Category Archives: Debt

Update II: Warning: Postal Worker Coming to A Clinic Near You (The Race Rot)

Affirmative Action, Debt, Economy, Film, Political Correctness, Race, Regulation, Socialism, The State

This week’s column, “Warning: Postal Worker Coming to A Clinic Near You,” is too lyrical for my liking. Nevertheless, if I’ve learned anything as a writer, it is the power of a personal story.

So do read about the latest incident in “a seven-year saga” at my local branch of the United States Postal Service.

The incident “was no more than a sadistic display of power, honed in a state monopoly, where captive ‘customers’ are pinned down like butterflies by ‘service providers.’ The discretion left to such petty tyrants is wide—fear of being fired minimal, if non-existent.”

“Just you wait until a postal worker of this caliber, subject to the same disincentives, is in charge of determining whether to schedule your emergency CAT Scan (or maybe not). You don’t wish to set that cat among the poor pigeons. These will be the very beasts rising out of the sea of statism unleashed by a government-controlled healthcare system.”

To get a glimpse of President Camacho’s post office, read “Warning: Postal Worker Coming to A Clinic Near You,” now up on WND.COM, and on Taki’s Magazine every weekend.

Update I (Sept. 4): Presumably, everyone who reads this blog has watched “Idiocracy.” It’s compulsory. I mention in “Warning: Postal Worker Coming to A Clinic Near You,” that the dialogue with “sour-Asian-lady-who-speaks-in-tongues” and “rude-African-American-guy” was precisely the kind of dialogue Joe Bauers, the protagonist in Mike Judge’s superb satire “Idiocracy,” had conducted with the “‘tarded” doctor character. Here’s a snippet (make sure to click on the sound clips for full effect):

Doctor (Justin Long): “Hey, how’s it hang, ese?”
Doctor: “Well, don’t wanna sound like a d-ck or nothin’, but, uh, it says on your chart that you’re bleeped up. Uh, you talk like a fag, and your sh-t’s all retarded. What I do is just like, like, you know… like, you know what I mean? Like– (chuckles)”
Joe: “No, I’m serious here.”
Doctor: “Don’t worry, scrot. Now, there are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded.” She’s a pilot now.
Joe: “I need for you to be serious for a second here, okay? I need help.”
Doctor: “There’s that fag talk we talked about.”

Update II (Sept. 5): THE RACE ROT. Before I address Mr. Davis’ fabulous letter, hereunder, which also rejects the “bigot” epithet another reader attached to me, check the column on Taki’s Magazine, where Richard Spencer, the young, hip (and dashing) editor posted a picture of the “‘tard” doc, screaming when he discovers Joe is an “unscannable.” I can’t get enough of “Idiocracy.”

Back to the cast in the column. “Sour-Asian-lady-who-speaks-in-tongues”: Yes, too many native Americans speak bad English, but not all speak in tongues. Ignoring her “heritage” would have made the column forced, artificial and phony.

Next: “Who ya gonna call? Ghost Busters!” Indeed, who did I call on to rescue me from the Asian service clerk? The African-American gentleman. At least I thought he was one. I asked sourpuss to call him because he had struck me on a previous session in the “coven” as standing head-and-shoulders above the rest in his pleasant, professional demeanor (and he was certainly buff). He turned out to be a “‘tard.”

Had I been concerned with race—or even prone to thinking in such terms—I would have mentioned that the “feral female PO devotee” who accosted me on my way out was white. Or that the sweet young woman who took the initiative and rescued me was Hispanic.

I did neither. When you tell a story, some facts contribute to the narrative; others don’t. If anything, shying away from these descriptions rings false and racist. I wrote spontaneously. I was plotting neither a PC or an un-PC piece.

I’m an individualist. However, I have also said the following in this interview with Dr. David Yeagley:

“Broad statements about aggregate group characteristics, provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decision in their daily lives as to where to invest scarce and precious resources—to wit, one’s life and property—based on probabilities and generalities.”

So while I treat each and every person on his merit, I do not shy away from speaking openly about demographic data.

I once lamented that, “We used to be able to joke about stereotypes without shrieking, ‘racism, Anti-Semitism,’ ‘Occidentalism,’ ‘Orientalism,’ ‘Eurocentrism,’ and that, “There is some truth to them.”

Update II: The French Revolution Revived

Conservatism, Debt, Economy, Europe, Federal Reserve Bank, Founding Fathers, Inflation, Liberty, Political Philosophy

“Everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit,” is how the Brilliant Edmund Burke, supporter of the American colonists, described the illiberal, irreligious, intolerant French Revolution. In return, the punk Thomas Paine spat worthless venom at Burke for his devastating critique of that blood-drenched Revolution. Like contemporary Americans, Paine’s fealty was to the Jacobins, who, for his troubles, almost had him guillotined. The Rights of Man, in particular, is intended as a refutation of Edmund Burke’s critique. Naturally, it does nothing of the sort.

There is no affinity between the French and American founding ideas. And Paine’s proto-socialism—he advocated welfare financed by taxes—is quintessentially unAmerican. Yet Paine is beloved of Americans; of Burke I seldom hear. I intend to change that here on BAB.

Let me begin with an excerpt from Reflections on the Revolution in France, where Burke speaks about the proliferation of fiat money (“fictitious representation”). He does so a great deal in this magnificent tract. Burke hammering on about “current circulating credit,” “defiance of economical principles,” and “bankruptcy” could not be more germane in fin de siècle America:

“At present the state of their treasury sinks every day more and more in cash, and swells more and more in fictitious representation. When so little within or without is now found but paper, the representative not of opulence but of want, the creature not of credit but of power, they imagine that our flourishing state in England is owing to that bank-paper, and not the bank-paper to the flourishing condition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of the transaction. They forget that, in England, not one shilling of paper money of any description is received but of choice; that the whole has had its origin in cash actually deposited; and that it is convertible at pleasure, in an instant and without the smallest loss, into cash again. Our paper is of value in commerce, because in law it is of none. It is powerful on ‘Change, because in Westminster Hall it is impotent. In payment of a debt of twenty shillings, a creditor may refuse all the paper of the Bank of England. Nor is there amongst us a single public security, of any quality or nature whatsoever, that is enforced by authority. In fact, it might be easily shown that our paper wealth, instead of lessening the real coin, has a tendency to increase it; instead of being a substitute for money, it only facilitates its entry, its exit, and its circulation; that it is the symbol of prosperity, and not the badge of distress. Never was a scarcity of cash and an exuberance of paper a subject of complaint in this nation.”

[SNIP]

Readers: search the online volume, posted on Bartleby.com, and post comments excerpting your favorite tracts.

Update I (August 26): Prof. Dennis O’keeffe is the author of Burke, due out in October of this year.

Update II: Russell Kirk on Burke:

“Written at white heat, the “Reflections” burns with all the wrath and anguish of a prophet who saw the traditions of Christendom and the fabric of civil society dissolving before his eyes. Yet his words are suffused with a keenness of observation, the mark of a practical statesman. This book is polemic at its most magnificent, and one of the most influential political treatises in the history of the world.” (The Essential Russel Kirk, 2007, p. 144)

Happy Days Are Here Again … La, La, La

Business, Debt, Economy, Labor

The economic experts who’ve got a lot riding on the recovery ass, now measure recovery by the slowing rate of job losses. Employers laid off fewer workers in July—247,000 as opposed to 443,000 in June. “The jobless rate dipped for the first time in 15 months to 9.4 percent in July, from 9.5 percent the previous month, and workers’ hours and pay edged upward,” reports the AP.

But, “the main reason the unemployment rate declined last month was not an inspiring one.” What that ass with ears Obama doesn’t divulge is this:

Hundreds of thousands of people, some discouraged by their failed job searches, left the labor force. The labor force includes only those who are either employed or are looking for work.

If laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have settled for part-time work are included the unemployment rate would have been 16.3 percent in July. All told, 14.5 million were out of work in July.

Job-seekers are finding it harder to get work because there are so few openings. A record 4.97 million people had been unemployed six months or longer in July. And the average length of unemployment grew to 25.1 weeks, also a record.

Recovery cannot commence until the government stops cold turkey the reckless, unconstitutional, immoral measures that are worsening the economy.

What are those? No great mystery there; they are the exact actions that would worsen your personal finances were you to indulge as the government does: Digging yourself deeper into to debt by spending yourself into oblivion. Bailing out debtors, restructuring their mortgages, reducing their payments, forestalling foreclosures, making borrowing artificially even cheaper when it should be expensive, penalizing banks for trying to lend conservatively, creating more and more government-sector jobs, which are supported by taxpayers, are a drain on the economy and create no economic value whatsoever—all the stuff the Obama Administration is championing as a matter of policy, all the while printing money non-stop.

There’s one good sign that Americans have parted company from the government in cultivating more frugal habits: “consumers paid down credit cards and reduced other debt in June for the fifth straight month.”

Destroying Health Care For The Few Uninsured

Affirmative Action, Constitution, Debt, Economy, Healthcare

The excerpt is from my new WND.COM column, “Destroying Health Care For The Few Uninsured,” now on Taki’s Magazine:

“If the US wasn’t already insolvent, I’d say that Obama was bankrupting the country, and sending the health care we have to hell in a handcart, for the ostensible benefit of less than ten percent of the population. But the US is already in the red, courtesy of the current president and his predecessor.

The reported numbers—between 46 and 50 million—are inflated. If CBS news says so, you can believe it …

Large-scale destruction in the purported service of the few—does that sound familiar? Last year, a bumbling Bush bailed out and nationalized large sections of the financial sector because of a few million bad mortgages. For the benefit of these bad debtors, BO has beefed-up Bush’s initial offering with a $75 billion foreclosure relief plan. Although sources cited by Foxbusiness estimate “that up to 6 million homes could be lost to foreclosure in the current economic crisis,” so far approximately four million loans have gone under, out of a total of 44.4 million mortgages countrywide. …”

Read the complete column, now up on Taki’s (“Universal Health Care Is Theft”) You can catch the weekly fare every Saturday on Taki’s Magazine too, where the reading is really good.