Check this video out of some McCain supporters arguing against activist attempting to erroneously linking Barack to the Islamic faith.
I look forward to this clip getting extensive media coverage like the fake story about McCain supporters at some rally shouting for Obama’s death.
Glenn Reynold over at Instapundit makes an interesting point:
MEGAN MCARDLE on why pro-regulation fever will abate. I hope so. One reason why I worry less about guns than butter is that there’s always more political pressure to end a war than to end a social or regulatory program.
This reminds of an an idea I have had for a while. The constitution should be amended by making it mandatory an expiration date (sunset clause) is included for all for legislation. By building into the system an automatic legislative mechanism to remove bills the system is more effective at minimizing the consolidation of power. To get around the problem of legislators setting meaningless expiration dates four different durations could be mandated by the amendment. Legislators could select between a fifty twenty-five, ten or five year expiration date for their bill.
Aside from potentially creating more bureaucracy to manage renewing laws as they begin to near their expiration date, I really can’t see any negatives for this kind of legislation from the perspective a citizen. If a good law but is about to expire then there will be plenty of political support to renew it, while laws that through the course of time are discovered to be bad, will not find enough political support and be discontinued. This kind of legislative mechanism would continually scrub bad legislation leaving behind only laws that find popular political support. The way it should be.
Reading the book Who Really Cares, I came across this passage (p. 62):
One might expect the increase in private giving going at this time to be especially high on the far left. In addition to 9/11, extreme liberals were suddenly facing an administration apparently less congenial to the ideals of income inequality than the Clinton administration had been, and which promoted tax policies that would lead to less total income redistribution than before. I expected to find people on the far left increasing their giving more than any other group in response to a president, who, they believed, intended to leave America’s most vulnerable people out in the cold.
I was mistaken. From 2000 to 2002, the percentage of the American People who gave increased by 5 percentage points. But one group bucked the trend: the far left. In 2000, 70 percent of people said they were “extremely liberal” gave money to charity each year. In 2002, the percentage giving among this groups had fallen to 60 percent. In contrast, the percentage giving of the “extremely conservative” sides rose from 84 to 89 percent.
The author, Arther C Brooks, uses this evidence to make a compelling argument. He argues that those on the left replace actually donating to charity with simply supporting policies that promises to redistribute the wealth. Note he is not claiming that those on the left favor providing money to the poor through redistribution policy instead of charity. Rather they substitute giving of any kind with only the policy that promises to do so.
Arguably the data shows this. When a conservative president comes to office liberals fail to accommodate for the likely cuts in welfare programs by personally donating more to charities that help the poor. If they were actually interested in helping the poor you would think they would donate more money when they knew their polices were not going to be enacted. Failure to do so implies liberal support redistribution for reason independent of helping the poor.
If I had to guess, supporting redistribution policy is not about helping the poor but punishing those who succeed in capitalism. Liberals don’t like capitalism and the don’t like those that succeed at it. They support redistribution as a means of redistribution against the wealthy.
This is also why wealthy liberals support redistribution as opposed to just giving their wealthy away. They favor punishing those wealthy like them who are unwilling to support redistribution policy.
In today’s New York Times, the new Nobel laureate Paul Krugman proves that he either should give his medal back, or that the Nobel committee is populated by a bunch of liberals. He claims that the answer to our current economic problems is deficit spending—as if more federal spending is going to change the un-competitive nature of America’s economy. The federal government has neither the resources nor the expertise to do such a thing, and it annoys me that so many people think it does.
On the other hand, there’s a lot the federal government can do for the economy. It can provide extended benefits to the unemployed, which will both help distressed families cope and put money in the hands of people likely to spend it. It can provide emergency aid to state and local governments, so that they aren’t forced into steep spending cuts that both degrade public services and destroy jobs. It can buy up mortgages (but not at face value, as John McCain has proposed) and restructure the terms to help families stay in their homes.
And this is also a good time to engage in some serious infrastructure spending, which the country badly needs in any case. The usual argument against public works as economic stimulus is that they take too long: by the time you get around to repairing that bridge and upgrading that rail line, the slump is over and the stimulus isn’t needed. Well, that argument has no force now, since the chances that this slump will be over anytime soon are virtually nil. So let’s get those projects rolling.
About the only thing I can agree with is some infrastructure spending—our nation lags behind in that respect and it is one of the few things I think the government is good for. We might as well do it at this time since it could indeed help some folks who can’t find other work, and provide a small stimulus to the economy while we invest in our future.
But infrastructure spending should not be seen as a way to ‘fix’ the economy—it won’t. The New Deal did not end the Great Depression, WWII and massive deficit spending did. But we should not continue to borrow from future generations to prop up a limping economy. The government can inject borrowed money into a failing economy, but it cannot create a sustainable one.
We are experiencing a massive market correction and reallocation of capital. We must let the market do its thing, and we do not need the government coming in to distort values. We are in for tough times no matter what we do, but we will be much better off in the long run if we keep the government out of the market. You would think the winner of the Nobel prize in Economics would understand that.
Reason TV has a nice segment showing how many of the ‘uninsured’ can afford health care they simply choose not to.
During the debate last night this question was asked:
It does not matter how health care should be ‘treated’. By its very essence its a commodity and as such will be treated in this fashion. Any resources in which the supply is less than the demand will be treated as commodity. The question becomes how do you want to distribute that resource? As has been shown countless times before, the state is much less effective and distributing resources than free markets.
Many on the left don’t even consider the fact that health care is a commodity. They talk about the greed and profits of those that work in health care as having a deleterious effect that will be eliminated if the state manages health care. This demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of those on the left regarding economics. Free markets generate profit in health care because the resource is conserved and not because greedy people are making profits off the misery of others. Even if you were to nationalize health care you would still have the same problem of health care being conserved. You would simply be replacing greedy CEOs and Insurance Companies with power hungry politicians and government bureaucracies.
When Brokaw asks if health care should be a right or a responsibility Barack responds with:
It’s unclear what it means to have a right to health care in the same way that the constitution means you have a right to free speech or religion. The rights enumerated in the constitution set limitations on the what the state can do to you. Constitutional rights are designed to protect you from state intervention. How then does a right to health care protect you from state intervention. If anything it’s the exact opposite. A right to health care guarantees that the state will intervene.
Barrack notes that its fundamentally wrong that his grandmother in her last days had to haggle with insurance companies. I think we can all agree with Barrack on this. That’s why doctors should work for free and pharmaceutical companies should charge nothing for their medicine. Because the cause of the wrongness, is not the free market system per se, but rather the fact that these resources are scarce and therefore requires some type of mechanism for distribution. However, if doctors and pharmaceutical companies are willing to work for free than health care will no longer be a conserved resource and this will eliminate the mechanism that Barack’s grandmother had to haggle with.
It’s hard to take liberals serious on nationalizing health care when they don’t advocate for goverment policies forcing doctors and pharm companies to work for free. Because the only way you fix the problem of scarcity in resources is to make the resources infinite. The only way to accomplish that is by forcing the providers of health care to charge nothing for their services and goods. Or so argues socialists and communists for hundred and fifty years.
Note: I found McCain responses to be less than inspiring as well. I wished he would of emphasized some of the points I have made here but I doubt this is the way he thinks about this stuff.
Recently I mentioned that conservatives give more that liberals. Several of my readers asked for evidence suggesting it. I pointed them to this book.
Recently while reading this piece on the morality of liberals and conservatives I came across this passage:
surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people. Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too. If you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering, then I think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious people actually live and ask what they are doing right.
Don’t dismiss religion on the basis of a superficial reading of the Bible and the newspaper. Might religious communities offer us insights into human flourishing? Can they teach us lessons that would improve wellbeing even in a primarily contractualist society.
You can’t use the New Atheists as your guide to these lessons. The new atheists conduct biased reviews of the literature and conclude that there is no good evidence on any benefits except the health benefits of religion. Here is Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell on whether religion brings out the best in people:
“Perhaps a survey would show that as a group atheists and agnostics are more respectful of the law, more sensitive to the needs of others, or more ethical than religious people. Certainly no reliable survey has yet been done that shows otherwise. It might be that the best that can be said for religion is that it helps some people achieve the level of citizenship and morality typically found in brights. If you find that conjecture offensive, you need to adjust your perspective. (Breaking the Spell, p. 55.)
I have italicized the two sections that show ordinary moral thinking rather than scientific thinking. The first is Dennett’s claim not just that there is no evidence, but that there is certainly no evidence, when in fact surveys have shown for decades that religious practice is a strong predictor of charitable giving. Arthur Brooks recently analyzed these data (in Who Really Cares) and concluded that the enormous generosity of religious believers is not just recycled to religious charities.
Religious believers give more money than secular folk to secular charities, and to their neighbors. They give more of their time, too, and of their blood. Even if you excuse secular liberals from charity because they vote for government welfare programs, it is awfully hard to explain why secular liberals give so little blood. The bottom line, Brooks concludes, is that all forms of giving go together, and all are greatly increased by religious participation and slightly increased by conservative ideology (after controlling for religiosity).
I think most of the evidence he refers to here is based on that book. But this should get the ball rolling on convincing you guys that liberal don’t give as much as conservatives.
You know, its between Oregon and California. They have an awesome seal.
The Xs represents being double crossed by the states of California and Oregon.
This link takes you to a video of some time elapsed video of the sky. Check it out. Its really quite something.
