I’m a Theodore Roosevelt Republican. In fact, if I were going to characterize my—on health where I come from, I’m a Theodore Roosevelt Republican and I believe government can lean in the regulatory leaning is okay.—Newt Gingrich (the gibberish too).
To some—perhaps many—Republicans, to be a Theodore Roosevelt Republican is quite respectable. Therein lies the rub. If you’re the type of (Robert) Taft Republican who values your life, liberty and property—then Teddy Roosevelt, “the guy who started the Progressive Party,” and was a proponent of “progressive ideals”—is bad news.
If you didn’t already know Newt was bad news; then Glenn Beck makes it abundantly clear. Especially politically poignant is Newt’s folksy retelling of Teddy’s food safety awakening.
About “‘TR’s drummed up a phony ‘food safety crisis,'” Thomas J. DiLorenzo observed the following:
… there were no epidemics related to commercial food processing” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Roosevelt’s “pure food laws” were aimed “at protecting producers,” not the general public. For example, as Powell recounts, some of these early laws set exceptionally high regulatory standards on imported foods as a form of veiled protectionism. Food inspection laws during the Roosevelt era were invariably favored by larger corporations who understood that the laws would disproportionately harm their smaller competitors. “The 1906 Pure Food And Drugs Act empowered the Agriculture Department’s notorious quack, Harvey Washington Wiley, to conduct crazy crusades against foods competing with the interest groups he served” (mostly larger corporate interests).
In Into the Cannibal’s Pot, I mention the hundreds of thousands of Filipinos whom TR killed.
“When it grows up, the EU wants to be just like the US. That was Jose Manuel Barroso’s message to his host at the US Public Broadcasting Service.” The excerpt is is from “One Nation Under Inflation,” now on WND.COM:
“The EU Commission president, a chap called Jose Manuel Barroso, told PBS’s Jeffrey Brown, on November 28, that the European suprastate is not quite up to American statist standards.
Barroso lamented that the EU lacks America’s level of ‘convergence’: ‘We have a common currency, but not, for instance, a common treasury,’ said this slick operator. Fiscal discipline (one wonders what our commissar means by that) can only come about with more ‘pooling of sovereignty.’
The Commission’s president certainly sees the US as a model ‘fiscal union,’ with a high degree of ‘fiscal policy’ ‘integration’ throughout; and is almost envious of the fact that the US federal government possesses ‘the instruments’ that have allowed it to accumulate enormous liabilities: Evidently, America’s debt-to-GDP ratio is larger than the European Union’s.
In a nutshell: Barroso longs for Brussels to be able to do the necessary tinkering to keep the PIIGS of the Eurozone —Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain—living at the expense of their more industrious, austere neighbors to the north. (Presiding European bureaucrats like himself live-it-up no matter where they reside.) The EU, complained its Capo di tutti capi, needs to create those “instruments.”
When it comes to Newspeak, Barroso still beats Obama.
In any event, when it grows up, the EU wants to be just like the US. That was Jose Manuel Barroso’s message to his host at the US Public Broadcasting Service. So successfully has the Unites States government submerged the sovereignty of its states that a top European technocrat longs to be like us. We must be in worse shape than we imagined. …”
“The dueling perspectives political panel is compatible with the aims of CNN, MSNBC, and the other progressive broadcasters. Here is how it works: You invite a member of the Republican establishment; often a RINO—preferably a bimbo—to do battle with a lefty from similar circles. The sides are ideologically so close, that, in all likelihood, the panelists hang out after the show.
This format is positively postmodernist. Why? Because, by presenting the public with two competing perspectives—you mislead viewers into believing that indeed there are two realities, and that it is up to them to decide which one is more compelling.
The one parallel universe is represented on Fox Business by the likes of Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne, and others. …
The philosophical filth spewed by such characters – almost nightly on freedom-promoting programing, no less – is that government can spend and lend to good effect; that it can tax without discouraging and disrupting production; and that our overlords in D.C. can regulate “better” (read energy-squandering) industries into being by steering capital and labor away from bad (energy-efficient) industries (oil and gas). …
The truth is that truth is immutable, never relative. The little truth there is in mainstream media should not be diluted or presented by its adherents as dueling with untruth.
The above Fox News fixtures no more represent truth or promote it than does your average Holocaust denier.
With an exception: Libraries have long since engaged in a robust debate as to how to classify Holocaust-denying literature. While admirably advocating for unfettered free access, Professor of Library Services John A. Drobnicki has suggested moving Holocaust denial out of the History section in US libraries and closer to the ‘Bigfoot books,’ so that Holocaust denial’s Dewey Decimal designation is with ‘hoax materials.’
Indeed, hacks are not historians. Although the dueling-perspectives panel format would suggest it is—the economic bunk spewed by the likes of Skinner, Heldman, Dowdell, Jeffers, Sibila, and Erika Payne is no version of the truth, but a perversion of it.” …
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UPDATE I (Nov. 18): MSNBC has just inaugurated the nauseating “NOW,” which utilizes the dueling-perspectives panel discussed in my WND column to great effect. Here is the little RINO Lolita S. E. Cupp making a weak case for the right of a man to hire a lawyer, in a pathologically litigious country, which jails more individuals than any other: the USA. By “a weak case,” the hallmark of an establishment Republican (or whatever one chooses to dub this political species), I mean that grimaces, gestures, and a paraphrasing of the host replace serious argument. In particular, earlier in the debate, Cupp picked up on a catchy phrase the host had used, and repeated it again and again (“precipice politics) in order to conceal her vacuity. In the loud talking (for it wasn’t intelligent debate) about the Super Committee, Naomi Wolf was the only individual to zero in on the issue of a soviet-style politburo making decisions in a so-called representative democracy. (Wolf didn’t put it this way, but she made the point effectively. And, of course, the US was supposed to be a republic, not a mobocracy.) Otherwise, everything is all very friendly and flirty.
UPDATE II:Via Facebook: What uncharacteristic intellectual pettiness it is to zero in on a trivial convention used in the column, instead of addressing the issue of natural law and reality, also the core of the column. This is what the column is about. However, maybe some here disagree that “truth is immutable, never relative.” And that “the little truth there is in mainstream media should not be diluted or presented by its adherents as dueling with untruth.”
UPDATE III: LEFT-LIBERTARIANISM. To the “there is nothing wrong with Judge and Stossel” crowd: ‘Cmon: They are the best we have, but there is plenty wrong. They are left-libertarians. For a while, Paul was teetering there too, but was pulled back from the brink by the conservatism of the his base, the majority of whom do not think that, at 1 million a year, the US needs more immigration and that anchor babies are dictated by the Constitution.
When there is a shortage of a good, it is safe to say that it is a result of government incursion into the economy. And there are reported “shortages—“severe” shortages—in “drugs for chemotherapy, infections and other serious ailments.” The shortages, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch, are “endangering patients and forcing hospitals to buy life-saving medications from secondary suppliers at huge markups because they can’t get them any other way.”
How would consumer demand have been heeded in an unhampered market?
The urgent demand for a drug would have been followed by a shortfall of supply. Large demand and short supply would initially send the price of the drugs rocketing. Profits in an unhampered pharmaceutical market would signal to the many drug makers that it’s pedal to the metal: time to enter into accelerated production of this scarce commodity.
Walter Olson of CATO provides more details about “the federal government’s widely publicized crackdown in recent years on pharmaceutical manufacturing and quality-control practices” to have played a role in current shortages.
