UPADTED: Ciao, Chavez (Wealthy Commie Croaks)

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Politics, Propaganda, Socialism

The “loss” of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has hit hard at MSNBC. (Rachel Maddow is sure to turn on the waterworks during her show.) How do you omit the pejorative “socialist,” in a piece about the death of one? Look to one Tracy Connor, staff writer at NBC News, who finesses an economy partly nationalized or under threat of expropriation with upbeat words: Chavez was a “self-styled populist,” who initiated “government reforms that championed the downtrodden,” and who “took greater control of the state-run oil company.”

More control than complete state control? More control than the nationalization of industry?

“A kind of very personalized socialism” is Eugene Robinson’s spin. Robinson is a writer at the Washington Post and an MSNBC pundit. Chavez, like the Cuban brothers, followed a “pure ideology model,” Robinson noodled.

Robinson proceeded to underscore the broad popular support Chavez enjoyed among his people, and then … contradicted himself (Robinson did; Chavez was consistent), saying that Chavez’s popularity ran counter to his many anti-democratic policies.

Robinson is no different to almost every single American voter, politician and chattering-class member. He equates crude majoritarianism with justice. If the masses want something—the masses must be right. Where mobocracy appears manifestly unjust, reason people like Robinson, this must be because it veered from the express wishes of the upright majority that unleashed the People’s Power.

News flash: Chavez was on his way to securing leader-for-life status because he had the support of the masses. Democracy—rule by absolute and unfettered majorities—is dictatorship by any other name.

More eulogizing for “Hue” courtesy of Eugene Robinson: Chavez was “quick witted,” “loose,” “idiosyncratic.”

UPDATE: Via Nick Gillespie come some facts about the “affable” commie who croaked, including that Chavez had amassed a fortune of $1 billion.

Only Following Orders

Ethics, Healthcare, Law, libertarianism, Morality

Forgive the hyperbole, but the, “I was only following orders” excuse for evil action or inaction comes with hefty historical baggage.

It also conjures the nurse at Glenwood Gardens, a California retirement home, who refused to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on an “87-year-old woman who had collapsed in the home’s dining room and was barely breathing.”

The woman was later declared dead at Mercy Southwest Hospital, officials said.

At the beginning of the 7-minute, 16-second call on Tuesday morning, the nurse asked for paramedics to come and help the 87-year-old woman who had collapsed in the home’s dining room and was barely breathing.
[the 911 operator] pleads for the nurse to perform CPR, and after several refusals she starts pleading for her to find a resident, or a gardener, or anyone not employed by the home to get on the phone, take her instructions and help the woman.
“Can we flag someone down in the street and get them to help this lady?” [the 911 operator] says on the call. “Can we flag a stranger down? I bet a stranger would help her.”

The relationship between the parties—the ruthless healthcare worker and the deceased—is governed by contract. By following her cruel heart, the nurse was also following the law—and this includes the libertarian law. There is no duty to act, as far as I know—all the more so if the contract by which the two parties were bound stipulated this pathetic policy: We don’t do CPR.

One can only hope that other elderly residents up and leave Glenwood Gardens, if they can, and that the facility is forced to change its policies for fear of bankruptcy.

Listen to the pitiful 911 call and you hear a 911 dispatcher (Tracey Halvorson) with a heart; a healthcare worker without one.

There is not much you can do to change someone without a heart. Name and shame says I.

MLK Spared a Thought For Poor Whites

Affirmative Action, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

There were many reasons not racist for which to dislike MLK, not least of them was the man’s dalliance with communists. “His associations with communists” is why Jackie Kennedy’s husband, hero of Chris Matthews’ last book, ordered the wiretaps on King.

Jacqueline Kennedy, as revealed from audio recordings of Mrs. Kennedy’s historic 1964 conversations on life with John F. Kennedy, held a low opinion of Martin Luther King, the man America has since deified. Jackie was unafraid to say as much.

But then she lived BPC: before political correctness.

Whatever politically incorrect realists like Jackie Kennedy had to say about MLK, he was nothing like the black community’s current, corrupt race hustlers.

“It is a simple matter of justice,” said Martin Luther King,” that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro [MLK’s words] from backwardness [MLK’s words], should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor.

In anticipation, let me say that no, affirmative action is always wrong from my perspective. The point of the post is to point out that MLK did not share the militant Afrocentrism that has become the norm in the US with dreck like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson (the son of the shakedown artist is a paragon of virtue too), and the agitators that are slowly replacing them.

UPDATED: GOP ‘Sequesteria’ & The GDP Gambit (When Debt = Growth)

Debt, Democrats, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Government, Republicans

Are you able to tease apart Republican “sequesteria” from the Democratic position on the effects of a miniscule decrease in the increase in US government spending, for this year?

I can’t.

The Democrats are adamant that a cut in oink-sector spending will destroy the chances of an economic recovery and will lower GDP.

It didn’t have to happen this way, lament the Republicans. Negotiations could have produced a better honed cutting instrument.

Note that the Republicans have never made relevant points such as that, “Government spending increases unemployment because it crowds out so much private sector job creation” (Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government, p. 202).

Or, as Larry Kudlow put it, “When the government spending share of GDP declines, so does the true tax burden on the economy. As a result, more resources are left in the free-market private sector, which will promote real growth.”

Ask yourself why GDP would shrink if the burden of government is reduced slightly. Why would Gross Domestic Product be affected by a threat of a reduction in the parasitical sector–the sector (government) that doesn’t produce wealth, but only consumes it?

Could this paradox be a result of the way in which GDP numbers are crunched?

Indeed.

Gross domestic product (GDP) gauges economic activity based on spending, or “consumption,” which is not what creates wealth. Production creates wealth. (Gross domestic income (GDI) is a lesser-known calculation used by the Federal Reserve to gauge economic activity based on income.)

Official GDP numbers also chart—and include—the growth of government debt. As Vox Day has explained, “GDP counts spending but doesn’t subtract debt, so it’s like saying that you’re rich because you maxed out your platinum Mastercard. Until the debt is paid back, you can’t properly count it as economic growth. And almost all of the GDP growth over the last 20 years has been nothing but debt growth.”

The GDP is a political construct, defined, tracked and manipulated by the D.C. political machine.

GDP statistically conflates the growth of debt with economic growth.

When our economic definitional building blocks are thus perverted, it becomes easy to peddle the GDP hoax. And that hoax is that a reduction in state spending and debt is also a reduction in economic growth, and that reducing debt must be avoided at all costs.

As Ayn Rand would have advised, “Check your premises.”

UPDATE (3/3): “THE SEQUESTER ISN’T REALLY THERE.” Via the fabulous EPJ: Ron Paul on the Sequester: