Monthly Archives: October 2012

Econ 101

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Milton Friedman had some thoughts on basic economics.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

There is all the difference in the world…between two kinds of assistance through government that seem superficially similar: first, 90 percent of us agreeing to impose taxes on ourselves in order to help the bottom 10 percent, and second, 80 percent voting to impose taxes on the top 10 percent to help the bottom 10 percent….  The first may be wise or unwise, an effective or ineffective way to help the disadvantaged—but it is consistent with belief in both equality of opportunity and liberty.  The second seeks equality of outcome and is entirely antithetical to liberty.

Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own.  So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.

And [emphasis added]

The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-union-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning.  It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system.  And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes.  Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.

Stated Differently™, bailing out losing firms assures us of mediocre economic growth.  Winston Churchill also had a thought on this matter.

When losses are made, under the present system these losses are borne by the individuals who sustained them and took the risk and judged things wrongly, whereas under State management all losses are quartered upon the taxpayers and the community as a whole.  The elimination of the profit motive and of self-interest as a practical guide in the myriad transactions of daily life will restrict, paralyze and destroy British ingenuity, thrift, contrivance and good housekeeping at every stage in our life and production, and will reduce all our industries from a profit-making to a loss-making process.

 

™Judge Andrew Napolitano

 

h/t Power Line

Sometimes

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It’s important to note that the last two Americans to die in the terrorist attack on our Benghazi consulate weren’t killed until several hours after the attack started.  Gary Bernsten, retired CIA officer, had this on our real-time response to the attack (i.e., while our State Department officials were listening to the attack-in-progress*) and this administration’s decision to take no meaningful response during the several hours it was going in:

You find a way to make this happen.  There isn’t a plan for every single engagement.  Sometimes you have to be able to make adjustments.  They made zero adjustments; they just stood and they watched, and our people died.

It’s also sometimes necessary to act entirely ad hoc.  But it takes a measure of courage and a willingness to run risks and a willingness to step into the unknown to do these things.

 

*This is from the State Department brief on 9 Oct:

I neglected to mention from the top that that agent from the top of this incident, or the very beginning of this incident, has been on the phone. He had called the quick reaction security team, he had called the Libyan authorities, he had called the Embassy in Tripoli, and he had called Washington. He had them all going to ask for help. And he remained in the TOC.

And from the Chicago Sun-Times:

We now know that the State Department had real-time communications with Benghazi during the attack….

Extortion

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Fox News is reporting that the

White House confirmed Thursday that President Obama is prepared to veto legislation that would skirt the so-called “fiscal cliff”—a battery of tax hikes and spending cuts—unless Republicans consent to raise taxes on top earners.

Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama plainly willing to see our economy collapse into another recession every bit as deep as the one from which we’ve not yet recovered solely for the sake of the ego of his getting his way on tax increases.  Obama demands to raise taxes on the 2% of the wealthiest of Americans while leaving taxes alone for the remaining 98% of us.  That’s his number, 2%.  Even though his tax increases will impact far more Americans than that (like anyone with income over $250k—small businesses, for instance, which pass through their incomes to the mom and pop owners/partners for tax payment), let’s take his number for argument’s sake.  What Obama is saying is that he’ll cheerfully blow up our economic future because he can only get 98% of what he claims to want: unchanged taxes for the 98% of the rest of us.

This makes crystalline what Obama really wants: those taxes on that group of Americans which he despises so much.  Obama doesn’t care a whit about the middle class or the poor, whom he could help by calling off his self-imposed gridlock.  He’s only concerned about the rush he’ll get from getting his way and getting over on that unacceptable group of citizens.

But this failure goes far beyond petty ego or the damage done to our economic future; it hits at our ability to protect ourselves from our enemies.  By vetoing any bill that doesn’t have his precious tax increases, even though it would walk us back from the fiscal cliff (just a bit over two months off), he’ll also be vetoing any bill that would end the sequester of an additional nearly half-trillion dollars from our military capacity beyond the already built-in nearly half-trillion dollar cut in spending for defense.  This is having, today, a negative effect on defense-related jobs.  Worse, the veto will put our military’s welfare, training, equipage, and capacity in serious jeopardy.

Here is extortion the Chicago way.  Nice economy you got there….

Three Things

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In preparation for tonight’s third Presidential debate, this time focusing on foreign policy, James Rosen, of Fox News fame, suggested via The Wall Street Journal, three questions to be explored concerning the Benghazi fiasco during which an American Ambassador and three of his fellows were murdered in a terrorist attack.

Rosen’s first question is this:

[T]he facts of the “pre” period before the attacks will tell us how high up the chain, and in which agencies, fateful decisions were made about security precautions for the consulate and annex in Benghazi.  We also stand to learn how the planning for the attacks could have been put in motion without being detected until too late.

We know that the Obama administration has claimed ignorance of the facts (in Vice President Joe Biden’s case, explicitly so).  We know, also, that Charlene Lamb, the Assistant Secretary of State for International Programs, Bureau of Diplomatic Security, in sworn testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, averred that the right amount of security was in place “as agreed” prior to the attack.  We also know from security correspondence, from the late Ambassador Stevens’ correspondence, and from the sworn testimony before that same House committee by the in-country security leadership that multiple requests for enhanced security had been rejected in the months and weeks just preceding the attack.

Rosen’s second question is this, concerning the hours of the attack itself [link added]:

A State Department briefing on Oct 9 offered an account that was riveting but incomplete.  When all of the facts of these hours are compiled, we will have a truer picture of the tactical capabilities of al Qaeda and its affiliates in North Africa.  We will also learn what really happened to Ambassador Stevens that night….

We know, for instance, that there was no crowd of protestors, much less rioters, near the consulate in the hours preceding the terrorist attack, both from that 9 Oct briefing and from video taken from the consulate.  Yet, in addition to Rosen’s capabilities question, there arises the matter of the administration, for two weeks, insisting that the attack was the result of rioting over a YouTube video, even though information to the contrary was available, both during and within hours after the attack.

Rosen’s third question is this, concerning that period of days following the terrorist attack:

[The time frame] stretches eight days—from 3:40 pm on Sep 11, when the consulate was first rocked by gunfire and explosions, through the morning of Sep 19, when Matthew G Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, publicly testified before the Senate that Benghazi was a terrorist attack.

We have the above strong indications—from on-scene—that the attack was a terrorist assault, and we have Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s false claim of having termed it so the day after in a Rose Garden speech.  We also have his UN Ambassador Susan Rice four days later going on five different Sunday talk shows and claiming that the attack was a protest against that video and not a terrorist attack.  This claim was repeated by various members of Obama’s immediate staff over the next several days, and it was even repeated by Obama himself at his UN speech nearly a week after Olsen’s testimony.

It’ll also be interesting to see whether, in the aftermath of Candy Crowley’s interference in the second debate, the moderator of this debate, Bob Schieffer, will allow the questions to be explored, and if so, whether Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney will do so (and if so, whether he’ll do so with less of the clumsiness he displayed in the second debate).

Are We Like Europe Now?

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Current Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize four years ago on his ascension to the American Presidency for his flowery rhetoric during his campaign tour of Europe.  (I’ll skip over his…flowery…behaviors in pursuing his own agenda in the ensuing years.)  Now the European Union also has received the accolade, for—flowery rhetoric?  (I’ll skip over the…flowery…responses within the EU’s member populations to being held accountable for their budgetary decisions.)

As the editorialists of The New York Sun put it,

Our own view is that…[i]creasingly the Nobel Peace Prize is political prop—its recent American winners have been Vice President Gore, President Obama, and President Carter—whose lessening luster will offer little to a European Union that itself has become a shackle of socialism.  It is a sad story.  And maybe some day, it will take a surprising turn.  One can always hope.  We intend no slight to the great strivers for a better Europe when we observe that in the coming generation the dreamers will look elsewhere than Brussels for the beacon of liberty.

There is that similarity, too, it seems.  Those American recipients also have steadfastly tried to move America toward more government control over our economy and over the decisions we individual Americans and our businesses make in that economy.  Indeed, the present administration, with its outright takeover of the one-sixth of our economy represented by the health insurance and health care industries, its ownership of two of the major car companies in our auto manufacturing industry (which ownership this administration is loath to quit), and its diktats to our financial industry, seems bent on a path of interventions associated with corporatism, a sub-genre of socialism.