He doesn't get it, either

William Vallicella: Does Government Create Jobs?

In their last presidential debate, President Obama strangely agreed with Governor Romney when the latter said that "Government does not create jobs."

But of course government does create jobs. There are all sorts of government jobs. That perfectly obvious point was underscored in a recent NYT op-ed piece. So both the president and the governor were wrong to claim that government does not create jobs.

But, as one would expect, the NYT piece missed the real point, which is what the governor had in mind but did not clearly state, namely, that government does not create economically productive jobs.

Where does the money come from to pay government workers? From taxes and loans. Such money is not available for consumption. The economy expands, and jobs are created, when people buy things. The point is made well by Robert Samuelson in Flat-Earth Economics.

So if the Obama Administration claims that it has created x jobs, ask yourself: what sort of jobs? The ones that count, the ones that will have a real effect on expanding the economy, are not government jobs. Private sector jobs are what we need and these are precisely the ones that government cannot create.

So if you have any sense, you will vote for Romney-Ryan.

Vallicella still doesn't fully get it, himself -- "The economy expands, and jobs are created, when people buy things"

The wide-spread belief in, and perpetuation of, that false idea is one of the main reasons we are, and most of the world is, in the dire economic mess we're in ... and is why no one at all is going to do anything to get us out of the mess -- the whole world's economy is going down the toilet because no one wants recognize reality and life in accord with it.

The truth is not that "the economy expands, and jobs are created, when people buy things", but rather that "the economy expands, and jobs are [ultimately] created, when people *make* things".

Simply buying things -- the mere consumption of wealth -- does not, and cannot, make us wealthy. "I feel rich when I spend money" does not make one rich. To become wealthy, we have to work productively so as to generate wealth.

Liberal Logic 102

Look at all these dishonest "liberals" calling Egnor a liar ... for showing their perversity --

Michael Engor seems to be enjoying the "Liberal Logic 101" site, which is understandable, as it so graphically illustrates the constant illogic of "liberal" beliefs and positions.

Recently, he posted another of their comments of the Sandra Fluke incident.

The "quote" on the 'Liberal Logic 101' image is "So can someone please explain to me what's so wrond about the government taking money at gunpoint from people who've choses to abstain from promiscuous sex in order to pay for my choice to engage in promiscuous sex?"

And why is Egnor a "liar" for linking to this succinct editorial? Because, apparently, in "liberal" "logic", when the government forces a private entity, say and insurance company or an employer, to subsidize or pay for -- under threat of government violence-unto-death -- the "contraceptive needs" of sexually promiscuous persons, that money isn't taken from anyone. Apparently, it just materializes from thin air. And, apparently, the threat of violence vanishes because the immediate target of it is "corporations".

The ‘First Lady Debate’

Via Bob Parks: Flashback: The ‘First Lady Debate’ -- They did find one person to claim that Mrs Romney had "won the debate" ... but, her manner when she's saying it seems to indicate that she's in on the joke.

Also, Via Bob Parks: Quote Of The Day -- It couldn't happen to a more deserving, and no-talent, tramp.

Proper Reduction

Kristor: Proper Reduction

Judge Jeanine Rips BHO Over Benghazi

The Other McCain: Judge Jeanine Rips BHO Over Benghazi, And There Is A Larger Problem

'Did your son always have ...?'

So far as I know, no one has publicly noticed something telling concerning Joe "Gaff-o-Matic" Biden's coarse, vulgar, and wholly inappropriate question to Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods, at the ceremony for the return home of the bodies of the four Americans murdered in Benghazi -- "Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?"

Consider - at the time, the entire supporting staff of alleged-President Obama, and the man himself, were still claiming that:
1) the attack on the consulate was merely a movie-review “gone wrong” - as though that would have any Constitutional relevance, even were it true;
2) and, just as importantly, that US officials didn’t know what had happened during the attack, and couldn’t know until after “an investigation”.

Point 1) has been dealt with previously - the very premise of it is invalid. Yet, nevertheless, this alleged-administration used it as the pretext to arrest, as Hillary Clinton has whispered to Charles Woods that they would do, their designated fall guy, the no-name producer of some You-Tube film-clip that no one had even heard of. To put it another way, this alleged-administration blatantly violated the Constitution with respect to the human rights of a guest in our country … and the very people who were always falsely accusing Bush II, Bush I, and Reagan of violating Americans’ Constitutional-and-human rights said nothing.

Concerning point 2), as we now know - as anyone wishing to know the truth now knows - this alleged-administration knew, in real-time, as it was happening, what was going on in Benghazi. And that three requests for military support were explicitly denied. And further, that somewhere in the chain of command, the order was twice issued to the men there to “stand down”.

It seems that, in the end, Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty disobeyed the order to “stand down”, and engaged in a several-hours battle with the Islamic attackers.

Now, consider again Biden’s crass question: "Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?" Does such a question even make sense if it were true that this alleged-administration hadn’t yet known what had happened? Does such a question even make sense if Biden had not known what had happened.

Does such a question even make sense if Biden had not already known that a mere two Americans, Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty, armed mostly with just what they could carry, had fought for hours against superior numbers armed with rocket launchers and mortars?

===
You know, considering how often over the past four plus years Biden has put his foot into Obama’s mouth -- you see, ol' coal miner Joe is one of those people who cannot resist saying "I know something you don't know" -- it’s kind of surprising they he hasn’t had an “accident” by now.

There is another reason

Habitual Idiot, as it happens, there is 'another reason', an actual reason: really, Auster, in some ways, on some topics, you're at least as bad as the leftists.

Blacks in present-day America are "falling behind" academically not because of their biology, but because of cultural permissions and expectations. Blacks in present-day America disproportionately commit violent crime not because of their biology, but because of cultural permissions and expectations.

Blacks are human beings -- just like you whites (*) -- which means that, just like you all, they are 'fallen' (to use Christian terminology): human beings are lazy and perverse. When given permission to short-sightedly self-destruct, that's exactly what most humans will do.

For two or three full generations, now, the "liberals" and other leftists have been teaching black Americans that it is pointless for them to exert themselves, either at learning or at earning their own livings, and that they have every right to expect and demand "free stuff" because whites "owe them", and also, if the mood strikes them, that they have every right to bop that little old lady over there over the head and steal all that she has, or even to murder her. Given human nature, the results we constantly see, and that you're always on about, are exactly what one should expect.

But all this "human biodiversity" bullshit that you and your ilk are always on about doesn't address the issue: the problem is not biology/race, it is culture and sin. And you, claiming the name of Christ, surely ought to understand this.

(*) For rhetorical effect, I'm momentarily ignoring that I'm mostly white myself. And, I gotta tell ya', in my experience, most of you whites aren't any more on the ball, mentally, than you (Auster and ilk) are always going on about blacks.

Police were combing Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for evidence of bullying

New York Post: SI suicide teen was bullied over viral sex video -- "Police were combing Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for evidence of bullying" ... Because, of course, the problem isn't that we willingly raise up our daughters, and our sons, to make of themselves sluts. No, no, no! rather, the problem is "bullying". In this instance (as in so many other recent instances), "bullying" means "openly stating the truth about the situation."

Look, the truth is: the girl was a slut -- and so were the other kids who "bullied" her about being filmed going about her business.

Look, the truth is: the girl was a slut -- because she was raised to be a slut; the main point of her "education" was to make it all-but-impossible for her to resist the self-destructive siren-song of sluttishness. The main difference this girl and Tiffany or Brandon is that her ultimate self-destruction came quickly, in one fell swoop, rather than being dragged out in dribbles over the span of twenty-five or thirty years.

And you, ungentle reader, who falsely call yourself 'conservative' and/or 'Christian', may rant and rave all you want over my blunt "unkindness" in stating the sad truth about this poor self-murderer, but it will not make of her a non-slut, and it will not bring her back. And, more importantly, this ranting will do nothing to help other young women and men resist making of themselves sluts.

What is more important to you? Preserving the so-called "Sexual Revolution" -- the very conflagration which is destroying these lives, and all our lives -- and thereby remaining "respectable" in the eyes of the leftists, or returning our society to a proper moral footing, which respects, rather than denigrates, chastity and which respects human life?

The homeowner analogy is pretty good

Willian Vallicella responds to a reader who directs him to (the fool) Paul Krugman as having the correct answer to (right-minded) concern about the destructive nature of the (continuously mounting) Federal debt -- Left, Right, and Debt

Krugman's 'argument,' if you want to call it that, consists in an attack on an analogy between individual and government debt:

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

Krugman's first reason is that families have to pay off their mortgages, but governments don't have to pay back what they borrow. ...

Ready for Krugman's second reason? It's a real winner: "Second - and this is the point almost nobody seems to get - an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves."

That's bullshit, which is presumably why nobody gets it except him of the simian countenance. It makes no clear sense to say that the debt is money we owe ourselves. So each of us owes a portion of the debt to every other one of us?
...
The homeowner analogy is pretty good.

No analogy is perfect, of course. A perfect analogy would be an identity, and you can't compare a thing to itself --except vacuously.

Do read Vallicella's full take-down. But I have a shorter, or, at least, simpler --

1) Krugman's first point of "refutation" of the applicability of the easily understood analogy between household debt and state debt is to assert that, states being sovereign, a state may simply repudiate its debts. Krugman's ultimate "solution" to the massive -- and continuously expanding -- debt of the United States is to repudiate it, to welch on it, at some point.

Now, we all know that debtors who are seen to welch on their debts tend to find it impossible to secure new loans. Absent some third party willing to legally assume the risk should the maxed-out debtor bug-out yet again, who would risk his own money with further lending to the known welcher? To put it another way, who is going to co-sign for the US government when it is known to welch its debts -- and who is going to legally enforce the terms of the (new) contract? Remember, states are sovereign -- until they collapse.

2) Krugman's second point of "refutation" of the applicability of the easily understood analogy between household debt and state debt is to assert that "an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves." ... and therefore, magically, it isn't a problem that the Federal government of the United States of American is currently borrowing about 40% of the monies it spends.

To put this point of his "refutation" of the applicability of the analogy into the terms of the analogy, he's saying that Mrs Welcher can loan the money to Mr Welcher to cover the (ever-expanding) family debt, and that Mr Welcher can loan the money to Mrs Welcher to cover the (ever-expanding) family debt, and that that will "solve" the family debt problem ... and that, anyway, ultimately, Mr and Mrs Welcher can simply decline to repay one another the debts they've contracted to one another.

That's what they're trying to do in "the European Union", isn't it?

NOW, combine his two point of "refutation" of the applicability of the easily understood analogy between household debt and state debt -- he's asserting that: unlike private entities, the Federal government of the United States of American can continuously expend more monies than to collects in taxes, and continuously expand the amount of the over-expense, because:
1) "we" are "borrowing" the monies from "ourselves";
2) and "we" don't have to repay the "loans", anyway.

"Liberals" seem to believe in perpetual motion.

Constitution Party

What's not to like? I mean, other than the fact that they don't have much of a presence?

Constitution Party: Our Principles

Constitution Party: 2012 Plarform

From their plank item 'Constitutional Convention':

We oppose any attempt to call for a Constitutional convention, for any purpose whatsoever, because it cannot be limited to any single issue, and such convention could seriously erode our Constitutionally protected unalienable rights.

This is a common view of conservatives ... and it's mistaken. Sure, the "liberals" and other leftists would propose all sorts of foolish and/or destructive changes to the Constitution. BUT, even were a Convention to accept such proposals, a Constitutional Convention does not itself modify the Constitution: it is still the States and the People who have to have to approve Amendments.

Concerning the plank item 'Tariffs and Trade' -- they're protectionists; and protectionists invariably refuse to see that protectionism is contrary to human freedom, that's it's just one more way to use the violence of the State to compel the many to subsidize the few. I guess they can't see that the protectionist scheme they outline in the plank is contrary to their general themes of limited government and maximal individual freedom. Their protectionism plank is also in direct violation of their 'Wage and Price Controls' plank.

'Liberal' 'logic'

"Liberal" "logic" is, of course, the antithesis of actual logic. Consider just this one simple example --

Everyone knows that there is -- and has been for as long as any of us has been alive -- a great deal of vote fraud in America. Further, everyone knows that it's the Democrats who do it systemically.

Everyone knows that when the Democrats propose tinkering with the election laws, it's always to make vote fraud easier ... because they expect to profit from it.

Everyone knows that when the Democrats throw tantrums every time the Republicans make modest proposals to make vote fraud more difficult, it's always because they consider vote fraud to be an important tool for "winning" elections.

So, here's today's example of "liberal" "logic" --

The Republicans have been moving over the past few years, and have been successful in many States, to require identification when a person show up to vote.

The Democrats -- predictably and dishonestly -- charge that the Republicans merely seek to "disenfranchise" "minority voters" (never mind that historically, that has been the bailiwick of “Progressives”, in general, and the Democratic Party, in particular). Then, they up the ante by claiming that there just isn’t enough vote fraud in the entire country to even justify commonsensical steps to reduce it (never mind the evidence of your own experience, which is that in any close election the Democrats miraculously discover “misplaced” “ballots” days, or even weeks, after election day).

At the same time, this year, the “liberals” and Democrats are bringing in UN interference to “observe” the American election. The UN!

So, on the one hand, the “liberals” and Democrats assert that there is no appreciable vote fraud in America. And, on the other hand, “liberals” and Democrats assert that there is so much vote fraud in America that we need UN observers (the UN!?) so as to keep our elections clean.

Since when did the UN have anything to do with clean politics?

The flaw is in the hidden premise

Jeff Jacoby: Can a conscientious liberal back Obama? -- there is, in fact, no such thing as a "conscientious liberal".

'Corporate money in politics'

One can be certain that the sort of "liberals" who routinely freak out over "corporate money in politics" will say nothing about this 'corporate' money seeking to influence politics

Harvest, aborted

Michael Egnor: "Those bandits in white coats gave up too quickly because they wanted an organ donor,"

Segregation was liberal policy

Michael Egnor: Segregation was liberal policy -- Whether they're using the power of the State to legally discriminate against citizens who are black, or against citizens who are white, or of some other race, it's all the same to "liberals".

The forked tongue of the 'Science!' fetishist

Vox Day: The forked tongue of the fetishist

Mark Steyn: Let Them Go Hungry

I dislike first ladies — as a concept, I mean, not as dinner dates. I think of the first lady as an individual who happens to be married to the guy with the job, rather than as a job in its own right with a huge staff and bloated budget. But I seem to be in a minority, and most Americans appear to be comfortable with the neo-monarchical inflating of the president's wife into a full-blown Queen Consort. So, to give all those staffers the pretense of something to do, it's necessary to identify a "cause" for the first lady to "champion." The Arab Spring? Whoa, steady on. By "cause," we mean something kinda non-political, more like good works, but with the force of federal power behind it.

So it was decided that Michelle Obama would go to war on childhood obesity....

The first lady was on hand for the launch of the new federally mandated lunch limits. The stench of failure and risibility has not yet attached to this initiative as it has to so many other Obama-era bureaucratic excesses. But, through September, returning schoolchildren complained about their new, insufficient lunches. Teachers and parents who took up their cause did so in statist terms, beseeching the commissars to raise the mandated calorie limits. Very few did so on first-principle grounds — which is to say the argument that a system in which a centralized bureaucracy attempts to impose a uniform menu on a nation of 300 million people is nuts, and cannot survive. In theory, education is the responsibility of local school districts in sovereign states. Yet somehow a bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture wound up with a monopoly on what your kids eat.

Where do you go to vote out the Commissar of School Lunches? Even if Romney wins in November, I doubt this will be anybody's big priority. Statists well understand that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life. Sometimes your team has to take a time-out for a couple of years, but, even when they do, all the departments and agencies and bureaus are still in place, hyper-regulating away. I mean, how often does the party of small government actually abolish anything? ...

Ever since I was a kid, and began to understand such matters, I have despised the concept of 'First Lady', for just the reason Steyn mentions: I am, and have always been, a republican.

'Using armed violence in any context is flat out wrong...'

CSGV Believes This Girl Was Wrong -- it's logically impossible to reason with "liberals", for they are (at best) willfully insane.

Still, isn't it interesting to see "liberals" making moral assertions of absolutes?

(h/t: Dissecting Leftism)

Vandals desecrate pile of manure with Democrat Party headquarters

Michael Egnor: Vandals desecrate pile of manure with Democrat Party headquarters

On the one hand, I wouldn't put it past the Democrats themselves to have done this. But, let's take it as given that some Republicans, or at least non-Democrats, dumped the manure. Now, for sure, dumping a pile of manure at the headquartes of the "other" party isn't a very respectful thing to do. But, notice -- and in contrast to what Democrats, or their supporters, so typically to do -- no one was killed or even injured, nothing was damaged, broken or destroyed, and nothing was stolen. Plus, manure is actually valuable, unlike the sort of trash "liberals" leave behind.

The Problem of Evil

I haven't yet read/digested it myself, but I can tell already that it's deep and insightful (and carefully explicates things I also have said, in brief, about the so-called "problem of evil") --
Kristor: The Problem of Evil

An Algebraical Conundrum

Michael Flynn: An Algebraical Conundrum (a Socratic-like dialogue)

'The media loved Obama to death...'

Michael Egnor: "The media loved Obama to death..." -- "... But Obama has always been a media phantom, created entirely by the pundits of the Acela corridor. He's a liberal cipher [*]. If not for the media, Obama would be not showing up for roll-call votes in the Illinois senate, instead of not showing up for the debate in Denver."

(*) Thus, the call and need for The Lightworker's Prayer

Liberals must have decoder rings to help them navigate the world

Kathy Shaidle: Liberals must have decoder rings to help them navigate the world, however awkwardly -- "So if I understand this woman correctly:

She’s mad that they tried to keep gays out of the Boy Scouts AND she’s mad that they took too long to kick out the ones that got in, and molested little boys."

Missing Richard Widmark

Kathy Shaidle: Missing Richard Widmark

I'm not crippled, though my mother was; so, I am confident that I understand, as well as any able-bodied person can, what living as a cripple is like.

And, I totally agree with the comments of "FFF’s resident crippled correspondent".

"Genuinely disabled people like the blind, Paralyzed, severely retarded etc. are not helped by wasting resources on the faux cripple. In fact the only people helped by our current state of affairs are the tax sucking bureaucrats, lawyers and “service” providers who are merely bilking the system."

A widespread, and particularly obnoxious, example of this is the reserved "handicapped parking" spots. Pay attention to who parks in those spots -- they are almost never actually disabled persons. They are almost always the "faux crippled" who get themselves declared "disabled" purely for the benefit of the reserved parking.

As far as it goes

One of those "gamers" who claims to be a Christian: Debasing marriage -- There are more ways to lie, to deceive others (or oneself), than simply to say what is not-true. And, in fact, the "best" lies, the ones that most successfully deceive their audience, are those which say nothing that is in itself false.

What this 'Dalrock' always seems to forget to mention is that men created and promoted and cheered-on and empowered 'feminism' and the so-called Sexual Revolution. And it wasn't *just* the ivory-tower leftists who did this; Joe Average -- the very same Joe Average who is now bitching about the wholly predictable result -- was also willingly complicit, and continues to be, in the training up of whole generations of American women to be disposable tramps, to be nothing more than sterile masturbatory aids to his passing whims.

These "manosphere" whingers are forever bitching because "there are no good women left to marry" -- by "good" they mean both "hot" and "chaste" (*) -- even as they assert for themselves the need and the (moral) right to "test drive" any women they are "dating", so as to ensure that they are "sexually compatible", before actually maybe thinking about marrying her, someday, if the creeks don't rise.

In other words, they don't want to marry one woman and limit their sexual expression to her alone: they want unfettered and indiscriminate access to one of the benefits of marriage, without any of the concomitant costs or commitments.

Even before the term "dating" came to almost always mean "engaging in pre-marital sex with", "dating" wasn't about marriage -- the word for that is 'courting'. Even in the supposedly more innocent 1950s, the most innocent meaning "dating" ever had was "let's 'hang out' and see what happens" ... as though it hasn't been very well known, since about the beginning of time, what happens when men and women, not married to one another, "hang out".

(*) But "hotness" and "chastity" are polar opposites.


Edit:

In case Gentle Reader has not yet understood why I go on about the damnable hypocrisy of the "gamers" of the "manosphere" (*), consider this short post by 'Dalrock': Mentu’s moving vasectomy post ... and especially the "moving" post to which the title refers: Vasectomy Part 1.

(*) I mean, even aside from the fact that "game" is intentionally constructed on a false, and indeed wholly imaginary, anthropology: "evolutionary psychology".

Liberal Logic 101

Liberal Logic 101

A co-worker sent me this one, which I especially liked -- Re-Elect Obama…

This one sums it up fairly well -- What's the difference ...


This one also sums it up well -- Who is human…

Concerning Christian "hate" -- Just to be clear…

On "non-judgmentalism" -- Furious Liberal Friday

On police brutality -- The Tale of Two Kings… -- if there is ever a(n explicit) political coup in this country, it is more likely to be the civilian police departments, rather than the military, who provide the bully-boy muscle behind it. And the "mainstream media", what's left of it, will provide the cheer-leaders.

On getting what you ask for -- Life’s pleasant ironies…

On logical consistency -- Smokers rights…

On public perceptions -- We can trust the media…

On linguistic consistency -- Definition #1

Bombshell allegations against New York organ procurement entity

Lydia McGrew: Bombshell allegations against New York organ procurement entity

Unfortunately, most people have made a 'god' of their own time-bound physical lives -- while ignoring their eternal lives -- and so do not care about this sort of thing. And, in fact, they will hate those who try to bring this sort of thing to light, rather than hating the guilty parties.

Until, of course, it happens to them; but then it's too late.


Earlier posts on this topic --

The Organ Transplant Industry is Immoral

'Bioethics' and the Houben Case