CHURCHILL ON THE BUFFETT RULE

Steven Hayward often devotes blogs to some of Churchill's insights.  Here's a timely one:

Since I was a couple days late with last week’s helping of Winston, I might as well do this week’s a day or two early, especially since I was reading the source material for this one just this morning—WSC’s 1937 essay about Franklin Roosevelt.  Obama (and Buffett the Buffoon) ought to read this warning, one of several, that Churchill offered about the New Deal:

A second danger to President Roosevelt’s valiant and heroic experiments seems to arise from the disposition to hunt down rich men as if they were noxious beasts.  It is a very attractive sport, and once it gets started quite a lot of people everywhere are found ready to join in the chase.  Moreover, the quarry is at once swift and crafty, and therefore elusive.  The pursuit is long and exciting, and everyone’s blood is infected with its ardour.  The question arises whether the general well-being of the masses of the community will be advanced by an excessive indulgence in this amusement.  The millionaire or multi-millionaire is a highly economic animal.  He sucks up with sponge-like efficiency money from all quarters.  In this process, far from depriving ordinary people of their earnings, he launches enterprise and carries it through, raises values, and he expands that credit without which on a vast scale no fuller economic life can be opened to the millions.  To hunt wealth is not to capture commonwealth.

This money-gathering, credit-producing animal can not only walk—he can run.  And when frightened he can fly.  If his wings are clipped, he can dive or crawl.  When in the end he is hunted down, what is left but a very ordinary individual apologizing volubly for his mistakes, and particularly for not having been able to get away?

But meanwhile great constructions have crumbled to the ground.  Confidence is shaken and enterprise chilled, and the unemployed queue up at the soup kitchen or march out upon the public works with ever-growing expense to the taxpayer and nothing more appetizing to take home to their families than the leg or the wing of what was once a millionaire.  One quite sees that people who have got interested in this fight will not accept such arguments against their sport.  What they will have to accept is the consequences of ignoring such arguments.  It is indispensible to the wealth of nations and to the wage and life standards of labour, that capital and credit should be honoured and cherished partners in the economic system.

If this is rejected there is always, of course, the Russian alternative.  But no one can suppose that the self-reliant population of the United States, which cut down the forests and ploughed up the soil and laced the continent with railways, and carried the wealth-getting and wealth-diffusing to a higher point than has ever been reached by mankind, would be content for a week with the dull brutish servitude of Russia.

The coming bust in the healthcare bubble

Any sentient person would argue that all bubbles eventually burst.  The typical economic bubble grows larger and larger until it finally reaches a size that the enabling catalyst simply can no longer provide enough whatever to grow and sustain the bubble.  At this point air begins to escape, the bubble shrinks to a size that can be sustained, and voila, we have a sustainable, 'normal' equilibrium.  Scottish journalist Charles Mackay addressed this phenomenon in a book published in 1841: "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds".  In it he discussed the known bubbles up to then:  Misssippi Scheme of John Law in the early 1700's, South Seas bubble, Teapot Dome, Tulip mania, and others  proved to Mackay that bubbles eventually burst.  Nothing has changed. Witness the credit bubbles of the '20's that led to the Great Depression and the Dotcom and housing bubbles of the last decade.  This column by Andrew Foy, an M.D., makes a compelling case, backed up with ample graphs and charts, that the US healthcare system long ago entered the bubble phase and is now headed for a major correction.

A summary of Obama's reign by VDH

Victor Davis Hanson brings a Greek historian's perspective to his columns which makes them uniquely knowledgeable reading. In this column he summarizes Obama's reign and suggests what might be in store should he win the November election.  It's hard to argue with Hanson's conclusions since it's hard to argue against the facts.  The most pressing question, or maybe even the last question to be answered regarding the various actions of the Obama administration is have these actions been driven by its far left ideology or simply incompetence? The easy answer is both.  There  is yet another scenario. It's simply impossible to ignore the conspiracists in this mix, those who allege Obama is a front for the Soros led, one world, socialists who want to eliminate the sovereignty of individual nations. Think one grand world government headquartered in Brussels, of course, where transnational bureaucrats harmonize laws and regulations creating a tension free international economy and system of justice. (Yeah, the European experiment has worked out great to say nothing about the United Nations and its collection of dozens of rogue dictatorships like Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela.) Conspiracists believe all the destructive policies we've seen over the past three and one-half years have been designed and planned in order to bring down the economy of the US, debilitate our military, and condition us to a grand scheme that will make the world whole and save everyone from pain and anguish.  Obama's weird personal background, obvious dislike for America's history as we now know it, his currying favor with our rivals and enemies lends at least some credence to this extreme view of his motivation.  It is hard to understand why a rational being would legislatively cram down an unpopular 100% partisan healthcare law, ignore obvious jobs creation by not approving the Keystone pipeline, stock his administration with a gaggle of lefty 'czars' who specialize in job-killing regulations through fiat governing, confide in a autocratic head of state about 'flexibility', etc, unless he has a hidden agenda.

Zimmerman murder trial

Racism in this country is now being played like a finely tuned Stradivarius by most black leaders and their white accomplices in the Democratic Party.  It is a shame and what's more this overt racism is seriously holding back the black race.  In the sports/music/entertainment worlds of our culture, blacks earn their way and have become major factors through open and fair competition. They have been well rewarded financially for their success.  In politics and education where they have been given "help" through Affirmative Action programs and gerrymandering of political jurisdictions to ensure proportionate representation, success is not apparent.  In fact, it is hard to find any real progress in the fortunes of most blacks since the inception of all the many government programs, agencies and laws designed to create equality between the races.  It can be argued that race relations have never been worse and with 70% out-of-wedlock birthrate and incarceration rates many times greater than any other race, it can also be argued the blacks in the main are not making the progress they should be. Finally, it can be seriously argued, black leadership in and out of Congress is running the serious risk of losing the goodwill and support of the large and tolerant white middle class who opposed slavery (and shed blood to free the country from this cancer), opposed Jim Crow laws in the South (and supported the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s), and who still support those failed programs designed to make up for past societal sins against blacks.  Often replies in the 'Comments' of internet posted articles and blogs make better points than those made in the article or blogger's posts itself.  The following comment by an anonymous poster on the Trayvon Martin-Zimmerman tragic confrontation is one such example:

Think about Mukden, Gulf of Tonkin, the Sudentenland – whatever incident fills the bill. They are situations where a perception was exploited, whether you agree the original perception was justified, to expand a different agenda, usually exaggerating some danger or injustice. That higher agenda didn’t really care whether truth was served or not, or whether myths were employed as long as certain ends were achieved.

The above is the way I see the Trayvon Martin case. The black community and the political Left have taken a killing and made it into something far above what it may or not have been, and in their eyes, the case is closed. All these calls for ‘we just want an arrest’ seem phoney – what they in fact want is a conviction. Just wait and see what happens when Zimmerman walks and you’ll learn the truth of it.

In order to serve the racial obsession of the Left and urban myths about white Americans past and present, Zimmerman was magically transformed into a white man. Further, and despite massive statistical evidence that presents a completely opposite picture, the Left used the Martin case to say ‘See, we told you so – white people are murdering blacks in this country every day – hunting them even.’ One thing becomes the entirety of the United States of America because it is not seen as an anecdote, but confirmation of a massive trend.

Well, it is a lie. A lie based on hate and racism. The Dem Party has been veering into dangerous territory for at least a decade now and today they have become the most radicalized they have been in my lifetime. This radicalization has gone mainstream.

Although I suspected it, I never really believed the NBA Player’s Association would release such a patently racist press release as they did about the Martin case – you can’t get more mainstream than that. Blacks who bitterly complain about injustice, like Spike Lee, a mainstream film maker, who usually confines his whining to attacking Clint Eastwood because he didn’t depict heroic blacks at Iwo Jima, or that we should all do a Zimmerman on Cleopatra and turn a Macedonian Greek into a black sub-Saharan African, went off the rails and tried to release Zimmerman’s address – violence was certainly implied.

The real core of this situation is the urban myths black American’s hold about white people in America and the history of America, and the extent to which the liberal Left has bought into them, as if it’s still 200 years ago, slave ships still plying the waters of the Atlantic, or at least Jim Crow firmly in play. To invoke this, the Left has had to replace the now gone institutions of racism with ‘code,’ ‘dog-whistles,’ bizarre and inescapable theories like ‘white privilege,’ ‘the New Jim Crow,’ and Critical Race Theory.

Almost unbelievable racists are institutionalized in our mainstream colleges and universities: Dr. Boyce Watkins at Syracuse, Michael Eric Dyson at Georgetown, Melissa Harris-Perry at Tulane, Cornel West at Princeton and the vile James Cone at Union Theological Seminary. On top of this, you have similarly intransigent racists like Al Sharpton at MSNBC, Tavis Smiley at PBS, and Roland Martin at CNN. I have followed the writings of these people: there is not a single doubt in my mind they share the same intellectual and philosophical space as Nazis in 1930s Germany. The Dem Party is not far behind.

The Left and black Americans pillory groups like the Tea Party or GOP as racist simply because black folks don’t join them, not because they are structured around race. And every single entity that accuses the Right themselves either belongs to, or supports mainstream race-based groups too numerous to mention. Meanwhile on that conservative Right, they support not one mainstream law or organization founded on a concept of race.

Those on the side of Martin as being evidence of the endemic racism of America constantly ask others to do something they refuse to do: think of the greater good. The Duke Lacrosse case had the exact same racist sadness emerge from the black community.

In my entire life, I have never seen such a wholesale flood of hypocrisy, lies, racism and myths emerge from the Martin case as I’ve seen emerge from black Americans and the Dem Party. They have gone too far this time. What will be the result is unknown. Obama and Holder and their payback minions have already done more to radicalize blacks in a few short years than in the last 50. They have done so to a receptive audience, nodding their heads yes that America is full of white supremacists who simply went underground in 1970.

It is hard to believe I live in a country where a black Florida representative can show up to work dressed like a Bangkok hooker from a strip club and say the most vile racist things about whites. It is hard to believe that not one congressman in America has the guts to stand up and say ‘get out’ to the Black Congressional Congress. There’s more – I’ve written enough.

But I will say this: let’s no longer ask why there was not one Iraqi who had the guts to blow out Saddam Hussein’s brains, or one German close to Hitler do the same. Under far less perilous circumstances, we have become muzzled by one piece of name-calling which, considering the reality of America, is a perfect Orwellian expression of ‘doublethink’: you are a racist. Pitiful. Resolve: gone. Courage: gone. Audacity: gone. Common sense: gone. Proportion: gone. Context: gone.