How Hypocritical Can You Get, Liberals?

How low will liberals go? Who knows? Here are the news items on liberal hypocrisy, for just one day.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a high-school student could not wear a T-shirt with anti-gay slogans. But I thought that liberals believed in the First Amendment and the right of dissent.

OK, well maybe innocent high-school students must be protected from the cruel winds of the public square. But the faculty of Ohio State University (Mansfield) voted to allow gay professors to file charges for sexual harrassment against a librarian, Scott Savage, who recommended the following books for a reading list: “'The Marketing of Evil' by David Kupelian, 'The Professors' by David Horowitz, 'Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis' by Bat Ye'or and 'It Takes a Family' by Senator Rick Santorum” because it made them feel unsafe.
But I thought liberals believed in free speech and were absolutely against censorship in any form.

Then we have Howard Dean. He has just called for making border security a top priority. “'The first thing we want is tough border control,' he said.” But don’t Democrats in every big city in the nation order their police officers not to arrest illegal immigrants? And don’t liberals call the border fence “inhuman?”

As gas prices reach $3.00 a gallon the New York Times reports that “Democrats running for Congress are moving quickly to use the most recent surge in oil and gasoline prices to bash Republicans over energy policy.” But haven’t Democrats for years opposed development of new oil resources offshore and in Alaska, and isn’t it Democrats that insist on fancy gasoline formulations that drive up the price and cause local shortages? And don’t Democrats believe that energy prices ought to be high to encourage conservation?

There’s a question that every day gets bigger and bigger. Do Democrats believe in anything?

Two Nations Under 401(k)

Many social changes do not occur in the blaze of national publicity but work their way under the radar, slowly changing society one person at a time. Such a change may be the 401(k) revolution, the rise of defined contribution pensions, or more exactly, the rise of pre-tax individual savings plans. Donald Lambro at the Washington Times celebrates their huge expansion.

The numbers are astounding and explosive: Since 1990, total worker assets in 401(k) plans have grown an average of 13 percent a year, from $385 billion to an estimated $2.1 trillion in 2004... says the Investment Company Institute.

At $2.1 trillion, we are talking about real money. But what political junkies want to know is: Does this change the political balance in the United States towards an ownership society?

"Investors, regardless of income, gender or race, vote more Republican than non-investors," tax cut crusaders Grover Norquist and Cesar Conda wrote in a Wall Street Journal analysis about the effect of President Bush's tax cuts.

But there is another thing to think about. While the ranks of investors grow what about the people left behind? What about the dependent classes, the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party who live by remittances from the government: from government programs, from government jobs, and from government pensions? These people have a completely different outlook on life, and live lives that depend, until their dying day, upon the continuance of that check from the government. For the last half century the Democrats have been happily growing the ranks of the dependent, instinctively understanding that their political support comes from the dependent classes.

When will the clash come between these Two Nations, between the defined contribution nation and the defined benefit nation?

e-Stonian PM Gets Friedman Prize

He’s no relation of Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion, and he’s certainly not lacking in courage.

He is Mart Laar, the former Prime Minister of Estonia, who set in motion the economic reforms that has doubled the GDP of Estonia in ten years. And now he is the third recipient of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty awarded by the Cato Institute.

Accordint to Marian Tupy

Mart Laar replaced the "dead hand" of the government with Adam Smith's "invisible hand." His government eliminated import tariffs (a decision that was partly reversed by Estonia's membership of the European Union) and established a flat income tax. Corporate taxes on reinvested profits fell to zero and a currency board was established to combat inflation. The government also undertook extensive privatization of state companies.

But here is what Laar himself says about his reforms, as told on the Cato Institute’s website.

"I had read only one book on economics — Milton Friedman's Free to Choose," he said. "I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatization, the flat tax and the abolition of all customs rights, was the result of economic reforms that had been put into practice in the West. It seemed common sense to me and, as I thought it had already been done everywhere, I simply introduced it in Estonia, despite warnings from Estonian economists that it could not be done. They said it was as impossible as walking on water. We did it: we just walked on the water because we did not know that it was impossible."

Oy! It’s lucky that Milton Friedman has solid ideas that actually work. Suppose Laar had read some lefty tome instead! Then e-Stonia would be in a mess, like Old Europe.

And bravo to Mart Laar for turning his nation into a Baltic tiger.

Women Should Be Nice to Men

Author Caitlin Flanagan has written a book for the stay-at-home-mother-with-a-nanny set. It is called To Hell With All That. It’s about time, you might say. After all, we have all been assuming up to now that the nanny set were all out pursuing high-powered careers.

But Flanagan got in trouble with the feminists, so marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher decided to interview her. Flanagan is really a liberal, you see, except that

"I have one conservative standpoint," says Flanagan. "I really have traditional emotions about having a full-time, at-home parent, be it mom or dad. For that, the left has excoriated me, humiliated me, called me names in print - one of which I had to look up."

Welcome to the club, honey. But what has really got her into trouble is promoting the idea that women should be nice to men.

"Try just doing something nice for your husband. Set the table, cook something you know he loves and see what happens."

You see men are not what you think.

"Men really want to help women. Yes, there are bad men in the world. Avoid them. Most of them show their stripes very early."

Actually, men want peace in the house and they are prepared to put up with quite a lot to get it. Men the world over live with the truth that if She is happy, everyone is happy. But if She is not happy then nobody is happy.

Lesson of the Duke Rape Case

In all the flap over the Duke University lacrosse rape case one thing is being forgotten, writes Ann Coulter with her usual verve.

You can severely reduce your chances of having a false accusation of rape leveled against you if you don't hire strange women to come to your house and take their clothes off for money.

She certainly has a point. Not only that.

You can severely reduce your chances of having someone playing the race card on you if you never get into a compromising position of any kind with an African American.

In general, white males seem to have internalized this lesson. That is what the government’s Table 42 in the National Crime Victimization Survey demonstrates year in and year out.

Here are the numbers for Table 42 in 2003 (pdf).

National Crime Victimization Survey 2003 from Table 42. Personal Crimes of Violence Perceived Race of Offender Incidents of Rape/Sexual Assault White Black   White victim 75,866 20,310   Black victim 0 21,105

There you have it. The numbers are pretty telling. Whites are happily raping away on white women. And blacks are happily raping away on black and white women. But whites are not raping black women. In the government’s Table 42 the zero has an asterisk. The sample is too small for a reliable number.

The question is: Why are white rapists so careful about not raping black women? The answer is obvious. Because it is too dangerous.

In this non-judgmental age there are still a few things that people are still really judgmental about. One of them is white-on-black rape.

If you didn’t know that before, you do now. That is what the Duke lacrosse rape case is all about.

Next They Will Lay Off the Journalists

We all know the agony of the layoff. We sympathize, more or less, with the grossly overpaid auto-workers and union pilots as they strike to maintain their rents. And then we are sorry when we read of 10,000 laid off at General Fishslice. But think of the coming layoffs for journalists. You haven’t thought of it? Well, Boris Johnson has. It’s all very well for the well-paid auto workers, but sooner or later they will come for the journalists, and there will

come a time when the forces of international capital will decree that there is no longer any economic justification for this space to be filled by the manual labour of this particular semi-skilled artisan.



The ancient word-plant will be shut. The gerundive turning-sheds will fall silent. The lathes will cease to hone the metaphors, and no sound will be heard in the vast grammatical assembly lines save the drip-drip-drip from the cracked skylight and the scuttling of rats in the stock of unused similes.

Yes, it’s a pretty grim prospect, for every ink-stained wretch knows

that ranged beneath us, smacking their chops, are hordes of brilliant and pustulant young thrusters, only too keen to show what magic they could produce in our places.

In a healthy economy there are lots of jobs being created and lots of jobs being destroyed. For all the lamentations of union leaders, tender-hearted progressives, and sundry other special pleaders,

It's the market and it's the only way.

President Hillary Means Same-old Same-old

After the stellar economic growth of the last 25 years you would think that all serious presidential contenders would be talking expansively about the wonders of low tax rates and the wisdom of the market. But you would be wrong, according to Larry Kudlow. A President Hillary Clinton would take us back to the days to industrial policy and a “national investment authority.” Sounds like Old Europe. Said Hillary in Chicago:

“Tax cuts are not the cure-all for everything that ails the American economy,” and that instead we need the “right tax system [and] the right investment, including infrastructure. . . . decisions and policies that only all of us acting together through our government can make to set the stage for future prosperity.

Of course, this is suitably vague, but it does suggest a lot of top-down political control. And if the infrastructure of the nation needs investment, it is because liberals siphoned the nation’s wealth in the 1960s and 1970s into social programs, and sneered at continuing to build highways until we had paved the nation over.

Of course, no speech from a Democrat would be complete without a bit of class warfare. Said Hillary:

“America did not build the greatest economy in the world because we have rich people.”

That’s true. We built the railroads with the money of rich people in Britain. But it is also true that we have rich people in the United States because we have built the greatest economy in the world.

There is another way to grow the economy and bring prosperity to Americans. Writes Kudlow:

Two weeks ago I was in the Oval Office with President Bush and a handful of financial journalists. The president spoke to us about his growth policies and priorities, such as making tax relief permanent, keeping the tax rate on dividends and capital gains low, maintaining lean budgets, and expanding free trade.



This vision is in deep contrast to the one being set forth by Hillary Clinton. The president places the risk-taker and the entrepreneur at the center of economic growth; the presidential candidate sees government as the driving force of the economy.

Amen, brother.