UPDATED: Fix The Shoreline, Roll Back the Sea, Uncle Sam (Cap-In-Hand Chris Christie Agrees)

Government, Political Economy, Private Property, The State, Welfare

A Staten Island resident who lost it all in Hurricane Sandy could be heard demanding, on Huckabee’s Fox News show, that the government fix the shoreline. If it does that small thing, she and her plucky neighbors would gladly rebuild.

Yes, Uncle Sam, roll back the sea for the good lady, will you?

Another Huckbee guest complained that FEMA aid and private home insurance did not cover the cost of a new home. Kick in the difference, will you, Unckie Sam?

“Where I am going to spend Christmas?! Where do I put decorations up? Where do I put a Christmas tree up?”, demanded a gentleman who attended a FEMA town-hall meeting in New York, earlier this week. A neighbors chimed in, complaining that the lion’s share of the help she has received—and the only assistance matching her needs—came from her neighbors.

This you bemoan? Is it not a lesson for you?

Pundits soon turned to the question of suing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And most agreed about the “wisdom” of “governmental immunity,” intended to “stop people from suing the government and government employees and officials in many cases.“

Indeed, legislators have used their position to pass laws exempting themselves and many others from liability. (In the event that you sue the state, guess who pays? We The People.) And the people want more of this corruption? (They will soon get doctors who can’t be sued.)

Let’s see: The victims described are surprised to have received close to no assistance from an entity whose employees are impervious to litigation, and immune from public shaming or loss of employment.

FEMA “victims” are surprised to have received the finger from an entity which is fortified by failure. The more a government agency fails, the more likely it is to receive more taxpayer funds.

In the bureaucracy, incentives are always inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off. Failure will never see the closing of a government agency, or the firing of nasty, inefficient, over-paid, affirmatively appointed official.

These victims (and all those who demand from government what it cannot and will never give) refuse to comprehend that because of its very nature—a system without the imperatives of private property—government will never allocate or conserve resources efficiently.

Why on earth would anyone seek to interact with such an entity? (I have a good ideas why.)

UPDATE (Dec. 5): Predictably, Gov. cozy-up to Obama, cap-in-hand Chris Christie is on board with the mindset described. Two days ago he “announced that he has formally requested federal approval of 100% reimbursement for state and local government costs associated with debris removal and emergency protective measures that continue in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.”

Who said local was best? Not this big, fat ponce, to whom re-election is everything.

UPDATED: Iran, Susan Rice And The Tit-For-Tat Gangs

Democrats, Iran, Middle East, Republicans, Trade, UN

The Stupid Party and its followers have been maligning “United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice for an investment portfolio that “includes investments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in several energy companies known for doing business with Iran, according to financial disclosure forms.”

The Evil Party and its devotees have responded by pointing “to ]John] McCain’s financial disclosures, which reveal $1,000 to $15,000 in the JP Morgan International Value Fund. What’s the second-biggest holding in that fund? Why, Royal Dutch Shell, of course. McCain has another $1,000 to $15,000 stake in the JPMorgan Emerging Markets Equity Fund, which invests in China’s CNOOC, which has contracts to ‘develop some of Iran’s biggest oil and gas fields.'”

Two observations: The arguments the Democratic and Republican factions advance exist on a continuum of cretinism. There is no qualitative difference between them. Both Republicans and Democrats agree that Iranians should be crippled economically, when the truth is that Iran should be bartered with, not boycotted. Trade, not democracy, is the best antidote to Iran’s belligerence. The more economically intertwined countries become, the less likely they are to go to war.

The second and secondary point is that the woman (Susan Rice) probably has no idea how all her money is invested. Most people do not examine each and every investment fund they have in their portfolio.

UPDATED (Dec. 2): Rice may, however, be accused of hypocrisy and worse for enforcing sanctions, yet investing in Iran.

Bye-Bye Biology, Hello Androgyny (Unisex)

Gender, Military, Political Correctness, Sex, The State

Like any arm of government, the military is the playground of feel-good politicians and their playmates. As such, “It is manacled by doctrinaire mediocrity, multiculturalism, feminism, affirmative action (fem and other), and every postmodern pox imaginable.”

In their quest to rid the world of the reality of biology, progressives have now petitioned to welcome women into combat duty. In the tradition of political expedience, Uncle Sam is likely going to be bidding bye-bye to biological “inequality” in the military.

The women in combat issue has reared its head again with the recent lawsuit filed on behalf of four female military personnel by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN).
The suit claims that because of the direct ground combat exclusion policy (which includes infantry, armor [tanks], and close-in artillery), which has been in effect since 1994, women are denied access to “a number of critical assignments, schools, and positions” which in effect are a ‘brass ceiling’ that limits promotion opportunities.

The Israelis, every bit as liberal and libertine as we are, tried making “GUYS DO DOUBLE DUTY FOR FEMINIST DELUSIONS.” Thing is, they don’t have as many warm bodies to spare as we do, so they had to rethink. Men died. Why? Because it is in the nature of most men to protect females (although to a large extent this instinct has been bred out of the metrosexual male). They got taken out doing what was once second nature to men. They lingered/overcompensated for women and got picked off.

I’ve made my own Modest Swiftian Proposal on a related matter.

Go ape on affirmative action in [the military.] Not only should women and minorities be well-represented … they should be overrepresented. Adjust admission tests, physical and cognitive. Make the Police Officer Selection Test (POST) easier. Or admit the desired gender and race with still lower scores. Drop the IQ requirements by two standard deviations, if necessary! And a bull’s eye on the target be damned. Sharpshooters of the new, “improved” intake needn’t drop an attacker; they can settle for grazing him. Aiming the firearm in the general direction of the assailant will suffice. ALSO, support the super obese for the …

Go for it. Perhaps when men get fed-up about dying in combat to compensate for female megalomania, they’ll quit the military. A feminized, enfeebled military may net fewer wars.

UPDATED: Spielberg’s ‘Pleasant Fiction’ About Abe

Film, Founding Fathers, History, Hollywood, Propaganda, Racism

Tom DiLorenzo says that “Spielberg’s Lincoln movie is just another left-wing Hollywood fantasy.” Lincoln didn’t use his political heft to push for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. He did, however, push for an earlier iteration, the “Corwin Amendment.” It “would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery”:

Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Lincoln, is said to be based on several chapters of the book Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns-Goodwin, who was a consultant to Spielberg. The main theme of the movie is how clever, manipulative, conniving, scheming, lying, and underhanded Lincoln supposedly was in using his “political skills” to get the Thirteenth Amendment that legally ended slavery through the U.S. House of Representatives in the last months of his life. This entire story is what Lerone Bennett, Jr. the longtime executive editor of Ebony magazine and author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, calls a “pleasant fiction.” It never happened.
It never happened according to the foremost authority on Lincoln among mainstream Lincoln scholars, Harvard University Professor David H. Donald, the recipient of several Pulitzer prizes for his historical writings, including a biography of Lincoln.

MORE.

UPDATE (Nov. 30): Writes Myron Pauli:

“I would like to correct one thing. The Congress that passed the Corwin 13th Amendment was not overwhelmingly Republican. There was a small House Republican majority but the (lame duck) Senate was Democratic (and only barely Republican if you count 14 Senators walking out) and a 2/3 majority is needed for an Amendment.

http://lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo245.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_1858

Nevertheless, Lincoln did almost nothing (and impeded efforts) to stop the impending Civil War during the nearly 10 months from his election to the Battle of First Manassas. A professor of history from LSU (whose name I regrettably forgot) went over all the proposed compromises and Lincoln’s opposition/inaction to preventing war.

Ironically, the Crittenden and Peace Conference Plan compromises would have confined the extension of slavery into Arizona and New Mexico – regions so barren that they did not become states for another 40 years – and not conducive to plantation slavery whatsoever! To keep slavery out of Arizona (!!), over 600,000 people died, a region got impoverished, with more wounded and PTSD and
drug addicted, the income tax imposed, etc.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/peace.asp

Lincoln, of course, blamed the War on the South (or God – 2nd inaugural).”