Animal Farm and the Krystal Ball

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MNSBC host and self-described “Democratic political strategist” Krystal Ball was recently discussing Thomas Piketty’s latest book — the subject of which is income inequality — when she foolishly introduced into her dithyrabmic George Orwell’s famous book Animal Farm.

“Even the august and ostensibly economically literate Wall Street Journal tells [Piketty] to read Animal Farm,” Krystal Ball said. “Animal Farm, hmm. Isn’t that Orwell’s political parable of farm animals where a bunch of pigs hog up all the economic resources, tell the animals they need the food because they’re the makers and then scare up a prospect of a phony boogie man every time their greed is challenged?”

No, it is not.

George Orwell was a soft socialist all his adult life and did not believe in laissez-faire, but that hardly means Animal Farm is an anti-capitalist novel. Even the most liberal reading of Animal Farm could not possibly conclude that it’s anything other than an indictment — an utter indictment — of Soviet Russia and totalitarianism in general, which, incidentally, was what George Orwell himself said:

“Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution” (source).

For those of you who haven’t read Animal Farm, every significant scene apes an actual event from Soviet history — including the Bolshevik Revolution, Trotsky fleeing the country, and Joseph Stalin’s Obama–like cult of personality.

As CJ Ciaramella recently put it:

“At the end of the book the once-egalitarian farm has devolved into a dictatorship where the animals toil harder, longer, and for less food than they did under the yoke of human masters before the revolution.

“So Animal Farm might be the worst analogy for the problems of late capitalism. A better example might be that our system has produced someone with the critical reading skills of a potato, and then allowed her to rise to the position of a national TV news host, mostly by virtue of her membership in the entrenched political class.”

(Link)

Back to the books, Krystal Ball.





Obama And the White House Reject Costly Ozone Regulations

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)



Obama Versus Technology: ATM’s Responsible For Unemployment

It is, to say the least of it, a very horrifying thing indeed that someone in this position of power actually believes an economic canard of this caliber — a canard that’s been bunked a billion times, and which, in fact, is so easily debunked — and yet it’s even more horrifying to realize that so much of this country’s economic fate is in the hands of one whose economic knowledge is this puerile.

I, for one, was absolutely appalled when I saw the following:

Russell Roberts, professor of economics at George Mason University and a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, recently rebutted and demolished Obama’s absurd notions, by pointing out the obvious:

The story goes that Milton Friedman was once taken to see a massive government project somewhere in Asia. Thousands of workers using shovels were building a canal. Friedman was puzzled. Why weren’t there any excavators or any mechanized earth-moving equipment? A government official explained that using shovels created more jobs. Friedman’s response: “Then why not use spoons instead of shovels?”

… Or look at eggs. Today, a couple of workers can manage an egg-laying operation of almost a million chickens laying 240,000,000 eggs a year. How can two people pick up those eggs or feed those chickens or keep them healthy with medication? They can’t. The hen house does the work—it’s really smart. The two workers keep an eye on a highly mechanized, computerized process that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago.

The savings from higher productivity don’t just go to the owners of the textile factory or the mega hen house who now have lower costs of doing business. Lower costs don’t always mean higher profits. Or not for long. Those lower costs lead to lower prices as businesses compete with each other to appeal to consumers.

… Despite losing millions of jobs to technology and to trade, even in a recession we have more total jobs than we did when the steel and auto and telephone and food industries had a lot more workers and a lot fewer machines.

Why do new jobs get created? When it gets cheaper to make food and clothing, there are more resources and people available to create new products that didn’t exist before. Fifty years ago, the computer industry was tiny. It was able to expand because we no longer had to have so many workers connecting telephone calls. So many job descriptions exist today that didn’t even exist 15 or 20 years ago. That’s only possible when technology makes workers more productive (boldface mine).

(Read the full article here.)

This, incidentally, is another manifestation of Bastiat’s economic law: “What is seen and what is not seen.”




The States Versus ObamaCare — By Pam Bondi

Smart Lady Pam Bondi
Pam Bondi is the attorney general of Florida. In the latest edition of the Wall Street Journal (January 5, 2011), she wrote the following article, which is a rather remarkable article that I think should be read by every American who believes that (a) government has legitimate authority to force each of us to pay for one other’s healthcare; and (b) that congress acted lawfully in the methods used to pass that abortion known as ObamaCare:

This week begins the inauguration and swearing-in ceremonies for newly elected officials all over the country. One thing many of us have in common is that the voters rewarded us for our outspoken opposition to ObamaCare.

The electorate’s decisive rejection of the Obama administration’s policies reveals a pervasive concern over the federal government’s disregard of fundamental aspects of our nation’s Constitution. No legislation in our history alters the balance of power between Washington and the states so much as ObamaCare does.

The tactics used to pass the health-care bill gave all Americans ample warning of the constitutional wrongdoing that was about to occur. Concerns were raised in the summer of 2009 over the constitutionality of the individual mandate and other portions of the bill, yet the president and Congress proceeded full-steam ahead. In the Senate, the much-ridiculed “Cornhusker Kickback” gave Nebraska an all-expenses-paid Medicaid expansion program. Due to public pressure, the provision was eventually removed from the final law.

Following Senate passage, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned to “deem-and-pass” the federal health-care bill, a constitutionally suspect procedure of passing a bill without actually voting on it. Instead, the speaker allowed the House to vote on the Senate version of the bill without amendments, and Congress subsequently used a parliamentary maneuver called budget reconciliation to “fix” the flawed bill [emphasis mine]. In the end, not a single Republican voted for the legislation.

Unwilling to acquiesce to such a blatantly unconstitutional act, Florida and 19 other states challenged the new law and its requirement that nearly every American purchase health insurance. The lawsuit is based on the common sense notion that an individual’s decision not to purchase health insurance is not an act of “commerce” that can be regulated under Congress’s constitutionally enumerated powers. Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration has invoked shifting and contradictory arguments in its efforts to defend the indefensible.

The U.S. Department of Justice first argued that the fine triggered by noncompliance with the individual mandate was not a penalty but a tax authorized by the Constitution’s Taxing and Spending Clause—hoping no one noticed President Obama’s claim on national television that the individual mandate is “absolutely not a tax.” The Justice Department continued to press this tax argument despite the fact that Congress referred to the individual mandate as a “penalty,” excluded it from the bill’s revenue-raising section, and claimed the Commerce Clause as the constitutional authority to pass it.

The federal judge presiding over the states’ lawsuit in Pensacola, Fla., got it right when he wrote: “Congress should not be permitted to secure and cast politically difficult votes on controversial legislation by deliberately calling something one thing, after which the defenders of that legislation take an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ tack and argue in court that Congress really meant something else entirely.”

The Department of Justice has even argued that the individual mandate regulates the so-called commerce-related activities of “mental processes” and “economic decisions.” It doesn’t matter if a person is currently engaged in an activity affecting commerce, according to the Justice Department, but only that a person inevitably will. Gaining little traction with this thought-equals-action argument, the Justice Department pivoted and claimed that the individual mandate is “essential” for this kind of health-care reform. The Constitution grants Congress only specific powers—it does not empower Congress to pursue its policy objectives by any means necessary.

As new state attorneys general take office in the coming week, I fully expect an increase in the ranks of the states fighting ObamaCare in court. Our lawsuit, together with a similar lawsuit filed by Virginia’s attorney general, has exposed the health-care law’s threat to individual liberty and to the constitutional structure that the Founders designed as a means of protecting that liberty. The stakes are clear and compelling: If the courts deem the federal health-care law to be constitutional, then there are no meaningful constitutional restraints on Congress’s power to regulate virtually every facet of our lives.
(Link)

Here, though, is what I’d really like to know from all defenders of socialized medicine:

Upon whose authority or upon what authority do you justify the wild notion that a group of bureaucrats possesses legitimate power to force me to pay for your healthcare? Says who? And why?

Doctor Hal Scherz: Dear Patients — Vote to Repeal ObamaCare

Dr. Hal Scherz
Doctor Hal Scherz is a pediatric urological surgeon at Georgia Urology and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. He also serves on the faculty of Emory University Medical School and is president of Docs4PatientCare. Just recently, he wrote that “because the issue this upcoming election is so stark — literally life and death for millions of Americans in the years ahead — we are this week posting a ‘Dear Patient’ letter in our waiting rooms.” This is, in part, what that letter says:

“Dear Patient: Section 1311 of the new health care legislation gives the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and her appointees the power to establish care guidelines that your doctor must abide by or face penalties and fines. In making doctors answerable in the federal bureaucracy this bill effectively makes them government employees and means that you and your doctor are no longer in charge of your health care decisions. This new law politicizes medicine and in my opinion destroys the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship that makes the American health care system the best in the world.”

In this same letter, Doctor Scherz writes:

“Badly exacerbating the current doctor shortage [ObamaCare will bring] major cost increases, rising insurance premiums, higher taxes, a decline in new medical techniques, a fall-off in the development of miracle drugs as well as rationing by government panels and by bureaucrats like passionate rationing advocate Donald Berwick that will force delays of months or sometimes years for hospitalization or surgery.”

He also cites the brutal, unignorable, irrefutable facts of ObamaCare’s passage:

“Despite countless protests by doctors and overwhelming public opposition — up to 60% of Americans opposed this bill — the current party in control of Congress pushed this bill through with legal bribes and Chicago style threats and is determined now to resist any ‘repeal and replace’ efforts. This doctor’s office is non-partisan — always has been, always will be. But the fact is that every Republican voted against this bad bill while the Democratic Party leadership and the White House completely dismissed the will of the people in ruthlessly pushing through this legislation….

“In the face of voter anger some Democratic candidates are now trying to make a cosmetic retreat, calling for minor modifications or pretending they are opposed to government-run medicine. Once the election is over, however, they will vote with their party bosses against repealing this bill.”

The letter’s final lines are perhaps the most important:

“Please remember when you vote this November that unless the Democratic Party receives a strong negative message about this power grab our healthcare system will never be fixed and the doctor patient relationship will be ruined forever.”

In the Wall Street Journal, the following from Doctor Scherz is appended:

This message is going out to an electorate that is already frustrated over what they see happening to health care. Missouri voters rejected ObamaCare overwhelmingly in August, voting by a margin of 71%-29% to reject the federal requirement that all individuals purchase health insurance. Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen has assessed that ObamaCare is “a disaster” for Democrats. And around the country many little-noticed primaries have reflected voter rage—including the Republican primary victory of surgeon, political newcomer, and advocate of repeal Daniel Benishek in Michigan’s first district.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s damage-control efforts have fallen flat. The latest round of pro-ObamaCare television spots targeting the elderly and starring veteran actor Andy Griffith have not only failed to move the polling numbers. They have caused five U.S. Senators to ask for an investigation of the ads as a violation of federal laws barring the use of tax dollars ($750,000) for campaign purposes.

(Link)