Thursday, 11 June 2009 by bbbeard.

Now the Obama administration wants to limit ‘executive’ pay across the private sector, not just for companies receiving TARP funds. People were warned this is the next step. This is crazy. The people in government who think this is an appropriate function of government skipped a few classes somewhere along the line — maybe they should google ‘enumerated powers’. They have no wisdom or insight, only power. Corruption empowers, and absolute corruption empowers absolutely. Hayek warned us.

Do we really want some idiot in Washington deciding how much we earn, whether we get promoted, and ultimately who we work for? The ostensible  principle here is that companies, and by extension, people, are not competent  to decide how to allocate their resources, so people with guns helpful government bureaucrats must step in. The reality is that government, far from being competent to run our lives, is corrupt and incompetent.

Some folks said the TARP limits were justified because those companies came to the government “hat in hand” for help, and other folks nodded their heads. Now the excuse for the power grab is that companies do not act in their own “long-term” interest. When the limits are extended to lower and lower level employees, they will stop referring to “executives” and claim the government must control all salaries out of “fairness” — after all, why should my secretary earn more than the secretary next door? They, the leftist/statist/socialist/communist/progressive/fascists — call them what you will — believe there is no room for freedom in this country, and that “society”, by which they mean themselves, must decide what is fair. They have no idea how the economy operates, and they don’t care, because they cling to some mistaken concept of how it “should” run. They have no idea how wealth is created, and they don’t care, because they think no one should be wealthy. They have a word for such a society: Utopia. (It means ‘nowhere’, but they think that’s ironic, not prophetic).

Michael Moore, famed left-wing economist, now wants to turn GM into a railroad and windmill company. Moore once formulated a principle upon which he thought the economy should be based: no one should make anything they can’t afford to buy. So, no yachts. No luxury cars. Oh, and by the way, no buildings larger than the minimum construction worker can afford to buy. No airplanes larger than a kit plane. No railroads (I guess he’ll make an exception for high-speed rail). No factories. No oil wells. No power plants. No shipping containers and no ships. No MRI machines. No radio telescopes and no space stations.

The problem — apart from the simple fact that in this Utopia, life will be poor, nasty, brutish, and short –  is that decapitating the economy starts a cascade. If no one is allowed to own a yacht or a Cadillac, then no one will be hired to make them, and those people will be thrown out of work. If no one is allowed to make a power plant, no one will have electricity. If there are no airplanes or railroads or ships, all your goods will have to be produced within walking distance. This is not some weird fevered right-wing chimera — this is social policy as formulated by Michael Moore and left-wing idols like Mahatma Gandhi. Another description of Gandhi’s Utopia is “crushing poverty”. Think Calcutta, not Knightsbridge.

Hope and change, indeed. More like envy and disaster.

UPDATE: The Yahoo link to the original story is broken (as happens a lot with time-limited news stories), so I replaced it with a screen shot of the story. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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Wednesday, 3 June 2009 by bbbeard.

For those of you who don’t read French, the title says, “One of the biggest Muslim countries on the planet”. That’s Barack Obama, talking about the United States. At least, that is what is being reported in Le Monde. Bet you didn’t know that fun fact about America, did you?

Just for the record, the Wikipedia entry on Islam indicates that the Muslim population of the United States is between 1.8 and 3 million. And the only countries with larger Muslim populations are Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Ghana, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Libya, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikstan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Yemen, not to mention the West Bank and Gaza, which are not a country, and so are necessarily exempted from the President’s sweeping proclamation. But I suspect that if you are not a totally off-the-wall Obamaphile, you already knew that the Muslim population in the U.S. is tiny.

What on Earth was he thinking? Does he really believe that the U.S. is one of the biggest Muslim countries in the world? What Kool-Aid has been drinking? This is the kind of weird, insular, eccentric comment that gets Republicans — or Dennis Kucinich — branded as oddballs for life. Do any of you Obama supporters out there have an explanation for this? Is this supposed to be some kind of wacky-Jedi-mind-trick that Obama is trying to pull on the Islamic world? Does he really think that Muslims — especially rulers of Muslim countries — are that ignorant? My theory is that he really believes it because (a) he has known a lot of Muslims, and (b) he is not good with numbers.

Number One Son says: “It’s too bad we can’t impeach him just for being an idiot.”

h/t Belmont Club

UPDATE: Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times Caucus Blog reports on Obama’s Big Muslim Gaffe with the deeply dishonest title, “Obama Says U.S. Could Be Seen As  Muslim Country, Too.” No, Jeff, as you admit in the second paragraph, he said the U.S. is one of the biggest Muslim countries on the planet. (Again: why would anyone defend this worldview?) And Zeleny reports — without irony! — that Obama also said “the United States and other parts of the Western world ‘have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam.’ ” So — not only does our President live in a fantasy world where the U.S. is chock full of Muslims, he blames Americans for being uneducated about Islam. Unbelievable.

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