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George Rebane
If Congress does nothing more, we have a long list of added taxes, fees, etc drizzling down on us over the next few years. Congressman John Flemming MD, (R, LA) has summarized them nicely on his website. In case the Congressman’s home page changes, I have made a one page pdf of the data Download MoreTaxesEtc. H/T to a regular a RR reader for digging this out for us.
George Rebane
[This was recorded as my regular commentary on KVMR FM 85.9 for broadcast on 16 April 2010.]
Nuclear zero has a nice ring to it. That great philosopher Rodney King poignantly asked, ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ With this aim, many of the world’s leaders met last week in Washington to see if doing away with all nuclear weapons in the world would be a good goal that we should now try to achieve. That this goal is beyond silly, and has a snowball’s chance in hell of being achieved, will occupy us for the next couple of minutes.
This is George Rebane, here to convince you that the atom bomb has been one of the greatest protectors of human life since the invention of the club, and I’ll throw in penicillin just to sweeten the argument. Most of us are immediately hypnotized by the mushroom shaped cloud and Hiroshima’s devastation when we think of nuclear weapons. But let’s take a step or two back from any hip level hysteria here.
Public schools don’t teach kids that throughout history governments have been the greatest killers of their own people. And we’re not talking about the millions killed when countries get into wars with each other. Consider that during the 20th century WW1 caused about 16 million deaths, and WW2 ended at least 50 million lives. But these deaths are dwarfed by how many people were intentionally killed by their governments in non-war related holocausts.
Through various pogroms, forced relocations, death camps, etc, that 20th century governments sponsored, these killed over 170 million people more than the war-related figures. These mass murders have a name – they are called democides. The 170 million figure does not include China’s mass deaths brought about by Mao’s ten-year Cultural Revolution. The extent of this democide alone is now quietly estimated at an additional 120 million deaths.
Who did all the killings? Primarily autocratic and totalitarian regimes with weak economies. A study by Dr Gerald Scully of the University of Texas directly correlated a country’s economic strength to its propensity to kill its own citizens. Government leaders have always set up institutional programs to kill their own in bad economic times. You can get into the gory details by googling ‘death by government’, which is also the name of a scholarly book on the subject by R.J. Rummel.
So let’s get back to nuclear zero. Great wars between nations ended in 1945 with the atomic bomb. America and the communist super-powers devised mutual assured destruction or MAD to keep everyone’s missiles in their silos during the Cold War. After the USSR collapsed, America’s nuclear umbrella and the promise to use it against aggressive rogue states, has kept the peace.
But now, while continuing to cut back on our remaining warheads, Obama has started to disarm the US with a non-reprisal policy against non-nuclear powers. Russia is a willing partner in this as it cannot afford to maintain its strategic missiles. Instead Russia continues to increase its vast stockpile of tactical nukes to support its policy of dominating the so-called ‘near-abroad’ countries. Russia’s tactical nukes are not negotiable, and China is not even a part of the ‘let’s all just get along’ charade.
Which brings us to last week’s loss of the Polish leaders as they flew to observe the first official commemoration of Stalin’s 1940 Katyn Forest massacre of 22,000 Poles comprising most of Poland’s intelligentsia and all of its officer corps. But nowhere in the reports on this crash is the real message of ‘death by government’ being brought to the world’s attention. As Stalin said, ‘A few deaths are a notable tragedy, a million deaths is merely a statistic.’
I sincerely hope that you will look into this history on your own to see if somewhere in there is a message for us.
I am George Rebane, and I expand these and other themes in my Union column, and on georgerebane.com. The opinions here are mine and not necessarily shared by KVMR.
George Rebane
Starting with the federal government, public service unions have contributed to fiscal calamities in every jurisdiction across the land where they have been able to get a foothold. That is not to say that the leftwing chorus has stopped singing its hosannas to clandestine and corrupt collective bargaining. Democrat controlled city councils and mayors, led by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, are admitting that they have let the unions bring them to the brink of fiscal disaster. Rating agencies are downgrading government debts at all levels. Vallejo was the first dead canary, now the mine is filled with methane. (New metaphor for the nimble reader, back to torpedoes later 😉
Meanwhile the Obama administration is continuing to back SEIU and other unions which outright bought the presidency in 2008 with over $85 million cold cash, the largest single special interest tranche of election spending in history. One of the union payoffs is the imposition by presidential decree of “project labor agreements” for federal construction.
The PLA union-growing gambit increases total costs of projects by anywhere from 10 to 15%, and tilts the playing field away from the 85% of construction workers who are non-union. Every government project infected by PLAs has suffered gross cost overruns. Notable examples are Boston’s Big Dig, Seattle’s Safeco field, LA’s Eastside Reservoir, San Francisco airport, … .
One of the country’s leading socialists, SEIU president Andy Stern, can take credit for much of the growth of public service unions and the resurgence of union influence in America. It was Andy who delivered the big checks to Obama, and got to sleep over a lot in the White House guest room. (Can anyone divide $85,000,000 by 31 visits?) Now, on top of his game, Mr Stern is bailing before some of the little excesses at the SEIU come home to roost and, mayhaps, put a smudge on his polish.
George Rebane
Big monopolies and oligopolies are no better in the private sector than they are in the public sector. Both types of organizations suffer systemic failures in the feedback necessary to keep them on the straight and narrow as far as their customers are concerned. Of course, big government can do more damage to its ‘customers’ because it has guys with guns and can print money without your permission.
But here’s an example of the kind of chicanery Verizon, the big broadband connectivity supplier, puts over on its consumers. The following report from my friend and correspondent Dr Larry Press, IT professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills, is included with his permission.
We ordered 7 mbps service from Verizon and they turned it on, but we were only getting about 1.5 mbps — presumably tons of retransmission errors due to an aggressive modulation scheme. They scheduled a truck roll to fix the problem.
The minute the driver arrived, he told me that, at 9,000 feet from my central office, there was no way I was going to get 7 mbps. He checked the line, and concluded that I could reliably run at 4.2 mbps, but, unfortunately, Verizon only offers 3 and 7, so I could only get 3.
They could have easily told me at the time of the order that 7 mbps was not available at my house. They could have saved a truck roll. The “technician” who scheduled the truck roll could have done the same.
The driver told me he does 5 calls per day and 3 are typically fruitless, but that it gave him job security so he was happy with the system. What a guy.
I had to make yet another 30-minutes-on-hold call to Verizon to change my order to 3 mbps — he could not change the order automatically.
The driver also confirmed the Internet rumors and leaked memos saying that Verizon was not installing new fiber, but focusing on increasing the take rate on what they have installed already. So much for my getting fiber. (I wonder how much Verizon has extracted from the California PUC in return for “promises” to roll out fiber).
Professor Press also runs a website for his students that has more info (here and here) about what’s going on in the world of broadband.
George Rebane
As we know, and contrary to a constant stream of MSM reports about “the party of NO” and “they have offered no ideas of their own”, the GOP is now bringing together its alternative piece of healthcare legislation that they hope to pass if their fortunes turn this November. The major features of the GOP approach are compared to Obamacare in this pdf. Congressman Tom McClintock promoted and supported these alternatives during the last year, and his office forwarded this to me. Take a read.
George Rebane
The self-serving liars in Washington have attempted for the last two years to convince us that they have injected newly printed and borrowed cash into our economy in order to stimulate it out of the recession that followed the housing bubble. This has not come to pass. The economy has struggled to find its feet in spite of the imposed government impediments to weigh it down.
In this interval we have executed a Keynesian folly that still portends our economic demise. Long time RR readers know that I am of the Austrian school persuasion bathed in the evidence of its general correctness describing and predicting the predilections of humanity’s fisc.
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University offers an illumination (here) of the much propagandized stimulations from our nation’s capital, stimulations that have turned out to be a bland prophylactic to what is really needed. Ludwig von Mises prescribed the correct emetic to purge our system of what ails us – “Do nothing, sooner!”
[update] Maybe what we now need is more of what a Democratic Congress gave us in 1945 after the war had ended. FDR and his New Deal had miserably extended the Great Depression through the thirties, and WW2 had been an unsustainable bump in employment that was now going to result in greater layoffs than ever before. As reported by the Folsoms of Hillsdale College in the 12apr10 WSJ (here), Truman advised Congress to resume FDR’s alphabet soup socialism, but Congress “responded by just saying ‘no’.” And it was a pretty comprehensive NO.
No to the whole New Deal revival: no federal program for health care, no full-employment act, only limited federal housing, and no increase in minimum wage or Social Security benefits.
Congress cut taxes instead, and in doing so almost eliminated the short post-war recession and gave rise to what today we call supply side economics. Apparently more than one member in that august body had become aware of F. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom which came out in 1944. Then with lowered taxes, the economy exploded and kept expanding for the next twenty years.
By the late 1940s, a revived economy was generating more annual federal revenue than the U.S. had received during the war years, when tax rates were higher. Price controls from the war were also eliminated by the end of 1946. The U.S. began running budget surpluses.
Congress substituted the tonic of freedom for FDR’s New Deal revival and the American economy recovered well. Unemployment, which had been in double digits throughout the 1930s, was only 3.9% in 1946 and, except for a couple of short recessions, remained in that range for the next decade.
The Great Depression was over, no thanks to FDR. Yet the myth of his New Deal lives on. With the current effort by President Obama to emulate some of FDR’s programs to get us out of the recent deep recession, this myth should be laid to rest.
George Rebane
Obamacare is truly a unique event in American governance. But then, not everyone is worried. H/T to RR reader for the graphic.
George Rebane
[This piece is published here in The Union today as my April column. Coincidentally, today’s (10apr10) WSJ also published an article that expands on the Singularity in its discussion of galactic civilizations. I have appended the relevant paragraph.]
In my past columns I have hinted at the enormous impact that accelerating technology is having on education and America’s workforce. Here I’ll try to convince you that ‘enormous impact’ is an understatement. Let me start with the punchline and then back off. Unless you’re planning on dying in the next ten or twenty years, it is very likely that you will live in a world with machines that are smarter than humans. The event when machines reach par intelligence with humans is known as the technological singularity, or simply the Singularity.
Before you turn the page, let me alert you that the Singularity will be the most planet changing event since the asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs 40 million years ago. And most of you will be around to witness it. We are now living in the pre-Singularity years and already sense that something different is going on. For example, wealth-producing productivity continues to increase while the number of workers required for such work is going down.
As a developed society we haven’t yet figured out what to do with the extra workers except maybe start all kinds of new service industries and public sector jobs to keep most everyone busy. But machines are already pushing themselves into the service sectors. Performance neutral workplaces in government seem to be the only places immune to encroaching technology.
Let me disabuse those who think the Singularity is some hare-brained notion held by weirdo techies. The Singularity is a very mature idea that has been around for at least forty years. Today major scientists in artificial intelligence, nano-technology, and genetic engineering are working on perfecting everything from the brain-computer interface to machine consciousness.
[This commentary was recorded last week at KVMR FM 85.9 for its postponed airing today 9 April 2010.]
‘The blue of the grass’ is the color green in an African language. That’s a lot of letters compared to the five letters in the word ‘green’ to get across the same message. But it’s also getting harder to communicate in English. In the last several decades English has lost much of its ability for clear, concise, and complete delivery. Techies call this ‘information carrying capacity’, and the capacity of everyday English has been going down. We are paying a price for this loss in our public dialogue. Hi, I’m George Rebane.
Our world is getting more complex while our language is dumbing down. Back in the old days when you heard someone called a ‘hero’, you could be sure that the person had knowingly gone above and beyond the call to risk life, limb, treasure, or honor. Not any more. Today a ‘hero’ is a millionaire athlete making a lot of touchdowns, or a father helping his son build a go-cart, or a GI running through a withering crossfire to bring back a wounded buddy. If we want to discriminate between the GI and the athlete, we have to use a lot more words. Hero doesn’t cut it any more.
Disabled or handicapped people aren’t disabled or handicapped. They are ‘challenged’. If a person has a problem with math, they’re math challenged. Hell, I’ve spent my life being math challenged. But if I said that to someone, they would never know that math has always been my strong suit, and the basis of a rewarding career. Nevertheless, I’ve been challenged by math problems many a time. Today ‘challenged’ has so many meanings that we have to tell a story instead of simply using the proper word.
Speaking of problems – people and organizations no longer have them. They’ve traded them in for ‘issues’. So if a meeting agenda has on it the discussion of certain issues, you have no idea whether it calls for a group problem solving session or simply a boring report. Again, more explanation is necessary to avoid confusion.
The same disease has struck a passel of other words like ‘discriminate’, ‘racist’, ‘right’, ‘prejudge’, and ‘immigrant’. The name of the disease is political correctness. People afflicted with this malady seek to convey a flattened world that has no distinct edges or shapes that efficiently define the specifics of a landscape. Doing that would expose them to being ‘judgemental’ – and heaven forbid, no PC person would want that tag hung around their neck. Nice people are non-judgemental, they never decide that this is not that. Or do they?
Today we are told that immigration reform season is here again. But our handicapped language no longer supports a clear discussion of the illegal alien problem. We have decisions to make about 12 million of them here in a country that has thrived from liberal immigration policies.
For the record, immigration is a two party process. An immigrant is a foreigner who receives permission from the welcoming country to enter, work, and make it their new home. He becomes an illegal immigrant when he violates the conditions of his lawful immigration while remaining in-country. Our laws say that such individuals are not in the same category as those who enter our country illegally. But for us to talk about them requires that they have a unique label. Historically that has been ‘illegal alien’. Today the PC disease has banished the label and its clear meaning.
For political purposes illegal aliens have been softened to ‘un-documented immigrants’. Everyone knows immigration is as American as apple pie, and these so-called immigrants are merely challenged by the lack of a few pieces of paper with some words on them. Why should we discriminate against their ability to work and receive government benefits because of this bureaucratic inconvenience? And so we will again start talking past each other, because we have lost the correct words from a once-rich language.
I am George Rebane, and I expand these and other themes in my Union column, and on georgerebane.com. The opinions here are mine and not necessarily shared by KVMR.
