One never notices what has been done;
one can only see what remains to be done.
Marie Curie
Happy Labor & Capital Day!
On the Prohibition of Productive Work By Fascists
Image of the Day
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| Via EconLib |
About a century ago, when the intellectuals, politicians, and professional bureaucrats starting building Leviathan, they said it was all about us. There were things we wanted that we just couldn’t do for ourselves....They would provide schools, keep our meat and hospitals safe, stabilize the money, bring about fairness, and professionalize philanthropy. There would of course be a cost to getting these great benefits. There would have to be a tax...The whole bargain really was a poison apple. The birth of leviathan coincided with history’s first world war, which was financed all around the world through the new magic money machine called central banking. There were price controls, wage controls, speech controls, conscription, labor camps, shutdowns of financial markets, censorship of the press, and all-round planning. the whole of life. The wartime bureaucracies did not go away in peacetime. A new class of bureaucrats had been born, people who held their jobs and powers regardless of public will or elections. There was prohibition in the U.S. followed by the Great Depression and the fascistic experiment in national planning called the New Deal. [The] second war world gave birth to another layer of state control. Massive welfare states were born that control health care, work hours, cartelized corporate establishments, provide security to old age, stamp out drug use, end invidious discrimination, redistribute income domestically and internationally, and so on. There was a time when people dreamed of a limited state, one that was checked by constitutions, representative democracy, courts that complied with laws passed by legislatures beholden to the people. This dream fully died 100 years ago.David Gregory Is Done with MTP!
There was a time when it was seemingly plausible to imagine the state as a helper, a benefactor, an agent of charity, a force for justice, a bringer of fairness, a planner more far-seeing and wise than the decentralized, diverse, and dispersed population over which it ruled. Those days are really over. The state does not love us. We should have known all along. How and why? Because the state brings to the social matrix only one unique thing: the legal use of compulsion. What awaits is a new awareness, one that reclaims the old liberal insight, that society can manage itself without a monopolist of power and coercion.
I know this news is somewhat dated, but I didn't realize it because of a mid-August family emergency; I was working through a backlog of podcasts today and discoverered the fact that David Gregory will be replaced by political analyst/NBC pollster Chuck Todd; according to industry sources, he was paid a $4M severance to go away from MTP and NBC News with a speak-no-evil clause. Not bad if you can get it; I don't know if he has a no-compete clause or what his options are. In his early 40's, he could probably start a second career say in academia as a journalist; I expect him to write a book or two, maybe dabble in new media like Katie Couric. Given his ratings record, I don't expect to see him land a related gig at a major network, at least in the near future. I have no idea, but I would have thought Jay Leno, who retired at the top of his game, might have attracted a major deal by now (I have not checked recently). Yes, different line of work, but it's the ratings game. I would not be surprised to see Gregory covering the 2016 election in some format.
I would like to think Gregory's ouster was related to his patently one-sided interviews which I have sometimes reviewed in transcript commentaries of Sunday talk soup, my principal target over life of the blog. Of course, MRC details the excesses of mainstream media on a more universal basis. But, and I have not reviewed the show's ratings, apparently the ratings, not Gregory's biased performances, were the culprit. But don't think Chuck Todd will be a major difference; he is also blatantly left-center in his perspective (MRC has a top 10 retrospective here).
Tom Woods and His Digs at Romney
Several days back Tom Woods had a thread on Facebook congratulating Ron Paul on his birthday. For reasons I don't understand, Tom Woods felt a need to describe Paul as a man of conviction and principle in a profession of phonies: he specifically singled out Mitt Romney as a man of no discernible principle. This struck me as an unnecessary cheap shot, and a protest comment led to a thread where Woods himself and several Woods acolytes posted comments, including an exasperated sarcastic shot when I suggested that Woods had not done due diligence on Romney's governing philosophy.
As a result, I have since unsubscribed to his podcasts and removed relevant links to my blogroll. I get contradicted all the time, but I felt Woods was being a jerk. In fact, Ron Paul is closer to my views than Romney, I understand the bitterness against Romney during the last 2 Presidential elections by Paul supporters, including Woods, and in fact I have written a number of critical posts on Romney, including his neocon views.
Actually, Woods' lecture here is reasonably good; I've made similar observations before, e.g., the Washington Monument issue during sequester. But my prime reason for including this video is because he takes another not-so-subtle swipe at Romney early in the presentation. The real talking point is not what Woods is pointing out--i.e., about the failure of central planning without an authentic market, but the fact that running more efficiently something better handled in the private sector is not so virtuous, e.g., why focus on running the Dept. of Education more efficiently, when there should be no such federal agency? Granted, Woods does make a passing reference to privatization in his comments.
But I do think government can be made more efficient and effective; in the past, I've pointed to Mitch Daniels' DMV reforms as a case in point. And there's no doubt Romney's executive skills would be well-suited for the Oval Office. We are not going to shrink the $3.7T budget by a third or more overnight (it's difficult to get past a Senate filibuster), and a business executive knows to make tough decisions. Coolidge is another example of a superb administrator. It's hard to argue against an executive willing to pull the trigger on failing projects, veto spending bills, etc. Now you need to have a chief executive who is more than Greenshades-in-Chief, but if there is anything worse than taxing the people's money, it's wasting the people's money.
Facebook Corner
(Cato Institute). "Oh, the humanity! Companies might sell 'poorly performing vacuum cleaners' to an unsuspecting public! And only legislation can save the day!
Or – and I know this might sound crazy to some people – we could just rely on consumers to evaluate the vacuum cleaners, buying the better ones and leaving the 'poorly performing”' ones on the shelf."
I wonder if the Roomba would have survived the maid union...
Should Schools Be Privatized? YES.... Dream Team: Buckley, Friedman, Sowell
Proposals
I'm old-fashioned... I think you should ask in-person.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Gary Varvel via PatriotPost |
Petula Clark, "My Love". An all-time favorite, a pop classic.
