Candidate Romney = Rise of the Libertarians

A lot of people have been talking about what will they do if Mitt Romney is nominated for the GOP Presidential Candidate. I’m not alone in thinking that the GOP establishment is desperately trying to prop up Mitt as their establishment candidate. The establishment GOP media is pushing Mitt and attacking Newt. They have their various reasons, mostly citing “electability,” for pushing Romney but that won’t help Mitt if he should become the nominee.

The level of negative attacks coming from Mitt Romney’s campaign is turning people off. How else can you explain almost a $10 million ad blitz from Team Mitt (with 80% being attack ads) and losing independents nationally (his Raison d’être)? Mitt seriously lacks any Tea Party support as well. The establishment has been openly hostile to the Tea Party, wanting the votes but not the criticism. Rubio is a perfect example, elected by the Tea Party only to shun the Tea Party (TP Caucus and SOPA?)  and put himself in Mitt’s camp. Mitt probably think that since Liberals think Tea Partiers are all racists, he better stay away so as to not be guilty by association.

So what does that mean for the Libertarian party?

I would argue that many of the Tea Partiers are libertarian minded voters. I’d challenge anyone to find huge level of disagrement with Tea Party fiscal policy (since there is no central figure for the TP, Wiki is the best source)  and CATO’s fiscal policy. Many Tea Partiers are endorsing Ron Paul, an Austrian economic style libertarian. There would be no room for a Paul in a Romney administration, every knows it. So where will all that support go? Dr. Paul has said he will not run as a third party candidate, I believe him.

I think a lot of people that cannot stomach the notion of voting for Romney will instead vote for the Libertarian party candidate, most likely Gov. Gary Johnson. I know a lot of Paulites like Johnson. I like Johnson and I know a lot of Tea Partiers do too. Looking at Gov. Johnson’s fiscal policy aims, they mesh with the Tea Party.

If the GOP primary keeps going like it’s going, with Mitt Romney poisoning the well in his Pyrrhic quest for the nomination, I see the Libertarian Party growing. As Soros said, “There’s not much difference between Obama and Romney.” Where will the people go if faces with two of the same?

Update: Like Mana from heaven comes this great link from Legal Insurrection: The Conversation With a Florida Tea Partier That Should Scare Every Republican

“I see a Romney nomination causing Tea Partiers like me to tune out. We are already disheartened by the congressional leadership. Romney will be the final nail in the coffin. He is completely uninspiring, and is everything we have been working so hard to defeat within the GOP,” Rebecca said. “Don’t even get me started on that Bain Capital picture. Ugh. There is no way he can win. And I don’t want to have to defend him while he tries.”

“I will be voting this Tuesday. I will make it fit into my schedule. I feel like my vote matters right now,” Rebecca said. “But can you see how I might not make it a priority if I feel like either my vote doesn’t matter, or if I don’t feel like the candidate I’m voting for will be much different then what we have? Can you see how life may take precedence over casting an uninspired vote? I can’t be alone in this thought process, and if enough people feel this way (and I think they will) it will be catastrophic for Romney and really very bad down-ticket as well.”

This is exactly the way a lot of people are feeling. It reinforces my point that a Romney nomination will cause a lot of people to just not vote Romney. They won’t vote Obama either, but Romney will be as much of a uniter for the GOP as Obama has been nationally.

Parallels to the 2008 Democratic primary? You betcha! Remember the PUMAs? Remember how they caved and enough HRC dems held their nose to vote for Obama? That turned out great didn’t it? There is little difference between the GOP establishment and Democratic establishment. Do we cave in this time as well, for another empty suit?

Romney is a Keynesian

I posted this on a Legal Insurrection thread but thought I’d post it here as well.

Newt can’t say it but everyone else should be saying it. Romney is not a Reagan Republican, he is a Bush Republican. Romney is a progressive, he like all progressives believe that Govt (if run by the right people aka himself) will bring a better society. His tell is when he talks about Regulations. He talks about “smart regulations” like all progressives do. Romney says that the free market needs regulations, which show how good a Keynesian he really is just like Bush.

Govt doesn’t create jobs. It can only give the right environment so that markets can create jobs. I’ve heard Newt talk about that, I’ve never heard Romney say anything like that. Romneynomics = Bushonomics = Obamanomics = Keynesian clap trap that caused this whole mess…the idea that our betters are the ones that should make the decisions. Newt at least is taking the good parts of Paul (Fed, economics (Reagan was an Austrian)) and leaving the bad parts of Paul. Romney would never touch the Fed.

I’m posting this on my Xoom so Ill add some links and videos to add some evidence for me claims later.

GOP leaders don’t like Gingrich and that’s a good thing!

As Newt gains momentum in the GOP primary, the attacks against him by the GOP elite keep growing.

1. Why GOP leaders don’t trust Gingrich
2. Gingrich and Reagan: In the 1980s, the candidate repeatedly insulted the president.
3. Newt’s Troublesome Lack of Prudence
4. Hour of Newt
5. Gingrich: I’ll “serve notice” that future debates must allow audience cheering

Twitter has been even more disturbing as GOP pundits and bloggers: C.E Cupp, Michelle Malkin, Guy Benson and Jim Geraghty sneer and deride Newt and the people that support him.

Newt is not the perfect candidate, he does have lots of skeletons in his closet. I don’t agree with some of his positions at all. But the mere fact that he scared the shit out of the GOP elite and those who want to be part of the elite (explains the bloggers), gives me even more reason to support him.

I have zero faith in the political parties. They are only out to serve their own self interest and the interest of their backers. The Democrats serve the Unions and their “favorite” companies. The GOP serves their “favorites” as well. They both have shown zero regard for what is good for the nation as a whole, rather than their own narrow self interest. The GOP elite want the status quo. They want to keep the things the way they are. They didn’t like Reagan when he ran against Bush I. They wanted a party man like Bush. Afterwards, Reagan became so popular that it was political suicide to talk bad about him. (Well unless your Mitt Romney.) Bush I was a company man through and through.Romney is of the same vein as Bush I, a good company man. Romney’s only chance of winning is to be a company man. He has no appeal to anyone outside of company men and NE Liberal Republicans. Without company backing, he is dead in the water. The GOP media knows this. That’s why the decline to do any real reporting on Romney. That is why any attack against Bain is derided as “Anti-Capitalist.” What is why, as Romney’s numbers continue to fall, their attacks against the front runner continue to rise.

It doesn’t matter who is the frontrunner, as long as it is Romney. When it’s not Romney, we start to see a lot of stories of how bad the frontrunner is. No word about Cain until he became the frontrunner, then multiple stories crept up against him. Newt surged, then came the onslaught. Santorum surged, then came the onslaught. Now Newt is surging again…more attacks. Notice a pattern?

If the GOP has any chance of winning, it has to be a party for the people, not the elites. A vast amount of people are turned off from the Democratic Party, because they perceive it to be a party for the Elites. Obama was the chosen one and pushed down everyone’s throats. The media were behind their money men completely and pushed Obama; never reporting negatives, giving him softball questions, while viciously attacking anyone with the gumption of telling the truth about Obama (Palinization).

Now has the GOP establishment in full panic mode. From C.E. Cupp;

At the risk of sounding maudlin or apocalyptic, the conservative movement is poised to become irrelevant or simply extinct. If the next few weeks go the way the last one did, conservatism may as well hang up a sign that says “Closed for Business (apologies to Ronald Reagan).”

The irony is that she is absolutely right. The conservative movement that the party Elites enjoy will be dead. That’s a very good thing!

GOP media has lost their damn minds

I normally like Charles Krauthammer. He usually analyzes a topic well and presents a clear logical explanation to an issue. That said….today he has lost his fucking mind! I think during the night, someone took out all the logic circuits and replaced them with sauerkraut.

His first mistake is to assume that only Romney can be the nominee. Then assume that any and all criticism of Romney’s business is “class warefare,” i.e. anti-Capitalism. These are just the lead up to what we already know what is going to happen.

If Romney is the nominee and loses, it’s all the fault of those of us who criticized Bain’s business model and Romney’s role in creating it.

Suddenly Romney’s wealth, practices and taxes take center stage. And why not? If leading Republicans are denouncing rapacious capitalism that enriches the 1 percent while impoverishing everyone else, should this not be the paramount issue in a campaign occurring at a time of economic distress?

Now, economic inequality is an important issue, but the idea that it is the cause of America’s current economic troubles is absurd. Yet, in a stroke, the Republicans have succeeded in turning a Democratic talking point — a last-ditch attempt to salvage reelection by distracting from their record — into a central focus of the nation’s political discourse. (Bolded for emphasis)

That’s your narrative. The other narrative people like Krauthammer will be saying is, if Romney isn’t the nominee and the GOP loses….oh wait…if Romney isn’t the nominee the GOP will not lose…my bad. You know what the narrative would have been anyway. This is a clear example of the GOP media Obamatizing Romney.

Obamatization: The act of carrying water for a candidate, never criticizing them and demagoging anyone that does.

Maybe we need a list and hold these asshole accountable for the damage they are doing to the country, by trying to push the least vetted GOP candidate around…Romney.

I dare say, if Kraut keeps this up…he’s no better than Stephen Colbert.

h/t Legal Insurrection

Looking at Bain Capital is perfectly acceptable…here’s why.

Is Bain Capital Romney’s bane?

A preview of the optics the Left will use.

It seems like the conservative punditry think that any questioning of Romney’s activities at Bain are not just an attack on Romney but an attack on Capitalism itself. That we should just grin and bare it, Romney is the only guy that is capable of winning against Obama.

I’ll start with the last claim first. To say Romney is the only one that can win, is pretty defeatist already. In a year of high unemployment, low GDP growth, and low POTUS approval ratings, if the GOP platform is soooo weak that only a liberal Republican from the NE (which makes him pretty Liberal in the rest of the country) is your only hope, why are you even playing?

Romney claims that he is the only guy because he is the most electable. Well what if that claim is a myth. John Hawkins seems to think so. Here’s the most relevent.

4) His advantages disappear in a general election: It’s actually amazing that Mitt Romney isn’t lapping the whole field by 50 points because he has every advantage. Mitt has been running for President longer than the other contenders. He has more money and a better organization than the other candidates. The party establishment and inside the beltway media are firmly in his corner. That’s why the other nominees have been absolutely savaged while Romney, like John McCain before him, has been allowed to skate through the primaries without receiving serious scrutiny.

Yet, every one of those advantages disappears if he becomes the nominee. Suddenly Obama will be the more experienced candidate in the race for the presidency. He will also have more money and a better organization than Mitt. Moreover, in a general election, the establishment and beltway media will be aligned against Romney, not for him. Suddenly, Romney will go from getting a free pass to being public enemy #1 for the entire mainstream media.

If you took all those advantages away from Romney in the GOP primary, he’d be fighting with Jon Huntsman to stay out of last place. So, what happens when he’s the nominee and suddenly, all the pillars that have barely kept him propped up in SECOND place so far are suddenly removed? It may not be pretty.

On the issue of Bain, did it get a bailout? While Politico has shown itself to be nothing more than a HuffPo like arm of the DNC, stories like this will have a hard time being explained away. While Team Romney’s explanation is technically true, the optics of it are bad, very bad. In the modern political climate, if Romney can’t explain it in a way that appeals to the average, economically illiterate voter in less than 30 seconds then it’s a net negative that Obama will gladly hang around his neck with a very willing media to do the dirty work. (Got to save all that “small donor” lucre for community organizing and making sure the dead get to vote.)

There are plenty more reasons for why Romney’s electability might be a myth but I won’t go into them now. Suffice to say the only real person trying to hold back the GOP lemmings from jumping off a cliff for Mitt is Prof Jacobson at Legal Insurrection. Make sure you have him on your daily blogroll.

Now lets look at the charge that an attack on Bain is an attack on Capitalism itself. Looking at the claim, it just doesn’t make sense on its face. It doesn’t follow that the business practice of one firm are representative of the whole. A good analogy that is use is this. Questioning the methods of Michael Mann, the Hockey Stick illusion, does not represent an attack on Science in general. That’s the kind of attack the Left usually makes, equating one for the whole. So while the conservative punditry are busy saying that Perry’s and Newt’s attacks on Bain are Leftish tactics…it can equally be said of their attacks as well.

The truth is, in order to make things better overall you need feedback. Whether Newt’s and Perry’s attacks are true, partially true or out right fabrications, they provide a feedback mechanism for correction. Is Romney the best guy given the hostile climate he will have to face from Obama, Democrats and the Democrat leaning MSM? Again I have to hand it over to Prof Jacobson:

In response to this entirely legitimate point being raised that a predatory history of investing may not be what we want in the nominee for the presidency, we have a chorus of voices asserting that Newt is attacking capitalism.  Some of those voices long have hated and vented venom at Newt, others are less ideological and have reacted as if the entire capitalist system were under attack.

It’s sad to see so many in the Republican Party so incapable of distinguishing between economic and political arguments.

Redistricting

Why is it assumed that all African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans are all Democrats?

Now that the Reapportionment provision of the census is complete, the fight now goes to the state legislatures to redraw district maps. So be prepared for Democrats to automatically equate a Black and Hispanic voter as liberal. It’s like people like Thomas Sowell or Marco Rubio don’t exist at all. It’s much the same with women, they all should be Democrats.

So if your black, Hispanic, or a woman and your not a Democrat, you don’t exist. At least they aren’t shy about telling everyone how they really feel. They just don’t say it explicitly.

Unintended Consiquences – The Texting Ban

Government policy always leave unintended consequences. That’s as much a fact of life as anything. So it should come to no surprise, except to those that believe laws written by politicians can fundamentally change human behavior, that the cell phone texting ban craze that has been swiffering (Dane Cook reference) the nation hasn’t had the effect the politicians so desperately wanted. According to a recent study published by the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI), texting bans have the opposite effect of what was intended. DOH!

It’s illegal to text while driving in most US states. Yet a new study by researchers at the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) finds no reductions in crashes after laws take effect that ban texting by all drivers. In fact, such bans are associated with a slight increase in the frequency of insurance claims filed under collision coverage for damage to vehicles in crashes. This finding is based on comparisons of claims in 4 states before and after texting bans, compared with patterns of claims in nearby states.

Policies like these are paternalistic and the object of love and adoration for progressives. Yes, I said Progressives, because paternalism has its followers in the Democratic, GOP parties and with so-called “Independent” politicians. Yes, that’s a shot at Michael Bloomburg. Remember kids, Progressives gave us Prohibition. How did that turn out?

So it’s no surprise that this study is meet with anger by the politicians that want to tell you what to do.

“Last Thursday, I blogged about misleading claims from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) disparaging the effectiveness of good laws and good enforcement in our campaign to end distracted driving,” LaHood wrote in his blog “The FastLane,” this morning. “Unfortunately, they’re at it again today with another misleading ‘study,’ ” LaHood continued. “There are numerous flaws with this ‘study,’ but the most obvious is that they have created a cause and effect that simply doesn’t exist.”

Fortunately, the Department of Transportation can help on that front, and we can prove that good laws coupled with tough enforcement can reduce deadly distracted driving behavior. In April, we launched pilot enforcement campaigns, called “Phone in One Hand, Ticket in the Other” in Hartford, CT and Syracuse, NY.

In the last six months alone, hand held cell phone use has dropped 56% in Hartford and 38% in Syracuse; and texting while driving has declined 68% in Hartford and 42% in Syracuse.

Of course Sec LaHood doesn’t tell you that his statistics are flawed as well. They are based on police reports. Now put the HLDI study and the decline in tickets together and what do you have?

People will put their cell phones down when they see a cop, or just lower their phone so that it’s hidden. People will continue to do, what they always do. Banning texting while driving will not stop people from doing it. Just like banning alcohol didn’t stop people from drinking in the 20s. Just like banning Cocaine didn’t stop out POTUS from skiing in college.

The only real way to stop people from distracted driving is to change the incentives. Kind of like what Ford is doing with their Sync system. I talked about it in this post, I also mentioned how I would like to see a study done of accident rates of people white texting with Sync systems in their cars and those without. We now know that the bans aren’t working, I still have my money on the market led solutions, like Sync.

Tea Party vs the GOP establishment

I’m not going to bother posting links. Anyone that has read the headlines or watched any news shows knows whats going on between the GOP establishment and the Tea Party backed Christine O’Donnell. It’s not pretty.

My condensed version is this.

The GOP establishment loved the Tea Party, when the Tea Party was going after Obama and the Democrats. The GOP loved when the Tea Party was protesting Democratic Town Halls and the GOP love when the Tea Party rallies around “conservative” issues.

The GOP establishment do not like it when the Tea Party have the nerve to elect who they want to represent them, instead of who the establishment wants. This O’Donnell thing pretty much proves that.

One thing that I have always liked about the Tea Party was that is was true grassroots. There are no leaders and no directors. It’s a truly decentralized organization, that is only possible thanks to the highly decentralized nature of the internet. Thinking along those lines, it’s easy to see why the Democrats at first hated them. But it’s also easy to see why the GOP establishment hate them now. The Democrats and the GOP are basically the same, they are in it for the power not for the people.

It’s funny thinking that people like Chris Matthews, who have belittled and pretty much made shit up about the tea party, are now finding out that the Tea Party isn’t so bad. (Only when the Tea Party bucks the GOP establishment mind you.)

“I have waited all my adult life for an election in which voters have the fire to reach up and burn those who have been running the show for decades, but I didn’t know it would come from the right and the center. 2010 could be the first year in modern times when being in office and part of Washington is the worst possible credential when facing voters.”

Anyone with a brain and two eyes knew that the Tea Party was about real change, not the uppity rhetoric, but the real deal. Throwing the bums out and starting over. Maybe even a little slash and burn strategy is necessary in a few races.

The problem is, that the Democrats have partisan shades on. They won’t see the Tea Party for what it is, they only see what they want to see…..racism. The GOP establishment thought they could ride the coattails of the Tea Party movement all the way till November. Now the GOP are finding out that the villagers have enough Tar and Pitchforks to paint the Democrats for their selfish and unnecessary spending as well as the GOP for their spending spree during the Bush years.

Sowell on Liberals and Conservatives

Thomas Sowell hits a home run here.

The late liberal Professor Tony Judt of New York University gave this definition of liberals: “A liberal is someone who opposes interference in the affairs of others: who is tolerant of dissenting attitudes and unconventional behavior.”

According to Professor Judt, liberals favor “keeping other people out of our lives, leaving individuals the maximum space in which to live and flourish as they choose.”

That of course would be the classical definition of Liberalism. What we call Liberal in the US now, is anything but liberal. As Sowell says later, “‘progressive’ may be more in vogue.” Progressive is what todays version of liberals used to call themselves. That was back in the early 20th century, until Progressive policies gave us the Great Depression. Liberals love to forget that Hoover was a Progressive Republican. So Progressive that Democrats wanted him to run for the Democratic Party instead of Al Smith. But I digress, history is selective to the modern Democratic Party.

Does the sweeping legislation empowering federal officials to tell doctors, patients, hospitals, and insurance companies what to do, when it comes to medical care, sound like leaving individuals the maximum space to live their lives as they choose?

Communities that have had overwhelmingly liberal elected officials for decades abound in nanny state regulations, micro-managing everything from home-building to garbage collection. San Francisco is a classic example. Among its innumerable micro-managing laws is one recently passed requiring that gas stations must remove the little levers that allow motorists to pump gas into their cars without having to hold the nozzle.

Liberals are usually willing to let people violate the traditional standards of the larger society but crack down on those who dare to violate liberals’ own notions and fetishes.

Our academic institutions are overwhelmingly dominated by liberals. They feature speech codes that punish politically incorrect statements. Even to apply to many colleges and universities, students must have spent time as “volunteers” for activities arbitrarily defined by admissions committees as “community service.”

I think most modern liberals would stop reading there, thinking that Sowell is only berating them. If they’d be truly tolerant and keep reading they’d see Sowell take Conservatives to task as well.

As for conservatism, it has no specific political meaning, because everything depends on what you are trying to conserve. In the last days of the Soviet Union, those who were trying to maintain the Communist system were widely– and correctly– described as “conservatives,” though they had nothing in common with such conservatives as William F. Buckley or Milton Friedman.

Professor Friedman for years fought a losing battle against being labeled a conservative. He considered himself a liberal in the original sense of the word and wrote a book titled “The Tyranny of the Status Quo.” Friedman proposed radical changes in things ranging from the public schools to the Federal Reserve System.

Sowell is making two points here. First and foremost, don’t get caught up in fancy rhetoric. Anyone that considers themselves educated and intelligent should always look past the flashiness of words to their real meaning.

The second point is also easy. Don’t get caught up with labels. People are much too complex to be labeled.

Thomas Sowell on Equality and Racism

Anyone that reads this blog knows that I think very highly of Thomas Sowell. His logic is impeccable. In his latest column,  he writes about equality.

Ask the bean-counters where in this wide world have different groups been proportionally represented. They can’t tell you. In other words, something that nobody can demonstrate is taken as a norm, and any deviation from that norm is somebody’s fault!

Anyone who has watched football over the years has probably seen at least a hundred black players score touchdowns– and not one black player kick the extra point. Is this because of some twisted racist who doesn’t mind black players scoring touchdowns but hates to see them kicking the extra points?

At our leading engineering schools– M.I.T., CalTech, etc.– whites are under-represented and Asians over-represented. Is this anti-white racism or pro-Asian racism? Or are different groups just different?

So what is it about equality that gets people all riled up? Well I think the first thing, the one Sowell is poking fun of, is the idea of equality of outcomes. No one can tell you of a time or place, where everyone was perfectly proportionally represented. Why?The simple answer is, everyone is different. Each racial group has a standard normal distribution of intellect, athleticism, musical ability, mathematical ability, etc.

So when some bean counter is looking at racial statistics at X university. What are they really looking at? They are looking at distribution of a certain ability, say math, within a distribution of people with high math ability in that certain population.

If a certain racial group makes up only 20% of the total population. And if only 20% of a racial group are good at math and only 30% of those are good enough to get into MIT. It doesn’t take a MIT math wiz to tell you that you will never get equal representation (20%) of the total population at MIT.

That’s only part of the problem. The other part is the very notion of equality. What does it mean? It might sound like a dumb question, but it’s that very question that gets people all worked up to begin with.

Most Liberals, I’d say, have a notion that equality means that the outcomes have to come out equal. This is the equality of outcomes that Sowell talks about in Conflict of Vision. This is a basic premise of “Unconstrained Vision.” That since everyman is equal (a point that both Left and Right usually share) then the outcomes have to be equal as well. It’s a very Utopian concept that almost always fail to account for what is found in reality. This premise looks past natural ability, determination, and work ethic in determining the outcomes. Only the final number is important. If the final number doesn’t fit the ideal, then some nefarious motives have to be at work.

The other notion of equality is the idea of equality of opportunity. This idea, central to the “Constrained Vision,” is one that values the natural abilities in determining the outcomes. The only ideal is that everyone be giving the same opportunity to succeed in life, what happens is up to chance and that persons desires, work ethics and abilities.

Equality of opportunity stresses that the mechanism be equal, while equality of outcomes ignores the mechanism. By mechanism, I’m talking about laws, institutions and rules (All this is from Conflict of Visions). Equality of outcomes stresses the final tally, while the equality of opportunity doesn’t really care about the outcomes. Is it any wonder why the two sides talk past each other? The whole very basic premise of what is “equal” is radically different.

I’d argue that the equality of opportunity is the one true measure of equality. Men are equal to a certain extent. When talking about rights and privileges, then all men are equal. Yet, when we are talking about abilities, then all men are certainty not equal. I am not equal to Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen. I’m not equal to Lebron James on the basketball court. I’m not equal to Eli Manning on the football field as well. Yet neither are they equal to me at what I do best. Even when it comes to my chosen profession, I doubt any of them even know what Gas Chromatography or Mass Spectroscopy are, much less know how to analyze data and troubleshoot problems.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses. This is so obvious that most people overlook it when talking about equality. I think that those of the equality of outcomes persuasion kind of wish away that fact. When talking about economics (income equality is the biggie), people tend to forget that not all people act the same exact way. We all act in our interests. The variation with various ethnic and racial groups is enormous. The variation within the total human population is even bigger (imagine that).

If we all acted the same way, life would be boring. If we all acted the same, a central tenet of modern human self-worth, that we are all unique and different, is meaningless. Think about that for a minute. If we act all the same, meaning the same abilities and skills, then really each person is not really worth much of anything, since there are billions of exact duplicates all around the globe. One thing that makes human life so valuable, is that we are all unique. That we all do have differing skills, abilities and wants.

If you think about the liberal unconstrained view of equality, outcomes, you’ll notice that the end run is exact duplicates. If we were to achieve the liberal Utopia where everyone is “equal,” it doesn’t matter if they are all equally living in the mud, eating bugs and all dying from Malaria. We are all “equal” right. No one is better off than the rest. There is no room for innovation or the entrepreneurial spirit. Those are the things that lead to “unequal” outcomes. After all it was Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos drive, entrepreneurial spirit and leadership (all innate skills and abilities) that lead to their “unequal” outcomes of extreme wealth. In order to have equal outcomes, the extraordinary would have to be culled from the human race.

Of course a Liberal would contest that equal outcomes means everyone is as wealthy as the Gates, Jobs and Bezos of the world. Yet, I find that assertion flat-out insane. How do you create wealth? You don’t just print it out of a printing press. You can’t just add zeros to a bank account to create wealth. Wealth is created by innovation, drive and entrepreneurial spirit, the exact things that would need to be culled in order to attain equality of outcomes.

A cursory look at history supports my case. Pretty much every government that tried to create equal outcomes has done so by bringing everyone down to the lowest common denominator. From Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Revolution in Cuba, the people live a far lower standard of living than even the poorest person here in the  “unequal” US. Hell the Cubans only just recently were allowed cell phones (although it does them no good), where as practically everyone even those living on food stamps and welfare have had cell phones here in the US for years.

One of the things that got us started on heavy-handed government regulation of the housing market were statistics showing that blacks were turned down for mortgage loans more often than whites. The bean-counters in the media went ballistic. It had to be racism, to hear them tell it.

What they didn’t tell you was that whites were turned down more often than Asians. What they also didn’t tell you was that black-owned banks also turned down blacks more often than whites. Nor did they tell you that credit scores differed from group to group. Instead, the media, the politicians and the regulators grabbed some statistics and ran with them.

The bean-counters are everywhere, pushing the idea that differences show injustices committed by society. As long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it– and the polarization they create will sell this country down the river.

Racism is a common reason for inequality, according to Liberals. The reason is simple, they can’t find any episode from history, except those above which they want to forget, that has had equal outcomes. Racism is the only way they can cope with the fact that their ideas don’t work. It gives them a bogey man to blame because their whole concept of equality is wrong, they are thinking in the wrong terms. Outcome based equality is a pipe dream. All that we can do, giving a wide range of human interests, skills and abilities, is create an environment where everyone is given equal opportunity.

Modern Liberals can’t handle that. That would mean ending racial quotas (the most pervasive form of racial discrimination on the planet in my opinion), the end of collecting racial statistics and the end of Affirmative Action. But you can’t play identity politics that way. Identity politics is the core of the modern Democratic party. Look at their push for illegal amnesty. Even the most ardent Liberal will concede that it is for electoral political reasons.

Ironically,The Liberal world  the very opposite of the world in which Dr. King wanted. Dr. King wanted a world were people were judged by the content of their character NOT the color of their skin. Modern Liberals judge people by the color of their skin or what they are packing in their pants/pantsuit first and foremost.

Racism will be around for as long as there is money in keeping it around. The last time I checked, not too many conservatives or libertarians were giving money to Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. More importantly it will continue to be used as a weapon for as long as the people fall for it.