Happy 237th USMC

Or alternately, some motivation:

Pinup Art by Andrew Bawidamann

Paul Ryan’s Speech and the Facts: Part 3

Continued from Part 1, and Part 2.

ThinkProgress goes on with point 5:

5. “$716 billion, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama.” Ryan’s favorite lie is a deliberate distortion of Obamacare’s savings from eliminating inefficiencies. Furthermore, Ryan’s own plan for Medicare includes these savings. Romney has vowed to restore these cuts, which would render the trust fund insolvent 8 years ahead of schedule.

Oh, this is fun.  Obamacare takes $716 billion from Medicare to pay for itself.

From there, ThinkProgress goes into fantasyland.  Obamacare’s savings are projected savings.  They don’t exist.  They’re supposed savings that will happen in the future.

That’s like saying I’m going to beat Michael Phelps at swimming in 2016 because I decided to do a lap in the pool today.  My projected athletic potential is unrivaled!  I’ll do powerlifting and do a 100-meter dash faster than a Suzuki Hayabusa while I’m at it, and then be hanging out with Michelle Jenneke in the Olympic village.

Okay, now that you’ve “right-clicked, saved as” and moved on, I’ll reiterate.  It doesn’t matter what promises you make if you don’t keep them.  See point 3.  It doesn’t matter what projected savings you have when those savings don’t materialize.  You can’t say “I’m gonna, I’m gonna”, especially when you have a track record for “I didn’t, I didn’t”, or worse yet “it’s not my fault, it’s his fault”.

And ThinkProgress finishes up with point 6:

6. “The greatest of all responsibilities is that of the strong to protect the weak.” Ryan closed the speech with an invocation of social responsibility, saying, “The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.” However, numerous clergy members have condemned Ryan’s budget plan as “cruel,” and “an immoral disaster” because of its devastating cuts in social programs the poor and sick rely on. Meanwhile, Ryan would give ultra-rich individuals and corporations $3 trillion in tax breaks.

They really are clueless.  This is actually a bit of actual Republican code (hint: it doesn’t have anything to do with racism).  It’s a subtle way to say to pro-lifers that there’s a interest in protecting the unborn, who are by their very nature, weak.  It’s a point to say that things like the Born Alive Act would be supported.  Interesting that ThinkProgress only thinks of the poor and sick adults, who can work their way out of their weakness, rather than newborns who are by their very nature without even legal protections.  But regardless, their opinion here is also flawed.

Duties to one’s fellow man are supposed to be those that we assume of our own volition.  If you choose to help your neighbor, you do so out of your own concern.  If you do so because the government mandates it, you get people who are disinterested in their fellow man because “the system” is supposed to take care of them.  This is why every year, often around Christmas, when a news story comes out saying that conservatives give huge amounts to charity and leftist-statists are skinflint scrooges, leftists are surprised.

“You find that people who believe it’s the government’s job to make incomes more equal, are far less likely to give their money away.”  Compassion, however, should be rooted in personal engagement; liberals fail to match conservatives in this area.

The “devastating cuts in social programs” are good things.  It helps people to help themselves.  Thomas Sowell, among others, has written at length about how the welfare state has caused a decline in those it’s supposed to help.  Sowell specifically cites the example of how the black family has been destroyed by programs mean to “help”, and how individual black Americans find themselves figuratively enslaved to a system that makes them into perpetual wards of the state.  Same applies to anyone else whose individuality and individual accomplishment is subsumed into identity politics along class lines which lead them to believe they have a station in life that they cannot escape.

ThinkProgress’s accusation of a lie is based on their own opinion, an opinion that is disproven by facts, history, and the conditions of those who are subject to government “help”.

Furthermore, tax hikes and increased spending on those who are unfortunate does nothing but harm those who are actually working to improve their lives.  If you’re working at $15/hour and you lose another $1/hour to pay for someone else to sit and not work, your life is harmed by being forced by goverment to fund a government bureaucrat to redistribute your hard-earned income.  If you’re working at $15/hour and your boss, who’s an evil rich robber baron who’s both evil and rich and spends his leisure time racing flying machines with his dog Muttley, has his taxes raised, that means he may not be able to pay you as much.

That means he may not be able to employ you at Evilco.  With workman’s comp and Obamacare and social security and FICA and a dozen other impositions, he may not be able to afford to pay for your labor.

And then you’re out of work.  This gives the government bureaucrat someone else to distribute wealth to, but it hurts you.  We’ve covered this ground before many times, but it’s worth looking at the second and third-order effects of taxes and “social programs” that are nothing of the sort.   $3 trillion in cuts to employers and a climate of stability means businesses will expand.

You may not get a job making fantastic flying machines, but you might be working in the top hat and cape business instead.  It’s economics.

So out of 6 contentions of lies, ThinkProgress is wrong on all of them.  Except for point 3, if you’re somebody who cheats on their wife and says “but I said I’d be faithful, I didn’t promise I wouldn’t cheat!  That’s not saying I wouldn’t cheat!  I didn’t promise that!”  Basically what you’d expect from someplace called “ThinkProgress”.

Democrats Call For Gun Magazine Ban in Cybersecurity Bill

From The Hill:

Democratic senators have offered an amendment to the cybersecurity bill that would limit the purchase of high capacity gun magazines for some consumers.

Shortly after the Cybersecurity Act gained Senate approval to proceed to filing proposed amendments and a vote next week, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a sponsor of the gun control amendment, came to the floor to defend the idea of implementing some “reasonable” gun control measures.

The amendment was sponsored by Democratic Sens. Frank Lautenberg (N.J.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Jack Reed (R.I.), Bob Menendez (N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Schumer and Dianne Feinstein (Calif.). S.A. 2575 would make it illegal to transfer or possess large capacity feeding devices such as gun magazines, belts, feed stripes and drums of more than 10 rounds of ammunition with the exception of .22 caliber rim fire ammunition.

Predictably, when there’s a shooting, they rush to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it, because the gun banners want to ban everything.  Magazines are just part of the slippery slope.

Photo by Oleg Volk.

There’s a dog whistle response from these cretins.  A criminal uses a firearm to commit a crime, and they call for banning the tool, while they call for tolerance of crime and disarm the citizen against the criminal.

Rather than your nightstand Glock having 12 rounds to deal with something that goes bump in the night, they want you to have 10.  Rather than having 30 rounds in your competition 10-22, they want you to have 10.  Rather than have 30 rounds in your homeland security rifle, they want you to have 10.  And then you don’t need that evil AK-47 assault rifle chambered in a super high-powered military cartridge.  And you don’t need that .30-30 lever gun, because it actually has the same ballistics as that evil AK47.  And you don’t need that .22, because mobsters use those to shoot people in the neck.  And you don’t need anything, because the state declares that you, the citizen, should be lorded over and controlled.  Criminals don’t rebel against the state, they just plunder from the citizen, so that’s not the concern of the Ruling Class.

Ugh.  Sometimes it’s almost troubling to have to write the same thing over and over again, being frustrated with supposed representatives that at every turn seek to undermine our personal security as citizens, from infringing on our freedom to buy soft drinks to denying us modern tools of self-defense; while simultaneously arming themselves with bodyguards with fully automatic weapons and eating Wagyu/Kobe beef at $120/pound just because they’re new aristocracy.  They make themselves enemies of individual liberty at every turn, and it’s really aggravating.

Anyhow, to the uninformed or person unfamiliar with firearms, a large magazine might, on face value, seem threatening.  What’s the difference between 10 rounds and 12?  What’s the difference between 10 and 30?  10 and 60?  10 and 100?  Well, as we saw from the Colorado theater murders, 100 round drums don’t work well.  Beta-mags, especially the imported knockoffs, are mostly used by folks playing with them on the range.  They jam – just like they did at the theater murders.  There’s a reason we don’t see troops overseas using them.  There are reliable 60 and 100-round magazines, notably made by Surefire (the flashlight people) – and who uses those?  Competition shooters, varmint plinkers, military and law enforcement.  And why?  So you can make up for your misses if you need to.  The same applies to 30s, 12s, and 10s as compared to single-shots.

The leftist-statist argument that no one needs those magazines never extends to their own personal bodyguards and law enforcement.  If they’re made for killing lots of people, as the leftist argument goes, why should cops use them?  Why should a bodyguard?  Should cops be out to kill lots of people?  Should bodyguards?

Photo by Oleg Volk.

Large magazines are used so that if you’re in a pinch, you have available rounds.  It’s like having a large gas tank, or a good battery.  It means you can operate for longer.  It means if you’re plinking, you can shoot a while longer without reloading.  If you’re varmint or predator hunting, where there are few magazine restrictions and you’re basically exterminating pests, you can do what you’re trying to do without stopping.  If you’re competition shooting, you can go longer between stages without having to fumble with a reload.  If you’re defending your house against a flash robbery or riot, it means you stand a chance against a mob that will otherwise kill you.  Or if you’re defending yourself and need to shoot at all, why would you want to be limited to 10?  10 chances to stop an attack and protect your life, and if you don’t make it by then, that’s the end?  Or would you rather have 12?  Or 17?  Or 20?  Or 30 or 60 or 100 or 100,000?  Is your life not worth defending?  No one ever leaves a gunfight going “man, I wish I didn’t have all that ammo at the beginning”.  Someone might say “I’m glad I didn’t need it”, but no one ever says “I wish I had run out and been killed instead.”  More ammunition is always good (unless you’re drowing or on fire) because it means you have more chances to succeed.  Ideally, you never need them, but if you do, no one wants to be limited.

A bodyguard needs them to protect his client, a cop needs them to protect himself, and you need them to protect yourself.  A license, a commission, or a badge don’t mean someone else’s life is more important than yours.

A self-defense shooting may not be a woman defending herself from a rapist in an alley.  It may be a woman defending herself from her male family members who want to “honor kill” her.  It may be a elderly black man defending himself from a gang of racist thugs intent on a lynching.  Or a gay man who accidentally crosses the boundary from the neighborhood of Boys Town to Little Arabia and finds himself the target of religiously-mandated execution.

There was a time when firearms were even marketed for those who lived in rural areas and might suffer depredation by bandits.  (And back then a 12 year-old could buy it through the mail… and yet there were no school shootings.)

Worth noting is that the roots of gun control are racism.  It’s always centered in the power structure trying to suppress the underclass, and usually that means minorities.  This is why many southern states that are supposedly culturally pro-gun still have anti-gun laws on the books.  For example, North Carolina requires pistol purchase permits.  If you want a handgun for self defense, the sheriff gets to decide if you get to exercise your 2nd Amendment rights, or gets to decide that you’re the wrong color (or a Marine if you live in Onslow County) and you can’t.  Texas still has no provision for open carry.  Many states and the federal government have laws against “cheap handguns” or “Saturday night specials”, which were originally called “n*ggertown Saturday night specials” – and were banned by racists based on fears of an armed populace (poor black people also wanted guns to protect themselves from criminals of all colors).  California’s bans kicked in after the Black Panther march on Sacramento with guns in the open.

Photo by Oleg Volk.

Something worth noting, for those that think the state should decide on your rights:

Adam Winkler, author of the forthcoming book, “Gunfight: The Battle Over The Right to Bear Arms in America,” traced the birth of the modern gun rights movement to the Black Panthers in the September issue of The Atlantic. In it was a fact of history that I’d never heard: “Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied,” Winkler wrote. “But from then on, armed supporters guarded his home.”

The Ruling Class has always sought to disarm the citizen in order to control him.  A disarmed populace enables the tyrant, no matter color or creed.  An armed populace guards against tyranny.

“This is my homeland security rifle. There are many others like it except for accessories, but this one is mine. My rifle secures freedom. It protects my life.”
(Again, photo by Oleg Volk.)

Also, for those concerned about “large” amounts of ammunition (which is something else that comes up right after the mag bans), consider that many folks who shoot buy in bulk.  If you burn 100 rounds per range trip for one particular gun, and make one trip per month, you burn 1200 rounds at the end of the year.  That’s not much at all.  Now if you buy that ammo one box at a time, it’s expensive.  If you buy a couple of cases, you can leave the ammo sit (it takes a long time for most ammo to go bad, especially if stored properly), and when you buy in bulk, you can save quite a bit of cash.  Plus if you decide to go out for a weekend and introduce someone to shooting and burn through 300 rounds plinking at bowling pins (fun!), it’s nice to have that on hand.  For folks who are really serious shooters will go through a lot more, and will often buy in very large quantities to have the ammo on hand throughout the course of a year – as well as to beat inflation.  For those unaware, metals prices skyrocketed in the last few years, ammo prices went up and up and up.  A case of 500 rounds of 7.62×39 for Teh EVIL AK-style rifles went from $50 to $150.  A 50-round box of 9mm went from $5 (I still have some at that price from Dick’s Sporting Goods in KS) to $12-15.  The $5 ammo that I did and still have yet to shoot has helped me beat inflation.  It’d be as though you could buy gas for your car that would last for years – and thus stay at the same price, defeating inflation.

Meanwhile, a citizen with a gun in Utah stopped a knife-wielding maniac who had begun attacking innocent people.

Update: You can read most of the gobbledygook legalese of the bill here and here.

HotAir notes that gun bans aren’t popular anyway.  If you want to keep it that way, invite people to go shooting with you.

Going Fishing

Even though there’s a lot going on, with the Supreme Court about to announce their vote on Obamacare and Arizona’s supporting-federal-immigration-laws state laws and Holder getting held in contempt, gotta take some time off.  Updates from me will be a bit less frequent for a little while.

So enjoy April Vokey illustrating a joke.  She’s Canadian, and as per the stereotype, she illustrates that there really are only two professions in Canada: fishing guide or Mountie.

For those curious as to what Rowsdower was, he was a drunk.  It would be a Canadian profession, but it requires no education or training or skills.

The Incessant Academic Argument For Tyranny and The Refutation of Freedom

We have evolved to need coercion.

 

From Daniel Lieberman, Harvard biology professor, via the NYT:

…humans evolved to crave sugar, store it and then use it. For millions of years, our cravings and digestive systems were exquisitely balanced because sugar was rare. Apart from honey, most of the foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate were no sweeter than a carrot. The invention of farming made starchy foods more abundant, but it wasn’t until very recently that technology made pure sugar bountiful.

Unsurprisingly, a Harvard professor is ignorant of the outside world, and ignores that there are fruits and melons and berries and even vegetables of the squash family that are quite sweet.  There are many that have been more refined and developed through agriculture, but there were plenty of them around in nature beforehand.

The food industry has made a fortune because we retain Stone Age bodies that crave sugar but live in a Space Age world in which sugar is cheap and plentiful. Sip by sip and nibble by nibble, more of us gain weight because we can’t control normal, deeply rooted urges for a valuable, tasty and once limited resource.

The constant cry that there is an evil villain out to ruin The People, the constant drum beat that The People are weak, unable to control their urges, and must be controlled are all present.  This is going to be very predictable.

What should we do? One option is to do nothing, while hoping that scientists find better cures for obesity-related diseases like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. I’m not holding my breath for such cures, and the costs of inaction, already staggering, would continue to mushroom.

Mr. Lieberman opens his piece by saying that criticisms “most worthy of attention” are the libertarian arguments that this is bad.  That’s Lieberman’s way of ignoring them.  His questions are based on false premises.  His question of “what should we do?” is really – “what should the government do to The People?”  He, being an elite Harvard professor, is clearly a ruler of men, an intellectual powerhouse whose huge brain means that he is of course exempt from being lumped in with The People – but the “we” he speaks of is that of the Ruling Class.

The “do nothing” argument is flawed.  If the government does nothing, individual citizens will make their own decisions.  Off the top of my head, I can think of two writers here who’ve lost double-digit weight in the last year because they got sick of being heavy.  Nature solves its own problems.  Nobody wants to be at an unhealthy weight.  Modern individuals, with modern, sedentary jobs balance the costs of health issues against those of other pressing matters in their daily life.  If they have families they need to spend time with, that time at the gym may become less important.  If to maintain their standard of living, they need to work more in a sedentary job and there’s a health cost, that’s a decision they make.  If they recognize that their weight (whether that be too big or too small) is effecting their quality of life, then they work to change it.

The relative availability of modern foodstuffs is not an issue in their weight.  Their decision to eat and drink the amounts that they do is.  This goes to Lieberman’s second flawed point.  Everyone knows what makes you fat.  Everyone.

A more popular option is to enhance public education to help us make better decisions about what to eat and how to be active. This is crucial but has so far yielded only modest improvements.

A recent study even showed that when you feel fat, you’re getting fat.  Your body will tell you.  Within 3 hours after eating, you’ll feel it.  From Metro:

A team led by obesity expert Prof Fredrik Karpe made the discovery by asking volunteers to eat fatty foods containing traceable carbon isotopes.

They tracked the fat’s path from the gut, which they assumed would be taken around the body by the blood to be ‘burned off’ by the muscles, with the excess slowly adding to our girth over time.

Instead, they found the first fat from a meal entered the bloodstream about an hour after it was eaten by the volunteers.

‘By the time three to four hours have passed, most of it has been incorporated into our adipose tissue, mostly in the shorter term fat stores around our waists,’ Prof Karpe said. Fat around the waist is used only for short-term storage, and can be burned off when people need energy.

Your body tells you you’re fat.  You feel it.  Education isn’t that difficult.  Calories in > calories out, you get fat.  Calories out > calories in, you lose weight.  Calories in = calories out, you stay at your present weight.  You intake calories with food, burn them with activity.  Millions of pages have been written about this, but ultimately, it’s not that complicated.  Most of those millions of pages are spent trying to balance lifestyle and eating habits and the best ways for each individual, which government cannot do anyway.

The final option that Lieberman comes up with is, as usual, that of all other final answers to problems that the state has deemed worth destroying.  Of course the “final option” is the one he states that he laments by listing last.  He then notes that the paternalistic state is really a good thing, and by introducing coercion to mimic the “nasty, brutish, and short” existence of primitive man, we will finally have the best solution to fighting obesity.

The final option is to collectively restore our diets to a more natural state through regulations. Until recently, all humans had no choice but to eat a healthy diet with modest portions of food that were low in sugar, saturated fat and salt, but high in fiber. They also had no choice but to walk and sometimes run an average of 5 to 10 miles a day. Mr. Bloomberg’s paternalistic plan is not an aberrant form of coercion but a very small step toward restoring a natural part of our environment.

For all the academic twisting here, no, the government’s function is not to reduce us to animals.  Lieberman’s graphic represents what they think of the public – mindless apes:

And the solution is sitting in the ad bar, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

Lieberman continues, justifying his desire for control of The People’s bodies:

Though his big-soda ban would apply to all New Yorkers, I think we should focus paternalistic laws on children. Youngsters can’t make rational, informed decisions about their bodies, and our society agrees that parents don’t have the right to make disastrous decisions on their behalf. Accordingly, we require parents to enroll their children in school, have them immunized and make them wear seat belts. We require physical education in school, and we don’t let children buy alcohol or cigarettes. If these are acceptable forms of coercion, how is restricting unhealthy doses of sugary drinks that slowly contribute to disease any different?

Paternalistic laws have only propagated in the last few decades because the state has sought to replace the parent.  Youngsters don’t have to make rational, informed decisions because that’s their parent’s jobs.  Society doesn’t agree at all with Lieberman.  Government bureaucrats and the Ruling Class have decided to instituted controls regardless of what society thinks.  Paternalistic laws now try to change adults into children, all of whom “need” controlling by the state.

Lieberman’s arguments are founded on a basis of overreach that has never been part of the American tradition – those aren’t acceptable, either.  Taking parental authority from the parent and placing it in the hands of the state is part of Lieberman’s academic ruling class society – it is not part of greater American society.  Mandatory education laws often force children into crappy schools run by governmental bureaucrats – in comparison, home-schooled children often do better because their parents have a personal vested interest in the well-being of their own child.  The parent of a child will almost invariably be more interested in the well-being of their child moreso than the most enlightened, wonderful schoolteacher attempting to teach a hundred in a day.

Requiring immunizations has taken place as part of disease-reduction initiatives, but you can catch mumps or rubella.  You don’t walk by a fat person and suddenly gain 40 pounds.  There are also plenty of arguments against mandatory vaccinations, some of which come from Hollywood kooks, and some of which come from folks who really don’t like that medical industries can simply force people to buy their products through government mandates.  If there were benefits to it, people would choose to do it.  Flu vaccinations are pushed, but not mandatory, and people volunteer for them.

Children drinking and smoking were stopped by their parents, not by the state.  The push for control over drinking is what begat Prohibition, wherein the moral busybodies in the Temperance Movement declared that people were too drunk and stupid to be trusted with their freedoms.  That resulted in the entire nation rebelling against it.  It also resulted in the state murdering its citizens for their own good.

As for seat belts:

Seat belt laws are part of the same problem.  They assume that individuals can’t make good decisions, and that people must be forced into those decisions.  For years, there were no seat belts in automobiles.  Individual manufacturers came up with ways to make cars safer, some of them being far ahead of the curve, and as individuals saw safety features, they chose to buy them.  Notably, Volvo owes much of its reputation in the US to numerous safety features.  With the exception of seat belts where a person could become a projectile and impact another person, seat belt laws do infringe on personal freedom.

The children in the truck bed above are not going to be violently flung out of the truck.  The driver, knowing he has a load of precious cargo, is going to drive safely and slowly.  If he does, the children won’t ride with him again – their parents won’t let them.  Or, even without seatbelt laws, a law enforcement officer could stop the truck and deal with the driver as necessary for endangering his passengers.

Back to Lieberman:

Along these lines, we should ban all unhealthy food in school — soda, pizza, French fries — and insist that schools provide adequate daily physical education, which many fail to do.

The state is not the parent.  If parents tell the schools to stop serving foods they deem unhealthy, then the school – which is employed by the parent-taxpayers, must respond.  To do otherwise is a failure of the school to live up to the contract is has with the parents.  Of course, in Lieberman’s world, the school, as a function of the state, is superior to the parent.  As such, the school can dictate how they will raise children.

The assumption that rich foods are a cause of childhood obesity is also contingent on portions served.  100 calories of pizza, with bread crust, a layer of cheese, a pretend piece of meat, is the same as 100 calories of sandwich, with a slice of cheese, a bread crust, and a pretend piece of meat.  The decisions to eliminate soda, pizza, and french fries are based on Lieberman’s Ruling Class notion of “what is good for you”, not on what actually is.  As noted in his own article, these rich foods are incredibly good for you if you’re in a state of constant activity.  So their elimination not only restricts the freedom of individuals to choose their own foods, but also assumes that children aren’t engaged in any activities, and penalizes the active for the sake of the inactive.

I note that it restricts individuals freedoms, and not just those of children, because parents who send their children to school have already had lunches confiscated.  The parents’ authority to feed their own children is stomped on by the state.  This isn’t some case of child abuse or neglect (aside from in the minds of fascistic nanny-staters), this is a case of the state dictating how you shall live.

Adults need help, too, and we should do more to regulate companies that exploit our deeply rooted appetites for sugar and other unhealthy foods. The mayor was right to ban trans fats, but we should also make the food industry honest about portion sizes. Like cigarettes, mass-marketed junk food should come with prominent health warning labels. It should be illegal to advertise highly fattening food as “fat free.” People have the right to be unhealthy, but we should make that choice more onerous and expensive by imposing taxes on soda and junk food.

And here we get to the “nudging”.  Make choices so onerous and difficult that people will be forced into what the dictator desires.  The iron fist of an authoritarian state is wearing a velvet glove.

Adults who face the consequences of their own decisions will make choices.  No one wants to be a bloated fatass.  The mayor was wrong to tell people what they can and can’t put in their bodies, but he’s a tyrant across the board, and his only redeeming quality is that he’s a wonderful example of one.

The food industry doesn’t need to be more honest about portion sizes.  Individuals need to be responsible for their own actions.  Saying “people have the right to be unhealthy, but…” is another excuse justifying dictatorial control.  These taxes and impositions aren’t about health, they’re about control.  Individuals who eat foods in moderation can eat what they like and have no issues.  Those individuals are being denied choice foods by their own government because other individuals make poor decisions.  None of this is the province of government.

Individuals then don’t have the right, with onerous taxes and impositions, they might have the priviledge of being unhealthy.  It will be restricted to those who can afford it.  The wealthy and powerful will be able to afford one lifestyle, while those who are relatively poorer will no longer be able to enjoy the fruits of their own labor.  The reason the term “fat cat” came about is because previous to the last few decades, the only people whose labor had ceased to be vigorous manual labor and who could afford enough food to be fat were the very wealthy.  Today, thanks to advances in technology and agriculture, everyone can afford the bounties of those foods.  Lieberman is desirous of price controls and taxes to socially return us to a time where only the wealthy and privileged could enjoy dining as they see fit.

This would hardly be progress, and does not improve the life of the individual.

Additionally, labeling doesn’t work.  A study I’ll link to as soon as I can find it again brought up that people who guess calorie amounts of foods usually get them fairly close, or overestimate.  If you’re looking at this breakfast:

You know there are a LOT of calories in it.  You don’t need a chart to see that it will make you full, it will keep you powered for most of your day, and you can eat a light lunch, because you  had a massive breakfast.

With regards to Lieberman’s absurd statement that food makers shouldn’t be allowed to say “fat free” if a food can make you fat, that’s just stupid.  Fat is a substance.  If the substance is in the food, it’s has fat, it has lipids.  If it doesn’t have fat, it’s fat free.  Anything eaten in excess can make a person fat.

Finally, Lieberman sums up with this cry for tyranny:

We humans did not evolve to eat healthily and go to the gym; until recently, we didn’t have to make such choices. But we did evolve to cooperate to help one another survive and thrive. Circumstances have changed, but we still need one another’s help as much as we ever did. For this reason, we need government on our side, not on the side of those who wish to make money by stoking our cravings and profiting from them. We have evolved to need coercion.

We did evolve to eat healthily.  We evolved to eat what our bodies need.  We didn’t evolve to go to the gym, we evolved to live at the gym.  Modern workplaces and modern conveniences mean we’re enjoying a sedentary life.  The key word there is that we are ENJOYING.  Millenia of our ancestors as poor dirt farmers working their way up from misery have allowed us modern luxuries.  It’s up to us as individuals to do something with them.

We didn’t evolve to cooperate, we cooperated to survive.  The individual’s survival first, and the enhancement to individual survival that a group provides is why we got together in groups.  Here Lieberman’s thinking is exposed in such a short sentence.  He shows a collectivist mindset, that there is “the people” and not the individual.  We banded together to aid each other, not to coerce each other.  We as individuals found that survival strategies worked better when we formed voluntary bonds.  The government, as it was intended, is a voluntary cooperative that exists as a construct of the Constitution.  It follows the orders of We The People – each individual – it is there to provide for our security and defense that we as individuals might live freer lives.  We established our government to provide for our rights to live free of the rule of a king or dictator, that we might exercise our inalienable rights as bestowed by our Creator.

Lieberman’s cry for the government to crush the free market is that of a Marxist useful idiot.  “Those who wish to make money by stoking our cravings and profiting from them” are the usual class-enemy capitalists, and his desired government is one that will crush capitalism.  His desire is for tyranny.  He makes a plea for coercion, and through his warped world-view, demands that the state protect us from ourselves.  The people are stupid, unreasoning, mindless apes who are still trapped by their weak bodies and weak minds, fooled by the decadent capitalist exploiter!  Thus we need the government to beat us, to crush our freedoms, he reasons.  He demands a government that will coerce us in order to free us from our exploiters, trading in someone who offers you what you want for someone who tells you what you are allowed.

This is the very heart of tyranny.

And it’s complete bullshit.

Circumstances have changed, and we have one another’s help.  Lieberman views us as unreasoning apes, and it’s not much surprise that his apes are black, seeing as how demeaning races tends to be a theme for Harvard academics.  The very page that Lieberman posted his desperate cry for government to oppress and crush the freedoms of individuals refutes his own idiotic claims.

Look to the right of his misanthropic screed and you’ll see the solution.

We have one another’s help in voluntary cooperation.  It’s called freedom.

In the form of the free market, CocoaVia there is introducing a product that fulfills that desire for sweet foods.  Interestingly CocoaVia links to Mars Botanical, which links to Mars, as in M&M Mars, who make all kinds of candies and food products, for humans and our animal friends.

The very same “those who wish to make money by stoking our cravings and profiting from them”, as though profit, money, and desires of free individuals are all dirty things, are here to provide us with options we want.  If our sedentary lifestyles result in us getting fat, we’ll change to diet soda.  If we still want candy, but we as individuals know that a king size Snickers is going to be a lot of calories, then we swich and try something like “CocoaVia” and enjoy the taste without the calories.

Stoking our cravings and profiting from them is why we aren’t Lieberman’s ideal of a caveman.  Our cravings for food, water, shelter, sex, and the rest of Maslow’s Hierarchy has driven us to the point where we can communicate these ideas through the digital realm instantly across the entire planet, and for some ideas, even beam them around the planet and off into space.  Our desires are what drives us.  To squelch these desires, to have them crushed beneath the boot of a tyrannical government that knows what’s best, is the dream of a power-hungry fool.  Lieberman is an idiot of the most educated, highest caliber.   Lieberman views us as the sum only of our nature, and not of our minds.  He sees the people as a mass of idiot cavemen who must be controlled and coerced – forced by government into doing what he has decided they should.  If he includes himself among the cavemen, it is only in a self-flagellating gesture of his own misery; but he still views himself as more intelligent than the foolish fat cavemen around him, viewing them as Cass Sunstein’s ideal of the average American as Homer Simpson, an idiot roaming through life who needs government to control him.

Freedom itself refutes the needs that ostensibly cause demand for tyranny.  Freedom itself, as shown above, has generated a response to the demand for healthier alternatives.  People don’t want to be bloated fatasses.  People want to be thin – and there are plenty of people who want, through voluntary cooperation, to help their fellow man.  There are a myriad of programs available, and there have been for years.  There have been people selling or giving away fitness advice for years from Jack LaLanne to Richard Simmons to Billy Blanks to Jillian Michaels to Suzanne Somers to Zuzana:

There have been groups of free individuals who voluntarily cooperate in order to help themselves, and others, be healthy.  The luxuries afforded by millenia of slow standard of living improvements have made it so.

To demand that a ruthless government oppressor force people into being healthy is at best a pathetic indictment of the character of the person demanding it, and at worst a sniveling plea to allow the egghead arguing for it to become a greater power in the dictatorial Ruling Class.

While doing research for this piece, I stumbled over some supporters of these measures.  Most fall in line with Cass Sunstein’s idea that people, as opposed to individuals, are dumb Homer Simpsons, too stupid to live, and need to be controlled.  A few even indict themselves for the same traits, as here:

What is going on here?

I know you think I’m going to come down on the “food police” banning cupcakes in schools. But as an adult constantly struggling with my weight who was a fat kid, I have to say that schools being forced to serve healthier food could literally be a lifesaver.

There are a few who want to be treated like Private Pyle because they can’t take care of themselves.  You want to eat how you like, you pay the price in your own life.  You want to budget some fat into your life because you enjoy chow?  That’s the prerogative of the invidividual.

Lieberman and the “Serious Eats” fatbody, however, want everyone to be treated like the platoon because a few people are fat.  They want everyone to pay for one individual’s decisions.  Notably, the world of the military exists through voluntary cooperation, through voluntarily subordinating the will of a free man to that of a state forged on a Constitution made by free men to protect the rights of men to be free.  The US military swears an oath to a piece of paper that protects the right of the individual to eat those jelly donuts, while they themselves go without.  There is actually a purpose for it there.  In free society, there is not.

Lieberman and the “Serious Eats” no-self-control fatbody begin to fall into a subset of that leftist mindset of the “Moral Equivalent of War”, wherein they believe the state should use force against its citizens – for their own good.  These fools believe it is moral to hurt one’s own people; it is moral for the state, which exists at the behest of the individuals, to oppress the people, because it’s what they’d really want.  They want free men outside the realm of that squad bay to be treated like recruits becuase it’s “for the people’s own good”.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

- CS Lewis

Lieberman, you are demanding force be used against free individuals, free men.  You view us as rapacious, mindless black apes; you dismiss the individual’s will and wish to control men as a collective.  Yesterday was the anniversary of D-Day, where we fought against your kind of ideas.  You want us all to suffer and couch it in your pseudo-science belief that people are in biological need of control.

We have evolved to need coercion.

On Women in Combat Part 4 – Lawsuits Against Reality

From Bloomberg News:

Two female soldiers asked a federal judge to throw out the U.S. military’s restrictions on women in combat, claiming the policy violates their constitutional rights.

U.S. Army reservists Jane Baldwin and Ellen Haring, in a lawsuit filed today in Washington, said policies excluding them from assignments “solely because they are women” violate their right to equal protection guaranteed by the Constitution’s 5th Amendment. The complaint names Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Army Secretary John McHugh as defendants.

“This limitation on plaintiffs’ careers restricts their current and future earnings, their potential for promotion and advancement, and their future retirement benefits,” the women said in the complaint filed by Christopher Sipes of Covington & Burling LLP in Washington.

As expected, there are women and lawyers suing to fight reality.

Rifle: 8 pounds
Boots: 4 pounds
Helmet: 4 pounds
Vest with SAPI plates: 15+ pounds
NVGS: 2 pounds
Gas Mask: 3 pounds
Water: 10 pounds
Ammo: 10 pounds
Pack: 50 pounds (sleeping system, medkit, clothing, socks, hygiene gear, etc.)

I’m just ballparking there – some items weigh more or less.  The Interceptor with SAPI plates always felt like 25, but I’m sure that’s just because it crushes the breath out of you, too.  Grunts also strap stuff more stuff to their vests than armor crews.  Plus there’s 782 gear/FLIC to wear.  Kneepads are worn because it hurts when you put 300 pounds plus down on hard ground.  It’s almost like resting, except you know you have to stand again, and it hurts on the way up.

This limitation on plaintiffs’ careers restricts their current and future earnings, their potential for promotion and advancement, and their future retirement benefits

Reality places limitations on the plaintiff’s ability to survive combat, their potential existence, and the possibility of them receiving any future promotions other than posthumous, and giving their retirement benefits to anyone but their family as life insurance.  Lawsuits will not make the rigors of combat easy.  It will force trainers and instructors to place objectively inferior women and men into infantry situations they should never be placed in just to make some cocktail party political general and leftist politician happy.

More stupidity:

“The linear battlefield no longer exists,” the women said in the complaint, describing as “arbitrary and irrational” the combat restrictions for women.

“Woman are currently engaged in direct combat, even when it is not part of their formally assigned role,” the reservists said. Furthermore, the Army has “deliberately circumvented” its own policies by “attaching” women to ground combat units.

“There is no practical difference, in terms of the work that servicewomen do, between ‘assigning’ women to a ground combat unit and ‘attaching’ women to a ground combat unit,” the women said in the complaint.

There is a huge difference between a motor-T truck driver chick being attached to a combat unit and the same chick being crushed with 150 pounds of gear as an M240 gunner, or the A-gunner, who gets to carry his own rifle, plus extra barrels and ammunition for the M240.  There is a huge difference between a radio maintenance chick who carries the crypto unit to update a vehicle’s radio and an armor crewman who has to break track.

This is just an MLRS track.  Assuming it uses Bradley tracks, those blocks are something like 25 pounds each, times 82-85 per side.  Lots of weight.  Knocking the pins out takes a sledge and a special tool, and knocking the pins out from underneath the vehicle requires swinging a sledge in the prone sideways.  It’s very hard work.

Knocking out torsion bars is done with a post driver level with the ground.  It’s another thing that’s incredibly difficult (and the body motion required to pound something out at waist-level would probably result in EEO complaints anyway.)  With actual tanks, the track blocks weigh something like 60 pounds each, the shells the loader moves weigh 50something pounds and have to be manipulated inside the vehicle.  And that’s not even getting into towing and how much tank bars weigh.

Over at The Soldier’s Load, there’s an excellent piece on how Women Do Not Belong In The Infantry.

Women do not belong in the infantry.

It’s a simple statement and one that, until recently, nearly every civilized culture seemed to accept as a truism. For reasons as multitudinous as they are apparent and profound, in time of war men have shouldered arms and marched to the clash of legions or the sound of the guns. Women as a rule have not. Even in those scattered and wretched societies whose women prowled the battlefields to torture the wounded and desecrate the dead, no woman was thrown into offensive action against the massed ranks of the enemy. Show me an exception and I’ll show you savages.

I’ll note that the exceptions aren’t necessarily savages.  They’re also last-ditch forces, partisans, and nations surrounded on all sides by genocidal enemies.

Of course, IDF girls aren’t as known for looking like this:

As they’re known for this:

And make no mistake, the tough-looking chick in the top picture still looks like the four in towels below underneath.  She’s probably 5’8″ and 150 pounds or so if she’s big.  And still, she’s not going to carry another 150 pound load-out.  She’s not going to tack up and hump for miles and miles.  She’s not going to carry a mortar base plate or a Javelin for 10 hours, or load 155 shells or change a final drive (a gear in tracked vehicles that weighs slightly more than Mount Rushmore).  She’s not going to drag another troop who weighs 250 pounds loaded out of the line of fire.

Soldier’s Load goes on:

Most service members will admit that conditioning hikes are grueling exercises in physical and mental endurance. I personally despised them, especially when it was my turn to shoulder a 25 pound machine gun or a 45 pound, .50-caliber receiver. Each hike took all of my effort and physical fitness to complete. Unsurprisingly, during my time at The Basic School no female lieutenant completed a hike of greater than 6 miles with the rest of the 180 or so male lieutenants. Not one. And that’s with the male lieutenants carrying all of the radios and heavy weapons.

His whole post is very articulate, and worth reading here.  He also hits on cultural, physiological, and other reasons that have been touched on here.

But this will be decided in the courts, and in the halls of government bureaucracies now run by leftist politicians who are out to make their political points and, as Evan Sayet says, elevate failed, evil, and wrong at every turn.  Standards will be dropped, instructors who maintain the old standards will be accused of sex discrimination and driven out (never mind that reality discriminates), and the institutions will become weaker, and people will die for what some politically correct academic lawyer nitwit got into his addled little brain to impose on institutions that are light years away from his fantasy world.  Women will die, men will die, conflicts will be lost, morality will be displaced, and the few who choose to nobly serve will suffer for the institutions made by the academic leftists.

On Women In Combat

NoOneOfAnyImport reblogged and commented on a post from a little while back about female Marines going to Infantry Officer School:

I found an interesting development and good analysis over at The Patriot Perspective. Saying that women don’t belong isn’t too popular a stance nowadays.  Still, it needs saying sometimes.  It doesn’t mean women should have their opportunities limited because their gender is inferior.  It just means the constraints of reality can limit women’s opportunities whether we like to admit it or not. Have a great weekend, everyone!

First off, thanks!  Second, what you’re noting is the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of results.

There’s something worthwhile to note here that is rarely mentioned, because the military is public sector and not private sector: Bona fide occupational qualifications.

It’s why the term garbageman isn’t “garbageperson”, and why Hooters Girls aren’t Hooterspeople.

But Bikini’s sports bars actually have good food in addition to eye candy.  Too bad there isn’t one for 150 miles.

Being a garbageman most places requires a lot of physical strength to pick up and throw trash that can’t simply be mechanically moved into a truck.  Being a Hooters Girl requires a pleasant appearance and in general, physical attributes that men don’t have.

War is also a profession.

It’s been a men’s profession since slightly after the first women’s profession was created.  It’s not a pleasant profession, and until modern developments and technologies made it so women could be adept is some modern aspects of war, the actual combat aspects of it have been almost exclusively male.  Today, the pointy end of the spear still is male – and there’s a reason for it.

Before I go further, I’ll note that both myself and JBH are Marine combat vets.  Neither of us are pogues or REMFs.  Combat arms MOSes are not easy.  Putting women in combat arms MOSes will not end well.  Putting women in military professions they didn’t belong in before didn’t end well, either.

Kara Hultgreen was killed by social engineers.  She was the first female naval aviator on a carrier.  She may have become a fantastic pilot, but she was pushed into a job she shouldn’t have been in that was above her skill level.

As I noted a while back:

Forcing women into military positions they didn’t belong in killed Kara Hultgreen.  She wasn’t ready for flying on carriers, but she was promoted into it so some cocktail party Ruling Class general could brag about how progressive he was to congressmen and senators he hobnobs with.  When she plunged into the water and died, she did so because someone had to make her into something she wasn’t supposed to be yet.

She might’ve been a fantastic carrier-based pilot, but the political rush to make her The First killed her.  A good pilot was killed due to some political general and politician’s ambition.

The ocean and a pitching carrier deck and crosswinds don’t care what you have between your legs, they don’t care how you’re “the first”, or what a great stride forward you are for some cocktail-party general or admiral who can brag to political cronies.  She died because someone put her where she shouldn’t have been – and that was in a job that, had she not been forced into it as “the first” she may have lived to excel at.  She probably would’ve made a great pilot, instead of a dead one.  Technology allowed her to overcome physical differences that made her weaker, and would have allowed her to exploit physical differences that made her stronger.

Even that cannot be said for putting women in combat arms MOSes.  There is no fly-by-wire to compensate for natural physiology differences.  There is having to lift roadwheels, break track, carry shells, and do the kinds of manual labor you’d see on a construction site, but often with field-expedient tools.  There are still the requirements of being a rifleman if your gear goes down.  There are plenty of men who can’t do the jobs.  Putting women into the jobs simply doesn’t work.  Men and women are different.   Especially because in this case it’s about social engineering and equality of results, it cannot work.  No amount of lofty academic ideals can change reality.  People in positions of power – academic social engineering progressives seeking to create the “New Man” – have been doing this to the tune of 94  million dead.  The same mindset that fought against economic laws, wheat harvests, and those who didn’t sign up for the big new idea – is the same mindset that fights here against physical and physiological ones.

Equality of results means there will be quotas.  They’re already talking about “gender neutral” PT tests, which means you’ll have women and weaker men making it through – who shouldn’t be.  This is about politics, plain and simple.  This is about equality of results in order to prove how wonderful and enlightened we’ve become as a nation that we can reject reality.

Adam Savage from Mythbusters says it well:

–

There are two big functions in the military:  Troop welfare and mission accomplishment.  Ultimately mission accomplishment comes first, but the close second (and often part of the mission) is troop welfare.  Troop welfare means having troops ready and able to accomplish missions.  Putting weak men and women into positions where they cannot accomplish missions with the same certainty, where they endanger all other elements of a movement, assault, or action, ultimately threatens entire operations and strategies.  It undermines the US’s ability to project force, and ultimately the US military’s ability to keep the US safe, as well as maintain our commitments to allies.

–

Commenter Keith DeHavelle quoted retired Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum concerning being a POW.  In the same story he linked, she went on:

Cornum scoffed at the theory that women lack the animal instinct required to kill. “War is not a hormonal event. It is a profession with discipline. We’re not people who club and bludgeon people to death any more. No one objects now to women flying fighters, bombers, and attack helicopters. They seem to object to hand-to-hand combat. Personally, I’ve never met a woman who wanted to be in the infantry. But if they’re big and strong and tall, and they want to do it, they’ll end up there. Gender should not be a discriminator in combat roles.”

Yeah, actually we do still club and bludgeon people.  War is applied force.  For those who’ve read the book Starship Troopers, you’ll recognize this as when Sgt Zim explains that you learn to fight with sticks and knives and your fists because that may be all the force you need to apply to get the enemy to comply: “War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him…but to make him do what you want to do. Not killing…but controlled and purposeful violence. But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It’s never a soldier’s business to decide when or where or how — or why — he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people — ‘older and wiser heads,’ as they say — supply the control.“

You also do still have to drag wounded friendlies.  You do still have to hump a 90-pound pack.  You do still have to lift a tow bar – for those unfamiliar with tanks and AAVs, it a pair of bars that connect two vehicles to tow, and weighs roughly eleventy-billion pounds.  You do still have to be able to lift and carry a 155mm shell.

If you’re a 90 pound woman or a 98 pound man let in under “gender neutral” PT standards, you don’t have physical controls to use when the military is doing police actions.  You don’t have those tools to use.  But I’m sure Cornum is right – after all, we haven’t done a police action for the last eleven years or anything with a substantial ground force in two different nations.  And we’re not talking about women in the infantry, we’re just talking about women in combat arms MOSes, and then it’ll be the infantry.

It’s called the slippery slope; for the side pushing it, it’s the Overton window.  The old insanity is the new sanity.  Note the Cornum story is from 2003.

Some more from the Cornum story:

Weighing just 110 pounds on a 5-foot-6 frame, with both of her arms broken and a bullet in her back, she couldn’t fight. If she bit her assailant, she worried he’d hit her and break even more bones. She vowed not to scream, but every time he knocked her broken arms, she couldn’t stop a scream of pain. Her main worry wasn’t rape, she says, but rather that the shackled Dunlap might get himself shot trying to defend her. “Other than that, it didn’t make a big impression on me,” she says, shrugging. “You’re supposed to look at this as a fate worse than death. Having faced both, I can tell you it’s not. Getting molested was not the biggest deal of my life.”

See that new dynamic there?  That another new thing that you’re introducing to ground force elements.  You’re introducing a physically weaker person that others will naturally be protective of, especially due to gender.  Like it or not, chivalry still exists, especially in the kinds of men who put their lives on the line for their country.  That doesn’t help mission accomplishment or troop welfare.  That introduces another dynamic that will make mission accomplishment more difficult, and troop welfare more elusive.

The dynamic between genders exists for a reason, it’s one of the wonders of the human condition.  Women have strengths and weaknesses, men have strengths and weaknesses.  Womens weaknesses make them ill-suited to war, and some men’s strengths make them well-suited to war.  None of it helps troop welfare or mission accomplishment.  Also, as noted last time:

A group of 18-25 year olds in the same environment with mixed genders (and orientations, thanks to politicians) is going to end up with pregnancies and relationship squabbles moreso than an all male unit.  There are a myriad of reasons why this doesn’t work, none of which are being listened to by the politicians and political generals.

Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in mixed-gender units see this all the time.  There’s office drama, there’s field drama, there’s hygeine issues (this is a whole other can of worms), there are pregnancies that prevent deployments – which means a fully staffed unit will lose troops of it’s TO&E, going from full to reduced strength because a woman chooses an easy way to dodge war.  While men also do similar things – like going home and getting high with their buddies on pre-deployment leave, there’s stigma attached.  The man is a coward, and pulled a coward move.  A woman getting pregnant doesn’t face the same criticism, because she’s not expected to face physical danger, and she’s hiding behind a baby to get out of deployment.  It’s unpleasant to discuss, but those who see it and have to deal with it do acknowledge it.  (Being in an all-male unit, I saw the male cowardice.  The female equivalent is well noted.)

There are other factors to consider as well.  Realistically, “On Women In Combat” could be the title of a book.  To look at one last phenomena – ask why we fight.  We fight to protect our home and hearth – we fight to protect security, liberty for ourselves and our families, friends and neighbors.  Humans as a species have fought for their noncombatants.  They’ve fought for their children, for their wives and their homes.  Men, biologically speaking, are expendible.  Men, biologically speaking, aren’t as necessary for raising children (and not in the lefty Murphy Brown sense, either).  Men are there to protect and preserve, women are there to nurture and create.  Thousands of years of human history have led us on this same path.  When we look at all our traditional reasons to fight, never does someone say “send the women and children first”.  That’s backwards.  Thousands of years have agreed.

Morally, a nation that sends its women to fight by choice is one that is rejecting nature.  Women who fight because they must (like WWII Soviet women’s units) are something else (though it’s worth noting what the level of concern for Soviet leaders about their citizens was).  Politicians wanting to put women in harms way to make them “equal” flies in the face of pretty much the whole history of humankind.

–

(Note that none of this questions the virtues of a person or their spirit as a human being, but once again, that there are certain differences between gender.  Doesn’t change their value as a human being, or the virtue of their spirit.  But gender can be a limiting factor in certain aspects of life – for both women and men.)

Dumb and Numbers

Mark Steyn writes about Obama’s budget fairytale and the “Buffet Rule”:

If the alleged Sage of Omaha is as exercised about this as his public effusions would suggest, I’d be in favor of repealing the prohibition on Bills of Attainder, and the old boy could sleep easy at night. But instead every other American “millionaire” will be subject to the new rule — because, as President Obama said this week, it “will help us close our deficit.”

Wow! Who knew it was that easy?

A-hem. According to the Congressional Budget Office (the same nonpartisan bean-counters who project that on Obama’s current spending proposals the entire U.S. economy will cease to exist in 2027) Obama’s Buffett Rule will raise — stand well back — $3.2 billion per year. Or what the United States government currently borrows every 17 hours. So in 514 years it will have raised enough additional revenue to pay off the 2011 federal budget deficit. If you want to mark it on your calendar, 514 years is the year 2526. There’s a sporting chance Joe Biden will have retired from public life by then, but other than that I’m not making any bets.

Let’s go back to that presidential sound bite:

“It will help us close our deficit.”

I’m beginning to suspect that the Oval Office teleprompter may be malfunctioning, or that perhaps that NBC News producer who “accidentally” edited George Zimmerman into sounding like a racist has now edited the smartest president of all time into sounding like an idiot. Either way, it appears the last seven words fell off the end of the sentence. What the president meant to say was:

“It will help us close our deficit . . . for 2011 . . . within a mere half millennium!”

It’s those fancy budget tricks again.  It’s forecasting savings on things not spent and on income that won’t materialize when businesses move elsewhere.

Well, who cares about corporations? Only out of touch dilettante playboys like Mitt Romney who — hmm, let’s see what I can produce from the bottom of the top hat — put his dog on the roof of his car as recently as 1984! That’s where your gran’ma will be under the Republicans’ plan, while your contraceptiveless teenage daughter is giving birth on the hood. “Corporations are people, my friend,” said Mitt, in what’s generally regarded as a damaging sound bite by all the smart people who think Obama’s plan to use the Buffett Rule to “close the deficit” this side of the fourth millennium is a stroke of genius.

But Mitt’s not wrong. In the end, a corporation doesn’t pay tax. The marble atrium of Global MegaCorp’s corporate HQ is indifferent to the tax rate; the Articles of Incorporation in the bottom drawer of the chairman’s desk couldn’t care less. Every dollar of “corporate” tax has to be fished out the pocket of a real flesh-and-blood human being, whether shareholder, employee, or customer.

Remember this?

That’s a “tax on the manufacture” of the vehicle.  It’s a business tax.

But you see that?  That’s the window sticker.  That tax is passed onto the consumer.

Taxing individuals who make $250,000 as robber baron slaveowner millionaires is just going to mean those small business owners and businessmen will simply increase the costs of their goods and services.  If the Fantasy Maid Service of Lubbock ends up having to pay a millionaire bill of attainder tax, then they’ll simply pass it on to their customers.  Ultimately, the increased prices hurt the business and crush them because they can’t expand if they can’t sell their goods and services to more people.

Sadly, they don't look like that. But they might someday... and then they'll be taxed into oblivion.

It’s a cheap cry for votes.  It’s pushing class warfare, with useful (though incredibly wealthy) idiots like Buffet supporting it.  While he may be wise in the ways of businesses he understands – note that he doesn’t invest in things he doesn’t understand – he’s unwise in government.  Or else he’s chosen to create barriers to entry for his competition, making sure that no one little can make it – it’s the “pulling up the ladder” phenomenon.

If you’re an employee making $30,000/year, you’re working along, and you need your job.  If you’re a business that grosses $500,000 and has ten employees to pay, you’re now a “millionaire” and the people who are going to hurt are going to be your $30K employees as well as the business as a whole.  If you’re a $44,000,000,000 investor that owns a hedge fund that is 88,000 times larger than that small business, you won’t feel that tax at all.  You buy and sell those ants for breakfast.  Your personal wealth is larger than the GDP of most African nations, and your life will never be changed by another tax.  You’ve got your money and it’s time to make sure no one else does.  You can regulate and tax everyone out of existence because you have an army of litigators and lawyers to protect you.

But the small business owner will be destroyed.

Either Buffet is insulated, short-sighted, and foolishly believes, as have the tyrannical dictators of socialist hellholes around the world and throughout history, that he is smart enough to run everyone’s life and knows what’s best for you – or – he’s intentionally creating further barriers to entry, ensuring that the world he has created will be maintained, calcified in a web of regulations and taxes that enshrines the old businesses that can never be harmed as government will protect and save them for pull.  He’s part of the Ruling Class, and has decided that he’ll run things from now on with his rich and powerful cronies… and the less rich and powerful will be demonized as “the real enemy”.  There will be the masters and the serfs, and the citizen burghers and kulaks will have to be destroyed as we are driven down this Road To Serfdom.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose Part V

Milton Friedman discussing Friedrich Hayek’s the Road To Serfdom back in 1994.  As relevant again today as ever.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 2 is perhaps the more interesting of the two, especially around the 12 minute mark on.  Friedman points out that experience may be more important than the influences of books or television; and how people have seen the failures in the former Soviet Union and the successes in Asia and the Pacific where unfettered economies succeeded.  Arguably the internet and the 24 hour news cycle has become even more important, because it shortens the memory and lessens experience, but as he mentions, it’s a sophisticated question not easily answered.

Some important quotes:

If an experiment in private enterprise is unsuccessful people lose money and they have to close it down.  If an experiment in government is unsuccessful, it’s always expanded.

Particularly relevant to the health care debate:

The founders of our country believed in individual freedom, believed in leaving people be, letting them be alone to do… whatever they wanted to do.  But our government has been increasingly departing from those Constitutional principles.  You know there’s a provision in the Constitution that congress shall not interfere with interstate commerce.  That provision had some meaning at one time.  But it has no meaning now at all.  Our courts have ruled that anything you can think of is interstate commerce and so the government exercises extensive control over things that it has no business interfering with.

Around the 17 minute mark, Friedman begins dissecting the Federal Reserve.

At the 19 minute mark, Friedman discusses the collapse of the nation under debt.  His belief was that the changes in public perception were going to allow the people to halt the expansion of government.

In response to why socialists would be happier about the history of the last 50 years (before 1994, though it works the same today) at the 21 minute mark:

Because the story they tell is a very simple story – easy to sell.  If there’s something bad, it must be an evil person who’s done it.  If you want something done, you’ve got to do it – you’ve got to have government step in and do it.

The story Hayek and I want to tell is a much more sophisticated and complicated story.  That somehow or other there exists this subtle system in which without any individual trying to control it there is a system in which people in seeking to promote their own interests will also promote the well being of the country – Adam Smith’s invisible hand.  Now that’s a very sophisticated story.  It’s hard to understand how you can get a complex interrelated system without anybody controlling it.  Moreover the benefits from government tend to be concentrated.  The costs tend to be dispersed.  To each farmer the subsidy he gets from the government means a great deal.  To each of a much larger number of consumers it costs very little.  And consequently those who feed at the trough of government tend to be politically much more powerful than those who provided the wherewithal.

Eloquently stated and encapsulating the relationship between people and government very succintly.

Afterwards he breaks down what parties mean what – bringing up liberalism as classical liberalism, and states he’s libertarian in philosophy, though not party.  He mentions Hillarycare in passing as incredibly socialist.  The EIC that he mentions at the end he supported as a replacement for all welfare programs with the EIC, a “negative income tax”, that helps to establish a baseline income.  He ended up fighting against it, because as we all know, the EIC just became another welfare program, not a replacement for the patchwork of welfare that was already in place.

Well worth watching.

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And as a reminder:

No, the other Hayek.

Katy Perry Does Something New

It’s an actual new thing for Hollywood and the music industry to do.  Or rather, a really old thing, but for the last few decades, we haven’t seen much of it.

A comment from another website:

I always knew Marines were made in gas station bathrooms.

 

YAT YAS!