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David Warren has interesting thoughts on the oil spill and on the mentality of the governing class.
…In a sense, Obama is hoist on his own petard. The man who blames Bush for everything now finds there are some things presidents cannot do. More deeply, the opposition party that persuades the public government can solve all their problems, discovers once in power there are problems government cannot solve.
Alas, it will take more time than they have to learn the next lesson: that governments which try to solve the insoluble, more or less invariably, make each problem worse.
I like to dwell on the wisdom of our ancestors. It took us millennia to emerge from the primitive notion that a malignant agency must lie behind every unfortunate experience. …
…In so many ways, the trend of post-Christian society today is back to pagan superstitions: to the belief that malice lies behind every misfortune, and to the related idea that various, essentially pagan charms can be used to ward off that to which all flesh is heir. The belief that, for instance, laws can be passed, that change the entire order of nature, is among the most irrational of these. …
Jennifer Rubin has a mind-blowing quote from Juan Williams, along with her usual excellent commentary.
Juan Williams — to the amazement of some of his co-panelists — let it rip on Fox News Sunday. The subject was nominally the Sestak and Romanoff scandals, but Williams found the bigger theme:
“I think the problem here is this is an administration that, as Hillary Clinton famously pointed out, you may not want to have answer the 3:00 a.m. call.
These are guys who have tremendous vision about legislative achievements and specific things like health care, going forward on immigration, those difficult issues for America that America so far has failed to deal with.
But when it comes to the crisis, when it comes to the gulf oil spill, the wars, the recession, they feel as if it’s being imposed upon them, rather than taking the helm. I think that’s what Americans are sensing right here. And I think it’s the source of their problem at the moment. Are you able to handle a crisis in a convincing way that inspires confidence? And so far, the president hasn’t done that. …”
Christopher Hitchens has a different view: he expresses disdain for both Israel and Turkey.
…While we wait for this puncturing of the current balloon of propaganda, we might as well savor the ironies. As well as being the two most intimate allies of the United States in the region, Turkey and Israel possess large and educated populations that want in their way to be part of “the West.” They also both suffer from mediocre and banana-republic-type leaders, who are willing prisoners of clerical extremists in their own second-rate regimes. Turkey cannot be thought of as European until it stops lying about Armenia, gets its invading troops out of Cyprus, and grants full rights to its huge Kurdish population. Israel will never be accepted as a state for Jews, let alone as a Jewish state, until it ceases to govern other people against their will. The flotilla foul-up, pitting former friends against each other, only serves to obscure these unignorable facts.
In the Corner, Jay Nordlinger comments on brave politicians.
By now, you may well have seen Chris Christie giving the teacher’s union what-for. I’m talking about this video. As you know, Christie is governor of New Jersey. And a breath — no, a tornado — of fresh air. All my life, I have waited for a politician to stand up to the teachers’ unions: for their bullying, for their unreason, for their claim to be watching out for “the children” when they are merely benefiting themselves. Politicians are just too frightened of the teachers’ unions, even when they have their number, unquestionably — even when they loathe them. …
In the National Review, Kevin Williamson breaks down the numbers in the Ponzi scheme that the government class has been running.
About that $14 trillion national debt: Get ready to tack some zeroes onto it. Taken alone, the amount of debt issued by the federal government — that $14 trillion figure that shows up on the national ledger — is a terrifying, awesome, hellacious number: Fourteen trillion seconds ago, Greenland was covered by lush and verdant forests, and the Neanderthals had not yet been outwitted and driven into extinction by Homo sapiens sapiens, because we did not yet exist. Big number, 14 trillion, and yet it doesn’t even begin to cover the real indebtedness of American governments at the federal, state, and local levels, because governments don’t count up their liabilities the same way businesses do. …
In the Daily Beast, Charlie Gasparino compares the current recession with the Depression and the failed government policies that prolonged it also.
…I’m not saying we are headed for a replay of the 1930s—read up on the history of economic booms and busts, and you’ll see they’re different in their own way—but there are disturbing similarities: Buried in those wonderful economic numbers, which the president touted on Friday, was the fact that almost all of the job growth was a function of the government’s hire of temporary census workers, rather than businesses beginning to hire again. After a period of improvement, private-sector job creation has almost ceased. Even worse, “the real” unemployment rate (which doesn’t count people looking for jobs) is rising above 17 percent, depending on the survey, which means that more people are simply dropping out of the workforce. Finally, a 9.7 percent unemployment rate is nothing to brag about, particularly when you have the Fed pumping massive amounts of money into the economy with near-zero percent interest-rate policy. …
…His stimulus package was supposed to produce shovel-ready jobs that would repair our infrastructure much like the various public-works programs instituted by Hoover and Roosevelt. But instead of spending the money on building roads and bridges, states have hoarded much of the stimulus cash to keep their own workforces fat and happy. While the construction industry suffers 20 percent unemployment, state and local governments are keeping employment at the DMV just humming along.
It should come as no surprise that unemployment is alarmingly high just about everywhere—except in government and on Wall Street, the recipient of government bailouts, which is yet another reason why investors are getting antsy and stocks are starting to slide. …
In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin gives another example of how taxes hurt the economy and earning potential of citizens.
The lesson that high taxes hurt business and, by definition, the communities in which those businesses reside is one that is proved every day by high-tax states like New York. That this applies not just to the financial industry and other victims of confiscatory fiscal policy but to all sorts of citizens as well is an issue rarely explored in the mainstream press. So it was fascinating to note that in the follow-up coverage to the first boxing match held at Yankee Stadium in 34 years this past weekend…
…Trost went on to state that …We’d love to do [Mayweather-Pacquiao], but I believe both of them are non-residents and the tax could be as much as 13 percent on the purse, where the tax out in Vegas is zero. That’s a big difference.”
…while liberal advocates for higher taxes routinely claim they are doing so to help ordinary New Yorkers, they ought to consider that in making it unattractive for fighters to perform here, they are actually robbing the people from the South Bronx and elsewhere in the city who work in the many jobs created every night Yankee Stadium is open. The failure to bring more such exhibitions to the city illustrates the simple truth that, once again, liberal economics has scored a technical knockout on the economic well-being of working-class New Yorkers.