… and leaves liberal pundits with the egg on their face in the process.

The Stimulus Is Working | All Is Saved

July 11 (Bloomberg, Obama Says Economic Stimulus Plan Worked as Intended). President Barack Obama said his $787 billion stimulus bill “has worked as intended” as he pushed back against Republican criticism that his recovery program has failed to rescue the economy.

“It has already extended unemployment insurance and health insurance to those who have lost jobs.

September 2 (Ezra Klein, The Stimulus is Working). There’s a legitimate argument over how effective [the stimulus has] been, or whether it’s been effective enough given the expense. But it has been effective. their jobs in this recession,” Obama, who is traveling today in Ghana, said in his weekly Saturday radio and Web address. “It has delivered $43 billion in tax relief to American working families and business.”

March 25  (huffingtonpost.com, GOP Senator: Stimulus Working Already). Federal stimulus dollars have begun to flow, initiating an “amazing” number of projects and creating jobs, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) said Wednesday.

January 25 (Ron Useful (the debate is over) Chusid Idiot, Economists Disagree With Public On Benefits of Stimulus). Among the experts, this isn’t even worth debating anymore — it’s simply an obvious truth that the stimulus was effective.

The Mindset Has not Changed | A Depressionary Relapse May be Coming

If anyone wants insight into what the hell is really going on, avoid the typical left of center blogs and the radical left-wing arm of the Democratic party. Instead, start paying attention to those individuals who’ve had a front row seat to the entire derivative sub-prime leading debacle.

Enter former Morgan Stanley chief Asian economist Andy Xie. Xie comments on the United States in a recent China International Business article. He focuses on a bailout nation (that us) keen on perpetuating a bubble economy predicated on malinvestment and overconsumption. In this he sees parallels with Japan and its long malaise:

March 5 (cibmagazine.com, A Change Of Mindset). Japan has experienced two decades of economic stagnation since the collapse of the infamous bubble it suffered in the 1980s. The most popular explanations are that Tokyo wasn’t aggressive enough in stimulating the economy after the bubble burst, or that it withdrew its stimulus too early – or both. This line of thinking is popular among elite economists in the US, where it is rarely challenged. But few Japanese analysts buy it…

The argument to “stimulate until prosperity returns” is popular because it doesn’t hurt anyone in the short term. When a central bank prints money, its nasty consequence — inflation — takes time to show up. When a government spends borrowed money, repayment is in the future. Nobody feels the pain now. Indeed, when debt is sufficiently long-dated, nobody alive need feel the pain. So analysts who advocate stimulus are popular with politicians because it sounds like a free lunch. Japan’s tale is just a nice story that seems to support the argument…

Japan has run up the national debt equal to 200% of GDP — the greatest Keynesian stimulus program in history — all in the name of stimulating the economy back to health. It has failed miserably. Japan’s nominal GDP is about the same as when the stimulus began. Those who advocated the policy blame Japan’s failure on either the stimulus being too small or not being sustained for long enough – that is, the dosage, not the medicine itself, was at fault.

Edward Harrison of CreditWriteDowns.com comments:

(The mindset will not change; a depressionary relapse may be coming). Exactly right. Stimulus is no panacea for excess capacity and malinvestment. The problem in Japan is that it propped up zombie companies and asset prices in a quest to prevent a Great Depression-like deflationary bust. This has discouraged capital investment in the business sector because zombie competitors reduce returns on investment. And it has trapped some in debt-laden assets.

Obama Has a Change of Mindset

Xie is optimistic about Obama finally starting to abandon bailouts and stimulus (no matter how much the Democratic union rank-and-file, and the left-wing supporters, loved and cheered them) and instead has started to get at the root cause of the crisis:

We are hearing the first major departure from the mainstream consensus; US President Barack Obama has just announced a proposal to limit proprietary trading on Wall Street. This is his first major step to address the root cause of the crisis.

The crisis happened because financial professionals had incentives to bet other people’s money in a game they could not lose. With so many getting in on the act, the liquidity they threw into the trades made them effective, turning bankers into heroes, but only for a while.

The crisis showed that their behavior was indeed rational: while the losses to shareholders and taxpayers surpassed all the accounting profits that Wall Street reported during the bubble, those who made the trades are still rich, because they paid themselves bonuses in cash, not derivatives.

Up till now, the radical left-wing has been advising Obama, and he has not been well-served:

Obama has not been well-advised. His so-called accomplishment — stabilizing the financial system — comes from throwing trillions of taxpayers’ dollars at financial firms. He has behaved like a Wall Street trader: spending other people’s money with no thought of consequences. Anyone can do that. Hopefully Obama has fundamentally changed his approach.

Reform, not stimulus, is the solution. Only by limiting financial speculation can the foundations be laid for a healthy recovery, and to prevent another crisis.

Let’s hope, not only for all our sakes but also Obama’s — if the county slips into a double dip resesson later in the year, the Democrats are finished, and deservedly so.

Oh yeah, from the Wopps department:

Woops! CBO: Deficit To Be $1.2 Trillion More Than Obama Estimates

A new congressional report released Friday says the United States’ long-term fiscal woes are even worse than predicted by President Barack Obama’s grim budget submission last month.The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obama’s budget plans would generate deficits over the upcoming decade that would total $9.8 trillion. That’s $1.2 trillion more than predicted by the administration.

More From libertarianromanticideal

• How Climate Change Science Really Works | How Scientific Knowledge is Produced
• Health Care Reform Leads to The Public Option & Declining Medical Care
• Health Care Reform Is a Liberal Obsession | It’s The Left’s Iraq

In a previous post, I suggested that the “global warming denier” is now pretty much myth. Certainly on practical grounds, it may as well be.

At best going through “global warming denier” arguments and then proceeding to knock them down is a distraction and waste of time — at worse, it’s a red herring, i.e.,  it’s not where the interesting and important climate questions are.

At the heart of that post was a talk at Fermilab by Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences of M.I.T. Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, who isn’t in any a way a “global warming denier.”. He simply doesn’t believe that that 1) C02 is the sole cause of warming or 2) that the data supports the view that the end is neigh unless we do something now.

I got a comment on the SkepticalScience blog about Dr. Lindzen:

As to Lindzen… he has been fighting a rear guard action on global warming denial for more than twenty years and is now reaching his last stand. The one claim he can still make with some small degree of veracity is that we don’t know all the details of all possible feedbacks and thus the models could be wrong. This is close enough to ‘true’ to keep him within the fold of scientific endeavor… but just barely. (YouTube video on the empirical evidence for man-made global warming).

How Scientific Knowledge is Produced and How Climate Change Science Really Works

This was a typical mis-characterized of Dr. Lindzen by individuals who  have little to no clue about how science works, i.e., how scientific knowledge is produced in the lab, usually but not always, in academia, and what really goes into having a successful scientific career.

He’s certainly fodder for the global alarm contingent, but w/in the academic sphere, the man is highly respected and regarded, as much as any scientist can be w/in his field. There’s simply no question about that.

Fermilab is not only the institution that’s invited him to give talks. These institutions do so because he’s an acknowledged expert in the field, and he has something to offer. They wouldn’t invite him if they didn’t think that. Within the field, his hypotheses and work are not regarded as “reaching [their] last stand.” He publishes, he has research grants (try to get one of those!), he trains post-docs, who need 1) an adviser who publishes at a regular rate, with their names on the paper, and who 2) gives them an opportunity to extend the work done in his lab, to present that work at conferences, and — hopefully — to publish.

The competition for beginning (i.e., associate professor) tenure track academic positions is fierce. If the guy was on some sort of “last stand,” post-docs simply would go elsewhere. That’s not the case (see: http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/students.html, and http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/students2.pdf). The man is working scientist, he has a working lab which is a publishing factory — he’s doing his job and he’s good at it. Period.

Additionally, other experts in the field put his ideas to the test. And other researchers put their ideas, theories and hypotheses to the test, and so on. While no one completely agrees with anyone else (they may not even like them), everyone takes everyone’s else work and ideas very Very VERY seriously, even if they disagree. They’re paid thinkers, all of them. That’s their job.

If somebody stops “thinking,” or they start beating a dead horse, they stop getting invited to give talks (because they have nothing new to offer, which is the point of these professional talks), potential post-docs go elsewhere, research grant money dries up, and they stop publishing. In short, their academic research career is over. This is definitely not Lindzen’s situation.

In fact, he’s done something quite unusual, extremely difficult, and highly valuable. He’s one of those rare researchers that is thriving in a minority camp. That’s rare and it takes talent. Everyone in his field respects that. You can take that to the bank.

Finally, what’s the field’s current stance on the issue of positive feedback mechanisms in the climate? It’s not a closed issue. Copy and paste this in your browser’s URL window:

“forcing feedback” site:.edu

This tells google to search for this keyword phase across all academic domains. You can also do a search across all government domains, e.g., “forcing feedback” site:.gov

There’s 100’s of papers, talks, discussions. And these google searches almost certainty under-estimate the interest in the topic. If it was close to being a closed and decided issue, you would see a very different set of hits. For example, if you instead google this:

either “speed of light” site:.edu

you’ll get 10’s of thousands of hits, but ZERO are about anything seriously asking the question, “hummm . … what effect does the ‘either’ have on the velocity of light?” The either theory was dis-credited by the the theory of relatively over 100 years ago. All these hits are about how the theory was dis-credited.

None of this means Lindzen is “right.” It does mean he’s highly relevant to the discussions currently ongoing w/in the climate research community.

Disgraceful Claims by Some on Left-Wing Who Are Science-Ignorant

I did a search for Dr. Lindzen on some of the top left-wing blogs and found references like this and this and this .

I spent many years in the trenches of the academy in a research lab training to be a research scientist. I didn’t study environmental science, but I do have first hand experience with how “science” works, from the bottom (i.e., coming up with a testable hypothesis, designing an experiment and/or mathematical/computational model (preferably both), statistical analysis, & interpretation) to the top, (i.e., finally taking all that data and telling (one hopes) a compelling story about some aspect of how the universe works (grounded in the data), and then putting the work through the hoops, i.e., presenting the work at invited talks, conferences, etc., and then, THEN, submitting the work for publication and dealing with reviewers and editors). It’s a BIG DEAL.

Anyone who’s consistently producing work is a GOOD scientist. The job isn’t to be “right.” Perhaps only God knows the “truth.” It is instead to successfully, creatively, intelligently apply known methods and techniques to the data, draw conclusions grounded in the data, than then present that to the world in the hopes that, in some way, it’ll, advance and inspire the thinking of others. If you don’t get this about “science,” you don’t get anything.

How Global Warming Alarmists Will Lost Their War Against Science

The smearing of hard working published scientists by such fear mongering  individuals & ne’er do wells as these announces, loud and clear, to the wider scientific community: I have not a clue about how scientific knowledge is produced — and worse, I don’t care: I have an agenda to pursue, an axe to grind.

This is how the left will eventually lose its most recent war against science.

More From libertarianromanticideal

• Global Warming & Climate Change | The Real Debate, Facts & Causes
• Is Obama Finally Starting to Understand How Misguilded The Stimulus Has Been?
• Why Liberal Michigan Smart does not Trump Texas Market Value | A Lesson in How the Economic World Works

Perception Management

In addition to the ‘better-than-expected’ jobs loss announced today for February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also went back and adjusted the employment numbers from April-July 2009:

With the release of February data on March 5, 2010, BLS has corrected April-July 2009 establishment survey estimates for all employees and women employees for the federal government series. The changes result from corrections to initial counts for Census temporary and intermit– tent workers for Census 2010.

Jesse @ Jesse’s Café Américan compare the views of the US employment Seasonally Adjusted “headline numbers” presented by the BLS in December 2009, and the current view that they are showing as the true number today after the two recent sets of revisions:

Jesse comments:

The net result of the revisions is that jobs were added to the beginning and the end of what will be defined as ‘the recession.’

This serves to now make the slump look steeper and more severe, and the recovery to be a little sharper, with plenty of jobs leftover to create a ‘flat impression’ in 2010 at worst.

In short, jobs were removed from almost every month in the revision during the slump, and shoved into the beginning and into the end.

That looks like a nice picture of a recovery, doesn’t it? See, the Feburary 2009 stimulus program and the strategy of massive bank bailouts have worked.

I have seen corporate managers who have come into a new position and inherited a mess jigger the numbers in a similar way. You make the slump look as bad as possible, and shove the excess profits or revenue into the beginning and the end of the problem, to make your efforts look as heroically effective as is possible.

However, to soften the blow, or add insult to injury, he adds:

In fairness to the Obama Administration, they are only doing what Bush II, Clinton, and Bush I had been doing right along with almost every statistic that they have issued. It’s called ‘perception management.’ (SnowJob: Revising the Jobs Report).

So, while “fixing” the economy isn’t really working, the Obama Admin is at least managing perceptions in an intelligent manner — now if only they could get Harry Reid to shut up:

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SkepticalScience.com is one of the few blogs out there that’s doing it right when it comes to the global warming “debate,” i.e., it’s going to the actual research papers.

Lately, they’ve been putting out excellent videos and articles that, for the lay person, effectively answer the “global warming deniers,” i.e., those individuals that do not believe the climate is warming and/or do not believe that C02 plays any role. Check out the video below:

However, while this video is excellent, as well as the other posts knocking the legs out from under people who deny that the climate is getting warmer, I’m wondering — who, really, are these deniers? Billy Bob living in a trailer park eating mayonnaise sandwiches? There are people who don’t believe that humans ever went to the moon, but nobody pays much attention to them let alone puts in a lot of time and effort trying to debunk their arguments (which will never convince the Billy Bob’s of the world anyway). So what’s the point here — or rather, what’s the big news? The climate is warming? “Everybody” knows that.

True, there are influential senators (Inhofe) and media personalities (Glen Beck) who are highly visible deniers, but — again, really — how much of a influence are they? Hard to believe that their uninformed opinions are somehow going to turn the tide of thinking on this issue.

So, why is skepticalscience.com spending so much time on this? It’s not where the real debate is.

Recently, Fermilab invited MIT’s  Dr. Richard Lindzen to give a talk at one of their colloquiums:

Fermilab colloquium: “The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming,” Presenter Richard Lindzen, 2/10/2010 4:00 PM
(you’ll need RealPlayer to view the colloquiums. Install RealPlayer as a stand alone application, and then you should be able to view the talk in either IE or firefox).

Fermilab was interested in Dr. Lindzen because 1) climate change is definitely a “hot” topic and because 2), perhaps more importantly, they’re interested because almost all the research is based on computational-statistical models, and Fermilab has some of the best experts in computational and statistical modeling in the world. They’re clearly in a position to both understand and critique the computational and statistical methodology that lies at the heart of predictive-based climate research.

The Colloquium is long — it clocks in at over an hour, which is a long time for an afternoon colloquium, and then there was a 30min Q&A.

What might surprise readers of this blog is that Dr. Lindzen agrees with 98% of this video. I’m not a climate expert, but listening to his talk, he would disagree with almost nothing here: the climate is warming and that C02 plays a role. You’d be hard pressed to find a climate scientist or a physicist that would disagree with that.

Where might Dr. Lindzen part company with some who believe the climate is warming? Dr. Lindzen is convinced that climate change global alarm is dead wrong because of the lack of evidence for positive feedback in the climate.

This was an influential talk because of it’s speaker (Dr. Lindzen) and it’s location (Fermilab), and it’s making it’s way around the net and in professional academic circles.

Anyone who wants to hear the best argument against global warming alarm should check out the talk.

More From libertarianromanticideal

• How Climate Change Science Really Works | How Scientific Knowledge is Produced
• Stop Global Warming By Eating Your Furry Pet
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More Government Control Over Health Care or Less | Outcomes And Why Your Dog is Luckier Than You

Guess which story comes from a system where the government dominates a health care system and which story comes from a largely free-market health care system:

Story One:

Story Two:

Hat Tip: Reason.tv: Treat Me Like a Dog!

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• Fatal Flaws In HR3200, Liberal Health Care Reform | Pro-market, Free-market health insurance solutions
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• Predictable Negative Outcome of Greater Government Control over Health Care

Here’s the Radical Left-Wing/Statist Partisan Democratic argument for increased government control of the health care industry:

Fact: The U.S. directly or indirectly controls 46% of a health care where costs are spiraling out of control.
Fact: Radical left-wing partisan Democrats want to increase the percentage.
Conclusion: costs will fall and overall health care will improve.

Don’t know if you quite agree with this? Let’s try a parallel argument from a libertarian, i.e., “common sense” perspective:

Assume: Smoker Joe smokes about 46% of one pack of cigarettes per day — and he’s not feeling as well as he used to (before he started smoking).
Assume: Smoker Joe’s Radical Left-Wing/Statist Partisan Democratic doctor wants him to increase the amount he smokes, say, to 75% of pack per day.
Radical Left-Wing/Statist Partisan Democratic doctor’s conclusion: Smoker Joe will feel better in no time!

A few days I posted a video about the NHS run Stafford­shire hospital scandal in England. The story sounds like a page torn from a history textbook about a Soviet era hospital system.

Canadian Doctor to Patient: I would advise you to get over the boarder and find somebody and do something.

If bigger government health care passes, this is what U.S. citizens will eventually have to look forward to — warning: heartbreaking and appalling to watch:

England is one clear example of how NOT to reform health care.

I recommend reading David G. Green and Laura Casper’s economic report, Delay, Denial and Dilution: The Impact of NHS Rationing on Heart Disease and Cancer to see the inevitable outcome of the necessary rationing of government health care.

For those interested in a real solution to runaway health care cost, check out: Pro-market Alternatives to Democratic Health Care Reform.

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• Government Controlled Health Care vs. Free Market Health Care
• Health Care Reform, Reconciliation, Trust in Big Government Falls
• Truth About Liberal Health Care Reform | Partisan Liberals become Anti Liberal-Health-Care-Reform Allies

President Obama’s new health care plan will all but guarantee the elimination of private insurance and lead to a single payer government-run health care system, says policy analyst Matt Patterson of the National Center for Public Policy Research.

In the new report, “White House Health Care Plan Contains Back Door to a Public Option,” Patterson found that President Obama’s health care reform plan would:

* Create a new federal agency charged with monitoring health insurers to make sure that proposed premium increases are not “unreasonable” or “unjustified”; this agency could compel private insurers to lower premiums, offer rebates or “take other actions to make premiums affordable.“
* Dictate that health insurers cover those with pre-existing conditions and saddle them with billions in new taxes and fees.Patterson calls Obama’s ploy “breathtakingly audacious,” noting, “Far from being able to keep the plan you like, the president’s health care plan seems designed to make sure you end up with only one option for your health care — the government.” (President Obama’s Health Proposal Would Lead to Public Option).

Heath Care For All | Continuing Stories in Pursuing A Moral Imperative

… Far from being able to keep the plan you like, the president’s health care plan seems designed to make sure you end up with only one option for your health care — the government …

A few days ago I was <sarcastic tone>inspired</sarcastic tone> by Kirsten Pow­ers’ op-ed in The New York Post, “Why cost shouldn’t stop health-care reform” when she wrote:

The rich­est, most pow­er­ful, most amaz­ing nation in the world should treat its cit­i­zens who fall ill bet­ter than some bro­ken Third World coun­try. If we can afford to try to rebuild Afghanistan with lit­tle hope of suc­cess, then argu­ing about pay­ing for Amer­i­cans to have health cov­er­age seems petty.

There are Many Kinds of Costs

<sarcastic tone>I said I’d try to post exam­ples of how other people from rich, pow­er­ful, and amaz­ing nations refused to flinch from the costs of health care reform — monetary and human — in the hopes that we Amer­i­cans can learn to be made of the same tough stuff as they, and if collectively, nationally, they can make tough choices about their sick and dying cit­i­zen, why we cer­tainty can take equally tough stands in our com­mit­ment to the moral imper­a­tive of forcing Heath Care For All, so help us God!</sarcastic tone>

Here’s one story about what the British were willing put up with for over 3 years in the pursuit of the moral imper­a­tive of mandating health care for all until a private citizen, Julie Bailey, founded the campaign group Cure The NHS after the death of her mother at the hospital (and start getting ready to join groups like this here in the U.S. if ObamaCare comes to pass):

Patients Were Routinely Neglected By Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust An Inquiry Finds

[While pursuing a costly moral imperative] the NHS was preoccupied with cost-cutting, targets and process, and had lost sight of its responsibility to provide safe care said the NHS scandal inquiry chaired by Robert Francis QC.

It found patients were left unwashed, sometimes for up to a month, and that some staff showed a “disturbing” lack of compassion for people in their care.

Mr Francis said: “I heard so many stories of shocking care. These patients were not simply numbers, they were husbands, wives, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers grandparents.

“They were people who entered Stafford Hospital and rightly expected to be well cared for and treated.

“Instead many suffered horrific experiences that will haunt them and their loved ones for the rest of their lives.” (Patients ‘Routinely Neglected’ By Trust).

Coming To A Hospital Near You? | Government Care

American health care is not British health care, at least not yet. But if Democrats get their way, this country will rush to adopt a system much like the one that is killing people in Great Britain.

Democrats will say that what they have planned for U.S. health care is not a copy of the British system, though it’s been held up by the left as the model for years. But a nationalized health care system, no matter how it’s tailored, will collapse like other socialist programs. Government-run health care may at times look like it works, but it is unsustainable — and deadly. (www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis).

To read more about real solu­tions to the prob­lem of ris­ing heath care costs, see:

Pro-market Alter­na­tives to Demo­c­ra­tic Health Care Reform

See also:

• Why Isn’t Gov­ern­ment Health Care the Answer?
• What Should Be Done?
• FAQ: Consumer-Directed Health Care

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• Health Care Reform Is a Liberal Obsession | It’s The Left’s Iraq
• Heath Care For All | Stories of Pursuing A Moral Imper­a­tive Part 2
• The Blind Faith of Liberals | Liberal Big Government Health Care Reform | ObamaCare

Cynicism About Big Government

Reconciliation is a legislative process in the United States Senate intended to allow consideration of a contentious budget bill without the threat of filibuster. Introduced in 1974, reconciliation limits debate and amendment, and therefore favors the majority party.Reconciliation also exists in the United States House of Representatives, but because the House regularly passes rules that constrain debate and amendment, the process has had a less significant impact on that body. (Reconciliation —  Wikipedia).

nakedemperornews.com has a new featured video showing minority Republicans crying like babies about reconciliation:

oh … — wait! That’s a video of Obama & Dems in ‘05 crying about how the 51 Vote ‘Nuclear Option’ Is ‘Arrogant’ Power Grab and Against the Founders’ Intent!

Silly me. You know, I can’t tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats anymore, and apparently neither can most Americans: Americans’ trust in governmental institutions is shrinking.

I guess whether you’re for or against Reconciliation depends on who’s side you’re on and what you want:

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Government Shopping Spree

Even the Tax Policy Center — a project of the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution and Urban Institute — realizes that the government is way, Way, WAY overspending.

President Obama’s tax proposals for the 2011 budget will yield a $4.9 trillion shortfall Rather than $1.1 trillion, as the Obama Administration Claims

The budget assumes a baseline in which the 2001–2003 tax cuts are permanent (including the estate tax at its 2009 level), the exemption in the alternative minimum tax (AMT) is permanently indexed for inflation from its 2009 level, and that temporary expansions of refundability of the child tax credit and of the earned income credit are permanent. Those provisions would reduce revenues by $3.8 trillion over the 2010–2020 period. TPC’s analysis measures the impact of the tax proposals not against the administration baseline but rather against a current law baseline that assumes the 2001–2003 tax cuts expire as scheduled in 2011 and that the AMT exemption maintains its permanent level. Against that baseline, the administration’s tax proposals would cause much greater revenue losses than official budget estimates show [$4.9 trillion v. $1.1 trillion]. (Tax Policy Center, Tax Proposals in the 2011 Budget).

Taxation cannot create prosperity

The radical left-wing of the Democratic Party will take this as a call for increasing taxation, but as Bevan Sabo of Free Market Mojo (and Adam Smith) comments:

Taxation cannot create prosperity. While some taxation is necessary to provide for essential government functions (a police force, fire protection, a judicial system, national defense, etc.), wealth, progress, and prosperity can only be created through de-centralized planning. In other words, each individual pursuing his/her selfish interests leads to general prosperity – control disguised as altruism leads to stagnation and ruin. Adam Smith attempted to teach the world this lesson in 1776 – putting Obama’s economists over 300 years behind in their field. Perhaps Sir Winston Churchill summarized the argument best:

Can a people tax themselves into prosperity? Can a man stand in a bucket and lift himself up by the handle?

So, will the Democratic budget save us from the current economically killing Democratic agenda? Well, apparently a new study finds 79% of Americans believe in miracles. Good. We’re going to need one.

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Michigan residents just live like they are in the stone age

Coming from die hard leftest blogger in Michigan, this was just too good to pass by:

Those Texans are really misinformed (as are far too many other Americans). The Texas Tribune reviewed how ignorant many are of science, including widespread belief in young-earth creationism and that humans and dinosaurs coexisted (Almost One Third Of Texans Believe “The Flintstones” Showed Real Life).

While the post ostensibly makes fun of creationism, it also happens to be aimed, deliberately or not, at one of the most prosperous, fiscally conservative, libertarian, low tax burden, free-market oriented states in the union.

Michigan’s Hard Times

Compare Texas to the leftest blogger’s home state of Michigan, one of the most liberal, left-leaning, over-regulated, highest taxed economically battered states in the union. Michigan’s economy is very much in the thrall of liberalism — but that’s OK with the left-wing because they believe the real point of being here on earth is not really to actually do something, anything, to provide real material value in the lives of others, the point is to be so much more smarter and more moral then anyone else.

Yes, Michigan residents don’t believe that a cartoon about the stone age shows “real life,” because Michigan residents (sadly) live, economically,  like they’re in the Stone Age.

Modern liberalism has managed to place who one “is,” one’s “feelings,” “intentions,” or “values” above what one does, how one acts. The best example of this was the left-leaning Nobel peace committee awarded President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for intentions and values (an “honor,” by the way, that embarrassed Obama himself, for just this reason).

Markets Reward Value, Not IQ

Market theoreticians, both on the left and right, have to a large extent employed the equivalent of the Great Man theory of history to explain what makes markets and economies tick. According to this theory, the course of history is shaped not by the convergence of multiple, unpredictable events but by the intervention of great men.

The only problem with this neat little formulation is that it is wrong at every level. For starters, the idea that value creation is a one-way street from the top to the bottom is not just offensive, but it ignores the principle of comparative advantage, a key breakthrough in market theory. Put simply, this principle holds that everyone benefits by exchanging goods and services with everyone else, regardless of anyone’s inherent capabilities. It’s in the interest of even the most annoying “all-rounder” (as we say in India), who is better than me at everything, to specialize in those tasks in which our gap is the biggest and trade with me for those in which our gap is smaller. Under the elaborate division of labor that ensues, both the less-endowed and the better-endowed contribute to each others well being. (Markets don’t reward smart people. They reward value.)

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek (who actually did something to win his award) understood this principle:

In a functioning market, Hayek insisted, financial compensation depends not on someone’s innate gifts or moral character. Nor even on the originality or technological brilliance of their products. Nor, for that matter, on the effort that goes into producing them. The sole and only issue is a product’s value to others. Compare an innovation as incredibly mundane as a new plastic lid for paint cans with a whiz-bang, new computer chip. The painter could become just as rich as the computer whiz so long as the savings from spills that the lid offers are as great as the productivity gains from the chip. It matters not a whit that the lid maker is a drunk, wife-beating, out-of-work painter who stumbled upon this idea through pure serendipity when he tripped over a can of paint. Or that the computer whiz is a morally stellar Ph.D. who spent years perfecting his chip.

Markets are a fundamentally antielitist social force. (Markets don’t reward smart people. They reward value.)

Markets are a fundamentally antielitist social force. That’s probably what annoys left-wingers the most, and why Texas is so often reviled while crumbling statist-liberal states are embarrassingly defended and aplogized for at every left-wing turn.

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