The US Economy Grew Fastest With No Fed And No Income Tax

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/09/2013 21:00 -0400

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 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-08-09/us-economy-grew-fastest-no-fed-and-no-income-tax

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

How would America ever survive without the central planners in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve?  What in the world would we do if there was no income tax and no IRS?  Could the U.S. economy possibly keep from collapsing under such circumstances?  The mainstream media would have us believe that unless we have someone "to pull the levers" our economy would descend into utter chaos, but the truth is that the best period of economic growth in U.S. history occurred during a time when there was no income tax and no Federal Reserve. 

Between the Civil War and 1913, the U.S. economy experienced absolutely explosive growth.  The free market system thrived and the rest of the world looked at us with envy.  The federal government was very limited in size, there was no income tax for most of that time and there was no central bank.  To many Americans, it would be absolutely unthinkable to have such a society today, but it actually worked very, very well.  Without the inventions and innovations that came out of that period, the world would be a far different place today.

It is amazing what can happen when the government just gets out of the way.  Check out all of the wonderful things that Wikipedia says happened for the U.S. economy during those years...

The rapid economic development following the Civil War laid the groundwork for the modern U.S. industrial economy. By 1890, the USA leaped ahead of Britain for first place in manufacturing output.

An explosion of new discoveries and inventions took place, a process called the "Second Industrial Revolution." Railroads greatly expanded the mileage and built stronger tracks and bridges that handled heavier cars and locomotives, carrying far more goods and people at lower rates.

Refrigeration railroad cars came into use. The telephone, phonograph, typewriter and electric light were invented. By the dawn of the 20th century, cars had begun to replace horse-drawn carriages.

Parallel to these achievements was the development of the nation's industrial infrastructure. Coal was found in abundance in the Appalachian Mountains from Pennsylvania south to Kentucky. Oil was discovered in western Pennsylvania; it was mainly used for lubricants and for kerosene for lamps. Large iron ore mines opened in the Lake Superior region of the upper Midwest. Steel mills thrived in places where these coal and iron ore could be brought together to produce steel. Large copper and silver mines opened, followed by lead mines and cement factories.

In 1913 Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, a step in the process that became known as mass-production.

When hard working, industrious people are given freedom to pursue their dreams, great things tend to happen.  The truth is that we were all designed to create, to invent, to build, and to trade with one another.  We all have something that we can contribute to society, and when families are strong and the invisible hand of the free market is allowed to work, societies tend to prosper.

It is not a coincidence that the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was between the Civil War and 1913.  The following information comes fromWikipedia...

The Gilded Age saw the greatest period of economic growth in American history. After the short-lived panic of 1873, the economy recovered with the advent of hard money policies and industrialization.

From 1869 to 1879, the US economy grew at a rate of 6.8% for real GDP and 4.5% for real GDP per capita, despite the panic of 1873.  The economy repeated this period of growth in the 1880s, in which the wealth of the nation grew at an annual rate of 3.8%, while the GDP was also doubled.

Wouldn't you like U.S. GDP to double over the course of a decade now?

So why don't we go back to a system like that?

In 1913, the Federal Reserve and a permanent national income tax were introduced.  Today, the unelected central planners at the Federal Reserve totally run our financial system and the U.S. tax code is about 13 miles long.  The value of our currency has declined by more than 96 percent since 1913, and the size of our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

Meanwhile, control freak bureaucrats seemingly run everything.  Almost every business decision is heavily influenced either by taxes or by the millions of laws, rules and regulations that are sucking the life out of our economic system.

My favorite example of how suffocating red tape in America has become is the magician out in Missouri that was forced by the Obama administration to submita 32 page "disaster plan" for the rabbit that he uses during his magic shows for kids.

It is no wonder why we don't have any economic growth.  The central planners in the federal government are killing our economy.

And the central planners over at the Federal Reserve are killing our financial system.  In school we are taught that the Fed was created to bring stability to our financial system, but the truth is that they have been responsible for financial bubble after financial bubble, and now Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has created the largest bond bubble in the history of the world.  When that thing bursts, and it will, we are going to see financial carnage on an unprecedented scale.

Unfortunately, the truth is that the Federal Reserve never has been looking out for the interests of the American people.  It was created by the big banks and it has always worked very hard to benefit the big banks.  During the Fed era, the big banks have become the most powerful economic entities on the entire planet.  Our entire economy is now based on debt, and the big banks are at the very center of this debt spiral.  The following is an excerpt from a recent article by Paul B. Farrell...

Today’s world includes four Wall Street banks each with assets over $1 trillion, each more than Goldman. Plus eight other big global banks each have over $2 trillion total assets, including, among the 100 largest, Barclays, HSBC, Deutsche, ICB-China and Japan’s Mitsubishi.

Yes, this new world is changing fast. Back in 2008 the world’s financial banks were in ruins. Wall Street sunk into virtually bankruptcy. Goldman and its Wall Street too-big-to-fail co-conspirators had trashed the global economy, triggered a virtual depression, and Wall Street’s casinos lost over $10 trillion of Main Street retirement funds.

And as we saw back in 2008, the Federal Reserve is going to do whatever is necessary to prop up Wall Street.  Most Americans never even heard about this, but during the last financial crisis the Fed secretly loaned 16 trillion dollars to the big banks.  Those loans were nearly interest-free and those banks knew that they could get basically as much nearly interest-free money as they wanted from the Fed.

So how much nearly interest-free money did the Fed loan to normal Americans?

Not a single penny.

That would be bad enough, but it is also important to remember that since 2008 the Fed has actually been paying banks NOT to lend money to the rest of us.

What is it going to take for the American people to start demanding that the Fed be abolished?  They are absolutely destroying our financial system.

Meanwhile, the central planners in the Obama administration have been doing their part as well.  During the second quarter of this year, the number of Americans working between 30 and 34 hours per week fell by 146,500.  During that same time period, the number of Americans working between 25 and 29 hours rose by 119,000.

Why is this happening?

Well, the Obamacare employer mandate will apply to workers that work at least 30 hours each week, so employers are starting to cut back on the hours their employees are getting in order to comply with the law.

But this is just one example out of thousands, and most Americans already know that the U.S. economyhas been crumbling for many years.

In fact, things have gotten so bad that even 53 percentof all Democrats believe that the American Dream isdead even though Barack Obama is residing in the White House.

But this is just the beginning.  Things are going to get much, much worse.  We are going down the same path that Greece has gone, and the unemployment rate in Greece has just hit a new all-time record high of 27.6 percent.

That is where the U.S. is headed eventually.  Decades of very foolish decisions are catching up with us.

The primary reason why all of this is happening is debt.  As a society, we simply have way, way, way too much debt.

The biggest offender, of course, is the federal government.  Since 1970, federal spending has grownnearly 12 times as rapidly as median household income has, and since the year 2000 the size of the U.S. national debt has grown by more than 11 trillion dollars.

When government debt gets too large, it has a profoundly negative effect on an economy.  The following is an excerpt from an outstanding article by Lacy H. Hunt, a Ph.D. economist...

*****

Here are the studies, starting with the one with the broadest implications:

1. "Government Size and Growth: A Survey and Interpretation of the Evidence," from Journal of Economic Surveys. Published in April 2011, Swedish economists Andreas Bergh and Magnus Henrekson (both of the Research Institute of Industrial Economics at Lund University) found a "significant negative correlation" between size of government and economic growth. Specifically, "an increase in government size by 10 percentage points is associated with a 0.5% to 1% lower annual growth rate."
2. "The Impact of High and Growing Government Debt on Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation for the Euro Area," in European Central Bank working paper, Number 1237, August 2010. Cristina Checherita and Philipp Rother found that a government-debt-to-GDP ratio above the threshold of 90-100% has a "deleterious" impact on long-term growth. Additionally, the impact of debt on growth is nonlinear – as the government debt rises to higher and higher levels, the adverse growth consequences accelerate.
3. The Real Effects of Debt, published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland in August 2011. Stephen G. Cecchetti, M. S.Mohanty, and Fabrizio Zampolli determined that "beyond a certain level, debt is bad for growth. For government debt, the number is about 85% of GDP."
4. "Public Debt Overhangs: Advanced-Economy Episodes Since 1800,"by Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent R. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 26, Number 3, Summer 2012, pages 69-86. The authors identified 26 cases of "debt overhangs," which they define as public-debt-to-GDP levels exceeding 90% for at least five years. In spite of the many idiosyncratic differences in these situations, economic growth fell in all but three of the 26 cases. All of the instances, which lasted an average of 23 years, are included in the paper. They found that average annual growth is 1.2% lower for countries with a debt overhang than for countries without. The long duration of such episodes means that cumulative shortfall from the debt excess—i.e., several years in a row of subpar economic growth—is potentially massive.

*****

But it isn't just federal government debt that is the problem.  The rest of us have way too much debt as well.

If you can believe it, the ratio of private debt to GDP was 273.3% for the twelve months ending in the first quarter of 2013.

That is an astounding figure.

And as Hunt explained, having too much private debt is also very bad for an economy...

In Too Much Finance, published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in March 2011, Jean Louis Arcand, Enrico Berkes, and Ugo Panizza found a negative effect on output growth when credit to the private sector reaches 104-110% of GDP. The strongest adverse effects are for credit over 160% of GDP.

The second is the 2011 BIS study authored by Cecchetti, Mohanty, and Zampolli. They found that private debt levels become "cancerous" (in BIS economic advisor Cecchetti's own words) at 175% (90% for corporations and 85% for households)—just slightly more than the UNCTAD study.

When you add our private debt to GDP ratio of 273 percent to our federal debt to GDP ratio of 101 percent, you get a grand total of 384 percent.

This is how we have funded the false prosperity of the past couple of decades.  Essentially, we have been putting our good times on a credit card.

And as anyone that has ever tried to live on credit knows, the good times eventually run out.

But this is what the Federal Reserve was designed to do.  It was designed to get the U.S. government trapped in a debt spiral from which there would never be any escape.

It is not an accident that our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Fed was originally created.  This is what the bankers wanted the system to do.

They wanted a system that would extract wealth from all of us through taxes, transfer it to the government, and then transfer it to them through interest payments.

We never needed a central bank, we never needed the IRS and we never needed an income tax.  America would be doing just fine without any of them.

But instead, America chose to go down the path of collectivization and central planning, and now we are heading toward the biggest economic disaster in the history of mankind.

Average:

tweedle dee and tweedle dum, the world over

Pascal
on September 16, 2013 at 1:55 am said:
In part because a more extended version of Reagan’s 1964 stump speech called “A Time for Choosing” that included lines you may recall, “Let me suggest there is no left and right. There’s only an up or down…”

Reagan updated it and delivered the revision circa 1983, but it seems to have been lost. And that, IMHO, is a terrible disservice to the country.

As best as I can recall, Mr. Reagan likened the accepted Marxist political spectrum of left and right to the ups and downs of a scaffold.

"The Left would gain control, and they’d pile up programs on their side of the platform. The foundation beneath the platform would begin to sink from the weight of their efforts. This resulted in the platform being tilted noticeably. It made the voters feel uncomfortable. So the voters would turn to the Right to straighten things out.

Well the right might try to prop up the left side a bit, and refill the foundation, but in doing so, they’d dig a hole under their side of the platform next. Those who gain power always have interests who want something back — usually in the form of legislation that favors them or taxes their competitors — for their support. Thus the weight of these efforts and favors repaid cause the platform to tip to the right this time. That sinking feeling leaves the voters uncomfortable again.

So the voters would then put the Left back into power. And the Left would begin to fill in the hole under the right, but pile up more programs on their side and drive their side of the platform even deeper into the foundation of America’s liberties.

And so it would go on, back and forth, Left and Right, Left then Right. Pretty soon the citizens of this great nation would find themselves in a pit of despair; a pit dug by the machinations of those who built up the oppressive weight of government. Government has been built up incrementally, one law after another, ruling upon ruling, practice becoming entrenched policy. And it was all done under the guise of representing a left or a right side, but both headed in one direction — into the pit of tyranny. All those vested interests would insist it stay that way. Worse, as they’d get more demanding they’d cloak it with fairness. They were owed all that they’d “earned” for their efforts to gain “their people” power in the past.

At some point the vast majority of Americans will insist on climbing out of the hole dug for them by this political machine — that single minded and ruthless incremental see-saw of power-seeking achieved by eating away at the foundation of our liberties. Taxes and regulations and busybodyness that is in no way justified in a nation dedicated to individual freedom.

Americans were passed a birthright containing the fresh air of freedom. It is what our Founders had envisioned, and it is what our fathers fought to keep. And it’s pretty much still been available to most Americans for around 200 years. If we do not stop the digging soon, somewhere along the way, Americans will demand to be let out of this pit. May God bless them then as He has in the past."

It seems to me that the TEA party movement is the living example of what he was suggesting. It is too bad that its members think so lowly of their efforts that they keep insisting on trying to reform the GOP instead of dumping it before it buries them.

Democrats also want War

“One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line.” Ex-President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998

“If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program.” Ex-President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

“Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.” Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Feb 18, 1998

“He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.” Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

“[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.” Letter to President Clinton, signed by Senators Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and others Oct. 9, 1998

“Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998

“Hussein has chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies.” Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999

“There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf War status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.” Letter to President Bush, Signed by Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL,) and others, December 5, 2001

“We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandated of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.” Sen. Carl Levin (D, MI), Sept. 19, 2002

“We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.” Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

“We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.” Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002

“The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.” Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002

“I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force if necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.” Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002

“Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.” Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

“There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.” Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002

“He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years, every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This he has refused to do” Rep. Henry Waxman (D, CA), Oct. 10, 2002

“In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.” Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002

“Saddam Hussein’s regime represents a grave threat to America and our allies, including our vital ally, Israel. For more than two decades, Saddam Hussein has sought weapons of mass destruction through every available means. We know that he has chemical and biological weapons. He has already used them against his neighbors and his own people, and is trying to build more. We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons, and we know that each day he gets closer to achieving that goal.” Senator John Edwards (D-NC), October 10, 2002

“While the distance between the United States and Iraq is great, Saddam Hussein’s ability to use his chemical and biological weapons against us is not constrained by geography – it can be accomplished in a number of different ways – which is what makes this threat so real and persuasive.” Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), October 10, 2002

“We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.” Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL), Dec. 8, 2002

“Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction. So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real.” Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003

“The essential facts are known. We know of the weapons in Saddam’s possession: chemical, biological, and nuclear in time. We know of his unequaled willingness to use them. We know his history. His invasions of his neighbors. His dreams of achieving hegemonic control over the Arab world. His record of anti-American rage. His willingness to terrorize, to slaughter, to suppress his own people and others. We need not stretch to imagine nightmare scenarios in which Saddam makes common cause with the terrorists who want to kill us Americans and destroy our way of life.” Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), September 13, 2002

“Make no mistake: Saddam Hussein is a ruthless tyrant, and he must give up his weapons of mass destruction. We support the President in the course he has followed so far: working with Congress, working with the United Nations, insisting on strong and unfettered inspections. We must convince the world that Saddam Hussein is not America’s problem alone; he is the world’s problem. And we urge President Bush to stay this course for we are far stronger when we stand with other nations than when we stand alone.” Governor Gary Locke (D-WA), January 28, 2003 Democratic Response to President Bush’s “State of the Union” address
---------------------------------------------------

 Saddam Hussien was charged with crimes against humanity, found guilty, and hanged.
One of his many crimes was using chemical weapons against the Kurdish people –

As early as April 1987, the Iraqis used chemical weapons to remove Kurds from their villages in northern Iraq during the Anfal campaign. It is estimated that chemical weapons were used on approximately 40 Kurdish villages, with the largest of these attacks occurring on March 16, 1988 against the Kurdish town of Halabja.

Beginning in the morning on March 16, 1988 and continuing all night, the Iraqis rained down volley after volley of bombs filled with a deadly mixture of mustard gas and nerve agents on Halabja. Immediate effects of the chemicals included blindness, vomiting, blisters, convulsions, and asphyxiation. Approximately 5,000 women, men, and children died within days of the attacks. Long-term effects included permanent blindness, cancer, and birth defects. An estimated 10,000 lived, but live daily with the disfigurement and sicknesses from the chemical weapons.

Saddam Hussein’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid was directly in charge of the chemical attacks against the Kurds, earning him the epithet, “Chemical Ali.”

http://history1900s.about.com/od/saddamhussein/a/husseincrimes.htm

Now then, if Obama is willing to leap into attacking Syria for the regime using chemical weapons on a number of people the White House says is about 1400 people (although official estimates say about 525), surely he would have approved going into Iraq against the leader of the country having used chemical weapons that killed 5000 and affected 10,000 others?

If not, why not?

How is one different from the other?
It is one thing to be all holier than thou when you’re not in charge, but another thing entirely when it is on your own shoulders.

Financing Housing

As for the global financial crisis, that wasn’t Bush, it was Clinton who really started that mess, by forcing the banks to give mortgages to low-income, unqualified buyers, with the Community Reinvestment Act.

Simply put, the financial crisis of 2008 was caused by a lot of banks making a lot of loans to a lot of people who either could not or would not pay the money back. But this explanation raises two key questions. Why did private lenders, whose job it was to assess credit risk, make those loans? And why did the army of financial regulators, with massive enforcement powers, allow 28 million high-risk loans to be made?

There’s a strong case that the answers can be traced to Sept. 12, 1992. On that day presidential candidate Bill Clinton proposed, in his campaign book “Putting People First,” using private pension funds to “invest” in government priorities, such as affordable housing, to “generate long-term, broad based economic benefits.” Seldom has such a radical proposal been so ignored during a campaign only to later lead to such devastating consequences.

After his election, President Clinton tapped Labor Secretary Robert Reich to lead the effort to extract, as Mr. Reich put it in 1994 congressional testimony, “social, ancillary, economic benefits” from private pension investments. Mr. Reich called on pension funds to join the administration’s “Economically Targeted Investment” effort. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros assured participants that “pension investments in affordable housing are as safe as pension investments in stocks and bonds.”
Six pension funds ultimately agreed to invest in public housing that was backed by $100 million in federal grants and guarantees, but the program never took off. In the end, even unions and their pension funds rejected the effort to direct any part of their retirement savings toward someone else’s welfare.

The Clinton administration lost the battle to use pensions to fund low-income housing, but it succeeded in winning the war by drafting Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the commercial banking system into the affordable-housing effort. It did so by exploiting a minor provision in a 1977 housing bill, the Community Reinvestment Act, that simply required banks to meet local credit needs.

http://www.aei.org/article/economics/the-clinton-era-roots-of-the-financial-crisis/
(Originally from Wall Street Journal –http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323477604579000571334113350.html)

Civilized Morality to Savage Morality

 I will let C.S Lewis answer this question of morality 

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others.

We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers of Pioneers — people who understood morality better than their neighbors did. Very well then.

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.

Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something — some Real Morality — for them to be true about. The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said ‘New York’ each means merely ‘The town I am imagining in my own head’, how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all.

In the same way, if the Rule of Decent Behaviour meant simply ‘whatever each nation happens to approve’, there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had even been more correct in its approval than any other; no sense in saying that the world would ever grow morally better or morally worse.

I conclude then, that though the difference between people’s ideas of Decent Behaviour often make you suspect that there is no real natural Law of Behaviour at all, yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the opposite.

Police Pursuits

There are some stats about what has happened in Victoria with limited pursuits:

In 2006 when pursuit guidelines were tightened, there were 186 reports of drivers evading police. Seventy-seven drivers or 41 per cent weren’t caught.
The following year the crime rate more than tripled with 589 drivers refusing to stop. 39 per cent were never found.
By 2010, 972 attempted to evade police with 45 per cent of those succeeding for good.
Last year evade police reports exploded to 1508 reported offences, 989 drivers or almost 60 per cent, are still on the run.

Totally predictable, if you make it effectively voluntary to stop for the Police.

Immigration swamping

To favor one’s own over others is viewed as a base chauvinism. Therefore, the inconsistency of sup­porting mass immigration while at the same time claiming a concern for the working poor disappears if one defines the working poor in international terms, rather than in chauvinistic, national ones. Put in other terms, a true Marxist should show a concern for all the strug­gling masses of mankind; to be more concerned for your own working classes is a retrograde nationalism, best eschewed. This change of focus explains, in large measure, the left’s abandonment of the workingman and joining with corporate interests on the issue of immigration. It is, of course, also the case that the parties of the left increase their power by importing third-world immigrants who overwhelmingly become constituents of those parties. The net result is that people who oppose massive immigration have no place to turn for support on either the right or the left of the political spectrum

The Perils of Diversity(Book Review)

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=9928

Diversity in Blue Eyed training

Jane Elliott and her Blue-Eyed Devil ChildrenBy: Carl F. Horowitz FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, January 08, 2007

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=1019
Why does racial diversity training, whose deleterious effects have been chronicled in these pages more than once, seem like a children's group exercise, a sadist's version of "patty cake, patty cake, baker's man?"  There's a good reason:  It is a children's exercise.  At least that's how it began and operated for many years until the pillars of our society became convinced of its necessity.  We have a retired school teacher named Jane Elliott to thank for the leftward infantilizing of the American mind.

Elliott, born in 1933, is one of those second-tier celebrities who invariably invite the comment, "I know I've heard that name before."  You probably have.  She's been on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" at least five times.  She's personally led diversity-training sessions for General Electric, Exxon, AT&T, IBM, and other major corporations, plus federal agencies such as the Department of Education and the U.S. Navy.  She's lectured at more than 350 colleges and universities.  She's been the subject of television documentaries.  A Disney made-for-TV movie about her life reportedly has been in the works since 2003.  Textbook publisher McGraw-Hill has listed her on a timeline of key educators of history, right up there with Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, Maria Montessori and nearly two dozen others.[i]

Jane Elliott is our nation's long-reigning Dominatrix of Diversity.  For nearly 40 years this native of rural Iowa has been engaged in a Torquemada-style quest to eradicate racism, real or imagined, from every nook and cranny of American life.  She casts a mighty long shadow.  Every time a corporation forces new employees – at least Caucasian ones – to endure intensive and prolonged anti-bias training, it is ratifying the legacy of Jane Elliott.  Every time a college requires incoming white freshmen to be "cured" of racial, ethnic and religious prejudices presumably lurking within, it is fulfilling Elliott's vision.

Jane Elliott's calling card is a role-playing exercise she devised in the late Sixties for her third-grade class to help encounter and conquer racial prejudice.  It's the one about eye color, in which a teacher or "trainer" requests that everyone in the room divide themselves into two groups and pretend to have either blue or brown eyes.  "Blue-eyed" is a racial proxy for Caucasian; "brown-eyed" is a proxy for black.  Ideally, participants aren't initially aware of this.  They soon will be. The trainer proceeds to subject "blue-eyed" participants to a barrage of insults and taunts, while giving "brown-eyed" participants favored treatment, including the right to join in the punishment.  Then, preferably on the following day, the trainer reverses the roles, so it is the brown-eyed subjects who receive verbal abuse – but with an important difference:  The blue-eyed subjects, now familiar with being tormented, prove rather tepid tormentors.

The exercise should strike most people as manipulative and sadistic.  But to Elliott and fellow trainers, everyone is better off for having undergone it, for their subjects now appreciate the suffering that blacks in this country are forced to undergo each day.  Replicated countless times in a variety of settings, this exercise – she is averse to calling it an experiment – has been the linchpin of the now-huge diversity training industry.  Its main premise, that whites require remedial measures to expunge their inherent racial bias, has won converts throughout the top echelons of corporate life.  Top officials such as Steve Reinemund (PepsiCo), Patrick Stokes (Anheuser-Busch), H. Lee Scott (Wal-Mart) and Richard Syron (Freddie Mac) have embraced mandatory multiracial diversity with evangelical zeal.  The "blue eyes-brown eyes" exercise, and its underlying thinking, is also the coin of the realm among leaders in government, philanthropy and higher education.  Even skeptics among them (assuming they still exist) have learned for the most part to put aside their misgivings and play along, lest they invite a reputation for racial insensitivity and maybe a lawsuit.

Whether the trainees are children or childlike adults, the premise is the same:  All white individuals must be emotionally rewired to overcome their racism.  Nobody wins unless everybody wins.  And Jane Elliott plays to win.    

Making Whites Pay: Anatomy of an Exercise

It was April 5, 1968, and the nation was in a parlous condition.  Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had just been assassinated in Memphis.  Black rioting had broken out in Chicago, Washington, D.C. and other cities.  The small community of Riceville, Iowa seemed far removed from the urban racial tinderbox.  But a local school teacher, Jane Elliott, sought to unite the two worlds. She was white and ashamed.  It was time to make her fellow whites feel ashamed as well.

Elliott was convinced King's murder was the product of the white racism thoroughly permeating our society.  The lynch mob and the burning cross merely were outward manifestations of the sickness.  Elliott would make no exceptions for seemingly tolerant, fair-minded liberals.  Allwhites would have to recognize their destructive prejudices.  Children, their innocent minds not yet poisoned by the larger society, offered the greatest hope for change.

Opportunity beckoned.[ii]  A student walked into Mrs. Elliott's class, slung his books on his desk, and asked: "Hey, Mrs. Elliott.  They shot that King yesterday.  Why'd they shoot that King?"  Once her all-white class was fully assembled, she asked them, "How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?"  She continued:  "It would be hard to know, wouldn't it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves.  Would you like to find out?"  A chorus of "Yeahs" went up.  Mrs. Elliott clearly had planned for this moment.

She asked her students to form two separate groups.  The first would pretend to have blue eyes; the second would pretend to have brown eyes (some no doubt really did have blue or brown eyes, making her job easier).  Then the fun began.  The "blue-eyed" students were berated and taunted at every turn by Mrs. Elliott and the "brown-eyed" students.  The following Monday it was the "brown-eyed" students' turn to suffer.  But Elliott noticed the abuse this time was less pronounced.  She reasoned that the kids in the role of "blue eyes," having been sensitized to abuse, were less willing to inflict it on others.  Eureka!  Here was the key to racial healing, proof that black underachievement was purely a product of white-dominated constructions of reality. Turn the tables on whites, and they, too, will perform poorly.  "We had one (brown-eyed) girl with a mind like a steel trap who never misspelled a word until we told her that brown eyes were bad," she proudly recalled to a campus audience many years later.[iii]

To Elliott, this was empathy-building, not brainwashing.  And it was sweet payback.  Whites were learning to live life as blacks (later amended to "people of color") experience it daily. Whites were teachable, and hence not inherently evil.  But they required guidance to realize their potential goodness.  In Jane Elliott's jaundiced eyes, white bigotry is a universal condition unaffected by region, nation, personal situation or even the passage of time.  In a Web-exclusive interview for PBS on December 19, 2002, Elliott denounced whites as conditioning people here and abroad to believe otherwise.  "We are constantly being told that we don't have racism in this country anymore, but most of the people who are saying that are white," she said.  "White people think it isn't happening because it isn't happening to them."[iv]

In Elliott's race-obsessed view of the human psyche, whites need to experience intensive collective guilt.  Blacks, however, are off the hook.  Whatever the injustices blacks inflict upon whites, they are justifiable reactions to far worse injustices inflicted upon them by whites. Sensitivity training has to be a one-way street.

At any rate, about a month after Elliott unveiled her exercise, fate intervened.  Johnny Carson, ever on the lookout for Everyman guests with a human-interest angle, got wind of her exploits (the local Riceville newspaper had reprinted student essays on the experience).  He asked her if she'd like to appear on "The Tonight Show."  She said yes, and flew to the show's NBC studio in New York City.  On the set, following some obligatory tension-relieving small talk, Elliott briefly discussed her exercise.  And then it was time to go.  Her presentation, however, left quite an impression on the nation.  "The Tonight Show" staff found itself blitzed by hundreds of angry letters.  "How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children," one letter read.

  

The townsfolk of Riceville were especially displeased.  When Elliott walked into the teachers' lounge the following week, several colleagues got up and walked out.  When she went downtown to do errands, she heard whispers.  Her children were taunted or assaulted by their fellow students; more than once they were called "nigger lover."

     

This sort of local majoritarian tyranny was at once indefensible and counterproductive.  For Elliott now was more convinced than ever that whites were in need of redemption.  Replicating her exercise would become her life's mission.  Accordingly, her reputation grew.  In 1970, ABC television produced a half-hour documentary, "Eye of the Storm," showing her applying her experiment to her class.  That same year, she demonstrated it for educators at a White House Conference on Children and Youth.  PBS in 1985 aired its own Jane Elliott documentary, "A Class Divided."  Progressive idealists grew misty-eyed at the mention of her name, knowing children were learning the evils of racism, though by taking hard knocks in the process. Eventually, adults would have to be knocked around as well.      

Taking It to the Top

Jane Elliott retired from teaching in the mid 80s to take on bigger game:  the working world. Part of the reason was money.  Several years ago she admitted that her standard fee was $6,000 per day from "companies and governmental institutions."[v]  But more importantly was her exercise's socially transformative powers.  The challenge was how to "sell" it to large organizations.  She and her allies developed a two-pronged strategy.

         

First, there was the carrot.  Elliott knew that to convince upper- and mid-level managers of the necessity of training employees, she would have to frame her appeal as a sound business model. Thus, a prejudice-free work force became crucial to morale and profitability, especially with corporations and government agencies increasingly run by blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other non-Caucasians (a process heavily driven heavily by affirmative action and mass immigration). Here was the perfect ounce of prevention.  Diversity trainers spoke the upbeat language of modern business culture, their presentations frequently peppered with references to "teamwork," "mutual learning," and "winning together."

Second, there was the stick.  That is, businesses would have to be apprised of the negative consequences of not getting with the program – consequences such as bad publicity, boycotts, and expensive lawsuits.  The legal climate encouraged this.  The Supreme Court in 1986 ruled inMeritor that an employer could be held liable for damages if management had tolerated a hostile work environment affecting a particular class of employees, even in absence of any intent to harm.[vi]  Moreover, the doctrine of disparate impact, established in the early Seventies inGriggs v. Duke Power Co.,[vii] had become more entrenched than ever.  An employer's business practices, even if not intentionally discriminatory, could be liable for damages if they yielded unequal racial outcomes.

    

Companies that ran afoul of civil-rights activists found out the high price tag of not instituting a zero-tolerance policy against racial bias.  Over the years, egalitarian lawyers, backed by the U.S. Department of Justice, realized huge windfalls for themselves and their clients by forcing consent decrees upon companies such as Texaco, Denny's, Abercrombie & Fitch.  These cases resulted from highly questionable allegations of systematic discrimination against employees and/or customers.  Punishment involved not only heavy fines, but also the institution of stringent and carefully-monitored company-wide diversity plans.  Since corporations by nature disdain unwanted publicity, they learned that racial-tolerance training was a cheap way to head off far more expensive legal action in the future, all the while smiling through clenched teeth about the importance of Diversity.

   

Thus, employer-sponsored diversity training, whether conducted by internal staff or outside consultants, has become de rigeur.  Its champions haven't forgotten about their original mentor. Rare indeed is the diversity specialist who doesn't offer Elliott's training films.  And, boy, have they proliferated.  In addition to "Eye of the Storm" and "A Class Divided," the Elliott film library now includes four additional masterworks:  "Blue-Eyed," "The Angry Eye," "The Stolen Eye," and "The Essential Blue-Eyed."  National MultiCultural Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based diversity consultant, aggressively promotes her videos over the Web.  So does the Encino, Calif.-based Business Training Media, Inc., which sells "The Essential Blue-Eyed" for $299.99. This video, jam-packed with 50 minutes of training, plus 36 minutes of debriefing, can help employers and employees alike recognize signs of stereotyping that hold back people of color. BTM excitedly summarizes its contents:[viii]

Elliott divides a multiracial group of Midwesterners on the basis of eye color and then subjects the blue-eyed members to a withering regime of humiliation and contempt.  In just a few hours, we watch grown professionals become distracted and despondent, stumbling over the simplest commands. People of color in the group express surprise that whites react so quickly to the kind of discrimination they face every day of their lives.          

Ah, nothing like "a withering regime of humiliation and contempt" to boost profits!  "The Essential Blue-Eyed," moreover, can help trainers "reveal how even casual bias can have a devastating impact on personal performance, organization productivity, teamwork and morale." It also can "identify culturally biased codes of conduct within an organization which may be invisible to the majority."

     

Government agencies likewise rely on Elliott's methods to train employees.  Diversity sessions at the Federal Aviation Administration, for example, have included segments in which dissenting, or potentially dissenting, employees were tormented by peers.  At one point, white males were verbally abused by black co-workers and then forced to walk a gauntlet, aggressively fondled by female workers.[ix]  Psychologist Edwin J. Nichols, who heads a Washington, D.C. training firm, has performed Jane Elliott-inspired seminars and full-scale cultural audits for at least a half-dozen cabinet-level departments, three branches of the armed services, the Federal Reserve Bank, the FBI, the IRS, NASA, the Goddard Space Center, plus any number of state and local government agencies.  Whites, he believes, are emotionally cold people, the result of their evolution since the Ice Age.  He first came to prominence in 1990 at a University of Cincinnati training seminar to humiliate a blond, blue-eyed female professor whom he claimed belonged to "the privileged white elite."[x]

Higher education, of course, presents a seemingly limitless set of opportunities to apply Mrs. Elliott's wit and wisdom.  At Wake Forest University in the fall of 1999, one of the few campus events designated as mandatory in attendance was "Blue Eyed," a racial-awareness workshop depicting whites on film being abused, ridiculed, made to fail, and taught helpless passivity so that they can identify with "a person of color for a day."  In the current academic year, Johns Hopkins University suspended a student, Justin Park (an ethnic Korean, no less), for a full year for posting racially "offensive" (to blacks) Halloween party invitations.  With massive overkill, the university mandated that he also attend a workshop on diversity and race relations and perform extensive community service.[xi]  University of Pennsylvania historian Alan Charles Kors argues that for sheer sadism, campus diversity training resembles Maoist Chinese re-education sessions.[xii]  Anyone familiar with the dynamics of small group tyranny knows the parallel is apt.

The Road to Show Trials

           

In diversity role-playing, whites are guilty until proven innocent – and of course, they will never get to prove it.   Its role-playing exercises are far removed from experiments observing behavior in an authoritarian environment, a la Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo.[xiii]  There, participation was voluntary, conducted under tightly controlled settings, and did not proceed from assumptions about collective guilt.  By contrast, diversity training, Jane Elliott-style, requires that everyone participate and confess.

Jane Elliott's vision is being realized.  To say that the blue eyes/brown eyes exercise is "kid stuff" is true enough.  But more to the point, its role-playing reduces adults to the level of children -- fearful, whimpering and apologetic for nonexistent offenses.  Far from combating white resentment of nonwhites, such "training" actually creates it.  School multicultural programs, Thomas Sowell observes, has produced "mounting evidence of increasing (italics author's) animosities among students of different backgrounds."[xiv]  Apparently, that's also true in the adult world.  In Britain, where Elliott is virtually lionized by multiculturalists, a former government diversity specialist explained the effects of diversity training:[xv]

You cannot over-estimate the damage to race relations that "diversity awareness" training is causing in this country.  It's having the opposite effect to that intended, causing divisions, resentment, and an increase in judgments based on race, where previously such things were actually quite rare.  How do I know this?  I was involved in putting together a diversity "toolkit" for a government department, and saw first-hand the effect it had as it was rammed down the throats of staff.  

If Jane Elliott and her diversity minions are going to be defeated, more people like this, here and abroad, are going to have to speak out, and at whatever risk to their careers.

     

Elliott's crusade against racism, launched from the far Left, is about manipulation and punishment of Caucasians.  It provides no encounter with serious ideas, something she derisively terms "intellectualizing."  Whites are evil and parasitic; blacks are downtrodden unappreciated fountainheads of creativity.  In a 1998 interview with an Australian Internet magazine,Webfronds, she pontificated:[xvi]

You're all sitting here writing in a language [English] that white people didn't come up with.  You're all sitting here writing on paper that white people didn't invent.  Most of you are wearing clothes made out of cloth that white people didn't come up with.  We stole these ideas from other people.  If you're a Christian, you're believing in a philosophy that came to us from people of color.

White people, she added, "invented racism."  At least Susan Sontag, in her infamous diatribe of some 40 years ago likening the white race to "the cancer of human history," credited whites with producing, among other things, Mozart, Kant, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare and parliamentary government.[xvii]  Elliott credits whites with virtually nothing except oppression of people of color.  Less a heartland Susan Sontag than a white Louis Farrakhan, Elliott is consumed with the need to force whites to experience shame and atonement.  She's in good company. As Ryan O'Donnell pointed out in these pages nearly four years ago, virtually all the early leaders of the diversity industry began as hard-Left activists in the Sixties.[xviii]

Pascal Bruckner, author of the classic Eighties tract, The Tears of the White Man, described the mind of the self-hating, Third World-worshipping European fantasist:[xix]

With great fanfare, Third-Worldists beat their chests, enjoying the revulsion they inspire, cynically rolling in the mud...The ritual judgments passed against Europe are very similar to the booster shots that children get every year.  As with a vaccination, a little bit of anxiety and recrimination is injected in order to avoid any moral examination.

Shift the context from Europe to America, and it would be difficult to imagine a better description of Jane Elliott and the legion of diversity trainers she has inspired.

  

It is a travesty that this woman has been allowed to pass her brand of thought control off as a quest for social justice, and hence a mark of moral superiority over those needing vaccination against racism.[xx]  It is a travesty of modern corporate governance in particular that senior management has been complicit in this power grab.  This situation must not be allowed to continue.  Companies should be accountable to their respective board members, employees, customers and shareholders.  Shareholder meetings, in fact, offer an excellent opportunity to voice demands for transparency.  Shareholders should not be bashful about introducing resolutions calling for review of all written and audiovisual company diversity training materials.  A corporation is in business to provide goods and services to customers willing to pay for them, not to force attitude therapy on employees who don't need it. 

It is perfectly natural for people to envision, and work for, a better society.  But when idealism becomes a relentless, all-consuming drive to achieve perfection in our time, scornful of outside reality checks, it enters the realm of totalitarianism.  The most aggressive of such idealists have a long track record of destruction, and nowhere more so than when carried out through State power.  The road from mandatory diversity sessions to Stalin's show trials is far shorter than racial diversity enthusiasts like to imagine.  The world, of course, won't change Jane Elliott.  But, fortunately, we are still in a position to make sure that Jane Elliott and her disciples won't change the world.
NOTES:
[i] Cited in Stephen G. Bloom, "Lesson of a Lifetime," Smithsonian, September 2005, http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2005/september/lesson_lifetime.htm.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] "Jane Elliott Attacks Racism in UNCP Address," University Newswire, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, October 10, 2002. 

[iv] Quoted in James Fulford, "Jane Elliott:  35 Years of Rage," vdare.com, April 9, 2003.

[v] Cited in Alan Charles Kors, "Thought Reform 101," Reason, March 2000, http://www.reason.com/news/printer/27632.html.

[vi]  Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (1986).  The Supreme Court held that sexual harassment cases were covered by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  The original plaintiff, a bank teller trainee named Michelle Vinson (who subsequently would win various promotions), claimed she had been sexually harassed by a supervisor, Sidney Taylor, with whom she allegedly had an affair.  A U.S. District Court ruled that any sexual relationship occurring between Miss Vinson and Taylor was voluntary, and hence unrelated to her actual or perceived job performance.  An appeals court reversed the decision, applying a "hostile environment" standard.  Institutional harassment, rather than Mr. Taylor's specific behavior, was at issue in determining whether a violation of Title VII had occurred.  The Supreme Court, led by Justice Rehnquist, upheld the ruling, endorsing a standard established by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. See Richard A. Epstein, Forbidden Grounds:  The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws, Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 357-64. 

[vii] Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971). 

[viii] See http://www.business-marketing.com.store/education.html.

[ix] Ryan O'Donnell, "The Corporate Diversity Scam," FrontPageMag.com, January 27, 2003.

[x] Kors, "Thought Reform 101."

              

[xi] Justin Park, the social chair of the campus chapter of Sigma Chi, posted invitations to the fraternity's "Halloween in the Hood" party on Facebook.com.  Some black students found the ad offensive.  That such offense might have been unwarranted was irrelevant to campus administrators, who found him guilty of failing to respect the rights of others, harassment and intimidation, among other charges.

On November 20, Park received a formal letter from Associate Dean of Students Dorothy Sheppard informing him of his punishment.  In addition to being forced to undergo mandatory diversity training, he was banned from campus until January 2008, ordered to complete 300 hours of community service, and read and write a reflection paper on 12 books.  The message was clear:  The tiniest perceived assault against a racial minority group will result in disciplinary measures so severe as to terrify all others out of giving similar offense.  Recently, the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has taken up Park's case.  FIRE Director of Legal and Public Advocacy Samantha Harris wrote a letter, dated November 28, to Johns Hopkins President William Brody, protesting the severe treatment of Mr. Park as inconsistent with the university's Undergraduate Student Conduct Code promoting free expression of ideas. Park, by the way, is a junior despite being only 18 years of age -- in other words, a prodigy.  If the Johns Hopkins administration truly were interested in promoting academic excellence, it would be holding up Park as a role model.  See FIRE Press Release, "Johns Hopkins University Suspends Student for One Year for 'Offensive' Halloween Invitation," November 30, 2006.   

           

[xii] Kors, "Thought Reform 101."

[xiii] It should be mentioned that Zimbardo, the psychologist who developed the controversial 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, is an admirer of Elliott. He says her exercise is "more compelling than many done by professional psychologists."  Quoted in Bloom, "Lesson of a Lifetime." 

[xiv] Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education:  The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas, New York:  Free Press, 1993, p. 85.

[xv] Quoted in Donald Clark Plan B, "Diversity Training -- More Harm Than Good?," July 4, 2006. http;//donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com.

[xvi] Quoted in Kors, "Thought Reform 101."

[xvii] Susan Sontag, comments in Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57. 

[xviii] O'Donnell, "The Corporate Diversity Scam."    

[xix] Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man:  Compassion As Contempt, New York:  Free Press, 1986 (original French edition, 1983), p. 120.

[xx] Elliott herself enthusiastically describes her work as "an inoculation against racism."  She elaborates: "We give our children shots to inoculate them against polio and smallpox, to protect them against the realities in the future.  There are risks to those inoculations, too, but we determine that those risks are worth taking."  See Bloom, "Lesson of a Lifetime."

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Carl F. Horowitz is director of the Organized Labor Accountability Project at the National Legal and Policy Center, a Falls Church, Va.-based nonprofit organization that promotes ethics and accountability in American life. He has a Ph.D. in urban planning and policy development, and has written widely on immigration, labor, housing, welfare and other domestic policy issues.

Broken Windows spending=living wage

1. bhudson (4,174) Says:
   September 1st, 2013 at 8:48 am
   And just wait for them to justify the additional cost of the living wage using what has been identified as the Broken Windows fallacy – the idea that its all good because that extra expense will return so much more good as the workers will spend it and the Keynesian multiplier will take over, but which conveniently ignores the fact that the money used to fund the higher wage would otherwise have been used elsewhere in the economy in the form of expenditure or savings; it creates no new money and no greater economic outcome.
   An intellectualized version of alchemy, built on a foundation of quicksand.
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2. “Once the monkeys learn they can vote themselves bananas, they’ll never climb another tree.” Robert Heinlein
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4. It does not take a sensible and gifted economist like Oliver Hartwich to work out that if things progress in the same path through 2017, then by 2017 NZ will be near the top of the OECD income nations – provided, of course J. Key and W. English keep their heads, sell some more of the infrastructure assets, and don’t spend everything.
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