God whispers to us in our pleasures,
speaks to us in our conscience,
but shouts in our pains:
It is His megaphone
to rouse a deaf world
C.S. Lewis
Amusing Satire By Rothbard on Quota Systems
As "Cherokee Liz" Warren, mediocre Democratic challenger to one of the better senators, Scott Brown (R-MA), is desperately trying to dig herself out of a hole whereby she attempted to list herself as a Native American (Indian) while in academia, she is in a state of denial about issues of integrity and divisive class-based politics.
I just stumbled across this priceless little gem on the mises.org site from probably the most prominent American libertarian, Murray Rothbard:
A political theorist friend of mine thought he could coin a satiric oppressed group: short people, who suffer from "heightism." I informed him that he was seriously anticipated two decades ago. In addition to this clear-cut oppression of [hiring, compensating, and electing] talls over shorts, Feldman pointed out that women notoriously prefer tall over short men. Feldman also perceptively pointed to the [heightist bias] in such phrases as people being "short-sighted, short-changed, short-circuited, and short in cash."
I went on in my article to call for a short liberation movement to end short oppression, and asked, where are the short corporation leaders, the short bankers, the short senators and presidents? I asked for short pride, short institutes, short history courses, short quotas everywhere, and for shorts to stop internalizing the age-old propaganda of our tall culture that shorts are genetically or culturally inferior. (Look at Napoleon!) Short people, arise! You have nothing to lose but your elevator shoes. I ended by assuring the tallies that we were not anti-tall, and that we welcome progressive, guilt-ridden talls as pro-short sympathizers and auxiliaries in our movement. If my own consciousness had been sufficiently raised at the time, I would have of course added a demand that the talls compensate the shorts for umpteen thousand years of tall tyranny.France, Greece et al.:
You Can Go Your Own Way
Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)
On the Highway to Hell
I have zero use or patience for state-of-denial, myopic, counterproductive, economically illiterate demagogues and rent-seeking political parasites like French "President" Master Legal Plunderer François Hollande. His decision to reverse Sarkozy's half-measure but politically courageous entitlement reform to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 is ethically bankrupt and unjustifiable. I will note here the most overused misnomer or rationalization for any socially liberal politician, i.e., "social justice".
Just a side note here: as a Catholic, I want to do due diligence to the concept on social justice before writing original essays on the topic. Thomas Woods is perhaps the most prominent Catholic libertarian/historian in the Austrian Economic tradition; for a nice brief conspectus on Woods versus his progressive Catholic critics, see here.
But let me give a brief example of my thinking: a scientist entrepreneur develops a process that yields fuel profitable at half the current market price. His profit is a fraction of the relevant price difference. He becomes wealthy as a result of volume sales. All customers, including lower middle class, are better off because they have more money in their own pocket for other purchases. Others--who contribute little to government revenues--say, due to personal choices over work or lifestyle--believe that they are entitled to receive not only public but private benefits at the expense of the scientist entrepreneur, simply because he took the risks and efforts to succeed. The legal plunder of the scientist's income is not "justice": one person works to get income; the others use political connections to get income at his expense. It's morally hazardous; it reinforces a dependence on the efforts of others and against one's development into a virtuous citizen. The government picks winners and losers and hence is intrinsically unjust, unequal protection under the law.
At its core, it's the difference between classical liberalism (negative rights) and social liberalism (positive rights) (cf. a relevant discussion here).
As for Hollande: obviously the trend has been for longer lives, we know the French entitlement programs are unsustainable, just like in the US. He's adding payroll taxes to make this political payoff possible, but really this amounts to intergenerational theft and raising labor costs impair job creation when a significant percentage of young people can't find work.
Political Potpourri
All states except Utah (June 26) have now completed their primaries, and Romney yesterday padded to last week's total clinching the nomination, now at 1480. Romney and Obama have been battling close nationwide polls with Gallup and/or Rasmussen within a point or 2 of each other. One interesting observation: in RCP's Wednesday polls, no Dem candidate (Obama, Murphy, Casey or Kaine) surpassed 50%. We are still 5 months before the election; granted, that's a lifetime in politics, but there's no doubt that Obama et al. have taken a big hit over this month's employment numbers; decelerating employment numbers still show this one of the slowest job recoveries in US history. I've already refuted the talking point about the massive job losses at the beginning of the term. With the White House and the Senate under Democrat hands, we are still at a jobs deficit 3 years into a recovery with fitful starts and stops. I'm still incensed at the disingenuous attacks against "failed GOP policies"--what these Democrats are really saying, make no mistake, is that they lack faith in the free market and believe that the fiscally bankrupt government can micromanage the economy, hubris with a state of denial.
I decided that I didn't want to write a separate segment on Sunday talk soup, but I found myself annoyed at Romney's less competent, mediocre replacement as Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick. Patrick was doing everything that he could to downplay Romney's record as governor, including the low job growth rating. This is unconscionably, deliberately misleading, and this piece of work knows it. I will simply state the incontrovertible truth that Massachusetts has been heavily vested in the high tech market--and the 2000-2002 market Nasdaq correction had its effect. Also, Romney had a political opposition that was 85% Democrat, and governors have little direct impact on the economy. Massachusetts employers did not report to Romney; what Romney did do, among other things, is help create a more business-friendly climate by helping Massachusetts taxpayers and businesses keep more of their money and out of the spendthrift hands of Massachusetts Democrat state legislators; increasing business tax and regulatory burden, which the Democrats wanted to do in the midst of the downturn, would have simply accelerated job losses. The Massachusetts economy, despite its structural dependency on the high tech industry (other states, like California, have more broad-based economies that mitigated the effects of the Nasdaq bust), had begun to recover before 2007.
Finally, among the interesting results of yesterday's California vote were the voter approval of pension reforms in San Jose and San Diego and what looks to be the rejection of a cigarette tax hike (thumbs UP!). I have not read the reforms in detail, but I believe San Diego's involves putting new municipal employees into a 401K system and reform end-of-career income spiking to artificially prop up the pension basis. Should we be surprised that the public unions want to get the liberal California judiciary to throw out these modest reforms? Oh, and so help me, if I hear disingenuous union representatives once again claim that they've already given away the store with crony Democratic leaders in Los Angeles and Sacramento; can I see a show of hands of anyone thinking that California Democratic executives jawboned the unions into more taxpayer-friendly givebacks than, say, Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI)? That's what I thought: NOBODY. Union leaders who think that taxpayers buy into their self-serving rhetoric, paying lip service to "austerity" by mere down payments on lavish benefit packages beyond workers in the private sector are simply delusional.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon". I hadn't heard this song in years, but Ray Davies delivers one of the best pop vocal performances I've ever heard. He gives a clinic on how to sing a pop song: the cadence, the inflections, the pitch. His voice wraps around the lyrics and blends with the melody effortlessly. Vocal artistry...
