is a hideous expansion of government that was never envisioned by the people who created the Constitution.

What? You Haven't Seen Food, Inc?

That's what I wanted to ask the folks over at the-blog-that-shall-not-be-named when they excoriated Senator Coburn for holding up an alleged "food safety" bill. If they'd take the trouble to watch Food, Inc, they might learn a couple of things, like that some of our biggest food safety problems are exacerbated by government involvement (quick example: we have a few too many scares with e coli, right? E Coli grows well in the digestive systems of cows that are
fed corn. We, of course, finish off, or fatten up, our cows on corn. Not that corn's their natural diet or anything [That would be grass, for you non-rural folk]. We fatten them up on corn in large part because corn is cheap. Corn is cheap because the government subsidizes it. The government subsidizes it because of lobbying from certain giant corporations...) and that large corporations have a nasty habit of squeezing out competition by means of government muscle (Just google "monsanto + soybeans." Just google it. That's all I'm sayin'.)

I didn't have time to go into detail, though, and just left them to wallow in what they incorrectly perceived to be the moral high ground. However, what Stanislav, a Russian blogger, posted today reminded me of the whole thing. I haven't looked in detail at the bill, and don't know whether Stanislav is correct in the details, but...well, go ahead and read this:

In America, the House has already passed the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act S.510 bill and only the Senate is left to pass their version and commingle them into a unified monstrosity. The bill is designed to destroy the small farmer in America, the very caste of people who is the most likely opposition to the control of the moneyed elites.

Though the American small farmer is a dieing breed, with hundreds of thousands of families throwing in the towel over the past decade, he is not dieing out fast enough.

[snip]

The paperwork restrictions on farmers, the amount of effort to put in perfectly filled out copies or to face $500,000 fines on the first infraction, will guarantee that only the large agro giants are left standing in rather short order. On top of this the FDA will have full authority to dictate each and every detail of how food should be grown and under what conditions to the American farmer.

This is one of the ways it's done, folks, that is, this is one of the ways large corporations get rid of the small fry. For more details on this sort of thing, you can read Crunchy Cons; Mr. Dreher has a fairly lengthy discussion of this stuff.

Used to be, people in this country had enough sense to laugh when someone said that the most frightening sentence in the English language was, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."

---

You haven't seen Food, Inc, have you? You went out and spent your movie money on something with explosions, or to see Bella snog that dimwit vampire, didn't you?

---

Government, Food, and Libel

Mrs. MOTW brought home Food, Inc from the library. Now, actually, I've wanted to see that film for some little time. I am not unaware of how the food business has changed over the decades. Dreher talked about it quite a bit in Crunchy Cons (highly recommended reading, see my review here).

Mostly, I didn't see too much different from what I expected to see, having read about many of these issues before. I will say that I was mildly aggravated by the persistent tone that so many of the people in the film had, an undercurrent of "these companies will do anything, including make you sick, for a profit." I, of course, am:

A) Goin' "DUH! Read Genesis, people are fallen!" Real conservatives are never surprised at crappy human behavior, including their own.

B) Wondering how the fact that it is government interference in the marketplace that makes this stuff possible could have had so little impact on so many of the people being interviewed. People being interviewed for the film repeatedly noted that the food market is skewed because of government subsidies--government subsidies which have been lobbied for by people in the fast-food business, agribusiness, and so forth. It was government distortion of the marketplace, albeit brought on by powerful, moneyed interests, that caused the problem, but everybody seemed to be concerned with how they could get government to fix the problem.

Get the government the heck out of the way, anyone? As the film's director was quoted as saying in the Wikipedia article, emphasis mine:

...the whole system is made possible by government subsidies to a few huge crops like corn. It's a form of socialism that's making us sick.

Now, just how you gonna get government out of the way? An educated population, that's how.

Pity we ain't got one o' those.

But that's not what I started out to write about. The film made a few references to "veggie libel laws." Having never heard of such a thing, I went and googled it. I will be monkey's fershlugginer uncle, there is such a thing. 13 states (including Oklahoma), apparently, have special laws that make it much easier to sue people who make disparaging comments about an agricultural product. Apparently, if you've got a negative opinion about certain foods, unless you have the Oprah's deep pockets, you had better keep it to yourself.

Amazing.

Go watch the film. Your time won't be wasted.

Financial Crisis 101

Courtesy of Andrew Klavan. Actually, this was about as good an explanation of the situation as you can get in four minutes.

Quote from a Facebook Friend

Regrettably, I don't think I can give the man proper credit without blowing my identity. But here 'tis:

I do not like it Uncle Sam, I do not like it Sam I am. I do not like these dirty crooks, Neither how they cook the books. I do not like when Congress steals, I do not like their secret deals. I do not like this Speaker Nan, I do not like this "YES WE CAN!" I do not like this kind of hope, I do not like it, nope! nope, Nope!

Amen, brother, amen...

How A Bill Really Becomes a Law

"Control the People," He Says...

Well, yeah, I'm sure he didn't mean it like it sounds...

The Problem in a Nutshell

I actually left a comment on the local lib blog (don't often do that anymore, kind of a waste of time), and elicited a comment from what I think is pretty much the only other regular reader they have, and to my mind, that comment explained all there is to know about why the Democratic Congress is so determined to push through their health scare care deform reform despite knowing full well that their proposals are intensely unpopular.

Basically, he said to wait a generation and then, you'll never be able to wean people off it--government health care, that is. Oh, he couched it in terms of the people "benefiting" from it for a generation, which is obviously highly debatable, but I think he's right in that other respect. If the Democrats get this passed, they know perfectly well it will ultimately become one more untouchable entitlement program that will help to keep their party in power--especially if, via comprehensive immigration reform amnesty, they get about 12 million new voters in the next few years.

They might lose power this year, the thinking goes, but after that, it's perpetual Democratic one-party rule, baby! So the only problem, from their perspective, is getting sitting Congressmen to walk the plank for the sake of the party's future.

Short and Sweet on the Constitutionality of the "Slaughter Solution"

Tony Blankley does a good job of laying it out, short and sweet for you. I strongly suggest you read it.

This Time, It's Personal

This delightful scene was sent to me by a relative.

Ah, the sweet smell of torches and the wonderful sight of pitchforks...

From Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy--and How They Will Do It Again if No One Stops Them

I checked Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy--and How They Will Do It Again If No One Stops Them out from the library a few days ago. I'd love to reproduce the whole book here, but, copyright violations aside, I just haven't got the time. Those unfamiliar with a more conservative analysis of the mortgage-related financial troubles we've experienced over the last two years would do well to start with this column by Thomas Sowell. That will give you a little more background so that you can better appreciate this material from the introduction to Architects of Ruin.

All of this has led Americans to wonder: What happened? How the heck did we get here? Whose fault is it? Who do we blame? What mistakes were made? How can we get out of this mess?

There has been much debate about this question, but the ultimate source of the problem, it is generally agreed--the triggering event that caused the chain of other dominoes to fall--was the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the United States. Banks and mortgage companies had made trillions of dollars in loans to individuals with terrible credit. They signed loans with illegal immigrants, offered so-called NINJA (No Income, No Job, No Assets) mortgages, and allowed people with bad credit to leverage their money. When the loans began to fail in large numbers, a new term entered our national vocabulary: toxic assets. And so the crisis began.

Still, an underlying mystery remained: What explains this perplexing behavior? Were they nuts? Did they simply take leave of their senses?

The conventional narrative was written in the first days of the collapse. And as usual, the loudest, most obstreperous voices seemed to prevail. "The private sector got us into this mess," Congressman Barney Frank indignantly declared as events began to unfold; "the government has to get us out of it."

According to this view, deregulation of the banking industry had encouraged the rise of "predatory lenders" who had pushed home loans on people who couldn't afford them. Those loans were then sold to unscrupulous Wall Street financiers, who repackaged them in the form of mortgage-backed securities. The securities were sold in turn to mutual funds, pension funds, and various foreign investors. but their value was grossly overstated and ultimately rested on the faulty assumption that housing prices would keep rising indefinitely. Once again, the supposed result of irresponsible deregulation of financial markets.

This explanation, coming from Frank, had the obvious benefit of pinning the collapse on his political enemies, the Republicans, while completely exonerating any Democrat (such as himself) who had responsibility for overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed lending institutions that traditionally acted as a backstop to the housing market. It is not an accident that Frank has been in the forefront of attempts to minimize the crisis or (when it could no longer be denied) deflect the blame to his opponents. When some conservatives pointed out that Fannie and Freddie had abandoned their sober mission of stabilizing the middle-class housing market in favor of a misguided crusade to expand minority home ownership by forcing banks to lower their lending standards, Frank and his allies brazenly shouted them down.

[snip]

...the rush to heavy government intervention, new programs, and massive spending was now treated as inevitable. It was the 1930s all over again, and Obama was the new FDR. Free-market economics had been tried and found wanting. Obama referred to its theories dismissively as "failed ideas" and refused to entertain any talk of tax cuts or (God forbid) "doing nothing" in response. To the contrary, the crisis proved that it was time to return to stronger government controls. Anyone standing in the way was seen as part of the political fringe, a die-hard ideologue on par with a Holocaust denier.

This is the self-serving fairy tale propounded by Barack Obama and his allies in Congress and the press. The actual truth about what happened was a much more interesting and complicated--and incriminating--story, too complex to be conveyed in a media sound bite.

[snip]

It was a massive social engineering project, a grand generational enterprise, thirty years in the making, carried out by an ad hoc alliance of radical activists, labor unions, liberal politicians, federal bureaucrats, and Wall Street financial titans who sought to make getting a mortgage and owning a home a civil right.

[snip]

...the heart of the story is the role that radical activists and liberal politicians in Washington played in trying to harness the U.S. financial system to advance their socialist agenda. Properly understood, it is a cautionary tale about the perils of trying to use the power of the state to do good, to help people by giving them a leg up, to "level the playing field." Ironically, such efforts have usually ended up doing the most harm to the very people they were intended to help. The result in this case was no different.

[snip]

...two additional facts should be very disturbing to American taxpayers.

First, the same people who caused the debacle have now been tasked with cleaning it up. The Obama administration is full of Clinton retreads, and they show no signs of having learned anything from the damage they have wrought.

[snip]

Second, the same cast of characters is busy leveraging state power to manipulate capitalism for their next great social cause: the so-called green economy. Just as occurred in the subprime mortgage crisis, federal authorities and environmental activists are working in tandem, browbeating energy companies and the automotive industry, using the power of the state to compell the creation of carbon-trading schemes and the forced development of green technologies that are simply not profitable. This approach essentially co-opts the regulatory power of the government to create false incentives to invest in green technologies.

The Silicon Valley investor Eric Janszen (who according to the New York Times accurately predicted the dot-com bubble) says that the hype and activism behind green technology will create enough "fictitious value" that the coming green tech bubble will reach an astonishing $20 trillion...before it bursts. In the meantime, environmental activists and their political allies stand to profit handsomely: former Vice President Al Gore has already netted $100 million in profits from green economy schemes.

Plus, of course, the green agenda offers plenty of scope for good old-fashioned political self-dealing. See, for example, this story from the Washington Times of July 15, 2009: "Rep. Ed Perlmutter of Colorado inserted a provision into the recently passed House climate change bill that would drum up business for 'green' banks, such as the one he has invested in and his family and a political donor helped found in San Francisco...Mr. Perlmutter, a two-term Democrat, has two investments in the 3-year old New Resource Bank, which calls itself the nation's first green bank."

Needless to say, there will be much more to come. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

We have not nearly seen the end of liberal activists trying to manipulate the capitalist system for their own profit and social goals. Unless they are stopped, the rest of us are going to pay the price.

Time and again, since I was but a wee sprout, I have observed that a remarkable amount of the time, politicians get elected by promising to "fix" problems that they have caused. They use the massive power of government to fix some perceived injustice, never dreaming--they haven't the training or background reading to understand the subject, all too frequently--that they are going to cause more problems than they solve, and then, utterly unable to perceive that they have screwed up, blame everyone else for the resulting chaos and try yet again to "fix" the problem.

The story is told of a baseball manager who, unsatisfied with the play of his left fielder, benches him and plays the position himself in the critical last inning. After muffing an easy pop fly, the manager heads back into the dugout and announces to the left fielder, "Son, you got left field so messed up, can't nobody play it."

Right now, more than seventy years of government interference in the natural activity of the marketplace has so fouled up the field that can't nobody play it--and yet if you offer the obvious solution: let the air out of the balloon, get the government off the field--you will be shouted down as the obvious lunatic.

How Delightful

Much to my surprise, apparently someone else thought this was the best line delivered in the movies in a long time. I may put this in the sidebar.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

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This was sent to me--again--by a relative. I've seen it before, years ago, as a matter of fact. It's one of those things that keeps going 'round the internet, getting changed bit by bit. I enjoyed this version. Typos, if any, were present in the text as it was sent to me.

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Two Different Versions! ................. Two Different Morals!


OLD VERSION: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.

The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself

MODERN VERSION:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.

CBS, NBC , PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast.

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green.'

Acorn stages a demonstration in front of the ant 's ho use where the news stations film the group singing, 'We shall overcome.' Rev. Jeremiah Wright then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.

Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer.

The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ants food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he doesn't maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote in 2010.

Excellent Article on Man's Rights

A right is the sovereignty to act without the permission of others. The concept of a right carries with it an implicit, unstated footnote: you may exercise your rights as long as you do not violate the same rights of another—within this context, rights are an absolute.

A right is universal—meaning: it applies to all men, not just to a few. There is no such thing as a "right" for one man, or a group of men, that is not possessed by all. This means there are no special "rights" unique to women or men, blacks or white, the elderly or the young, homosexuals or heterosexuals, the rich or the poor, doctors or patients or any other group.

A right must be exercised through your own initiative and action. It is not a claim on others. A right is not actualized and implemented by the actions of others. This means you do not have the right to the time in another person’s life. You do not have a right to other people’s money. You do not have the right to another person’s property. If you wish to acquire some money from another person, you must earn it—then you have a right to it. If you wish to gain some benefit from the time of another person’s life, you must gain it through the voluntary cooperation of that individual—not through coercion. If you wish to possess some item of property of another individual, you must buy it on terms acceptable to the owner—not gain it through theft.

[snip]

Statists have corrupted the actual meaning of a right and have converted it, in the minds of most, into its opposite: into a claim on the life of another. With the growth of statism, over the past few decades, we have seen an explosion of these "rights"—which, in fact, have gradually eroded your actual right to your life, money and property.

Statists declare you have a "right" to housing, to a job, to health care, to an education, to a minimum wage, to preferential treatment if you are a minority and so on.

[snip]

Under statism, "rights" are a means of enslavement: it places a mortgage on your life—and statists are the mortgage holders, on the receiving end of unearned payments forcibly extracted from your life and your earnings. You do not have a right to your life, others do. Others do not have a right to their lives, either, but you have a "right" to theirs.

There's more, of course, and I recommend you read it. I would add only (at this point--I've only read it once) that rights, starting with your right to life, are, as the Declaration of Independence says, a gift of God. You have them because God says you do. Where there are any limitations, they are likewise to be found in the decrees of God, that is, that is why governments can legitimately collect taxes for legitimate--that is, God-ordained--functions. God instituted government, and authorizes taxation to support it.

But taxation for any governmental purpose beyond those legitimate functions, the principle one of which is to act as God's minister for justice, that is, to protect man's rights? I'm very tempted to call that theft.

No, No, This'll Never Be You...

Don't worry about it. You'll never, ever have a need to put up unarmed resistance. You'll never, ever have a need for the ability to put a man on the ground with each technique.

Shhhh. Go back to sleep. Why would you need to have the ability to, unarmed, knock a man off his feet?

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Hat tip to Cathouse Chat's Kat.

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