Free Market
Why Capitalism Works ~ PragerU (w/Sowell, Freidman & Brooks)
This post is connected with another that is similar in it’s point.
Here, Thomas Sowell writes about the pernicious lie that comes from the Left by speaking about a great book by Arthur C. Brooks from AEI. What prompted me to post this is the indoctrination of our youth in this Facebook post that is horribly wrong in many respects:
Cowboy Shooting
“But seriously, to claim that we live in a post racial era is the epitome of absurdity. Although i’m all about forging unity we can’t do so while ignoring the reality of racial injustice, white supremacy, and national oppression in this country. Malcolm X perhaps said it best when he said you can’t have capitalism without racism. The capitalist system thrives off of racism and the division it creates amongst the masses of people. To fight tooth and nail against this order exploitation requires a relentless struggle against racism,white privilege, and all forms of bigotry.”
BONO on the free markets:
Here is Thomas Sowell’s review of Arthur Brooks book… there is the pencil example by Nobel winning economist Milton Freidman as well as an Artur C. Brooks presentation at the end. Econ class 150 is in session:
More frightening than any particular beliefs or policies is an utter lack of any sense of a need to test those beliefs and policies against hard evidence. Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.
One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.
[….]
A new book, titled Who Really Cares by Arthur C. Brooks examines the actual behavior of liberals and conservatives when it comes to donating their own time, money, or blood for the benefit of others. It is remarkable that beliefs on this subject should have become conventional, if not set in concrete, for decades before anyone bothered to check these beliefs against facts.
What are those facts?
People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.
It is not that conservatives have more money. Liberal families average 6 percent higher incomes than conservative families.
You may recall a flap during the 2000 election campaign when the fact came out that Al Gore donated a smaller percentage of his income to charity than the national average. That was perfectly consistent with his liberalism.
So is the fact that most of the states that voted for John Kerry during the 2004 election donated a lower percentage of their incomes to charity than the states that voted for George W. Bush.
Conservatives not only donate more money to charity than liberals do, conservatives volunteer more time as well. More conservatives than liberals also donate blood.
According to Professor Brooks: “If liberals and moderates gave blood at the same rate as conservatives, the blood supply of the United States would jump about 45 percent.”
Professor Brooks admits that the facts he uncovered were the opposite of what he expected to find — so much so that he went back and checked these facts again, to make sure there was no mistake.
What is the reason why some people are liberals and others are conservatives, if it is not that liberals are more compassionate?
Fundamental differences in ideology go back to fundamental assumptions about human nature. Based on one set of assumptions, it makes perfect sense to be a liberal. Based on a different set of assumptions, it makes perfect sense to be a conservative.
The two visions are not completely symmetrical, however. For at least two centuries, the vision of the left has included a belief that those with that vision are morally superior, more caring and more compassionate.
[….]
The two visions are different in another way. The vision of the left exalts the young especially as idealists while the more conservative vision warns against the narrowness and shallowness of the inexperienced. This study found young liberals to make the least charitable contributions of all, whether in money, time or blood. Idealism in words is not idealism in deeds.
Here is Brooks short presentation
Some Later Additions:
Rush on Pope Francis` Attack on the Free-Market
No where in the world is there unfettered capitalism. No where.
David Cutler`s Warnings 3-Years Ago About Obamacare (Bonus: Dianne Feinstein Spins)
Via HotAir:
…David Cutler, who worked on the Obama 2008 campaign and was a valued outside health care consultant wrote this blunt memo to top White House economic adviser Larry Summers in May 2010: “I do not believe the relevant members of the administration understand the president’s vision or have the capability to carry it out.”
Cutler wrote no one was in charge who had any experience in complex business start-ups. He also worried basic regulations, technology and policy coordination would fail.
“You need to have people who have understanding of the political process, people who understand how to work within an administration and people who understand how to start and build a business, and unfortunately, they just didn’t get all of those people together,” Cutler said.
The White House dismissed these and other warnings. It relied on appointed bureaucrats and senior White House health care advisers.
[….]
The White House didn’t heed this warning for the same reason they embarked on this project in the first place. The bureaucrats and the activists thought they were smarter than the markets, and smarter than the people who have actual experience in the private sector. It’s the same infection that creates the monumentally tone-deaf argument that people should be happy that the government forced them out of existing plans they chose for themselves in order to pay more for coverage that the consumers know they don’t need. It’s unbridled hubris, and it produced this inevitable Greek tragedy that also doubles as farce.
Now, keep this in mind, too. Did the White House bring in ground-up business people and web-savvy firms to take over from the bureaucrats and the contractors who wasted $400 million on a web portal that doesn’t portal anything? No — they brought in Jeffrey Zients, one of Obama’s economic advisers, and kept everyone else in place. With this background in mind, just how likely will it be that the November 30th deadline for full functionality will be met?
More from HotAir. Dianne Feinstein spins Obama’s promises:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation yesterday in part to face the music. Bob Schieffer led off this portion of her appearance by noting that the Obama administration has failed to deliver on many promises of ObamaCare, not the least of which was “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Feinstein tries to explain that the promise was true … up until the bill passed.
No, seriously (via Eliana Johnson at The Corner):
More from HotAir:
So let’s get this straight. The promise made by Barack Obama from 2007 forward all the way through the 2012 election, made dozens if not hundreds of times in those five years, meant that you could keep the plan you liked only if we never enacted the reform he proposed? I’ve heard some pretty fanciful spin on the “keep your plan” promise, but that really does take the cake. “Never made clear,” indeed.
Here’s another question for Senator Feinstein. You voted for this bill and helped push it through Congress with zero Republican votes. Why is it only now that we find out that you had no idea how this bill, drafted in the Senate by senior Democratic leadership, would impact Americans who liked the insurance they already had?…
Thomas Sowell on the ‘Free-Market` ~ Keyword, Free
3-questions liberals never ask:
- compared to what?
- at what cost?
- what hard-evidence do you have?
Chevy Volt ~ Government Backed Failure
Lonely Conservative mentions the inevitable:
Ah well, I guess they figure if they lose enough money on Volt production they can just come back to the taxpayer trough for another big bailout.
Nearly a year ago General Motors was losing almost $50,000 for each Chevrolet Volt it built. Now GM’s business model, driven by trendy environmentalism, calls for it to cut the price and lose even more money.
The green lobby wants more hybrids and plug-in electric cars on the roads. Therefore the president wants 1 million electrics humming around by 2015 — and the carmakers have to ignore market reality under pressure to do what the environmentalist-political complex demands.
Even if it makes no sense. ….
This time it’s because the automaker is going to drop the price by $5,000. USA Today reports that with “a full $7,500 federal tax credit, the price is cut to $27,495,” a figure that doesn’t include some state tax credits.
Aside from those whose egos demand that they use their cars to scream out their moral superiority as environmentalists, and maybe a few enthusiasts who dabble in the technology, does anyone really want these electric cars? Their dismal sales numbers simply do not justify their existence.
Government Intervention Creates Zero Capital
“A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge” ~ George Gilder
If Detroit is an example of small government-God Help Us All!!
God Help us All!!
If Detroit is an example of small government… God Help Us All!! Melissa Harris Perry forgets that Detroit has been run by unions and big government Democrats for over 5 decades, and was then bailed out and over-regulated by the current administration… how convenient.
As the Chicks on the Right mention…
….Meanwhile, back in Reality-Land, National Review’s writer Kevin Williamson gave us all the real picture of Detroit back in 2011, while it was on its path to bankruptcy, when he penned the following:
Detroit maintains 13,000 government workers but has 22,000 government retirees burrowed into the body politic, and their health-care subsidies alone account for nearly $200 million of the city’s budget. Pensions alone already account for a quarter of city spending; in three years, they will account for half. Pensions and city workers’ health-care subsidies account for $561 per year from every resident of Detroit, which has a very poor population — average monthly income of barely $1,200 before taxes, a fifth of the population in poverty, etc. The official unemployment rate is 30 percent; the real rate is much higher.
But never mind all that. The answer to EVERYTHING for MHP and all her little commie friends at MSNBC is government, government, government, dontchaknow. If Detroit JUST would’ve had more GOVERNMENT and more spending….then it would’ve been fine, minions
Gay Patriot brought my attention to a failed prophecy of Obama’s wonderful handle on economics 101.
As Michael Barone reported yesterday in the Washington Examiner:
National Journal’s Major Garrett has an excellent column today looking back on President Obama’s 2011 Labor Day speech in Detroit. “This is a city that has been to heck and back,” Obama said then. “And while there are still a lot of challenges here, I see a city that’s coming back.” Noting that Obama cited the “advanced battery industry taking root here in Michigan,” Garrett points out that the battery firm in question, A123 Systems, received $249 million in Energy Department grants–and is now bankrupt. And of course so is the city of Detroit.
In matters economical, this man’s powers of prognostication aren’t particularly strong.
Moonbat points out — of course — that the “official” numbers from the White House, even if true, are REAL BAD!
Barack Hussein Obama set out to be a transformative president. He has already succeeded. Presidential spokesliar Jay Carney recently credited the Regime with creating 7.2 million private sector jobs. Even if that preposterous boast were true, it would hardly put a dent in Obama’s legacy:
Since February of 2009, the first full month of Obama’s presidency, 9.5 million Americans have dropped out of the labor force. Nearly 90 million Americans are not working today!
That means that 1.3 Americans have dropped out of the labor force for every one job the administration claims to have created.
There are 15 million more Americans on food stamps today than when Obama assumed office. …
That means that more than two Americans have been added to the food stamp rolls for every one job the administration says it has created.
If we were to take how many jobs the Regime actually has created — limited mainly to the overstaffing of the largely useless federal bureaucracy — and subtract from it the number of jobs it has destroyed through ObamaCare and excessive taxation and regulation in general, the number of new jobs for which Obama deserves credit would be millions in the negative.
French Patriots `Occupy` Socialist HQ
The French patriot group Generation Identitaire have produced this video of their recent “occupy” of the French Socialist Headquarters in Paris. GI unfurled a huge banner protesting Socialism. It took more than 20 minutes for the French cops to finally evict them from the top of the building. Most were arrested and detained, eventually released.
Job Creation Best from Free-Market or Government? plus, FDR vs the Constitution
Via Gay Patriot,
From Zero Hedge,
“Governments are good at creating work, but they are not good at creating value-generating jobs,” is the conclusion from this insightful 3-minute clip from Professor Steve Horwitz. Too often the jobs that politicians ‘create’ are simply to their own benefit. Critically, Horwitz explains that transitions (from agriculture to manufacturing to service to information for instance) are temporarily painful but relatively quickly re-allocated. If, however, politicians attempt to prevent this transition – to stall the free market’s signals – this will halt innovation, growth, and create more poverty (ring any bells). Creating meaningful valuable jobs (something we saw earlier today is not occurring) does not appear too complex – “the best job-creation program in human history is the free market and the entrepreneurship it generates” – it simply means our politicians must get out of the way.
Video description:
President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” has long been credited with rescuing the nation from the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Lee Ohanian, Professor of Economics at UCLA, challenges this conventional wisdom in a provocative examination of FDR’s economic policies.
`The Real Legacy of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s Iron Lady` ~ Heritage Foundation
Is America Becoming Europe? (Whiteboard Videos)
Video description:
Across the Atlantic, Americans see European economies faltering under enormous debt, overburdened welfare states, governments controlling close to fifty percent of the economy, high taxation, heavily regulated labor markets, aging populations, and large numbers of public sector workers. They also see a European political class that is unable — and, in many cases, unwilling — to implement economic reform.
This timely and sobering video explains why Americans cannot ignore the “canary in the coalmine” across the pond in determining our future. We must ask the question: “Is America becoming Europe?”
To learn more read Dr. Samuel Gregg’s Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594036373/
4-Short But Impactful Responses to Criticisms of Capitalism
A great 4-point memorization in order to respond to water-cooler discussions about our economic system, 4 Criticisms & 10 Virtues of Capitalism:
4 Common Criticisms of Capitalism include:
(1) “It’s all about Greed.” (Capitalism is not about greed. Greed is fundamentally a matter of the human heart, not of any economic system. There are greedy socialists and communists too.)
(2) “The Rich Get Richer at the Expense of the Poor” (Capitalism is not a zero-sum game. In market economies, wealth is not static, but is constantly being created. Though 3 billion worldwide remain in poverty, capitalism has lifted 4 billion out.)
(3) “Capitalism leads to overconsumption & materialism” (Materialism is hardly unique to capitalist cultures. No one is more materialistic than a socialist.)
(4) “It makes people unequal.” Said another way, “It creates winners and losers” or “Some have a lot, some have a little.” In other words, “Capitalism leads to inequalities in wealth” (Having a lot is not wrong. The possession of wealth is not wrong, but the means of accumulating it may be. These objections assume there is something fundamentally wrong with inequality. I’m no Kobe Bryant or Michael Phelps, but I’m okay with our unequalness. People have different gifts and abilities. People invest different effort and diligence. God does not hate inequality, but rather injustice and oppression.)