The Intellectual Defense of Freedom

Recent events reminded me of the need to put forth a full intellectual and moral defense of freedom and liberty. First up is Mary Anastasia O'Grady's article on how left wing students have wrong footed the conservative government of Sebastian Piñera, despite excellent economic growth of 6% in 2011.

How this can be in Chile, the poster-child of liberal economic reform, is at first a puzzle. The answer—and this is a cautionary tale for Americans—may lie in Chile's political and intellectual climate, which is desperately short of voices able to defend the morality of the market and the sanctity of individual rights.

Specifically, the problem in Chile has its roots in the for profit system that gives the wealthy greater access to college education and also the fact that private school graduates get better test scores than their public school counterparts. The difference in test scores impacts admissions. Rather than celebrate the fact that private for-profit colleges increase the supply of education, students are protesting for free state run education. And of course the leader of the protests has close ties to Cuba, which should wreck her credibility, but seemingly does not.

Meanwhile a German version of Mein Kampf is set to come out in print. I applaud the decision to let the German people read for themselves the genesis of the great evil that befell their country. Hitler set the bar for evil in the twentieth century, and people sometimes forget that he put it all in writing first. Kind of reminds me of Ahmadinejad in Iran. Evil is alive and well, and people the world over need to be exposed to American ideals. Why?

. . . versions of the unexpurgated book have been best sellers over the past few years, including in Palestinian areas and in Turkey. Local popularity of this book is a useful data point to identify worrisome cultures.

That's only because the Israelis are racist.

Meanwhile, I guess the Occupy movement will be protesting along with the rest of the communists tomorrow. It's always a sure sign that a movement has allied itself with the second most evil political philosophy in history when they choose May 1 as a day of national protest. I remember that the open borders/amnesty types did so a few years back. There is surely a political rule that all May day protests are in league with forces of darkness. The Occupy protestors had a single valid complaint buried beneath their socialist clap-trap, that some of the banksters had enriched themselves through federal largesse, either in the form of Federal Reserve pay outs or from the U.S. Treasury. As a tea partyer, I can be sympathetic to that complaint; but they piled on with so much socialist b.s. and they behaved in such an abhorrent manner that no one could take them seriously. Finally, where is the political leadership that is arguing against them? I want to hear a conservative politician state that inequality is the fair and proper outcome of a free society, because some people are more talented or hardworking or both and deserve to be rewarded. It is fair and just. Finally, I wish we could just remember that socialism is the opposite of freedom.

Despite their promises of massive protest, I doubt that most people will be seriously inconvenienced by #occupy tomorrow. But they will get lots of free media.

Re-learning through the centuries

Dean here. We must apologize as we have been extremely remiss in our guest blogging duties while B-Daddy is vacationing with family down in Australia. We will try to catch up and make up for some lost time this week.




Has socialism finally jumped the shark in Cuba?

President Raul Castro expanded self-employment fields on Sunday, ahead of looming government plans to slash as many as one million jobs -- 20 percent of communist Cuba's work force -- from state payrolls.

The economy, 95 percent of which is currently in state hands, does not have the ability to absorb such vast numbers of jobless. Castro's move aims to try to reduce the socioeconomic fallout, but it will be an uphill battle.

The Council of Ministers "agreed to expand the range of self-employment jobs, and their use as another alternative for workers who lose their jobs," Castro said as he gave a closing address at one of two annual sessions of the National Assembly.

After the crash of the former Soviet bloc, Cuba's cash-strapped government in the 1990s approved a wide range of self-employment. Positions such as beauticians, dog groomers, small restaurant owners and even lighter refillers were legalized as long as workers got licenses and paid taxes.

But social resentment emerged as an issue when some workers, particularly in small private restaurants, achieved dramatic levels of success.

The government began increasing taxation and regulation, and decreasing license-granting, until the self-employed sector was largely rendered paralyzed, like the rest of the economy.

(italics, ours)

Or is it merely jumping it, again?

From the Pilgrims abandoning a collectivist impulse to the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it keeps dawning on us, over and over, that socialism is an unsustainable economic model... yet free market capitalism which generates the inevitable unequal outcomes is viewed as unseemly as the italicized paragraph indicates.

Not because of actual results or empirical data has collectivism survived through the centuries but rather has envy, one of the seven deadly sins, been the life blood of a model and philosophy that never seems to go gently into that good night.

What all this appears to indicate is that as fallible humans, we will probably never completely rid ourselves of collectivism, be it straight-up socialism that we see abroad or the crony capitalism as practiced here in America, currently.

What would be nice, however, is we reach a point where free-market capitalism becomes the coin of the realm, so to speak, rather than the reactionary oh crap, everything else has failed - let's give that capitalism thing a tryM.O..

Being resentful and envious is no way to go through life.


This will be cross-posted over at Beer with Demo later today.

Knowing Nothing About Cars

...doesn't prevent you from running an auto company. A year ago I opined that Big Ed Whitacre didn't need to know anything about cars to run GM. Today both Michelle Malkin and Dean alerted me to the TARP Inspector General report that shows that the decision to close Chrysler and GM dealerships was essentially arbitrary and counterproductive; but Big Ed is still GM CEO with the full backing of the Shareholder-in-Chief. Dean's commentary is highly recommended. You can read the whole TARP IG report here.

Michelle Malkin points out the most outrageous point on page 33 of the report:

Mr. Bloom, the current head of the Auto Team, confirmed that the Auto Team "could have left any one component [of the restructuring plan] alone," but that doing so would have been inconsistent with the President's mandate for "shared sacrifice."

In other words, concerns over social justice, rather than the most economically viable plan to allow the companies to recover, guided decision making. This will play itself out in the health care arena as all manner of insurance companies and hospitals will be harmed in the name of "shared sacrifice" as Obamacare is implemented. This is more than mere justicialism, it puts squarely on the road to socialism as the economic basis of free enterprise is destroyed.

Justicialism?

We're not dictators, we're justicialists.

I've got to admit that I never even knew that Peron thing in Argentina had a name other than Peronism, kind of catchy, but not so much so as Justicialism. KT is on a crusade to get us to stop calling Obama a socialist and instead label him a justicialist. Although I believe that Obama is secretly a socialist and justicialism is a way station on that Road To Serfdom, I lack the evidence to know what is in his heart, and have limited proof of this right now. However, I think we can all agree that the economic results of justicialism are about the same as for socialism. From the Wikipedia article on Argentina's debt restructuring:

Argentina went through an economic crisis beginning in the mid-1990s, with full recession between 1999 and 2002; though it is debatable whether this crisis has ended, the situation has been more stable, and improving, since 2003. (See Economy of Argentina for an overview.)

Argentina defaulted on part of its external debt at the beginning of 2002. Foreign investment fled the country, and capital flow towards Argentina ceased almost completely. Argentina was "left out of the world." The currency exchange rate (formerly a fixed 1-to-1 parity between the Argentine peso and the U.S. dollar) was floated, and the peso devalued quickly, producing massive inflation.

Socialism, justicialism, leftism and statisms of all ilk have the same end result, economic ruin. This because freedom works best. In America, we still have a problem, even if we are not remotely socialist, which I will continue to repeat for effect:

The size of government has become a threat to our prosperity and our freedom.

The Coming Carbon Thugocracy Update

During the campaign, I predicted that if Obama won, he would use the EPA to back door Congressional lawmaking and get the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emmisions. From an October article in the WSJ:

In an interview last week with Bloomberg, Mr. Grumet said that come January the Environmental Protection Agency "would initiate those rulemakings" that classify carbon as a dangerous pollutant under current clean air laws. That move would impose new regulation and taxes across the entire economy, something that is usually the purview of Congress. Mr. Grumet warned that "in the absence of Congressional action" 18 months after Mr. Obama's inauguration, the EPA would move ahead with its own unilateral carbon crackdown anyway.

So guess what happened? From the NYT article today:

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials.

Unlike the earlier proposal, this effort does not seem to propose the blatantly unconstitutional proposal to have the EPA impose a tax on carbon emissions. The administration is trying not to tread on Congressional toes in other ways as well. Lisa P. Jackson is the new EPA administrator. From the same article:

The finding and proposed regulations would be issued in sequence, with ample opportunity for public comment and not in a sudden burst of regulatory muscle-flexing, Ms. Jackson said. The regulations would work in concert with any legislation and not supplant it, she added.

The article also points out the likelihood of lawsuits that would dramatically draw out the implementation. But I say, bring it on! I would love to see this case in front of the Supreme Court, with the AGW crowd (that's anthropogenic global warming) having to defend their pseudo-science. American Thinker has pointed to the total hysteria on the other side, with little proof that man is (a) causing global warming and (b) that global warming is actually harmful. I think this last bit is the trickiest part for the chicken-little crowd. Just because the earth heats up, life is not necessarily harmed. In fact, increased carbon dioxide and warmth might help biodiversity. If that could be shown, then the tree huggers should be encouraging us to by that Hummer.

But of course, it really isn't about saving the planet is it? It's about wresting control over the lives of individuals to establish a socialist utopia where the intellectuals rule and rid us of our benighted ways. But the dirty little secret of that dream is that thugs with guns always end up ruling, not the so-called enlightened intellectuals.

This is a threat to freedom. It is one more warning, as if we needed one, that Obama is on a crusade to secure socialism in America, just like someone else who just won an election.

Socialist Roundup

It's been a busy week in the blogosphere, lampooning the creeping socialism in America.

Iowahawk peers in to the future and comes back with ad copy for Congressional Motors new offering, the Pelosi. Iowahawk is the funniest satirist in the blogosphere.

Tom Smith asks if it is too late to become a French socialist, since our Congress seems intent on following the Latin American model. H/T KT Cat.

Mark Cuban has performed another public service (besides firing Don Nelson) by setting up a blog to track the expenditure of YOUR MONEY, that the nation's Treasury Department refuses to publish. His blog is Bailout Sleuth. H/T Dean.

Speaking of Dean, he mocks the notion of Chris Dodd chairing bailout hearings, given his sweetheart loan from Countrywide Mortgage.

And to give credit where due, we applaud Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) for asking Neel Kashkari of Treasury if he feels like a "chump" for handing over $50 billion in taxpayer swag to AIG and then seeing them pay fat bonuses to senior executives. Unfortunately, this was not meant to be satire, it just is. Video here.

That video is posted on the E!3 blog site, (Eject! Eject! Eject!, I think it's an AF thing). The author, Proteus, has a post election commentary so poignant, that I feel compelled to quote a large portion. Read the whole post here.

On Tuesday, the Left – armed with the most attractive, eloquent, young, hip and charismatic candidate I have seen with my adult eyes, a candidate shielded by a media so overtly that it can never be such a shield again, who appeared after eight years of an historically unpopular President, in the midst of two undefended wars and at the time of the worst financial crisis since the Depression and whose praises were sung by every movie, television and musical icon without pause or challenge for 20 months… who ran against the oldest nominee in the country’s history, against a campaign rent with internal disarray and determined not to attack in the one area where attack could have succeeded, and who was out-spent no less than seven-to-one in a cycle where not a single debate question was unfavorable to his opponent – that historic victory, that perfect storm of opportunity…

Yielded a result of 53%

And...

There is much to do. That a man with such overt Marxist ideas and such a history of association with virulent anti-Americans can be elected President should make it crystal clear to each of us just how far we have let fall the moral tone of this Republic. The great lesson from Ronald Reagan was simply that we can and must gently educate as well as campaign, and explain our ideas with smiles on our faces and real joy in our hearts.

Wow! Couldn't say it better myself, so I'll wrap it up for tonight.