This morning I am considering fairness. Our President likes to lecture us on his concept of fairness. But like so many things, we don’t agree.
Take for instance, unions and strikes. The President and his friends on the left think that it is fair to allow unions to organize and to use strikes as leverage for better wages, benefits and working conditions.
I would not deny workers the right to organize and strike if the law was not squewed in their favor. When I think of laws, I think of it as my neighbors telling me what I can’t do. I have no issue when my neighbors say I can’t break into their home and take their stuff. I have no problem when they say I can’t drive through the neighborhood at 90 mph. But I do have a problem when they tell me I can’t fire a worker. My neighbors have no idea how my business works and how my employees fit in.
So when it comes to striking, I see it as fundamentally unfair for my neighbors to tell me that I can’t replace workers who refuse to work.
That is essentially where we are in this society. Under the guise of fairness, workers have been granted all kinds of privledges at the expense of business owners. To claim this is fair is to show that you are not considering one side of this equation.
So please spare me your lectures on fairness. It is a undefined term used by politicians to whip up the public into an emotional frenzy.
Posted by: The Elephant Owner in Labor and Unions on April 30th, 2011
Democrats like to create American villains. When it comes to financial scape goats, they fall back on Wall Street Fat Cats or Oil Speculators. Our President is now blaming high gas prices on speculators, but speculating and investing a key components to our free market system. I don’t think our President is as big a fan of the free market as I am, so I’ll tell you where the system breaks down.
Bankruptcy
Wall Street fat cats and speculators are free to take tremendous risk. The upside to these gambles are immense, and because of our pathetic bankruptcy laws, the downside aint so bad. Rich people go bankrupt and remain rich.
Donald Trump is one of those rich guys that use the bankruptcy laws to full advantage. He has filed for bankruptcy at least three times. Trump uses bankruptcy as leverage to renegotiate terms after his gambles fail.
He gambles…he fails…he uses the courts to protect his assets. Rinse and repeat.
This same backstop is there for speculators and big investors. If they lose, they just close up shop and hang open for business sign up next door.
The last time Congress updated the Bankruptcy laws, it was the left that protected the status quo. They claimed that the tougher laws were payback to big banks and it would hurt the little guy with credit card debt. I beg to differ. The current laws hurt the guy who pays his bills. That would be me and millions of other ethical Americans. Tough bankruptcy laws hurt everyone who over spends or gambles beyond their means.
Risk with rewards and no penalty is dangerous. It creates bubbles and hinders the free market from functioning.
Posted by: The Elephant Owner in Debt on April 30th, 2011
the economy needs to expand by at least 2.5% just to keep up with growth in the labor force. So at 1.8%, we’re essentially losing ground, a fact that last week’s 429,000 initial jobless claims underscores…read more
George Will writes about education in Kansas City:
In the 1980s, after a court held that the city was operating a segregated school system, judicial Caesarism appeared. A judge vowed to improve the district’s racial balance by luring white students to lavish “magnet schools” offering “suburban comparability” and “desegregative attractiveness.” And he ordered tax increases to pay the almost $2 billion bill for, among other things, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a planetarium, vivariums, greenhouses, a model United Nations wired for language translation, radio and television studios, an animation and editing lab, movie editing and screening rooms, a temperature-controlled art gallery, a 25-acre farm, a 25-acre wildlife area, instruction in cosmetology and robotics, field trips to Mexico and Senegal, and more.
Neither test scores nor the racial gap in academic achievement improved, and racial imbalance increased. Today, African Americans are 28 percent of the city’s population and 63 percent of public school students. And Covington (“We’re not an employment agency. We are a school district”) has survived the tumultuous process of closing schools. He won the support of a narrow majority on the elected school board. Except for one incumbent board member who ran unopposed, all those candidates in the next election who had opposed the closures were defeated. Now what?
Judges make rulings from the bench and it is not they who suffer the consequences. The common man with common sense needs to stand up and tell these elites they have no power for we the people govern ourselves. The arrogant elite who lack common sense and morality are but a small minority.
These gold announcements are getting boring. At some point it will lose value and many have predicted the impending fall, but today the price is climbing and I see no reason why it should stop anytime soon.
I did a little Google search for older web proclamations that gold is overpriced. I found:
After I used the historical data for home prices…I concluded that home prices will stabilize or recover this year, I tried to study gold prices…Due to limited usage of gold, it is obvious that there are only two factors influencing gold prices: emotional and speculative…The dollar has been rising against most currencies, so the argument that gold prices will go up since they are inversely proportional to dollar does not work…read more
This was written in 2009. Home prices have not stabilized. They have continued to fall. According to ZILLOW.COM, the Zillow Home Value Index has declined $190,000 to $170,000. A 10% drop.
When the above article was written, gold was at $891 per ounce. It has nearly doubled over the same period.
Oops. I guess this prediction hasn’t come true.
Posted by: The Elephant Owner in Inflation on April 29th, 2011
A study finds that Europeans are happier when they don’t work overtime while the amount of overtime makes no difference to American’s happiness. You have to wonder if there the cultural difference between the U.S. and Europe was caused by their welfare state or if the welfare state was caused by the cultural difference.
The study used surveys of European and American attitudes, finding the likelihood of Europeans describing themselves as “very happy” decreased from 28 percent to 23 percent as work hours increased. Meanwhile, Americans’ happiness stayed relatively consistent, with a 43 percent chance of describing themselves as happy regardless of the amount of hours spent working
I like Paul Ryan. He is smart. He is articulate. He has a lot of the traits I am looking for in a president, but I don’t want him to run…yet.
Paul Ryan needs to focus on his plan to cut spending and reform entitlements. The nation needs him to be successful. There are many aspects of running for president that will endanger the success of they Ryan mission.There will be distractions about his personal life. There will be non-stop fund raising and traveling.
It will be real evidence of leadership if Paul Ryan can get the majority of his plan through. If he can reform entitlements, he will be the first person from the House to have earned my support for President. So my adivce to Representative Ryan: Stay in Washington and “get her done”.
I have always believed Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. I still believe it, but seeds of doubt have entered since I have seen his so-called Birth Certificate.
Check out this animated image. It shows the upper right corner. First I highlight the color and copy the curved line up. Why do the black lines and the type curve with the page, but the background pattern doesn’t. Is this a function of the scanner with OCR settings? I don’t know…it just looks strange to me.
ObamaCare is set to start penalizing doctors who order too many tests. The goal is to reduce the cost by eliminating defensive medicine. Many doctors order expensive tests to cover the legal ass.
It seems to me, ObamaCare is treating the symptom and not the cause. If the problem is defensive medicine because of law suits, then the legal system needs to be fixed. Penalizing doctors will lead not to reduced costs but to doctor who avoid the sickest among us. They will avoid them by which specialty they select or by limiting the number of patients they see.
Why is it that the left never learns the lesson of unintended consequences.
Posted by: The Elephant Owner in Health Care on April 27th, 2011
Obama’s strengths and weaknesses come from his high degree of “integrative complexity” — his ability to keep multiple variables and trade-offs in mind simultaneously. The integratively simple thinker — say, George W. Bush — has one universal organizing principle that dominates all others, while the integratively complex thinker — Obama — balances many competing goals.
In other words, people who agree with Dana are complex. People who don’t are dolts.
So just for fun, let’s assume Dana Millbank is correct. Barack Obama is intelligent, complex and an abysmal failure. The Presidency is too big for even someone as smart as Obama and all his Ivy League advisers. Isn’t this proof that a big government is unworkable?
I can understand, although not agree with, wanting to penalize firms for “sending jobs overseas.” I am stunned, however, that the Obama administration’s National Labor Relations Board is trying to penalize Boeing for sending jobs from the state of Washington to the state of South Carolina.
Allen West stands to deliver his message of honor, character and integrity and is met with a rude lefty who thinks her right to ask a question rises above the rights of all others. How typical.
And if a Tea Partier was ever so rude to a black Democrat…it would be all over the news.
Liberals love high speed trains and the way China can get things done.
For the past eight years, Liu Zhijun was one of the most influential people in China. As minister of railways, Liu ran China’s $300 billion high-speed rail project. U.S., European and Japanese contractors jostled for a piece of the business while foreign journalists gushed over China’s latest high-tech marvel.
Today, Liu Zhijun is ruined, and his high-speed rail project is in trouble. On Feb. 25, he was fired for “severe violations of discipline” — code for embezzling tens of millions of dollars. Seems his ministry has run up $271 billion in debt — roughly five times the level that bankrupted General Motors. But ticket sales can’t cover debt service that will total $27.7 billion in 2011 alone. Safety concerns also are cropping up.
Faced with a financial and public relations disaster, China put the brakes on Liu’s program. On April 13, the government cut bullet-train speeds 30 mph to improve safety, energy efficiency and affordability. The Railway Ministry’s tangled finances are being audited. Construction plans, too, are being reviewed.
Liu’s legacy, in short, is a system that could drain China’s economic resources for years. So much for the grand project that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times likened to a “moon shot” and that President Obama held up as a model for the United States.
According to candidate Obama: Under his plan, your electricity rates will necessarily sky rocket. Those are Obama’s words and the EPA is ready to put that into action.
Unfortunately, everyday Americans may not realize the impact of the EPA’s “Train Wreck” of new regulations on jobs, the economy and price of essential energy until it’s too late. The truth is, even the EPA itself doesn’t quite know what these regulations might cost to implement – although various outside analysts seem to agree that, at minimum, the 10 major rules that the EPA issued in 2010 could cost the economy at least $23 billion and nearly one million jobs
President Obama wants to switch to a “green” economy. Is it because he has bought into the global warming hoax hook, line and sinker or does he have another motive? Who knows and who cares? Just remember this then next time he has the gall to call the Republican plans “radical”.
As an aside: Can you remember the last time things worked out the way Obama planned them? Remember he predicted unemployment wouldn’t rise above 8% if his “stimulus” was passed. ObamaCare was going to bend the cost curve down, Guantanamo was suppose to be closed in a year and terrorist were to be tried in civilian courts…and how’s that Libyan kinetic military operation going?
And from the outset, the president has had little patience with critics. Serious critiques are always illegitimate “talking points.” In the summer of ’09 he started insisting that he didn’t want to hear “a lot of talking” from Republicans. The time for debate always seems to be over when it’s clear to everyone that he’s losing the argument.
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