And do note the example of Say’s Law right at the front where the mown lawn is exchanged for food and drink. Demand is created by supply. This has been replaced by Obama’s Principle: from each according to his ability, to each according to his vote.
This is America which really is far gone. But everything American eventually seems to get here too. So the most anti-American segments of our population will eventually pick up this all-too-American meme as well. It is not a good omen. It was this statement, however, that I found the most remarkable (at 4:24):
Those with the highest levels of education have the lowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view, while those who have not graduated from high school can claim the most diverse discussion mates. In other words, the most educated amongst us are also the most likely to live in the tightest echo chambers.
That is quite something to think about if it is actually really true.
I’m Dreaming of an Old Theory
I’m dreaming of an old theory
Where supply’s the basis for demand
Where the economy’s stronger
Recoveries longer
Because Say’s Law is at hand
I’m dreaming of an old theory
With Keynes at long last finally dead
Spending based on value added
And no more budgets in the red
I see I have been named in a column under the heading, “The Sexist Hits Just Keep on Coming“. And in the text we read:
And if we needed any reminding of the kind of stuff Jenna Price and her supporters are up against, the past few days served up a couple of useful reminders. On Thursday, RMIT economics lecturer Steve Kates did his best to put Fox News to shame with an opinion piece on the right-of-centre Quadrant Online site. Kates’ reaction to Barack Obama’s re-election: ‘The confluence of the mendicants, the envious, the abortion lobby, what I call the cohort of damaged women, and the social-sciences know-nothings has proven a formidable combination.’
Quite frankly, this burns me up. I am the least sexist person I know and it harms my reputation to say anything to the contrary. I will be looking for an apology from The Age and whoever wrote this statement. It is an actionable matter and I am not going to stand for it. I can hardly think of anything more purposefully designed to harm my reputation than this. It is totally unacceptable. I will not accept such statements and this goes for anyone else who might decide to call me a sexist in print.
As it happens, I have worked for women, I have worked with women, I have had women work for me whom I have employed, I have promoted women because I thought they were excellent at what they did and I have always sought in every way to promote women rights in every environment I have been in. Who is this columnist to make such a statement on a single phrase in a single para when she didn’t even bother to read the entire article and see what I said? She know nothing about me at all.
My point was this. The sexual revolution has damaged young girls and done them a great deal of harm but the Obama campaign, rather than try to remedy these problems merely sought to exploit them for political gain. And this they have done and quite successfully. Whether women are better for it in the long run I have my doubts. But that is the question to answer if you want to buy into the debate. And the particular point I was making was the vast amount of harm the “sexual revolution” has done to women.
To me, the question whether the sexual revolution has damaged young girls and the women these young girls eventually grow up to become seems open and shut to me. I didn’t say all women, of course, but I do say some and it is a sadly large proportion. But let me make a few observations.
First, the Obama campaign targeted young single women and were very successful in this targeting. The Gallup Poll shows that the 2012 election ended up with the widest gender gap since gender gap measurement began in 1952. Moreover, a much larger proportion of unmarried women voted for Obama in comparison with married women. This was not by accident but was the explicit design of the Obama campaign.
Second, every father who has met at the front door the young man who has come to pick up his young daughter knows very well what is in that young man’s mind. “You’re not going out dressed like that” is an old story but comes from a kind of experience that everyone is perfectly aware of.
Third, are women really content with the culture of the one night stand or commitment-free serial monogamy? The culture of respect, specially the serious importance attached to sexual relations that was once a universal, has been worn away and while it has not disappeared, it is nothing like what it was. Sex is too easy to come by; boys are less inclined to marry and girls do not end up with the love and companionship a true marriage should bring. Nor are we cultivating an environment that encourages children. This was always an ideal, of course, but is it still the culturally driven ideal or are we into a kind of every-woman-for-herself society?
Four, enticing young women into the socially dead end of bearing fatherless children is a major problem. Why is that not seen as a catastrophic outcome? We have institutional structures that allow young single women to accommodate having children but why are we not warning them about how it ruins their own chances in life and dulls the prospects of their children as well.
Five, how is one to make sense of “vote as if your lady parts depend on it”? That really is an Obama-Biden ad which they pulled after a while but not before it made the rounds. You tell me what this is supposed to say if it is not the single most sexist ad you have ever seen.
This is asking for a prioritisation of issues that is very different from what I think was important. I worry about the fiscal cliff, public debt, rising deficits, foreign policy, radical Islam, a nuclear Iran and other issues along those lines. How does worrying about your “lady parts” fit into this? An explanation is needed for why this is of such relative importance to young single women when the likelihood of limiting the availability of abortion or eliminating contraception is nil as my article pointed out.
Six, whatever else my article was, it was sympathetic to the problems facing young women. It is not sexism to raise this issue. The anger that I believe is there really does seem to be there, which led to the largest gap ever not only between women and men but between unmarried and married women, in both cases in Obama’s favour. This requires explanation, and for me, part of the a explanation I trace back to the sexual revolution. I may have this wrong, although I cannot believe it is not an important part of a full explanation. But an explanation of some kind is required. The Obama campaign knew what it was doing in targeting this demographic in this way.
Seven, Code Pink and their demonstration at the Republican convention where they dressed as v______ was to my mind vulgar but was trying to sway the same demographic. To me, it is something that ought to lose you votes but instead it seems to have picked them up. Look at the video and see what sense you can make of it, but this comes with a triple-X vulgarity alert.
Eight, Obama in many ways provides policies that seem to me to undermine marriage. In my view, the importance of marriage and stability in marriage are values that should be defended. Not everyone agrees but that is why we discuss. Perhaps someone such as myself from a very different world does know something that might be useful knowledge to those who were not there. And it may not seem all that important to some, but the stability of the family is at the very centre of our stability as a society.
The Democrats pander to this destabilising segment of the population by providing resources that contribute to the breakdown of the family. Barack Obama’s Life of Julia ad was addressed to these women. No man ever appeared in this ad but at age 31 Julia had a child (a son who does appear once at age 10). This is a cohort that the Democrats were appealing to. I think of this Julia as very badly served by a culture that does not encourage her to have children within marriage and which allows her to look to government to provide the support that was once provided within a family structure.
Nine, the song by Garfunkel and Oates also looks at things from the perspective of a 31 year old woman. I thought this made a lot of sense and, as you can see, it is a point being made by two women. The 31 year old is angry and particularly at the stupidity of her own self when she was 29. A very clever piece of work and worth more than just a passing glance. And if you got through Code Pink, you will find this quite tame by comparison.
Ten, a sexist dismisses women as a lesser breed without the competencies to manage and do the things a man can do. I, on the other hand, have always welcomed women into top jobs and think it is wonderful that women are reaching such levels. We as a society are tapping into a wonderful resource that other societies do not and both men and women are the better for it. I feel I shouldn’t have to explain myself, but as someone who supported to the maximum extent Margaret Thatcher (here is a posting I did on Thatcher which I titled, “The Greatest Woman of the Twentieth Century” I can hardly think of my polical views as tainted with an anti-woman brush. Odd kind of sexism to support a woman but be anti-woman. This may cut no ice with the left, but if you are thinking in this case about men and women and not left and right, it is hard to pin a sexist tag on someone who would be happy to be governed over by a woman and who would trust their political judgment ahead of someone else just because they were a male.
And whatever I felt about Hilary Clinton, I felt the same about Bill Clinton. Gender has nothing to do with it, just as I would oppose most of what Gillard has done had she been Julian and not Julia.
Lastly, I will mention the afterward of my book, Free Market Economics. This is the first of the acknowledgements I made. I won’t mention names since I don’t want to bring her into this, but she was instrumental in getting the book done as I have personally told her many times and wrote this to say so:
I am therefore endlessly grateful to my colleague, _______ _____,who allowed me to write this book as the basis of the course we taught together. Her support, encouragement and sensible advice meant a good deal to me as the book was being carved out of nothing more than the ideas which had been developing in my mind over a goodly number of years. Neither she nor I knew what would come out during any given week. Her willingness to allow me to put onto paper my views on economics, and to use these as the basis for our classroom instruction, was essential for this project even to have commenced.
I know sexism when I see it and I am not in any way, shape or form a sexist. It is a quite defaming statement to make about someone, particularly someone who must work with and for women. As it is not true, and is demonstrably untrue. I am outraged that The Age can see fit to put such a defamatory para into its news without even giving me a call so that I could at least make the points I am making here. I will expect an apology.
A review by Helen Smith, the Insta-Wife, of Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men which for some women is apparently something to hope for. From the review:
One reason I suggest in my book for men’s negative attitudes towards marriage, women and the society is the denigrating and damaging way that boys and young men are treated in our culture and a book with a title like this sure doesn’t help. To her credit, Rosin at least offers up a lame explanation to Jacob [that is, to Rosin’s young son who is affronted by his mother’s book title] that ‘I want to convince people that some men out there need our help, since it’s not so easy for them to ask for it. ‘He doesn’t quite believe me yet, but maybe one day he will.’ Yet as I read the pages of her book, I am not sure what type of help she thinks men need and as Christina Hoff Summers said to me about men’s centers that try to convince men to be more like woman: ‘I don’t think that’s the kind of help men want.’
It’s bad news all round but at least there is a rear guard that is trying to turn this around. For the record, the question Rosin’s son asked his mother was: “Mommy, Why Would You Write a Book with Such a Mean Title?” I don’t really think there is any good reason myself. The comments at the end of the review are also worth a read.
It might also be noted that Smith is writing her own book on these issues but from a very different direction. Her title is, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matter.
A bit of an early post mortem on the American election but we have to start somewhere. Possibly the most crucial determinant of the result is that the American voting population is now inhabited in very large numbers by those who believe the world owes them a living and that someone else having more than they do is in itself a wrong that needs to be righted. There is, however, more to it than that.
The confluence of the mendicants, the envious, the abortion lobby, what I will call the cohort of damaged women, and the social sciences know-nothings has proven a formidable combination. They are a new constituency amalgamation that will affect the politics of the United States for the foreseeable future.
The Mendicants
So far as those who vote for a living are concerned one can understand why they are voting as they do. There are more of them than ever as their numbers have been propagated by leftist parties everywhere with the specific aim of building near-majority voting blocks. And this they have done. Whether it brings ruin to the country is merely a detail and as ruin is so slow, the present political class hopes to be gone and done before things really do fall about their heads. That was the view of the Roosevelt generation as it had been for those who took their lead from Lyndon Johnson. But now, with the $16 trillion debt and another trillion added each year, this may be the generation that finally does have to pay the price. Greece is more than a metaphor. It is an example of what really can happen when public spending moves beyond control. But in the meantime, there are large parts of the electorate voting for the services and goods that the government promises to distribute to them. Romney nearly having won after making it clear that he intended to withdraw the supposedly free healthcare was a sign of the residual good sense in much of the voting population but this 47% as he named them are a hard bunch to pry loose from their spoils. It may take an outcome no different from Greece, where the Government point blank can no longer afford to pay for its promises, that may well be the only way this will ever end.
The Resentful and the Envious
The resentful and the envious are the second cohort; they are the ones who had been instructed to vote for “revenge”. That Obama used precisely that word was seen as a blunder by those who had no idea just how potent the word was. This had been market tested and focused grouped to an extraordinary degree and was launched just when it was meant to have its greatest effect, just before the election itself. It is a word that makes little impact on people who are generally satisfied with their lives. The dangers in it went right past the Romney campaign team just as you might think. They even put the word revenge into their own ads and spread far and wide the very concept Obama was himself trying to promote.
It may strike the wrong tone for us, but for those who are worm eaten with envy, they understood the point very well indeed. They were there in their numbers with no greater aim in mind than to bring down those whom they resent and envy for their perceived success in life. For those who were never going to vote for Obama anyway, it was just one more reason amongst all of the others. For those towards whom the desire for vengeance was aimed, it found its mark and made them into broken glass Democrats. They were motivated to make sure Romney was never going to win if they had anything to do with it, and they did have something to do with it and Romney did indeed lose.
The Abortion Rights Lobby
An important component of this part of the Democrat program is the bringing into the fold what I describe as “damaged women”. This is a relatively new phenomenon in politics which has existed in various forms before now but has emerged only recently as a formidable force for right of centre parties to have to deal with. It is a product of the feminism of the 1960s which unmoored women from their traditional roles but had as its most significant element the “sexual revolution”, a change in social mores euphemistically known as “sexual liberation” but which is anything but. It has made the abortion rights issue possibly the greatest gift ever for the Democrats in the US.
And here is the thing. The likelihood that the Republicans would even attempt to do anything about “reproductive rights” cannot be seriously entertained. The ability to restrict a woman’s ability to secure an abortion, in New York or California let us say, would require a Republican to be elected with the expressed intent of limiting abortion, who would then make appointments to the Supreme Court dependent on this one feature in a judge’s CV. This judge would need to receive approval in the Senate and having done so would then need to form part of a majority decision to repeal Roe and Wade. Having repealed Roe and Wade there would then have to be legislation passed to make abortion illegal and we are talking about New York and California when such legislation would be unlikely to pass a single state house in the United States. Thus, the probability of any of this ever happening, whoever might become the president, is precisely zero. Abortion rights are as secure as, indeed more secure even than the right to bear arms. It might as well be in the Constitution given how literally impossible it would be to change the circumstances for abortion in any significant way, never mind the availability of contraception.
Damaged Women
And what’s more, everyone knows it. Anyone who votes based on some concern that the Republican party would be capable of making this change even if it wished to is living in a world of paranoia and might as well be worried about asking the government to protect them from men from Mars. The reality, however, is more closely represented by this video which is funny in a very unfunny way. Do not play this in an office environment and make sure you turn the volume down. I also give you a bad language alert. But the point is massive.
Miss 31 voted for Obama and is representative of the women who are in massive agreement with their cries of misogyny and the lack of respect for women. There is no point going too far into this, but the most influential social philosopher of the twentieth century was Hugh Hefner and his Playboy Philosophy. You would have to be at least as old as I am to recall what a shock it was to read Hefner’s “philosophy” in the pages of Playboy back when I was about 14 in the 1960s. Here’s the gist. All those uptight girls hanging onto their virginity ought to liberate themselves and get into the sexual scrum with the boys. In an era when a goodnight kiss was a big deal this was magic. And with the likes of Germaine Greer and her buddies saying the same just as the birth control pill was becoming readily available, a new world opened for which neither the young women of the time nor the young men were really prepared.
But who has come out of this genuinely hurt by the changed attitude to women. Both men and women are worse for it, but if you ask me, it is women who have been psychologically damaged far more than the men. And I suspect Miss 29 has not avoided the deep and fearsome pains of commitment-free sexual relations either.
These are the attitudes that Obama was tapping into. Watching the Middle East burn and the American economy trashed by debt and deficits are irrelevant to such women whose anger is beyond all understanding, particularly for men of my and Romney’s generation.
Social Sciences Know Nothings
And then, finally, there are the social sciences know nothings. It is a term I have put together for want of something better. They too love power but have no way to gain it other than through the words they use. These are the armchair Marxists and social revolutionaries of the couch. All talk and no action, but there is plenty of talk. They produce little and their value added is minimal in comparison with the serious producers of the world. They have read the literature of the left, they have thought their shallow thoughts, and they are irritated that the riches of the world have gone to people who never graduated from universities and who might be unable to string five sentences together in a single paragraph. These are your academics and media types who, in their own way, may be the most envious and resentful of the lot.
And it has been clear from the start that the media have understood exactly how bad Obama has been because they have known with precision exactly what parts of what Obama has done or said that have required their cover. Obama has had to lie over Benghazi and so they have covered for him to the maximum extent they can. Obama tells producers “you didn’t build that” and the media runs dead with the quote so that it never really becomes as significant as it ought to be. They know exactly how dreadful Obama has been, and cannot even manufacture a greater good that their lies and distortions have protected the community from having to do without should Obama lose this election in spite of everything they have done.
We are in dangerous times. Obama and Gillard are two of a kind. Empty of ability, proven failures at everything they have tried to achieve, but nevertheless able to command majorities in the legislative systems of our two nations. But the American election is the one that will matter most and whose outcome will resonate far into the future in ways that are incalculable. Re-electing Obama has endangered our way of life and may even make it unsustainable. Electing Mitt Romney would have given at least the possibility of putting us back on a more stable path. It is an option that has now been closed forever. It is the alternative future that because of the election will never be allowed to happen.
The cleverest part is that this is of the same girl at age 29 and then again at age 31. There is wisdom here but how many young girls are brought up to understand where true serenity lies and that is in making a home with one chap and with children and for life.
Just don’t open in an office setting or if anyone else is around.
Government policy has gone from who can best manage our communal affairs to who will promise to transfer more from our communal wealth to those with the power to vote themselves a larger share. It is the major issue in the presidential election in the United States and it will be just as large an issue here in 2013. I have an article at Quadrant Online that looks at the contrast between the parties of the right and left both here and in the US. This is the central contrast discussed in the article:
The right has a vision of how a world can be best constructed by leaving each of us the freedom and opportunity to find our own way. It is always an adventure and nothing can be guaranteed, but there are satisfactions in being allowed to build our own lives ourselves and in our own way. But it comes with fewer forms of open-ended government support.
BY contrast, the left is filled with plans for what it will do for us: for ‘the poor’, ‘the disadvantaged’, for women, migrants, Aboriginals, or whoever can be transformed into a victim group and induced to become dependent on government programs, grants and handouts. Socialism is a drug of dependence. It is a narcotic addiction very hard to break.
They used to say about heroin that you shouldn’t try it because it is so incredibly good and then when you’re hooked it sets about ruining your life. It pulls you in and then never lets you go. Same again for socialist non-solutions to our problems. There are communal ways to deal with some of our problems and governments can sometimes help. But it is hard to think of proposals to fix things that came from the collectivist side of politics that actually left things better than they had been before. They may actually exist, I just have trouble remembering what they are.
Why you voting? Well if you are an Obama supporter, you know. The Romney ad is full of appeal to abstract rights and responsibilities. It is an appeal to what is best in America. And why does Obama want you to vote for him? For “revenge”. That is a word that was not plucked out of the air as it came to mind. That is a word that has emerged in focus groups and has been market tested in all the demographics that matter. If you think of the sentiment as repulsive and disgusting, well that’s your business. But Mitt Romney is now spreading the very message that Obama wants voters to hear.
The Obama campaign is not aimed at the high minded and those who love America and what it stands for. It is aimed at a very different group entirely. The resentful and the envious. The anti-American haters of which there are many born and bred in the United States. The education system is dominated by the left who fill their students with anti-market and anti-capitalist rhetoric as do their newspapers and the media in general. And then there are those who care nothing at all about the deficit. They want that flow of benefits to continue without stop. Romney won’t provide it or even try. Obama will try and might even succeed.
This is Obama’s latest ad. It runs for more than two minutes so much cost an absolute fortune to run, but run it they are. It won’t change your vote but you are not the target.
Who is the ad aimed at? Why does this ad and talking about revenge work? I take you back to Peggy Noonan in the context of a post I put together almost a year ago.
Yet for all that Obama is still the favourite to win in November. I have been astonished at the ability of the Obama administration to manipulate the electorate almost at will. I have quoted the following passage from Peggy Noonan before and will have reason to do so no doubt from now till November. Put everything Obama does and has done into the context of this kind of analytical ability:
The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’
There are people who want revenge and there are people who want government benefits and there are people who hate everything America stands for. That is the Obama coalition and who is to say it is not now the 50,1%.
I assumed that those BBC polls showing massive support worldwide for Obama over Mitt Romney are due to ignorance, the absence of any real dogs in the fight for most of those surveyed and the role of the media which is not quite capable of keeping the truth about Romney from breaking out in America but which has kept the world completely in the dark why Romney should be supported by at least half the American population. All those racist crackers, or something, but there can be no really sensible reason which is why we here in Australia have the Obama advantage over Romney at an astonishing 68% to 7%.
But there is another way of looking at it which is that those responding to the survey questionnaire understand perfectly well what the difference between the two is but even so prefer Obama to Romney. And if that’s the case, then things are really in a political mess just about everywhere and the only hope is that America does elect Mitt Romney who will start the process of reform, first in America and then everywhere else as he stops paying their defence bills for a start.
The European decadence as reflected in their preference for Obama has been raised in a quite interesting article by Michael Ledeen. He calls his article “Letter to My European Friends” which is really just cover for what he means, “You Europeans are a Bunch of Fools”.
The American Revolution was a great thing, and Americans were right to abandon authoritarian Europe for the possibility of creating a free country across the ocean. Anyone who truly values liberty, has to see that Obama is a threat. He wants to turn the United States into a version of Europe: big, meddlesome government, constantly higher levels of taxation and intrusive regulation of almost everything, combined with a deliberate and systematic weakening of military power and a foreign policy that shrinks from decisive action against freedom’s enemies.
That’s you, sadly. So it’s understandable that you’d favor Obama (although the numbers—reminiscent of plebiscites rather than normal elections—are ridiculous). It’s yet another sign of the decadence of Europe
Ledeen continues with a discussion of how far Europe has fallen:
The Europe I loved, and still love, is increasingly a theme park. It’s fun to visit, but it’s no longer a source of creative inspiration. Europeans seem to me to have abdicated their liberties to their governments, provided that the governments provide them with an easy life, replete with free medical care, plenty of vacations, and no international obligations. Surely you know that very few of your tax euros go towards your defense. We have been paying that bill for decades, and our soldiers and military power have been protecting you.
So don’t be surprised—but you should be very concerned—that we are increasingly looking across the Pacific. It’s no accident that the most brilliant and talented Americans are increasingly Asians, not Europeans.
We don’t want to follow your example. And your landslide support of Obama—who has done terrible damage to America—confirms my pessimism about your future.
Australia is not as far gone as Europe but we are getting there. This is going to be a pivotal election next year in Australia as well. The aim of the left is to create power for themselves by causing dependency in others. They are ruining this country by pretending to make it better by softening the edges and making things fairer. Anyone who believes that our Prime Minister cares about anyone but herself is a deluded fool, but there are plenty of those around and the more she can buy the fewer of the rest of us there will be. And not only will we not get the security and the basic living standards these socialist thieves pretend to provide we will be all the worse for it. But there are always a proportion who will take their chances that the handouts will keep coming. Our only hope is that the proportion has not yet reached 50%, but if the Labor Party has anything to do with it, we will get there as quickly as it is humanly possible.
Law of Markets 