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What WikiLeaks Hath Wrought
What did they tell us about Guantánamo? Exactly what we wanted to hear.
Joseph Margulies
April 28, 2011 | 12:00 am
WikiLeaks recently released a trove of secret risk assessments regarding nearly every prisoner who has ever been held at Guantánamo Bay. I have been continually involved in Guantánamo litigation longer than any lawyer in the world, having been counsel of record in Rasul v. Bush, the first case that went to the Supreme Court from Guantánamo. Over the years, I have defended a number of prisoners at the base. Yet, in the Kafkaesque way that these things work, I cannot comment on the WikiLeaks material because they remain classified. But, even if I could, I would write about something else, because, when it comes to Guantánamo, oddities like this are no longer what matters. Indeed, they've been replaced by the base's symbolism in the national consciousness.
It is sometimes said that the 1960s have become a cultural litmus test. A person's mental image of that turbulent decade predicts a great deal about his or her position on many of the hot-button issues we face today. Those for whom the 1960s meant the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the end of Jim Crow, the narrowing of the chasm between rich and poor, and the wistful end of New Deal liberalism have a very different vision of the country than those for whom it meant urban riots, campus chaos, the assassination of two Kennedys and a King, dramatically rising crime rates, and the first welcome stirrings of modern conservatism. In this way, the decade was not simply ten years in the long march of a nation's history, but a rare moment when competing visions of national identity collided in the public square.
We are quickly reaching a similar point regarding the meaning of, and proper response to, the attacks of September 11. Increasingly stable narratives are taking shape. These narratives vie to claim both the "true" understanding of the past and the proper direction of the future. And, as these narratives compete, the iconic images of the post-September 11 worldGuantánamo, waterboarding, military commissions, rendition, and countless othersare converted from policies that are either good or bad (and choices that were either wise or foolish) to symbols that represent particular visions of national identity. It is this symbolic potency that Karl Rove had in mind when he told a BBC journalist in March 2010 that he was "proud" of waterboarding and the other "enhanced" interrogation techniques. He meant that he was proud the United States had set itself on this course, and that staying the course by adhering to these methods symbolized America's commitment to a particular vision of both the past and future.
So it was with the reaction to the WikiLeaks material. Readers discovered in the cache what they set out to find and hailed the discovery as confirmation of their prior views. The New York Times, for instance, editorialized that the documentswhich it says were received from a third party that obtained them from WikiLeakswere "a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created [at Guantánamo]. They describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration's system for deciding detainees' guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released." But, reviewing the same material, the National Review Online shrugged that "Wikileaks seems to be supporting Bush's war on terror more than it's causing any problems for the former administration."
This shift from counter-terror policies to symbols of national identity is momentous and under-appreciated. As with our understanding of the 1960s, the competing visions of September 11 have produced hardening social narratives. These narratives explain the meaning and complexity of contemporary events, at least to the satisfaction of those who share the vision. But, to do so, the narratives must jealously insist upon an idiosyncratic approach to facts. Those that support the narrative are welcomed and assimilated, making the narrative stronger, and those that do not are ignored or dismissed. In time, as this creative use of evidence repeats itself, the narrative matures into myth, which misleads not so much by the falsehood it contains as by the truth it leaves out. In the end, for example, we are left with the myth of the 1960s as the golden years of the Great Society versus the myth of the decade as the moment when conservatism rescued the country from ruin. Or, in the post-September 11 context, the myth of a strong America attacked because of her values versus the myth of an American empire out of control.
I see several dangers in this trend. First, it makes it almost impossible for new facts to influence the debate in a rational way. The narratives pounce on each new development like a fishing party on a whale, carving it into pieces, using what parts it can, and throwing the rest overboard. This was clear from the commentary surrounding the WikiLeaks release. Even though the Obama administration cautioned that the assessments were outdated and "may or may not represent the current view of a given detainee," this caution went almost entirely unheeded, as different commentators seized on different pieces of information to validate their preconceived view.
Second, a transformation like the one taking place signals the end of rational discussion. When an issue achieves the symbolic potency that the post-September 11 debate has achievedwhen policies become symbolsit means that intelligent debate is impossible. A change in policywhether, for instance, prisoners should be tried in civilian or military courts; whether defendants should be read their Miranda warnings; whether interrogators should be allowed to use coercive techniques; whether Guantánamo should closebecomes a proxy for contrasting visions of national identity. To retreat, to compromise, to accept the legitimacy of another's view is to relinquish one's image of the nation. Thinking like this breeds sloganeering, demagoguery, and pettiness. It is not the stuff of sound decision-making, much to the detriment of the human beings whose lives are at stake and the nation whose security we ponder.
Third, national shouting leads to bad policy. When a position is pressed not because of its merits but because of its symbolic potency, it acquires political significance and prevails simply because it is politically impossible to resist it. The accommodation that must take place in order for government to function starts with certain issues as sacrosanct, and compromise must be found elsewhere. Policies endure not because they should, but because they must. This heralds the end of politics and the triumph of ideology. When actors in the public square cannot even view known facts in the same way, or willingly ignore empirical evidence simply because it is inconvenient, the give and take of political life cannot survive. And so it is, for instance, that Guantánamo remains open not because anyone in the intelligence world thinks it is a good idea, and not because it serves our national interests, but because it is politically impossible to close.
Finally, there is the level at which I have been engaged with this debate most personally. I have been to the base many times. I have tried to explain to my clients that they are no longer people whose alleged misdeeds will be judged individually, but rather, a collective symbol of American national identity. In a country that prizes individualism above all else, I have tried to explain that their individualism has been lost in the pot-clanging and drum-banging that takes place in this country when national identity is at stake. They do not seem to understand.
Joseph Margulies is a clinical professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law and associate director of the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center. He is the author of Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power and is writing a new book, Like a Single Mind, on the changes in American thought produced by September 11.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/87520/wikileaks-guantanamo-bay-national-identity
I don't even need to come here and post.
All people have to do is read and search the archives to see how
stupid Republitards sound with all their ridiculous paranoid posts.
It's simply pathetic on their part.
But like Donald Gump, they have no shame and will say what ever it
takes to con you out of your money and benefits.
All people have to do is read and search the archives to see how
stupid Republitards sound with all their ridiculous paranoid posts.
It's simply pathetic on their part.
But like Donald Gump, they have no shame and will say what ever it
takes to con you out of your money and benefits.
I say; if you give a Republitard enough rope, they'll hang themselves.
And they are.
Hope they enjoy being a minority in the House and Senate for the next
40 years.
I remember when they cried how they were minority members for 40 years
during the first term of the Clinton presidency.
And now they're right on track to regaining that position.
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Is There Hope for Liberty in Our Lifetime?
Friday, April 29, 2011
by Jacob H. Huebert
[Speech given at the Mises Circle in Chicago on April 9, 2011. The video and audio recordings are available through Mises.tv.]
Is there hope for liberty in our lifetime? It's tempting to think so.
As I discuss in the first part of my book, Libertarianism Today, libertarianism used to be of interest only to a tiny handful of people scattered across the country. As I've heard Walter Block and others say, if you were in the libertarian movement a few decades ago, it was easy to feel like you knew almost everyone else in the movement.
This was even true to a considerable extent when I first became involved in libertarianism about 15 years ago. I only discovered libertarianism because I happened to know someone who saw that I was interested in political ideas (conservative ones at the time) and suggested that I subscribe to The Freeman magazine published by the Foundation for Economic Education. But of course most people didn't know anyone who could recommend The Freeman to them, and they almost certainly didn't hear about libertarianism on television, in their schools, or in any major periodicals, apart from Henry Hazlitt's Newsweek column.
Now, of course, everything has changed. You meet people who call themselves libertarians everywhere. And, sure, some of them don't necessarily understand what that means, but it's remarkable that they even know the word "libertarianism." And what's really remarkable is how many of them do know what it means. I've done some speaking at law schools across the country over the past year, and I've been surprised by students who come up to me and start telling me that they read LewRockwell.com every day, that they're reading books about Austrian economics by Murray Rothbard from the Mises Institute. Even when I was in law school less than a decade ago, this was unheard of.
There are two big factors that have contributed to this, and each has built on the other: one is the Internet, and the other is Ron Paul.
When Ron Paul ran for president in 2008, the mainstream media almost entirely ignored him, but a hard core of supporters got his name out on the Internet, and people learned about him that way. Eventually his growing group of supporters raised enough money for him on the Internet to bring him to the mainstream media's attention, and now it seems like we see Ron Paul on national television almost every day. So people started listening to Ron Paul, and Ron Paul sent them back to the Internet to learn more about the ideas he was espousing related to Austrian economics and liberty. Specifically, he directed people to the Mises Institute, which had been promoting these ideas consistently particularly those related to war and the Federal Reserve in a way that no other institution has, and which was ready with a massive library of educational material online.
Again, to anyone who's been around the libertarian movement for more than a few years, this is all amazing -- something that, even five years ago, I couldn't have imagined.
So when you look at this explosion of growth that we've had as a movement, and when you look at the growing antigovernment sentiment that many people seem to have, it's tempting to think that we really have a shot at seeing a more libertarian society here in the United States in our lifetimes.
But there's a quote from Ayn Rand that is relevant here: "It's earlier than you think." In other words, even though it seems like we've come a long way in the struggle for liberty, and even though it seems like it should be obvious to the world that they should cast off the state that's oppressing them, in fact there's a whole lot more to be done, and it may be a very long time before we see success -- if we ever do.
How will we get from here to there? What can we do to get there as fast as possible? Let's consider a couple of things that some people think we should do that I believe won't work, and then we'll look at what does work.
Americans Aren't Libertarians
Some people think electoral politics is the way to go.
And there's one way in which electoral politics certainly can be helpful to the cause: as an educational platform. Murray Rothbard favored the creation of the Libertarian Party because he thought, quite reasonably, that it would be a good way to spread the libertarian message to people who only pay attention to political ideas every four years when there's a presidential election. And the Libertarian Party has done that with varying degrees of success over its history. And of course Ron Paul did that with great success in 2008. That's fine.
What's not fine for advancing liberty is trying to run candidates for major offices with the idea of actually winning the Presidency or seats in Congress because you're not going to win any elections with a libertarian message. You can point to Ron Paul winning a seat in Congress, but Ron Paul is the exception to a great many rules. As Lew Rockwell says, "There is only one Ron Paul."
The reality is that the overwhelming majority -- not most, not half, not a quarter, but the overwhelming majority -- of people in America, and in every state and every city, are not libertarians and aren't even close to being libertarians.
David Kirby and David Boaz of the Cato Institute have published research in which they use polling data to estimate that 14 percent of voters are libertarians.
Unfortunately, that number is far too high. If you look at the questions they asked in their polling to determine whether someone is a libertarian, they're just a few very broad questions about people's attitudes toward government and the market.There's nothing in the questions that would give you any idea of where those people stand on some of the most important issues of our time, such as war, the police state, and the Federal Reserve, to name just a few things that aren't covered. If the poll had asked about those things and defined "libertarian" more like members of the libertarian movement define it, we'd see that the percentage of the population we could reasonably count as libertarian is much lower.
The Tea Party Isn't Libertarian
But what about the tea party? One might think there's cause for hope there because, even though most tea partiers might not be pure libertarians, they seem to be talking about some of the right things, and they sometimes seem to have a healthy us-versus-them attitude toward Washington. In fact, some big names in the libertarian movement have seen the tea party movement gaining momentum and have tried to latch onto it and fund it, thinking that this might finally be a chance to get smaller government.
Without question, there are some true libertarians in the tea party movement, and I'm sure that some of them are able to use the tea party to introduce others to libertarian ideas. I started out as a conservative who liked Reagan's limited-government rhetoric, and if I could come around, I'm sure some of the younger, more open-minded people in the tea party can come around.
But if you look at the tea party by the numbers, you realize that if liberty's going to be achieved in the United States, it's not going to be brought about by these people.
Consider some figures from an April 2010 CBS/New York Times poll of tea party supporters.
It asked tea partiers to identify the political figures they admire most. Who was number one? If you guessed Ron Paul, I appreciate your optimism, but you're way off. It's Newt Gingrich -- who's known for, among many other things, advocating the death penalty for drug dealers, pushing for war with Iran, and praising the New Deal.Number two? Sarah Palin. Make of this what you will. Number three is a tie between Mitt Romney -- the progenitor of ObamaCare -- and that noted enthusiast for smaller government and a "humble foreign policy," George W. Bush. Then at number four we have another tie, this one between George H.W. Bush (who gave us the mandatory low-flush toilets we enjoy today), Mike Huckabee (who, as far as I've noticed, doesn't even pretend to favor liberty), John McCain, and, finally, yes, Ron Paul.
So add up all those people who admire ("Admire"! Think of it! George Bush? Sarah Palin?) someone other than Ron Paul, then compare that to the number of people who admire Ron Paul -- which was 3 percent of all tea-party supporters -- and you have a pretty clear idea of how likely the tea party is to advance liberty.
Those figures I just gave are a little old; they were from a year ago. You might be tempted to think that the tea party has become more radical since then. After all, government's only gotten bigger more spending, more war so maybe they're more radically opposed to the government now?
I'm afraid not.
Back in September, a Pew poll found that 47 percent of tea partiers said they were angry with the federal government. That seems kind of low, considering that the media is constantly telling us how angry tea partiers are, and if you're really antigovernment, you do have a lot to be angry about.
But if they weren't that angry before, maybe they're really angry now. After all, they put in all that work to elect a new Congress, and that Congress hasn't done anything at all to reduce government -- and almost all of the tea-party Republican freshmen in Congress voted to renew the PATRIOT Act without any changes and with almost no debate. They must be really mad about that -- being betrayed by the people they elected!
But no -- in fact, the opposite is true. The Pew poll found that now only 28 percent of tea partiers say they're angry with the federal government. And that's after a couple months of a Republican-dominated House of Representatives. Imagine how not-angry they would be if the Republicans captured the Senate and the White House, too. If that happens, these people -- led by the same talk radio hosts who led many of them to the tea party -- will be right back where they were during the Bush years.
And all of this is to say nothing of the troubling anti-immigrant, virulently anti-Islam, and pro-war views that many tea partiers have been espousing right alongside their "limited government" talk.
Incidentally, here are the top three 2012 presidential picks of tea partiers from a Pew poll taken in March: #1, Mitt Romney; #2, Mike Huckabee, #3, Newt Gingrich. In fairness, however, that was back in March. Now, the results might be different. Now, they might replace one of these names with Donald Trump.
So I don't think it's an especially encouraging sign that the tea party came along and adopted some of the rhetoric and strategies of the Ron Paul movement. And I think the people who are trying to fund that movement and its candidates are wasting their money -- if their goal is to advance liberty.
History Isn't Encouraging
There are still more reasons to think Americans aren't about to embrace liberty and put libertarians into office. Think about the infringements on liberty that Americans tolerated and enthusiastically supported over the course of the 20th century -- especially the early 20th century. During World War I, Americans supported entering a pointless war, tolerated conscription of their sons to fight in that war, and tolerated many other infringements on their liberties, especially their right to free speech. Then they tolerated prohibition of alcohol -- alcohol, which had played a vital, central role in Western civilization! -- for years. Then they tolerated and repeatedly voted for the New Deal. Then during World War II, they tolerated the government rounding up Japanese-American citizens and putting them in concentration camps and all kind of wartime economic controls.
Now think about how much closer the country was back then to whatever libertarian roots it had. Those people went along with all of that tyranny even though, unlike today's Americans, they didn't grow up going to federally controlled government schools. Those people in the early 20th century were much more loyal to institutions other than the state their churches, their fraternal organizations, and other institutions of civil society. If those Americans back then could be so easily manipulated into embracing unprecedented fascist schemes, do you really think that Americans today are going to vote for less government?
Consider, too, that over the decades ahead, more and more people will be receiving checks from the government through social security and federal-government jobs. Are those people going to suddenly stop liking the federal government? Are they going to be receptive to calls to roll it back? Of course not.
I don't say all of this to be negative or to depress you. The point simply is that trying to win elections isn't going to work now or anytime soon because most people aren't libertarians and aren't about to be. As Ayn Rand said, "It's earlier than you think."
The Courts Won't Save Us
Some people argue that since libertarianism can't win through the electoral process, we should go to the federal courts and use them to pursue liberty. After all, that's what the leftists do when voters won't go for what they want. With these libertarians, the idea is that we need to get courts to start reading the government's powers in the Constitution more narrowly and to start reading its protections for liberty more broadly.
This camp has had big wins recently, particularly in the District of Columbia v. Heller and MacDonald v. Chicago gun rights cases, where the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms and that this right applies against state governments via the Fourteenth Amendment. And these legal activists think with some justification that this demonstrates that their strategy is a good one.
Of course, it is a great and heroic thing that they did this and that they won. There can't be any doubt that many people -- in DC, in Chicago, and in other cities with stringent gun-control laws -- can now enjoy a right they couldn't before.
But their big victory for liberty is likely to be not-so-big in the long run. The Supreme Court said in those decisions that while an absolute ban on guns is unacceptable, reasonable restrictions would be okay. And when the court someday tells us what it meant by "reasonable restrictions," we'll almost certainly find that the right they're willing to recognize is actually very narrow.
Winning court battles on issues like this helps people in the short term, and that's great. It's heroic -- it's saving people from being harmed by their criminal government. But this does nothing to address the underlying problem of a federal government that's taking more and more power for itself.
The federal courts will not help us win that battle. The federal judges who sit on those courts are chosen by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and we all know that the President and the Senate will never choose or select anyone who won't say that the federal government can do whatever it wants.
A strategy that relies on the courts relies on the assumption that the rulers Washington chooses for us might someday just decide to be benevolent and give us liberty. That idea should just seem patently absurd to any libertarian. That idea accepts the myth that judges are really just unbiased, neutral arbiters when of course they're not; they're political rulers who control us. Judges haven't harmed liberty because lawyers haven't made good enough constitutional arguments in support of liberty; they've harmed liberty because that's what they were put on the bench to do.
So the courts won't save us.
What Will Work
What will work?
People who want instant gratification will be disappointed, but my answer is the same answer that Albert Jay Nock gave in his classic essay "Isaiah's Job" and the same answer that Leonard Read gave in his classic essay "How to Advance Liberty" (also a video lecture).
What we can do to advance liberty is to work first and foremost on the one unit of society we're actually capable of improving: ourselves. Each of us can learn more about liberty, learn more about history, learn more about Austrian economics. We can learn to improve ourselves in every respect, especially in our speaking and writing skills so we can then pass the things that we learn on to others.
But our purpose shouldn't be to go out and foist our ideas on others who haven't asked for them. People don't appreciate that; it will make them close their minds to you. Also, that kind of approach gets too close to the mentality that statists have, that they need to go out and reform other people to make them more like they want them to be. That's not a healthy attitude.
Instead, because we'll make ourselves the best we can be, other people will be drawn to us. Because of the character and intellect that we will cultivate, they'll want to hear what we have to say. Other people, following our example, will then spread the ideas to others, and slowly we'll see the ideas seep more and more into the culture. Eventually, we'll see them pop up in unexpected places; we'll hear them coming back to us out of the mouths of people from whom we wouldn't have expected to hear them.
This isn't far-fetched. We have a perfect example of this phenomenon in the real world today. In fact, this method I advocate explains in large part why libertarianism suddenly seems to be everywhere. Our perfect example is Ron Paul. Did Ron Paul ever really seek mass appeal? Did he attract his massive following through pandering to the masses? No. All he did was communicate his ideas clearly and consistently for decades, through whatever forums have been available to him, while maintaining an exceptionally high level of personal integrity.
Then -- almost as if by magic -- hundreds of thousands of people were drawn to him, wanting to hear his ideas, wanting to learn from him. And now, look at all the people who he's inspired, who have gone out and begun to learn more and begun to spread the word themselves. Look at how we see the names of Mises and Hayek turning up in newspapers and magazines and on television, coming now from people who aren't necessarily libertarians, but who are aware of these things because the ideas have gotten out there. This is how our ideas advance.
The Mises Institute also provides an example of this phenomenon. Did the Mises Institute attract its huge following through advertising in popular media? Did it have a plan -- or ever try -- to go out and convert the masses to liberty? Not that I know of. All the Mises Institute did was build a great institution and a great website and put the ideas out there, making them as freely available as possible to anyone who wanted to come find them. And then, because the Mises Institute is a light in the middle of a world of darkness, people were drawn to it.
Now some might say, "That's great, but how do we actually get liberty?"
One way we can get liberty that's perfectly consistent with the strategy I've just described is to create institutions that serve as alternatives to government institutions. People who homeschool their children are doing this -- they're freeing their children from the coercion and indoctrination of the government schools. And notice that this came about because a bunch of people just started doing it -- they didn't wait for liberty-friendly politicians to be elected, they didn't wait for liberty-friendly judges to be on the courts, and they didn't ask anybody's permission.
But I know some people will still say, "Okay, that's fine, but how do we get a libertarian society? How can we get rid of the state?"
The answer is that we have to keep doing our never-ending job of self-improvement, and we have to be patient.
Someday -- we don't know when -- the existing Leviathan will collapse, just as the Soviet Union collapsed. Nothing lasts forever -- especially not a socialist or fascist government. When that day comes, however it comes, if we've done well in spreading our ideas, there will be a natural aristocracy of libertarian leaders ready to help rebuild society on a better foundation.
This could be many years from now, and my guess is that it will be well after our lifetimes. Or it might not happen at all. That's just reality.
And it's nothing to be upset about. There are many good things that might happen in the future that we're going to miss out on because we happen to have been born in this particular time period. Think of all the advances in technology that will probably happen someday that none of us will get to see: interplanetary travel, human lifespans extended to hundreds of years, the holodeck from Star Trek, and, of course, at long last, flying cars. Do you sit around all day being bummed out about that? No! You enjoy the stuff you do have, and you're glad you don't live in some previous century when you would have had it a lot worse.
It should be no different for liberty. There's no reason why we should expect progress in this area to be faster or easier than progress in other areas. Getting a whole society to change its mind about some of its most fundamental beliefs is really difficult -- especially when all the world's governments, which have all the guns and all the money, are working hard against you.
There's no quick fix. Libertarianism isn't a political philosophy for people with high time preferences. It's high time preference -- the need to see results in Washington now -- that leads libertarians astray. It's what has made people latch on to politicians who don't really share our values. It's what has made people pursue political projects that would actually move us in the wrong direction, such as school vouchers and so-called social-security privatization. High time preference is what makes people think we should focus our efforts on the federal courts; just convince one judge and you get instant liberty -- convince five Supreme Court justices and you get liberty for the whole country.
But it doesn't work that way. It can't work that way. Even if judges would do this, there would be no underlying foundation in society. People wouldn't be ready for it, and there's no reason to think it would last.
This isn't to say we should never be involved with short-term practical political projects. If there's a good chance of protecting someone's liberty by going to court, do it. If there's an antiwar movement that wants to stand in the way of a president's evil deeds, join it.
But as we do these things, we must never forget the long term -- and we must never compromise our principles, or everything we've built in this libertarian movement could be lost.
And, if you have an urgent personal need for more liberty in your life, there are lots of ways you can go out and get it. You can find ways to minimize your taxes. You can find ways to get around regulations (for example, you could be like Jeffrey Tucker and hack your shower). You can hold onto gold instead of Federal Reserve notes. You could also do what more and more people are doing and move to a part of the world that will give you more of the type of freedom matters most to you -- if it's that important to you. The Free State Project suggests the possibility of doing this within the United States. And, by the way, as more people vote with their feet like this, governments will have to compete for citizens -- which is another way that liberty can increase without us having to dirty our hands in politics.
Regardless of what happens with the rest of society, we should all be glad that we're living in a time and place that has allowed us to discover libertarianism and Austrian economics. This lets us see the world clearly in a way that few other people who have ever lived have been able to. Unlike most people, we can see the state for what it is. Unlike most people, we can understand what's going on in the economy. Unlike most people, we have the truth, and in many important respects, the truth has already set us free.
So let's keep learning, let's keep improving ourselves, let's keep communicating our ideas to others, let's create more liberty for ourselves without the politicians' help, and let's take joy in all of that. And even if we don't get as much liberty as we'd like in our lifetimes, we'll have enjoyed ourselves along the way, and we'll take satisfaction in knowing that we've given our time and energy to a worthy endeavor.
Jacob H. Huebert is the author of Libertarianism Today. He is an attorney and an adjunct faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Visit his website. Send him mail. See Jacob H. Huebert's article archives.
This article was originally given as a speech at the Mises Circle in Chicago on April 9, 2011. The video and audio recordings of that speech are available through Mises.tv/.
http://mises.org/daily/5247/Is-There-Hope-for-Liberty-in-Our-Lifetime
Why Unions Oppose Pay Incentives
Friday, April 29, 2011
by F.A. Harper
[ The Writings of F.A. Harper , Vol. 2 (1961)]
When visiting Sweden recently to study the impact of their advancing socialism, I was surprised to find an almost universal acceptance of the principle of paying workers on a piecework basis. And I recall that early in World War II, a political leader of the United States was severely criticized by our Russian allies because he opposed bonuses to individuals for extra output in the war plants.
These anomalies were brought to mind recently by the assertion in an issue of the AFL-CIO Collective Bargaining Report (Vol. 2, No. 12) that unions in the United States "ordinarily are opposed to wage incentive plans."
The AFL-CIO argues that incentive pay "puts a strain on the entire collective bargaining process … [and] creates friction between workers." It charges that such schemes are "based on the notion that workers will not perform an 'honest' day's work unless they are 'bribed' by the promise of 'extra' money," and that employers, in hope of higher profits, promise monetary reward to induce workers to "produce more than a 'fair day's work.'" Then comes the frank admission: "When workers are paid according to their individual efforts, the union's function of securing high guaranteed wages for all workers becomes more difficult. The local union's ability to present a unified position for base rate increases is weakened."
In other words, incentive-pay plans take over the presumed union function of getting a fair and reasonable wage, and thus threaten the maintenance of union power. "Wage incentives deemphasize the union's role in securing higher wages," according to the report, and "may threaten the union's entire existence."
A Continuing Problem
There is no denial, of course, that incentive-pay plans are often difficult to design. But this problem is not peculiar to incentive-pay plans. It is a problem with any plan of pay determination. Incentive pay involves the question of how much Jones produces relative to Smith, his coworker. This is the same sort of question that is involved in deciding how much of a product is "produced" by tool operators vs. tool investors vs. the electrical-power and telephone suppliers, etc.
Problems of accurate determination of a fair wage exist, to be sure. But that only emphasizes that they should be solved as fairly as possible. Incentive plans may be one way to do this.
It will be readily admitted that in some instances, the fruits of an incentive-pay system may not be worth its cost. Many of the points raised by the AFL-CIO report are important questions. But whether in an incentive-pay system the cargo will be worth the freight is a matter which management must judge in each case. To say that no industrial plants should design and use an incentive plan is as foolish as to say that all should use them. The former is the position of the AFL-CIO and of most other unions in the United States, whereas even socialist Russia and Sweden reject this form of equalism.
When unions oppose the general policy of extra pay for extra work, as under incentive or piecework payment, they are merely extending the practice of featherbedding which is so common in union contracts. The difference is only one of degree -- equal pay for less work is like equal pay for no work at all.
Something for Nothing
Labor unions are not alone in demanding equal pay for less work. This is a policy that has been adopted again and again in our economy. Farmers demand a price for products not produced and a rent for land not farmed. Teachers demand about equal pay for unequal jobs of teaching, with salary based almost entirely on hours spent in training and in the classroom rather than on proficiency at the task. Many other illustrations could be given, too.
The whole question of incentive pay needs a point of focus. And, to me, it is this: so long as economic goods and services are to be made available for exchange in our society, they will be made available either with or without incentive to the one who receives them.
There is no avoidance of this choice, and no possible compromise. A person gets goods in exchange for something, or he gets them in exchange for nothing. A "laborer" receives pay for working, or he receives pay for not working. What other alternative can there be?
On the question of incentive pay, it would appear that union leaders find it to their advantage to uphold the principle of pay for not working. This is just another instance where personal rights are being sacrificed for the furtherance of personal power. When incentive pay is denied in principle, the least diligent worker gets as an excess payment part of what the most diligent worker has earned, but is not to be allowed to receive, according to the union policy propounded in this report.
It is a late day for individual justice in the United States when we have to look to Russia and Sweden for some leadership in rejecting equalism -- for leadership in upholding the rights of the more productive employee to receive the fruits of his handiwork.
Floyd Arthur "Baldy" Harper (1905–1973) was a Cornell University professor and member of the Mont Pelerin Society. He helped start up the Foundation for Economic Education, codirected the William Volker Fund, and founded the Institute for Humane Studies. At Harper's death, Murray Rothbard wrote, "Ever since he came to the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946 as its chief economist and theoretician, Baldy Harper, in a very real sense, has been the libertarian movement. For all these years, this gentle and lovable man, this wise and Socratic teacher, has been the heart and soul and nerve center of the libertarian cause." Read Rothbard's memorial: "Floyd Arthur 'Baldy' Harper, RIP." See F.A. Harper's article archives.
This article is excerpted from The Writings of F.A. Harper , Vol. 2: Shorter Essays, Part I (1961).
http://mises.org/daily/5245/Why-Unions-Oppose-Pay-Incentives
April 26, 5:56 PM, 2011
Blindness Toward War Easy for Americans
By John R. MacArthur
John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of the book You Can't Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the April 20, 2011 Providence Journal.
To understand the utter absurdity of America's intervention in the Libyan civil war, I recommend a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York to see its new exhibition of German Expressionism. It will be much more instructive than reading the media commentary about the president's opening of yet another Mideast war.
I'm not merely referring to the surrealism (in the work of the artists Ernst Kirchner, Emil Nolde and Max Beckmann) of Nicolas Sarkozy's "leading" a coalition of the righteous against the evil Moammar Gadhafi, who not so long ago was the French president's honored guest in Paris. Nor am I alluding to the stupidity of entering a sectarian battle (the German Expressionists were deeply affected by the overthrow of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the factional fighting that followed in 1918-19) in which the goals and personalities of the opposition leaders are largely unknown; or even to the hypocrisy (the Expressionists were big on pointing out moral hypocrisy) of Barack Obama, once considered the anti-Bush, who now wages his very own "war of choice" without bothering to ask Congress for permission.
No. I'm talking about the growing divide between American illusion and the reality of war. Because we have been largely cut off from images of corpses and carnage since the invasion of Grenada whether by official censorship or self-censorship by the timid U.S. media Americans no longer have the capacity to connect military action with the casualties of war. Evidently, they think very little about the consequences of firing millions of bombs, bullets and missiles at distant targets occupied by unknown foreigners. Nowadays, with only 0.5 percent of Americans in the military (compared with 8.6 percent during World War II), we have relatively few witnesses to the butchery of soldiers and civilians who can come home to tell their stories.
I don't know war up close. Thankfully, I've only gotten to hear the accounts of others who suffered through World War II and Vietnam. Even so, the MOMA exhibition grabbed me by the throat, since the German Expressionists, in particular Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, understood war quite well, having endured trench warfare during World War I.
The work of these artists before the war already wasn't easy on the eye their graphic style and printing techniques were disorienting, subversive and sometimes hideous but the movement had sufficient idealism, says the MOMA show's curator, Starr Figura, to believe "in art's ability to transform society." After the war, "Expressionism withered," writes the historian Peter Jelavich. "As an art and a lifestyle, it was too dependent on an optimistic vitality that could not withstand the combined shocks of wartime and post-revolutionary trauma."
The MOMA exhibition devotes an entire wall to 50 prints by Dix titled "Der Krieg" ("The War"). These terrifying pictures the hideously wounded, a skull invaded by worms, monstrously disfigured faces, the dead and the living dead confront the viewer with the fact that war's impact stretches far beyond physical damage to buildings and flesh. Dix's genius is in depicting the destruction of the human spirit that results from decisions made by politicians who never experience the direct effects of war. I applaud Rolling Stone magazine for publishing photos of Afghan civilians murdered by leering American soldiers (also Paris Match for its photo of two Libyan soldiers torn to pieces by NATO bombs), but Dix's prints surpass photojournalism in their emotional reach.
Nowadays, with wars often waged from on high or from very far away by pilots, sailors and computer programmers who never encounter their victims, it's easy to be blind. Phony talk about "targeted" and "precision" bombing, "no-fly zones," "protecting civilians" with air strikes and "limited" war designed to prevent "massacres" (as opposed to the actuality of overthrowing the West's favorite "reformed" Arab dictator to stabilize Libyan oil exports and boost Sarkozy's low poll numbers) is intended to hide the horror of war. There's no such thing as a wholly "just" war and certainly not a "clean" war.
Nevertheless, there is a paradox in Dix's work and life that might help indifferent Americans empathize with the victims of war. Although Dix (a machine-gunner in the Kaiser's army) was celebrated as an "anti-war" artist, he remained ambivalent about the organized killing that such statesmen as Obama and George W. Bush prefer to euphemize in slogans like "the war on terror." In 1961, nearly four decades after "Der Krieg" appeared, Dix said that "the war was a horrible thing, but still something powerful. . . . Under no circumstances could I miss it!" Elsewhere, he said he had wanted to "experience everything very precisely. . . . Hence I am no pacifist. Or perhaps I was a curious person. I had to see everything myself."
In justifying the attack on Gadhafi's forces, our president piously declared that "some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different."
Perhaps without knowing it, Obama has presented a wonderful opportunity to educate the citizenry, and with a patriotic justification to boot. From now on, all Americans should proudly open their eyes to atrocities committed by their armed forces abroad. For a little recent history, they could begin by traveling to Hanoi, Panama, Baghdad, Kabul and Benghazi. They would surely be edified by what they found, and maybe a little wiser.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/04/hbc-90008077
'Mr. Y' and the Decline of the American Empire
Pentagon insiders challenge the militarist paradigm
by Justin Raimondo, April 29, 2011
While the rest of the "news" media was busy covering the Great Birth Certificate Drama, Rachel Maddow spared her audience yet another hour of having to watch that walking hairpiece make a fool of himself (and us), and instead focused on the real news: a US-trained Afghan pilot had turned on his trainers and killed 9 Americans – the biggest single casualty report since 2005. Not only did Rachel report this story, she also wondered aloud at its implications – the doubtful feasibility of a policy that assumes the Afghans will "stand up" as we "stand down – and wryly noted how the Obama White House is even utilizing the same phraseology we all remember from the Bush years.
My ears perked up. Is someone who often seems like a dyed-in-the-wool Obama cultist and partisan hack finally rebelling against the Great and Glorious Leader? Well, maybe, maybe not: in any case, she proceeded to give a platform to Prof. Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, and, most recently, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War. Bacevich is a retired US Army colonel who graduated from West Point, fought in Vietnam, and now teaches at Boston University: he lost a son in Iraq and has become an eloquent conservative critic of our foreign policy of global intervention.
Bacevich spent a good deal of his time talking about an article recently released by the Wilson Center, " A National Strategic Narrative," [.pdf] signed by "Mr. Y." He started out by saying that the publication of the article is important less for the actual content of the piece and more because of who wrote it – " Mr. Y" is a pseudonym for U.S. Navy Captain Wayne Porter and U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Mark Mykleby, who both work for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. As he describes it, "What they are saying is our approach to national security policy has been excessively militarized, we really need to pay more attention to what goes on inside the country."
Bacevich went on to note that these two officers are not alone. Rather than being resistant to change – that is, to a substantial cut in our misnamed "defense" budget, and the demilitarization of our foreign policy – quite the contrary seems to be the case. He cites the many emails he gets from serving officers basically agreeing with his non-interventionist views, and indeed many in the military hierarchy raised objections to the Iraq war, to such an extent that the neocons were screaming at one point about keeping the soldiers in their barracks and out of "politics."
It was great to hear Bacevich lay into the Democrats for not having "the necessary moral courage to take the sort of political risks that are involved in saying we are not going to dominate the world, we are going to bankrupt the country and squander our moral standing" – on MSNBC! That almost makes up for Chris Matthews forgetting he's supposed to be a journalist.
And so, excited at hearing this news of a prominent defection from the War Party, and coming from inside the Pentagon, no less, I eagerly sought out the actual text [.pdf] that had Prof. Bacevich so enthused. I have to confess to being a bit disappointed: I should have taken to heart his caveat about the authorship being more important than the content. Outside of the most reified academic journal, I've never tried to navigate prose so clotted with coined phrases and indecipherable jargon: the authors torture their readers with phrases like "sustainable interdependence," "national strategic narrative," and other coined phrases of such ethereal vagueness that one is drawn into a semi-hypnotic state in which individual words no longer seem to have much meaning, but only via accumulation do they impart a blurred but recognizable impression.
What's recognizable is not anything new: it's the same old transnational progressivism that has animated the "internationalist" wing of the War Party since the days of Woodrow Wilson, albeit leavened with the spice of declinism – an admission that, for purely economic reasons, we simply cannot sustain our foreign policy of untrammeled imperialism and global dominance. It is a sigh of exhaustion coming from the pinnacle of power, a warning that our over-extended and obscenely expensive "defense" budget is diverting vital resources away from more productive uses.
Of course, this being the Obama administration, the authors cannot bring themselves to say where this purloined wealth is being diverted from – instead, they point to our lack of "infrastructure," and cuts in the education budget, and the straitened circumstances of our increasingly threadbare Welfare State. Yet they do manage to acknowledge what is obvious to everyone: that the entrepreneurial spirit that built America's great wealth is in some pretty sad shape:
"Many of us have forgotten that rewards must be earned, there is no 'free ride' – that fair competition and hard work bring with them a true sense of accomplishment. We can no longer expect the ingenuity and labor of past generations to sustain our growth as a nation for generations to come."
Well said – yet we are never told what is the source of this complacency and expectation of a "free ride." Perhaps it's best not to delve into that too deeply, because the authors have other concerns – that is, aside from making a pitch for more "infrastructure" and "investing" more federal dollars in the teachers' lobby and the rigidly bureaucratic state-monopoly system over which they preside. Their chief concern is this:
"For forty years our nation prospered and was kept secure through a strategy of containment. That strategy relied on control, deterrence, and the conviction that given the choice, people the world over share our vision for a better tomorrow. America emerged from the Twentieth Century as the most powerful nation on earth. But we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable source of energy."
In short, we are not going to conquer the world, and it's time our rulers recognized the economic and military reality: so give it up, guys! America's fifty-year global rampage is about to come to an end, whether we like it or not.
This is precisely what libertarians such as Ron Paul have been saying for years, and this is the real key to a left-right, progressive-libertarian alliance. As Paul has pointed out on numerous occasions, we could fund all the lefty-liberal pet projects like government-run
I have to add, however, that there are some major problems with Mr. Y's woozy-globalist worldview. Reading this prose, one is reminded of a late-night campus bull session fueled with a liberal dose of psychedelics, in which the "interconnectedness" of Everything is often and solemnly noted. This latter-day Woodstockian worldview all too easily translates, in "national security" terms, into the by-now-familiar language of "humanitarian" intervention. It's no accident that Mr. Y's prescription is prefaced by Anne-Marie Slaughter lecturing us that we are an "exceptional nation" because we are committed "to universal values – to the equality of all human beings, not just within the borders of the United States, but around the world."
Ms. Slaughter, until recently a top official in the Pentagon's policy department, was one of the loudest agitators for US military intervention in Libya – a testament to this administration's militant defense of "universal values." That this lays down a tripwire for yet another prolonged war in the Middle East is rendered no less dangerous because it is done in the name of "multilateralism" and "humanitarianism" rather than unilateralism and "fighting terrorism."
I'm hardly shocked that Porter and Mykleby in effect modify the concept of sovereignty to suit their own purposes: America is committed to "sovereignty without tyranny," they aver, and go on to attack the Treaty of Westphalia as a hopelessly outdated standard which must be discarded by a new doctrine of "interdependence." After all, the US military has been heedlessly violating the sovereignty of other countries since the Mexican-American war, and never more brazenly or massively than with our global "war on terrorism" – so is it any surprise these two worthies, immersed in the culture of the Pentagon, disdain the traditional concept of sovereignty, as such?
At the heart of this Wilsonian – or, really, [Franklin D.] Rooseveltian – vision is a scheme to make imperialism work on the cheap. Recognizing the limits of American power, and yet still trying to maintain some façade of a "world order" – one that favors the US and its alleged "interests" – this is the task the transnational progressives have set for themselves. What they want, most of all, is a soft landing when the supporting structures of the Empire begin to crack. Since I live in that Empire, I, too, hope our fall will be sufficiently cushioned, but my sense of realism – call it pessimism conditioned by history – warns me to prepare for the worst.
Professor Bacevich is right: neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have the will to pull this country back from the abyss of financial and moral bankruptcy. The collapse, when it comes, will prove the case against Empire – but by then it will be too late.
On Apr 29, 4:56 am, lbiglee75 <leroys...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Bottom line is stop pointing a finger and start to find the answers
> Bottom line is stop pointing a finger and start to find the answers
There's lots of answers, the question is whether the answers are fair
or not.
If it just benefits a few, then the answer is; it's not fair.
Travis is just another "I got mine, to hell with you and everyone
else" kind of guy.
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Superman Renouncing His US Citizenship
Posted by Lew Rockwell on April 28, 2011 06:25 PM
The Man of Steel doesn't want to be seen as a tool of the US government. He may want lower taxes too, and financial privacy. (Thanks to Patrick McPherson)
Re: Superman Renouncing His US Citizenship
Posted by Stephan Kinsella on April 29, 2011 09:30 AM
![[]](http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Spiderman3.jpg)
Lew, this is a telling development. Good for DC and good for Superman!
I've always been a Marvel fan, but boycotted Spider-Man once he was portrayed as fawning over Obama (see my LRC post Spider-Man, Criminal or, the real death of Spider-Man). One of my favorite comics as a kid was the DC/Marvel Superman vs. Spiderman "crossover" book. Now we know who to side with.
Update: Reader Chip Norman writes:
-
![[]](http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Superman5-224x300.jpg)
- I think you're being a bit hard on Spider-Man he can't help who they draw him next to. And don't forget that Spidey's co-creator, the great Steve Ditko, is an Objectivist, which has to be better than nothing. In contrast, Superman was created as a propaganda vehicle for union thugs. And while it's good that he renounced his citizenship, I doubt it was in a spirit of secession; I bet this is paving the way for a Globalist Superman (the Justice League is already the U.N. with capes).
- This is a great time to point you to Paul Pope's libertarian take on Batman, where the hero saves Mises' works from the Nazis. It's amazing: http://www.amazon.com/Batman-Year-Hundred-Paul-Pope/dp/1401211925
- I think you're being a bit hard on Spider-Man he can't help who they draw him next to. And don't forget that Spidey's co-creator, the great Steve Ditko, is an Objectivist, which has to be better than nothing. In contrast, Superman was created as a propaganda vehicle for union thugs. And while it's good that he renounced his citizenship, I doubt it was in a spirit of secession; I bet this is paving the way for a Globalist Superman (the Justice League is already the U.N. with capes).
![[]](http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Superman5.jpg)
On Apr 28, 12:02 pm, Travis <baconl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> *So, Superman is going to renounce his U.S. Citizenship? That makes no
> sense at all. Clark Kent/Superman was raised by loving and kind parents who
> instilled within him traditional middle-America values. He's as American as
> baseball and apple pie---and then some!*
>
> *Although... I must point that, technically speaking, Superman is an
> illegal alien. With the emphasis on "alien." *
>
> *However, that won't stop these Lefturds who have infested the comic book
> industry from destroying the very fabric of our cherished childhood
> superheroes while trashing America:*
>
> *So, Superman is going to renounce his U.S. Citizenship? That makes no
> sense at all. Clark Kent/Superman was raised by loving and kind parents who
> instilled within him traditional middle-America values. He's as American as
> baseball and apple pie---and then some!*
>
> *Although... I must point that, technically speaking, Superman is an
> illegal alien. With the emphasis on "alien." *
>
> *However, that won't stop these Lefturds who have infested the comic book
> industry from destroying the very fabric of our cherished childhood
> superheroes while trashing America:*
Have they also asked to see his birth certificate?
He might not be eligible to be "super" by Republitard standards.
Just another illegal alien waiting to be deported by Republitards.
However they make exceptions for him because he works for nothing.
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http://www.bizzyblog.com/2011/04/29/wh-west-coast-pool-reporter-banned-for-videotaping-sf-fundraiser-protest-gave-obama-early-2008-assist-by-omission/
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Is She Really One of the World's 100 'Most Influential' People?
Posted by Laurence Vance on April 29, 2011 03:15 PM
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) has been named by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 "most influential" people. Her bio was written by President Obama. I feel bad for what happened to her, and I wish her a full recovery (although I don't wish her back in Congress since she never met a war spending bill she didn't like), but is she really one of the world's 100 most influential people?
Congressional creeps Paul Ryan and John Boehner are both on the list. Although I loathe them, they are certainly influential people. The most influential member of Congress didn't make the list: Ron Paul.
Gary Johnson: Keep Guantanamo Open
Posted by J.H. Huebert on April 29, 2011 02:05 PM
On Freedom Watch, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson told Judge Napolitano that he would keep Guantanamo open. He says "a lot of prominent libertarians" have told him that we need to keep Guantanamo open because if we didn't, we'd have to do the same thing -- by which I guess he means torture and indefinite detention without trial -- somewhere else.
Where did he find "prominent libertarians" who told him that?! I don't know, but we can start the process of elimination by noting that it certainly wouldn't have been anyone at LRC, the Mises Institute, the Independent Institute, or the Future of Freedom Foundation, which have all stood firm against the warfare/torture/police state and avoided the Johnson bandwagon (if it's big enough to even be called a bandwagon).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRlGXuGHfrc&feature=player_embedded
UPDATE: There's more good stuff in the rest of the interview. Asked directly, Johnson says that he wouldn't end the Department of Agriculture or Department of Commerce. He also says we don't need to end the Fed -- we just need to have the "resolve" to balance the budget. "We went to the moon; we can balance the budget," he says, making one wonder if he even knows what the Fed does.
"... what we are witnessing is a historical reenactment of the 1970s, if not the 1930s, with the same throwback economic policies that caused the dismal economic downward spiral of those years. But this is not all that President Obama doesn't understand. He also doesn't understand the budget, taxes, business, the energy and oil markets, and even health care."
The Obama Watch
What Professor Obama Doesn't Understand
By Peter Ferrara on 4.27.11 @ 6:08AM
President Obama's self-congratulatory "economic recovery" is way too little, way too late. By historical standards for the American economy, we should be in the second year now of a booming economic recovery. Instead the economy is still struggling to get off the ground, and what is booming instead is prices and inflation.
If you listen to what President Obama is saying in his reelection campaign, which is already underway in his town hall tour across America, the reason for this is clear. President Obama does not understand the basics of economics. What he says repeatedly is that increased government spending is the foundation of economic recovery and growth. But the economic reality is that incentives for increased production are the foundation for recovery and booming growth.
As a result, what we are witnessing is a historical reenactment of the 1970s, if not the 1930s, with the same throwback economic policies that caused the dismal economic downward spiral of those years. But this is not all that President Obama doesn't understand. He also doesn't understand the budget, taxes, business, the energy and oil markets, and even health care.
Consequently, the American people will continue to suffer high unemployment, rising inflation, soaring gas prices, falling real wages and incomes, record poverty, and ultimately worse. That is until this tragically unqualified President who has spent his entire life cloistered in the fever swamps of the far left is replaced by new leadership that will restore the American Dream.
Facebook Fallacies
On April 20, President Obama took his reelection campaign to a town hall at the corporate headquarters of Facebook in Palo Alto. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg began with a question on the budget, asking "what specifically do you think we can cut…?"
Obama responded by saying first let me explain why the problem is Bush's fault. (Get the transcript if you don't believe me.) This from the President whose own 2012 budget projects that after just one term of office he will have run up more national debt in four years than all prior Presidents combined, from George Washington to George Bush. A President who in that same budget proposed a fourth straight budget deficit of over a trillion dollars, including a record deficit for this year of $1,645 billion, when the highest previously in American history was $458 billion.
If President Obama didn't want those deficits, he could have proposed spending cuts 2 years ago. Instead he enacted an utterly failed, trillion dollar, government spending stimulus package. And despite his misdirection rhetoric, he continues to oppose any serious spending cuts to this day. The real cause of the record deficits and debt is that President Obama increased federal spending by 28% in his first two years alone. And in his 2012 budget he proposed to increase federal spending by another 57% by 2021.
Professor Obama told the Facebook audience that the deficits arose because "we had a massive tax cut that wasn't offset by cuts in spending." But from 2001 when the first round of the Bush tax cuts were adopted until 2007, federal revenues increased by almost 30%. From 2003 when the Bush tax cuts were completed until 2007, federal revenues soared by 44%.
Obama's excuse for his runaway spending is that it was necessary to counter the recession. So he is both blaming Bush for the deficits and taking credit for them in promoting recovery. At the Facebook town hall, Obama further advanced his theory that government spending is the foundation for economic growth and recovery, saying, "If all we're doing is spending cuts and we're not discriminating about it, if we're using a machete rather than a scalpel and we're cutting things that create jobs, then the deficit could actually get worse because we could slip back into a recession."
But it is obvious to everyone but Obama and his hypnotized true believers, party apologists, and bought and paid for special interests that his government spending has failed to produce a timely and robust recovery. That is because President Obama's Keynesian theory that increased government spending and deficits promote economic recovery and growth was proven fully and finally wrong to everyone who was awake over 30 years ago.
President Obama persisted at the Facebook town hall, however, explaining that his spending spree will promote recovery and growth because then "we can still…invest in high speed rail" and, "We can still invest in something called ARPA-E, which is like DARPA except just focused on energy, so that we can figure out what are the next breakthrough technologies that can help to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels."
Spoken like a true central planning neo-socialist, for it is not the government's role, nor does the government even have the capability, to figure out what the next breakthrough technology is to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. America has always enjoyed the world's highest standard of living precisely because we leave decisions like that to the competitive marketplace, not government bureaucrats. And no we are not going to create a booming recovery by wasting still more tens of billions of taxpayer funds on "high speed rail," which is a souped-up version of the mass transit boondoggles that have long proven so adept at wasting taxpayer funds without advancing any economic growth.
President Obama then thoroughly mischaracterized the differences between him and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan over the budget and taxes. Obama told the Facebook audience, "So what his budget proposal does is not only hold income tax flat, he actually wants to further reduce taxes for the wealthy, further reduce taxes for corporations, not pay for those, and in order to make the numbers work, cut 70 percent of our clean energy budget, cut 25 percent out of our education budget, cut transportation budgets by a third."
There he goes again with his idea that increased government spending on "clean energy" would enhance economic growth. But saddling the economy with high cost, unreliable energy, and burdening it with an entire energy industry that can survive only on corporate welfare, is only going to tank the economy rather than promote recovery and growth.
Moreover, exactly contrary to this misconceived rhetoric, Ryan's budget would only return federal taxes to their long run, postwar, historical level relative to the economy over the past 60 years at 18% of GDP. What President Obama is proposing is to increase the level of federal taxes well beyond that to new record levels, as I explained last week.
Then, indicating that he doesn't even understand his own tax proposals, President Obama told the Facebook audience, "Keep in mind, what we're talking about is going back to the rates that existed when Bill Clinton was President." Counting the end of the Bush tax cuts, Obama's proposed phaseout of deductions, the new Obamacare tax on investment, and Obamacare's increased Medicare payroll tax, the new top federal tax rate would be nearly 45%. State income taxes would put that over 50% in most states.
In his recent national budget speech, President Obama proposed adding another trillion dollars in increased taxes on the nation's job creators, investors and small businesses. Then he proposed an automatic tax increase trigger that would raise taxes still further in 2014 if "our debt is not projected to fall as a share of the economy." In his Virginia town hall on April 19, he raised the possibility of increasing the maximum taxable income for the Social Security payroll tax. All of these tax increases would leave the Clinton era tax rates in the dust.
A Tale of Two Budget Deals
Since President Obama doesn't understand economic growth or taxes, he fundamentally misconceives sound budget policy as well. Restoring robust economic growth is the essential foundation for balancing the budget. As revenues boom along with the economy, government spending reductions would eliminate the deficit relatively rapidly within a few short years. Trying to chase consistently lower than expected revenues because of a weak economy would lead to a vicious circle -- America's downward spiral of deficits, debt, and stagnation.
The foundation for that economic growth is not increased government spending, but incentives for increased production. Those incentives arise from lower tax rates, which enable producers to keep a higher percentage of what they produce, promoting still further production. Reducing unnecessary regulatory costs and barriers further promotes incentives to produce by increasing the net reward for production.
This is why Paul Ryan's reduced tax rates for both individuals and businesses promote a balanced budget, and lead ultimately to paying off the national debt entirely. In contrast, President Obama record increases in federal tax rates for virtually every major federal tax would have the opposite effect, on the economy and on the budget.
The contrast between the Ryan and Obama budgets is shown by the experience of the two budget deals of the 1990s. In 1990, then President Bush broke his famous "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge that won him the 1988 election, for a budget deal that supposedly reduced spending by $3 for every dollar of tax increases. But by 1992 the deficit, which had stabilized at around $150 billion in the late 1980s, almost doubled to $290 billion because the tax increases pushed the country into a brief recession. President Bush was booted out of office in the 1992 elections as a result.
This is exactly what President Obama is calling for today, only with much, much higher tax rates -- an increase of $1 trillion in taxes and more on top of the already scheduled tax increases from terminating the Bush tax cuts, Obamacare, and his proposed 2012 budget tax increases.
But the 1995/1996 budget fight between the Gingrich-led Republicans and President Clinton resulted in a budget balanced much like Ryan has proposed, with all spending cuts and tax cuts to promote the economy. The booming growth as a result cut the 1995 deficit of $164 billion to $22 billion by 1997, followed by 4 consecutive years of surpluses totaling $560 billion. That was the biggest reduction in the national debt in world history.
Confusing the Faithful
But President Obama's double talk was confusing even the faithful at the Facebook town hall. A very respectful, even worshipful Lauren Hale rose to ask the President:
Her problem is Aristotelian logic. Under the new Marxian dialectic, you can both increase government spending to create jobs, until they show up some day, and cut government spending to close the deficit, if polls show that is what you need to do.
Peter Ferrara is Director of Policy for the Carleson Center for Public Policy and a Senior Fellow for the Heartland Institute. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is the author of America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb: How the Looming Debt Crisis Threatens the American Dream, and How to Turn the Tide Before It Is Too Late, forthcoming from HarperCollins.
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/04/27/what-professor-obama-doesnt-un
The Obama Watch
What Professor Obama Doesn't Understand
By Peter Ferrara on 4.27.11 @ 6:08AM
President Obama's self-congratulatory "economic recovery" is way too little, way too late. By historical standards for the American economy, we should be in the second year now of a booming economic recovery. Instead the economy is still struggling to get off the ground, and what is booming instead is prices and inflation.
If you listen to what President Obama is saying in his reelection campaign, which is already underway in his town hall tour across America, the reason for this is clear. President Obama does not understand the basics of economics. What he says repeatedly is that increased government spending is the foundation of economic recovery and growth. But the economic reality is that incentives for increased production are the foundation for recovery and booming growth.
As a result, what we are witnessing is a historical reenactment of the 1970s, if not the 1930s, with the same throwback economic policies that caused the dismal economic downward spiral of those years. But this is not all that President Obama doesn't understand. He also doesn't understand the budget, taxes, business, the energy and oil markets, and even health care.
Consequently, the American people will continue to suffer high unemployment, rising inflation, soaring gas prices, falling real wages and incomes, record poverty, and ultimately worse. That is until this tragically unqualified President who has spent his entire life cloistered in the fever swamps of the far left is replaced by new leadership that will restore the American Dream.
Facebook Fallacies
On April 20, President Obama took his reelection campaign to a town hall at the corporate headquarters of Facebook in Palo Alto. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg began with a question on the budget, asking "what specifically do you think we can cut…?"
Obama responded by saying first let me explain why the problem is Bush's fault. (Get the transcript if you don't believe me.) This from the President whose own 2012 budget projects that after just one term of office he will have run up more national debt in four years than all prior Presidents combined, from George Washington to George Bush. A President who in that same budget proposed a fourth straight budget deficit of over a trillion dollars, including a record deficit for this year of $1,645 billion, when the highest previously in American history was $458 billion.
If President Obama didn't want those deficits, he could have proposed spending cuts 2 years ago. Instead he enacted an utterly failed, trillion dollar, government spending stimulus package. And despite his misdirection rhetoric, he continues to oppose any serious spending cuts to this day. The real cause of the record deficits and debt is that President Obama increased federal spending by 28% in his first two years alone. And in his 2012 budget he proposed to increase federal spending by another 57% by 2021.
Professor Obama told the Facebook audience that the deficits arose because "we had a massive tax cut that wasn't offset by cuts in spending." But from 2001 when the first round of the Bush tax cuts were adopted until 2007, federal revenues increased by almost 30%. From 2003 when the Bush tax cuts were completed until 2007, federal revenues soared by 44%.
Obama's excuse for his runaway spending is that it was necessary to counter the recession. So he is both blaming Bush for the deficits and taking credit for them in promoting recovery. At the Facebook town hall, Obama further advanced his theory that government spending is the foundation for economic growth and recovery, saying, "If all we're doing is spending cuts and we're not discriminating about it, if we're using a machete rather than a scalpel and we're cutting things that create jobs, then the deficit could actually get worse because we could slip back into a recession."
But it is obvious to everyone but Obama and his hypnotized true believers, party apologists, and bought and paid for special interests that his government spending has failed to produce a timely and robust recovery. That is because President Obama's Keynesian theory that increased government spending and deficits promote economic recovery and growth was proven fully and finally wrong to everyone who was awake over 30 years ago.
President Obama persisted at the Facebook town hall, however, explaining that his spending spree will promote recovery and growth because then "we can still…invest in high speed rail" and, "We can still invest in something called ARPA-E, which is like DARPA except just focused on energy, so that we can figure out what are the next breakthrough technologies that can help to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels."
Spoken like a true central planning neo-socialist, for it is not the government's role, nor does the government even have the capability, to figure out what the next breakthrough technology is to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. America has always enjoyed the world's highest standard of living precisely because we leave decisions like that to the competitive marketplace, not government bureaucrats. And no we are not going to create a booming recovery by wasting still more tens of billions of taxpayer funds on "high speed rail," which is a souped-up version of the mass transit boondoggles that have long proven so adept at wasting taxpayer funds without advancing any economic growth.
President Obama then thoroughly mischaracterized the differences between him and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan over the budget and taxes. Obama told the Facebook audience, "So what his budget proposal does is not only hold income tax flat, he actually wants to further reduce taxes for the wealthy, further reduce taxes for corporations, not pay for those, and in order to make the numbers work, cut 70 percent of our clean energy budget, cut 25 percent out of our education budget, cut transportation budgets by a third."
There he goes again with his idea that increased government spending on "clean energy" would enhance economic growth. But saddling the economy with high cost, unreliable energy, and burdening it with an entire energy industry that can survive only on corporate welfare, is only going to tank the economy rather than promote recovery and growth.
Moreover, exactly contrary to this misconceived rhetoric, Ryan's budget would only return federal taxes to their long run, postwar, historical level relative to the economy over the past 60 years at 18% of GDP. What President Obama is proposing is to increase the level of federal taxes well beyond that to new record levels, as I explained last week.
Then, indicating that he doesn't even understand his own tax proposals, President Obama told the Facebook audience, "Keep in mind, what we're talking about is going back to the rates that existed when Bill Clinton was President." Counting the end of the Bush tax cuts, Obama's proposed phaseout of deductions, the new Obamacare tax on investment, and Obamacare's increased Medicare payroll tax, the new top federal tax rate would be nearly 45%. State income taxes would put that over 50% in most states.
In his recent national budget speech, President Obama proposed adding another trillion dollars in increased taxes on the nation's job creators, investors and small businesses. Then he proposed an automatic tax increase trigger that would raise taxes still further in 2014 if "our debt is not projected to fall as a share of the economy." In his Virginia town hall on April 19, he raised the possibility of increasing the maximum taxable income for the Social Security payroll tax. All of these tax increases would leave the Clinton era tax rates in the dust.
A Tale of Two Budget Deals
Since President Obama doesn't understand economic growth or taxes, he fundamentally misconceives sound budget policy as well. Restoring robust economic growth is the essential foundation for balancing the budget. As revenues boom along with the economy, government spending reductions would eliminate the deficit relatively rapidly within a few short years. Trying to chase consistently lower than expected revenues because of a weak economy would lead to a vicious circle -- America's downward spiral of deficits, debt, and stagnation.
The foundation for that economic growth is not increased government spending, but incentives for increased production. Those incentives arise from lower tax rates, which enable producers to keep a higher percentage of what they produce, promoting still further production. Reducing unnecessary regulatory costs and barriers further promotes incentives to produce by increasing the net reward for production.
This is why Paul Ryan's reduced tax rates for both individuals and businesses promote a balanced budget, and lead ultimately to paying off the national debt entirely. In contrast, President Obama record increases in federal tax rates for virtually every major federal tax would have the opposite effect, on the economy and on the budget.
The contrast between the Ryan and Obama budgets is shown by the experience of the two budget deals of the 1990s. In 1990, then President Bush broke his famous "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge that won him the 1988 election, for a budget deal that supposedly reduced spending by $3 for every dollar of tax increases. But by 1992 the deficit, which had stabilized at around $150 billion in the late 1980s, almost doubled to $290 billion because the tax increases pushed the country into a brief recession. President Bush was booted out of office in the 1992 elections as a result.
This is exactly what President Obama is calling for today, only with much, much higher tax rates -- an increase of $1 trillion in taxes and more on top of the already scheduled tax increases from terminating the Bush tax cuts, Obamacare, and his proposed 2012 budget tax increases.
But the 1995/1996 budget fight between the Gingrich-led Republicans and President Clinton resulted in a budget balanced much like Ryan has proposed, with all spending cuts and tax cuts to promote the economy. The booming growth as a result cut the 1995 deficit of $164 billion to $22 billion by 1997, followed by 4 consecutive years of surpluses totaling $560 billion. That was the biggest reduction in the national debt in world history.
Confusing the Faithful
But President Obama's double talk was confusing even the faithful at the Facebook town hall. A very respectful, even worshipful Lauren Hale rose to ask the President:
- "At the beginning of your term you spent a lot of time talking about job creation and the road to economic recovery, and one of the ways to do that would be substantially increasing federal investments in various areas as a way to fill the void left from consumer spending. Since then, we've seen the conversation shift from that of job creation and economic recovery to that of spending cuts and the deficit. So I would love to know your thoughts on how you're going to balance the two going forward, or even potentially shift the conversation back."
Her problem is Aristotelian logic. Under the new Marxian dialectic, you can both increase government spending to create jobs, until they show up some day, and cut government spending to close the deficit, if polls show that is what you need to do.
Peter Ferrara is Director of Policy for the Carleson Center for Public Policy and a Senior Fellow for the Heartland Institute. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is the author of America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb: How the Looming Debt Crisis Threatens the American Dream, and How to Turn the Tide Before It Is Too Late, forthcoming from HarperCollins.
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/04/27/what-professor-obama-doesnt-un
Kenyan muzzieshit. Til HE proves otherwise.
 | Obama Confirms - Not A Natural Born CitizenHarold | April 29, 2011 at 8:12 am | Categories: Criminal Activity, Executive, Media, Progressives, Propaganda, U.S. Constitution | URL: http://wp.me/pmtmV-5RD |
J.B. Williams 4/29/2011 As the media blitz to silence questions about Obama's eligibility for office become shrill, Obama finally releases his so-called "long form" birth certificate (aka, a birth certificate), confirming once and for all that he is not a natural born citizen of the United States in compliance with Article II of the U.S. [...]
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 | Buyer's Remorse: Black Chamber of Commerce CEO, Harry Alford, Blasts "Marxist," "Brownshirt Obama" and his anti-business agenda (Video)Scotty Starnes | April 29, 2011 at 3:14 PM | Tags: anti-business, Black Chamber of Commerce, brownshirts, Harry Alford, Marxists, President Obama | Categories: Political Issues | URL: http://wp.me/pvnFC-5cg |
watch?v=ecdf4RSVe1Y&feature=player_embedded
H/T Breitbart.tv
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