Monday, April 27, 2009

Three Percent Sounds so Small

Gag me with a spoon.

If you can stand to read the White House propaganda linked above, you will find that, on top of everything else we have already forked out in his first 100 days, our man Obama thinks we ought to devote another 3 percent (at least) of our GDP to research and development...(creating) new policies that invest in basic and applied research, (creating) new incentives for private innovation, (promoting) breakthroughs in energy and medicine, and (improving) education in math and science.


New policies that invest in basic and applied research?? What does our young green president think we have already been doing? Is he trying to make us believe that this country does not already invest massive amounts in basic and applied research? We have colossal government taxpayer money pouring into research already, through NASA, through the Department of Agriculture, through federal grants to a huge number of universities, through NIH. And we have an amazing level of private investment as well in a large range of scientific and technological areas, or as he would call it, basic and applied research. A free market economy excels at investing in the scientific breakthroughs of tomorrow, allowing its people to invest where they see the problems, to find solutions a government could never imagine.


Our GDP was 14.33 trillion dollars in 2008. And Barack Obama wants to spend at least another three percent of that. Three percent never sounds like a lot, but why the heck isn't he man enough to come right out and say that he is talking about 420 billion dollars?? I'll tell you why. Because that is one heck of an unaffordable lollipop and Obama knows that the working, taxpaying people of this country are sick and tired of spending another several hundred billion dollars every time he gets out of bed in the morning. Especially on things like education, energy, medicine and private innovation, for gosh sakes, which we already spend PLENTY ON! We already outspend any other nation on education, but he wants to take more of your money away from you and fritter it away on a problem which can't be solved with more dollars. If more and more money has not fixed education by now, there is little reason to believe that spending more money will bring us results. Breakthroughs in energy and medicine? Helloooooo! We are the most innovative country on Earth with regard to both! It is time to appreciate what we have been doing, and more importantly, it is crucial for Mr. Obama to learn a little something about the country he lives in, and to try to understand HOW we managed to do it.


We elected a very naive young man. He said in his address to the National Academy of Sciences,

I believe it is not in our character, the American character, to follow. It's our character to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again.


Obama seriously thinks we lead because it is somehow embedded in our character? Surely not! The reason we have been leading is that we have a framework which allows our people to live largely government-free, and to do the things which only people (not government) are capable of, including keeping a lot of their money so that they (the people who know best how to spend their own money) can invest it as they see fit and use it to create amazing things. We call that framework our Constitution, and that is what makes us great, not the fact that we are some kind of natural leaders. We are really just like any other people, no better, no more talented, no smarter. It is our framework which allows the individuals of this nation to be all we can be and to create things which are rarely, if ever, dreamed of in more tyrannical or totalitarian societies which control the people through socialistic economies driven by oppressive taxation.

By taxing the people enough to devote an exorbitant three percent of GDP to governmental research, Obama will quickly kill everything which he says he wants to bring about in this country which is already great for reasons obviously unknown to Obama.



Hot diggity damn, if you want Obama's wishlist of inventions to actually happen, you have to let the money and the rule-making stay with the people. Only the people, using their own money and resources, and free of onerous government regulation and control, can create what the current leader of the (current) free world says he wants, things such as

solar cells as cheap as paint; green buildings that produce all the energy they consume; learning software as effective as a personal tutor; prosthetics so advanced that you could play the piano again; an expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge about ourselves and world the around us.

Bureaucrats will never make any of the above happen. No one can legislate genius into existence, no one can collect enough tax to force people to create clever things. No one can make government large enough to bring the world to perfection. Not even Obama.

If we want to keep advancing as a nation we have to keep reminding Obama and all the congress people who seem so very much in love with him, that governments don't create. Only people create. And the government has to be kept very small to allow the people to blossom. The best way to create new incentives for private innovation is to leave the resources in the hands of the individual and never let government get its grubby hands on them!

Friday, April 17, 2009

CNN: Certainly Not Neutral

Susan Roesgen will soon be a household name. You have never heard of her? No, perhaps not. Not yet. You have not heard of her, and she has not heard of you. SHE is a reporter for CNN, though I use the term loosely from today forward. And YOU are the "thinking man" of America. She truly knows nothing about you and has never met you, nor anyone like you. If you have not seen this snippet of her work, you really must take a look. Almost one hundred thousand people have seen it already. You are a little late!

Are you feeling a tiny touch of outrage about the ignorance of Susan Roesgen? The bias of Susan Roesgen is unparalelled in news reporting. And the fact that she would display her ignorance under the guise of news reporting is shameful.

Whether you have already joined the Tea Party Movement or have yet to figure out why you should do so, this video is likely to make your blood boil. Roesgen is purportedly acting in the capacity of reporter, but she demonstrates no objectivity whatsoever. Does she work for Cable News Network? Or does she work for CERTAINLY NOT NEUTRAL??

She has clearly taken a position on the tea party story, which she is not supposed to do! Not only that, she seeks to educate the father she is interviewing. What is she? A teacher? A teacher who roams the streets with a video crew, hoping to tape her lessons as she lays knowledge upon the masses?



The Tea Party protesters are just average Americans and the man holding the baby is no exception. Roesgen is very hostile and lectures her interviewee to the effect that he is eligible for a four hundred dollar credit, and she apparently thinks he would care. She cannot even conceive of the fact that this man does not want the "crack" the US Government wishes to hand out to its people. She wants him to know that Illinois is going to get a nice present of fifty billion dollars from the federal government. She is angry with him that he wishes to talk of LIBERTY and LINCOLN; she takes a very aggressive tone in barking her information at him. Why is she giving information at all? She is supposed to be LISTENING to this man and collecting information. The father she is berating believes the government should let the people keep their money; presumably this man is against the creation of a nation plagued with dependency. Perhaps he reads my blog, lol. He had to learn this stuff somewhere! He knows all about Unaffordable Lollipops and he doesn't want any. He just wants his freedom and wants to go out and earn (and KEEP) enough money to buy his own lollipops. But Roesgen has no idea that this is the issue!

Susan Roesgen thinks that American voters ought to be happy because handouts are promised. There will be many blogs and articles declaring FIRE SUSAN ROESGEN and Boycott CNN. CNN is unfair, CNN is biased, CNN has an agenda for the world and that agenda does not include informing the viewer. It might have to do with leading us to a progressivist society of collectivism, one which we don't want!

Maybe people would like to send CNN a letter and let them know this kind of reporting and bias will not be tolerated. And if you write, do send a note along to Susan and point her to my blog. She could learn a little bit by reading about lollipops and how much they really cost. She needs to develop an understanding of Unaffordable Lollipops and what those lollipops do to the electorate upon whom they are foisted. When people learn about the costs associated sweet lollipops, (which include the currently impending bankruptcy of otherwise wealthy states and countries), they no longer want anything to do with these goodies. And that is why the Tea Party Movement is growing by leaps and bounds.


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Friday, April 3, 2009

So Many Friedmans (And Krugmans), So Little Time

If you are like me, you will probably have quite a long reading list, perhaps over at Goodreads.com, and you are not sure what to read first. Here is a little quiz which might help you. Multiple guess!



Which Friedman said it? Tom or Milton?

  • We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
  • If you don`t visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods are going to visit you.
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Who said it? Milton Friedman or Paul Krugman?

  • “But the vitriol also reflects the fact that many of the people at the Republican National Convention, for all their flag-waving, hate America. They want a controlled, monolithic society; they fear and loathe our nation's freedom, diversity and complexity.
  • A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
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Who said it? Milton Friedman or Paul Krugman?

  • “The fundamental fact of American politics - and I've sharpened my view on this since last year and the hardcover edition of the book - is that we've got an alliance between the religious right and the accumulators of great wealth. Those are the people who are running things.”
  • “What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system”
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Which Friedman said it? Tom or Milton?
  • I basically did all the library research for this book on Google, and it not only saved me enormous amounts of time but actually gave me a much richer offering of research
  • The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.
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Which Friedman said it? Tom or Milton?

  • The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.
  • Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
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Which Friedman said it? Tom or Milton?

  • The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism. (Okay, so can we start acting on that now, please?)
  • Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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Who said it? Milton Friedman or Paul Krugman?

  • “Those tax cuts, rather than the spending binge, are the primary cause of the (federal) deficit.” (Wow, did a nobel prize winning economist SERIOUSLY say that?)
  • “The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.” (Now you're talking!)
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So who should you read? The author who prefers FREEDOM? Or those more interested in creating TYRANNY? The answer of course, is ALL OF THE ABOVE. How else are you going to know what is going on in this crazy world?

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