Ray Harvey

In a recent interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, socialist documentarian Michael Moore — who, not coincidentally, made a socialist propaganda movie called Capitalism: A Love Story — revealed Monday (September 27th, 2011) what we all already knew: he has no understanding whatsoever of what capitalism really is.

The video clip won’t embed, but you can watch it here (and I suggest you do).

This is what Michael Moore said:

When you say the word capitalism, you have to talk about it in its current sense. You can’t told about the old days or the way maybe, you know, Adam Smith. The sort of old capitalism….

[In the] old days when you worked hard and prospered, everyone else prospered as well. And not only that, as you prospered, the wealth was shared with your employees, with the government. Everybody had a piece of the pie. You, who started the business or invented the light bulb or whatever, you got a bigger piece of the pie. And you know what, nobody cared because you invented the light bulb. That was a pretty cool thing….

None of the major religions, in fact they all, say it’s one of the worst sins you could commit, is to take such a large piece of the pie while others suffer.

Isn’t that heavy?

But the truth is, capitalism is the diametric opposite of what Michael Moore would have you believe.

What is capitalism?

Capitalism is a social system based upon private ownership of the means of production and the preeminence of the individual over the group.

This issue — capitalism-versus-socialism — hinges upon one thing, and this one thing is the only thing you’ll ever need to know about the subject: private ownership (capitalism) versus public or government ownership (socialism).

Do we each own ourselves and (corollarily) our property?

Or do others own us and our property?

Money is property.

Capitalism is an entire political theory — not, as is sometimes supposed, merely economic.

The exclusively economic component of capitalism can be described as the right to life, liberty, and property applied to commerce and industry.

Pure laissez-faire capitalism, which does not exist now and has never existed fully, means that government removes itself from all commerce (and that includes healthcare), in the same way that government removes itself from the bedroom.

In addition to early America, there is at least one other society that has come close to laissez faire capitalism:

“After the War Hong Kong had no minimum wage, low and simple taxes, zero tariffs, zero capital controls, and a stable legal environment. Postwar Hong Kong went as far with economic laissez faire as any other country in history. This resulted in economic development that benefited virtually all the people of Hong Kong. Living standards increased substantially even for the poorest people in Hong Kong” (Stefan Karlsson, “Inflation Leads to Protectionism,” 2004).

Capitalism means that commerce and industry are entirely privatized.

Corporations that receive government subsidies are not capitalistic. They’re the opposite: they’re mercantilistic.
The same is true of small businesses and farms that receive subsidies.

Trade tariffs are not capitalistic but mercantilistic.

Mercantilism is an ancient and more primitive form of socialism. It is socialism before Karl Marx.

Political theory is the theory of government, and government, properly defined, is the body politic that possesses rule over a certain specified geographic region.

Economics is the science of production and exchange, but production does not just mean agriculture, although that is certainly included.

Productive work is any kind of work geared toward the task of survival — survival in the fully human sense of the word, including, therefore, arts, sports, industry, and so on.

Thus the essential questions of government are these:

Do humans exist by right or by permission?

Are we free by nature?

If so, why?

Are we free to produce, exchange, and exist, or do politicians, elected or not, have authority and jurisdiction over the lives of us — to any degree?

Obviously, there’s only one sane answer to all these questions; for to say that humans do not exist by right is the same as saying humans only exist when someone permits us to. But if that were true, we must then ask: who permits? And why? And who gives these people permission?

Fundamentally, political freedom can be achieved only through recognizing each and every single individual’s right to life.

If, then, you believe that we are each individuated and sovereign, and if you believe that our lives are entirely our own and not the government’s and not another’s, if, in short, you believe “we each have a property in our person,” as John Locke said, then you believe in the inalienable right to life, liberty, and property.

You believe, therefore, in laissez-faire capitalism.


More here on the many permutations of socialism.

As you may recall, the White House recently waived EPA ozone regulation because those regulations proved too costly (this despite the fact that you can’t put a price tag on mother earth), but now the Obama administration is looking to make asthmatics pay a steep price — a measure, let it be noted, which will have absolutely no effect on the ozone or the environment:

Asthma patients who rely on over-the-counter inhalers will need to switch to prescription-only alternatives as part of the federal government’s latest attempt to protect the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday patients who use the epinephrine inhalers to treat mild asthma will need to switch by Dec. 31 to other types that do not contain chlorofluorocarbons, an aerosol substance once found in a variety of spray products.

The action is part of an agreement signed by the U.S. and other nations to stop using substances that deplete the ozone layer, a region in the atmosphere that helps block harmful ultraviolet rays from the Sun.

But the switch to a greener inhaler will cost consumers more. Epinephrine inhalers are available via online retailers for around $20, whereas the alternatives, which contain the drug albuterol, range from $30 to $60.

Unlike these fatuous environmental regulations, asthma is no joke. Thus even left-wingers like the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle (an asthma sufferer herself) are campaigning against them. As McArdle correctly notes: “when consumers are forced to use environmentally friendly products they’re are almost always worse:

Er, industry also knew how to make low-flow toilets, which is why every toilet in my recently renovated rental house clogs at least once a week. They knew how to make more energy efficient dryers, which is why even on high, I have to run every load through the dryer in said house twice. And they knew how to make inexpensive compact flourescent bulbs, which is why my head hurts from the glare emitting from my bedroom lamp. They also knew how to make asthma inhalers without CFCs, which is why I am hoarding old albuterol inhalers that, unlike the new ones, a) significantly improve my breathing and b) do not make me gag. Etc.

(Link)

Cough it up, asthmatics, cough it up.

But Obama and his clownish administration are still feverishly trying to recruit members — this time with a brand new website called AttackWatch.com, designed, according to national field director Jeremy Bird (of Obama for America) to “get the facts and Fight the smears…. [T]he site offers new resources to fight back, including policy issue pages that fact check statements by Obama’s Republican opponents with links to evidence to back them up.”

Sounds like a smart plan to me.

If, then, you’re aware of any anti-Obama rhetoric going on out there, I urge you to report it to the Obama thought police:

AttackWatch.com

Or if you prefer, you can tweet about it. In fact, last I heard, the tweets were coming in at a rate of about one every two seconds.

Here are a handful of them:

From DrFreeLance: “I saw a werewolf drinkin a pina colada at Trader Vic’s, and his hair was perfect.”

From chuckdevore (Republican state legislator in California): “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean a big majority of us isn’t out to get you…”

From EddieRobbins: “My neighbor removed his Obama bumper sticker. I think he’s a racist.”

From DickMeyers: “Bless me #AttackWatch for I have sinned. I have muttered naughty words about our Dear Leader 9 times & have doubted his divinity a few times”

From joaniekensil: “Ate refried beans & chips for breakfast which is sort of racist foodist – Carbon emissions to follow.”

From PoliticalGravity: “Saw a kid with a lemonade stand and she didn’t have a permit.”

From thorninaz: “Hey #attackwatch, I saw 6 ATM’s in an alley, killing a Job. It looked like a hate crime!”

And from the always excellent IowaHawkBlog: “#AttackWatch have you cried “uncle” yet? Because we can keep this up all f***in’ day.”

Most of these occurred within a two-minute time span.

Meanwhile, in related news, Michelle Obama is working hard to legislate what food our children are allowed to eat, because, as everyone knows, “you’re not free if you’re not healthy.” Darden Restaurants Inc., which was lucky enough to receive one of the coveted ObamaCare waivers (why you’d need or want a waiver for a piece of legislation as brilliant as Obama’s healthcare catastrophe is another subject for another time), has happily jumped onboard Michelle Obama’s nutritional campaign.

The phrase forced charity is a contradiction, and yet it’s precisely this principle that’s the cornerstone of virtually all left-wing doctrine.

In one form or another, forcing charity lies at the root of every major democratic program — from public schools, to welfare, to social security, to medicare and medicaid, to unemployment checks, and so on, all of which, the left-winger believes, cannot be handled voluntarily, and so must be forced.

But suppose for a moment that this bedrock belief is wrong. What then?

The following is an explosive phone call which recently took place on 850 KOA, and it captures the issue in such a way that it might just change your life. Ross Kaminsky is the host. It is a civil and absolutely riveting exchange between a garden-variety left-winger and black republican who does not believe in or want government handouts, and who properly understands the danger of such handouts.

Push play and then slide the player over to exactly the 22:50 mark. The call lasts about seven minutes. Listen:

I’ve come under some fire from a few union lackeys over my Labor Day post — teamsters who have contacted me to tell me how misguided my closing lines actually are. You see, in describing unions as having a long history of hatred and violence toward non-union members like me, I’m accused of being “unfair.”

Well, I wonder.

Via Michelle Malkin, who has been indefatigable on this subject:

Meet Eddie York. He was a workingman whose story will never scroll across Obama’s teleprompter. A nonunion contractor who operated heavy equipment, York was shot to death during a strike called by the United Mine Workers 17 years ago. Workmates who tried to come to his rescue were beaten in an ensuing melee. The head of the UMW spearheading the wave of strikes at that time? Richard Trumka. Responding to concerns about violence, he shrugged to the Virginian-Pilot in September 1993: “I’m saying if you strike a match and you put your finger in it, you’re likely to get burned.” Incendiary rhetoric, anyone?

A federal jury convicted one of Trumka’s UMW captains on conspiracy and weapons charges in York’s death. According to the Washington, D.C.-based National Legal and Policy Center, which tracks Big Labor abuse, Trumka’s legal team quickly settled a $27 million wrongful death suit filed by York’s widow just days after a judge admitted evidence in the criminal trial. An investigative report by Reader’s Digest disclosed that Trumka “did not publicly discipline or reprimand a single striker present when York was killed. In fact, all eight were helped out financially by the local.”

In Illinois, Trumka told UMW members to “kick the shit out of every last” worker who crossed his picket lines, according to the Nashville (Ill.) News. And as the National Right to Work Foundation (pdf), the leading anti-forced unionism organization in the country, pointed out, other UMW coalfield strikes resulted in what one judge determined were “violent activities … organized, orchestrated and encouraged by the leadership of this union.”

Trumka washed off the figurative bloodstains and moved up the ranks. As AFL-CIO secretary, he notoriously refused to testify in a sordid 1999 embezzlement trial involving his labor boss brethren at the Teamsters Union. No surprise. Thugs of a feather: Trumka’s violence-promoting record echoes the riotous Teamsters strikes dating back to the 1950s, when the union organized taxicab companies to target workers with gas bombs, bottles and fists.

And now, Trumka is spearheading a Democratic Party get-out-the-vote campaign by far-left groups — publicized in the revolutionary Marxist People’s World — to “energize an army of tens of thousands who will return to their neighborhoods, churches, schools and voting booths to prevent a Republican takeover of Congress in November and begin building a new permanent coalition to fight for a progressive agenda.”

Take those as literal fighting words. The bloody consequences of compulsory unionism cannot be ignored.

Also, according to the FBI, “four of the last eight Teamsters presidents have been criminally indicted and since FY 2001, racketeering investigations have yielded more than 2,000 indictments and awarded more than $3 billion in fines and restitution. In past union elections, Hoffa’s team was caught laundering union funds for electioneering and for campaign polling on dues-payers’ dime.”

(Link)

And here’s more:

AFSCME, UFCW, and SEIU corner Republican Congressman and shout: “Fuck you!” “Shame!”

Union thugs in front of Verizon Vice President Bill Foshay’s private home yelling: “We’re here to fight, Bill!”

Union thug to Jewish guy: “Bad Jew!”

Union thug to Fox News reporter: “I hate you because it makes me feel good.”

Union thug in Ohio: “The tea party is a bunch of dick-sucking corporate butt-lickers who want to crush the working people of this country…. You’re fucking hypocrites.”

And in Denver, racist SEIU supporters taunt gay black entrepreneur Leland Robinson, who had the nerve to (correctly) criticize teacher’s unions at a Capitol rally: “Get behind that fence where you belong! Do you have any children? That you claim?”

Yes, poor misunderstood teamsters indeed.

For over 100 years now in the United States, the first Monday in September has been called Labor Day. The original Labor Day, however, was celebrated on a Tuesday (September 5, 1882) in New York City. It was organized by the Central Labor Union, and it wasn’t until 1884 that the first Monday in September was selected as the official day of Labor Day — or, as it was then called, “the workingmen’s holiday.”

On its website, the U.S. Department of Labor says this about Labor Day:

It is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers…. The vital force of labor added materially to the highest standard of living and the greatest production the world has ever known and has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy.

But did you know that none of this is accurate?

The fact is, there’s one and only one way to increase employee pay while simultaneously shortening employee hours — and that one way has nothing at all to do with labor unions.

It’s through advances in technology:

By replacing bare hands with shovels, by replacing shovels with tractors, by replacing tractors with new inventions, and so on — that is the only way to ease the plight of the worker.

As the economist Joseph Schumpeter put it, technological advances are what in turn enable businesses to produce ever more with ever less, and this is the only thing that advances standards of living, including worker wages and worker hours.

Technology, which capital investment fosters, is and always has been the one and only way to raise the standard of living — for everyone:

[P]retty much all of the gains from the Industrial Revolution went to unskilled labor: rents barely changed, therefore the gains from industrialization were not absorbed by landowners; interest rates barely changed, therefore the gains from industrialization were not absorbed by capitalists; wages — particularly unskilled wages — exploded. The idea that collective bargaining was necessary to prevent worker exploitation is a historical myth (Professor Art Carden, “Labor Day And Freedom,” 2008).

It is for this reason that the capitalists are the people whom we should truly celebrate on Labor Day — not the union thugs with their hatred and their long history of violence toward anyone like me who are not and never will be a union member.

I’ve said it many times before: if something is economically tenable, it never needs to be subsidized, because the market will adopt it naturally. If something needs to be subsidized, it’s not economically tenable and should not be subsidized. Just recently, we’ve had the misfortune of witnessing yet again the reason that this is so.

Solar energy will one day be tenable, but the technology (which incidentally the free market best fosters) is still many years out. Thus the latest in a long line of infuriatingly wasteful “green energy” debacles.

Debra Saunders, of the left-wing San Francisco Chronicle, explains:

Last year, President Barack Obama came to the Bay Area to tout “green jobs” at an event at solar panel manufacturer Solyndra’s Fremont plant. Quoth the president: “The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra.”

On Wednesday, Solyndra announced it was shuttering its remaining Fremont factory, laying off 1,100 workers and filing for bankruptcy. It was a sorry day for the Bay Area.

I remember the day Obama came, May 26, 2010, vividly. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to greet the president and wave to the hard hats. Venture capitalists preened. Just to show how brainy and farsighted the solar crowd is, Obama reminded the audience that his energy secretary, Steven Chu, is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

Rube that I am, I didn’t understand what Obamaland was thinking. Solyndra had not turned a profit since it was founded in 2005. The plant in which Obama stood was bankrolled with a $535 million federal loan guarantee. Two months before, PricewaterhouseCoopers questioned Solyndra’s “ability to continue as a going concern.”

If the president wants to send a positive message on the U.S. economy, I wondered, then couldn’t his people have found a California company that doesn’t rely on a federal loan and actually makes money?

Bad advance work, I figured.

A month later, Solyndra canceled a planned $300 million public offering. In November, Solyndra closed its older plant and cut its workforce. Today Solyndra’s lights are out.

Now I am wondering: Isn’t there some graybeard in the White House who — knowing that the president won’t look good if the tax-funded solar plant folds — does some digging to make sure the president’s choice of venue will not come back to haunt him?

Or could it be that Team Obama is composed of like-minded green true believers who insulate themselves from other points of view — much like the way, critics contended, George W. Bush was surrounded with yes men?

Consider: The administration continues to cling to its belief that green jobs are the jobs of the future, despite evidence to the contrary. A July study by The Brookings Institution found that green jobs account for 2 percent of American jobs — and Brookings used a generous definition, which included public-transit and waste-management jobs as green. Even still, Brookings found that green jobs grew at a slower rate (3.4 percent annually) than the national economy (4.2 percent) between 2003 and 2010.

Some Democrats have clued in. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., recently observed, “Of course we want to be part of the new innovation and green jobs. But you know, the green jobs have been about a lot of talk, and not a lot has been happening on that.”

But Team Obama won’t give up the dream.

Then again, the administration has friends in the green-titan community. Enter Oklahoma oil magnate George Kaiser, who raised at least $50,000 for the 2008 Obama campaign and is a frequent visitor to the White House. Kaiser was a top Solyndra investor.

In September 2009, Solyndra became the first recipient of an administration energy loan program that was part of the president’s stimulus package. A 2010 Government Accountability Office audit of the program found that five applicants, including Solyndra, bypassed required steps for funding. A Department of Energy spokesperson told The Washington Post that the GAO got it wrong.

The Solyndra decision baffled some industry experts, who questioned the viability of the company’s solar technology. “To think they could compete on any basis, that took a very big leap of faith,” solar analyst Ramesh Misra later told the Post.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has been investigating the Solyndra deal — with little cooperation from the administration. Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., who chairs the investigative subcommittee, noted in a statement, “In an apparent rush to push stimulus dollars out the door, the Obama administration wasted $535 million in taxpayer funds in guaranteeing a loan to a firm that has proven to be unviable in the global market.”

Thursday, White House press secretary Jay Carney defended the loan program with its goal to “invest in cutting-edge technologies.”

The president, his Nobel Prize-winning energy secretary and Vice President Joe Biden (via satellite) participated in events that promoted Solyndra’s brand. In addition, Solyndra got to spend a half-billion in taxpayer dollars — and still the solar company couldn’t succeed.

Stearns and the committee’s chairman, Fred Upton, issued a joint statement that rang true. They said, “We smelled a rat from the onset.”

(Link)

It’s saying a lot, but Howard Fineman, of the notoriously left-wing Huffington Post, this Sunday told notorious left-winger Chris Mathews that ObamaCare was Barack Obama’s biggest political mistake — to which notorious left-winger David Ignatius, of the notoriously left-wing Washington Post, concurred. Watch:

(Video via Newsbusters)

But what about “the environment”? Economics are meaningless compared to Mother Earth, aren’t they? And anyway, there’s no connection between wealth and clean, healthy environments.

Well, the enviro-friendly White House seems to be rethinking that edict, as is usually the case whenever the rubber meets the road:

White House Rejects Controversial Ozone Regs

President Barack Obama on Friday asked the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw a proposed regulation for ozone air quality standards, citing the nation’s wobbly economy.

President Obama, in a statement, said that by requesting withdrawal of the ozone regulations “I have continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover.”

A passenger enters a Kansas City Metro bus that warns of an Ozone Alert in Kansas City, Missouri, last month.

The EPA’s ozone rule has been among the more controversial regulations proposed by the environmental agency. Republicans and industry groups say the rule would be too costly to implement and lead to a slowdown in economic growth. Earlier this week, House Republicans said they would hold a vote this winter on a bill to prevent its implementation.

(Link)