“The voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. The free market—it has not been unfettered for a very long time—is really a spontaneously synchronized order comprising trillions upon trillions of voluntary acts that individuals perform in order to make a living. Introduce government force and coercion into this rhythm and you get life-threatening arrhythmia. Under increasing state control, this marketplace —this magic, organic agora—starts to splutter, and people suffer.”—ILANA (April 23, 2010)
The market place brings plenty; the state does the opposite. Yet not a day goes by when the masses, ignorant of the forces that feed, clothe, cure, employ, entertain them and innovate for them, do not demand that those who’ve done nothing of the kind—the McCains, Obamas, Bushes, Clintons, Keith Alexanders, Lois Lerners, Eric Holders of the world—proceed with force against those who do nothing but.
One of the reasons the Internal Revenue Service will only ever accrete in size and scope is the thugs that man it. Watch this YouTube clip of a representative cross-section of the IRS workforce, no doubt, at a “training conference.” Look at these ugly, off-putting beasts getting their freak-on at your expense. They dress and look like crap, butts and crotches wiggling all over the place, and they sound like crap.
You don’t imagine that such a gross-out of a group—repulsive both physically and mentally—could add value to a company that is vying for the consumer’s voluntary vote, do you? “Give me a break.”
Although no Ron Paul in his understanding of American liberty, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), and not Sen. Rand Paul, has come closest to articulating the solution to the agency of legalized thuggery called the IRS.
The IRS ought to be abolished. Working Americans ought to be liberated from its deforming and deadly clutches.
The left sees the world through the prism of faction; facts are expected to align themselves accordingly. Thus to Chris Hayes of MSNBC, the central issue in the kidnapping and accidental recovery of “Cleveland’s lost girls” is society’s endemic, institutionalized, violence against women. The state’s endemic, institutionalized, violence against and indifference to its citizens—that doesn’t feature.
True to type, CNN Erin Burnett didn’t push the bureaucrat she interviewed too hard, today, when he insisted conveniently that the perp, Ariel Castro, 52—who had kidnapped and raped Amanda Berry, 27, Gina DeJesus, 23 and Michelle Knight, 32, and imprisoned them for about a decade—ought to be the focus of ire, and not the police department.
“Ignoring adult missing persons reports seems to have been a de facto departmental policy [in Cleveland] for many years,” reportsSlate’s Justin Peters, who, like most liberals, blames budgetary cuts (no amount of taxpayer money is ever enough for these people), rather than the state’s inability to allocate resources efficiently, and with the aim of pleasing “clients,” as the private sector is forced to do.
Government outfits organize around the optimization of the political needs of union members and other sectional interests. It’s the nature of the bureaucratic beast. The needs of the communities they are supposed to serve come last.
…the hum of criticism on Seymour Avenue is about the subtle signs, such as the lowered shades or odd behavior of Castro and how he never entertained guests.
These are the kinds of signs that police officers who patrol a specific beat over time might notice or hear about from neighbors. But that kind of patrol disappeared when community policing ended.
On Tuesday, I talked with a couple of community activists with years of perspective on police response to the missing persons: Delores Walton and Ruth Standiford. They hound police and are frequent critics as members of the Task Force for Community Mobilization and Peace in the Hood.
UPDATED I: Michael Maier on Facebook: Yes. Community policing was the way it once was when I was a kid (you knew your local policeman). But as the communities cops must police have become more “diverse” and menacing, and less recognizable, police, understandably, prefer to stay way.
RAY SUAREZ: There was a steady drumbeat of stories coming out of that West Cleveland neighborhood talking about attempts to tell the police over the years, attempts to report Ariel Castro for various infractions.
Did the police handle that today in the press conference? PETER KROUSE: I did not hear the entire press conference, but I believe they did say that they did everything they could.
In fact, yes, I know they did. They said that they investigated every lead that they knew of. And I know we have reported in The Plain Dealer a lot of the efforts that they went to, to try and find these girls. One of the officials said that, in hindsight, you know, they may discover that there was something that they missed, but that it would be hindsight. It was not — it wasn’t anything that they could pinpoint.
These cases — at least in the case of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, the two who were abducted as teenagers, those cases were pretty well publicized. And the efforts by the police to find some answers were pretty well publicized, too.
…public intellectuals … thought nothing of delivering South Africa into the hands of professed radical Marxist terrorists. Any one suggesting such folly to the wise Margaret Thatcher risked taking a handbagging. The Iron Lady ventured that grooming the ANC as South Africa’s government-in-waiting was tantamount to ‘living in cloud-cuckoo land.’
Tell me that fools are not attempting to redefine, à la postmodernism, the very definition of news. And why not? Academics have similarly broken down the ancient concept of the intellectual discipline.
“Intellectual disciplines,” historian Keith Windschuttle has written, “were founded in ancient Greece and gained considerable impetus from the work of Aristotle who identified and organized a range of subjects into orderly bodies of learning. … The history of Western knowledge shows the decisive importance of the structuring of disciplines. This structuring allowed the West to benefit from two key innovations: the systematization of research methods, which produced an accretion of consistent findings; and the organization of effective teaching, which permitted a large and accumulating body of knowledge to be transmitted from one generation to the next.” (The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle, Encounter, pp. 247-250)
Failing to lead the news with coverage of Mrs. Thatcher’s passing is in-itself big news.
UPDATE I: MSNBC’s odious Martin Bashir, a Briton, is dismembering Thatcher. His correspondent’s source of analysis: Meryl Creep’s depiction in “The Iron Lady.”
As I said, disciplinary breakdown.
Of course, many of Thatcher’s moves I‘d oppose, however it is undeniable that she was perhaps the only true great female leader other than old Golda Meir. I cannot think of a woman with a Thatcher-like intellect in international politics. Golda didn’t have that intellect, but she was quite the character. Both were nothing like today’s whiny, idiot fems.
UPDATE II: Don’t bother searching the articles penned by the presstitutes in the UK and the US, about Baroness Thatcher. Her remarkable oratory they call simple—to these cretins plain-spoken reason is counter-intuitive and hence, simplistic. The so-called 10 best quotes from Mrs. Thatcher’s are really stupid things said about her by her intellectual inferiors in Labor.
Here is Mrs. Thatcher displaying that incisive intellect of hers:
“…What the honorable member is saying is that he would rather the poorer were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.”
Watch the above bit of parliamentary flyting as only the British can do, and tell me the woman was not brilliant. Even her opponent delights in her retort.
“I detest every one of her domestic policies,” the Member tells the PM. To which she replies without flinching, in that crisp beautiful English:
“The honorable gentleman knows that I have the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of East Europe who’ve experienced it have.”
On the famous U-Turn:
“For those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catch phrase the U-Turn, I have only one thing to say: ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.'”
The exchange below with the pompous Peter Mansbridge of CBC is particularly relevant to the empty talk about “compromise” infesting current debates:
What perturbs Peter Mansbridge, a Canadian institution in his own right—a stuffy, ossified, yet rather able lefty journo—is what he calls “the uncompromising style of Thatcherism.” A liberal doesn’t like a debate about substance, for it demands intellectual argument. Rather, the liberal is compelled to make silly points about style for those allow for an emotional approach (“Baroness, you make me feel bad; you hurt my self-esteem”).
Mrs. Thatcher offers up a gorgeous metaphor for the pursuit of truth: “When you’re starting a journey over the seas, you steer by stars that are always the same in the heavens. If you haven’t any stars to steer by, then it’s a pretty nondescript journey. …consensus doesn’t seem to be a very good star to steer by.”
Exquisite.
And Mrs. Thatcher’s coup de grâce: “Why are you so interested in compromise and consensus? Why are you not interested in having clear objectives; and having been elected on clear objectives, knowing full-well that the difficulties would emerge first and the benefits later?”
