Edgetho
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- Mar 27, 2012
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A big part of obama's "Statists of The Union" dictum will center around this topic. You can expect his OFA minions to invade (Mau-Mau, actually.... Read: Tom Wolfe) our beloved message board with all sorts of misdirections and outright falsifications.
These people need to be understood. If you don't understand your enemy, it makes it difficult to defeat him.
And yes, I didn't use the word 'opponent' on purpose.
Believe me when I tell you, WE are not their opponents in their minds. They're fighting a War and we're trying to make nice with them. Well, except for me.
The 3 Types of "Income Inequality" Religious Extremists
With disturbing regularity, pundits great and meager decry a familiar and reviled foe of progress known as "income inequality."
Under the rubric that income inequality is inherently evil, unfair, or overly capitalistic, three distinct sub-sects of this odd religion have emerged.
All these quotes have been <snipped> Please go to the link for the whole story
These people need to be understood. If you don't understand your enemy, it makes it difficult to defeat him.
And yes, I didn't use the word 'opponent' on purpose.
Believe me when I tell you, WE are not their opponents in their minds. They're fighting a War and we're trying to make nice with them. Well, except for me.
The 3 Types of "Income Inequality" Religious Extremists
With disturbing regularity, pundits great and meager decry a familiar and reviled foe of progress known as "income inequality."
Under the rubric that income inequality is inherently evil, unfair, or overly capitalistic, three distinct sub-sects of this odd religion have emerged.
The "Wall Street Needs More Regulation" Tribe:
Tyler Cowan of George Mason University is emblematic of this group. Cowan is concerned with the growing disparity of wealth between the top one percent and the remainder of society. He believes it is linked to structural problems with our society -- especially Wall Street's ne'er-do-well financial engineers -- that can only be solved by big government.
In 2011, for instance, Cowan wrote that he was unsure whether "the new financial regulation bill [Dodd-Frank] will help" and offered several endorsements of its key features. Cowan seems to have missed the century-long tidal wave of regulation already levied upon the financial industry with government inevitably destroying that which it claims to protect (housing, student loans, etc.).
The thousand-page Dodd-Frank bill -- which was never read by lawmakers -- confers immense and unconstitutional powers on an unelected bureaucrat
All these quotes have been <snipped> Please go to the link for the whole story
The "Robots Will Steal All Our Jobs" Tribe:
Mike Shedlock is the archetype of the robophobes, publishing one fear-mongering article after another, seemingly on a weekly basis. A sampling of his headlines may help offer some perspective into the mindset of this particular brand of Luddite:
Meet "Baxter" the Robot Out to Get Your Minimum-Wage, No Benefits, Part-Time Job, Because He's Still Much Cheaper; Fed Cannot Win a Fight Against Robots
Carl the Robot Bartender Mixes Drinks and Chats With Customers
Future of Medicine: Meet Sedasys - Your New Robot Anesthesiologist
Robotic Outsourcing; Food Preparation Robots Invade China, Japan, US; Who is to Blame, and What Can be Done About It?
$210,000 Cow Milking Robot; Presenting the "Astronaut A4 - A Natural Way of Milking"; How Far Off is the Completely Robotic Farm?
There are more. But the last one is particularly striking: since the dawn of human history, increased automation has marked the cultivation of food. From men tilling fields and picking crops to massive farm machinery and crop-dusters, mechanization of farming has improved the lives of billions of people.
And somehow "robots" will disrupt that trend?
Each new innovation -- a robot is but one example -- creates entire new ecosystems to plan, design, build, and service.
The 1730 invention of the flying shuttle dramatically accelerated the process of weaving and production of cloth. This innovation in turn led to incredible new opportunities for entrepreneurs to supply raw materials, service machinery, create new families of finished products, and the like.
You may know it as the Industrial Revolution.
The "Statist" Tribe:
Paul Krugman, on the other hand, belongs to the dogmatic school of progressive thought. In this case, you can read progressive as Doctrinaire Marxist.
Krugman, whose inane posturing and reflexive hypocrisy have been thorougly exposed as pure, unvarnished idiocy by historian Niall Ferguson, pretends to belong to the Cowan tribe.
But his cheerleading of Communists like Bill DeBlasio gives away the game. Krugman is a Statist; his religion is government; and any of his bleatings -- income inequality or otherwise -- are designed to lobby for increasingly centralized and authoritarian government.
As the French painfully discovered with their one year flirtation with Marxism, collectivism can't work, won't work, and has never worked in all of human history.
And somehow Paul Krugman and his fellow ideologues missed that part of history class.
What's 1,000 times worse than income inequality? Income equality.
In truth, North Korea represents the ideal for those who fight for income equality with its one man at the top worth tens of billions of dollars while the entire civilian population starves, largely impoverished.