Mayor Pete's understanding of economic liberty is weak tea indeed

The American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis makes some observations about a recent interview of Pete Butigieg by CNBC's John Harwood, and they're worth your considering, but I have my own, which I'll share momentarily.

First, the relevant part of the interview:

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said some confusing things — or at least some things that confused me — in an interview with CNBC reporter John Harwood. Here is part of their exchange:

Buttigieg: … The economy is not some creature that just lumbers along on its own. It’s an interaction between private sector and public sector. And public sector policies, for basically as long as I’ve been alive, have been skewed in a direction that’s increasing inequality. And a lot of this is the consequence of what you might call the Reagan consensus. There was a period where even Democrats seemed to operate in this framework that assumes that the only thing you’d ever do with a tax is cut it. That those tax cuts were assumed to pay for themselves. The empirical collapse of that supply side consensus, I think, is one of the defining moments of this period that we’re living through.

Harwood: Why do you ascribe it to the Reagan consensus as opposed to technological change, globalization, movement of capital?

Buttigieg: Well, all of these forces interact. But none of these forces automatically have to make our society more unequal. If anything, globalization was supposed to create more equality among nations.

Harwood: Well actually it has created more equality in the world. It’s taken millions of people out of poverty.

Buttigieg: Sure, it’s lifted so many out of poverty. And by the way, there are ways that it can work for us at home, too. But again, we’re seeing a concentration of wealth and power that skews things in the opposite direction. The fundamental truth is, it turns out a rising tide does not lift all boats. Not on its own. Especially if some of the boats are sort of tethered to the ocean floor. And that’s the kind of pattern that we’ve been on.

As I say Pethokoukis then makes observations - six of them - that are incisive. I particularly resonated with number four:

Fourth, kudos to Harwood for correcting Buttigieg on the impact of globalization on inequality since Buttigieg is seemingly unaware that inequality between nations is experiencing an unprecedented decline. And as Harwood also correctly mentioned, market liberalization across the developing world — particularly China — has brought a billion humans out of extreme property.

But I wish Pethokoukis had addressed the even more fundamental problem with Buttigieg's thinking.

The economy is not primarily an "interaction between private sector and public sector." The private sector is the economy.  Even within the purview of what government puts in place - stuff that is the product of its proper Madisonian function, such as infrastructure, courts, law enforcement and the military - as well as all the stuff that most definitely is not the product of its proper Madisonian function, such as involvement in health care, agriculture and education, it is the private sector that provides the goods and services with which government does its thing. I see this in the countless county commissioners, county council, city council and board of works meetings I attend. To a large extent, they consist of approving contracts with privately owned organizations that do stuff and make stuff.

See, Mayor Pete, the public sector is - or at least ought to be - minuscule in comparison to the private sector. So minuscule that it ought to be folly to juxtapose them. The private sector is really just the sum total of millions of daily agreements made between people and organizations regarding the market value of millions of goods and services.

Which brings me to his trotting out of that business of tax cuts "paying for themselves." That's not the point, never has been, and never should be. The whole argument about government being too big is valid and one important reason why it's wrong to speak in such terms.

But it's not the primary reason why that's wrong. The primary reason is that, to repeat something that LITD says so often that I have to be careful that it doesn't turn into a formulaic talking point,

government ought to have to puke all over itself to justify taking the first penny from any of us, rich, middle-class or poor. 

There is a justification to be made for a small degree of taxation. See the above-enumerated proper functions under a Madisonian framework.

But that's it. The rest of the money you have ought to be yours and immune to government seizure.

Maybe being raised by a Marxist obscured this simple moral truth for Mayor Pete.

But maybe he can get schooled in the process of running for president.

It's still late in the day - today's edition

I tend to concur with David French's assertion that the Left still prevails culturally in post-America, even in the wake of the massive state-and-federal-level victories for Republicans in November:

Even while Streep was still speaking, conservative Twitter sparked to life, making all these critiques and more. Yet there was one sentiment that I thought was misplaced, a dash of triumphalism that rang hollow. “This is why Trump won,” said some. “Keep talking like this, and Trump wins again,” said others. In the narrow political sense, there’s some truth to this. Lots of voters don’t like to be hectored. Lots of voters defy Hollywood’s commands.

Indeed, since 1968 — when the modern Left really got rolling — the Democratic party has been largely losing ground. It’s lost most presidential races, it’s lost its stranglehold on the House of Representatives, it has lost the Senate, and now its fortunes in the states are at a low ebb. For all their celebrity star power, the Democrats are the weakest they’ve been in generations.

But in that same period, whose cultural values have most advanced? The secular Left has taken a sledgehammer to God, family, and country — the pillars of our national culture — and Hollywood has led the way. American irreligiosity is rising, the family (especially in our most vulnerable communities) is collapsing, and generations of children are now raised to view their nation not as a flawed but indispensable beacon of freedom but rather as a bigoted oppressor, an instrument of evil across the globe. 

In fact, it’s strange to even think of Trump as somehow a triumph over Hollywood. In many ways, he is Hollywood — a towering celebrity who has exhibited and lived exactly the personal values that fill the pages of People magazine and Us Weekly. To “beat” Hollywood, the GOP turned to Hollywood. It can mock celebrity culture no longer. 

Hollywood sells the best cultural drugs. Truth is optional, self-indulgence is a virtue, and bullying is bravery. And last night it was all wrapped in Streep’s alluring package, an emotion-laden call to arms that stirred the hearts of millions.

Over the long sweep of history, what matters more? Donald Trump’s immigration policy or the fate of the family? Paul Ryan’s entitlement reforms or the faith of a nation? The fate of the family and the faith of the nation narrow and constrain our politics, limiting our choices to those options that are palatable to an increasingly dependent people. Hollywood is helping redefine our nation’s character. And if the Left keeps winning our culture, the GOP can keep winning our politics and the nation will still lose.

So laugh all you want at Streep, conservatives. When it comes to the things that truly matter, she’s winning, we’re losing, and Donald Trump isn’t going to turn the tide.

Still, it's hard not to see an impending crackup on the Left, as identity politics demands such impossible contortions of its adherents that the fissures can't be healed:

The New York Times published a story today about racial divisions that are springing up around the Women’s March on Washington, the progressive event scheduled for the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. At the core of the story is Jennifer Willis, a white woman from South Carolina who was planning to attend the march with her daughters. But after reading something online which she found off-putting, Willis decided to cancel her trip. From the NY Times:

Ms. Willis, the South Carolina wedding minister, had been looking forward to the salve of rallying with people who share her values, a rarity in her home state, where she said she had been insulted and shouted at for marrying gay couples.

But then she read a post by ShiShi Rose, a 27-year-old blogger from Brooklyn.

“Now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less,” Ms. Rose wrote. “You should be reading our books and understanding the roots of racism and white supremacy. Listening to our speeches. You should be drowning yourselves in our poetry.”

Willis felt offended at the assumption that she wasn’t already aware of her advantages but told the NY Times, “The last thing that is going to make me endeared to you, to know you and love you more, is if you are sitting there wagging your finger at me.”

For her part, ShiShi Rose tells the Times she wasn’t trying to discourage anyone from attending the march, but adds, “I needed them to understand that they don’t just get to join the march and not check their privilege constantly.”

The last word in the piece is given to Willis who asks, “Can you please tell me what that means?” I think she already has an instinctive sense of what it means, which is why she was offended. It’s progressive code for: Shut up! 

But maybe that's the endgame, what final leftist "victory" looks like: Somali-level anarchy and the momentary rule of a succession of tribal warlords.

You know, something like a state of affairs in which "many . . . fall away, and betray one another and hate one another . . . [and] many false prophets  . . . arise and lead many astray."

The more the 21st century progresses, the more I come to see the importance of cultivating traits like humility and clarity. I'm less inclined to see any of my fellow fallen mortals as the embodiment of all I hope to see prevail in this realm.

One encounters much talk in conservative enclaves of reversing the cultural rot depicted above by French - that sledgehammer that has been taken to our culture's pillars. I'm beginning to see that such a process will not be birthed at any kind of convention held in some big urban hall or in the panel discussions in the banquet rooms at some scenic resort. There will be no drafting of a document that will serve as our unshakable road map to a future of restoration.

There will be no New Era for the material realm in which safety, peace, happiness, general prosperity and comity reign without disruption.

There is no substitute for the real work we must do: fix our gaze on our real home and pray that He who reigns there will have the mercy to let us in.

The CEO - wage earner gap debunked

Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute explains:

The nation’s largest labor federation reports this year that the typical CEO running an S & P 500 firm received total compensation of $12.4 million in 2015 while the average rank-and-file worker was paid just $36,875 — a pay gap of 335-to-1.

But the AFL-CIO can only get such an inflated pay ratio by applying a series of statistical sleights of hand that result in an invalid apples-to-oranges comparison of the total compensation for CEOs to the cash wages of mostly part-time workers.

To start, the AFL-CIO only considers a very small sample of S&P 500 CEOs to get its 335-to-1 ratio. Using a larger, more representative sample of CEOs produces a much smaller pay gap.

For example, the AFL-CIO’s own website reveals that the average CEO compensation of Russell 3000 companies was $5.7 million last year, which would cut the 335-1 ratio by more than half to only 155-to-1.

Further, BLS data show that there are actually more than 20,000 chief executives employed nationally who “manage companies and enterprises” at an average annual salary of $220,700. For that more comprehensive group of America’s CEOs, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio drops to only 6-to-1.
Then there’s the issue of average pay for rank-and-file workers. The AFL-CIO reports an annual pay figure of $36,875 in 2015 for the “average nonsupervisory worker,” but doesn’t provide any additional details.
Here are the details not provided by the AFL-CIO.
The $36,875 annual average worker pay for the 99 million “production and nonsupervisory employees” is based on an average hourly wage of $21.04 for rank-and-file workers in 2015, an average workweek of only 33.7 hours for those workers, and an assumption of 52 weeks of work per year. That’s how the AFL-CIO gets its reported annual pay for the average U.S. worker: $21.04 per hour x 33.7 hours per week x 52 weeks = $36,875.

So every year, to get the highest possible pay ratio, the AFL-CIO does a statistically deceptive comparison of the total compensation for only 500 CEOs who are working full-time and in their prime earning years to the cash wages only for 99 million rank-and-file workers who are mostly part-time workers. But you would never know that from the AFL-CIO’s website because the details of average worker pay are never fully explained. 

How would the AFL-CIO’s outsized pay ratio change if we considered total compensation for both CEOs and full-time rank-and-file workers? To make the comparison as accurate as possible, let’s consider rank-and-file employees working a 50-hour week (even though most CEOs probably more than 50 hours a week) and receiving fringe benefits equal to 46% of their cash wages, which is the current estimate from the BLS for all workers.
The total annual compensation for rank-and-file workers would be nearly $72,000 and would result in a CEO-to-worker compensation ratio of only 172-to-1. In other words, the AFL-CIO’s reported CEO-to-worker pay ratio is inflated by a factor of almost two times by comparing the total compensation of CEOs to the average cash wages for part-time workers.
Beyond the statistical chicanery used to generate an inflated pay ratio, what’s the point of the AFL-CIO’s annual reports on CEO pay? The AFL-CIO tells us that although America is supposed to a land of opportunity, the rising CEO-to-worker pay gap means that “corporate CEOs have been taking a greater share of the economic pie” while wages have stagnated for the average worker. The message is that if CEOs weren’t being so generously compensated then rank-and-file workers would be making higher wages rather than getting only the leftover scraps.

Let’s do a little experiment: The S&P 500 CEOs received $6.2 billion as a group in total compensation in 2015. If the AFL-CIO could confiscate that entire amount and redistribute it to the rank-and-file workers, how would that affect average worker pay? 

Each of 99 million rank-and-file worker would receive an annual increase in pay of only $63 before taxes, or about 3.6 cents more per hour. In other words, complete confiscation and redistribution of S & P 500 CEO compensation would make almost no difference in pay for rank-and-file workers.
It’s not that surprising that the AFL-CIO would engage in an apples-to-oranges comparison to produce the highest possible CEO-to-worker pay ratio possible in its role representing union workers.

But, of course, a comprehensive look at facts doesn't have the sex appeal of a class-struggle-narrative sound bite.

 

Get your kids out of government schools - today's edition

Dispensing poison with our tax dollars:

Some Henrico parents are outraged about a controversial video shown at Glen Allen High School. It tackles things like racial profiling and the school to prison to pipeline. 

The YouTube video titled "Structural Discrimination: The Unequal Opportunity Race," was shown to students at a Glen Allen High School Black History month program.

"Dr. King gave his life so that America would be a place where we are judged by the content of our character not the color of our skin," said radio personality Craig Johnson. "Now we have poverty pimps being led by our current president Barack Obama who all they talk about is the color of skin."

A concerned parent wrote a letter complaining the video is leading to tensions in school. 

"Y'all are privileged. Get the --- blank --- over it," read one of numerous tweets about the topic said the parent. 

Don Blake's granddaughter attended the assembly.

"They are sitting there watching a video that is dividing them up from a racial standpoint. It's a White guilt kind of video," said Blake. "I think somebody should be held accountable for this."

Johnson agrees. 

"Force that person to stand on that stage and defend that video," said Johnson. "I'm telling you ... I will mop the floor with that person."

Do not get inured to this stuff. Yes, I know it's the norm in 2016 post-America, but stay alarmed.

Thursday roundup

You've surely heard about the nuclear black market that has had Moldova as its hub, probably even checked out some analysis and commentary.  Here is the original AP story about it. It ought to make your hair stand on end:

[There have been] at least four attempts in five years in which criminal networks with suspected Russian ties sought to sell radioactive material to extremists through Moldova, an investigation by The Associated Press has found. One investigation uncovered an attempt to sell bomb-grade uranium to a real buyer from the Middle East, the first known case of its kind.

In that operation, wiretaps and interviews with investigators show, a middleman for the gang repeatedly ranted with hatred for America as he focused on smuggling the essential material for an atomic bomb and blueprints for a dirty bomb to a Middle Eastern buyer.

In wiretaps, videotaped arrests, photographs of bomb-grade material, documents and interviews, AP found that smugglers are explicitly targeting buyers who are enemies of the West. The developments represent the fulfillment of a long-feared scenario in which organized crime gangs are trying to link up with groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaida — both of which have made clear their ambition to use weapons of mass destruction.

The sting operations involved a partnership between the FBI and a small group of Moldovan investigators, who over five years went from near total ignorance of the black market to wrapping up four sting operations. Informants and police posing as connected gangsters penetrated the smuggling networks, using old-fashioned undercover tactics as well as high-tech gear from radiation detectors to clothing threaded with recording devices.

But their successes were undercut by striking shortcomings: Kingpins got away, and those arrested evaded long prison sentences, sometimes quickly returning to nuclear smuggling, AP found.

For strategic reasons, in most of the operations arrests were made after samples of nuclear material had been obtained rather than the larger quantities. That means that if smugglers did have access to the bulk of material they offered, it remains in criminal hands.

The repeated attempts to peddle radioactive materials signal that a thriving nuclear black market has emerged in an impoverished corner of Eastern Europe on the fringes of the former Soviet Union. Moldova, which borders Romania, is a former Soviet republic.

Heather Wilhelm on why she doesn't give a flying flip whether there is ever a woman president.

Kevin Williamson on why inequality is a feature of life in any society where humans are relatively free and therefore nothing to be concerned about.

House Freedom Caucus endorses Dan Webster for Speaker. He'd be dandy, as would Jason Chaffetz. McCarthy, not so much.

Ted Cruz eats Sierra Club head Aaron Mair for lunch. Mair is appearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee and tries to pull that 97-percent-consensus-on-"climate-change" crud on the debate champion.

Russia is now launching cruise missiles at targets in Syria from ships1,000 miles away in the Caspian Sea - and not just a few of 'em.

If for some reason you still needed more convincing that the Pacific Educational Group was one of the most poisonous forces in post-America, this ought to do it:

A major national conference for teachers and school administrators starting on Saturday, October 10, in Baltimore will focus exclusively on race and racism, featuring workshops on “interrupting whiteness” in American schools, the “dominance of White supremacy” in society, “White privilege” enjoyed by Caucasian students, “white domination of thought,” and how to “decenter whiteness.”

The conference, officially titled The National Summit for Courageous Conversation 2015, is organized by the Pacific Educational Group (PEG), a large and influential consulting firm hired by hundreds of school districts nationwide — often under pressure from the federal government — to address “racial gaps” in scholastic performance and behavior problems in the classroom.

Taking place in Baltimore, natch. And we all know what the term "conversation" means to the jackboots: We do the haranguing, you do the listening.

The ridiculous and poisonous extent to which identity politics has metastasized

Naomi Schaefer Riley at the NY Post understands that you don't let an article like that by Lisa Miller in New York Magazine go unremarked upon.

Miller thinks it's quite intriguing and groundbreaking that a hoity-toity private school called the Fieldston Lower School is taking the goofy-ass concept of the "affinity group" to the next level and clustering the student body according to demographics.  In short, segregating the blacks, Hispanics, "Asians," whites, Jews and so forth from each other for much of their classroom experience and impressing upon them the "importance" of pondering their racial or ethnic identities.

It's enough to make you hurl.  Miller just has to bring in all the fabricated racial premises for the recent round of urban unrest:

It was not lost on anyone that this program was being rolled out against a national backdrop of explosive racial drama — or that, both within Fieldston and without, the central racial story is still white and black. Mariama Richards, the director of progressive and multicultural education at all Fieldston schools and the lead architect of the program, is herself black — an “equity practitioner,” her Twitter bio says, in public and private schools. In 2013, she had been wooed away from Georgetown Day, where she had done similar work for nearly a decade. The following summer, she and colleagues had developed what has come to be known as the affinity-group program while the people of Ferguson, Missouri, were raging over the shooting, by a white police officer, of an unarmed black man named Michael Brown. So when parents say the new race program has an activist agenda, they are entirely right. In January, after a grand jury failed to indict the police officer responsible for the choking death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, more than a hundred members of the Fieldston faculty signed a letter expressing solidarity with #blacklivesmatter: “This is an occasion when, as citizens and as educators, remaining silent is not a viable option.”

And then it gets ludicrous.  Jewish, Hispanic and "Asian" kids feeling like blacks are hogging all the attention:

“It’s so fricking boring,” said a fifth-grader in the Asian group. “We do the same thing every week. The conversations we have are mostly about the tensions between whites and blacks, and never about Asians or Hispanic people. It annoys me sometimes that people are like, ‘Oh my God, people are so segregated.’ But we are never mentioned. It’s just frustrating, I would say.”

And there are quotes from teachers and administrators about "authentic voices" and "privilege" and the rest of the jargon the jackboots insist that we pollute our skulls with.

And plenty of coverage of similar undertakings at other schools around the country.

You ought to read the whole thing, but be forewarned that you might blow chunks before you finish it.

Anyway, back to Riley's takedown of it:

At least some of the parents at the school are thrilled with this program and seem to feel it will help prepare their students for life after Fieldston.

One mother describes the sense of exhaustion and frustration she felt being a black student at Exeter coming from the Bronx.

When she saw all the white people, she asked her mother if she could come home. What really “broke” her, she says, was a class called “Black Experience in White America,” in which she was consistently asked to explain black perspective to her white classmates.

She thinks an “affinity group” will help prepare her daughter for this experience.

Perhaps. But this is not a problem that happened in math class or English lit. The demands that a black student represent his or her race in class comes from courses that focus on race and teachers who think a teenager’s personal experience is worthy of academic study.

Like so much of education from kindergarten all the way through a doctorate these days, the affinity groups are really just another way to encourage narcissism.

Because what matters most for the future of this country — for justice, for equality, for racial harmony — is how you feel.

Exactly.  And a society of self-absorbed dweebs puking all over themselves is ripe for conquest by jihaidsts.  Don't think that's going unnoticed.

They know good and well they're not some kind of champions of the downtrodden

John F. DiLeo at the Illinois Review has a great piece on the minimum-wage demonstration a handful of bussed-in protestors staged at the McDonald's shareholders meeting in Oak Brook.  He looks at a sampling of three demonstrators (they must have been quoted in the Chicago Tribune article that inspired him to write the piece): a 35-year-old minimum-wage employee at a McDonald's store in Kansas (where did he get the bread for the bus fare and lodging?), a lady who strives mightily to find a racial angle to the issue, and a SEIU agitator.

He then makes the point that should be front and center in discussions of fast-food wages: the fact that the minimum wage is for entry-level positions, and people generally advance from those pretty quickly, sometimes, if they like that company and field, rising to management level, and maybe even becoming a franchise owner.

But the part I'd like to share here is DiLeo's summary of what this kind of hissy fit is really all about:

• It’s a campaign to help the dying anachronistic trade union movement to come back from the dead. 
• It’s a campaign to crush the American franchise system by regulating small businesses exactly like we regulate deep-pocketed big businesses.
• It’s a campaign to keep the poor where they are, dependent on government for their housing and food and education. 
• It’s a campaign to stop upward mobility in the private sector. 
• It’s a campaign to rob our nation, once and for all, from any claim to the wonderful benefits of a free market economy.

The vanguard and the useful idiots: the two main elements revolutionaries need to take a crowbar to the normal-people economy.

Memo to Mrs. Food Desert: Go away and quit poisoning Western civilization

I've really had it with Mrs. FD.  She gets fawned over in the glitzy mags because of her status, but she is nothing but a blatant race-hustler a la Sharpton, Marc Lamont Hill et al.

When, as first lady, you're invited to give a speech at the dedication of a new pavilion at a major art museum, you're supposed to say a few kind words about the museum board, the architectural team, any committees of volunteers that were involved, and then maybe offer a few words about the role of art in civic life.

You're not supposed to wallow in the most vulgar kind of identity politics.

The First Lady then mentioned one of the themes that one of the museum’s exhibits has, which is, “How can we truly, fully witness the melting pot of cultures and sensibilities and struggles that make America unlike any other country on earth?”

“This is a bold, very hard question,” Ms. Obama said.

She continued that it was difficult for her and people who “look like” her to visit cultural centers because minorities are intimidated by them.

The First Lady explained, “There are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood.”

She continued, “In fact, I guarantee you that right now, there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum. And growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself. So I know that feeling of not belonging in a place like this.”After referencing that the President and she have opened the White House to “young people,” Ms. Obama continued, “And with this inaugural exhibition, the Whitney is really sending the same message to young people and to people of every background across this country. You’re telling them that their story is part of the American story, and that they deserve to be seen.

“And you’re sending that message not just with the art you display, but with the educational programming you run here. You’re reaching out to kids from all backgrounds, exposing them to the arts, showing them that they have something to contribute.” 

Look, lady, anybody with the 20 bucks to get into the museum will be admitted.  There was no reason to go there.

And then she used the commencement address at Tuskeegee University to really lay it on thick:

" . . .  over the years, folks have used plenty of interesting words to describe me. One said I exhibited ‘a little bit of uppity-ism,'” Obama said. “Another noted that I was one of my husband’s ‘cronies of color.’ Cable news once charmingly referred to me as ‘Obama’s Baby Mama.'”

Then she really got into the self-absorption and the parsing of the media's supposed parsing of her gestures, statements and general way of carrying herself:

“As potentially the first African-American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations; conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. Was I too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?” Obama said, according to The Hill.
Obama said she and her husband, the president of the United States and arguably the most powerful man in the world, have faced “frustrating” racism, which is “a heavy burden to carry.”

“We’ve both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives,” she griped. 

This crap is really wearing thin, coming from a woman who has her taste in vacations:

In January, the president and first lady Michelle Obama traveled at taxpayer expense to beautiful, exotic India. The trip included a romantic visit to the Taj Mahal, perhaps the world’s most famous architectural testament of love — a gleaming, white marble mausoleum constructed under the orders of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal. (RELATED: Obama To Show Michelle Taj Mahal)Back in March 2014, the whole Obama clan faced the prospect of cutting a mini-vacation in sunny Key Largo, Fla. short because of Russia’s meddling in Ukraine. It was sad, too, because the first family wanted some rest and relaxation away from the cold, snowy doldrums of Washington, D.C. (RELATED: OH NO! Obama May Have To Cut Third Vacation THIS YEAR Short Because Of Ukraine)That same month, Michelle Obama and the first daughters Malia and Sasha jetted off to China for over a week of much-needed sightseeing. (RELATED: Globetrotting Michelle Obama Announces Luxurious Vacation To China)

As of July 2014, the Obama family had already spent a whopping $44,351,777.12 in taxpayer funds on vacations. That dollar amount is obviously substantially higher now. (RELATED: The Obamas Have Spent Over $44 Million In Taxpayer Cash On Travel) 

She's been at this since her senior thesis at Princeton - nobody's idea of a fly-by-night junior college - when, rather than take on some lofty rumination on the sweep of civilization, she chose to whine about her identity as a black on campus for the previous four years.

January 2017 can't come soon enough.

Freedom-Haters insist on narrative over fact to the bitter end

Is there any other term for what Sarah Silverman did to her "friend" other than despicable?

Comedian Sarah Silverman admitted that a story she told about wage discrimination (in which she even went so far as to call out a specific employer by name) was a lie — and then said people who might consider her lie a reason to question the movement she was supporting were “maniacs.” In an April 6 wage-discrimination-activism video for Levo League, Silverman accused New York Comedy Club owner Al Martin of having paid her less than a male comic for doing the same work: “I was out with my friend Todd Barry and we were doing sets around town together, and I was pretty well-known already, and we both did back-to-back 15-minute sets at this club, the New York Comedy Club, and he paid me 10 bucks . . . and we were outside talking and Todd somehow brought up that he, you know, mentioned that he got 60 bucks,” she said. “So I went back inside and I asked the owner Al Martin and I said, ‘Al, why did you pay me $10 and you paid Todd Barry $60?’ And he, it was so perfect,” Silverman continued, laughing. “He goes, ‘Oh, did you want a $60 spot?’ It was symbolic, I didn’t need $60, but, you know it was pretty s****y.”

Wow! “Pretty s****y” indeed! Just one problem: That didn’t actually happen.

As Martin explained to PJ Media on Tuesday, Barry’s set was a booked job, while Silverman’s was just a last-minute guest spot (read: expected to be unpaid regardless of gender) that he let her have as a favor — and the $10 was cab fare he gave her just to be extra nice. In other words: He definitely didn’t pay her less for the same job, because the set she did that night wasn’t even a job at all. In a statement to Salon, Silverman admitted that she had made the whole thing up and apologized to Martin: “My regret is that I mentioned Al by name — it should have been a nameless, faceless anecdote and he has always been lovely to me,” she said.

Says the story "just popped into [her] head."

Hands up, don't shoot.

Brutal gang rape at UVA.

Rising global temperatures.

Religious freedom equals rank discrimination.

Satan is referred to in Scripture as the father of lies.  There is no disputing the fact that he is prowling this realm without restraint.

Leftism is so evil and foul that it eats its own if a lie that increases its overall power can be perpetuated.

Picketty: All you redistributionists took away the wrong takeaway

Seems the author of last year's big hit among the pointy-heads, "Capital in the 21st Century," feels he was misunderstood:

The book’s central proposition, that inequality in capitalist societies will inevitably grow, can be summed up with a simple equation: r>g. That is, the return on capital (r) outpaces the growth rate of the economy (g) over time, leading inexorably to the dominance of inherited wealth. Progressives such as Princeton economist Paul Krugman seized on Mr. Piketty’s thesis to justify policies they have long wanted—namely, very high taxes on the wealthy.

Now in an extraordinary about-face, Mr. Piketty has backtracked, undermining the policy prescriptions many have based on his conclusions. In “About Capital in the 21st Century,” slated for May publication in the American Economic Review but already available online, Mr. Piketty writes that far too much has been read into his thesis. 

Though his formula helps explain extreme and persistent wealth inequality before World War I, Mr. Piketty maintains, it doesn’t say much about the past 100 years. “I do not view r>g as the only or even the primary tool for considering changes in income and wealth in the 20th century,” he writes, “or for forecasting the path of inequality in the 21st century.”

Instead, Mr. Piketty argues in his new paper that political shocks, institutional changes and economic development played a major role in inequality in the past and will likely do so in the future.
When he narrows his focus to what he calls “labor income inequality”—the difference in compensation between front-line workers and CEOs—Mr. Piketty consigns his famous formula to irrelevance. “In addition, I certainly do not believe that r>g is a useful tool for the discussion of rising inequality of labor income: other mechanisms and policies are much more relevant here, e.g. supply and demand of skills and education.” He correctly distinguishes between income and wealth, and he takes a long historic perspective: “Wealth inequality is currently much less extreme than a century ago.”

All of this takes the wind out of enraptured progressives’ interpretation of Mr. Piketty’s book, which embraced the r>g formulation as relevant to debates playing out in Congress.  

Actually, normal-people-type observers - as opposed to Kool-Aid-besotted types such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich - had started pointing out the holes in Picketty's thesis some months ago:

Many mainstream economists had reservations about Mr. Piketty’s views even before he began walking them back. Consider the working paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research in December. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, respectively, find Mr. Piketty’s theory too simplistic. “We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide to understand the past or predict the future,” the paper’s abstract reads, “because they ignore the central role of political and economic institutions, as well as the endogenous evolution of technology, in shaping the distribution of resources in society.”
The Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago asked economists in October whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: “The most powerful force pushing towards greater wealth inequality in the U.S. since the 1970s is the gap between the after-tax return on capital and the economic growth rate.” Of 36 economists who responded, only one agreed.
Other critics have questioned the trove of statistical data Mr. Piketty assembled to chart trends in income and wealth in the U.S., U.K., France and Sweden over the past century. Are such diverse data comparable, and have the adjustments that Mr. Piketty introduced to make them comparable distorted the final picture? 

Another real-world example of Churchill's famous axiom that a lie makes its way around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

 

Relentless goose-step of the Christian-hating jackboots

You know, I hesitated for a moment to post this.  I thought perhaps that the Christian-couple-running-a-business-that-gets-extorted-by-homosexuals phenomenon had perhaps reached such momentum that people might be inured to individual stories illustrating it.

But an angle peculiar to this one - the lesbian couple suing for "mental anguish" -  continues a theme I began to explore in the last post, namely, that the aim of the overlords is to entrench the notion that people are such fragile flowers that the mere sound of a musket, or the mere declining of a ranch-owning couple to host a lesbian "wedding" is enough to completely shatter anyone of even average constitution.

Some damn judge in New York state was willing to perpetuate this dim view of human resilience:

“We respect and care for everyone!’’ Cynthia Gifford told the New York Post. “We had an openly gay man working for us this past season,’’ she said.

“We’ve had a woman who’s transitioning to be a man. We don’t discriminate against anyone.’’

The state of New York sees things in a completely different way. The Gifford’s were ordered to pay a fine of $13,000 — a $10,000 fine to the state and another $1,500 to each of the lesbians. The $1,500 was for “mental anguish”. #Facepalm

“This is scary,’’ Cynthia Gifford said. “It’s scary for all Americans.”

Can there be any doubt, when things have come to this pass, what is really going on?  This has nothing to do with the damn couple's domestic bliss, and everything to do with marginalizing the foundations of our civilization in the name of the Great Leveling Project.

The Leftist mindset: "Something has to be wrong with this and need fixing"

Perhaps you've heard about Seattle renaming Columbus Day "Indigenous People's Day".

From government classrooms, this manifestation of hatred for one's own culture made its way to city council and became law:

Progressives always have hated Christopher Columbus, viewing him as nothing more than a white, genocidal monster who enslaved natives and spread disease to wipe them out.

It’s really almost as stupid as “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” sounds.

Like a lot of stupid ideas, this one came from the schools. In the days before the city acted, its school district did. The school board passed a resolution that included, but was not limited to, this nugget of dumb, “WHEREAS, the School Board seeks to combat prejudice and eliminate discrimination and institutionalized racism, and to promote awareness, understanding, and good relations among indigenous peoples and all other segments of our District…” (Read the whole thing, it’s all amazingly crazy.)

A parade of progressive grievance groups threw support behind it, and the city council passed the change 7-0.

Councilman Bruce Harrell said, “We are celebrating the triumph of the indigenous people. We are not reveling in the pain of our past, but indeed rejoicing in the triumph… In honoring Indigenous People’s Day we are honoring the best of our self, the best of the city.”

This politically correct garbage stems from progressives’ hatred of the fact that Europeans more than 500 years ago figured out the planet had another half. They seem to think no one would have ever made it around the globe had it not been for Christopher Columbus.

And the whole thing is yet another example (like the one I gave in my post yesterday about how Jews became oppressors and Palestinians became the oppressed in progressive eyes after the 1967 Six-Day War)  of how the Freedom-Haters glom onto groups upon which they can confer Beleaguered Victim Status and serve as champions for, completely ignoring the fallen humanity they share with everybody else:

Progressives also depict the western hemisphere prior to 1492 as a Utopian paradise devoid of strife, war and problems. Indians were not a Utopic people; they had wars just like the rest of the world. What they didn’t have was any significant technological, industrial or weapons advances in centuries. Europeans were, by far, a better equipped and armed people. That’s hardly their fault. Were the tables reversed, the history would’ve been too.

Daniel Greenfield wrote a post at Sultan Knish recently about this phenomenon.  Freedom-Haters by nature have this compulsion to spoil the party, to find some egregious flaw in stable societal situations:

The perpetually aggrieved deeply resent those who are oblivious to their anger. It is the theme that dominates the literature, the music and the political writings of an infuriated left throwing its anger at a mindless mass that is perfectly happy collecting paychecks, living in the suburbs and watching television. It is not their prosperity that the left hates, but their uncomplicated happiness. 

It is this uncomplicated happiness that the left sets out to ruin at all costs.

Leftist activism is drama. It is deliberately destructive and disruptive. It glories in taking the happy lives of ordinary people and wrecking them. It plays the part of the troubled sibling, the one who is driven to destroy the happiness of the rest of the family out of his or her own willful unhappiness. 

Happiness is a choice. It is not dependent on the condition of the individual, but on his state of mind. The essence of enduring happiness is a state of stability. Leftist politics are instability incarnate; the opposite number of happiness. That is why the left acts as the destroyer of happiness. 

The left does not think that anyone should be happy. It is not unhappy because it is personally enmeshed in suffering. The ideological leaders of the left tend to come from the upper classes. They know no hunger except when they are dieting. They experience so few material shortcomings that they treat poverty as a lifestyle; slumming in poor areas and showily living on a few dollars a day.

Differences between men and women?  Unjust!  No matter that it's the natural order of things!   Technological advancement?  Far outweighed by environmental damage!  Wage gaps between executive-level and entry-level positions in companies?  Greed!  A fixed pile of money being hoarded!

In any example of the FHer enterprise of undoing Western civilization, one finds this impulse.

Kind of puts the lie to all those insipid messages about "just breathing and being happy in the moment" that Freedom-Haters routinely post of Facebook.  That's just to soften up the unsuspecting so they don't notice the Great Leveling Enterprise going on around them.

A city run by Freedom-Haters since forever moans about the level of its income inequality

The San Francisco Chronicle is fit to be tied because the obvious has happened:

The article quotes the Brookings Institution noting the income gap between San Francisco's rich and poor is accelerating faster than any other U.S. city. Then the Chronicle starts spewing more data from The Human Services Agency:

For every 1,000 people over age 25 in San Francisco, 7.3 are worth more than $30 million, completely outstripping New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

More households are earning less than $25,000 and more earning more than $100,000. Almost triple the number of households made more than $200,000 a year in 2010 compared to 1990

The middle class has dwindled from 45 percent of the city's population in 1990 to 34 percent in 2012.

And of course, there must be a racial tinge to all of this data; “The shrinking middle class has meant fewer families with children and fewer African Americans.”

The Chronicle notes: “Many San Francisco families are surviving by living doubled-up with another family in one unit. Among Latinos in San Francisco, 42.4 percent live this way and for Asians, 37.4 percent do. Twenty-five percent of African Americans live doubled-up, and 18 percent of whites do.”

Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of SPUR (an urban planning think tank), sounded the alarm, saying income inequality was "the greatest threat to American democracy." He claimed income inequality in San Francisco is growing because of poor housing supply, offering the usual litany of socialist solutions, including raising the minimum wage. He confessed the obvious, saying:

I think most people in San Francisco believe in the idea of equal opportunity, believe in the idea of a public realm that's more European and less American if you will...If we keep going down this path, San Francisco might still be beautiful, and it might still be walkable and might still be loved all over the world. But it will no longer be the cradle of progressivism in America. It will no longer be a place that is dynamic culturally.

Double down, that's the ticket!

What we discover when we peer into the internals of inequality data

Megan McArdle points out a noteworthy fact:

As a new article from Bloomberg News explains, Democrats aren’t benefiting from hammering on inequality because almost all the areas with the worst inequality are already controlled by Democrats:

There’s just one problem: the districts where Democrats have the best shot to win Republican-held seats show some of the smallest gaps between rich and poor in the U.S., an indication of just how hard it will be for their message to take hold with voters.

Of the 100 congressional districts ranked as having the greatest gap between rich and poor, not one is held by a Republican whose seat is considered up for grabs this November,according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

. . . The seat with the widest gap between rich and poor belongs to a Democrat, Jerry Nadler, whose district takes in Wall Street and parts of Brooklyn not yet reached by that borough’s redevelopment. In all, 32 of the 35 districts with the greatest income inequality are held by President Barack Obama’s party.

And the better-off segment of the population in flyover country is qualitatively different from that found in FHer-heavy enclaves:

The rich of America’s affluent urban areas tend to be the beneficiaries, one way or another, of a global tournament economy in which markets are often close to “winner take all,” and vast sums can flow to people who are just a little bit better than their competitors. The wealthy in Republican districts, on the other hand, are more likely to be competing in local or national markets, not glamour industries, where sales are ground out one at a time. Because the sums involved are smaller, the wealth gap is also smaller -- and business owners are less likely to be sympathetic to the idea that their success has a huge luck component.

Corporatists and bureaucrats tend to see things through a macro lens, while those who take their freedom seriously tend to think in terms of individual lives shaped by individual decisions.

 

Secretary Global Test: Once we complete the Great Leveling Project, jihadists will give up their West-hatred

That's essentially what he's saying when he says that poverty is a big recruitment tool for Boko Haram.