This Needs Comment

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In that Epic Comment Thread I referenced earlier (as of this writing, 556 comments) Markadelphia dropped this turd:

We survived higher levels of spending before…even made it through “The Scourge of FDR” and ended up in great shape.

Unix-Jedi glommed onto this almost immediately, but I ran across something a day or two ago that I cannot find now. Still, the point stayed with me, and it was this:

The Keyneseans insist that it was the “public spending” of the war economy that brought us out of the depression and spurred the incredible growth of the post-war economy.

Not so.

They seem to neglect the fact that, after the war, the United States was the only major industrialized nation that hadn’t been smashed. We had our own sources of raw materials, unmatched manufacturing capability, and the rest of the world needed rebuilding.

Who else was there to provide the things the world needed to rebuild? America’s economy didn’t magically rebound because our government had spent a lot of money it didn’t have – that was just what had provided the manufacturing base. Without a market to sell to we’d have crashed right back down. But that market was there, and it needed what we could make.

That market isn’t there now, and the rest of the world makes everything anybody might need. We buy most of it ourselves, if you haven’t noticed.

The world is not the same as it was after WWII, and only a fool or an idiot would fail to recognize that.

I’m also going to copy a comment from that thread in its entirety, in case Echo should ever go Tango-Uniform. By reader Moshe Ben-David:

I waded through all 544 comments. Took me a couple of hours. It was truly difficult but educational. I think I will copy and paste to a document to use as a textbook example.

I have tried to explain the bizarre way that the leftist mind such as Mark’s works, but it is one thing to tell someone what it is like, yet it doesn’t do as much justice as actually seeing a leftist speak for himself and prove what I am talking about; the sheer inability to grasp the most basic concepts and facts and then put them together in any meaningful way.

I must salute DJ, Unix, GOF, and Ken for their unbelieveable patience and willingness to engage in this exercise for the benefit of others who have come here to learn. I have engaged people with graduate degrees regarding the subject of Biblical apologetics in the same patient manner with facts and logic, not for my opponent’s benefit, but for our audience.

That is the good reason Kevin has not banned him. He serves as a kind of lab rat or zoological specimen, where, instead of learning about such idiots in the abstract, we get to read him first hand and be able to say, “So THAT’s what it looks like!”

It would be fun to coin a single word that describes Mark’s condition. Ignorance can be a temporary condition that can quickly be overcome with a little education. Stupidity can be organic or physical in nature. So, what shall we call it when you encounter a human who seems to have enough cognitive ability to function in society and even seemingly pass for having reasonable intelligence and yet beneath it all engages in the grossest forms of cognitive dissonance, and worse, willful ignorance? I don’t want to call it Markism because it would be too easily confused with Marxism, even though Marxism seems to be the logical reductio ad absurdum result of Markism.

Maybe we could call it Markean “Mark – ee – an”, but I’m afraid too many would mispronounce it “Mar-keen.” How about “Markasian?”

We’ve been saying this for three years.

And he Just. Doesn’t. STOP.

Quote of the Day – Harsh Your Mellow Edition

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Reader Ken left a link in the Übercomment thread yesterday to a piece over at The Market Ticker entitled The Only Part That Mattered In Obama’s Telethon. Read the whole thing, but I’m going to excerpt two parts – a lead-in and today’s QotD:

Entitlements consume, for all intents and purposes, every dollar of tax receipts in the here and now. Not tomorrow, not as growth in medical spending occurs, not in the future.

Right here, right now, today.

Note that we haven’t spent one nickel on defense yet. Nor have we paid the interest on the debt, which is quite mandatory. Nor have we funded one of our so-called “discretionary” programs, including Homeland Security, Energy, Education, HUD, Department of State, Veterans Affairs, Justice or anything else.

What President Obama told you is that The Federal Government has no plan to deal with this, not now and not in the future. It cannot even meet its own entitlement spending from the taxes it collects, leaving the entirety of the rest of the government, including national defense, to be put on the credit card.

You were told, today, that our government is insolvent.

Not “might become” insolvent if we don’t change our ways.

The United States is insolvent, right here, right now, today, and The President announced it for all who cared to listen worldwide on national television.

(Emphasis in original.)

I quoted that so that I could put this in context. It’s a comment by “Peter99” to the piece:

Although there’s nothing new in here, the beauty of this ticker, IMO, is that it succinctly and unambiguously shows that the leaders of this country, both parties, starting from when the gov’t got into the entitlement business up through today, have collectively, increment by increment, created a situation that cannot be salvaged without pretty much dismantling the system as it exists.

And, even the least discerning reader should be able to see that, no matter how it occurs, the dismantling is going to be extremely painful for everyone.

As I said, RTWT. And all the comments.

More ObaMao

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I’m sure many of you have already seen this image that made the rounds of teh intarwebs recently:

I found it here, with another image you might find equally interesting.

Here’s one you probably haven’t seen, taken by a previous coworker on a trip to China back just before the Winter Olympics provided by Sarah a long time ago (my memory is failing me):

(Click the image for full 1200×1600 size.)

Sarah wrote in her email (all the way back in April):

A friend of mine brought this back from China after the Olympics — it’s not satire, it’s a genuine expression of admiration on behalf of like-minded people. When the American media was in Beijing, apparently there was an attempt to hide these souvenirs from other Americans. Kinda says it all, doesn’t it.

Can anybody translate the caption? Joe Huffman’s coworker says the caption translates as “Serve the People.”

“Serve the People”?

IT’S A COOKBOOK!!

Quote of the Day – Language Manipulation Edition

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Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that words are wise men’s counters, but they are the money of fools.

That is as painfully true today as it was four centuries ago. Using words as vehicles to try to convey your meaning is very different from taking words so literally that the words use you and confuse you.

Take the simple phrase “rent control.” If you take these words literally– as if they were money in the bank– you get a complete distortion of reality.

New York is the city with the oldest and strongest rent control laws in the nation. San Francisco is second. But if you look at cities with the highest average rents, New York is first and San Francisco is second. Obviously, “rent control” laws do not control rent.

If you check out the facts, instead of relying on words, you will discover that “gun control” laws do not control guns, the government’s “stimulus” spending does not stimulate the economy and that many “compassionate” policies inflict cruel results, such as the destruction of the black family.

Thomas Sowell, The Money of Fools – Part I

But they mean well!

The Dumbing-Down of America

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Another example of what our education system (or the destruction thereof) is wreaking on the country is given by Old NFO in his post We’re getting old:

I’m on the road again, putting stuff on a boat to go test it and I’m looking around and other than the geeks, everybody else has gray or white hair (if they have any hair left)…

Ages are 68, 67, 66, 66, 63, 61, 59, 58, 58, 56, 53 and 51, or an average of 60+ years; and all of the scientists were over 60 too (one is 79 years young). Two guys were lured back out of retirement to come work on this stuff. We were in at 0630 every morning, worked until about 1900, and did it again and again till we were done. And some of the stuff was ‘designed’ on the spot to get things done…

—

But a problem (or at least my perception), is there are NO younger people in training for any of our jobs. I literally went around to the various organizations represented and asked! The consensus was when we all retire (I think ALL of us will be gone within 5-6 years), there will literally be no one with the capability to build/integrate/assemble/deploy/retrieve systems like this; much less anything larger.

RTWT.

I’m an engineer, working for a not-small engineering company. In my department we have several engineers past retirement age working part-time to supplement their incomes (and because they have the experience, knowledge and judgment that younger engineers lack). Read what Old NFO has to say about the younger members of his “team.” This is not atypical in my experience. And it’s a for-real problem.

How Government is Like Bacteria

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I’ve been getting links and comments from The Silicon Graybeard for a while now, but I’ll admit that I haven’t spent much time over there.

That’s going to change. One excellent example of why is this recent post, On Germs, Weeds, Companies, Governments and Skunks. Excerpt:

(Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine’s) most memorable law, and where I’m going with this, was “Systems of Regulations created as a management surrogate take on a life of their own and exhibit a growth history which closely parallels other living entities observed in nature”. He went on to show the number of pages in armed forces procurement regulation vs. time along with a curve of weed growth (from the journal “Weed Science”), and produced a graph any biology student will instantly recognize as the sigmoid growth curve of populations, also called the logistic function.

A usual example is the common bacteria E. coli. This species can divide and produce a new generation every 20 minutes; if conditions could remain optimum it would undergo geometric growth and produce a colony the size of the planet in 24 hours. Because conditions can’t remain optimum, it has a logistic growth curve, producing much smaller colonies.

In regulations, there is a price for this. Although the legislators and regulators never consider this, every regulation consumes some amount of time and money to comply with. The new Finance Reform bill has been estimated to required the development of 250-300 new regulations. Every regulation slows down, hinders and costs every honest business real money. Despite the widespread talk of corrupt CEOs and general lack of corporate ethics, I’ve been working in the manufacturing industry since the mid 1970s, and every company has had an active, if not aggressive, ethics compliance program with requirements for training and seminars every year. There are exceptions but most companies do their best to be honest and law-abiding. Government seems to think it’s mere coincidence that countries with lower tax rates and lower regulation attract business, and they demonize companies for moving to countries where the environment is better.

A simple way of determining if someone you talk to has any economic sense is to ask them about corporate taxes. The economically ignorant (I’ll be polite) will scream to tax the corporations. Those with sense will tell you corporations are fictitious and can’t pay tax. Tax is part of the cost of doing business and therefore passed on to the buyer (the people calling for them to be taxed). Corporations can collect taxes for the government (for which they are punished with more costs, not paid) but cannot generate them. Every penny a company has comes from its customers. In a global market where they compete with companies in cheaper environments, they are at a disadvantage.

I quoted that so I could quote this:

This is where we find ourselves as a nation.

We are strangling in a bureaucracy with a Code of Federal Regulations that has grown like a bacterial culture. A nation that was founded by a constitution that fills about 14 printed pages in today’s technologies, passes financial reform bills that go over 2000 pages, health care bills that go almost 3000 pages, and more. Each bill creates hundreds of new regulations, which are so poorly written they have to be refined by hundreds of court cases. The court cases effectively create new law and new regulations. Since congress is in session every year and passes at least one new law every year, the total number of laws and regulations increases without limit and everything eventually becomes illegal.

What can we do? We can’t form a “skunkworks country” that can get around our laws and create a more mobile, productive society. We only have one option: we have to create a national process, like industries do, to become more “lean, mean and low to the ground”. Get rid of superfluous laws. We simply must reduce the size of the CFR and reduce the destruction caused by the regulation and litigation in our society. To me, Tort Reform is absolutely essential. A big part of the industrial lean activities is to study what policies need to be gotten rid of because “we’ve always done it that way”. The same should be done with the CFR.

In other words: “deregulation.”

There’s a lot more there. Please, go read.

And Graybeard? You’re on the blogroll.

EPIC

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A couple of weeks ago I posted My New Favorite Flag, a little throwaway post (or so I thought) until perennial commenter Markadelphia spoke up.

The result is quite possibly the longest comment thread in TSM‘s history.

We’re going to top We have topped 500 on this one, folks, and it is positively filled with example after example of why I don’t ban Markadelphia – he’s just too perfect an example of what we’re fighting against.

(Kudos to reader John Hardin for recovering the comment thread after JSKit/Echo went away.)