George Rebane

Some idle thoughts during a year of invasions, stimulus injections, climate change sacrifices, and elections promising hope-filled change.

* A young Alan Greenspan made an audacious observation back in the early sixties.
* Tonight PBS’s ‘Nightly Business Report’ again declared its true colors.
* Today is the fortieth anniversary of the Soviets’ crushing of what has come to be known as the Prague Spring in 1968.

A young Alan Greenspan made an audacious observation back in the early sixties.  He wrote, “Government regulation is not an alternative means of protecting the consumer. It does not build quality into goods, or accuracy into information. Its sole ”contribution” is to substitute force and fear for incentive as the ”protector” of the consumer. The euphemism of government press releases to the contrary notwithstanding, the basis of regulation is armed force. At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun. . . .” (written during his Ayn Rand years).  When I remind my liberal friends of this notion, they condescendingly dismiss it as a typical overstatement by another libertarian over-wary of government excess.

In a more recent example of Greenspan’s observation, Heidi Dalibor of Grafton, Wisconsin was arrested and booked for ignoring appeals by her local library.  It seems that the twenty-year-old was remiss in returning some books.  Now you would think that this is not cause for armed officers to show up at her door, cuff her, and cart her away.  But it happened and, somewhat incredulous, she paid her fines.  Here one immediately hearkens to Greenspan’s dictum to ask what would have come to pass if she had forcefully resisted arrest for such a seemingly minor infraction.  Those who think that the SWAT team would never have been called are in for a surprise.  Indeed, you can die for not returning books to a government library or refusing to put the government mandated lights into the ceiling of what you believe to be your very own remodeled kitchen.  And the collectivists will cheer your passing until the truck pulls up in front of their house.

Tonight PBS’s ‘Nightly Business Report’ again declared its true colors.  It presented a piece on “Family Friendly Policies” impressed on businesses so that workers could spend more time with their families, and not be so much imposed upon by the needs of their workplace.  The entire tenor of the report was that America’s knuckle-dragging corporations are finally being made to see the wisdom of their counterparts in the EU.  Nowhere in the report was it mentioned that these policies are not sustainable, and that EU companies are busy lobbying their governments to allow them to dismantle such economy busters in a global marketplace.  Another example of MSM professional journalists doing comprehensive and balanced reporting.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the Soviets’ crushing of what has come to be known as the Prague Spring in 1968.  Those of us with a surfeit of birthdays remember the news reels of Red Army tanks rumbling through that beautiful Baroque capital, and the pitiful resistance of the Czechs as communist order was restored.  Tonight BBC World dutifully reported on the anniversary, and took the tack of all liberal MSM outlets when presented with such opportunities to educate through history.  They gave it a pass.  Instead of focusing on the tragedy of a small nation caught under the treads of expanding international communism, they made a human interest story out of it.  This is a now typical approach to the revisionist history of collectivist atrocities.  The whole Soviet assault was made to appear as if it were an overarching natural disaster that the citizens of Prague had to weather.  BBC’s version was simply a vignette or two on the hardships suffered by a couple of families who lived through a hurricane Katrina instead of a deliberate manmade terror.