UPDATED: ‘How Do You Create A Job?’ (Hint: Food Stamps)

Business, Democrats, Economy, Free Markets, Socialism

In the Connecticut Senate debate, Republican Linda McMahon floored Democrat Richard Blumenthal with this simple question: “How Do You Create A Job?” Via the Free Republic: “Blumenthal stammers like an idiot. When he gets done, Linda McMahon schools him on the correct answer.” Writes David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner: “If you’re willing to suffer through Blumenthal’s answer, the response is pretty good”:

McMahon touches on the most important part of the production process: profits.
“Profits are the street signs of the free market—without profits there’d be no products.” [That’s Mercer, not McMahon.]

McMahon ought not to have used the active form of the verb, “create,” as it suggests that a central planner is involved in the creation of jobs. Her response, however, was instructive and refreshing. She might have also taken the opportunity to point out that production and jobs begin with savings and capital accumulation; not spending, as the DC establishment will have you believe.

But for an impromptu turning of the tables on a vile opponent (which is what McMahon’s performance was); she did a good job.

UPDATE (Oct. 7): Want to boost the employment prospects? “Do food stamps and unemployment insurance,” says Nancy Pelosi: “It is the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance — the biggest bang for the buck.”

Repeating the line twice was a form of self-persuasion.

Hot Air explains the liberal calculus whereby you forcibly take money from producers and hand it over to consumers and it magically multiplies:

“Pelosi, for her part, continues to insist that food stamps and unemployment stimulate the economy, and claims that every dollar spent in food stamps returns $1.79 to the economy. She floated this notion earlier this summer while trying to defend more borrowing to pay for yet another extension on jobless benefits rather than funding it through monies already authorized in Porkulus. That argument assumes that the $1 food stamp in question got plucked off the food-stamp tree at no cost to the government, rather than costing the full dollar plus the administrative costs of distribution and accountability. Even then, that dollar won’t generate a 79% ROI as it travels through the retail sector; if that were true, investors would put their money into nothing else.”

UPDATED: Big , Bad Business Generates The Jobs

Business, Economy, Labor

The Economist: “It is true that small companies create jobs, especially when they are first born. And small companies destroy millions of jobs when they die—which is often. In fact, only a small fraction of smaller enterprises are capable of generating sustained growth of very many jobs. Yet lawmakers of both parties fall over themselves as the protectors of small business, creating programmes that often help big corporations (and wealthy hedge-fund managers) as much or more than favoured smaller enterprises.”

The Economist’s statement, being the Economist, is somewhat incoherent, at least in its tenor. The writer editorializing, being of the Left, wants the politicians to help small business, even though his facts tell him the returns on such assistance are minimal and that small business is not necessarily the engine of economic growth.

Of course, contra the SE Cupp cool model of “capitalism,” helping big business is as capitalistically crony as helping the smaller concerns.

UPDATE: To Robert G.: Yes, indeed, and WHAT IS AN OPEN ECONOMY?

“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)

True too is that Big Biz was once small biz.

UPDATED: Dumb Distaff (Dastardly Too)

Ethics, Feminism, General, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Morality, Republicans

Show me a Democratic commentator that is as studiously dumb as the Republican Lolita, SE Cupp. Cupp generally limits herself to gesturing wildly, grimacing, or portentously parroting the same mind-numbing banalities previously disgorged by Newt, Dick, Karl, et. al.

Now Cupp is getting bolder and venturing into political economy. On Dylan Ratigan’s confused, MSNBC show, Cupp insisted that when you give corporations bailout money, and they then blow the cash abroad, this is an example of the free market at work. Live with it!

I don’t want to do an injustice to the smug Republican sweetheart, so I will try to post the clip if it comes online. Please send it along if you find it before me.

If you have heard of anything resembling the caliber of Cupp’s cretinism, please post it together with a hyperlink to the story. Proof is paramount.

I want your most outrageous and hilarious clips of what rolls off the tongues of TV’s female talkers.

I’ll kick off the competition with two other examples of cerebral pruning:

Exhibit B: “How do you know there is going to be an economic recovery,” Greta Van Susteren asked GOP dummy, Dana Perino. “There always is; these things go in cycles,” squeaked the Heidi Klum of the commentariat.

Exhibit C: Together with another member of the silly sex, usually blond, Margaret Hoover forms Bill O’Reilly’s “Culture Warriors.” Some time ago she joined her host to damn the Obama administration’s decision to cease “criminalizing cancer and AIDS patients for using a substance that is (a) prescribed by their doctors and (b) legal under the laws of their state.”

According to Hoover’s calculus, once you decriminalize a drug, criminal enterprise corners the market.

Toots, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s a hard concept, but the section “THE COSTS OF ILLEGAL MARKETS,” in “Addicted To The Drug War,” may help. On the other hand, don’t hold your breath.

In order for your snippet to be posted in BAB’s Comments Section, your Brilliant Babe must be a member of the punditocracy, Democrat or Republican; She cannot be a politician. Those are the rules. Hyperlinks to your story are a must.

UPDATED (Oct. 5): Huggs hereunder feels real sorry for idiots who are rewarded for their misleading stupidity and avarice. Some of these dames have sent even sillier boys to their deaths with their warring words. Huggins commits the sin of the ages. “Job: Jewish Individualist” speaks to those. The righteous suffer; the wicked reap the spoils of their cunning and cupidity. And this you want to reward with love?

What a perversion is that?

If you wish to love the wicked, at least make sure that the righteous are rewarded equally for their good works.

Contemporary parallels to Job’s individualism are hard to come by, not least because the State has replaced God as the ultimate authority. Other than principled libertarians, nobody challenges the god of government in any meaningful way. Our Delphic oracles are the pundits and assorted self-styled presstitutes. Their Delphi is the TV on which they primp, preen and parrot party falsehoods.

Global Ghouls Rising

Debt, Economy, EU, Europe, Political Economy, Regulation, Taxation

Since the onset of the economic crisis, the din has grown louder from assorted international institutions. It goes without saying that the demands are never for a dispersion of power. There have been various lunges for EU types of controls over financial institutions. Most of the resistance to the pull has come not from the US.

For example, and as I documented over this space, the Canadian government, not the American one, resisted a bank tax suggested by the the global regulatory regime.

Ministers fanned out across the world to raise opposition to the proposal for avoiding another financial crisis. ‘Canada is, and will remain, opposed to a tax that would penalize financial institutions that remained strong and prosperous while many of the world’s banks failed,’ Clement told a press conference with Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon.”

“In an apparent attempt to reignite damped discussions on a key regulatory issue,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “the IMF proposed that a half-dozen or so of the countries with the biggest financial centers—such as the U.S., U.K., and Japan—voluntarily agree to a set of guidelines to resolve failed systemically important international financial firms.”

Not-so curiously, in opposition are the European countries: “it is uncertain whether [they] want to cede sovereignty on the issue.” Some of these countries have also implemented austerity measures, which have angered hedonistic B. Hussein. Remember when our president instructed German Chancellor Angela Merkel to “print more money, not make it”?

If the IMF is looking for the political will to galvanize the globe, they will surely find it in the US.