Tag: Blithe Spirit

Catholics once came to the rescue

To market, to market, to save us all:

* WSJ today, p-1, has “Price cuts spur home sales.”  Biggest monthly gain in almost seven years. What? Market correcting itself? It does that? Not for those whose mantra is market-bad-government-good. Holy Mother the State we believe in, not in any stinkin’ market!!!!

* Cardinal Cajetan, Dominican, 1468-1534, upheld the market as arbiter of justice in pricing and even endorsed upward mobility as individual goal. Saw money as a commodity, and so favored foreign exchange — francs for dollars, etc. — and lending at interest: usury, they called it in those days, regardless of rate.

There were statists among them, one of them fellow Dominican DeSoto, as in Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, 1995.

* As for statism and its presumed role in bringing us together in a spirit of community, fellow 16th- (& 17th-) century commentator, Sir Thomas Smith chimed in (from England) on the role of self-interest in running things, within a property-rights framework:

It’s “a natural fact of human life to be channelled by constructive policy rather than thwarted by repressive legislation.” It’s better that people be “provoked with lucre [money]” than have governments “take this reward from them.”

Better too that entrepreneurs with their virtues and faults and their track record be the engine of change we can believe in than politicians with theirs.

* Also in the 16th, the papal bull “Cum Onus” condemning “usury” — lending at interest whatever the rate — issued in 1569 by Pius Fifth, came too late in the debate to quell lending at interest. Too many theologians (philosophers) had OK’d it.

In fact, four years later the Jesuits, forget their special vow to obey the pope, OK’d the mutually redeemable census contract — selling of annuities, whereby a price is put on delaying of money-use — in a general congregation and eight years after that, in 1581, all census contracting.

Some German Jesuits complained about such liberalism, and Jesuit Genl Claude Aquaviva told them to suck it up. “So much for the Pope’s census prohibition,” commented Rothbard, about whom one may look here.

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Requiem for an industry

A book you all might want to own.

From the day Barack Obama announced his candidacy to the moment he took the oath of office, the mainstream media fawned over him like love-struck school girls. Even worse, this time they went beyond media bias to media activism, says CBS veteran and #1 bestselling author Bernard Goldberg.

In his most provocative book yet, A Slobbering Love Affair, Goldberg shows how the mainstream media’s hopelessly one-sided coverage of President Obama has shredded America’s trust in journalism and endangered our free society.

Depends what you intend to shovel

In Connecticut “shovel-ready” is drastically in need of clarification.

The stimulus package is intended to provide new money for projects, not replace existing funding. That creates another problem, local leaders said. Any project within 90 to 120 days of starting – the common definition of shovel-ready – would already be permitted and into the bid process.

”Most towns don’t do that until the funds are already in place,” Mark Oefinger, Groton Town Manager, said.

Or, as Richard Guggenheim, assistant director of the Southeastern Connecticut Council of Governments, said during an interview Thursday: “It’s the ultimate Catch-22 on steroids.”

Wait a minute.  That is not the spirit.  Any more remarks in that vein, and you don’t get anything.

And what about this guy?  Is he out of it, or what?

Oefinger, like others, expressed concern that the stimulus will not provide long-term benefits or jobs.

”I think it’s going to be dumping a lot of money down the rat hole and not have a lot to show for it,” he said.

Rat hole, eh?

Yes, rat hole.

 

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They be smitten

Tom Roeser disagrees with Charles Krauthammer, whom he rates highly, in the matter of Obama’s being blamed if the economy continues bad.

I don’t believe [it] for a moment. Amity Shlaes shows how the FDR’s wild experimentation convinced the voters that at least he was trying. The compliant, supine media will be in Obama’s corner throughout and even if nothing is accomplished, his sunny visage of hope-hope-hope will be portrayed in Rooseveltian style.

They loved FDR too, of course, as John T. Flynn says in his 1948 Roosevelt Myth.  Reporters “played along with this maker of news” as he pulled rabbits from hat, ex-Rooseveltian Flynn wrote. 

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Hope-a, hope-a, rope-a, dope!

Will the stimulus work?

New York University economics professor Thomas Sargent:

The calculations that I have seen supporting the stimulus package are back-of-the-envelope ones that ignore what we have learned in the last 60 years of macroeconomic research.

Back of the envelope worked for Lincoln on his way to Gettysburg (Bob Newhart told us so), but for us in this day? 

Consider David Axelrod’s reaction, per WSJ.com’s Political Diary, to being asked about whether it will work:

Mr. Axelrod told Fox News that he didn’t view the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] [pessimistic] findings as important. He said the government has no choice but to act quickly in the current “national emergency” and “that a lot of these investments are ones that are going to pay dividends in the short term and the long term.”

This way lies madness.  Act quickly doing what?  Does it matter?  Of course.  So where does A-rod come off dismissing these economist hotshots hired by Congress and led by a Dem appointee?  Hack.

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Woe is us who came to cheer

A bad experience for Obama fans who waited for hours with their purple tickets, getting nowhere, until noon and the end of it.

And then, shear, crushing disappointment descends over the crowd. Unlike the smiles on all the faces you walked by on, say, election night, or in the metro last night, this crowd had to summon up all they had left after multiple hours in the cold to give a tepid ovation to the inauguration of a new president.

Symbolic of the presidency to come.

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Hospital news, going digital, knowing things

RUSHING THINGS . . . . Reading Chi Trib, I found quite an item in the obits.  Advice: always read the obits, an ongoing chronicle of comings and goings, emphasis on the latter, in which the noosepaper almost always gets it right, even dousing some of its endemic, genetic, inbred zest for gossip and other bad news.

This item, however, in the obit for an apparently admirable woman who died at 91 after a long life as wife, mother (of 5), widow, and school teacher, has the news that Oak Park has a “Rush West Suburban Hospital.”  This encompasses a major change that no local paper has uncovered, since West Sub has been owned by the Resurrectionist Sisters for several years and Oak Park Hospital has been a Rush Medical Center affiliate for as many.

TELEPHONY . . . . Meanwhile, back at the old homestead, we are without landline telephone, having had AT&T in our house yesterday to digitalize us stem to stern.  Painless as it occurred, painful in the aftermath, as James, who was a pleasure to have around for five or six hours, had not connected my desk phone to anything and (not his fault) had left us w/o a dial tone while central office finished the digitalization.

My subsequent mistake was to make two calls to the U-Verse help people when one would have been enough.  The first gave me Ashley, who correctly decided our internal connection problems called for a repair person to make a house call, which he or she will do tomorrow afternoon, the earliest time available.  The second, made for no good reason to tell them we had a dial tone (which turned out illusory) gave me Gregory, who incorrectly analyzed the problem and wanted to cancel my repair person, which I did not do, arguing that I still had the office-phone connection problem.  More later . . . .

STIMULATING . . . . Again to Chi Trib, where Jonah Goldberg’s column leapt at me off the page with his quite readable notations about government knowing best (not) and “everybody” knowing what works (not).  Everybody knew Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, for instance, everybody in Dan Rather’s CBS shop knew those Texas National Guard memos were legit — everybody knew until everybody didn’t.

So it is with the grand moguls of government-directed finance — or Citigroup– and Robert Rubin-directed, for that matter — how things will or would work.  Stimuli don’t work, at least didn’t since World War II, Goldberg says, citing economist Bruce Bartlett.  Why he doesn’t note its most famous failure, under FDR, I don’t know.

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Desperately seeking a new Rahm

Some very good news from Fifth-Illinois, where the slaters could not agree on a new Rahm Emanuel.

That mea[n]s the March 3 primary will be an open one with no party endorsed candidate. State Rep. John Fritchey (D-Chicago) came closest, but could not quite reach the 50 percent (plus one) benchmark.

What, no Fritchey?  Will his zoning business suffer, he “who handles City Hall zoning cases for private clients [and] has been a state legislator since 1996”?

The insiders, convened by State Sen. James DeLeo (D-Chicago) — “D-Howya doin’?” says John Kass — did not go along, they being city-suburban, including citizens from

much of the North Side of City of Chicago from Lake Michigan into the western suburbs [including] Schiller Park, Franklin Park, River Grove, Elmwood Park, Northlake, and Melrose Park.[3] Wrigley Field is located in this district, along with the Chicago neighborhoods of Lakeview, Uptown, and Lincoln Park.

It’s always nice to see disagreement among people whose nearest thing to a standard-bearer is a guy who does govt.-related business on the side while representing us in elective office.

“We dilute the strength of the party,” urged Ald. Patrick O’Connor, of the 40th ward, when “we” fail to slate someone. 

Is that so bad in these scandalous times?

 

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Skunk alert! Party-pooper sighted

Trouble ahead, predicts Dick Morris:

Obama has given power to men and women who really don’t believe terrorism is much of a problem. They implicitly share the European view that an attack here or there is not worth turning what they regard as constitutional guarantees on their heads. The result is that we will be vastly more vulnerable and have a good chance of being hit again soon.

If nothing else, this indirectly highlights Bushies’ success in protecting us, which isn’t much discussed in these days of joy and happiness at the coming of The One.

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Young black shooters

NY Times says one answer to black-boys homicide rates, ten times whites’, is “getting them jobs.”  Fine, says Heather Mac Donald.  Jobs for all is an excellent goal.

But the biggest barrier to the employment of crime-prone inner-city youth isn’t lack of real or even make-work jobs; rather, it’s their own willingness to show up every day on time and accept authority.

Not that “many inner-city teens aren’t courteous and enthusiastic workers.”  But:

Few teenagers from any background possess the self-discipline and reliability that employers seek; teens growing up in chaotic home environments are even less likely to have developed a work ethic.

Hard times add to crime rates, as NYT editorializes?  Hardly, says Mac D:

The claim that crime results from a bad economy has limited empirical backing in general, but it is particularly ludicrous applied to juvenile violence. It is not the collapse of consumer lending that induces a 16-year-old to shoot a rival who “disses” his girlfriend; it is a failure of self-control and a distorted understanding of self-worth.

Missing from the NYT editorial is the M-word:

The marriage imperative civilizes boys. By contrast, in a world where it is unusual for a man to marry the mother of his children, boys fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility: you are responsible for your children. Freed of the social expectation that they will have to provide a stable home for their offspring, boys have little incentive to restrain their impulses and develop bourgeois habits.

Not that anyone knows how to change the culture that has little room for marriage, but wouldn’t big ideas about how to solve the black youth murder rate have something to say about the problem, even in the NY Times?

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