Saturday, August 3, 2013

From the French Revolution to Obamacare, the left has stubbornly touted central planning. It's time for a change.

The Left’s Central Delusion
Its devotion to central planning has endured from the French Revolution to Obamacare.

Soviet Five-Year Plan propaganda poster.


Thomas Sowell
 
 The fundamental problem of the political Left seems to be that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore they see the real world as what is wrong, and what needs to be changed, since apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.
A never-ending source of grievances for the Left is the fact that some groups are “over-represented” in desirable occupations, institutions, and income brackets, while other groups are “under-represented.”
From all the indignation and outrage about this expressed on the left, you might think that it was impossible that different groups are simply better at different things. 
Yet runners from Kenya continue to win a disproportionate share of marathons in the United States, and children whose parents or grandparents came from India have won most of the American spelling bees in the past 15 years. And has anyone failed to notice that the leading professional basketball players have for years been black, in a country where most of the population is white?

Most of the leading photographic lenses in the world have — for generations — been designed by people who were either Japanese or German. Most of the leading diamond-cutters in the world have been either India’s Jains or Jews from Israel or elsewhere.                                                                                                                     
Not only people but things have been grossly unequal. More than two-thirds of all the tornadoes in the entire world occur in the middle of the United States. Asia has more than 70 mountain peaks that are higher than 20,000 feet and Africa has none. Is it news that a disproportionate share of all the oil in the world is in the Middle East?

Whole books could be filled with the unequal behavior or performances of people, or the unequal geographic settings in which whole races, nations, and civilizations have developed. Yet the preconceptions of the political Left march on undaunted, loudly proclaiming sinister reasons why outcomes are not equal within nations or between nations.

All this moral melodrama has served as a background for the political agenda of the Left, which has claimed to be able to lift the poor out of poverty, and in general make the world a better place. This claim has been made for centuries and in countries around the world. And it has failed for centuries in countries around the world.

Some of the most sweeping and spectacular rhetoric of the Left occurred in 18th-century France, where the very concept of the Left originated in the fact that people with certain views sat on the left side of the National Assembly.

The French Revolution was their chance to show what they could do when they got the power they sought. In contrast to what they promised — “liberty, equality, fraternity” — what they actually produced were food shortages, mob violence, and dictatorial powers that included arbitrary executions, extending even to their own leaders, such as Robespierre, who died under the guillotine.

In the 20th century, the most sweeping vision of the Left — Communism — spread over vast regions of the world and encompassed well over a billion human beings. Of these, millions died of starvation in the Soviet Union under Stalin and tens of millions in China under Mao.
Milder versions of socialism, with central planning of national economies, took root in India and in various European democracies.

If the preconceptions of the Left were correct, central planning by educated elites who had vast amounts of statistical data at their fingertips and expertise readily available, and were backed by the power of government, should have been more successful than market economies where millions of individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly.

But, by the end of the 20th century, even socialist and communist governments began abandoning central planning and allowing more market competition. Yet this quiet capitulation to inescapable realities did not end the noisy claims of the Left.

In the United States, those claims and policies have reached new heights, epitomized by government takeovers of whole sectors of the economy and unprecedented intrusions into the lives of Americans, of which Obamacare has been only the most obvious example.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2013 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Monday, July 29, 2013

Bill and Hillary Clinton are 'livid' at comparisons to Weiner’s sexcapades and Huma’s forgiveness

VERNE STRICKLAND: This is a bunch of trash, which I am using mostly to see if, after a quadruple by-pass on my crapped-out hard drive, I can still produce a post that can be read, if not understood or appreciated. Looking good so far, thanks to my  computer guru bud Billy Fulcher of Silicon Savor Computer Repair in Wilmington. Thanks, Big Bill! You da man!
 
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Fredric U. Dicker  Last Updated: 9:30 AM, July 29, 2013
Bill and Hillary Clinton are angry with efforts by mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner and his campaign to compare his Internet sexcapades — and his wife Huma Abedin’s incredible forgiveness — to the Clintons’ notorious White House saga, The Post has learned.
“The Clintons are upset with the comparisons that the Weiners seem to be encouraging — that Huma is ‘standing by her man’ the way Hillary did with Bill, which is not what she in fact did,’’ said a top state Democrat.
Huma Abedin with Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State at a House Appropriations Committee hearing in 2011.Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton in 2008.Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner on their wedding day. Bill Clinton officiated the nups in the gardens of the Long Island castle.
REUTERS
Huma Abedin with Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State at a House Appropriations Committee hearing in 2011.

Weiner and his campaign aides have explicitly referred to the Clintons as they privately seek to convince skeptical Democrats that voters can back Weiner despite his online sexual antics — just as they supported then-President Bill Clinton in the face of repeated allegations of marital betrayals.

“The Clintons are pissed off that Weiner’s campaign is saying that Huma is just like Hillary,’’ said the source. “How dare they compare Huma with Hillary? Hillary was the first lady. Hillary was a senator. She was secretary of state.”

A longtime Hillary aide and Clinton friend, Abedin’s surprisingly unequivocal support of her husband after his bombshell admission Tuesday that he engaged in salacious online sexting well after he resigned in disgrace from Congress in 2011 left the Clintons stunned, continued the source.

“Hillary didn’t know Huma would do this whole stand-by-your-man routine, and that’s one of the reasons the Clintons are distancing themselves from all this nonsense,’’ the source said.

Huma Abedin with Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State at a House Appropriations Committee hearing in 2011.Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton in 2008.Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner on their wedding day. Bill Clinton officiated the nups in the gardens of the Long Island castle.
REUTERS
Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton in 2008.

In the view of many Democrats, the Weiners have also alluded more subtly to the Clintons.
For instance, Abedin, with her husband at her side, declared last week, “Our marriage, like many others, has had its ups and its downs.’’

“Who didn’t think Huma was referring to the Clintons when she said that?’’ asked another prominent Democrat.

Worried about the potential impact on Hillary’s likely run for president in 2016, the political power couple has begun aggressively distancing itself from the crippled mayoral contender, according to sources.

Meanwhile, at least one prominent Hillary Rodham Clinton political operative was described as close to “going public’’ with a sharp criticism of Weiner — in order to send the message that the Clintons, fearing longtime damage to Hillary, want him out of the mayor’s race. (That would be someone other than former Clinton White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, who said yesterday that she was sure the Clintons wanted Weiner out of the race.)

With all the explosive ammunition Republicans have to fire at Weiner and a handful of other disgraced Democrats, GOP activists expected Senate co-leader Dean Skelos and Assembly Minority Leader Brian Kolb to unload at least a few critical comments.


Instead, there’s been total silence from the state’s two top elected Republicans — in yet another example of the collapse of the state’s two-party system.
Skelos “couldn’t care less about what’s going on with the Democrats. He’s just focused on . . . sending out meaningless tweets,’’ said a Republican strategist.

Huma Abedin with Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State at a House Appropriations Committee hearing in 2011.Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton in 2008.Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner on their wedding day. Bill Clinton officiated the nups in the gardens of the Long Island castle.
AP
Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner on their wedding day. Bill Clinton officiated the nups in the gardens of the Long Island castle.
fdicker@nypost.com