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Political Picture of the Day

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Mises Quote of the Day

"Taxes are necessary. But the system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation. It is rather a mode of disguised expropriation of the successful capitalists and entrepreneurs."
Mises - Human Action, p. 803; p. 807

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Mises Quote of the Day

"Nothing is more calculated to make a demagogue popular than a constantly reiterated demand for heavy taxes on the rich. Capital levies and high income taxes on the larger incomes are extraordinarily popular with the masses, who do not have to pay them."

Mises - Socialism, p. 447

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Mises Quote of the Day

"Credit expansion is the governments’ foremost tool in their struggle against the market economy. In their hands it is the magic wand designed to conjure away the scarcity of capital goods, to lower the rate of interest or to abolish it altogether, to finance lavish government spending, to expropriate the capitalists, to contrive everlasting booms, and to make everybody prosperous."
Mises - Human Action, p. 788; p. 794

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Mises Quote of the Day

Society does not exist apart from the thoughts and actions of people. It does not have “interests” and does not aim at anything. The same is valid for all other collectives.

Mises - The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, p. 79

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Mises Quote of the Day

"It is not mankind, the state, or the corporative unit that acts,
but individual men and groups of men, and their valuations
and their action are decisive, not those of abstract collectivities."
Mises - Epistemological Problems of Economics, p. 153

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Political Rant of the Day

As much as I detest the politics of the Kennedy family, I wish nothing but a speedy recovery for Senator Kennedy in the wake of his recent medical troubles.

But it got me to thinking about the Kennedy "legacy" and the Vice Presidential debate a few years back when Dan Quayle made a reference to former president John F. Kennedy and was told by his opponent that "I knew John Kennedy and you are no John Kennedy."

Instead of standing there looking sheepish and stupid, he should have said, " You are correct, sir. I am no John F. Kennedy. I am faithful to my wife. I do not abuse prescription drugs. I would never have left Americans stranded on the beach of the Bay of Pigs to be slaughtered. I would never have allowed the corrupt mayor of an American city to manipulate election results to give me the presidency. Yes, sir, I am no John F. Kennedy."

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More Women With Guns

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Common Sense, Degrees, and Politics

One statistic that the MSM seems to be quite fond of bandying about is that Senator Obama is not doing so well among whites without a college degree. If indeed this is true it only confirms what I've suspected for some time: a college degree does not necessarily mean the recipient has real intelligence or common sense.

It doesn't take a degree to know what Senator Obama is offering is not change but old fashioned, extreme left-wing, big state, cradle to grave entitlements government. There's not much new about what he's proposing. He's the latest in a long line of statists who believe that government knows better how to spend your own money than you do and that government has the right to take your money to do "good things." Of course, the government decides what those good things are.

Technorati Tags: College Degrees, Current Affairs, Politics, Senator Obama

Mises Quote of the Day

"What the doctrine of balancing budgets over a period of many years really means is this: As long as our own party is in office, we will enhance our popularity by reckless spending. We do not want to annoy our friends by cutting down expenditure. We want the voters to feel happy under the artificial short-lived prosperity which the easy money policy and rich supply of additional money generate. Later, when our adversaries will be in office, the inevitable consequence of our expansionist policy, viz., depression, will appear. Then we shall blame them for the disaster and assail them for their failure to balance the budget properly."

Mises - Planning for Freedom, p. 87

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Political Quote of the Day

“We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money.”
- Davy Crockett

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Public Discourse

You think the language of the current political landscape is harsh? You don't know the half of it:

"Egad sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox." - John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich
That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress." - John Wilkes

I'd love to hear that kind of exchange between the candidates today.

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No Government Program or Teachers' Union Left Behind

"In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA's behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us 'open' classrooms, teachers as 'facilitators of learning' rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of 'multiculturalism,' and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century."

- George Will 

As the parent of a child with significant special needs, I try to pay close attention to trends and fads in education. I watched the debate over "main-streaming" as it morphed into "inclusion." and "Least Restrictive Environment."

Now, I may be a cantankerous, contrarian S.O.B. but I want my daughter to receive an education that will help her achieve all that she can. If being in a regular classroom for some part of her school day will help to that end, I'm all for it. But if you want to stick her in a regular classroom so "regular" kids can learn about people with disabilities or so you won't need self-contained classrooms or have to hire more inclusion aides, then we're going to tangle.

No Child Left Behind? Don't make me laugh, it's more like No Bureaucrat Left Behind. The Department of Education should be dismantled and the stranglehold those epistemological child molesters of the NEA have on education should be broken once and for all.

Local schools means local.

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Technorati Tags: Disabilities, Education, Epistemological Child Molesters, George Will, NEA, Politics

Political Quote of the Day

Overheard over at Flaming Pablum concerning Bruce Springsteen's endorsement of Barack Obama:

"If your vote is swayed by the recommendations of your favorite musician, you're an idiot."

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Election Anxiety Relieved

I am so glad this came out today. I was worried that unless the word from Mount Bruce came down I wouldn't know who to vote for in November.

By the way, Metal Dad recommends you write in None of the Above.

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Humor

Hat Tip: The Patriot Post

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Political Quote of the Day

"So now the Democrats are trapped between two petulant, angry constituencies who each believe that 'their time has come.' Neither group particularly likes the other, and neither group believes the other has grievances equal to its own. Each group furthermore believes that if its champion should lose the nomination, the loss would represent yet another injustice in a long train of historical abuses.

Simply put, the Democrats have lived by the sword of identity politics, and they are now dying by that same sword.

In ordinary times, one could merely sit back and enjoy the poetic justice of it all.

But these are not ordinary times, and the outcome of this debacle may well be a McCain presidency.

And that, my friends, is no laughing matter."

- Steven LaTulippe

Technorati Tags: Democrats,Elections,Steven LaTulippe

Economic/Political Quote of the Day

It's not often I find myself agreeing with anything on the New York Times' Op-Ed page, and while I don't agree with Bruce Bartlett's ideas about what to do with the $117 billion we don't have, the article is worth reading:

"We need to stop and ask whether we can afford to spend $117 billion that the Treasury Department does not have on a program of dubious effectiveness. It simply makes no sense to send out checks to people who have no need for it as some kind of election-year bribe to vote for incumbents of both parties. That money would go a long way toward cleaning up the mortgages that are poisoning the financial sector.

Congress should immediately repeal the rebate and redirect the money that has been budgeted into a package of measures that would help the housing sector and those people who actually need assistance. The Treasury might use some of the money, for example, to enable Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored housing agencies, to buy up some of the bad mortgages, get them off bank balance sheets and help homeowners refinance them.

My gut tells me that the vast majority of Americans would happily give up their rebate if they knew that the money would be used instead to help families in need and start the process of cleaning up the bad debts in the housing sector. Everyone knows that we will have to spend the money eventually and that the sooner the financial sector goes through detox the better it will be for everyone."

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Political/Theological Rant of the Day

Faith, Politics, and Stupid, Loud-Mouthed Preachers

I could give a flying you-know-what about where Sen. Obama goes to church or what inane remarks his pastor may have made. His theological point of view is of no interest to me. What alarms me is his political point of view. As far as I can see, he is a typical, lefter than most Democrat who thinks that there is no problem, political or social, which cannot be solved with bigger government programs funded with your and my tax dollars.

I've sat under enough preaching, mostly of the evangelical/fundamentalist variety, to know that preachers are not immune to putting their foot in mouth on any given Sunday.

The best preaching I ever heard was preaching which attempted to faithfully and accurately exegete the particular biblical passage being looked at that day rather than the diving board approach so common in many so called "biblical" churches: Take a verse from the bible and use it as a launching point for a 30 to 40 minute talk expressing your opinions on any number of subjects. This, of course, is a broad generalization and I guess I must have been lucky to so often land in faith communities where this was the norm on Sunday.

Some of the best preachers I ever heard were John Stott, guest preaching at a small Presbyterian church in Chicago almost 20 years ago, George Polcaster, who was the pastor of the now sadly defunct Downers Grove Vineyard, and Kevin Cawley, who also preached at the Downers Grove Vineyard on occasion.

Technorati Tags: Current Affairs, John Stott, Kevin Cawley, Politics, Preaching, Senator Obama, Theology

Political Quote of the Year

From David Mamet's essay in the Village Voice, Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal':

"I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh."

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