Monthly Archives: March 2016

Central Management

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China is having a harder time managing a property market that is diverging, the country’s housing minister said Tuesday.

“The differences are severe, and it is worsening,” Chen Zhenggao said at a news conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress on Tuesday.  “The situation in the first-tier cities and the third- and fourth-tier cities are different, which brings about challenges to our regulatory work, and is a major issue.”

[emphasis added]  And this:

“This is a trade-off,” said Rosealea Yao, an analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics.  “On one hand, you want rural workers to buy homes,” she said.  “But there is a need to prop up housing prices because Chinese people only buy homes when prices are rising.  Inadvertently, this then fuels sharp gains in home prices in first-tier cities.”

There’s a hint there about the utility of managing a large, complex economy from a center that’s far distant from that economy.  Maybe, just maybe, the PRC should lay off from those one-size-fits-all rules.  Or even lay off from regulating so much at all.

Of course, that would mean a lessening of personal power for the men of the PRC government….

The Truth

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…is beginning to come out.

At a CNN Ohio coal country Townhall involving Progressive-Democrat Party Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT), Clinton said, in all seriousness,

I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country, because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.

Her campaign then clarified, in a post-Townhall statement, that her plan “would also safeguard workers’ retirement and health benefits.”  But do nothing about their current jobs so they can get to retirement, apparently.

In an MSNBC-hosted Townhall, Clinton also said this with a straight face:

Now, is Libya perfect? It isn’t.  Libya was a different kind of calculation [from Syria] and we didn’t lose a single person….

Because #FourLivesDon’tMatter.

Hmm….

A Good First Step

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The Obama administration is considering providing an emergency aid package to the cash-strapped Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq after concluding that the KRG’s inability to pay Peshmerga fighters their salaries poses a threat to the US-led campaign against Islamic State, US officials said.

But we need to do two things more: we need actually to send the aid package (money for wages, food, and fuel for the soldiers)—money—rather than just consider it, and we need to ship them arms and provide the training and logistics with which to use them.  We also need to just do it.  Nominally, we’d need Baghdad’s permission for this, but they’re too slow and too much anti-Kurds for this sort of thing to be forced through the Iraqi government.

We also need to help them learn fiscal discipline; although maybe this administration isn’t capable of that.

Free Speech

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…the way the Left sees it. And too many Republican Presidential candidates are misunderstanding the situation.

Recall last week: Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump was forced to cancel a rally in Chicago because “protestors” were out in force intending to prevent the rally from occurring.  They then bragged loudly about their success.

Over the weekend, at rallies in Missouri, Ohio, and again in Illinois, “protestors” again attempted to prevent Trump rallies from proceeding, charging him on the stage at rallies they couldn’t block.

These are not protestors exercising their own free speech rights; these persons are actively, cynically, dishonestly trying to prevent others from exercising their free speech rights.  These Leftists see freedom to speak as freedom only to speak what the Left approves.  These Leftists see listeners’ free speech not as their own choice, but only the choice to hear what the Left will permit them to hear.

We expect this sort of understanding out of the Progressive-Democrat Party Presidential candidates:

The ugly, divisive rhetoric we are hearing from Donald Trump and the encouragement of violence and aggression is wrong, and it’s dangerous.  …  That’s not leadership.  That’s political arson.

The Left’s encouragement of violence and aggression is, indeed, wrong, and it’s dangerous.  When will Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders condemn the Left’s assault on free speech, when will Clinton and Sanders condemn the violence their “protestors” threaten Republican rallies with?

It’s especially disappointing, though, to hear Republican Party candidates choose to attack a fellow Republican for being attacked by this assault on speech, carefully not saying a word about the real assault, the one on Americans’ First Amendment right.  John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz should know better.

Update: corrected a dumb___ typo.

Responsibility

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In an op-ed about President Barack Obama (D) and Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump, The Wall Street Journal had this citation of Obama’s words when Obama was asked, at a press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, about political polarization:

“What I’m not going to do is to validate some notion that the Republican crack-up that’s been taking place is a consequence of actions that I’ve taken,” Mr Obama said.  He explained Mr Trump’s ascent as the result of “the nasty tone of our politics, which I certainly have not contributed to.”

No, Obama has only disparaged our allies:

“When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong [with the Libya intervention],” Obama said, “there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up….

Because they didn’t live up to him.

He has only disparaged those who disagree with him, too.  In response to a Republican-led Congressional move to insist on (Syrian) refugees be vetted to screen out as well as possible terrorists among them, Obama had only this:

We are not well served when, in response to a terrorist attack, we descend into fear and panic. We don’t make good decisions if it’s based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks.

And disparaging Republican concerns with integrity in Washington:

With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball….  Short-term thinking and stale debates are not what this moment requires[.]

And because Obama didn’t get his way on gun control:

The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill….

And because Republicans fought for eliminating Obamacare,

…when Republicans realize they don’t get to hold the entire economy hostage over ideological demands….

And through his Senior White House Advisor Dan Pfeiffer:

We are for cutting spending, we are for reforming our tax code, we are for reforming entitlements,” Mr Pfeiffer told CNN’s Jake Tapper.  “But what we are not for is negotiating with people who have a bomb strapped to their chest.”

In no case did Obama have the intellectual courage or honesty or objectivity to address the arguments.  All he could summon the strength to do was insult the speakers of those arguments.  That’s the Progressive-Democrat Party’s objectivity.  That’s the Progressive-Democrat Party’s intellectual honesty, intellectual courage.  That’s what Progressive-Democrat Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is so desperate to give us four more years of.