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Daniel Greenfield posts on how our country has been left behind. So to speak.
American progressives like to think of their country as backward and reactionary compared to Europe. And they have never been more right than now when Europe and the rest of the First World have gone right while America under Obama has been left back.
In America Alone, Mark Steyn envisioned the United States as a beleaguered hope in a dying West. Seven years later, American politics are much less healthy than those of the rest of the free world.
America does stand alone. It stands alone in embracing the rule of the left.
Recently Australia, Japan and Norway welcomed in conservative governments. Tony Abbott, Australia’s new prime minister, is a former heavyweight boxer who attended Oxford and is putting a spoke in the wheel of the Global Warming ecohoax. Japan is casting off its pacifism and standing up to the People’s Republic of China and Norway gave its left-wing government the boot and moved in “Iron Erma” in a coalition with the libertarian Progress Party which opposes taxes and immigration and supports free enterprise.
Australia, Japan and Norway are not outliers. The majority of First World countries now have conservative governments.
Canada has embraced a patriotic foreign policy and energy exploration under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his conservative Likud party have continued to move Israel’s economy toward free enterprise. And even in the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron, for all his follies, is a conservative, even if he is more McCain than DeMint, and has pushed for deregulation and welfare reform.
Sweden’s center-right coalition government has won re-election for the first time in a century. …
Want to know how sick parts of our country are? John Fund writes on the inauguration of New York’s idiot mayor.
We all knew we were in for something completely different when the inauguration of self-described “progressive” Bill de Blasio as New York’s mayor began with a keynote from pro-Communist activist Harry Belafonte.
The 86-year-old singer has a history of extremism. He has been an infamous house guest of Fidel Castro, called Colin Powell and Condi Rice “house slaves” of the Bush administration, and last year compared the free-market Koch brothers to the Ku Klux Klan.
“We will be no longer a divided city,” he proclaimed as he compared today’s New York to a “Dickensian” nightmare, as departing mayor Mike Bloomberg looked on stone-faced. “We can become America’s DNA for the future.”
He was followed by the Reverend Fred Lucas Jr., whose talk was dominated by slavery metaphors and analogies. He compared New York’s five boroughs to a “plantation” and managed to cram into his short speech other references to slavery, such as “shackles,” “bondage,” “auction blocks,” “the Emancipation Proclamation,” the “Civil War,” and the “Reconstruction Era.”
It was almost a relief to then hear Letitia James, a former Legal Aid Society lawyer who is now the city’s new public advocate. She railed against “a gilded age of inequality,” “stop-and-frisk abuses,” and “land grabs for more luxury condos.” (There’s actually some truth in that last phrase.) …
Forbes OpEd on DC’s attitude that Americans don’t deserve to be free.
President Obama’s Kansas speech is a remarkable document. In calling for more government controls, more taxation, more collectivism, he has two paragraphs that give the show away. Take a look at them.
“there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes–especially for the wealthy–our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.
Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.”
Though not in Washington, I’m in that “certain crowd” that has been saying for decades that the market will take care of everything. It’s not really a crowd, it’s a tiny group of radicals–radicals for capitalism, in Ayn Rand’s well-turned phrase.
The only thing that the market doesn’t take care of is anti-market acts: acts that initiate physical force. That’s why we need government: to wield retaliatory force to defend individual rights. …
For a great example of how things really work in Washington, Tim Carney has the story of how corporations got the government to ban incandescent bulbs.
Say goodbye to the regular light bulb this New Year.
For more than a century, the traditional incandescent bulb was the symbol of American innovation. Starting Jan. 1, the famous bulb is illegal to manufacture in the U.S., and it has become a fitting symbol for the collusion of big business and big government.
The 2007 Energy Bill, a stew of regulations and subsidies, set mandatory efficiency standards for most light bulbs. Any bulbs that couldn’t produce a given brightness at the specified energy input would be illegal. That meant the 25-cent bulbs most Americans used in nearly every socket of their home would be outlawed.
People often assume green regulations like this represent the triumph of environmental activists trying to save the plant. That’s rarely the case, and it wasn’t here. Light bulb manufacturers whole-heartedly supported the efficiency standards. General Electric, Sylvania and Philips — the three companies that dominated the bulb industry — all backed the 2007 rule, while opposing proposals to explicitly outlaw incandescent technology (thus leaving the door open for high-efficiency incandescents).
This wasn’t a case of an industry getting on board with an inevitable regulation in order to tweak it. The lighting industry was the main reason the legislation was moving. As the New York Times reported in 2011, “Philips formed a coalition with environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council to push for higher standards.” …