Ray Harvey

Barack Obama is kicking off yet another much-needed vacation, following the debacle that was his Midwest bus tour, wherein he beclowned himself a great many times — for example, when he told an Illinois farmer, who was rightly concerned about the glut of government regulations, to just believe in bureaucracy:

“Folks in Washington,” Obama said, “like to get all ginned up [about things that aren’t necessarily happening]. Look what’s coming down the pipe!”

Here was Obama’s timeless advice to the concerned farmer:

“Contact the USDA. Talk to them directly. Find out what it is that you’re concerned about. My suspicion is a lot of times they’re going to be able to answer your questions and it will turn out that some of your fears are unfounded.”

Not really.

In fact, Obama and his unwavering belief in bureaucracy were put to the test by Politico journalist MJ Lee, who reported the results in an article entitled “Obama’s Unhelpful Advice.” Thus:

Here’s a rundown of what happened when I started by calling USDA’s general hotline to inquire about information related to the effects of noise and dust pollution rules on Illinois farmers:

Wednesday, 2:40 p.m. ET: After calling the USDA’s main line, I am told to call the Illinois Department of Agriculture. Here, I am patched through to a man who is identified as being in charge of “support services.” I leave a message.

3:53 p.m.: The man calls me back and recommends in a voicemail message that I call the Illinois Farm Bureau — a non-governmental organization.

4:02 p.m.: A woman at the Illinois Farm Bureau connects me to someone in the organization’s government affairs department. That person tells me they “don’t quite know who to refer you to.”

4:06 p.m.: I call the Illinois Department of Agriculture again, letting the person I spoke with earlier know that calling the Illinois Farm Bureau had not been fruitful. He says “those are the kinds of groups that are kind of on top of this or kind of follow things like this. We deal with pesticide here in our bureau.”

“You only deal with pesticides?” I ask.

“We deal with other things … but we mainly deal with pesticides here,” he said, and gives me the phone number for the office of the department’s director, where he says there are “policy people” as well as the director’s staff.

4:10 p.m.: Someone at the director’s office transfers me to the agriculture products inspection department, where a woman says their branch deals with things like animal feed, seed and fertilizer.

“I’m going to transfer you to one of the guys at environmental programs.”

4:15 p.m.: I reach the answering machine at the environmental programs department, and leave a message.

4:57 p.m.: A man from the environmental programs department gets back to me: “I hate to be the regular state worker that’s always accused of passing the buck, but noise and dust regulation would be under our environmental protection agency, rather than the Agriculture Department,” he says, adding that he has forwarded my name and number to the agriculture adviser at IEPA.

On Thursday morning, POLITICO started the hunt for an answer again, this time calling the USDA’s local office in Henry County, Ill., where the town hall took place.

9:42 a.m.: Asked if someone at the office might be able to provide me with the information I requested, the woman on the phone responds, “Not right now. We may have to actually look that up — did you Google this or anything?”

When I say that I’m a reporter and would like to discuss my experience with someone who handles media relations there, I am referred to the USDA’s state office in Champaign. I leave a message there.

10:40 a.m.: A spokeswoman for the Illinois Natural Resources Conservation Service calls me, to whom I explain my multiple attempts on Wednesday and Thursday to retrieve the information I was looking for.

“What I can tell you is our particular agency does not deal with regulations,” she tells me. “We deal with volunteers who voluntarily want to do things. I think the reason you got that response from the Cambridge office is because in regard to noise and dust regulation, we don’t have anything to do with that.”

She adds that the EPA would be more capable of answering questions regarding regulations.

Finally, I call the USDA’s main media relations department, based here in Washington, where I explain to a spokesperson about my failed attempts to obtain an answer to the Illinois farmer’s question. This was their response, via email:

“Secretary Vilsack continues to work closely with members of the Cabinet to help them engage with the agricultural community to ensure that we are separating fact from fiction on regulations because the Administration is committed to providing greater certainty for farmers and ranchers. Because the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction, it does not provide a fair representation of USDA’s robust efforts to get the right information to our producers throughout the country.”

So, still no answer to the farmer’s question.

And still no answer to the question I’ve been asking left-wingers for years: where derives your great confidence in bureaucrats and government bureaucracy?

In the following statement, Barack Obama presents what I take to be the most critical cog in his entire propaganda machine — knowing, as he does, that if people understand the actual truth, which is the exact opposite of what he says in the following, then the whole of his enterprise will crumble into dust:

“Don’t buy into this notion that somehow that all our problems would be solved if we eliminate government. Part of the reason why we had this financial crisis is because we didn’t have government do a good enough job looking over the shoulders of the banks to make sure that they weren’t taking crazy risks.”

(Source)

That is the Obama propaganda.

Now here’s the truth:

It was the state-sanctioned Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve’s expansion of the money supply — 1 percent interest rates! — that created the bubbles, and it was government intervention and government regulation that failed, just as regulation and intervention always does and always will. But let us ask: where, Barack, had all those bureaucrats gone since they weren’t looking over the shoulders of the government sponsored bankers?

Answer: they were ostensibly busy writing and enacting the over 51,000 new regulations that were added over the last 12 years, BEFORE 2008.

In fact, contrary to what Obama’s propaganda machine would have you believe, banking, housing, and insurance are the most regulated areas of the economy, and they have been for some time. These industries are strangled by regulations. In short, this is the failure of the regulatory state.

Still don’t believe it? Then don’t read the following from economist Dr. George Reisman, which was written in early 2009:

Under laissez-faire capitalism, the state consists essentially just of a police force, law courts, and a national defense establishment, which deter and combat those who initiate the use of physical force. And nothing more.

The utter absurdity of statements claiming that the present political-economic environment of the United States in some sense represents laissez-faire capitalism becomes as glaringly obvious as anything can be when one keeps in mind the extremely limited role of government under laissez-faire and then considers the following facts about the present-day United States.

1) Government spending in the United States currently equals more than forty percent of national income, i.e., the sum of all wages and salaries and profits and interest earned in the country. This is without counting any of the massive off-budget spending such as that on account of the government enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Nor does it count any of the recent spending on assorted “bailouts.” What this means is that substantially more than forty dollars of every one hundred dollars of output are appropriated by the government against the will of the individual citizens who produce that output. The money and the goods involved are turned over to the government only because the individual citizens wish to stay out of jail. Their freedom to dispose of their own incomes and output is thus violated on a colossal scale. In contrast, under laissez-faire capitalism, government spending would be on such a modest scale that a mere revenue tariff might be sufficient to support it. The corporate and individual income taxes, inheritance and capital gains taxes, and social security and Medicare taxes would not exist.

2) There are presently fifteen federal cabinet departments, nine of which exist for the very purpose of respectively interfering with housing, transportation, healthcare, education, energy, mining, agriculture, labor, and commerce, and virtually all of which nowadays routinely ride roughshod over one or more important aspects of the economic freedom of the individual. Under laissez faire capitalism, eleven of the fifteen cabinet departments would cease to exist and only the departments of justice, defense, state, and treasury would remain. Within those departments, moreover, further reductions would be made, such as the abolition of the IRS in the Treasury Department and the Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice.

3) The economic interference of today’s cabinet departments is reinforced and amplified by more than one hundred federal agencies and commissions, the most well-known of which include, besides the IRS, the FRB and FDIC, the FBI and CIA, the EPA, FDA, SEC, CFTC, NLRB, FTC, FCC, FERC, FEMA, FAA, CAA, INS, OHSA, CPSC, NHTSA, EEOC, BATF, DEA, NIH, and NASA. Under laissez-faire capitalism, all such agencies and commissions would be done away with, with the exception of the FBI, which would be reduced to the legitimate functions of counterespionage and combating crimes against person or property that take place across state lines.

4) To complete this catalog of government interference and its trampling of any vestige of laissez faire, as of the end of 2007, the last full year for which data are available, the Federal Register contained fully seventy-three thousand pages of detailed government regulations. This is an increase of more than ten thousand pages since 1978, the very years during which our system, according to one of The New York Times articles quoted above, has been “tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.” Under laissez-faire capitalism, there would be no Federal Register. The activities of the remaining government departments and their subdivisions would be controlled exclusively by duly enacted legislation, not the rule-making of unelected government officials.

5) And, of course, to all of this must be added the further massive apparatus of laws, departments, agencies, and regulations at the state and local level. Under laissez-faire capitalism, these too for the most part would be completely abolished and what remained would reflect the same kind of radical reductions in the size and scope of government activity as those carried out on the federal level.

What this brief account has shown is that the politico-economic system of the United States today is so far removed from laissez-faire capitalism that it is closer to the system of a police state than to laissez-faire capitalism. The ability of the media to ignore all of the massive government interference that exists today and to characterize our present economic system as one of laissez-faire and economic freedom marks it as, if not profoundly dishonest, then as nothing less than delusional.

Beyond all this is the further fact that the actual responsibility for our financial crisis lies precisely with massive government intervention, above all the intervention of the Federal Reserve System in attempting to create capital out of thin air, in the belief that the mere creation of money and its being made available in the loan market is a substitute for capital created by producing and saving. This is a policy it has pursued since its founding, but with exceptional vigor since 2001, in its efforts to overcome the collapse of the stock market bubble whose creation it had previously inspired….

This past Monday (August 15th, 2011) Ryan Rhodes, a Tea Party organizer in Iowa, asked Barack Obama how Obama could call for more civility when “your vice president is calling people like me, a Tea Party member, a ‘terrorist.’”

Barack Obama — who, as you no doubt remember from his debates with Hillary, was against “forcing” (in his entirely apposite words) the individual healthcare mandate before he was so emphatically for it — this past Monday said:

“As someone who’s been called a socialist, not born here, taking away freedoms because I passed a healthcare bill, I’m all for lowering the rhetoric.”

To me, the most interesting thing about Obama’s comment here is the paradoxical nature of it: in actual point of fact he is a socialist, and until fairly recently he made no secret of this. (You can watch him on video here. Or, if you can stomach them, read his poorly written books, one of which I’ve excerpted here, and you’ll see that he’s not only an explicit socialist but, like his “friend and mentor” Jeremiah Wright, he’s a socialist of the black nationalist variety.)

Obama has also made no secret of the fact that he is all for taking away freedoms in order to nationalize healthcare — which is of course called socialism — and so the only real rhetoric here, still, is Barack Obama’s.

Because he’s told so many blatant lies, and because it would be so painfully easy to catch him up in all his circumlocutions and contradictions, Barack Obama would be much better off, in the important months to come, avoiding confrontations like this:

At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent — Joseph Sobran

The Cult of Obama is disintegrating before our very eyes, and fundamentally transforming America has not proven as easy as Barack Obama had once anticipated. Now, it’s only the True Believers and the uninformed who cling to him still.

True Believer and democratic strategist Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, this past Sunday in the New York Times wrote that the American public has been “desperate for a leader who would speak with confidence, and they were ready to follow wherever the president led.”

Yes, you read that right: “they were ready to follow wherever the president led.”

As a True Believer, Drew Westen was not, I assure you, speaking hyperbolically.

If you’ve ever wondered how tyrants come into power with the full sanction of the people whose minds they control — that, reader, what you just read by professor Drew Westen, is precisely how.

There’s also True Believer Charles Fried, of Harvard Law School, who echoed Drew Westen’s above sentiments in a piece entitled — incredibly — “Obama Is Too Good for Us,” wherein, according to his saracastic counter-commentator David Harsanyi, “he disparaged a system that allows mere simpletons to transfer their free market absurdity to Washington through elections.”

And True Believer Jacob Weisberg of Slate wrote that because of “intellectual primitives” on the right, “compromise is dead” and “there’s no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people. The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed.”

In response to which, the same David Harsanyi quoted above said, with more irony still:

“Reasonableness is shoving a wholly partisan, Byzantine restructuring of the health care system through Congress in the midst of an economic downturn. But chipping a few billion off a $3.7 trillion budget in exchange for raising the debt ceiling is an act of irrationality that has, apparently, sucked the very soul from the American project.”

Yes, the Obama cult is disintegrating. The primary reason: Obama’s dyed-in-the-skein neo-marxist politics, which, among other things, led to Obama’s brainless acceptance of a cultic doctrine called Keynesian economics — a colossally flawed doctrine which, mathematically speaking, can never work, no matter how many Nobel Laureates propound its virtues.

I speak not to the True Believer (because he no longer has ears to hear me) but to the moderate believer when I say that the sooner you come to terms with this fact — the fact that Keynesian economics with its endless borrowing, printing, and spending can never lead a country or a county out of poverty and into prosperity — the sooner, then, that this country will begin to heal at last.

In the same way (and for the same reasons) that the majority of socialists do not know they’re socialists, so, too, the majority of Barack Obama’s followers don’t know the political-economic ideology they’ve accepted. For most, it never mattered. And yet what I wrote in 2009 is, I believe, more relevant now than it was even then; so I’ll say it again: those millions who fainted and swooned over Obama’s easy platitudes but never bothered to question his actual political-economic ideology, even when he spoke of “fundamentally transforming America,” that, reader, is the stuff of nightmares and nationwide cults. The reason the majority of Obama’s disciples don’t know the socialist ideology they’ve accepted is that the majority have no actual understanding of even the most basic political-economic principles, and that is why the propaganda of the leader — e.g. “We’ve actually been operating in a way entirely consistent with free market principles” (Obama, 2009) — works well on the believers. This, of course, is as true of the right as it is of the left.

But one thing Barack Obama had not reckoned on which has proved his undoing:

Because of America’s unique origins, there exists in the minds of many, many Americans a bedrock belief in the principles of liberty, individualism, and hard work, which are the diametric opposite of the entitlement mentality that socialism fosters. This conviction is almost never explicitly codified by those who hold it, and for this reason that hold is tenuous and poorly defended. And yet the conviction exists. As a matter of fact, it’s bred deeply into the very fabric of America, so that uprooting it by force, as Barack Obama intended when he spoke of “fundamentally transforming America,” created a massive counterforce from coast-to-coast which has stunned Barack Obama, his whole clownish administration, and ultimately precipitated the disintegration of the Obama cult.

Because of America’s origins, the spirit that’s become engrained in the minds of so many Americans would rather the country were torn asunder than let a race-obsessed, intellectually weak, neo-marxist poseur succeed at fundamentally transforming it.

It is, finally, important to note also that the principles of individualism, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which define the American spirit I speak of, are not, contrary to popular belief, anti-charity, coldhearted, or unkind. Just the opposite: America has been by far the most generous and charitable nation in human history, and for one very good reason: we could afford to be.

Until now.

Obama’s plummeting approval, as of August 11, 2011.

It is the insurmountable flaw in all leftist philosophy, the insoluble contradiction, the problem that cannot be overcome: No matter what form that leftist philosophy takes — whether it be progressive, egalitarian, democratic-socialist, welfare-statist, communistic, or any other name those of this mindset wish to call it — in order to redistribute wealth, there must first be wealth to redistribute.

Somebody must produce, and the left-winger cannot exist without this person.

The welfare state cannot exist without the producers of welfare.

For exactly this reason, the left-winger is at the mercy of the very person he seeks to plunder. The left-winger relies on those he so often denigrates.

The state by definition cannot produce. It is (by definition) an agency of force. If you have any doubt about that, consider this:

The state cannot spend or redistribute a single cent unless it first either borrows, taxes, or prints.

As Janet Daley so felicitously phrased it in her recent London Telegraph article:

This was the heaven on earth for which liberal democracy had been striving: a system of wealth redistribution that was merciful but not Marxist, and a guarantee of lifelong economic and social security for everyone that did not involve totalitarian government. This was the ideal the European Union was designed to entrench. It was the dream of Blairism, which adopted it as a replacement for the state socialism of Old Labour. And it is the aspiration of President Obama and his liberal Democrats, who want the United States to become a European-style social democracy.

But the US has a very different historical experience from European countries, with their accretions of national remorse and class guilt: it has a far stronger and more resilient belief in the moral value of liberty and the dangers of state power. This is a political as much as an economic crisis, but not for the reasons that Mr Obama believes. The ruckus that nearly paralysed the US economy last week, and led to the loss of its AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s, arose from a confrontation over the most basic principles of American life.

Contrary to what the Obama Democrats claimed, the face-off in Congress did not mean that the nation’s politics were “dysfunctional”. The politics of the US were functioning precisely as the Founding Fathers intended: the legislature was acting as a check on the power of the executive.

The wealth that the left-winger wishes to “spread around,” as Barack Obama famously put it, must originate somewhere.

Where?

Only one place: production.

That in a nutshell is the awesome logic of Say’s Law.

Production, said Jean Baptiste Say, is everything.

He was correct.

Capitalism, as the very name implies, is the engine of capital production.

But what is capital?

Capital is the the amount of wealth owned by a person or a business. Capital is a form of property, and it can, if the owner of that capital chooses, be used to invest. I emphasize that word because investment is the backbone of production, which is the backbone of job creation.

Without wealth, humans are impoverished. Thus, for humans the production of wealth is survival.

Ultimately nothing more fundamental than labor is required for the production of wealth.

Production = life.

Money merely symbolizes wealth. Money is not wealth in and of itself but only a representative.

When money is debased, as it is when, for example, it’s printed without real wealth (i.e. production) backing it, it loses its value. In this way, government has the power to indirectly divest the value of the savings that people have spent their lives accumulating: by printing money that can’t be backed by real wealth, government thereby strips money of its worth. When too much money is printed, the money inflates, and a dollar is no longer worth a dollar.

The left-winger’s big, big problem, which the right-winger has to his detriment also accepted (albeit tacitly), is rooted in the misbegotten belief that if government doesn’t provide it, humans interacting freely will not get it done. That is the source of the insoluble flaw in all leftist thought, which in turn has a deeper source: the belief that human survival should be assured.

Matt Damon, like so many Hollywood elites, is a left-wing bigot whose understanding of economics is astoundingly abysmal and yet entirely typical of his political party.

As noted here before, Matt Damon is a devotee of neo-Marxist Howard Zinn (RIP), who, by his own admission, did not like America and yet for some reason, despite his hatred of America, continued to live very well here all his life. (Noam Chomsky aussi.)

Last week, at a “Save Our Schools” march in Washington DC, Damon demonstrated his paucity of economic understanding, while at the same time disclosing (once again) that he regards expletive-laden invective as the best method of argumentation. It is not, as the following article makes clear.

This article, which is excerpted from Real Clear Politics, should by required reading for everyone interested in the subject of education:

[Matt Damon] addressed a “Save Our Schools” march in Washington at the behest of his mother, a professor of early childhood education. He attacked standardized tests. He praised all the public school teachers who “empowered” him and unlocked his creative potential by rejecting “silly drill and kill nonsense.”

Speaking on behalf of “an army of regular people,” Damon decried the demoralization of teachers by ruthless, results-oriented free marketeers whom he mocked as “simple-minded.”

What Damon’s superficial tirade lacked, however, was any real-world understanding of the deterioration of core curricular learning in America. Students can’t master simple division or fractions because today’s teachers — churned out through lowest common denominator grad schools and shielded from competition — have barely mastered those skills themselves. Un-educators have abandoned “drill and kill” computation for multicultural claptrap and fuzzy math, traded in grammar fundamentals for “creative spelling,” and dropped standard civics for save-the-earth propaganda.

Consequence: bottom-basement U.S. student scores on global assessments over the past two decades. Blaming the tests is blaming the messenger. The liberal education establishment’s response to its abject academic failures? Run away. This is why the Save Our Schools agenda championed by Damon calls for less curricular emphasis on math and reading — and more focus on social justice, funding and “equity” issues.

Out: Reading is fundamental.

In: Feeling is fundamental.

After his drippy pep talk absolving teachers of any responsibility for America’s educational morass, Damon then lashed out at a young libertarian reporter who had the audacity to ask him about the negative impact of lifetime teacher tenure. “In acting there isn’t job security, right?” Reason.tv’s Michelle Fields asked Damon. “There is an incentive to work hard and be a better actor because you want to have a job. So why isn’t it like that for teachers?”

It’s elementary that people will work longer and harder if they know they will be rewarded. There’s nothing anti-teacher about the question. (And before teachers-unions goons go on the attack, I am the child of a public school teacher and the mother of two children in an excellent public charter school by choice.) But Damon’s hinges came undone when confronted with the mild question.

“You think job insecurity makes me work hard?” he retorted. “That’s like saying a teacher is going to get lazy when she has tenure.” Gathering all the creative potential he could muster, Damon unleashed crude profanities on Fields. “A teacher wants to teach,” Damon fumed with his mother next to him. “Why else would you take a sh**ty” salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really loved to do it?”

Never mind that most out-of-work Americans would find nothing “sh**ty” about earning an average $53,000 annual salary plus health and retirement benefits for a 180-day work year.

Damon went on to deride standard, mainstream behavioral economic principles as “intrinsically paternalistic” and “MBA-style thinking.” And when the young reporter’s cameraman pointed out that there are bad apples in the teaching profession as in any profession, Damon called him “sh**ty,” too.

Tinseltown stars can afford to put emotion over logic, progressive fantasy over practical reality. The rest of us are stuck with the bill. And those whom bleeding-heart celebrities purport to care most about — the children — suffer the consequences of bad ideas.

Interminable teacher tenure in America’s largest school districts, from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, has produced a rotten corps of incompetent (at best) and dangerous (at worst) educators coddled by Big Labor. As the D.C.-based Center for Union Facts reports, “In many major cities, only one out of 1,000 teachers is fired for performance-related reasons. … In 10 years, only about 47 out of 100,000 teachers were actually terminated from New Jersey’s schools.”

By contrast, as the educational documentary “Waiting for Superman” (produced by avowed liberal turned reformer Davis Guggenheim) pointed out, one out of every 57 doctors loses his or her license to practice medicine, and one out of every 97 lawyers loses their license to practice law.

In Los Angeles, it’s not just meanie tea party terrorists making the case for abolishing teacher tenure. When the Los Angeles Times exposed how the city’s tenure evaluation system rubber-stamped approvals and ignored actual performance, the district superintendent admitted: “Too many ineffective teachers are falling into tenured positions — the equivalent of jobs for life.” USC education professor Julie Slayton acknowledged: “It’s ridiculous and should be changed.”

(Link)

Barack Obama, 2006:

“Raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.”

Barack Obama, 2006:

“Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.”

Barack Obama, 2011:

“Nobody likes to be tagged as having increased the debt limit for the United States by a trillion dollars. As president, you start realizing, you know what, we can’t play around with this stuff. This is the full faith and credit of the United States. And so that was just an example of a new senator making what is a political vote as opposed to doing what was important for the country.”

I guess it all just depends upon whose ox is being gored.

Barack Obama, 2011:

“When I said ‘change we can believe in’ I didn’t say ‘change we can believe in tomorrow.’ Not change we can believe in next week. We knew this was going to take time because we’ve got this big, messy, tough democracy.”

(Note to Obama: the United States is not a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be. The United States is a Constitutional Republic wherein the right to life and property are inalienable and therefore not subject to vote.)

Barack Obama, 2011:

“This is my vision for America: A vision where we live within our means while still investing in our future.”

Barack Obama, 2009:

“If I don’t fix the economy in three years, I’ll be a one term president.”

Barack Obama, 2011:

“The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting, I promise you, not just on immigration reform….”

Barack Obama, 2008:

“Just because you possess an individual right doesn’t mean local governments can’t constrain the exercise of that right.”

Barack Obama, 2008:

“[My grandmother] is a typical white person.”