Vignettes, Too

Still no time nor motivation to actually review anything in depth. I finished off five more of the Stephanie Plum mysteries, which are always good for a chuckle or three. Picked up a new series that a friend at work recommended, by Donna Leon, The Commissario Brunetti series which take place in Venice; really fun reading when you are at least somewhat familiar with the islands, lagunas and piazzas of La Serenissima.

Read Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer, which was not particularly surprising in its description of the global reach of the former first family's money grubbing influence peddling, but which got me to wondering whether this isn't just the tip of the iceberg, and if most global business operates in the same corrupt fashion, with the willing collusion of the world's political class. The magnitude of the dollars, rubles and francs involved is simply mind-boggling.

Picked up a trio of ebooks by a blogger whom I've been following for years, The Grey Man series by J.L. Curtis; Vignettes, Changes and Payback. Good adventure fiction, set in the U.S. Southwest. He published a fourth novel around Labor Day. It will be on my TBR pile soon.

A couple other books that I have partial reviews written for. I'll try to finish those off and get them up on one of my better days.

True Enough by Farhad Manjoo

Manjoo seems to have set a new record for how quickly I grew disgusted with the premise of a book. Far from being an unbiased study of fragmentation of our news media, his premise immediately veered to the left, explaining why conservatives and Republicans believe all of the lies that come from Fox News, while the progressives and Democrats live in a fact-based world.

I'm sorry, this book was not "true enough".

Stonewalled by Sheryl Attkisson

After reading Sheryl Attkisson's book, I think I feel a great deal as does she, frustrated by my inability to get to the root truths of a number of recent political scandals of the Obama administration. Some of what she wrote filled in details about Fast & Furious, Benghazi, the (Un)Affordable Care Act, and the horrible waste of taxpayer dollars given to "Green" companies whose owners were donors. But the key questions still remain unanswered. How high in the administration are the people responsible, and are these stories all simply the result of incompetence or something more sinister? I knew before, and Attkission confirms, that the media is in deep with progressive interests as well as big business, and for the most part cannot be trusted to do old-fashioned investigative reporting which speaks truth to power.

"What did we really tell America on this night that they didn't already know?
My own network is passing up stories on the crumbling Affordable Care Act; an exclusive investigation I offered about a significant military controversy; an investigation uncovering a history of troubles surrounding Boeing's beleauguered Dreamliner; and massive government waste, fraud, and abuse. Largely untouched are countless stories about pharmaceutical dangers affecting millions of Americans, privacy infringement, the debate over President Obama's use of executive orders, the FDA monitoring of employee email, the steady expansion of terrorism, the student loan crisis, the confounding explosion in entitlements, the heartbreaking fallout from the Haiti earthquake, continuing disaster for government-subsidized green energy initiatives, the terrorist influences behind 'Arab Spring', various congressional ethics investigations and violations, the governments' infringement of and restrictions on the press, escalating violence on the Mexican border, the debt crisis, the Fed's role and its secrecy, to name just a few."

After the election, President Obama issued orders to all Federal agency heads, directing them he was "commited to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government."

But what was the reality?

"But barely into his second term, the Obama administration finds itself making history instead for its secrecy and assaults on the press. I, and other investigative reporters who are fully experienced in the indelicate art of prying public information from the tight grip of the government's hands, have now begun comparing notes about the daunting challenges this administration poses. There's delay, denial, obstruction, intimidation, retaliation, bullying, surveillance, and the possible threat of criminal prosecution. In my view, and that of other national reporters, this is proving to be the least transparent administration we've covered."

No time to go into an in depth description of all of the problems with the current administration, the bureaucracy and the incestuous relationship between big business and government today. Just go read the book.

By the People by Charles Murray

 I'm a big Charles Murray fan, but this one was a little disappointing to me. The first third of the book describes some of the problems he perceives with the out of control growth of government interference in the lives of U.S. citizens, but I thought his prescription for dealing with the regulatory state and perhaps rolling back some of its excesses was a little lame. The last third of the book simply seems to be a rehash of some of the research he's described in other works, such as Coming Apart.

I was surprised to see here that "The American Bar Association's Canons of Professional Ethics explicitly forbade 'stirring up litigation, directly or through agents.'" at one point in time. I can barely remember a time without ambulance chasers and other leeches.

Evidently, at one point in time the purpose of tort law was simply to "make whole" some person who had been harmed by the negligence of another. If no negligence was involved, no compensation was owed. Such cases were few. In 1944, there was a California Supreme Court decision which set the precedent for the situation we have today involving strict liability - a defendant can be forced to pay damages even if no negligence occurred. And the floodgates were opened to all the frivolous and damaging lawsuits of the last half century.

In the matter of the Executive Branch choosing which of Congress' laws to enforce,

"Presidents have been pushing against the limits on their powers since George Washington, and that tendency has increased as the limits on government have loosened over the last seventy years...a broad range of constitutional scholars agree that President Obama's unilateral actions (on changing the provisions of the Affordable Care Act and selectively enforcing immigration laws) are not the thin edge of a wedge. He is merely pounding an existing wedge deeper into constitutional limits on presidential power."

Perhaps the most damning chapter in this book is the one titled A Systematically Corrupt Political System.

"..today's political process has produced politicians who, while keeping within the law, do things that are operationally indistinguishable from the way Third World kleptocrats operate."

Think about these identifying factors.

In a corrupt system:

• Government Service is a Way to Get Rich
• You Pay for Access to the Authorities
• Officials Shake Down Businesses
• Public Officials Shower Their Friends with Gifts
• Bribes Produce Results Independently of Political Principle

Think about it a bit.

One of the examples that got me a little hot,

"...the Wireless Tax Fairness Act was expected to come to a vote in the fall of 2011. It was supported by the cell-phone industry, had broad bipartisan support, and was certain to pass. But for months House Speaker John Boehner did not bring the bill to the floor for a vote. FinbVerizon sent checks to members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican."

It's called "tollbooth" charges by author P.eter Schweizer.

Murray's fundamental theory of political corruption.

"Corruption in the political process varies directly with the number and value of things that politicians have to sell."

and his fundamental theory of democratic politics,

"People who receive government benefits tend to vote for people who support those benefits."

This applies equally to middle class Social Security recipients, welfare mothers, farmers with sugar subsidies, and multi-billion dollar defense contractors.

There's a pretty good chapter towards the end of the book about the government shakedown of big businesses in the practice of levying large fines in negotiated "sealed", or secret settlements.

"If the government has been behaving with integrity in this process, and exposure of the sealed settlements would reveal that the companies have behaved badly enough to warrant their multibillion-dollar settlements, then corporations have no choice but to start behaving better. (this is the Progressive position on corporations js) But if it is the government that has been behaving badly, selectively choosing what regulations to enforce against whom so as to yield a large cash windfall (my naturally suspicious libertarian bent makes me believe this more likely js), corporate America will have to start asking itself whether it can coexist peacefully with the regulatory state."

America: Imagine a World Without Her by Dinesh D'Souza

Heh. I have an old colleague whose last name is D'Souza. When I first typed the title this post, I had his name as the author of this book, rather than Dinesh D'Souza. The mind works in mysterious ways.

D'Souza does a pretty good rebuttal of the Progressive view of America, as quoted below,

"According to the progressive critique, America was found in an original act of piracy; the early settlers came from abroad and stole the country from the native Indians. Then America was built by theft; white Americans stole the labor of African Americans by enslaving them for 250 years. The theft continued through nearly a century of segregation, discrimination, and Jim Crow. The borders of America were also extended by theft; America stole half of Mexico in the Mexican War. Moreover, America's economic system, capitalism, is based on theft since it confers unjust profits on a few and deprives the majority of workers of their "fair share." Finally, American foreign policy is based on theft, what historian William Appleman Williams termed "empire as a way of life." America's actions abroad are aimed at plundering other people's land and resources so that we can continue to enjoy an outsized standard of living compared to the rest of the world."

As an unabashed, patriotic, white cismale American capitalist, I can say for my part that he was pretty much preaching to the choir while he demolished these premises one by one. Without Western capitalism and Judeo Christian values, not to mention technology and modern medicine, far more of the people on planet Earth would still be living lives "nasty, brutish, and short".

I wish I had the energy to do a more thorough discussion. It was a very good read.

War: What is it Good For? by Ian Morris

 This began as an interesting read, detailing the benefits of the art of War as it pertains to the building of civilizations, such as the Roman, Han and Mauryan Empires. However, it fairly rapidly just got far too detailed for me to keep my interest up, so I stalled out about 125 pages in, and never got my momentum back again.

Some interesting excerpts:

"War has produced bigger societies, ruled by stronger governments, which have imposed peace and created the preconditions for prosperity. Ten thousand years ago, there were only about six million people on earth. On average they lived about thirty years and supported themselves on the equivalent of less than two modern American dollars per day."

"The good new is that we humans have proved remarkably good at adapting to our changing environment. We fought countless wars in the past because fighting paid off, but in the twentieth century, as the returns to violence declined, we found ways to solve our problems without bringing on Armageddon."

"Governments and laws bring their own problems, of course. "Formerly we suffered from crimes," Tacitus had one of his characters joke. "Now we suffer from laws." A government strong enough to stamp out wrongdoing...was also a government strong enough to do even greater wrong."

On the subject of the idyllic and peaceful existence of North American tribes before the scourge of the white man arrived on its shores,

"Excavations began at Crow Creek in 1978, and since then evidence for Native American massacres has come thick and fast. The most recent example (as I write) is at Sacred Ridge in Colorado, where a village was burned down around A.D. 800 and at least thirty-five men, women, and children were tortured and killed."

The effects of climate on civilization's rise are also discussed by Morris. He talks about the "Lucky Latitudes" where warmth, water and fertile soil allowed agriculture to develop on a large scale, leading to the rise of cities and societies larger than the nomadic tribes which had gone before. It's also interesting to note that the rise of civilization took place after Earth emerged from a series of Ice Ages, when the climate was conducive to agriculture, and that the Dark Ages took place during a cooling period when crop failures and famines made resources scarce.

There's the process dubbed "caging" by a pair of rival sociologists - when people are trapped by their lifestyle of farming and cannot merely flee to other hunting grounds, as hunter/gatherer societies of the past could. "Caged" people "find themselves forced - regardless of what they may think about the matter - to build larger and more organized societies. Unable to run away from enemies, thei either create a more effective organization so they can fight back or are absorbed into the enemy's more effective organization."

In the "some things never change" department,

"Excavators at Xuanquan, a Han military post office, have found twenty-three thousand undelivered letters, painted on bamboo strips between 111 B.C. and A.D. 107 (many of them complaints about how unreliable the mail was)."

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

 As in his earlier books, Lewis tackles a subject that is probably mind-numbingly complex to most Americans, and turns it into an interesting narrative. In Flash Boys he digs into the story of high frequency trading, or HFT, and how its growth has created a hidden "tax" on all investors.

The basic idea is that sometime shortly after the advent of fiber optic cables which transmit stock trading information between brokerages, banks and exchanges some traders realized that the amount of time information took to reach its destination could vary, depending on the length of the path taken, and that "All optical fibers were not created equal; some kinds of glass conveyed light signals more efficiently than others." Therefor, if they  paid for connections to the exchanges with very short physical distances, they could see the information on price changes and orders being placed before anyone else, and take advantage of that information in various ways to make money.

"The race they (high speed traders) needed to win was not a race against the ordinary investor, who had no clue what was happening to him, but against other high speed traders."

For a vastly simplified example, a large investment firm might want to place an order to buy a million shares of Coca Cola stock, and as a prelude to that order, they would begin by placing a small order, just to find out what the current market price is. A high frequency trader who is in the position to see that small order being placed before any other sellers see it can immediately place orders of their own which drives up the demand, which drives up the price, and they make a profit on the spread between the two.

Brad Katsuyama, who worked for the investment arm of the Royal Bank of Canada, discovered that somehow "the market" seemed to be anticipating his stock orders, and between the time he got a price quote, and then actually placed the order, only seconds later, the price had risen. This was costing his bank and its clients a great deal of money. As he began to investigate things to try to figure out why this was happening, he uncovered the entire murky business of the high frequency traders, and embarked on a crusade to make the market "fair" once again for all investors.

If you're thinking that you shouldn't care, because it's just the big banks getting played, and they make lots of money anyway, you need to remember that every small investor with a 401K plan has their money with some brokerage firm or bank, and every time the mutual fund in that 401K buys and sells stock, it costs more and sells for less, because of the HFT folks. We all get skinned.

One little interesting tidbit:
"During World War II his (Brad Katsuyama) Japanese Canadian grandparents had been interned in prison camps in western Canada."

I thought only the big bad U.S. interned its own citizens during the war. You mean to tell me that other nations thought their foreign born citizens might be a security risk, too?

Lewis also talks about "dark pools" a bit. A dark pool is an internal stock exchange run by a big bank in which one client is able to sell to another client very quietly, without the public exchanges becoming aware of the transaction, while the bank takes a cut of the transaction.

"The amazing idea the big Wall Street banks had sold to big investors was that transparency was their enemy. If, say, Fidelity wanted to sell a million shares of Microsoft Corp. - so the argument ran - they were better off putting them into a dark pool run by, say, Credit Suisse than going directly to the public exchanges. On the public exchanges, everyone would notice a big seller had entered the market, and the market price of Microsoft would plunge. Inside a dark pool, no one but the broker who ran it had any idea what was happening."

I rather loved this quote from one of the Irish-born programmers, Ronan, who went to work with Brad in his crusade to take down the HFTs.

 "I'm making thirty-five and they're making a buck twenty and they're f**king idiots."

And in the spirit of the corruptocracy that our nation has beome:

"...more than 200 SEC staffers since 2007 had left their government jobs to work for high-frequency trading firms or the firms that lobbied Washington on their behalf. Some of these people had played central roles in deciding how, or even whether, to regulate high-frequency trading." 2011 RBC study

Talking about why Russians seemed to end up programming for the HFTs,

"Good Russian programmers, they tend to have had that one experience at some time in the past - the experience of limited access to computer time."

I remember those days, myself. We used to have to make our programs lean and mean, because they ran on shared resources, which we were allowed to use only in specific time slots. With apparently unlimited data storage space and massive amounts of RAM available on inexpensive computing platforms these days, it's no wonder code multiplies indiscriminately.


This book was both fascinating and a bit worrying. Lewis never does come right out and say, "Brokerage A and Bank B have the programs in place to not get taken advantage of by HFT" and I really wish he had, so I'd know where to place my bets.

Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff by Matt Kibbe

 I was expecting from the subtitle of this book to encounter a well-reasoned set of platform planks, derived from first principles, but didn't get that, exactly, just more of a litany of recent government actions that should make us favor a more limited government. Perhaps some of this stuff is unknown to those who don't like to be bothered with current events, but I've already viewed most of these with some degree of alarm.

There are, however, some well-written bits.

"We should always be skeptical of too much concentrated power in the hands of government agents. They will naturally abuse it. Outside government, an unnatural concentration of power - such as the extraordinary leverage wielded by mega-investment banks or government employee unions - is always in partnership with government power monopolists."

Kibbe writes about the trials of finding Ayn Rand's works in a bookstore before everything was available at our fingertips. I used to spend my days off trolling all the local bookstores looking for undiscovered science fiction and fantasy to add to my library, and took every opportunity while traveling to visit used book stores, as well.

"Back in the day, you couldn't just log into your account on Amazon.com and find it, or the multitude of books related to it. I looked in any bookstore, at every opportunity. It was difficult to find."

I think Kibbe and I might be contemporaries, as this passage rang some bells for me, taking me back to when I was making less than minimum wage working at the University of Idaho food service in the SUB.

"I was able to pay my tuition by clearing trees and washing dishes for the college (students were exempt from the minimum wage that had been such a barrier to my earlier entry into the workforce)."

So, if the Affordable Care Act is such a boon to mankind, why is every organization with political pull doing their best not to be covered under its provisions?

"...about 1200 businesses have been granted exemptions from the ObamaCare employer mandate...labor unions representing 543,812 workers and private companies employing 69,813 workers..."


I found the following passages rather amusing:

Nobel laureate James Buchanan's "The message of Keynesianism might be summarized as: What is folly in the conduct of a private family may be prudence in the conduct of the affairs of a great nation."

versus

Adam Smith's "What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom."

On the individual mandate which represents another vast transfer of wealth from the working young adults to their grandparents:

"Why not respect young people enough as sovereign individuals to let them choose? Why not let young people save for their future health care needs tax free in exchange for voluntarily choosing a catastrophic health insurance policy?"

On the subject of imprisonment for drug offenses:

"The government should protect us from violence against other individuals. The sort of self-inflicted bad things that people can do to themselves, we should try to work as a society to minimize that, but putting people in jail for doing bad things to themselves is just not good for society."

The Manifesto

1. Comply with the laws you pass
"rather than craft narrow exemptions or even delay implementation...the Senate decided instead to exclude legislative and executive staffers from the online disclosure requirements of the STOCK act."

2. Stop spending money we don't have
3. Scrap the tax code
4. Put patients in charge
5. Choice, not conscription
6. End insider bailouts

Pelosi on TARP "It just comes down to one simple thing. They have described a precipice. We are on the brink of doing something that might pull us back from that precipice., I think we have a responsibility. We have worked in a bipartisan way."

7. Let parents decide
8. Respect my privacy
9. End the Fed monopoly
10. Avoid entangling alliances
11. Don't take people's stuff
12. Defend your right to know

All good ideas, but unlikely ever to be implemented, as the political and bureaucratic classes are far too enamored of their wealth and power and are entangled with the corporate special interests. Both major parties are in it up to their eyeballs, and dismantling the bureaucracy in Washington would take a Category 7 hurricane.

Things that Matter by Charles Krauthammer

 I had imagined that this book was going to be an autobiography, but it was not. It is actually a collection of Krauthammer's columns, written over the decades, on subjects as diverse as the utility of a pithy "F" word and its two and three word combinations, "the deuce is the preferred usage when time is short and concision is of the essence" to reminiscences about historical figures as diverse as Martin Luther King and Winston Churchill.

His writing is very much like his speech, carefully considered, in measured breaths, perhaps governed by his difficulty breathing after being paralyzed in his youth.

He covers the "central axiom of partisan politics - Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil." with phrases like this one, "Liberals believe that human nature is fundamentally good. The fact that this is contradicted by, oh, 4,000 years of human history simply tells them how urgent is the need for their next seven-point program for the social reform of everything."

On the marathoning craze of triathlons, decathlons and grueling "mudders", he writes, "Now that everyon can afford status symbols like designer jeans, conspicuous consumption gives way to conspicuous exertion. Sheer exhilarating length becomes a value in itself."

On Bush Derangement Syndrome, "Now, I cannot testify to Howard Dean's sanity before this campaign, but five terms as governor by a man with no visible tics and no history of involuntary confinement is pretty good evidence of a normal mental status. When he avers, however, that 'the most interesting' theory as to why the president is 'suppressing' the Sept. 11 report is that Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance, it's time to check on Thorazine supplies."

We may be seeing some of that flowing the other way now from partisans who believe the current president to be Satan incarnate.

On Sensitivity Training:
"This project for the inculcation of proper human feelings through behavioral technique is either sinister or idiotic. It is sinister when it works, as in Communist China, where they have learned how to break one's character through the extremes of coercion, deprivation and torture. These means are not yet available to American educators and family therapists. Which explains their low success rate."

One hears of the mob storming the Bastille during the French Revolution. Did you realize that it only held seven prisoners - the Marquis de Sade had already been set free a week earlier.

Krauthammer echoes something I've long thought, "I'm not one of those who see gay marriage or polygamy as a threat to, or assault on, traditional marriage. The assault came from within. Marriage needed no help in managing its own long, slow suicide, thank you."

Congratulations to those homosexuals who are now free to marry...and fight...and divorce...and ruin their children's lives. Bon voyage!

Though many of his essays on Iraq and the wars we fought there were written some time ago, he seems prescient in his cautionary tales here, foretelling the total disaster we are seeing right now as the vacuum left by the U.S. withdrawal after the Obama administration failed to negotiate a SOFA was filled with Al Qaeda affilliated jihadists wreaking havoc.

On our brief stint as the sole global power:

"American preeminence is based on the fact that it is the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict in whatever part of the world it chooses to involve itself."

Unfortunately, we have lost our way in determining our national interests and seem to have no coherent or cohesive foreign policy left, not surprising when the likes of Hillary and John Kerry are in charge of State.

And, he says,

"Americans have a healthy aversion to foreign policy. It stems from a sense of thrift. Who needs it? We're protected by two great oceans. We have this continent practically to ourselves. And we share it with just two neighbors, both friendly, one so friendly that its people seem intent on moving in with us."

That's the funniest thing I've heard about our illegal immigration crisis yet.

Educational, and fully worth the time invested in the reading.

The Real Crash by Peter Schiff

 There's nothing very surprising in the early going in Peter Schiff's new book, though it does serve as a good introductory work for those who aren't familiar with the workings of the Federal Reserve, and the role which the government has played in the most of the financial crises recently, such as the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble and the credit bubble.

Schiff relates the tale of what happened in the Harding administration after WWI, when the economy saw an increase in unemployment and a lack of economic growth - the last time in our history that a politician had the courage to let us suffer the pain of doing the right thing - and Harding "paid off the war bonds, slashing the national debt by one third".  The money used to pay off that debt was removed from the money supply, which put a downward pressure on prices, and an upward pressure on interest rates, which discouraged borrowing and encouraged saving.

"Instead of trying to fix the lagging economy through stimulus, the Fed responded to the economic contraction with monetary contraction."

Within a few years, unemployment had shrunk to 2.4%, and the stock market had exceeded its previous highs.

Quite a contrast to our government's response to the 2008 crash, and quite a contrast in results, as well.

On the creation of the dot-com bubble, Schiff writes,

"Many liberal economists and Fed defenders will argue that the Fed didn't create the stock market and dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. They blame 'greed' and 'manias.' There's a small degree to which they are right: the Fed did not specifically steer capital toward dot-com stocks. The Fed just created the excess capital that needed a home, and market forces and other government policies determined where that money went."

Schiff brings up an interesting distinction regarding the mortgage interest deduction.

"This is a huge mortgage subsidy...it distorts the market in favor of homeownership (more precisely, leveraged homeownership)."

The real estate bubble, he argues, was also brought on primarily by the Fed and other government policies. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guaranteed subprime mortgages in numbers never seen before, the Fed made cheap money readily available to lenders, the Community Reinvestment Act pushed banks to lend to poor people who would never have previously qualified for a loan, and the Bush administration, through the American Dream Downpayment Act,  provided grants to first time homebuyers.

The next bubble Schiff sees forming is the "government bubble",  a rapidly growing federal debt caused by out of control spending, reckless borrowing, and the Fed's inflationary policies.

Schiff busts the myth of government "job creation", by showing its many failures in that area, but also showing that the government's attempts to create jobs actually misallocate resources that could create jobs in other areas the government hasn't blessed with its favors.

The money quote:

"The problem isn't that the government bets on the wrong horses. It's that the government should be at the track in the first place."

In fact, government can best create jobs by staying out of the way.

"Jobs come from (a) the incentive to make a profit and (b) capital formation. The harder government makes it for employers to earn profits and the less we save to finance capital formation, the fewer jobs that will be created."

He spends a bit of time talking about "Hiring Taxes", those costs associated with creating a new job for employers, such as the employer match on Medicare and Social Security, unemployment insurance, worker's compensation, and other taxes, including new costs imposed by the ACA, aka Obamacare.

Schiff claims that people could take the additional money they would be paid if these hiring taxes were eliminated to "self insure" on some of these things. I have to differ with him there. Most people, unfortunately, will not do the wise or prudent thing, they'll simply spend the excess on consumer goods. We've seen this with the optional retirement plans like 401Ks and IRAs, we've seen it with young healthy folks failing to sign up for employer-provided health insurance, and recently the ACA, and if we went to an optional "social security" system, they'd probably not put anything away for retirement there unless forced to.

Heh. In contrast to the whole "follow your passion" movement these days, Schiff mentions in passing,

"With a few exceptions most people have jobs only because they need a job in order to afford the stuff they really want and need."

And, under the category of "preaching to the choir", he says,

"Entry-level jobs are not supposed to provide enough income to support a family. By the time individuals are old enough to marry and have children they should have acquired the skills necessary to command much higher pay. They acquire those skills working for low wages while still in their teens and prior to marriage. If the (artificially and legislatively high) minimum wage prevents them from getting those jobs, they will never acquire the skills necessary to support a family. In other words, the minimum wage knocks the bottom rung off the job ladder, making it impossible for many ever to climb up."

I like,

"While politicians and the media portray regulations as a way to keep 'big business' in check, the real effect of regulation is often to crush their smaller competitors and to keep others from even entering the fray to begin with."

and,

"So there you see the real threat the FDIC was created to battle: banks were losing business because customer didn't trust them. The real effect of government deposit insurance is not to protect depositors, but to protect banks."

When the Fed inflates our money supply, Schiff says,

"When inflation's effects show up in the form of rising prices, consumers don't typically blame politicians, they blame the merchants. In fact, politicians - the ones who caused the higher prices - are often the first ones to scapegoat merchants or manufacturers when prices start rising."

Schiff also debunks Warren Buffet's mantra that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. It seems Warren is only talking about his personal income tax rate, not the amount that Berkshire Hathaway, of which Buffet is the primary owner, paid on its earnings - $5.6 billion.

He proposes some "macro" solutions in the middle section of the book, including:

• Return the Fed to its original mandate
• Tax Reform
• Return to the Gold Standard
• Eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid
• Deregulate the Financial Industry
• Fix Higher Education
• Fix Healthcare
• Shrink Government

I think we've seen over the last few decades that there is little actual political will to allow free market policies and the principles of limited government "fix" these problems. They all sound like great ideas, but I am really doubtful that any of them will ever come to pass, absent a black swan event that forces us in that direction. Schiff's Real Crash may be that event, but the magic eight ball isn't giving out any answers right now.

During all of the years my kids were going to school and participating in band, orchestra and choir, I got to listen to music teachers lecture the parents about how it was a proven fact that learning to play music was good for children's grades in all the other subjects. I had my own theory about that, since I would see the same group of parents - heavily involved with their children's success - at all of the other school events, soccer games, football games, and so forth. The parents encouragement and active participation in making sure their children's lives were enriched and educational was, in my opinion, more important than whether or not they played music.

Schiff says something similar about the mantra that people who attend college will earn a significantly higher income than those who do not.

"In other words, all the factors (being a hard worker, coming from wealth, attending private or good public schools, being smart, having parents who attended college) that make someone more likely to go to college and finish college are also the same factors that, in and of themselves, raise a person's likely income."

Another thing upon which he and I agree, and which I have believed since I first attended college, decades ago:

"As an employer, even if you think college has no value, you might count on colleges to perform a screening function. Getting into college and finishing college indicates some level of competence and ability to follow instructions."

With respect to the huge "public service" push to make sure that all students in the U.S. attend college:

"Who is the real beneficiary from policies and cultural biases that push more and more eighteen-year-olds to go to college? The answer, of course, is the educational establishment itself."

It's all about the benjamins, baby.

And the reason for the skyrocketing college costs we've seen (applies to healthcare also):

"This is typical government action. Wreck an industry with subsidies and regulation; blame the ensuing failure on capitalism; then 'solve' the problem with a complete government takeover."

Bingo.

Regarding ridiculous student loan debt:

"...it's hypocritical for Congress to push eighteen-year-olds to take on $20,000 or more in debt. Our federal government is always trying to say who shouldn't be borrowing, and which loans are 'predatory,' claiming that lenders are exploiting people who don't know better. Is there any clearer example of someone who doesn't understand debt than a high school senior who has never handled his on finances on a meaningful level?"

Schiff does a great job of identifying many of the root causes of our huge debt problem, and lays out another prediction of how it will all end - badly, of course. He proffers some libertarian-flavored solutions for most of the causes, which will, in my opinion, never get implemented due to lack of political will to do the right or necessary thing. It's far simpler to bury our heads in the sand and pretend everything is all right.

Also unfortunately, the "personal" solutions he offers aren't much better, for the lower to mid- middle class. His company, EuroPacific Capital, only serves high income, high net worth individuals, and the types of services they provide for wealth protection and management are unavailable to average hard-working folks. Nothing he prescribes is significantly different than what I've seen before from other Cassandras, and the practical issues remain the same. If it is possible for you to do so, he recommends getting your money out of America and out of the US dollar.

I've got a bit of Kiwi shrapnel* lying around somewhere, I should be ok.

This is a book which most people would benefit from reading, but it's unlikely that the ones who need it the most, will.



*a New Zealand slang term for pocket change

The Nanny State Blues

Ranting variations on a theme

One of the persistent memes in US politics today is that people are essentially incapable of taking care of themselves, and thus the government must be called upon to take care of them – to act in their best interests. I’m not even going to get into the silliness of government officials knowing what’s best for anyone (and how do we know they're more qualified than the folks they're assigned to take care of?); that’s an entirely different discussion. I’m afraid that anyone with even a lick of sense and powers of observation would have to agree with the first principle here – a significant number of people are, quite frankly, not doing a good job of taking care of themselves, and really do need someone to take care of them; the matter of who should do so we’ll leave for another day.

Healthcare

One of the justifications for passing the silly ACA six years ago was that there were millions of uninsured people out there. A segment of the demographics counted was the young people who simply felt that they didn’t need health insurance, or that it was too expensive.

I’ve had some personal and anecdotal experience in that area, as I once worked for a company that offered really nice health insurance coverage at what I felt was a very reasonable price. A young coworker who was also a personal friend determined that he and his lovely wife were young and didn’t want to pay the premium for their coverage.

This was fine until she contracted a rare form of terminal cancer. Her illness and death left him not only emotionally but financially devastated, because he felt that he “couldn’t afford” his portion of the company subsidized the health insurance. How many of the health care bankruptcies in our country start with a tale much like this one?

Yet I am reluctant to endorse legislation which makes it mandatory for a person to purchase health care insurance. It seems a violation of their rights to me.

Retirement

Every other day in the media and the financial papers, it seems, there is another story about how Americans have only saved an average of $1000, $40000 or some other absurdly low figure in their 401Ks or IRAs. Surely something ought to be done about it, right? Honestly, I’m afraid many people are not quite bright enough to figure out that they really are going to need some money to retire on some day. Maybe they’re relying on hitting the MegaMillions jackpot at some point.

I’m sure a number of them say to themselves, “Some day, when I’m making $X a year, I’ll start to put money in a 401K. Some sweet day!” But for most of them, that day never quite rolls around, and when the kids are finally out of college and the nest is empty, they look around and think, “Wow! I really need to get to work on this retirement thing.”

So, the government proposes some mandatory retirement plan (I thought we already had a pyramid scheme mandatory plan called Social Security) like MyIRA, where they’ll put your money away in an account earmarked just for you. If you’re foolish enough to believe they can be trusted not to spend all of that money, too, I’m not sure your survival instincts are well-developed enough that you’re going to survive long enough to retire, so it may be a moot point.

Again, I don’t believe in coercion to force people to buy government sponsored bonds and slow growth funds in a MyIRA, but someone’s got to beat them about the head and shoulders to wake them up, right?

Diet

What about recent legislation in New York which keeps those poor, coke-swilling fat folks from drinking too large a cup of sugar syrup? I mean, it’s painfully obvious that obesity has reached gargantuan (see what I did there?) proportions in the U.S.A these days. Someone ought to do something about it!

Maybe if we just require bigger (supersized?) nutritional labels on the food we buy in the convenience stores, people will be able to read them. I hadn’t realized there was a connection between Type II diabetes and myopia, but perhaps I’m just oblivious to the obvious.

Verily, verily, I give unto you the most obvious commandment of them all. In order to lose weight, you must “Exercise more and eat less”. I have a personal friend who lost over 150 pounds by following those two simple rules over a year’s time. A stunning transformation!

I’m pretty certain even a kindergarten child can understand the concept, so we are we a nation of fatties? It can’t be a matter of awareness, it has to be all about self-control. But should we cede to the government the right to determine our diet? What if I like chocolate cake? Should some bureaucratic be allowed to rip it from my grasp? He can take if from my cold, dead, hands, if he dares.

Safety

What about safety issues, like motorcycle helmet laws, seatbelt laws, the mandatory use of child safety seats? When you remove my automatic, cynical reaction which tells me that someone at Graco is lobbying their congresscritter to keep making stricter child safety seat laws which oh so coincidentally coincide with their introduction of the latest, greatest and…dare I say it?...more expensive model, there’s not a whole lot of there there.

First, I believe that wearing a helmet makes riding a motorcycle somewhat safer, or at least not quite as likely to result in massive head injuries. I never ride anywhere without one, and I would never let a passenger ride without one. But do we really have to tell adults that they must wear them or be cited? If you're over 21, and I tell you not to stick your face in the lion's mouth, my responsibility pretty much ends there, if you decide to do it anyway. Again, I think some senator's brother-in-law owns a helmet manufacturing company, and came up with a new way to drum up some business.

Don't even get me started on the new "overfill protection" propane tanks we all had to buy to replace our perfectly good old "unsafe" tanks.

Child safety seats I can actually support, to some degree, as we all have an obligation to protect the small and helpless in our care. But it just seems crazy that every other year a new study comes out telling us which way they have to face, directly contradicting last year's data. I think that if you're hurtling down the road a mile a minute in a great big pile of steel, Murphy's Law is eventually going to catch up with you, and people are going to get hurt, no matter which way their seat is pointing.

I'm actually amazed sometimes, as I cruise down the multi-lane freeways, that all these people, each with their own agenda, manage to navigate to and fro every day with as little mayhem as they do. Think about it.

Ok, I'll climb down off my soapbox for a bit now.

The Myth of America's Decline by Josef Joffe

 For a while now, whenever I hear someone preaching a doom and gloom scenario, like the collapse of the economy, the total system crash of computers worldwide, or the disaster of global climate change, my first response is to try to figure out what they're selling. Hang on to your pocket books, folks, the hucksters are after your gold once again. If you hike to the headwaters of the source of the rumors of the dollar swirling 'round the drain, you'll usually find a hedge fund manager or a gold brokerage. When Y2K was the scare du jour, I'm pretty certain the generator salesmen were making out like bandits, and when I look at the carbon crazies' agenda, I see the sale of indulgences which rival the excesses of the early Popes, or heavy investments in "green" tech.

Josef Joffe does a great job of cataloging decades of pessimistic prophesies which our aspiring or existing leaders shouted from the rooftops in order to get our attention, our votes, or our cash. I had little yellow stickers all over the place, marking relevant passages, and it's tough to capture more than a taste of it here.

However, most of you can remember some of the scenarios we allegedly faced, even when they have directly contradicted one another from decade to decade.

"in the 1980s...following a nuclear exchange, a smoke- and particle-laden atmosphere would thrust the world into a new ice age. As of the 1990s...having unleashed the fossil-fueled fire of industry, they were now reaping global warming."

I remember, of course, when Russia was getting the lead over us in the Arms Race, and they were going to be able to counter our massive nuclear arsenal at will, and overwhelm Europe with their communist regime. Then, Japan was going gangbusters, and was buying real estate, banks, and other businesses right and left, and we were soon to be overtaken by Empire of the Rising Sun. Then, when Europe finally united and created a new global currency - the Euro - the demise of the almighty dollar was at hand.

"To praise others is to prod America. Russia, Europe, Japan, et al. will overtake us, unless we labor hard to change our self-inflicted destiny. The basic diagnosis remains constant; only the prescription will vary according to the ideological preferences of the seer...dramatization and exaggeration, fibbing or even outright falsehood, are all part and parcel of the prophecy."

It was rather interesting to note this little tidbit about all the Cassandras:

"...psychologist Philip Tetlock, after a an exhaustive review of 82,000 predictions by 284 policy experts over twenty years...performed worse than if they had blindly pulled their forecasts out of a hat...'These experts never lose their reputations, or their jobs, just  because long shots are their business'..."

The reality of the situation is that the United States has gained such a lead on the competition that catching up is a gargantuan task, and not as likely to happen as quickly as our detractors would hope. The data on GDP of the top world's economies shows that the grand total of ALL of  Brazil, Russia, China, India and Japan's combined economies to equal that of the United States.

The United States far outweighs all the rest in its sheer military power and tonnage, especially that which can be projected over global distances. In combat-capable aircraft, we have 3591, with the next closest contender being China, with 2004 (2012 statistics), in naval aviation, we have 1,429 to China's 311, In tankers and transport aircraft, we have 1,318 with the next closest being all of NATO Europe at 411, with china falling to a distant 5th with 77. The only statistic in which the U.S. "loses" is total number of men under military arms, where China has us doubled.

So, if it comes to a land war on the Asian mainland, we may have some issues. (Shades of Princess Bride!)

Joffe coins a phrase (or perhaps files off the serial numbers on it) for the type of economic growth which has been seen in the past in Japan and other Asian nations, which China is now pursuing - "modernitarianism". This is a combination of rapid modernization, industrially and technologically, with the full planning, backing and control of the state government. When combined with a ready supply of cheap labor which can be easily encouraged to move from the countryside to the cities where the industries are located, it can produce amazing double-digit returns for some period of time, but eventually runs afoul of its inherent limitations, compared to free market capitalism.

"The stronger the state's grip, the more vulnerable the economy to political shocks."

"Once the long run irons out the cyclical kinks, it spells out an enduring message: There is no endless double-digit growth in economic history; what goes up, eventually comes down to 'normal.'...no other country has escaped from this history since the Industrial Revolution..."

"Unconventional ideas and intellectual risk taking grow not out of the Politburo but from below. The government can shower money on the chosen, funding particle accelerators and space exploration (Green Power?). Yet the hardware will grind and grate without the right 'software', call it 'culture of freedom' or 'intellectual anarchy'."

This is not to say that what we've seen in the past in the West is unrestricted free market capitalism (I'm not sure we've really ever had that, despite the anti-monopoly propaganda resulting from the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons).

"Yet Asia by no means has a historical monopoly on this type of Asian values (corruption and cronyism). Indeed, lavish rent seeking, as granted by the state to favored groups, has worked its insidious ways in the West, as well. The two rapid risers of the late nineteenth century - the United States and Imperial Germany - enjoyed myriad kindness as from the cornucopia of the state, be they monopolies, cartels, franchises, subsidies, import barriers, or the suppression of labor unrest...the magnificent success story of the West unfolded behind the high walls of the nation-state, with the quite visible hand of the government bestowing succor and privilege. China didn't invent this model."

One of the most oft-repeated messages of doom is that the United States educational system has fallen far behind that of the rest of the world, and that our children have become woefully underprepared for life in college and beyond.

"A recent classic reads, 'Last year, more than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher education in China. In India, the figure was 350,000. In America, it was about 70,000'...Unsurprisingly, the alarm went hand in glove with a call for a lot more federal aid to engineering education."

China's "engineers" would be considered technicians in the United States. Our engineering schools are, in all reality, far better than most of their foreign competitors.


Our Federal government gives $36 billion annually to universities just for science and engineering programs. That budget dwarfs those of Europe and Asia.

Joffe pens, "Doom determines the national interest and then opens the national purse."

I'm seeing a version of this in my home state of Idaho right now. There's a constant barrage of commercials and advertisements in the media, telling us what a horrible job we're doing educating our children, and claiming that some unbelievably high percentage of our children cannot perform at grade level in reading, writing and 'rithmetic. I the true purpose of all of this propaganda is to get us all to vote for higher school levies and to lobby our state legislators to pass higher budgets for higher education... and lower education, for that matter.

I have to wonder how our terrible, horrible, no good, very bad school system here managed to send my daughter off to university to graduate in three years with a bachelors degree in mathematics (she wanted to be a math teacher until she sat through her first education class and couldn't stomach the nonsense they were spouting), and equipped one of her classmates with a full ride scholarship to Yale, another a music performance scholarship to USC, just to mention a few.

Listen, I think competent teachers can do a lot of good, but the most reliable predictor I've seen in my admittedly unscientific study of educational outcomes is the extent of parental involvement, encouragement, and support in that endeavor. Over and over again, I used to see the same group of several dozen parents at youth football, city soccer league, orchestra concerts, choir rehearsals, PTA events, school open houses, recitals, and so on ad nauseum. We weren't all rich, and some were definitely barely hanging on to the middle class, but we all cared, we all sacrificed, and we all spent whatever time it took to make sure our kids were getting everything they could out of their education.

Screw the fancy buildings and landscaping. Screw the computer labs. Screw the sports complexes, community centers, free school lunches, and teacher in-service days. None of that crap matters. Get the parents involved, make them responsible, and you'll see more success out of our schools. All the programs and educational theories in the world don't keep kids from failing. Families do.

If you think that  America is losing its edge, its competitive spirit, and its position as a leader in innovation:

"Today, the top three software companies in the world are American, so are eight of the top ten. Of the ten fastest-growing, six are American. There are no Chinese or Indian outfits in this lineup...There is no Chinese company among the top 100."

If you think all the smart folks coming here from overseas are heading back home with their newfound knowledge:

Of foreigners granted Ph.D.'s, 92% of Chinese recipients opted to stay in the U.S. after graduation, and 81% of Indians did the same. We are not suffering a brain drain, actually, we appear to be importing highly skilled, intelligent people.

So listen, folks, next time you hear how bad things are, and there's lots of shrieking how, "somebody's got to fix this"...check your pocketbooks. Someone is probably trying to sell you a bill of goods. America still Rocks!

Obama Zombies by Jason Mattera

 Mattera tells us all about how a media fully "in the tank" for candidate Obama, paired with an incredibly well run multimedia marketing campaign, put their man in the White House. In the runup to the 2012 election, democratic operatives and their strategies simply overwhelmed the republican campaign with a well-targeted message and relentless assault, combined with tactics from a high tech playbook.

Personally, during the campaign, I was struck by how many people I had previously known as rational individuals went out of their minds on the subject of finally having the opportunity to see a black man as president of the U.S. Mattera gives a number of examples of the typical Obama Zombie attitude.

A Tennessee State University student in an interview with MTV said, "It is a big issue with black women, whether we want to [vote for] a woman or an African American. I would love to see a joint ticket."

Mattera says "Here's an idea. How about we vote for the one with the best ideas. Groundbreaking, I know. Let it be said, I don't care if your name is Juan Carlos, John Smith, or John Wong, I will vote for you if you have the right ideas. Diversity is, um, irrelevant. The best thing about multiculturism is the food."

Reporter Joe Klein wrote,

"There aren't very many people - ebony, ivory or other - who have Obama's distinctive portfolio of talents....He transcends the racial divide so effortlessly that it seems reasonable to expect that he can bridge all the other divisions - and answer all the impossible questions - plaguing American public life."

As we've seen in the five years following, rather than bridging the racial divide, Obama has stoked the flames of racial conflict.

The most interesting part of this book was the section about how the Obama campaign totally outclassed the McCain campaign, using every technological weapon available to create a veritable e-blitzkrieg.

"As a McCain-Palin online adviser self-deprecatingly observed, 'Memo to self: next time get the co-founder of Facebook on your team.'"

"Oprah Winfrey addressed a rally of twenty-nine thousand people in South Carolina, campaign officials asked the crowd to text 'SC' to a specific Obama number. Thousands of cell phone numbers, just like that!"

This tactic was repeated at rallies all across the country to build a huge database of followers in every area of the country, that could be readily accessed and motivated to recruit others, to vote, and to work for the campaign.

I suspect that this book was merely an expansion of a paper or column that Mattera wrote which appeared elsewhere, detailing the Obama campaign's incredibly effective electoral tactics, and the remainder of the book was "filler", which sounds like most every other book I've read critical of progressive policies and candidates in the past half dozen years.

He outlines the Obama Zombies Talking points:

• Anti-war
• Global Warming
• Health Care Crisis
• Economic envy

I found nothing really new in any of this, just some affirmations of long held beliefs.
My progressive acquaintances have shouted for some time now "the free market doesn't work, it's time for something else!"

Mattera states well something I've believed for ages.

"The problem is that a free market (in health insurance) where consumers and providers freely partake of each other's services does not exist. Governments work hand in glove with providers...to arrange a package of services (mandates) that we are forced to buy - it's corporatism at its ugliest."

I did pick up a couple of definitions that had previously eluded me, and which explain a big portion of the huge disparity in health care costs. Community rating means that insurance companies cannot charge higher premiums to policy holders based on whether they are healthy or chronically ill. Guaranteed issue means that policies cannot be denied on basis of preexisting health conditions. Mattera discusses the obvious (to me, anyway) results.

"New York...is one of three states that have both 'community rating' and 'guaranteed issue.' ... In New York, for instance, insurances is roughly two to three times higher than the national average."

And I learned a completely new term - climate justice. Climate justice is a vision to dissolve and alleviate the unequal burdens created by climate change. My mind boggles at the mere idea.

Mattera also talks extensively about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, which is where most twenty-somethings get what they perceive to be news. I've watched no more than a handful of their broadcasts in my life, and wasn't terribly impressed.

Mattera proposes a six point battle plan for the Republicans to win again. The book was written in 2010, so we all know how that turned out.

1. Back to Basics, find a strong conservative candidate who can convey the message
Well, that was an epic fail!
2. Attack the Stimulus
The Republicans' economic plans were about as exciting as Perot's charts and graphs.
3. Promote Capitalism as a method to effect charitable change
The Republicans couldn't overcome the progressive class warfare mantra.
4. Frame the message - freedom to live life without government interference
It appears the progressives had a better message once more for the young folks, "you can live in daddy government's basement for life."
5. Twitter - use social media effectively
The definitive term in Grand Old Party is "Old"
6. Old conservatives - donate money. Obama spent $750 million in 2008 campaign.
I have no idea how the funding battles went in the last election. No amount of money in the world is enough to overcome a mediocre candidate and nonexistent message.

Who's Counting? by John Fund

I found a reference in James O'Keefe's book to Fund and Spakovsky's book on voter fraud. My initial impression  from O'Keefe is that it's pretty rare, based on the number of stings he performed, but Who's Counting shows just how widespread voter fraud really is in this country.
 I'm going to quote extensively from the book, as there is example after example of the problems in our system here; I can only give you a taste.

"The real myth in this debate is not the existence of voter fraud, which exists; the real myth is the claim that voters are disenfranchised because of voter ID requirements."

In 2009 "...ACORN had hired 59 inmates from a nearby prison work-release program to collect registrations. Several who had been convicted of identity theft were made ACORN supervisors: the group was hiring specialists to do its work."

"...former Alabama congressman Arthur Davis, a Democrat turned independent who says he regrets having opposed laws cracking down on voter fraud even though he knew it occurred in his district; as a reformer challenging an entrenched machine, he had to calculate ho many phony votes he would have to overcome to win."

"The Department of Justice prosecuted its larges voter fraud case ever in Chicago - prosecutors estimated that 100,000 fraudulent ballots were cast in the 1982 gubernatorial election."

"Chris Matthews...explained the scheme: Someone calls to enquire whether you voted or are going to vote, and 'then all of a sudden somebody does come and vote for you.' Matthews says this is an old strategy in big-city politics 'I know all about it in North Philly - it's what went on, and I believe it still goes on.'"

Does Matthews now support voter ID laws? I suspect not.

"Another method entailed collecting, during nominating petition drives, the names of registered voters who had died or moved - deadwood voters. Crews were hen sent to vote under those names."

During a city council election in 2007 in Hoboken, NJ, a group of imposters were caught. "The imposter admitted to the police that the group was from a local homeless shelter and each person had been paid $10 to vote using other people's names."

"...the North Carolina Board of Elections admitted that it had caught at least a dozen people trying to vote in more than one location, and election officials acknowledged that 'it would be hard to catch anyone who intentionally double-voted across state lines, because states don't share their voter databases.'"

Noncitizens are on voter registration lists all over the country.

"Up to three percent of the 30,000 individuals called up for jury duty from voter registration rolls over a two-year period in just one U.S. district court were not citizens. While that may not seem like many, just three percent of registered voters would have been more than enough to provide the winning presidential vote margin in Florida in 2000."

During a 1997 investigation into voting by noncitizens:

"...the INS refused to cooperate with the criminal investigation. An INS official was quoted as saying, '...if word got out that this is a substantial problem, it could tie up all sorts of manpower.'"

"Why would an illegal alien register to vote?...the federal I-9 form that employers must complete for new employees provides a list of documentation that can be used to establish identity - including a voter ID card."

Two to three thousand individuals summoned for jury duty in Orange County in 1998 claimed an exemption from jury duty because they were not citizens. 85 to 90 percent of those individuals were summoned from the voter registration list, rather than DMV records.

In a case of voter fraud in Greene County, Alabama in 1994 being investigated by the Justice Department and the FBI, the NAACP sided with the conspirators, provided their defense funds, instead of siding with the black voters whose voting rights were being thwarted - mostly because the leadership of the NAACP were friends with some of the fraudsters.

Unfortunately, there's a revolving door of sorts at the Justice Department, similar to the revolving door between the U.S. Congress, its staff, and the lobbying firms who buy their influence. The Justice Department is mostly staffed by lawyers who have worked for the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center and others who have a belief in "racial payback". Acting Assistant Attorney General of Civil Rights, Loretta King, told staffers in the Voting section how excited she was that "We now have two black men running the country." If a white man made that sort of comment, you can imagine the uproar from the media, but all we hear of this is crickets chirping.

Fund discusses the movement to change from the current electoral college system to a National Popular Vote, and analyzes the problems with this idea, as well as the reason behind the necessity of the electoral college established by the Constitution. He exposes the causes of low voter turnout by our military families, and the shameful way that many states have ignored the laws passed by Congress to make sure that their votes can be counted. In conclusion, Fund outlines a number of steps that we can take to limit voter fraud, including requiring voter ID, making sure all voters are U.S. citizens, preventing absentee ballot fraud, making sure voter registration databases contain valid data, compacts between the states to make sure people don't cast votes in multiple states (the problem is huge between New York and Florida - site of the disputed 2000 election, by the way), fixing the same-day registration and provisional ballot regulations, making sure our troops get their ballots in time to vote and return them before election day, and getting involved in our communities as election workers, a position filled now mostly by a vanishing corps of patriotic seniors.

Breakthrough by James O'Keefe

 I had been aware of O'Keefe's "sting" videos that exposed the amorality of the ACORN staffers, which subsequently caused Congress to cut off its funding, but I hadn't heard much about some of his organization's, Project Veritas, other capers, which he describes here. O'Keefe seems to have taken a lot of heat for his attempt to expose fraud and and misbehavior at both government agencies and supposed independent organizations that receive government support. It seems that when you offend the powerful and their pet media mouthpieces, being right is no protection from persecution or prosecution.

O'Keefe is seen as a tool of the Right, but he has this to say about it:

"If my targets seem to skew 'left,' it is for a reason. The left makes huge claims about government and its capabilities. Those who manage the government and other publicly funded social services all too often persuade themselves of their virtuousness, even if their virtue is subsidized with other people's money. Given their idealism, they refuse to cast judgment on their mission and tolerate almost no judgment from others.
Our target has never been the people who consume the benefits, whether they be unwed mothers or crony capitalists. Our target is the system that provides the benefits."

In a section on exposing the flaws in a voter registration system that requires no positive form of identification, there's a quote from Minnesota Representative Mary Kiffmeyer:

"If you have no system that deters and detects fraud and you don't determine the identity of voters, the electoral system cannot inspire public confidence."

It seems to me that this principle applies equally well to many other government "freebie" programs. If the voters as a whole are not confident that welfare fraud is being promptly detected, medicare cheaters are swiftly prosecuted, and disability fakers are kept off the rolls, then how can we support those "safety nets" wholeheartedly?

After O'Keefe's minions exposed "holes" in the voter registration system in North Carolina, the Board of Elections instituted some training for its poll personnel:

"They're talking about O'Keefe right now - exhibit about the video is on the screen at today's statewide, several hundred person training. They're using it as an example of 'red flags' for officials to look out for - lederhosen and arm casts. The recording inside polling stations issue has come up repeatedly..."

Typical government response, attack the superficial symptoms of a problem rather than the problem itself. It reminded me of an anecdote told by Richard Feynman about how he demonstrated the lax security on the Manhattan Project by showing the brass how he could "crack" any safe in their offices. Rather than put in place policies to increase security, the dictate was "Keep Feynman out of your offices."

Meltdown by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Woods provides an interesting narrative of the meltdown of the real estate and financial markets that happened early this decade, showing that the actions of the federal government, its quasi government agencies, Fannie and Freddy, and the Federal Reserve bear the bulk of the responsibility for the crisis. Additionally, he walks us through previous recessions and depressions usually blamed on the business cycle, showing that they, too, have been primarily caused by government meddling with the economy to suit its own purposes.

I, personally, have been convinced for some time that we haven't had a true free market capitalist economy for over a century, despite the rhetoric about robber barons and monopolies that comes out of history classes I took when I was young. Governments at all levels seem to have figured out how to reward their cronies and punish their enemies through the power of the purse strings, and have been doing so, to the detriment of the middle class taxpayer and the poor for some time now. Anyone who is truly honest and wants to help the little guys gets corrupted rapidly by the system in order to stay in power, and if they don't, they're out of power shortly.

One interesting thing that I found here was the following:

"It turns out that there was a larger percentage increase in adjustable-rate prime mortgages than there was in subprime mortgages, where all the trouble was said to be. This, too, explodes the myth that the mortgage crisis came about because of unscrupulous lenders preying on vulnerable people who for whatever reason couldn't understand the mortgage terms they were agreeing to. If that were the case, how did prime adjustable-rate borrowers get more bamboozled than subprime borrowers?"

Woods includes a great primer for those who haven't previously been taught about what money really is and how it is supposed to work, including the history of how we arrived at our currently unsound fiat currency. There's also a great section on Austrian financial theory, promoted by people like Hayek and von Mises.

Good stuff, perhaps a little dry, and gets you thinking, anyway.

The Ruling Class by Angelo M. Codevilla

 This was a rambling, seemingly disjointed piece about how there is a "Ruling Class" of people who have taken over the governing of this country, who are somewhat disconnected from the concerns of ordinary Americans. Their groupthink crosses party lines, affecting Republicans and Democrats alike, and the bottom line is that they feel they know better how this country should be run than the folks in flyover country, the Country Class. It really seems like an opinion piece or blog post that someone told Codevilla should be expanded upon and made into a book.

I kept reading on through it, waiting for the prescription at the end, and found that the solution proposed is that the ordinary folks in the Country Class should participate more in the governing process, and "take back" their government, starting with local school boards, city and county governments, and so forth. The problem with that is that the folks who are busy working for a living, raising their children, and just trying to get by seldom have either the time or the inclination to join the political process by standing for election, and unless they are willing to compromise their principles and be corrupted by the big money, they'll never rise very far in government, in my opinion.

If you just want a rehash of how badly things are going, now that we've elected a crop of fools to our national government, go ahead and read this.

Interventions by Kofi Annan

Something odd struck me, as I was reading this autobiography. It seems that many who write their stories have these deep insights into who their parents were, and what motivated them, what sort of inner conflicts they faced, and so forth. It occurred to me that I really have no idea who my parents were in that sense. I can relate their basic history about where they grew up, in what era, and so forth, but inner conflicts...emotions? We never spoke of such things. Probably never will.

I found this a difficult book to push on through and finish. It seemed that Annan went into deep details at times that weren't all that interesting to me, while glossing over things quickly that I'd have been interested in hearing more about, and he also assumed a little too much historical knowledge on the part of his readers regarding some of the conflicts on which he focused. I lived through all the years he was Secretary General of the UN, but I was busy raising a family most of the time, and our mediocre media here in the US has not done a great job of covering world events - Michael Jackson and Lindsay Lohan and Beyonce's lip synching are far more important.

I found it interesting that though he condemns Israel quite harshly in the chapters actually dealing with the Palestinian question, he has something different to relate in an earlier chapter about the civil war in Lebanon.

"I concluded that 'whatever other agendas they may serve, Hizbollah's actions, which it portrays as defending Palestinian and Lebanese interest, in fact do neither. On the contrary, they hold an entire nation hostage.'"

He's also quite frank about the source of many of Africa's problems, even though he looks to the West to provide (as always) more funding.

"In a telling, if tragic - sign of Africa's many false starts on the path to development, it is widely recognized that the two principal obstacles to African development are energy and infrastructure. To recall how clearly this was understood forty years ago is to realize the price all Africans have paid for bad governance ever since."

and regarding the Africa Report,

"It emphasized the failures of the international community, too, including the UN's failure, in helping the peoples of Africa, the failure of all to help them ensure peace and create the conditions for sustainable development. But it stated these failures as orbiting features of a core problem: internal African politics and African leadership."

and,

"The problems of Africa, however, have always stemmed from a lack of institutions: a lack of the institutional resources necessary to deal with the complex political, social, and economic problems faced on the continent. But irresponsible, unaccountable personalized systems of rule are the enemy of these. Cultivating the authority of a single individual over an entire and diverse population means that any institution that empowers the population's various constituencies has to be blocked or crushed. It means institutions that uphold a system for the peaceful transfer of power between political parties and between leaders have to be eroded or eradicated. Civil society institutions, organizations, and activists independent of the state, and so beyond the control of the Big Man, can never be allowed to flourish. Free enterprise, underpinned by free societies and systems of regulation and law independent of the day-to-day whims of the leader - an essential feature for private sector driven development - cannot be allowed."

The applications implicit in that last passage seem a bit scary to me, given the hero-worship some on the left have for the Obama presidency.

Annan was, it appears, responsible for the changing mission and vision of the UN in the modern era. As he says,

"Before 1988, only a dozen peacekeeping missions were launched in all of the UN's forty-three years. But in the brief period between 1988 and 1992, the Council created another ten."

The ideas below are, perhaps, what alarms some folks in this country - we seem to be quite jealous of our sovereignty, having won it a couple of centuries ago through blood and sacrifice. He whines a bit about how the U.S. would never agree to submit itself to the authority of the International Criminal Court. Given the composition of the General Assembly and most of the commissions established by the UN, I can't see that it would be a good thing, myself, as far too many of the rogue states would like nothing better than to drag our leaders and soldiers into trials there.

"the opportunity that the crisis in Kosovo provided: to draw a new line in international affairs, to set a new standard in how we held states responsible for the treatment and protection of the people within their own borders. We had to make clear that the rights of sovereign states to noninterference in their internal affairs could not override the rights of individuals to freedom from gross and systemic abuses of their human rights."

I found his take on the situations in places like Somalia and the Sudan enlightening.

"...civil wars have a security impact far beyond their source. They suck in their neighbors, send thousands of refugees spilling into other countries, create havens for armed groups and terrorists, and they cause the spread of criminal networks and cross-border lawlessness, including piracy."

One interesting thing regarding Iraq's intransigence when it came to allowing the UN weapons inspectors to fully verify that all of the WMD's had been destroyed,

"Tariq Aziz...once asked a senior member of the UN's inspection team...'You know why we can never allow you to certify that we've rid ourselves of our weapons of destruction, don't you?' The UN official replied incredulously that this was the entire purpose of the inspections, and that once free of the stigma, Iraq could come in from the cold. Aziz replied, 'The Persians and the Jews.' For Saddam, in other words, sustaining the fear that he possessed WMD was all about deterring Iran and Israel, two countries that he considered mortal enemies."

Holy guacamole, Batman! It's all about face in the Arab world.

All you international affairs freaks might enjoy this one, and I felt it was good to hear Annan's perspective on things.

No, They Can't by John Stossel

 I feel more and more, as I read Stossel's books, that I'm just part of the choir to whom he's preaching, you know? He's nearly as big-L Libertarian as Ron Paul, without nearly the nutty pronouncements, though. About the only things I still disagree with him about are legalizing recreational drugs and same-sex marriage. As a matter of libertarian principles, I understand and believe he has the right of it, but as a practical matter I see some serious consequences to both of these actions - and when Stossel criticizes big government, one of his pet gripes is the government's failure to consider all of the unintended consequences of their laws, policies and regulations.

I finally gave up on placing sticky notes beside the especially piquant passages, as it rapidly became too many to reasonably discuss in a timely review here. I saw a phrase  in a blog online this morning (no idea whom to hat-tip, sorry) that catches the flavor of something that Stossel doesn't explicitly state here - that government should be responsible for "policing" businesses, not trying to control them - and likewise with individuals. There are some things, like fraud, theft, assault, and more serious crimes, that it is the proper business of government to police and prosecute, but when a local, state or federal government instead begins to intrude into matters beyond those in which actual, prove-able harm is caused, it's a slippery slope to Orwellian times.

On a subject near and dear to my heart (and anyone who hangs around me long enough will hear me rant about it) - the shallow nature of what the media feeds us all these days, Stossel talks about how he had an expose prepared about Canadian health care, and how it related to the upcoming legislative battle over Obamacare.

"But then my report was delayed (by ABC). Michael Jackson died, and I was told that 20/20 obviously needed to do the entire hour on that. The following week, 20/20 aired an interview with Michael Jackson's sister. The following weeks, 20/20 covered his drug abuse, his music, his friends, his influence on America, where his money went, and so forth. 20/20 never found the time to run my hour on the downside of Obamacare."

and,

"The same week that the House approved the stimulus plan and jobless claims hit an all-time high, 20/20 devoted our whole show to 'Seduction: Why Him? Why her?'"

It seems far more important for all of our media outlets to keep us updated on the latest celebrity scandal than that we actually be informed about things that truly matter. Don't get me started.

On the subject of whether government can, or cannot, do anything to "fix" the economy, Stossel basically states that the only positive thing it can do is to stay the heck out of the way. Nearly everything else that big government does ends with unforeseen effects - rarely positive. He talks quite a bit about the modern applications contrary to Bastiat's "broken window" theory. The Keynesian economists who seem mostly to be in charge of our economy today think that government spending stimulates the economy, but they - and we - fail to consider what the result of allowing people to make their own decisions about how to spend their money would have been, had it not been taxed away from them to be spent by our all-wise overlords.

A quote I really liked,
"Since government services are funded through the compulsion of taxes, they have no market price. Without market prices, we have no way of knowing the importance that free people place on these services."

On the tragic burst housing bubble,

"At 20/20, at the peak of the boom, I was embarassed to anchor shows that my boss called 'real estate porn.' Porn, because people love to look at elegant houses and fantasize...In one, a promoter gave advice like, 'you can't get rich if you're a renter'... I didn't protest, but I should have."

I never understood, while this was all happening, how people could be convinced that the exponential rise in housing prices could continue indefinitely. Once the average home price exceeded the amount that an average working family could reasonably afford, according to all of the time-tested formula - used by banks for decades - it was only a matter of time for the house of cards to come tumbling down.

The phrase, "you can't get rich if you're a renter" also intrigues me. Having been a homeowner for a couple of decades, myself, I can tell you that your primary residence is not really, in general, a big moneymaker. If...IF...you're invested in real estate as a business, and can buy low and sell high, swooping in to pick up distressed properties, etc., you can probably make money at it, or if you're acquiring rental real estate over the long term, doing all your due diligence, you can make money that way, too. But when you buy a home where you can live and raise your family, a) you're limited as to how easy it is to take advantage of market swings - remember, you still need a place for your family to live when you sell your home, and if its price was up, anything nearby is probably up by the same percentage, so you're going to have to roll your "profits" right back into the new place. And let's not even talk about the true cost of maintenance over the long haul, plus the interest on your mortgage, taxes...

This is not a game for amateurs.

Stossel firmly believes that private industry, especially small businesses, do a far better job of serving the public than do our "public servants."

"They (New Yorkers) are shocked when I tell them that most of our subways were built, not by government, but by private companies...When the private company proposed raising the subway fare to 5 cents, the politicians said, 'Outrageous!' They forbade the increase and took over the subways. They promised to improve service and hold down fares. They did neither. Despite raising the fares to what is now $2.25, they still managed to lose money every year. Taxpayers fund them with billions in subsidies. If New York City had left the trains in private hands, maybe our subway would be more like Hong Kong's clean, efficient, and profitable one.

Yes. The world's only profitable mass transit is privately run."

Another thing that Stossel mentions in passing in a long section on health care, that happens to be another one of my pet rants, is those who confuse or conflate "access to health care" with being able to "afford health care". I won't even get into whether the latter is often a perception problem instead of a real one - though I will mention that I knew lots of young healthy folks who refused the $35 a month employee portion of their health insurance premium offered by a company that I worked for for nearly a decade, because they thought it was too expensive - and these were highly skilled manufacturing workers, not Wal Mart minimum-wagers.

"The truth is, almost al people do get health care, even if they don't have health insurance. Hospitals rarely turn people away; charities pay for care; some individuals pay cash; some doctors forgive bills. I wish people would stop conflating the terms, 'health care,' 'health insurance,' and 'Obamacare.' Reporters ask guests things like, 'Should Congress repeal health care?' I sure don't want anyone's health care repealed."

And in the category of "things that make you say, Hmmm?"

"It is no coincidence that the biggest push for more food regulation came at a time when Congress obsessed about the rising cost of medical care. When government pays for your health care, it will inevitably be drawn into regulating your personal life...Where does it stop?"

On bloated campaign spending,

"It is shameful that leftists let their hatred of corporations lead them to throw free speech under the bus. There is a smarter way to get corporate money out of politics: shrink the state. If government has fewer favors to sell, citizens will spend less money trying to win them." (emphasis mine)

Stossel tears into the educatin mess, and the trillions of dollars that have been thrown away in futile efforts to improve student performance. He feels at least part of the answer is in charter schools. I did a little research on a website - Global Report Card -  that tracks the ranking of every school district in the U.S., with respect to the rest of the world, and found the results very interesting. First, as you might imagine, some of the most wealthy areas of the country have the best schools, though it doesn't appear to necessarily be the result of higher per-pupil spending. I suspect that wealthy professionals tend to have the mobility to migrate to areas where their children's educations are likely to be great, and they also are probably very vocal consumers and actively influence local school boards. The really interesting thing was that in one of the top areas in the country for reading scores (Maricopa County, AZ) four out of five of the top performing schools  were charter schools. That area also appeared in the top 50 for Math quite often. This bears further reading and research to find out exactly what's going on in Phoenix and Tempe, I think.

A quote from the CEO of a very successful charter school.

"I don't do no teacher evaluations. All I do is go into a class, and if the kids ain't working, your ass is fired."

LOL. Short and to the point, if not perfectly grammatical.

The head of a pre-K education advocacy group says,

"We don't want to just focus on IQ scores. We want to look at how children are doing in their social and emotional, their noncognitive development."

Stossel replies, "Give me a break. If the huge government program can't perform the basic (and measurable) educational task of raising math and reading scores, why should we give the central planners more money because they promise to improve the kids' 'emotional development'?"

There's lots of great stuff in this book, and all you libertarians and conservatives out there ought to enjoy the heck out of it.