[Accor$314]

For Bob:

(Warning: the article quotes scientists, geophysicists and even a think tank specializing in water issues based in Oakland, California.)

U.S. faces era of water scarcity
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternew...ater-scarcity/

[Alkanyadela]

^ Liberal elitist, Cassandra from Tuscany.

All you want is to force Bob to stop watering his lawn in Scottsdale ... admit it.

You just want him to descend to your level of lifestyle: living in an old wreck of a building with a badger in the yard.

And where you bump into your neighbor every time you go out your door!

Sheesh.

[h0ldem]

Well, Bob lives in a DESERT (unlike Tuscany or NYC). Nothing personal against Bob, but it doesn't take a soothsayer to see what's going on. Even Cassandra knows that there are now millions of other folks living in that Arizona desert and before too long there's really NOT going to be enough water to serve them all -- and at the same time grow all that stuff in California and keep the lights blazing in Las Vegas.

Maybe we should ask why "Liberals" KNOW that "Conservatives" are full of BS (setting aside the fact that their financial guru, Mr. Greenspan, has finally fessed up that the Emperor's Conservative clothing is non-existent and that the entire Conservative economic model is based upon a "FLAW" and it DON"T WORK.)

Case in point, regarding the current titular head of the Conservative gang: 35 years ago a Conservative Republican President in 1973 declared the US would be energy independent by 1980. The current and supposedly Conservative Arizona Senator has been in Washington holding office for the past 25 years. Show me where this concerned Conservative has gotten legislation passed to create from logical and available desert sources (Sunshine!) his recently-discussed but never-to-be-fulfilled alternative energy agenda. Or where he has made it a priority to build those much-lauded nuclear power plants and nuclear waste facilities within Arizona state borders.

He calls himself a Conservative but is actually the ultimate NIMBY. A perfect example of All Talk and No Action. The definition of BS.

[cxddfrxc]

Obama and the War on Brains

NYTimes

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 9, 2008

Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.

Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life. Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse — a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance — doesn’t get very far either.

We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.

Almost half of young Americans said in a 2006 poll that it was not necessary to know the locations of countries where important news was made. That must be a relief to Sarah Palin, who, according to Fox News, didn’t realize that Africa was a continent rather than a country.

Perhaps John Kennedy was the last president who was unapologetic about his intellect and about luring the best minds to his cabinet. More recently, we’ve had some smart and well-educated presidents who scrambled to hide it. Richard Nixon was a self-loathing intellectual, and Bill Clinton camouflaged a fulgent brain behind folksy Arkansas aphorisms about hogs.

As for President Bush, he adopted anti-intellectualism as administration policy, repeatedly rejecting expertise (from Middle East experts, climate scientists and reproductive health specialists). Mr. Bush is smart in the sense of remembering facts and faces, yet I can’t think of anybody I’ve ever interviewed who appeared so uninterested in ideas.

At least since Adlai Stevenson’s campaigns for the presidency in the 1950s, it’s been a disadvantage in American politics to seem too learned. Thoughtfulness is portrayed as wimpishness, and careful deliberation is for sissies. The social critic William Burroughs once bluntly declared that “intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.”

(It doesn’t help that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas. After one of Stevenson’s high-brow speeches, an admirer yelled out something like, You’ll have the vote of every thinking American! Stevenson is said to have shouted back: That’s not enough. I need a majority!)

Yet times may be changing. How else do we explain the election in 2008 of an Ivy League-educated law professor who has favorite philosophers and poets?

Granted, Mr. Obama may have been protected from accusations of excessive intelligence by his race. That distracted everyone, and as a black man he didn’t fit the stereotype of a pointy-head ivory tower elitist. But it may also be that President Bush has discredited superficiality.

An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.

(Intellectuals are for real. In contrast, a pedant is a supercilious show-off who drops references to Sophocles and masks his shallowness by using words like “fulgent” and “supercilious.”)

Mr. Obama, unlike most politicians near a microphone, exults in complexity. He doesn’t condescend or oversimplify nearly as much as politicians often do, and he speaks in paragraphs rather than sound bites. Global Language Monitor, which follows linguistic issues, reports that in the final debate, Mr. Obama spoke at a ninth-grade reading level, while John McCain spoke at a seventh-grade level.

As Mr. Obama prepares to take office, I wish I could say that smart people have a great record in power. They don’t. Just think of Emperor Nero, who was one of the most intellectual of ancient rulers — and who also killed his brother, his mother and his pregnant wife; then castrated and married a slave boy who resembled his wife; probably set fire to Rome; and turned Christians into human torches to light his gardens.

James Garfield could simultaneously write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other, Thomas Jefferson was a dazzling scholar and inventor, and John Adams typically carried a book of poetry. Yet all were outclassed by George Washington, who was among the least intellectual of our early presidents.

Yet as Mr. Obama goes to Washington, I’m hopeful that his fertile mind will set a new tone for our country. Maybe someday soon our leaders no longer will have to shuffle in shame when they’re caught with brains in their heads.

----

[Htb48JBf]

It's not Jefferson's frailties in the bedroom that gave the lie to his principles; it's his personal failure to comply with the principles themselves... Jefferson... was an elitist in a Jacobin's cap.

At least you acknowledge (I think) that criticizing the man is quite apart from calling into question the ideals of classical liberalism the man espoused (as I forthrightly concede I failed to do by design with my MLK trope).

But enough about the man whose behavior you chose to enter as a defense (I think) for the pitiful job those who call themselves liberal today have done upholding their namesake principles -- for they are better than Jefferson and now we as a nation can fully discard him (and his anachronistic principles) -- for today's liberals have placed a black man in the presidency.

Don't waste the time Barry.

[Innockcroff]

The Government's War on Recession

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. | February 26, 2009

The great failing of the Obama administration is that it is packed with people who show no apparent knowledge of the essential truths of liberal theory. That theory, which is the core of the American political contribution and the driving force of modernity itself, is that freedom is the foundation of and the reason for social and economic flourishing. All evidence suggests they know nothing of this.

Obamites, in contrast, hold the opposite view, the one advanced by the Pharaohs and Emperors of old all the way through the Talibans and Hugo Chavezes of our own time. It is the view that nothing is beyond the competence of the state and its great leader. Particularly in economic affairs, these people have a wildly inflated view of what the nation's chief executive can accomplish through sheer will.

Liberal theory teaches that one truism of government is that whatever it does, the results end up making the problem not better but worse. I'm thinking of the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on illiteracy, and the war on terror. So it is with the war on recession. Already it has given us a record of failure, for going on a year most recently but really dating back to the 1930s.

A hundred years ago, liberal theory warned against the central bank on grounds that it would create inflation and generate instability and political corruption. All that happened. Liberals warned against the attack on the gold standard in the 1930s, and were proven right again. So it was for Bretton Woods and also for Nixon's final creation of unbacked currency. They were right again.

But do Obamites learn from history? On the contrary, they are completely blind to it.

Intellectual failure is at the root of the problem. Note how the administration invokes economic theory in its defense of its policy of wholesale national looting. In this case, bad economic theory works as a cover for acts of despotism. In the end, this is how the theoretical errors of J.M. Keynes end up having utility for governments.

But one aspect of this has not received enough comment. It concerns how the state is using the excuse of stimulus to help not society but itself. The state is certainly being stimulated here but the private economy – the only real source of social wealth – is being drained in many ways.

The most direct way in which stimulus is helping the state is by transferring resources from the private economy to itself in a zero-sum game. From Moody's comes direct evidence. While the rest of the nation's economy is shrinking, the economy of Washington, DC, is growing at a 2.5% pace. Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland are sharing in the glee, as government gains at the expense of everything else.

One of the great lessons of liberal theory concerns the extraordinary capacity of free exchange to create wealth. Trading makes both parties better off. Saving makes resources available for investment. Investment creates jobs that yield more products for people to purchase. Through this mechanism the West grew rich.

The economics of stimulus are not as complicated. They amount to taking from some and giving to others. There is no wealth creation at all. There is no magic "multiplier" to turn stones into bread. The economics of stimulus is value-destroying, because property is pried loose from owners who are putting it to socially useful purposes, and given to government so it can pass it out to friends.

This process is costly to overall wealth production – and most of those costs are unseen. We will never know what kind of real stimulus could have taken place had the property been left in private hands. What jobs might have been created, what investments might have been made, what kind of business expansions might have taken place? We will never know.

Phony stimulus can take the form of direct transfers of wealth, or it can take place through the creation of debt that ends up smashing the value of the currency in which people keep their savings. This introduces economic chaos that no one can control once it begins. The private sector is diminished.

The public sector, on the other hand, thrives on the unjust loot. The money it gets amounts to a direct infusion. How much of the stimulus helps the public sector? If you consider the private companies that are receiving public aid, it is 100%, as formerly capitalist enterprises are nationalized through the back door. Yet because private companies are getting the money, Obama believes he has bragging rights!

This phony stimulus seriously skews the job market as well, as people turn away from private-sector employment and look to government to provide no-risk employment. Really, this stimulus plan amounts to turning the hourglass upside down, so the sand can run from one bulb to the other bulb.

Bernanke is warning us that we are in a severe contraction right now, but the warning applies not to him or the rest of the public sector. They are all quite gleeful, actually.

Government stands to win while the rest of us will lose. Even if it had the perfect cure for recession, government has no incentive to implement it. Its prescriptions for the ailing economy are no different from the rest of the public sector, which serves itself at everyone's expense.

Indeed, government loves economic downturns. For decades, the private economy has been outrunning government. The private sector has taken over most of the command posts in society, from security to communications to all forms of technological progress. This has annoyed the state to no end. Now is the time for reprisal.

Economic depression is good for the state. Even if the state knew how to end it, why do we suppose that it has the incentive to do so?

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail] is founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author, most recently, of The Left, The Right, and The State.

Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

[boleroman]

Just one month in and already Mr. Rockwell declares it "failing"

This is a case of someone who sees the glass 7/8ths empty.

if he's right then I hope he's got a big storeroom stocked with food and a gun with lots of ammo.

[Golotop]

Liberal theory teaches that one truism of government is that whatever it does, the results end up making the problem not better but worse.

This guy is just so full of crap it hurts. Has he ever been outside of the US? How does he explain societies where the gov plays a big role and it works?

...the private economy – the only real source of social wealth – is being drained in many ways.

^ Not to offend anybody, but this is a certain brand of American stupidity.

This phony stimulus seriously skews the job market as well, as people turn away from private-sector employment and look to government to provide no-risk employment.

Well... uh... yeah, like the thousands of young people that sign up for the military? A HUGE expensive socialist make-work program that no one seems to have a prob with. Would you rather have the gov. pay people to fix the roads in the US or in Iraq?

A show of hands please: Iraq or the US.

...the public sector, which serves itself at everyone's expense.

I think this guy should spend some time in some other countries... how do they do it?

---

[JoesBro]

Liberal theory teaches that one truism of government is that whatever it does, the results end up making the problem not better but worse.

This guy is just so full of crap it hurts. Has he ever been outside of the US? How does he explain societies where the gov plays a big role and it works? "Orthodox Marxism cynically -- amorally -- rejected the possibility of neutrality and equity in political matters. All government was the special interest of one "class" or another. Just as capitalism ushered in the rule of the bourgeoisie, so would socialism bring about the "dictatorship of the proletariat." But how does capitalism -- that is, the free market -- represent the special interest of "capitalists" (i.e., nonmanual laborers)? If respect for property rights favors "capitalists," then why do corporations seek subsidies (each for its own self, mind you, not for the entirety of its purported "class")? If unregulated commerce leads to monopolization by these "capitalists," then why do real-world businessmen turn to government to provide them with monopoly entitlements (optimally, only for their own company, not for all "capitalists" including their competitors)? And if free trade benefits this class and no other, then why do each country's business leaders -- and union members -- lobby for tariffs on imports? We seem to forget that the classical liberals formulated their principles of private property, laissez faire, and free trade -- rejected by the Left and Big Business alike -- not against the graspings of the have-nots, but in opposition to policies that favored the few over the common good. All of the classic Marxoid evils existed before the advent of liberal capitalism, which arose specifically to eliminate them -- and did so most impressively. Social scientist Thomas Sowell sums up capitalism's economic and political contributions by the end of the nineteenth century:
Science and technology had brought undreamed-of progress to the lives of millions of human beings. Whether in agriculture or industry, output was growing by leaps and bounds. Mass killer diseases like smallpox were being defeated by medical science. The last great war to ravage the whole continent of Europe ended 85 years earlier, at Waterloo -- and such horrors were considered permanently behind us. Advances in the relationships among peoples showed similar signs of progress. Slavery, which had lasted for thousands of years on all continents, was wiped out throughout Western civilization, in a matter of decades.He laments: "The high hopes and expectations with which the twentieth century began gave no inkling" of what was to come -- the abandonment of limited government and the adoption, the bloody rise, of unlimited statism, most notably (in various forms) that of Marx, whose attributing of ancient evils to the emergent liberal order (and its "sham-liberty") was as absolutely insane as attributing polio to the Salk vaccine.

Equally mad are those Marxists who point to the very real problems of partial statism ("state capitalism") but then perversely propose a tried-and-false "solution" -- total statism (socialism) -- that would only exacerbate those problems. It's as if having recognized the danger of drinking polluted water but misidentifying the dangerous element, the Left advocated consumption of the undiluted pollutant. The failings of the mixed economy don't confirm but confute the claims of socialism. It is the State, not the free market, that doles out political privileges -- whether to the nomenklatura or the corporations. And it is the State that condemns whole populations to poverty -- as witness activist Russell Means' comparison of Native Americans, our country's most socialized community, to the citizens of the Soviet Empire."
Requiem for the Left By Barry Loberfeld
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, August 05, 2005

...the private economy – the only real source of social wealth – is being drained in many ways.

^ Not to offend anybody, but this is a certain brand of American stupidity. "In all the socialist literature I had read," ex-New Leftist David Horowitz once wrote, "there was not a chapter devoted to the problem of how wealth is created. Socialist theory was exclusively addressed to ... the division of wealth that someone else had created." Far from being anything that should have surprised him or anyone else, this was, in the words of Austrian school economist Murray Rothbard, something that had "been almost openly proclaimed by Karl Marx, who conceded that socialism" -- in any of its manifestations -- "must be established through seizure of capital previously accumulated under capitalism." Remember Marx's historicism: Just as feudalism created the conditions for capitalism, so would the latter create the conditions for socialism, one of which was the prerequisite wealth. Capitalism, he acknowledged, "during its rule of scarcely one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together." Considering that these were centuries of almost nothing but manual labor, Marx's observation should have been recognized instantly by everyone as a trenchant refutation of his own theory of value (and its barbaric "class war" implications). Be that as it tragically may, Marxist theory is clear on at least this point: first capitalism, then socialism.
Requiem for the Left By Barry Loberfeld
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, August 05, 2005

This phony stimulus seriously skews the job market as well, as people turn away from private-sector employment and look to government to provide no-risk employment.

Well... uh... yeah, like the thousands of young people that sign up for the military? A HUGE expensive socialist make-work program that no one seems to have a prob with. Would you rather have the gov. pay people to fix the roads in the US or in Iraq?

A show of hands please: Iraq or the US. I DO have a problem with it, and would prefer to have NO STANDING ARMY WHATSOEVER. (As does the above criticized author Mr. Rockwell.)

...the public sector, which serves itself at everyone's expense.

I think this guy should spend some time in some other countries... how do they do it? "While no poor nation has ever adopted a socialist government and then prospered, there are a great many nations that have adopted socialist governments, or various levels of socialist-style government policy despite not calling themselves socialist, and then either remained poor, or become poor, or in some cases merely become less prosperous as their existing high level of wealth began evaporating.

Government socialism erodes prosperity, which means that nations without much prosperity to start with do very poorly after adopting socialist policies; see much of Africa today or, again, any Communist nation. Wealthy nations can adopt socialist policies (using the more casual and common meaning of the term) and remain fairly well-off for years or decades, but the drain on wealth is real. Perhaps the best-known and most highly-regarded example of a socialist nation is Sweden, which was the third wealthiest nation in 1970 (having created most of the wealth and wealth-generating machinery it now enjoys before becoming a modern socialist state) but has slipped to 22nd place as the cost and unintended consequences of social programs and high tax rates have worked their negative magic. Sweden is still a fairly wealthy nation, with GDP per capita of $39,600 (versus $48,000 in the United States ; figures above are from the CIA Factbook and Wikipedia). But higher taxes mean that Swedes have even less disposable income than those numbers make it appear; if Sweden were admitted to the U.S. as a state, it would be among the poorest. On the other hand, the cost of medical care, in particular, is baked into the heavy Swedish taxload (but don't forget the long wait times for treatment and other problems you'd expect when hospitals are run by politicians).

One of the most important and positive differences for Sweden , compared to the U.S. , has nothing to do with socialism: Sweden isn't trying to maintain a global empire. That means it isn't paying for hundreds of military bases around the planet or outspending nearly all other nations combined on its military, as the United States is doing. Sweden thus has a far larger proportion of its wealth available for other things – not because of socialist-style policies but because the United States (which has plenty of socialist policies of its own) has come to spend nearly half its federal budget on its military and on other things related to maintenance of an empire (see also here).

Even with the huge financial advantage that comes from not trying to dominate the world, the negative long-term effects of socialist policies in Sweden have been serious. For example, the Wikipedia article on Sweden points out that the number of jobs in the Swedish private sector has not grown since 1950 and "none of the top 50 companies on the Stockholm stock exchange has been started since 1970." (Note: the same article later says that two of the top 50 companies were founded after 1970; either way, it appears Sweden is not doing well at building new businesses). And those in the Swedish government apparently understand that however they might feel about socialism, socialism is not the way to create wealth, because when Sweden fell on hard times a few years ago (Sweden's GDP fell by 5% in the early 1990s), the government cut spending and reduced elements of the welfare state while also privatizing some public goods and services. In short, more socialism was not the prescription for dealing with an economic problem; quite the opposite – something Americans clearly need to learn."
Complete List of Poor Nations That
Have Adopted Socialist Governments
and Then Become Prosperous
by Glen Allport STR | January 28, 2009
*****

In American politics the very meaning of the term "liberal" has become totally confused.

"One of the ways that the new statist intellectuals did their work was to change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to manipulate in the minds of the public the emotional connotations attached to such labels. For example, the laissez-faire libertarians had long been known as “liberals,” and the purest and most militant of them as “radicals”; they had also been known as “progressives” because they were the ones in tune with industrial progress, the spread of liberty, and the rise in living standards of consumers. The new breed of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated to themselves the words “liberal” and “progressive,” and successfully managed to tar their laissez-faire opponents with the charge of being old-fashioned, “Neanderthal,” and “reactionary.” Even the name “conservative” was pinned on the classical liberals. And, as we have seen, the new statists were able to appropriate the concept of “reason” as well.

If the laissez-faire liberals were confused by the new recrudescence of statism and mercantilism as “progressive” corporate statism, another reason for the decay of classical liberalism by the end of the nineteenth century was the growth of a peculiar new movement: socialism. Socialism began in the 1830s and expanded greatly after the 1880s. The peculiar thing about socialism was that it was a confused, hybrid movement, influenced by both the two great preexisting polar ideologies, liberalism and conservatism. From the classical liberals the socialists took a frank acceptance of industrialism and the Industrial Revolution, an early glorification of “science” and “reason,” and at least a rhetorical devotion to such classical liberal ideals as peace, individual freedom, and a rising standard of living. Indeed, the socialists, long before the much later corporatists, pioneered in a co-opting of science, reason, and industrialism. And the socialists not only adopted the classical liberal adherence to democracy, but topped it by calling for an “expanded democracy,” in which “the people” would run the economy—and each other.

On the other hand, from the conservatives the socialists took a devotion to coercion and the statist means for trying to achieve these liberal goals. Industrial harmony and growth were to be achieved by aggrandizing the State into an all-powerful institution, ruling the economy and the society in the name of “science.” A vanguard of technocrats was to assume all-powerful rule over everyone’s person and property in the name of the “people” and of “democracy.” Not content with the liberal achievement of reason and freedom for scientific research, the socialist State would install rule by the scientists of everyone else; not content with liberals setting the workers free to achieve undreamt-of prosperity, the socialist State would install rule by the workers of everyone else—or rather, rule by politicians, bureaucrats, and technocrats in their name. Not content with the liberal creed of equality of rights, of equality before the law, the socialist State would trample on such equality on behalf of the monstrous and impossible goal of equality or uniformity of results—or rather, would erect a new privileged elite, a new class, in the name of bringing about such an impossible equality.

Socialism was a confused and hybrid movement because it tried to achieve the liberal goals of freedom, peace, and industrial harmony and growth—goals which can only be achieved through liberty and the separation of government from virtually everything—by imposing the old conservative means of statism, collectivism, and hierarchical privilege. It was a movement which could only fail, which indeed did fail miserably in those numerous countries where it attained power in the twentieth century, by bringing to the masses only unprecedented despotism, starvation, and grinding impoverishment."
For a New Liberty
The Libertarian Manifesto
By Murray N. Rothbard [pdf]

[gZAhTyWY]

^ Thanks for the reply.

If anyone is interested in how you do that on a Mac:

Resting your free hand gently on the keyboard, choose the appropriate keyboard shortcut: Command + X for "Cut", Command + C for "Copy" and Command + V for "Paste". (The Command key has an Apple symbol and a cloverleaf symbol on it)