During the Bush presidency, I noticed several bumper stickers in my neighborhood that read: “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”  This or similar quotes were usually on the same Subaru, Saab, or Audi that had other stickers mocking Bush, Cheney, and/or your intelligence (assuming you disagreed with them).  Remember how the noble Democrats raged against the supposed dying of the light and told us how evil and stupid President Bush was?  Apparently dissent has fallen on hard times.  Check out this article, which outlines all the names you can expect to be called if you disagree with the current President.  My neighbor’s Subaru still has the sticker, I wonder if he views me as a patriot.

This week I was talking to my mechanic after he replaced something I had never heard of and I was asking him about certain makes and models of minivans and SUVs.   I thought I should consult with someone who sees these vehicles regularly before I bought one.  I said I was looking for something slightly used (along with other characteristics).  He said used cars are exceedingly difficult to find and the price of a decent used car has gone up recently.  I asked “why”.  He said “supply and demand”.  I said “explain”.  He said that since the result of “cash for clunkers” was that the used cars that were traded in were destroyed, the supply of used cars was decreased.  I further deduced that since more people are out of work or nervous about their future, they might be more inclined to buy a used car instead of a new one.  The end result:  supply has gone down and demand has gone up for used cars.   I got online and looked at various used cars and in fact,  they were more expensive then they were a year ago.  I also had a difficult time finding used vehicles of certain makes and models which I easily found less than a year ago.  I even spoke to a used car dealer who stated the same thing.  While this evidence is purely anecdotal, the simple logic of supply and demand is hard to argue with.

I do not think the President is stupid.  I know Larry Summers is not stupid.  They had to see that such a program would hurt poor people (the rich people this President despises so much don’t buy used cars, so it doesn’t bother them).  Why would they pursue such a plan if they knew that the end result would be tougher on the poor?  This president is in the business of chosing winners and losers.  A true free market conservative would have the market chose winners and losers based on talent and hard work.  Liberals, the President chief among them, want the government to take on that role. 

Who did the President chose to be the winners and losers?  Winners:  unions.  Losers:  poor and middle class consumers.  The President has consistently chosen the unions as his intended winners.  He bailed out the failing auto companies that were heavily unionized.  He offered the UAW ownership of some of GM, completely ignoring established contracts, bankruptcy law, the law of secured transactions, and the Constitution.  When it came time to cut auto dealerships and the thousands of jobs attached thereto (which are not unionized), the President didn’t bat an eye. This time, the President chose to help generate some new auto sales at the expense of reducing the supply of used autos.  He said it was for environmental and economic purposes but the fuel efficiency numbers for the cars destroyed and the cars purchased are virtually identical.  The obvious purpose was to keep unions working.  This time it was at the expense of poor people looking for affordable transportation.  Did the plan work?   The auto sales numbers spiked in the stimulated months but fell below previous levels in the following months, thus indicating that there was no net gain of cars sold in that some months cannibalized sales from other months.  In reality, the President’s chosen winners didn’t really win.  Poor people really lost.

One of the great things about our federalist system of government is that each of the states can act as a laboratory for public policy ideas.  The rest of us have the opportunity to watch and learn from the varying degrees of success and failure of the other 49 states and decide if we would like to apply any of these policies to our own community, state, or to the country as a whole. 

In recent years, New York and California have given us case studies in the results of a “tax the rich” policy.  New York has seen a mass exodus of rich people.  The result has been shrinking tax revenues and fewer jobs.  These rich people we love to hate are also job creators.  They own small businesses or portions of large businesses.  These businesses we love to hate also have the distinction of being where people work and get paychecks.  California has given us the extra blessing of seeing what a dual strategy of raising taxes on rich people and increasing regulations on business can produce.  The result:  impending bankruptcy.  California has seen businesses, both large and small, run like Secretariat to states like Idaho, Tennessee, and Texas.  The shrinking tax base means that the government doesn’t have any “makers” left to pay for all the “takers” the welfare state has encouraged.  Most recently, California has been trying to convince its citizens that the mandatory, zero-interest  ”loan” it will be taking from their paychecks isn’t really a tax.

Those of us in the so-called “fly over” states should be left wondering:  with these outstanding examples of failure on both coasts, why would Washington want to pursue the same failing policies for the whole nation?  And yet, what do we hear from the President, Speaker Pelosi and the others?  The same nonsensical policies that has failed New York and caused its liberal governor to tell his fellow Democrats to please leave the rich people alone.  The same nonsensical policies that have failed California twice in the past decade (remember Gov. Grey Davis?).    If you see the guy next to you in the lab burn himself, do you check his notes and then repeat the same process?  Apparently Washington says yes.

check out the following link:

No American should have to choose between health insurance and getting drunk.

….to figure out that the healthcare plan offered by the President is economically insane and will lead to rationing of medical care.  But in case you wanted a Ph.D. to explain it to you, try this.  Marty Feldstien, arguably one of the more distinguished economists alive, explains what should be obvious to anyone whose been paying attention.  Enjoy.

Rep. Maxine Waters has let slip the magic word…socialize (check out the video).  It is her intention to socialize the oil industry.  She is a socialist.  If you don’t have a problem with that, read a history book.  The Liberal agenda (I include Democrats and many Republicans as under the umbrella of Liberal) is open and obvious to all who care to see it.  Socialized medicine, massive welfare programs, increased taxes on the producers, insane new regulations on competition, and now socializing the oil industry…Mao and Lenin would be proud.  We will be poorer and less free as a result.  Don’t say you weren’t warned.

I find it hard to believe a guy claiming to be the victim of systemic white racism when he went from being born in the sticks of West Virginia to Yale, then Cambridge, then teaching jobs at Cornell and Duke, then a professorship at the world’s most prestigious university where he makes hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. I really felt the sting of this systemic white racism when the African-American mayor of Cambridge, the African-American governor of Massachusetts, and the African-American president of the United States, all stated their support for this poor victim.

We are not all the same.  Some cultures are a force for good.  Some are a force for evil.  I know that current PC dogma says that we aren’t supposed to “impose our values” on other people.  But I say if our values involve not raping young girls before we kill them, then our values are intrinsically better and those girls might be better off if we did impose.  In a less than surprising interview, an Iranian militia member has given us just a glimpse into the unadulterated evil that exists in certain parts of the world.  I think sometimes those of us in the West, with our head-in-the-sand view of human nature, either can’t or don’t want to fathom the depths of depravity that humans are capable of.  And when the prevailing culture encourages and enables some to act on that depravity at the expense of others, the result is pure evil.  In Ethiopia, militia men and even tribal leaders mutilate the genitals of young girls.  In Palestine, terrorist cells rape young women, knowing that the girl’s family will murder her as a result (an ”honor killing”) and then tell her that she should, instead of going home to die, strap a bomb to her chest and try to take out some Jews.  The difference in culture is apparent when these young women make their way to an Israeli checkpoint and signal to the soldiers that they have a bomb and the soldiers will attempt to coax her to the ground, dismantle the bomb and get her to a safe place for counseling and a new identification so maybe she can have a life.  One side is good, the other is evil.

Despite what certain politicians might say about how the middle class is poorer and can’t make it anymore, another sign that we are so filthy rich we can’t even see straight:  check out this article about the return of gout.  Yes, that’s right, gout.  A disease historically known only to the rich because of its association with lots of rich foods and alcohol consumption, has made its way to the middle class.  Anyone with a sense of history longer than one week knows that the middle class hasn’t been getting poorer its that they are human and feel poorer because they see rich people around them.  In reality the middle class, and most ofAmerica’s so-called “poor”, have things that were formerly reserved for the uber-rich.  Multiple cars, TV’s (and now satellite TV), home appliances,  and nice vacations are now seen as economic rights.  This is, by the way, the first time in human history when the poor people have been fat.  If you live in America, there is a 99.9% chance that you are not really poor.  So quite crying, unless of course your joints really start to hurt from the gout.

The subtitle of this book, “How Higher Taxes Will Doom The Economy – If We Let It Happen”, is probably a more accurate title to the book, but certainly the chosen title is more eye catching.  The conclusions the authors draw are no shock.  For the economically literate, its hard to avoid the ideas of Art Laffer and Steven Moore’s position at the WSJ and as a commentator make him a known proponent of what some call “supply side economics”.  For me the real value of the book is in its recounting of the past 50 years of economic history.  The numbers are hard to ignore.  Lower taxes create wealth for everyone.  Higher taxes kill prosperity.  For everyone.  Economics is about incentives and when you disincentivize work and entrepreneurship, we will all end up poorer.  A redistribution of wealth won’t work very well if there’s less and less wealth to redistribute.  Why this is so difficult to understand for many on the other side is hard for me to understand.  Overall, the book was pretty good.  If more of us understood some of these simple truths of economic history, I can’t help but think we’d have different election results.