Defending the American Dream Summit
Americans for Prosperity sponsor this summit. This year it is in Alexandria, VA, October 10-11, 2008. This reporter will attend and bring some good news back to Indiana, which is 1 of 15 states without an AFP chapter.
Fannie, Freddy and Friends: Hope for a Change?
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I write today about power and its abuse. This is an old story that is merely repackaged, like the practice of “re-gifting”. Americans are receiving an Enron-like gift wrapped in a government package. The names of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac will assume their place in the hall of shame along with WorldCom, Tyco, and Enron. The responsible party, the captain of the ship, will pay the same price as justice plays out as did Michael Milken, Ken Lay, and all of the other embezellers and thieves who led these corrupt entities.
Let’s remember what Bobby Kennedy said,
“The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use – of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public.” (from ‘I Remember, I Believe,’ The Pursuit of Justice, 1964)
The captain of the currently sinking ship was Franklin Raines. Frank Raines is, yes it’s true, economic advisor to Barack Obama. In August 2008, I addressed Mr. Obama’s lack of understanding of the law of unintended consequences, (http://acme111.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/wellthere-you-go-again-or-the-law-of-unintended-consequences/) which liberals do not understand. Government interfering in economic markets, creating and subsidizing lending institutions, institutions which lowered or eliminated standard lending practices, loaned billions to otherwise non-credit worthy customers. We are now realizing the unintended consequences of mortgage foreclosures, bank failures, and the verge of collapse of the financial markets.
The Democratically-controlled Congress held hearings in 2004 where a regulator with oversight over Freddie and Fanny told of bonuses to the executives during a year when the institutions didn’t make money and of other irregularities. He was subject to the wrath and anger of some of the most liberal members of the committee. The vitriol was excessive and brings to mind Shakespeare, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”and “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” (from Hamlet and Macbeth)
The videotape (which may be the downfall of the Obama candidacy-see http://acme111.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/where-have-all-the-liberals-gone/) shown below is a study in the unintended consequences caused by socialist, progressive, liberal, whatever you want to call them do-gooders who emerge from their ivory towers to inflict their social experiments on us. “O, woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!” Shakespeare, “Hamlet”, Act 3 scene 1.
An English proverb says, “A man is known by the company he keeps.” So first we learned of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Mr Obama’s 20 year relationship with him, an almost father/son relationship. Then we learned of terrorist bomber and founder of the Weather Underground, William Ayers and Obama’s long association with him. Dinesh D’Souza taught us about Obama’s lack of association with his half-brother George Obama who exists on $1 a month in Kenya, the lower end of the poverty scale in Kenya (see http://acme111.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/christianity-in-action/).
The latest is the McCain campaign assertion that Frankilin Raines advises Obama on economic matters. And well he should. Raines served under Jimmy Carter as associate director for economics and government in the Office of Management and Budget and assistant director of the White House Domestic Policy Staff, as well as Director, Office of Management and Budget under Bill Clinton. Then began his tenure with Fannie Mae which we now will bail out. Although Raines made over $20 million in 2003 alone.(Wikipedia-Franklin Raines)
Abraham Lincoln speaking about character and power wrote, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” How will the candidates’ character stand up to the test of power? With McCain, the answer is clear. With Obama, the answer is also clear, just look to the company he keeps.
Christianity In Action Technorati Profile
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Dinesh D’Souza, Townhall.com columnist,author and Christian apologist, has debated many of the secular humanist atheist(SHA) giants of our time. The list includes Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon) and Christopher Hitchins (God Is Not Great). The debates are on youtube for your thought-provoking viewing pleasure. D’Souza’s column today on Townhall.com, George Obama, Start Packing, is a perfect example of giving in action, how Christians make a difference, and how religious people differ from atheists.
I’ll let Dinesh speak:
“So isn’t it interesting that we keep hearing about Sarah Palin’s peccadilloes while the major media continues to ignore the George Obama scandal? Here is a guy living in Third World poverty and his half-brother is the leading candidate to become the next president of the United States.
I specifically asked people to send gifts of $5, $10 and $25. The reason is that even a relatively modest sum by American standards is a considerable sum by Kenyan standards. George Obama has said that he is living on a dollar a month. This seems an impossible sum to survive on, so I checked the poverty line in Kenya. According to United Nations estimates, it’s around $100 a year. By this measure, our little fund has provided for George for 20 years. Alternatively, George can move out of his 6 foot-by-10-foot hut and into a more comfortable dwelling. He can also get the training he needs to become a mechanic.”
This is the Christian way, a “what would Jesus do” moment. My question is what would the secular humanist atheists who run things like academia and the political left do. Dinesh answers that resoundingly. They do nothing.
They do nothing because to a secular humanist there is no God “out there” who cares for us, wants to be in our daily life, and who made us. No, to this group, their god is secular (non-religious), humanist (ego-centered), and substitutes science, success, or power for God.
Dinesh continues:
“I hear a lot from atheists, but interestingly no self-identified atheist contributed a penny. This seems in keeping with sociologist Arthur Brooks’ data showing that secular people are much less generous, both with money and time, than religious people. As Brooks might have predicted, most of my donations came from self-identified Christians, some of them in difficult circumstances themselves. Thanks to this generosity, Barack Obama’s half-brother can look forward to the prospect of a better life. George Obama, start packing!”
So is Barack Obama Christian? Muslim? I propose he is neither. He is a member of the church of Barack Obama. Self-absorbed, hungry for power, either indifferent to or embarassed about his Third World family member. Dinesh was interviewed by The Nation, a liberal SHA magazine:
“The reporter for “The Nation” thought he had me cornered when he asked, “Are you doing this to embarrass Barack Obama?” To which I answered, “Absolutely. He deserves to be embarrassed.”
Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values. This is the moral underpinning of our American culture. It’s why our coinage says “In God We Trust”. The day the SHA’s win will be the end of the great American experiment. Dinesh explains it better:
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McCain’s “Strategery”
There are two military concepts here that explain the (absolutely spectacular) choice of Governor Sarah Palin. One of them is the “envelope“: the parameters within which a fighter airplane must operate. The envelope can be seen as a sort of egg-shape, based on how quickly a plane can turn and maneuver. If your plane as a “tighter envelope” than another plane, the pilot has the advantage in a dogfight. More important is the “OODA loop” — which is the envelope for the pilot’s thought process. How quickly can the pilot observe the situation, orient within the situation, decide, and act. If the pilot’s OODA loop time is shorter, the pilot can overcome the slower.
Charlie Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and writer who blogs here. He has been published in Pajamas Media, CIO Magazine and American Thinker. From http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/08/mccain_and_the_ooda_loop.html by Charlie Martin.
According to Michael Barone, Townhall.com columnist, in
McCain Flies His Campaign Past Obama dated September 20,2008:
That term (OODA) is the invention of the great fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd. It’s an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
“The key to victory is operating at a faster tempo than the enemy,” Boyd’s biographer Robert Coram writes. “The key thing to understand about Boyd’s version is not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather the need to execute the cycle in such a fashion as to get inside the mind and decision cycle of the adversary.”
For a political candidate, it means acting in such a way that the opponent’s responses again and again reinforce the points you are trying to make and undermine his own position.
Obama chief strategist David Axelrod admitted of the Palin pick: “I can honestly say we weren’t prepared for that. I mean, her name wasn’t on anybody’s list.” But it was known that McCain’s VP adviser had traveled to Alaska, and anyone clicking on youtube.com could see Palin’s impressive performance in political debates. The McCain campaign shrewdly kept the information that she was on the short list and that she was the choice to a half-dozen people, who didn’t tell even their spouses. The Obama team failed to Observe.
Then they failed to Orient. Palin… powerfully reinforces two McCain themes: She is a maverick … and she has a record on energy of favoring drilling and exploiting American resources. Instead of undermining these themes, they dismissed the choice as an attempt to appeal to female Hillary Clinton supporters or to religious conservatives.
Then team Obama and its many backers in the media failed to Decide correctly, so when they Acted they got it wrong. Their attacks on Palin tended to ricochet and hit Obama. Is she inexperienced? Well, what has Obama ever run (besides his now floundering campaign)? Being a small-town mayor, as Palin said, is like being a community organizer, “without the actual responsibilities.”
It sounds to me that the Obama campaign’s “strategery” is now one of reaction instead of action. Obama’s strategists were handed a lesson in political strategy and tactics that sprang from the military background of Sen. McCain. Note how Barone describes the discipline of the McCain team, not leaking or even hinting at Palin’s selection. This is exactly what we need in a Commander-in-Chief.
More Barone:
Robert Coram describes what can happen when one player gets inside another’s OODA loop. “If someone truly understands how to create menace and uncertainty and mistrust, then how to exploit and magnify the presence of these disconcerting elements, the loop can be vicious, a terribly destructive force, virtually unstoppable in causing panic and confusion and — Boyd’s phrase is best — ‘unraveling the competition.’ … The most amazing aspect of the OODA loop is that the losing side rarely understands what happened.”
John Boyd would have been a terrific political consultant.
Too bad for the Obama team that Col. Boyd is no longer with us. I have my doubts that he would have made himself available to them. They will have to do with Matt Damon and Susan Sarandon. I think the George W. quote applies to what the McCain camp must be thinking. “They misunderestimated me.” (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bushisms).
So to Sen. Obama, here’s a little instructional video,courtesy youtube :
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Where Have All The Liberals Gone?
Have you noticed? Well, I did. There were no liberals at the Democratic National Convention. The word liberal was not used once from the faux Greek temple stage.
Burt Prelutsky, Townhall.com contributor, writes in his column dated September 8, 2008 entitled Dissecting Liberals, “If at times, it is not easy to determine what a liberal is, it’s because during presidential election campaigns, politicians who have
been voting like liberals, talking like liberals and boasting about their liberal credentials, suddenly insist that they’re really centrists as they go about trying to garner the votes of gullible Republicans and Independents. It’s rather like Michelle Obama trying to convince us that she’s just another stay-at-home mom who loves America and her kids, and in exactly that order.” (See my post about June Cleaver’s, whoops, I mean Michelle Obama’s speech at http://otd-log.blogspot.com/2008/08/bama-mama-or-june-cleaver.html#links)
Barack Obama, by any measure of his voting record, is the most liberal senator in Congress. Joe Biden isn’t far behind ranking #5 on the most liberal list. So if a political party nominates the most politically liberal ticket in Presidential election history, why don’t they say so? Why can they not use the word liberal?
Let’s return to Prelansky’s column. “There is a good reason, though, that liberals are liberals. By and large, they are people who never fully mature and who go through life,
like sullen teenagers, resenting figures of authority — be they police officers, members of the military, teachers who believe in discipline and academic standards in the classroom – people, in short, who have rules and values.”
They are people of moral relativism. There are no absolute truths in the world. There is your truth, this other person’s truth, and there is “my truth.” To the true liberal, “my truth” trumps all other opinions, facts and reality. “My truth” is of such value and importance that I will work through whatever means necessary to force others to live under it. “My truth” is flexible and amorphous as when a hard-pressed Bill Clinton actually told a questioning reporter, “It depends on what your definition of is is.”
They can’t use the L-word because America was founded upon and still lives by an absolute moral code, “We hold these truths to be self-evident..”, not opinions, polls, or think tanks but firm, unchanging Judeo-Christian truths.
Prelansky says,”One of the most annoying things about liberals is that when nightmarish events don’t take place as they predicted — be they concentration
camps for Jews, cataclysmic hurricanes or rising sea levels — they never admit they were mistaken. They can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge that global warming was a hoax concocted by Al Gore; instead, they merely start squawking like a barnyard full of Chicken Littles about the intentionally vague phenomenon known as climate
change.”
Barack Obama does exactly this in his interview with Fox News Bill O’Reilly when asked about the surge in Iraq aired September 4, 2008.
Barack agrees that the surge in Iraq worked but won’t admit that he was wrong in opposing the surge. O’Reilly points out that if it was up to Obama and Biden, there would have been no surge and asks Obama why he can’t say “I was right in the beginning but wrong about the surge.” Barack side-stepped, tap-danced and obfuscated through a 30 second non-answer.
Liberals cannot use the L-word in fly-over country because the vast majority of Americans don’t agree with their moral relativism, their rejection of traditional values, and their mockery and intolerance of the “gun-toting, goes to church on Sunday” majority of America. Give me a break. Oh, I forgot. America has an alternative: the straight talk, traditional values, country first, service above self express at a McCain-Palin train station (or voting booth) near you.
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McCain’s Mockingbird
Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is one of my favorite novels of all time. It’s the story of Tom and one summer in Mississippi, told through the voice of 8 year old tomboy, Scout (Jean Louise).
Scout’s father is the attorney defending Tom against a false rape charge. During the pre-trial and trial proceedings, little Scout hears her father, Atticus, being attacked and vilified for defending a black man in a white woman rape case. She asks Atticus why people would act in such a way. In his thoughtful way he answers.
“Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand.” (Pt. 1, ch. 9)
The truth of Harper Lee’s novel is not racial. It is on the surface but underlying the race implications is the story of a mob, the story of injustice. That is the storyline behind the personal attacks on Sarah Palin and the hypocrisy of the radical Left.
The radical Left advocates women’s rights, the “Uber-Damen”, a super woman who can have a professional career and shatter the glass ceiling while raising a family and being a spouse. But in Atticus’ words above, substitute conservative or traditional values for the word Negro. You’ll have the main stream media and the radical Left’s response to McCain’s pick.
Gov. Palin gave the political speech of the 21st century (thus far), demonstrating her mettle annd her worthiness. She’s a real person, living a real life. Scout said it best,
“I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.” Pt. 2, ch. 23
Folks. Regular, everyday, hard-working, family values, fly-over country, outside the beltway folks. And there is one running on the Republican ticket. Vote McCain-Palin.
The Tides of Change
“Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.”
This is a violation of one of my rules for writing. Never start a piece with a quote. But rule-breaking is the theme of the week. (Maverick being the other one.)
Pres. Teddy Roosevelt is the voice behind the words, echoing through the years from his bully-pulpit. Teddy, the scrawny, sickly child, willed himself to health, into the army, and then the Presidency. He proved himself at the small jobs and outgrew them with his energy and ability.
Teddy took on the heavyweights of his day, busting up monopolies that were engaging in corrupt illegal practices and started modern conservation, stemming from his love of the outdoors. He negotiated for the US to build the Panama Canal and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his negotiation of the peace in the Russo-Japanese War. It is a quintessential American story. In a manner, it’s Sarah Palin’s story.
Just as Teddy was attacked for fighting corruption, I think she’s being savaged by the left-wing attack dogs, in part, because of her anti-corruption, anti-government waste policies. So many of the lefties live off of government grants, programs, research and srudies. The ad hominem attacks will only garner her support. The Left fears her for multiple reasons, not the least that she has traditional values.
Read STAND BY SARAH: SHE’S STILL A WINNING PICK By DICK MORRIS, Published in the The New York Post on September 3, 2008. He writes: “Understand: Palin is under attack because she was such a good choice.” The vitriole from the Left is fear. They didn’t nominate Hillary (a woman, by the way) to eliminate the chance of Clinton backlash in the voting booth. They want the White House at any price.
Morris addresses one of the Democrat talking points: “Remember the Democrats’ central charge on McCain – ‘He’s a Bush clone.’ By choosing Palin, something George Bush would never have done, McCain showed how really different he is.” John McCain is not George Bush. He’s been more of a pain in the rump, many times siding with the Dems against the administration’s proposals. His best friend was the Democratic candidate for Vice-President. This ties in well with the Newt Gingrich initiative, American Solutions, a truly non-partisan effort for true change, change for the better.
More from Morris: “And so Sarah Palin reinforces the most important aspect of the McCain candidacy: Despite 30 years in Washington, he’s an outsider and a dedicated foe of corruption and conflict of interest in government. He’s the one who stands up against pork, earmarks and lobbyists and
backs campaign-finance reform. Palin brings the same kind of credentials to the ticket. When she speaks tonight and emphasizes her record of reform and her commitment to bring ethical standards to Washington, she’ll strike a deeply resonant chord throughout the nation.”
This is change. This is letting the person who’s outgrown their job move onto a bigger stage. This is history as the first female Vice President gets elected. Feminists, where are you? National Organization for Women, where is your voice of support? McCain’s audacity speaks of his character, service to his country since age 17 – that’s 55 years. It is the key ingredient in being President (see Richard M. Nixon and William J, Clinton). Teddy sums it up: “Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.”
If it walks like a duck…
US: Quds, Hezbollah Training Hit Squads
(http://www.military.com/news/article/us-quds-hezbollah-training-hit-squads.html?ESRC=dod.nl)
August 16, 2008
Associated Press
WASHINGTON – Iraqi Shiite assassination teams are being trained in at least four locations in Iran by Tehran’s elite Quds force and Lebanese Hezbollah and are planning to return to Iraq in the next few months to kill specific Iraqi officials as well as U.S. and Iraqi troops, according to intelligence gleaned from captured militia fighters and other sources in Iraq.
More from the article:
The fighters are expected to return to Iraq between now and October, but the officer said there’s no intelligence suggesting they are actually in Iraq yet. The information came from militia fighters captured in Iraq and other sources in the country that the officer would not describe.Many of the fighters fled to Iran this spring after Iraqi government forces cracked down first on militia sanctuaries in Basra and Baghdad’s Sadr City district, then in Amarah and now in Diyala province, the military officer said.
One of the reasons the U.S. believes the special groups moved out during that period is the sharp decline in the number of deadly roadside bombs bearing Iran’s signature explosive design. In March, there were 55 such attacks. By July, that number had dropped to 17 and by August 13 there had been just four, according to U.S. military charts obtained by The AP. U.S. intelligence believes those sophisticated bombs can be traced back to Iran. The military counts 446 of them so far this year; 178 of them were found and disabled before they could explode.
Iran, Hezbollah’s benefactor, denies giving any support to Shiite extremists in Iraq.
The officer said training is going on in at least four locations in Iran: Qom, Tehran, Ahvaz and Mashhad. The number of “special group criminals” – the U.S. name for Iraqi fighters sponsored by Iran – is unknown but is estimated in the hundreds and possibly more than 1,000.
According to the officer, the training camps are operating under the direction of Quds force commander Brig. Gen. Ghassem Soleimani, with the knowledge and approval of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The elite Quds Force is a branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
My Commentary:
“It is difficult to find a parallel to the unwisdom of the British and weakness of the French Goverrnments in this disastrous period. Nor can the United States escape the censure of history. Absorbed in their own affairs and all the abounding interests, activities and accidents of a free community, They simply gaped at the vast changes that were taking place in Europe, and imagined they were no concern of theirs. The considerable corps of highly competent, widely trained American professional officers formed their own opinions, but these produced no noticeable effect upon the improvident aloofness of American Foreign policy.” -Winston Churchill
This quote is a portion of the introduction to In The Words Of Our Enemies, by Jed Babbin. Babbin writes in the first paragraph of the Introduction about one conclusion Churchill reached about World War II tha should be on the minds of Americans after reading the article from AP. “There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action.”
You notice he uses the word action. Not talk, not cajoling, no “negotiating”. As Babbin writes, “Our policy according to Secretary of State Rice toward Iran is one of isolating it, by diplomacy and U.N. Security Council “sanction” resolutions from the world community.”
This has had amazing results, Madame Secretary. Again from Babbin’s book, “So far Iran is so isolated that: (1) Russia is openly building and supplying Iran’s nuclear program, and has supplied Iran with sopisticated anti-aircraft missile eyetems that essentially preclude air strikes against nuclear sites by all except stealth aircraft or missileds; (2) China is trading arms and technology to Iran for oil: and (3) Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has allied his nation with Iran (and China) in hopes of gaining weapons and technology and constricting American access to oil.” That is some isolation. The “isolation” has spread to our own hemisphere.
Babbin’s thesis is simple and pertient. Our enemies, those who who hate us for supporting Israel, being infidels, and spreading our decadent lifestyle, actually say what they believe. They have written it down, broadcast it on TV and radio, posted it on the Internet, and preach it in the mosques and madrasas.
The radicals of Islam, like Al qaeda’s bin Laden, al Zawahiri, and Iran’s Ayatollah al Khameini, have distorted the interpretation of Islamic teaching to fit their purpose. This extreme parsing of Islamic teaching began in its modern form with Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who lived in the US in the 1940′s and published Social Justice in Islam. On returning to Egypt, he was jailed and tried in an assassination attempt on Egyption president Nasser. While awaiting trial, Qutb managed to smuggle out the manifesto, Milestones. This document forms the basis of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
Zawahiri expanded upon Qutb’s work. Second in command of Al Qaeda and its number one spiritual advisor, he “created the theoretical framework to justify” suicide bombers, the killing of innocents (even women and children) and other Muslims. This is detailed in Lawrence Wright’s excellent primer, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. He sums up Zawahiri’s teaching: “With such sophistry, Zawahiri reversed the language of the Prophet and opened the door to universal murder.”
These are the people Iran supports and encourages. Iran does so in the face of international censure and will continue. George W. Bush was correct in describing an “axis of evil”. Almost every day there are new revelations about Iran’s military build-up or its support and sponsorship of terrorism. See my post on 14 August 2008 on this blog, Iran Builds “Smart” Submarine.
The next president will have to act, not talk, to preserve and defend the United States and its citizens. Folks, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, flies like a duck, then it’s a duck.
Our enemies are speaking to us with words and actions. Appeasement with Iran is not working. Our weakness emboldens Russis’s Putin and Venezuela’s Chavez. Australian Broadcasting reported August 18, 2008 that “the Russian military [is] moving short range ballistic missile launchers into South Ossetia.”
Please consider these words in the upcoming Presidential and Congressional elections. Straight-talk McCain is clear that evil must be defeated. Obama is over his head in these matters, the “above my pay grade” response to a different subject applies here also. There are many “-isms” bandied about but I propose a new one. To define Sen. Obama’s approach to foreign policy of talking them to death, let’s refer to that as Obamism. If he is elected president, Obamism can take its place beside Nevilleism and Daladierism.
Well…there you go again (or the law of unintended consequences)
The Heritage Foundation
August 18, 2008
Gettng Government Out of the Way
By Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D.
My commentary and opinion:
I used to love it when comedians, pretending to be Ronald Reagan during a presidential debate, would use that characteristic, good-natured line of Reagan’s, “Well…There you go again.” He would use that as an opening to refute a misstatement or misinterpretation of something he had said.
You see, in my lifetime, we’ve done things like raise the minimum wage. True to form, it does have an effect on the economic situation of Americans. They lose jobs. Companies can’t hire more people. Business is not like the government. It can’t just print more money and has to run efficiently to derive a profit. To all of you in Congress who voted for increasing the minimum wage (twice in 2007), well…there you go again.
You have invoked the law of unintended consequences. The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics in an article by Rob Norton defines the law. It is that actions of people-and especially of government-always have effects that are unanticipated or “unintended”. One Google search for this law yielded 426,000 results. After quickly scanning the first dozen or so pages one can see the word “government” on each page. This is a sure sign of the level of economic illiteracy among the elected and the electorate. Norton writes, “Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and popular opinion have largely ignored it.”
As Ed Feulner points out in his Heritage article, teen unemployment (read as minimum wage workers) has increased the most of any age group. “The jobless rate for teenagers in now 20.3 percent.”
Then he goes on to explain why:
“This makes sense. If government orders employers to pay unskilled, inexperienced workers more, they’ll simply hire fewer of those workers. And teenagers tend to be the people who fill minimum-wage jobs.”
Why can’t politicians grasp this concept? Why do otherwise clear thinkers elect representatives who vote for such legislation?
Although the concept dates back to Adam Smith (1723-1790), sociologist Robert K. Merton brought the concept into the twentieth century in a 1936 paper. He listed five possible causes of unanticipated consequences:
- Ignorance (It is impossible to anticipate everything, thereby leading to incomplete analysis)
- Error (Incorrect analysis of the problem or following habits that worked in the past but may not apply to the current situation)
- Immediate interest, which may override long-term interests
- Basic values may require or prohibit certain actions even ifthe long-term result might be unfavorable (these long-term consequences may eventually cause changes in basic values)
- Self-defeating prophecy (Fear of some consequence drives people to find solutions before the problem occurs, thus the non-occurrence of the problem is unanticipated)
Feulner, student of the Reagan school of optimism, closes with: “Today’s rising unemployment is one problem we’ll solve, as long as we keep encouraging our entrepreneurs — and keep government out of their way.”
That is the challenge facing America. Government is again too big, just as when President Reagan was elected. As Reagan said back then, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are,’I'm from the government and I’m here to help’.”
Let’s elect folks that believe in America, that want it to continue leading this remarkable march of human progress known as the United States of America. “If you’re afraid of the future, then get out of the way, stand aside. The people of this country are ready to move again.” Ronald Reagan
For more in-depth information on the minimum wage go to http://www.heritage.org/Research/Labor/minimumwage.cfm.
