Mrs. du Toit Weblog - WAP Version
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Snow Job
From Dean Esmay:
Resolved: Condoleezza Rice was democratically elected as United States Secretary of State.
It’s a false dilemna fallacy (an “apples to oranges"comparison).
Dean raises the point to define his statement that Hitler was not democratically elected, because it was a parliamentary system, not a plebescite for Hitler.
False.
The appropriate question to test Dean’s theory would be to say:
Resolved: Winston Churchill was democratically elected as Prime Minister of Britain.
Substitute Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair for Winston Churchill, and you have the same question.
Secretary of State is an appointment. Since we are not a democracy (we are a Representive Republic), none of our Presidents are “democratically elected” by The People, and other cabinet positions and posts are appointed by our Representatives. Our President is “democratically elected” by the electors (in the Electoral College), who (in some states) are a winner-take-all, not apportioned by popular vote.
Hitler was head of his Party, in exactly the way that Tony Blair or Winston Churchill were. A vote for his Party, was a vote for him, albeit indirectly… but indirectly is relative to the office, the understanding of who is head of that party, and the way that majorities determine the winner.
When the British got rid of Churchill, they voted for another party, but the end result was a “no” vote for Churchill.
The Nazi party lost 34 seats in the November 1932 election but remained the Reichstag’s largest party.The most shocking move of the early election campaign was to send the SA to support a Rotfront action against the transport agency and in support of a strike.
After chancellor Papen left office, he secretly told Hitler that he still held considerable sway with president Hindenburg and that he would make Hitler chancellor as long as he, Papen, could be the vice chancellor. On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of a coalition government of the NSDAP-DNVP-Centre Party. The SA and SS led torchlight parades throughout Berlin. In the coalition government three members of the cabinet were Nazis: Hitler, Wilhelm Frick (Minister of the Interior) and Hermann Göring (Minister Without Portfolio).
From Scholastic:
On the evening of Jan. 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler, the newly appointed Chancellor of Germany, stood in a government building at an open window watching a torchlight parade of 25,000 Nazi troops march through the streets of Berlin. Thousands of Germans cheered as they marched by, and Hitler was giddy with delight. “No power on Earth will get me out of here alive,” someone heard him say.
Earlier that day, the President of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg, had appointed Hitler Chancellor (similar to Prime Minister). Having won more than than 37 percent of the vote in the previous year’s legislative elections, Hitler’s Nazi party had enough power to effectively paralyze Germany’s democratic government, which had been in place since 1919. Hindenburg hoped that by appointing Hitler, he could satisfy Nazi legislators and break the deadlock, while maintaining control of the government behind the scenes.
To suggest that “Hitler wasn’t democratically elected” is say that the Reichstag didn’t have a majority in a parliamentary system. Had that party NOT been the majority, he would not have been “appointed.”
History | (0) View Comments
Bliss
I have seen the YouTube video about the Obama voters on a number of websites (here and here, for example).
There are lots of different takes on the video, with some suggesting that the interviews were cherry-picked. The Zogby poll data doesn’t seem to jive with that theory.
Some have posited that the media did a snow job, “not doing their job” showing the downside of the Obama/Biden ticket. Others are making comparisons to how Hitler achieved national popularity.
Actually, I’m quite happy with the poll and the short video, and find comfort in it. If the data is correct (and I see no reason to think that the data is any more skewed than a normal polling would be) then the American people didn’t knowingly elect a socialist, didn’t knowingly elect someone with no qualifications to be president, and didn’t knowingly support a man to be the Leader of the Free World who has no qualms about associating with terrorists and communists.
Yes, that’s comforting, because while they did a very stupid thing, they did it from a position of ignorance, rather than malice.
What’s been interesting to me is how this “change” we’re supposed to be getting is nothing like change at all (well, not that I expected anything different… I’m just amazed at how blatantly un-change it is so soon). Of all the names being discussed for cabinet appointments, they couldn’t get any more “old boy network” than they’ve been, nor is/was anything about Obama’s proposals any different from the typical, tax-the-rich-and-give-to-others policies of the Democrats for the last 100 years… but if you didn’t actually read about his proposals then you wouldn’t know that. Further, if you didn’t know the voting record and policy positions of Democrats, you wouldn’t see them as “same failed crap, different day.”
So we have ignorance upon ignorance, with the net result of a progressive in the White House.
What I believe is a reasonable counter-argument is the fact that if McCain had won, the same type of survey and data would be available. The majority of people would be just as clueless. Back when Kerry lost to Bush, there were tons of stories about how the average IQ of Bush voters was 98, and the average IQ of Kerry voters was 100. Woo Hoo!
So maybe this time the percentages were reversed and the average IQ of the voters, for the guy who won, dropped a few percentage points. Maybe that’s a trend.
I’ve been thinking about IQ a lot recently. I thought about it before I wrote this post, and I’ve written about the subject a number of times in the past (from different perspectives).
You can broadcast the truth, but you can’t make them drink.
The information about Obama was out there. While he was a fairly blank-slate, what was known about him was available (and not at all flattering), if you spent five minutes trying to find it. I don’t buy into the nonsense that the press was responsible for the snow job. Even if the media had presented the whole picture of Obama, I don’t think people would have paid any attention, because they don’t pay attention. People are responsible for their own ignorance. There is a point at which ignorance becomes willful ignorance. I’d like to say that you have to work pretty hard to be that stupid, but that’s not really true, given the IQ data of the nation.
Frequency | Options | |||
| 25% below 89 | 8th-Grade to 12th-Grade | Assembler, food service, nurse’s aide | ||
| 50% below 100 | 8th-Grade to 1-2 years of College. | Clerk, teller, Walmart | ||
| 100 to 111 | 1 in 2 above 100 | 12th-Grade to College Degree | Police officer, machinist, sales |
The above IQ distributions represent 95% of the American People. Those in the first two distributions represent 45%, with “normal” making up the other 50%.
Those people wouldn’t understand the fundamentals of economics if Thomas Sowell lived in their homes for six months, and had their undivided attention. They couldn’t define capitalism, let alone compare/contrast it to socialism or communism. They are incapable of understanding terms like “wealth distribution,” nor its origins or long-term effects.
The blogosphere is, in general, a tainted pool. If we focus on blogs that are more political and social commentary (as opposed to the on-line journals found on sites like FaceBook), the average IQ of the author and the readers is not normal. The fact that there are endless theories about how to reach “The American People” to do a better job next time, isn’t surprising, but it is tainted by the audience and the author’s IQ distribution.
The appeal of a candidate to people in the normal range amounts to “We’ll give you better paybacks and do a better job making life miserable for all those people who are keeping you down, and taking more than their share of the limited supply of money.”
Explain infinite money supply to someone with an IQ of 98. OK, let me restate that: explain it in such as way as they’ll understand it, assimilate it for use in evaluating public policy, and be able to use that information to evaluate the wisdom (or lack thereof) of a particular candidate’s vague policy descriptions.
I mentioned before that Daughter was engaged in a brief political discussion with one of her classmates at college. The conversation ended when Daughter heard the response, “So what if he is a communist? What’s wrong with communism?”
Daughter, not being in the normal IQ distribution, ended the conversation at that point.
People complain about the educational standards of this country (and I’m one of them, but for entirely different reasons), thinking that questions like “What’s wrong with communism?” would somehow disappear if people were better educated. That is flatly false. They have to be capable of being better educated and 95% of us are not.
What we can do, that we used to do much better, is tell people “Communism is bad” enough times for them to remember it, but they’ll have no ability to explain why that is.
Communism is bad
Communism is bad
Communism is bad
Communism is bad
Communism is bad
The premise of communism (its foundation) is an ignorant populace. Well, every society has that at the get-go (except the Ashkenazis). We can make it a wee-bit worse, but we can’t make it a whole lot better. It also has at its foundation a reliance on the prosperity and infrastructure of Capitalism. Communism BEGINS with Capitalism. It can’t last a day without it… because communism is not a productive economic system. That is known. That is accepted as part of its definition. It is incapable of producing or making wealth, or building any sort of infrastructure. It is a leech system, whereby the wealth created through Capitalism is used until it runs out, but no more will be made (and no infrastructure maintenance will occur).
What happens when communism has expended all the resources was not known. There was some speculation that a return to a Capitalist system for the cycle to repeat would be required, but how that would occur, given that a given society has gotten used to the laziness of communism, might not be able to produce enough Capitalists to regrow the wealth. A period of dormancy will likely be required, when we are neither Capitalist nor Communist (Barbarism is the most apt description or “Dark Ages")… sorta/kinda like the period from the Fall of Rome to the Englighment… about 1600 years, if history is any guide.
The Russians are currently in their “regrow” period and their leaders seem to be somewhat hopeful that they can get the cycle to something below 1600 years, but then it will probably only have enough regrowth to last a decade, instead of the 80 years it took them to consume everything in sight before.
The Party’s Over
When I’ve expressed my belief that our economic power-house-party is over, it’s seen as me being poopy… that I’ve succumbed to my dark, gloomy side. It’s no such thing, although thinking about it too much can have that result. We didn’t go full-bore into communism the way the Russians did, but we started at about the same time (there’s a decent theory that FDR might have been quite aware that his social policies were socialist and destructive in nature, but it was the only defense against all-out communism of the period).
Our schedule has just been a little slower than the Russians, because we’ve been enjoying communism-lite.
Let me explain that a bit, by looking at some of Obama’s suggestions… the best one (and my personal favorite) is that we “raise taxes on the wealthy and reduce taxes on the poor.”
(Well, despite the blindingly obvious slight-of-hand that we can’t possibly reduce taxes on people who don’t pay any.)
No, Obama is quite clever. We’ll get around the problem of reducing taxes on the poor by GIVING them money.
Brilliant!
The timing of all of this, coinciding with the Baby Boomers’ retirement is double-dab-super-brilliant. (One-third of the existing workforce will no longer be earning and paying taxes… it is currently one-fifth of adults in retirement.)
One of my favorite arguments about Obama’s proposed tax hikes on the rich is the one about how “taxes on the wealthy were higher (94%) during the Eisenhower administration.”
It is about this point that I want to take my Daughter’s response to the argument and runnnnnnnnnn awayyyyyyyyy.
OK, so let’s look at that comparison. If Obama is only proposing tax rates on the wealthy in the 39% range and during the Eisenhower period they were 94%, that would mean that the percentage of taxes paid under an Obama administration would be lower, right?
If you think this is a trick question, it isn’t.
Taxes are not paid on gross income. Taxes are paid on net income. If your gross is $100.00, you don’t pay tax on that amount.
Let’s say your net income was $5.00 (and net income is the amount of money you made after you subtracted your costs/expenses from the amount you took-in in sales).
The tax you pay would be $4.70, not $94.00 (which would be applying the tax rate to the gross, not the net). The actual tax paid (if we assume 95% of a product’s price is cost, not profit) was 4.7%.
But since the 1960s, Congress has closed tax loopholes. What that really means, when we turn off Orwellian-speak, is that Congress has spent the last 40 years removing categories of expenditures that were previously allowed as deductions. You can’t claim them as deductions anymore, and without them, your $5.00 in net income quickly becomes $50.00 in net income (raising the applied tax rate from 4.7% to 40.7%).
No one ever made bucks without spending bucks, so 94% was not the tax rate that was paid! They paid 94% on the net.
During the Eisenhower administration “when taxes were much higher than they are now,” the reality is that the real tax paid was nothing close to 94%. You could deduct the full cost of operating a car, the full cost of entertainment and advertising, the full cost of labor, the full cost of medical and retirement insurance paid to your employees, and the full cost of interest on personal and secured loans (not just your real property). You could also claim a loss for just about anything, including things now defined as “hobbies” (which are business ventures that lose money for more than two consecutive years, a la the entire American auto industry). In addition, you could employ various methods of realizing Capital acquisitions, spreading them out over peak years, and taking them during years when profits were lower.
Those tax loopholes have been closed, so the real rate of taxation, although less in actual percent, is higher in actual application.
We have the highest rate of real and applied corporate tax in the industrialized world!
Now how long will that wealth last when we start spreading it around?
If we tax someone’s wealth (what they’ve actually earned, net of costs), how much will they have left next year… Well, it will be what they had, less what we took. So how much will we have the year after that? Less than we took last year, plus a decline in what they make in the new year, because they had fewer dollars to make wealth with [dangling participle alert!].
It takes money to make money, so the smaller the pot of money to make money with, the smaller the result will be. Our pots keep getting smaller from year to year.
It doesn’t take more than year to get to a point of diminishing returns. (That doesn’t include the John Gault effect either.)
When the wealth of the “wealthy” is spent, where are we going to find the wealth so we can continue to distribute wealth to those more deserving and in need?
If history has been a guide, it will require that we redefine what wealthy is. What was once a tax on only the people making more than $250,000, will become a tax on people earning less than that… and on, and on, until all the wealth is gone.
That’s why the Democrats are proposing that we go after things like university endowments, church and non-profit tax-exempt status, and private IRA/401k accounts, closing the loopholes so that people can no longer use/deposit that money pre-tax, or claim them as deductions to reduce the amount on which tax is applied. After that, it will be a requirement to set aside that money, in higher FICA percentages, which aren’t a tax (if you live in Orwell-land).
When you take the money that people have to make wealth, there will be less of it to go around. Using the bathtub analogy, instead of more water coming into our bathtub to keep up with what is going out the open drain, you shut off the water supply. We’re incapable of plugging the drain, because people spend/consume, so eventually our bathtub has little or no water in it from which to spread. What tax rates and tinkering into the free market do is determine how much money is coming into our bathtub. The water still empties out at the same rate.
Obama has proposed that 5% of the people will be supporting the other 95%. Just how long do you think the wealth supply will last, factoring in diminishing returns?
Oh, about long enough for The People to vote in the Republicans again, and then the Republicans will get blamed for the economic crisis, just as Bush did, when he inherited a country with little water in it.
But the next Republican will inherit an even lower water level… and on, and on.
Our economic prosperity period, this amazing period of the last 30 years (with only small dips in the last 70 years), is over. There is no “economic recovery.” This is the new normal.
And about 95% of normal Americans have no ability to understand how that happened, or that they caused it.
Communism is bad
Communism is bad
Communism is bad
Communism is bad
Communism is bad
This is why ignorance is bliss, because you can be blindly happy not knowing that a trainwreck is about to occur. What train?
Money, Econ, & Numbers | (10) View Comments
Ammo Day
It’s today, so don’t forget! Details here.
Oh, and it’s Kim’s birthday, too. Amazing coincidence, huh?
Musing | (0) View Comments