Speaking of Bulverism…
| February 13, 2008 | Posted by Dave S. under Off Topic |
I’m not sure what inspired Professor Dembski to quote C.S. Lewis on Bulverism at this particular point in time but the recent and somewhat unexpected rise of Barack Hussein Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton in the democratic primaries might have been it. I predict that whatever legitimate criticism is leveled at him the Bulverians will be out in great number rejoining with “You’re only saying that because he’s black.” Mark my words. That is going to become a household phrase before November. My support, of course, will be for John McCain. I preferred McCain over Bush in 2004 and nothing has changed. I hope to see him team up with Mike Huckabee as VP. I don’t envy them the task of dealing with the inevitable Bulverism they’ll encounter if Barack Hussein Obama gets the nod from the democratic party. Hillary Rodham Clinton would be a lot easier to defeat IMO with her sordid past and no race card she can pull in her defense. Heck, her and Bill are already being Bulverized. Quite successfully too.
Flash Update on the level of success: Hillary Clinton effectively conceded according to the Drudge Report. Can I get a “Praise Allah” on that? The next occupant of the whitehouse is either going to be John McCain or Barack Hussein. I heard a rumor on the Bill Maher show last night that McCain might team up with Condoleezza Rice for VP. That’s solid gold genius. I should’ve seen it coming. The cognitive dissonance in the Bulverists will be so thick in the airwaves you’ll be able to cut it with a knife. Anyone know what Condoleeza’s middle name is? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?
47 Responses to Speaking of Bulverism…
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Please forgive the 17 minute tardy post, evidently you and I were typing at the same time, my old hands don’t go very fast anymore.
For the record I happen to support Barack Obama and not the opportunist Clinton. I readily admit that Obama is a standard politician and all politicians are opportunists to some degree, but Clinton is, to me, just about the scummiest, along with her husband, at being nothing but a political animal. There is nothing genuine about her.
sincerely,
d. grey
Dennis
I stand corrected on the school being in the “Middle East”. I knew only that it was in a Muslim country and incorrectly presumed that meant somewhere in the Middle East.
However, he DID attend a Muslim school. Barack Hussein Obama even describes it that way himself in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” saying he attended both Catholic and Muslim schools in Jakarta.
And Barack Hussein Obama did indeed fail to obey the law of the land by not putting his hand over his heart as the United States National Anthem was being played.
Check it out. There’s a nice picture of it with Hillary standing there too with her hand over heart on Snopes.com. Hillary at least knows the law. Is Barack ignorant of the law or just doesn’t respect the United States enough to salute it when required? That’s forgivable in many case but not for someone seeking the highest office in the land.
Barack Hussein Obama breaking the law by not saluting when the U.S. flag code required it
The law (in case anyone is wondering).
“Wal-Mart is productivity gains on steroids. I love it.” – Dave Scot
Apparently you’re unaware of the dehumanizing effects of large corporations. Independent small-business people care about their customers, their employees, and their products; huge corporations, by definition, care only for profits. You cannot serve God (or your fellow man) and mammon, Matthew 6:24.
Gerry
If you want to socialize and be charitable go to church and give generously. If you want more time and money for your church then you can quickly get the best price on groceries, a prescription refill, paint, car parts, sheets, an iPod, and things of nature in one stop at a Wal-Mart superstore. DaveScot 3:9:08
Capitalism and Christianity go hand in hand. See The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism -ibidem
A snip from another good essay on Christianity and capitalism (and science too for that matter):
How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and the Success of the West
December 2, 2005
Rodney Stark
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Perhaps needless to say but I will nonetheless: I have a Protestant background and while my faith in the supernatural aspects of it is lacking my faith in the great benefits to a society that embraces the Protestant ethic is quite strong.
Generally speaking Republicans borrow and spend while Democrats tax and spend. True they both have spending in common. But let’s look at it from a capitalist POV. Borrowing is not a bad thing for a capitalist. It all depends on the cost of capital (the borrowing cost) and the return on capital (how much you earn by investing the borrowed money). The cost of capital during the Bush administration was rather low. It was a good time to borrow. We do most of our borrowing by printing treasury notes (which don’t cost more than the paper they’re printed on) and selling them to foreign trade partners who are more or less forced to hold them in reserve as the dollar is the primary instrument of international commerce. They were sold during Bush’s terms with very low interest rates attached so our future obligations were minimal. Conversely the cost of capital was exceedingly high during Jimmy Carter’s term in office so that was a bad time to borrow. The other side of the capitalist borrowing coin (so to speak) is how the borrowed capital is spent. The Republicans tend to inject the borrowed money back into the economy in the form of business incentives which in turn grow the economy through the aforementioned productivity gains. Even military spending accomplishes this as there’s a huge capitalist business machine that makes the military hardware. Democrats on the other hand tend to not borrow and help businesses thrive with capital injection but instead tax those businesses and invest tax revenues into social equity programs that don’t grow anything other than the lower income class’ dependence on gov’t handouts. A great way to entrench and grow the government but counter-productive in growing the underlying economy from which your tax revenues come from. The Democrats kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. No one benefits from that in the long run except a government which seeks more power and control over the masses. Economic policy alone is sufficient to make ME vote a straight Republican ticket.
A ruinous danger to any democracy is when the voters discover they can vote for themselves all the money out of the public treasury. This is one of the reasons we have a representative democracy wherein our elected representatives are supposed to be smart enough to know better than to drain the national treasury dry to satisfy the short term greed of an economically illiterate electorate. Another danger in a capitalist economy is the unfettered accumulation of wealth handed down in familial lines from generation to generation. Concentration of wealth in too few hands is not a good thing. For that reason I’m all for very high marginal rates on estate taxes so long as the tax revenues are directed towards productivity enhancement (GDP growth) instead of social equity programs. Republicans do tend to eschew estate taxes and I don’t agree with that.
DaveScot, I know you’re having fun Muslim-baiting, whining about a minor break of an unenforceable law, and conflating one kind of Christianity with Christianity as such. I understand the need to lash out; it must be tough seeing your party circling the drain. Still, could you have the decency to refer to people using the names they use for themselves?
Clinton’s economic policies had nothing to do with the balanced budgets in his last couple years. He happened to be standing on the platform when the train came rumbling by. The train was the internet bubble.
Maybe some of you remember the Gary Trudeau comics about how some of the dot com companies had stock values higher than GDP of some countries. By the end of the bubble some the countries used for comparisons were Western European countries.
When the owners of the stocks in these dot com companies cashed in their stocks it generated 100′s of billions in tax revenues. Most waited till the capital gains taxes applied but many did it before the necessary time and were quite willing to pay regular income taxes because the numbers were so staggering. So this huge tax windfall generated the budget surpluses along with the increased business activity that the dot com bubble generated. Nothing Clinton did had much to do with it. He was a spectator.
When the stock market crashed as it always does when speculation builds it up, the losses in the stock market generated credits against taxes and thus reduced tax revenues and thus added to the quick turnaround in tax revenues. And these losses were also staggering as NASDAQ went from over 5000 to around 1200. Then came 9/11 and everyone sat on their money for awhile which contracted the economy and reduced tax revenues even more.
Luckily Bush pushed for tax relief early to help counteract these problems and then the Fed reduced interest rates and flooded the economy with money to stimulate home purchases and home improvement.
Unfortunately as in any economic expansion people get greedy and the banks were giving money away to people to buy houses which has now led to mortgage foreclosure problems now. Anything that contracts the economy such as tax increases will exacerbate the problem.
Dave:
It seems to me that there are limits to what one nation can do in the name of altruism. Indeed, I often wonder why our leaders feel the need to establish democracies in other parts of the world even as we are having one bear of a time maintaining our own. To me George Bush’s messianic mission, while inspired by compassion, compromises our long term interests. Clearly, we must go after those who have militated against us, but we must be circumspect about when and how we do it. Wars cost money and lives and in each case real people are asked to pay the price. That too, is a moral consideration. In our Declaration of Independence and in our constitution, we have already established a well-crafted sense of mission that is supposed to inform our strategic priorities. It is our government’s job to “promote the general welfare” and “provide for the common defense.” Nowhere does it say that we should establish freedom throughout the world, although it is certainly something that could be made a part of our mission.
Compassion is wonderful, but it needs wisdom to inform it. We have many enemies, foreign and domestic, that are trying to take us down. Russia is not our friend, Iran is a sworn enemy, and Saudi Arabia is funding terrorists all over the place. Most importantly, China is licking its chops waiting for the day that we spend our financial, military, and, yes, our moral resources to the point where we can no longer defend ourselves. We should not underestimate the importance of moral resources. Don’t forget that a morally- challenged Bill Clinton provided China with nuclear technology that they may someday use against us. He did this to advance his own self interests and for no other reason. We have a culture war going on in our country right now that is just as dangerous as the war on terror, because it eats away at our willingness to fight our enemies, both foreign and domestic. If we think we can fight the war on terror without winning this culture war, we delude ourselves.
Consider our confused moral priorities and our skewed sense of justice: We uproot displays of the Ten Commandments while installing foot baths for Muslims. We treat captured enemy combatants better than our own soldiers accused of war crimes. We grant privileges to illegal aliens while withholding those same privileges from prospective immigrants who wait their turn line. We are still the greatest country in the world, but we are ruled by political correctness. It may be imprudent to say so, but the ACLU is just as dangerous to our way of life as AlQaeda. Until we acknowledge that inconvenient fact, we will make no progress in the war on terror. Good grief, we have unchallenged terrorist cells operating in our own country, but we are afraid to comb out the mosques to get them. Meanwhile, the FBI is indicting Italians for 30 year-old mafia crimes.
In my judgment, we are in no position to save the world until we restore order in our own house, and that includes gaining control of our pornography culture and our proclivity to spread it around the world. We cannot give to others that which we ourselves have lost. True freedom, which is the right to “follow the dictates of our conscience,” has been redefined to mean the right to “follow the cravings of our appetites.” You can build a well-ordered society around the first concept, not the second. If we are going to spread freedom around the world, we need to reacquaint ourselves with what it is. Then and only then can we take up our global rescue mission, provided, of course, we amend the constitution in order to make it lawful. Meanwhile, let’s get busy restoring our own culture and saving our own representative democracy.
Jerry
Absolutely right. We felt the dot.bomb collapse coming at Dell in the middle of 1999 when our sales to Europe started going soft.
leo
Bush also inherited a balanced budget from his predecessor. Of course, there was a GOP congress prior to 2000. So ask yourself what changed? Go ahead, I’ll wait.
September 11th, 2001 is what changed. Trillions of dollars of paper wealth in the stock market disappeared in the blink of an eye. The stock market at that point had already taken a battering from the dot.bomb implosion but it was mostly confined to Nasdaq which is heavily weighted in high tech companies. The Dow was relatively unscathed until then. This was followed by a rather costly war. We were already in a mild recession when the crap hit the fan on 9/11. Bush had been in office less than a year at that point and hadn’t even presented his first budget to congress yet. Economic stimulus was badly needed to keep the mild recession from becoming a full blown recession. The economic stimulus and cost of prosecuting a serious war against terrorism negated any possibility of a balanced budget.
While I certainly don’t blame Clinton for the economic collapse I do blame him for handling terrorism as a criminal problem instead of a military problem. On Clinton’s watch as commander-in-chief we were attacked by Bin Laden’s terrorist organization in 1993 at the World Trade Center (6 Americans dead, 1000 injured), in 1995 in Saudi Arabia (5 dead), in 1996 in Saudi Arabia (19 dead, 200 injured), 1998 at U.S. embassies in Africa (224 dead, 5000 injured), and in 2000 the USS Cole (17 dead, 39 injured). Clintons most aggressive response to this was sending a few cruise missiles at a suspected Bin Laden location which blew up an empty aspirin factory. In the meantime he let Saddam Hussein go unpunished for an assassination attempt on former president George H.W. Bush in Kuwait which in and of itself is an act of war. He allowed Saddam to violate the conditions of the 1991 cease-fire agreement with impunity and defy the many U.N. resolutions leveled at Saddam. Meanwhile the head of the U.N. and his son were getting rich from kickbacks in a corrupt oil-for-food program where Saddam was selling oil to France and it wasn’t for food. If that isn’t enough he inked a warm fuzzy deal with North Korea where they agreed to halt nuclear weapons research in exchange for light-water nuclear reactor technology. The North Koreans continued with the weapons grade fissionalbe program without missing a single beat. And if that still isn’t enough Clinton got us involved in a civil war and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia where the U.S. had no national interest whatsoever (which isn’t bad in and of itself as things like ethnic cleansings should be stopped) but there were bigger fish to fry (like Iraq, North Korea, and Al Qaida) and to add insult to injury Clinton shirked his responsibilities as commander-in-chief and subordinated U.S. forces in Bosnia to direct U.N. command. Clinton’s domestic policies weren’t that bad (his wife and her failed attempt to take government control of 14% of the U.S. economy through nationalized health care notwithstanding) but he was an utter disaster as commander-in-chief.
Balancing the budget was an easy thing to do in the late 1990′s as tax revenues soared from millions of freshly minted millionaires cashing in high tech stock options and millions of others paying short term capital gains tax on stock market riches. In 1998, 1999, and 2000 I handed over a cool million in federal income tax and capital gains tax. That tax bill was more money than I’d earned in my entire prior working life. And I was one of the little guys. I knew many people who made tens and even hundreds of millions in those years and gave turned over half of it to the federal government. On top of that tax windfall that Clinton got through no act of his own he was simultaneously gutting the military under the rubric the peace dividend (end of the cold war) a war which he played no role winning. So as far as a balanced budget Clinton just happened to be in the right place at the right time and had a Republican congress to work with which had no problem not raising spending in response to the tax windfall. They would never have approved the things Clinton would have requested in any case, Clinton would veto anything they wanted to raise spending on, so the result was a balanced budget by way of a Mexican stand-off.
Jerry is also quite right about the losses that were carried forward from the stock market crash. In 2001 I claimed $140,000 in short and long term capital losses. At the rate of $3,000 per year (for a couple) I’m allowed to deduct capital losses against earned income that’s an annual deduction that I will have for the rest of my natural life and then some. I hadn’t even thought about that as factor in reducing current tax revenues. Thanks Jerry. Great point.
StephenB,
I think Bush’s objectives are more limited than the rhetoric he uses. Though democracy is an ideal in all the world it is best to limit your efforts to where it might make a difference.
I grew up in Pennsylvania which is called the keystone state because at it founding it touched much of what was important in the early colonies and states. Look at Iraq, geographically. It touches most of what is important in the Middle East and was once the seat of the Caliph, so if you are going to begin your efforts to bring democracy to the Arab world it is the best place by far to start. We did it with Japan and Germany and have been there with troops for 60 years and in Korea for 50 years.
What choices do these Arab countries have? Either a thug dictator like Saddam Hussein, a religious dictator of the fundamentalist Islam variety or a representative government. Where would you invest your jewels for your own future safety? That is what Bush has been trying to do but he has met resistance at every turn here in the US by liberals and by our enlighten brethren in Western Europe who all of sudden abandoned their quests for human rights when it is being led by a religious anti socialist US president.
Bush’s success economically has been his undoing politically. Thucydides said that there are three reasons why people go to war. They are fear, honor and greed. After 9/11 the country was in fear but for a large number of people Bush took that fear away by first dealing with the sources of terror and then along with the Fed corrected the economy so that no one thought there was a problem.
So why are we fighting. For many of us it is honor or the right thing to do to bring freedom to a lot of people and many of us are still aware that there is a dangerous enemy so fear still operates for many of us. The one thing for certain is that it is not greed why we fight though there are still some nut cases who will say it is all for oil.
Stephen
While I agree to some extent with most of you said re the mess at home I don’t agree it’s anywhere near as bad as you make it out to be. I would certainly agree that if the loony left as exemplified by the whackjobs that cluster at MoveOn.org and The Huffington Post ever became a significant force it would lead to the quick collapse of the United States. Fortunately, as the underwhelming response to “Air America” proved, the vast majority of Americans don’t want any part of that lunacy. On the other hand Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly are still top performers in radio and television ratings respectively.
“…you can quickly get the best price on groceries [etc] in one stop at a Wal-Mart superstore.” – Dave Scot
A couple of years ago we bought new appliances from a local, independent shop owner. A year later I went into the shop and the owner greeted me by name. I told him I needed a new filter for the fridge and he said, “You’ve got the such-and-such model, right? Here’s what you want” and pulled it off the shelf. And when I told him I forgot my wallet, he said, “Don’t worry about it; pay me next time you’re in town.”
How many dollars is that kind of human relationship worth, Dave?
But now Lowes has come to town, and this honest and caring man will probably be out of business within the year. And his employees, who have served him for years, will have to go to work for an out-of-state corporation, at a lower wage. Did anything important get lost here, Dave?
And it used to be we that didn’t have to lock our doors when we went out around here, since everybody knew everybody else and everybody looked out for the other guy. That’s changing now too. Is this a good thing or a bad thing, Dave?
Dennis, if you want to get technical, everyone in your picture is breaking the law because they are not facing the flag. Nice try though. If you’re going to try and enforce a law it has to be effective against all parties.
I think it shows that Barack is more of a patriot than Hilary, the fact he doesn’t have to use such trivial symbolic gestures to try and “look better” to people like you.
I think you, Dennis, are the unpatriotic one here. Anyone running for the office of President deserves every true American’s support. They are trying to do something huge for us, no matter their party affiliations or policies. Why would you not support someone who’s trying to improve our way of life? I’ll never understand the resistance.
Gerry
First of all, if everyone was like you then Lowes would go out of business instead of the small store you prefer to shop at. How much is the freedom of everyone to shop where they please worth in dollars? How much is the right of businesses to grow and accomodate their customers as they please worth in dollars?
I save an inordinate amount of time and money shopping at Lowes and Home Depot. I’d be driving the tires off my truck going from small store to small store for all the stuff I can buy at one Home Depot. The time and fuel savings alone are worth thousands of dollars every year. I have no problem at all with the staff at Home Depot not being helpful or knowledgeable. If a week goes by that I didn’t stop at HD two or three times it’s a rare week as that’s pretty much all I do is construction and landscaping. Moreover, at Lowes or Home Depot I can buy materials (or anything really) in excess of what I need to complete a job, then in one stop return the unused materials for a full refund, no questions asked. You’d want to use the force of law to make my life much more difficult for me and at the same time take away both my liberty to shop where I please and business owners to grow their businesses as large as they please and accomodate their customers as they please? Thanks but no thanks. Maybe you should move to a communist country or something where freedom means less.
Aside from all that Gerry, the main point I made flew right over your head. If I didn’t save a lot of time and money shopping at big stores I’d have to cut back somewhere on non-essentials. For instance I wouldn’t have as much time or money to spend in my favorite little eateries so they’d go out of business instead of the hardware store owner. People never stop to think about the downstream consequences. You stop thinking as soon as you see someone YOU know being harmed and in the effort to help them don’t consider that someone else will be harmed instead. The only way to help more than are harmed is through productivity gains. Lowes and Home Depot and Wal-Mart operate more efficiently than small stores. The savings from higher efficiency go to everyone. It’s true that a few people are harmed in the process but in the big picture more people are helped than harmed by productivity increases.
Brick and mortar stores of all kinds have their own problems to deal with at any rate. With the price of diesel and local taxes figured in there’s a lot of things I can buy in online stores at lower cost than getting them locally. I can comparison shop on the internet in seconds or minutes without driving anywhere, pay no local sales tax, not spend any time driving, not put wear and tear on my vehicle or burn fuel, and in 3 days or less the thing I bought is sitting on my doorstep. Again these are due to productivity gains. UPS is more efficient at pickup and delivery than I am. Online sales are more efficient than over the counter sales. Inventory management is far more efficient for online stores. Mail order stores can stock their inventory many miles from civilization where land is less expensive and isn’t getting in anyone’s way. They don’t have to provide heating and air-conditioning in showrooms. These are all good things. Sure there are always a few that will be harmed when businesses change to become more efficient but there’s a greater good to more people through gains in efficiency.
CaliKevin
There were presumably flags other than the one in the background flying at the event. If you’ve ever been to one of those events you’d know there are flags everywhere. Even if that wasn’t the case then Obama was breaking two laws while the others were breaking only one. Any way you look at the situation Obama comes out looking bad.
“Bad” is purely opinion. Maybe he is so moved every time he hears the national anthem he is physically unable to raise hand-to-heart. I don’t see why that should be perceived as bad.
Dave, well said; and a nice defense of capitalism and free markets.
I’m sure that romantic notions of the fading little shop owner paradigm would not compare to romantic notions of the fading availability and abundance of affordable merchandise, not to mention food and services, even jobs.
If what the little shop owner provides is more valuable, convenient, and affordable, he will do just fine. He may do even better to apply his entrepreneurial spirit and efforts to diversifying his interests into other ventures as well.
Replacing sound reasoning with sentimental and emotional appeals to…whatever it may be…will mean less freedom and less abundance in the long run. This happens to be the opposite of provision and compassion. It’s pure demagoguery.
It’s interesting that Wal-mart happens to provide more affordable products to lower income families; and its presence in the free market creates more competition — which means lower prices overall and more consumer choice, yet it’s regularly opposed by those claiming to be looking out for the little guy.
Apollos
Yeah, it’s the same story with the family farm. There’s a romantic attachment to a single family successfully working their few acres of land, the farm passing down from generation to generation, and the way of life associated with it. Unfortunately for that way of life it’s far less efficient than huge farms where the capital investment required is beyond the reach of the family farm. But fortunately big farms are so much more efficient that through them we’re able to make the same amount of land feed a far greater number of people. If it weren’t for “big agriculture” billions would either starve or have never been born in the first place. Productivity gains always involve reorganization of the labor force where in the short run there are winners and losers. Unless one realizes that productivity gains in the long run produce more winners than losers then the reorganization of labor is always seen as an evil. Capital flows to where it is most productively employed. Romanticism is a roadblock to progress and without progress we’d all still be living short brutal lives in caves, mud shacks, and grass huts.
The same lack of understanding of productivity gains is what liberals appeal to when they propose more Draconian forms of redistribution of income. They’re fixated on the notion that total income (or Gross Domestic Product) is fixed in size. They view GDP as a pie where if someone gets a bigger slice it means someone else must get a smaller slice. That may be true in the short term but in the long term the pie, through productivity gains, can grow in size so everyone gets a bigger slice. To enable productivity growth requires funneling excess capital to where it is most efficiently employed. Generally speaking those with lower incomes aren’t the ones who will best employ excess capital. That said there is definitely a huge danger associated with unrestrained capitalism. That danger is the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Thus in our (America’s) capitalist system we do employ some redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation and high inheritance taxes. If that’s taken to an extreme where everyone is equal then it squashes ambition like a bug. If everyone is artificially made equally successful and there’s no path to greater success or possibility of lesser success then why work harder than the next guy? We structure our system around equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. As a general rule of thumb modern “conservatives” promote equality of opportunity while modern “liberals” promote equality of outcome. There is a healthy middle ground which limits individual success to less than being so successful that a relative few can dominate the entire economy while limiting failure to not being put out on the street starving, cold, and helpless. Unrestrained greed is bad but so is unrestrained complacency. A balance between the two must be maintained so that ambition and hope for a better future don’t die because without ambition and hope there is no progress.