I enjoyed the speech you gave recently in which you said there’s no question the administration’s economic recovery program is moving us in the right direction. In just the short time since the stimulus package was enacted, the country has gained nearly a half-million new government workers while jettisoning more than 2 million private-sector jobs. I hope we can continue this positive trend. I’ve said for years that the main problem with our economy is that it produces too many private-sector jobs and not enough government jobs.
Consider the compensation packages, for example. Our society has finally evolved to the point where the average salaries and benefits for government workers are nearly double what we find in the private sector. If we could just turn every job into a government job, those poor schmucks currently employed in the private sector would be a lot better off. Plus unemployment would become nothing more than a bad memory, since it’s impossible to dismiss government employees as long as they don’t open fire on their co-workers.
I am, however, a little concerned about the cost to the Treasury. I read in the newspaper that each job created or saved by the stimulus package so far has cost roughly $282,000. I’d consider that a bargain for life-long employment, but according to my somewhat limited understanding of economics, those jobs only exist because of the stimulus money and will continue to exist only if new stimulus money is spent to support them. I’m as willing as any other liberal to throw around a few trillion here and there to create federal jobs, but we may reach a point where the voters will refuse to foot the bill.
So I have an idea that may help. I recently spoke to a fellow programmer who was outraged to learn that his company spent a LOT of money on a badly-designed computer system, and is now paying someone $150,000 per year just to answer the phone and try to help people navigate the system. When he explained this to me, I smacked myself in the head and realized I’ve cost the country some jobs over the years. When I design software, I make sure it’s so intuitive, the users almost never need help. In retrospect, this was rather selfish on my part.
We can’t undo the past, but we can avoid making the same mistake in the future. So I propose that in addition to micro-managing the auto industry, the banking industry, the insurance industry, the health-care industry, the investment industry and the mortgage industry, the federal government should micro-manage the software industry. If a new federal department were created (lots of jobs there) to dictate the design and specifications for all future software projects, we could guarantee that all software will eventually be hopelessly confusing and difficult to navigate. I know IBM already attempted this strategy, but they faced competition from companies that were allowed to set their own standards. That’s what needs to change.
Once all software is ridiculously confusing, the administration can announce it’s going to solve the problem with a new Department of Software Support. Plenty of businesses will be happy to dump their help-desk costs on the taxpayers, and best of all, it will be a good deal for the federal government as well. If a private company is willing to pay someone $150,000 per year to answer the phone, I believe the federal government could fund the same job for as little as $200,000 per year, including benefits. That means you could create literally millions of new jobs, while saving $82,000 per year, per job, compared to the current stimulus.
These jobs would also be perfect for under-educated people with marginal skills. Training would consist of learning to say “Did you try re-booting the computer?” and then putting the caller on hold until he swears a few times and finally hangs up.
If this plan doesn’t create enough jobs to end unemployment and get the economy back on track, the administration could simply extend the concept elsewhere. I have an idea for that as well.
I recently saw that the federal government created 7,000 pages of new regulations in just the previous year. Added to all the existing regulations, the result is that most Americans commit at least a few crimes each month without knowing it. One poor fellow I saw interviewed on TV even went to prison for selling flowers he grew himself … something about an endangered species law.
Once again, the administration can ride to the rescue (and create millions of new jobs in the process) by establishing a federal “Am I Breaking The Law?” hotline. All citizens would be required to carry special cell phones that speed-dial a federal call center. The center would be manned by federal employees whose only job is to tell them whether or not they’re about to commit a crime.
Think of the benefits to the ordinary, hard-working Americans liberal politicians love. If only the flower-grower I mentioned above had been able to call someone and ask, “I’m about to sell some flowers I planted and grew here on my own property … is that against the law or anything?” his wife and kids wouldn’t have had to visit him in prison.
Given the huge number of regulations already on the books, the call center would of course require a gigantic computer system to enable employees to quickly find the regulation in question. That, naturally, ties in perfectly with my first suggestion: the federal government could micro-manage the development of the system, which would guarantee that when it goes online, we’ll need for several thousand help-desk employees to tell the users to try re-booting their computers. (I believe the term I’m looking for here is “synergy.”)
Anyway, those are my ideas. If you’d like me to brainstorm a little more, I’m willing to clear my schedule for the next year. All I’d need to get by is $282,000.
“Hi, honey. Sorry I was gone so long, but the PTA meeting went really long and– what the heck is THAT?!”
“That, my dear, is fifty-five inches of hi-definition TV heaven. Awesome, isn’t it?”
“Well, yeah, it’s a gorgeous picture, but …”
“But?”
“But … Tom, we can’t afford this.”
“Sure we can! No problem.”
“Oh. So you paid cash for it?”
“Of course not. I don’t have that kind of money lying around.”
“You mean you charged this thing to a credit card? For Pete’s sake, we’re already paying interest on all the other stuff we bought for the house. This is going to blow up our budget.”
“No, no, no. I moved the TV debt to a category called off-book.”
“And what does that mean?”
“I don’t know, but the government does it all the time, so it’s got to work. I’m pretty sure it means we never have to pay for it.”
“Of course we have to pay for it!”
“Well, maybe, but we don’t have to count it, and that’s the important thing. Here, I re-worked our monthly budget, and as you can see, there’s no entry for big-screen TV payments.”
“Why on earth would you obligate us to make a big payment every month and then just leave it out of the budget?”
“Because I was afraid if I included it, you’d be really mad.”
“I’m taking this thing back to the store.”
“You can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because … uh … because it’s a health-care issue!”
“How can a new TV be a health-care issue?”
“Because football season starts in two weeks.”
“That has nothing do with–”
“Look, with that little TV, I have to sit two feet from the screen to enjoy a game. What if the Titans lose six in a row again and I have more convulsions? Remember those bruises on my forehead from colliding with the TV? Remember how I turned sort of stupid?”
“I assumed that was from watching too much football.”
“No, it was a serious medical condition related to small screen size. So if you think about it, this TV may seem outrageously expensive now, but it will actually save us money in the long run. Going to the doctor isn’t cheap, you know.”
“I still don’t see how that justifies–”
“Besides, I’m going to offset the cost by going through our cable bill every month and eliminating all the fraud and abuse.”
“Tell you what. Start eliminating the fraud and abuse right now, and put the savings in the bank. Then when you’ve saved up whatever this TV costs, you can buy it. In the meantime, it’s going back.”
“But it’s off-book! It doesn’t cost anything!”
“On-book, off-book, we’re still paying for it. And by the way, you reach retirement age in 14 years. Running up more debt now instead of saving for retirement isn’t a good idea.”
“Don’t worry about retirement. I put a huge chunk into our pension plan just last month.”
“You what? Where did you get the money to do that?”
“Well, I took a cash advance on the credit card, but–”
“And how are we supposed to pay for that?!”
“Out of our retirement income! Geez, you really don’t understand how any of this stuff works, do you?”
“Look, Tom, we sat down a year ago and wrote up a strict budget. We both agreed to it. You can’t just change it whenever you see something you want.”
“I can too!”
“Oh, really? And why is that?”
“Well … I see the budget as a living, breathing document. We couldn’t possibly have anticipated the situation we find ourselves in today, so we need to re-interpret the meaning of the budget to fit our present circumstances.”
“You CANNOT do that without my approval!”
“Sure, I can. I was wearing a very solemn-looking black robe when I did it.”
“You don’t even own a–”
“And while wearing the solemn-looking black robe, I solemnly declared that I have a right to a big-screen TV.”
“What the– how do you figure you have a right to a TV?”
“Because I really, really, really want one. That makes it part of the pursuit of happiness clause.”
“Riiiight. Excuse me for a moment. We’ll continue this after I make some tea.”
“You’re serving me tea?”
“No, but I think I’ll have a few people over for a tea party.”
(NOTE: I actually paid cash for the TV. But if the Titans lose six in a row, I might take it back anyway.)
My daughter picked up some books from the library a few weeks ago as part of her summer reading program. I was pleased to see she’d selected one book on the Revolutionary War and another on American history in general.
I was considerably less pleased when actually I took a peek at the American history book. That one included several Q & A sections, and one A to a Q nearly gave me a stroke:
Q: How did President Roosevelt put the people back to work during the Depression?
A: He created jobs for them.
AAAAAARRGGGHHH! Six years old, and my daughter is already being taught that 1) FDR saved the economy and 2) governments can create jobs. The book explained, in glowing terms, how FDR’s Works Progress Administration employed the unemployed. A few paragraphs later, the same book noted — without a trace of irony — that in spite of FDR’s jobs programs, unemployment remained high and the Depression lingered on for several years.
In spite of?! Try because of.
FDR was one of the biggest economic nincompoops ever to occupy the Oval Office — no surprise, since he knew nothing about business. He did poorly in business and economics classes at Harvard, then later proved how little he’d learned by starting or investing in several failed ventures. The job that kept him financially comfortable throughout his adulthood consisted of writing letters along the lines of “Dearest Mommy: I need more money in my accounts. Love, Franklin.”
So naturally, he decided he had the experience and know-how to fix the economy after the crash of 1929. What he promised on the campaign trail actually made sense: cut taxes and reduce federal spending. That is, after all, what lifted the country out of a nasty recession in 1920.
But once he was elected, Roosevelt made a huge mistake: he surrounded himself with egg-heads. They’d been itching to bring big-government socialism to the United States for decades, and the Depression gave them the opportunity they craved. (Echoes of Rahm Emanuel today: You never want a serious crisis to go waste.)
The egg-heads convinced FDR it was time for a “bold program of experimentation,” trying first this, then that, then something else. Roosevelt even bragged that he had no idea what they’d try next. Oddly enough, the business community interepreted this as “We have no idea what that @#$%ing idiot will do next,” and became skittish about investing in new equipment and hiring new employees.
As part of his bold experiments, Roosevelt ordered businesses to keep prices high — always a great way to bring in customers strapped for cash — and slapped sky-high taxes on “undistributed profits” … otherwise known as the money corporations might’ve used to employ more people in upcoming years. Then he was stunned and angry when unemployment refused to go down.
So by gosh, since the evil businesses wouldn’t hire anyone, FDR just created all those federal jobs out of thin air to fill the void. If only the WPA workers didn’t require taxpayer-funded paychecks, the plan might have worked, too. And if I could fill the left side of my bathtub by scooping in water from the right side, I’d have more water.
Roosevelt may have started out believing the WPA would prime the economic pump, but he wasn’t a stupid man and had to eventually realize it wasn’t working. No matter. The WPA became nothing more than a taxpayer-funded arm of the Democratic Party. Job applicants had their voter registrations checked. Registered Republicans were told to switch parties or look for work somewhere else. One WPA official in New Jersey with a sense of humor even answered his phone “Democratic Party Headquarters.”
Researchers who’ve tracked where the WPA money was spent found that local unemployment rates had nothing to do with it. Roosevelt spent little in the solidly-Democratic South, for example, despite high unemployment. He likewise spent little in solidly Republican districts. But he was a big ol’ Santa Claus in swing states and in districts where the Democrats hoped to pick up seats in upcoming elections.
As a means of forcing taxpayers to essentially provide campaign funds for Democrats, the WPA was a smashing success. As an engine for jobs and economic growth, it was a dismal failure. In 1938, after six years of “bold experimentation,” unemployment in the U.S. jumped to 19%.
But hey, it was a worldwide phenomenon and the U.S. was just caught up in it, right? Not exactly. In 1929, the United States ranked #1 in employment — the lowest unemployment rate in the industrial world. By 1938, we’d slipped to #13. Twelve countries had surpassed us. Some were even experiencing economic expansions as the U.S. slipped into a deeper Depression.
You can read to your heart’s content about the failure of FDR’s economic programs in books like New Deal or Raw Deal or The Forgotten Man. The point is, FDR didn’t “create” jobs. If anything, his punitive regulations and taxes destroyed them. And if you don’t want to believe me, you can take it from FDR’s own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morganthau, who said this to a group of Democrats in 1939:
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot.
For some reason, that startling admission by a New Deal architect never makes it into the textbooks. So now, much sooner than I’d hoped, I have to start explaining to my daughter that not everything she reads in library books or is taught in school is necessarily true. I have to explain to her that authors have their own agendas and sometimes they finagle or misinterpret the facts.
Yes, yes, yes … we’re talking about ancient history as far as she’s concerned. But it matters. It matters because someday she’ll be old enough to vote. It matters because we had millions of voters in 2008 who weren’t horrified when politicians responded to the government-induced economic crash by suggesting it was time for a “New New Deal.” After all, we were all taught in school that the original New Deal put the country back to work.
And decades from now, after energetic American capitalists have once again pulled us out of the current mess (providing the federal government doesn’t stop them), I don’t want my granddaughter opening a library book and reading about how Barack Obama’s trillion-dollar stimulus plan saved the economy.
A web site chewed me out and insulted me a few days ago. I was surfing through reviews of hi-def TVs, happily reading away, when I clicked a link that brought me to a page with this message at the top:
This is an interactive site with a lot of graphics and video. But you wouldn’t know that because you’re still using Internet Explorer, so some of the graphic areas will appear blank. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I’m supposed to include ALT graphics for older browsers. Well, guess what? I’m not going to design my site twice just because you insist on using ancient technology. Get your head out of your ass and download a REAL browser.
As you might’ve guessed, this site wasn’t selling any products. I’ll admit to quietly gritting my teeth while dealing with computer-illiterate customers, but I’ve never invited them to remove their heads from their colons. Seems like a bad marketing strategy.
I was more amused than insulted, but it occurred to me that among the young-hip-and-digital crowd, Internet Explorer is apparently becoming the Buick of Browsers: sure, it was okay for your parents, but nobody cool would drive one of those things now. (I mean, if you had to borrow Mom’s old Dell to get to Facebook on a Friday night, maybe … but you know.)
The Buick of Browsers was once considered the Unstoppable Behemoth, which led to one of the most idiotic lawsuits ever filed by the Justice Department: United States vs. Microsoft. As you probably recall, Janet Reno’s prosecutors claimed that Microsoft was abusing its “monopoly” in operating systems by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and therefore (eeeeek!) giving it away for free — thus harming the sales of Netscape Navigator. In addition to the feds, twenty state attorneys general carefully considered the evidence, came to the legal opinion that they could suck a few billion dollars from Microsoft into their state’s coffers, and joined the lawsuit.
It was a classic case of the federal government trying to regulate an industry that doesn’t need regulating. When I first read in the newspaper that Microsoft had a monopoly on operating systems, I immediately ran to the local Apple store to see which business had taken its place. But wouldn’t you know it … it was still there, selling Macs. There was no monopoly.
Yes, pretty much every PC in the world runs Windows now, but that’s the result of consumer choice. My first PC ran something called CP/M. At various times in the 1970s and 1980s, consumers and businesses could buy hardware and operating systems from Wang, Atari, Commodore, Amiga, Digital Equipment Corporation and, of course, IBM — which tried like hell to dethrone Windows with IBM OS/2.
IBM’s OS/2 fiasco is an example of why the industry doesn’t need regulating. When I was a kid, IBM was the behemoth: a supposed monopoly, controlling both the hardware and the software, too big and too powerful to be stopped, able to dictate prices and crush all competitors, lions and tigers and bears oh my. The evil HAL computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey was named as a reference to IBM. (Each letter occurs one place earlier in the alphabet.) IBM was going to run the world … and beyond.
Then a young nerdy guy named Bill Gates came along. IBM offered him $1 million for the exclusive rights to his DOS operating system, but Gates insisted IBM could license it for $1 per copy, as long he retained ownership. Behind his back, the IBM bigwigs — who couldn’t imagine anything close to a million PCs ever being sold — snickered at his foolishness. Then the young nerdy guy spent the next several years kicking their blue-bottomed butts out of the software business. After a joint IBM-Microsoft venture to develop an operating system fell apart, IBM executives began referring to Gates as “The Bastard From Redmond.” The once-unstoppable behemoth tried to crush Windows. They couldn’t.
We ended up with one dominant operating system for PCs because it makes economic sense, not because Microsoft is Darth Vader. A business world with multiple operating systems is about as efficient as a train system with multiple track sizes. I worked in an office back when various businesses were still running CP/M, Windows, DOS, or OS/2 – not to mention Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, WordStar, or WordPro. Sending documents back and forth was a nightmare. We had to constantly run them through conversion programs. Features such as tables and footnotes rarely came through without serious injuries.
Microsoft won the PC-software wars because they sold the best products. Everyone then gravitated to the victor because standardization made sense. But to Janet Reno’s Justice Department, that made Microsoft an evil monopoly that had to be punished, especially when they dared to bundle a free browser into Windows. By gosh, that sneaky move would guarantee the Evil Empire would own the browser market forever.
Except it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. In 2002, Internet Explorer accounted for 95% of the browsers in use. Today it’s at 60% and falling. That means consumers are taking the time to download other browsers … exactly what the Justice Department said wouldn’t happen. It’s a bummer for Netscape that they can’t sell their product anymore, but Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome have all managed to make money while giving away their products for free. (Firefox earned $80 million in 2008.) Free markets and competition did what the Justice Department couldn’t do and shouldn’t have tried.
In a book I read on American history and economics, the author pointed out that depending on who’s running the federal government, these are the risks businesses face when setting prices:
Charge more than everyone else: prosecuted for monopoly pricing
Charge less than everyone else: prosecuted for predatory pricing (or during FDR’s reign, for ignoring NRA regulations).
Charge the same as everyone else: prosecuted for colluding on prices.
In United States vs. Microsoft, it was considered predatory to give away software for free. Which makes me wonder: why isn’t the Justice Department going after Firefox and Google? And why the heck didn’t they prosecute Linux in 1998 along with Microsoft? By offering a free operating system that became wildly popular for web servers, Linux undoubtedly squashed some other company’s market share.
Anti-trust laws are supposed to protect consumers. (I’m not saying they do, but that’s the rationale.) If companies that give me free software are causing me harm, I sure can’t spot the damage. It must be something at the cellular level.
Last week, I wrote about being a self-taught programmer. Here’s how much you’d have to spend on software to become one as well:
$0.00
Yup, zero … because Darth Vader Microsoft gives away Express editions of their programming languages for free. You can download Visual Basic Express, C# Express, SQL Server Express and Visual Web Developer without spending a dime. They don’t have all the bells and whistles of the Professional series, but you can build real applications with them — I recently built one with Visual Web Developer myself. I design SQL Server databases, but I’ve never bought a copy of SQL Server. The Express edition is fine for development.
You can also watch tutorials on the Microsoft site, read documents full of step-by-step written instructions, and download a ton of examples. Toss in a few books, or a membership to Virtual Training Company ($30 per month for online access to thousands of video tutorials), and you can become an entry-level programmer for less than you’d spend on three pairs of shoes. Just add elbow grease and intellect.
Yes, Microsoft does all this in hopes that budding programmers will learn their development tools and continue to prefer them over everything else. So what? They’re not harming me. I’ll happily take that deal. In fact, I did take that deal. That’s how I learned my trade.
I’m just glad the Justice Department didn’t stop me.
I watched an NBC news story tonight on the “historic” financial reform bill. In a nutshell, the bill gives the federal government the power to regulate darned near everything having to do with financial transactions. The bill even gives the feds the power to ensure that people who apply for home mortgages are qualified.
Think about that one for a moment. If you want to borrow money to buy a home, it’s not enough anymore that the bank believes you’re qualified. Now the federal government has to agree. I’m really looking forward to bribing my congressman when I buy my next house.
The excuse for this monstrosity is that the federal government needs to ensure that banks no longer make the kinds of risky loans that led to the financial meltdown. Just one little problem: it was the federal government that encouraged (and sometimes ordered) banks to make those loans in the first place.
As I’ve recounted before, when my best friend applied for home loan 25 years ago, he was turned down — in spite of having a 10% down payment and a job as an attorney with a major law firm in Nashville. The bank told him he’d have to come up with a 20% down payment. That’s how “greedy” bankers protected themselves in those days … by minimizing risk.
Fast-forward to 2003. People were obtaining mortgages with zero percent down. People without jobs were obtaining mortgages. Illegal immigrants were obtaining mortgages. People who would clearly end up spending 50% of their take-home pay on house payments were obtaining mortgages.
What the heck were those greedy bankers thinking?
Their greed didn’t change. Their incentives did, courtesy of the federal government. “Progressive” politicians decided bankers weren’t lending enough money to people with lower credit scores and ordered them to change their lending policies. Janet Reno threatened the banks that resisted with federal lawsuits. “Progressive” attorneys — including one named Barack Obama — sued banks to force them to make risky loans.
Of course, the banks were happy to be in the game once Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started snapping up those risky loans. Now the banks could get their money up front. Anxious to see still more people buy homes, Andrew Cuomo, as head of HUD, told Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up even more risky loans.
The list goes on and on. You can learn what really caused the mortgage mess by reading Meltdown, Housing Boom and Bust, or Architects of Ruin. (I’ve read all three.) If you do, you’ll learn that two of the politicians who led the charge for more “affordable housing” policies were Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd. As much as any two people on earth, they helped create the financial mess we find ourselves in today. They not only encouraged risky loans, they slapped down efforts to apply the brakes to Fannie and Freddie.
So imagine my surprise when I learned that the “historic” legislation signed today by President Obama is known as the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill. Yup, two of the morons who helped cause the meltdown are now the champions of financial reform. They ought to name this bill the Stop Doing What We Ordered You To Do Act.
In the spirit of the age, I’m going to suggest names for bills Congress might want to pass in the future:
The Bernie Madoff Ethical Investing Bill
The Osama bin Laden-Khalid Shiek Mohammed Anti-Terrorism Bill
The George W. Bush Grammar Education Bill
The Bush-Obama Balanced Budget Act
The Bonds-McGwire-Canseco Anti-Steroid Act
The Ted Kennedy Safe Driving Bill
The Ted Kennedy-Lindsay Lohan Responsible Drinking Act
The Mel Gibson-Louis Farrakhan Anti-Defamation Bill
The Mel Gibson-O.J. Simpson Anti-Domestic Violence Act
Feel free to send me your own suggestions, and I’ll put them a future post.
Here’s Barney, who refuses to admit any responsibility whatsoever for his actions, lying about his push for more home ownership:
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the NAACP adopted a resolution yesterday condemning racism within the Tea Party movement and calling upon Tea Party leaders to repudiate the racists in their ranks. Anxious to avoid having this cheap, shameless political ploy come across as a cheap, shameless political ploy, mainstream media outlets were quick to point out that a few members of the Tea Party reportedly shouted racial epithets at a black lawmaker back in March.
I see … so if there are a handful of racists in a movement with tens of thousands of members, we’re allowed to demand that the movement’s leaders repudiate racism. Let’s see how that works out if we apply the same principle elsewhere.
Barack Obama received 96% of black vote in 2008. So if I can prove there are racists among his most black vocal supporters, then I’m entitled to call upon black leaders and pretty much everyone else who voted for Obama to repudiate them.
Exterminate the white people, kill the cracker babies … sure sounds like racism to me. And by the way, Obama not only failed to repudiate that second guy, Obama’s Justice Department dropped a voter-intimidation case against him — a case the FBI said was solid.
During my traveling standup days, performing in dives on long road trips, I met plenty of labor-union Democrats who were flat-out racists. One, after sharing his political wisdom with me, asked where I was from. When I replied “Chicago,” he told me he could never live there. When I asked why, he explained, “Too many ni##*$.” His racists buddies agreed. To that, I replied, “Yeah, we’ve got a lot ni##*$, like Walter Payton, Andre Dawson, and Mike Singletary. And then there’s Michael Jordan. That son of bitch breaks into my car at least once a week.”
At that point, while the racist was busy trying to hide his confusion behind a dumb grin, the other comedian pulled me outside and suggested we leave before the racist and his racist buddies pooled their brain power and figured out I’d just insulted them.
I’ve also met Republican racists, of course. And if I searched far and wide, I could probably even find a libertarian racist, although I’ve never actually met one. The point is, any large movement is going to have a few racists in the ranks. It’s not the fault of the leaders, and unless racism is actually part of the program, it says nothing about the movement itself.
According to news reports, the NAACP’s final resolution was slightly tamer than an earlier draft. The earlier draft said the NAACP would “repudiate the racism of the Tea Parties” and stand against the movement’s attempt to “push our country back to the pre-civil rights era.”
So people who favor limited government are racists, eh? Let’s check that one against history.
In the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower (Republican) proposed and signed the first significant civil-rights bill since Reconstruction. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came up for a vote, the Democrats were still mostly FDR’s party — the New Deal party. The Republicans were still mostly the small-government party — the party that opposed the New Deal. (Although after FDR managed to buy off a huge chunk of the electorate in the 1930s, the Republicans rarely put up a significant fight.)
Here’s the percentage of each party that voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
House Republicans - 80%
House Democrats - 63%
Senate Republicans - 82%
Senate Democrats - 68%
Anyone care to look at those numbers and explain the connection between racism and favoring lower taxes and smaller government?
Republicans were tagged as being against civil rights partly because Barry Goldwater, their presidential nominee in 1964, voted against the 1964 act. But Goldwater was hardly a racist. He joined the NAACP in the 1950s — long before it was fashionable for white people to do so — gave money to the NAACP, desegregated the Arizona National Guard while he was the state’s governor, and fought to desegregate the public schools in Phoenix.
Goldwater opposed the 1964 act because he feared it would become the legal basis for a quota system. Hubert Humphrey, a sponsor of the bill, replied that if such a thing ever happened, he’d stand on the capitol steps and eat every page of it. So naturally, some left-wing judges later did what left-wing judges are supposed to do: suffer massive hallucinations while reading laws. Despite what Humphrey himself said, they decided the bill called for quotas.
Most Republicans opposed quotas, thus maintaining the same position the party had held for 100 years: people should be treated equally, regardless of race. For that, they were labeled racists. Today, you don’t even have to oppose quotas to be labeled a racist … you can join that club merely by believing in the Constitution and opposing a big-government leftist who happens to be black.
But of course, the NAACP’s resolution isn’t really about racism — it’s about changing the subject. The Tea Party members are angry about runaway federal spending and skyrocketing federal debts. The trillion-dollar “stimulus” package has fattened the wallets of groups loyal to the Democrats, but it hasn’t stimulated much of anything else. The Democrats’ solution to the high cost of health care is to spend another trillion dollars of the taxpayers’ money — for starters, anyway. Reality is setting in, and messiah-worship among swing voters is wearing off.
So the NAACP, worried that Obama may receive the kind of shellacking in the upcoming congressional elections that Bill Clinton received in 1994, simply called a favorite play from the left’s official playbook: if you can’t defeat your opponent in the arena of ideas, call him a racist instead. It’s a page right out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals: attack, attack, attack, make it personal, and remember that in a political fight, the ends always justify the means.
Below, I’ve pasted some YouTube clips featuring two of my favorite authors, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. Both were professors of economics, both have been highly critical of Obama, and both happen to be black. Watch these clips, and if you disagree with their positions, please post a comment with your most logical, persuasive arguments against them.
Then I’ll ignore those arguments and call you a racist instead. It’s so much easier than debating the actual issues.
(By the way, in searching for videos of Thomas Sowell, I found references to him as “Uncle Tom Sowell.” Dangit, when are people going stand up and demand that the left repudiate all the racists in their movement?!)
I love it … A few weeks back, the city council in Los Angeles decided to boycott the state of Arizona for trying to prevent future Democrat voters — sorry, I mean illegal immigrants — from crossing the border and living in Arizona. Today an official from Arizona fired a return salvo. It sounded like this:
“Hey, Los Angeles … as long as we’re not doing business together anymore, I guess we should shut off your electricity.”
Or more specifically:
If an economic boycott is truly what you desire, I will be happy to encourage Arizona utilities to renegotiate your power agreements so Los Angeles no longer receives any power from Arizona-based generation.
I am confident that Arizona’s utilities would be happy to take those electrons off your hands. If, however, you find that the City Council lacks the strength of its convictions to turn off the lights in Los Angeles and boycott Arizona power, please reconsider the wisdom of attempting to harm Arizona’s economy.
By boycotting Arizona, the politicians in Los Angeles were, of course, expressing their outrage over what they consider to be a racist law. Now, I have to admit I haven’t actually read the law, mostly because reading legalese makes me want to rip my own head off — even more than when I read Curious George to my daughters. So I’ve only read about the law. What I’ve read is that the law
empowers local law enforcement to check the immigration status of suspects they have stopped for other reasons if there is a reasonable suspicion they are in the country illegally, but specifically bars police from racial profiling.
Will cops use the law as an excuse to hassle Mexican-Americans? I don’t know. I hope not. But the point is, the laws that Arizona decides to pass are none of the L.A. city council’s or Mayor Villaraigosa’s business. Given the red state / blue state divide in this country — not to mention the outsized egos of politicians in general – if states and localities start boycotting each other over laws in other jurisdictions that don’t meet with their approval, it’s going to get really silly, really soon.
It already has. A school administrator from Highland Park, Illinois decided to yank the girls’ high-school basketball team from a tournament in Arizona. Yes, a school administrator is getting into the outraged-politician act. This was after the team won its first conference championship in 26 years, and after the players worked to raise their own funds for the trip — oh, and by the way, it was also over the objections of many parents.
Of course, any parents who happened to share the little dictator’s outrage — sorry, I mean the school administrator’s outrage — could have simply pulled their girls from the tournament. But nope … the school administrator decided to make a statement on everyone’s behalf. When exactly did school administrators decide that imposing their politics on student activities was okay? I suppose it was shortly after college professors decided that lectures in business administration and organic chemistry should begin with 20 minutes of left-wing political indoctrination.
If the school administrator’s decision seems like a reasonable protest, then pretty please, try applying the same principle elsewhere. I now live in one of the most conservative counties in the country. Plenty of people around here are more than a little angry about the bailouts, the “stimulus” package, and health-care “reform.” If our school administrators announced they were canceling all class trips to the blue states to punish them for putting Obama in the White House, do you think perhaps that might raise a media ruckus? (And that would actually make more sense than boycotting Arizona. People in Illinois aren’t affected by Arizona’s immigration law … but we all get to pay for ObamaCare.)
Personally, I’d love to see Arizona pull the plug. It might be good for an arrogant politician like Mayor Villaraigosa to remember that he’s not the president or even a governor … he’s the mayor of Los Angeles — a city whose location defies geographical common sense and whose existence has therefore always depended on other regions. L.A. not only has to import electricity, it had to steal water from other regions of California in order to become a major city in the first place. (If you’ve seen “Chinatown,” it’s actually true-ish.) I once met a old codger from a dried-up valley region of California who, when I told him I lived in Los Angeles, blistered my ears about the great water ripoff, apparently thinking perhaps I’d been involved.
It would also be fun to see how super-glitzy L.A. adjusts to living by candlelight. I lived just outside of Los Angeles when the state’s power shortages produced blackouts in 2003. Rumor had it that dozens of Hollywood producers and directors woke up after the blackouts and realized they’d just slept with women their own age. Some of the women even had natural breasts.
But as long as the lights remain on, if the Los Angeles politicians are so concerned about racism, perhaps they should stop carping about laws passed in other jurisdictions and repeal their own ban on new fast-food restaurants in South Central. The population in that section of the city is nearly 100% minority, and the L.A. city council was oh-so concerned that too many folks living there are obese. So they decided limiting the number of fast-food restaurants was the key.
Yes, there are plenty of fast-food restaurants in South Central – but not as many per square mile as on the more prosperous, mostly white west side. And yet for some reason, the L.A. politicians aren’t concerned that people living on the west side will become obese simply because they have easy access to fast food … hmmm, I wonder what that reason could be?
Sounds like a case of racial profiling to me. Time to boycott Los Angeles.
Afghanistan is a mess, Iran’s hell-bent on becoming a nuclear power, our economy is barely staying afloat, Europe’s economy may be sinking thanks to overspending by Greece, there are still billions of dollars in “toxic” loans just waiting to go bad, the boomers are retiring and finally draining all those Social Security “reserves” that were never actually saved in the first place, and we’re running deficits that are so gargantuan, we can’t even grasp the numbers.
Faced with these emergencies, some members of Congress have courageously rolled up their sleeves and gotten to work on solving one of the most pressing issues of the times:
Men may still be left holding their peanuts at the ballpark while waiting for their dates in the ladies room, but a House panel on Wednesday may rectify the disparity in wait times for the loo in federal buildings.
The article was linked in an email, and when I read the headline and first paragraph, I assumed I’d navigated to The Onion. Nope. Real news story from a real news site … despite the belief among my liberal friends that the only “real” news organizations are those that openly cheer for Obama.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held hearings Wednesday on the “Potty Parity Act,” a bill that seeks to address the unequal number of restroom facilities for women in federal buildings by requiring at least a 1-to-1 ratio for toilets, including urinals, in women’s and men’s restrooms.
Okay, considering the hearings will no doubt lead to a new federal law, they need to be very careful about the language. “A 1-to-1 ratio for toilets, including urinals, in women’s and men’s restrooms” will probably be interpreted by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California (known as the Ninth Circus Court among lawyers) to mean that men’s restrooms and women’s restrooms must have an equal number of urinals. Then they’ll rule that the “penumbra of the Constitution” would further require an equal number of tampon-disposal boxes.
Supporters of the bill say women forced to wait in long restroom lines are at risk of health issues, including abdominal pain, cystitis and other urinary tract infections.
That would explain the alarming rate of abdominal pain, cystitis and other urinary tract infections among female federal employees. As I said in my documentary Fat Head, rule number one when you’re competing for taxpayer dollars is to wildly exaggerate the size of the problem. Unless the average wait time for a seat in the women’s room exceeds the average wait time for a trough in the men’s room at Wrigley Field, I’m guessing the cystitis epidemic is somewhat less real than the H1N1 epidemic.
“A lot of times people, when I dealt with this bill, called it ‘potty parity.’ They made jokes,” said Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., who proposed similar legislation as a state lawmaker that was enacted in the 1990s.
Gee, we’re sorry we didn’t take you seriously, Representative Cohen. But the thing is, when you go on TV and compare people who oppose a new trillion-dollar health-care entitlement to members of the Ku Klux Klan, you’ve got to expect people will assume you’re joking every time you open your mouth. And by the way, since you helped enact similar legislation at the state level, would you mind providing some data on the impressive reduction in abdominal pain, cystitis and other urinary tract infections?
“The fact is, it’s not a joke. Not only is it not a joke to women, it’s not a joke to men who go with the women who have to wait while they’re standing in line,” he said. “It’s also politically very popular. It’s the right thing to do and it’s catching up with the cultural lag in our society.”
Yes, it’s truly a sign of enlightened progress when, after massively expanding the number of people working for the federal government, we prove we’re willing to spend whatever it takes to make sure the female government employees don’t have to wait too long for a tinkle.
Others who testified at hearing included Kathryn Anthony, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Sharon Pratt, the former mayor of Washington, D.C.
Only in Congress would it require testimony from a professor of architecture and a former big-city mayor to clarify the complex issues involved in pee-pee wait times. It’s getting to the point that if someone turned on a TV and saw Monty Python’s Meeting of the Royal Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things, he could be forgiven for thinking he was watching C-SPAN.
The legislation would cover most federal facilities in Washington and across the country, including all properties managed by the National Parks Service, the Defense Department, the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Bureau of Prisons … yup, I predict that when all is said and done, federal prisons for women will be required to have as many urinals as federal prisons for men. But here’s what I don’t get: why does the federal government need to hold hearings and pass a law to require the federal government to provide equal access to toilets for employees of the federal government? Are they afraid the federal government will ignore the federal government’s advice on the matter?
And more importantly, how will the federal government force the federal government to comply with this federal law? Will the federal government levy fines against branches of the federal government that ignore the federal government? Or will they send federal government employees who ignore the federal government to a federal prison, and then fine them if it turns out the federal prisons don’t prove equal toilet access for federal employees?
None of this seems to make any sense. Then again, we’re talking about people in Congress who believe The Founders added an amendment to the Bill of Rights solely to ensure that the government would never take away the government’s right to own guns.
“Today, women still lack equal access to restrooms in many places of employment, education, and recreation,” said Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., chairman of the committee who authored the legislation. “The fact that many federal buildings do not provide as many restroom facilities for women as they do for men is simply unfair,” he said in his opening remarks. “It’s time for that to change.”
Women in Muslim countries must see this stuff on the news and wonder just how in the hell American women can stand living in such a backward society. The unequal access to restrooms in many places of employment, education and recreation makes me ashamed to be an American.
“I believe that there are a number of serious health and fairness issues related to restroom gender parity that we can address in newly constructed, acquired, and leased federal buildings, or in existing buildings undergoing major renovations,” Issa said.
Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and restroom gender parity for the millions of people who live off our taxes: those are the natural rights Jefferson held so dear.
Look, I don’t have any problem with ensuring that female federal employees have the same approximate pee-pee wait time as male federal employees, but they’re going about this all wrong. Forget about all those newly constructed, acquired, and leased federal buildings … just fire half of the federal workforce. That’ll bring the wait time down to zero.
Remember the big budget battle in the 1990s, when all “non-essential” federal employees were sent home (but still paid)? The country didn’t fall apart. We missed a golden opportunity back then: we should’ve passed a law that no federal employee could return to work without a petition signed by at least 100 citizens who don’t work for the government. (That will be tougher in the future, since the number of citizens who don’t work for the government is dwindling.)
Or here’s another way to achieve restroom gender parity: destroy half the men’s restrooms in federal buildings. That would fit perfectly with the socialist agenda of making everyone more equal even if it reduces wealth overall in the process. Think of the economic stimulus that will be produced by hiring all the plumbers and construction workers required to turn bathrooms into new offices for whichever federal employees are in charge of fining young people who don’t buy health insurance.
The Congressional Budget Office has not put a price tag yet on the legislation.
Oh, I’m sure Congress can tackle this problem for no more than $300 billion.
Hmmm … interesting reactions to Arizona’s new immigration law, or anti-illegal-alien law, whichever term you prefer. Not surprisingly, politicians from my old state of California are up in arms about it. That’s because they prefer a different term for illegal aliens: future loyal voters — if only they can push another amnesty bill through Congress someday. Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, has called for a moratorium on city-related travel to Arizona, and several members of the Los Angeles city council have proposed that L.A. stop doing any business with Arizona.
Mexican government officials are also up in arms, labeling the immigration law “abominable,” “a violation of human rights” and “discriminatory.” (Hard to argue with that last one; we do tend to treat criminals differently in America.)
Given all the hubub, I think the only fair course of action is to scrap the Arizona law and replace it with a new national immigration policy. Here are the provisions it ought to contain:
Foreigners will be admitted into the country according to their ability to contribute to our national progress.
Foreigners will be banned from interfering in our country’s politics.
Immigration officials must ensure that all immigrants have the necessary funds for their own sustenance and for the sustenance of their dependents.
Foreigners may be barred from the country if 1) their presence upsets the equilibrium of the national demographics, 2) they are deemed detrimental to our economic or national interests, 3) they do not behave like good citizens in their own country, 4) they have broken any of our laws, or 5) they are not found to be physically or mentally healthy.
Immigration authorities must keep track of every single person in the country and assist in the arrests of illegal immigrants.
A National Population Registry must be established to keep track of every single individual who comprises the population of the country and verify each individual’s identity.
A national Catalog of Foreigners must be established to keep track of all foreign tourists and immigrants, and assign each individual with a unique tracking number.
Shipping and airline companies that bring undocumented foreigners into the country will be fined.
All foreigners with fake papers, or who enter the country under false pretenses, may fined or imprisoned.
All foreigners who fail to obey the rules of the country will be fined, deported, and/or imprisoned.
All foreigners who fail to obey a deportation order are to be prosecuted and possibly imprisoned.
All foreigners who are deported and attempt to re-enter the country without authorization will be imprisoned for up to 10 years.
Foreigners who violate the terms of their visas will be imprisoned for to up to six years.
Foreigners who misrepresent the terms of their visas — such as working with out a permit - will face prosecution and possible imprisonment.
Citizens who help illegal aliens enter the country will themselves considered criminals and face prosecution.
Any citizen who marries a foreigner with the sole objective of helping the foreigner live in this country will be subject to up to five years in prison.
Yes, yes, I know … it’s not exactly send me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free kind of stuff. Some of those policies come off as racist, classist, or downright harsh. So how can I possibly call them fair?
Simple: those are Mexico’s immigration policies. If Mexican officials think our laws are abominable and discriminatory, let’s adopt theirs instead.
As you prepare to file your taxes so the federal government can continue spending wildly on “stimulus” projects to (supposedly) lift us out of the economic doldrums, here are some videos that might cheer you up. Well, not really. But they might clarify how we got into this mess and how we should be getting out of it. (Hint: huge government spending isn’t the answer.)
The first is a lecture by Peter Schiff, one of the few financial experts who saw the crash coming.
This one is by Thomas Woods. The topic is the Great Depression of 1920. What, you mean you’ve never heard of the Great Depression of 1920?! That’s because the government did almost nothing — except cut spending and taxes — and it was over in 18 months. That’s not something the people who write social studies books care to talk about.
If you pick up Woods’ excellent book Meltdown, you’ll learn how the Federal Reserve creates booms and busts. If you don’t know exactly what the Federal Reserve is, this video gives a brief summary. (Sorry, the pace is a little slow, but the information is good.)
Lender of Last Resort … ever wonder how the Federal Reserve “lends” money? If the federal government borrows a trillion dollars from the Federal Reserve for, say, a bailout or a stimulus bill (with health-care “reform” soon to follow), or if the Fed “injects” an extra trillions dollars into the economy, where exactly does the trillion dollars come from? Who has that kind of money in the bank? Who made all those deposits?
The answer is: nobody. The Federal Reserve “lends” money by creating it out of thin air. They write a check backed by nothing except a government IOU and deposit the check in a bank. We get to pay the interest on the loan through taxes, and meanwhile the magical new money devalues whatever savings we have through inflation, which means the government gets to spend our wealth without bothering to raise taxes.
The good news is, the big banking concerns — the Rockefellers, the Morgans, etc. — get to count the Federal Reserve checks as assets and write loans against them, thus earning millions in interest for the trouble of doing some paperwork. We get screwed; they get rich. (If you’ve ever wondered why super-rich families like the Rockefellers favor high taxes and big government, that’s why. Big government makes them even richer.)
Ain’t big government just grand? Yessir, the big-government crowd really sticks up for the little guy.
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