Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
We all seem possessed by the fear we are not special. We cannot emotionally tolerate that each of us apprehends only a tiny piece of reality. We create a fantasy in which whatever special piece of knowledge we believe we possess grants us a superior understanding as compared to all others. This fantasy lets us view ourselves as deserving a higher status in society than all others.
Some people build political ideologies around this fantasy.
The Mudville Gazette [h/t Instapundit] reports:
Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, says researchers have identified 40 personal profiles of people who list the military as their occupation on the Web site New Saxon.
The site is run by the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement and describes itself as an “online community for whites by whites.” Its leader, Jeff Schoep, says site operators remove any violent comments they find.
Dees sent a letter to four congressional committee chairs asking for an investigation.
I can see why this requires a congressional investigation. Forty members of a racist site claiming to belong to the military represent a serious problem. After all, there are only 1,473,900 active service personnel and only 1,458,500 reservists so if there are 40 white supremacists that means that a staggering 1 in every 36,847 active service personnel is a white supremacist! Clearly, this is a pants wetting emergency requiring immediate Congressional attention!
Okay, it doesn’t.
The photos from Iran are genuinely heartbreaking. You have unarmed men, women and students, out peacefully protesting that an election has been obviously stolen, and illiterate thugs, many whom are not even Iranian citizens, come out and attack them with truncheons and batons and take them away in the dead of night. THEIR RIGHTS TO FREE ELECTIONS HAVE BEEN STOLEN.
Where are the protests in the USA and London? I am talking about the local art schools, the ones that couldn’t get enough of protesting the Iraq war and similar types of incidents, that close so that all the students can flood the streets? The anarchists all in black smashing store windows? Where are they?
And now in China, after the government cracked down on Tibet (thanks, Beastie Boys, for all their support, it helped a lot) they are now going after other indigenous groups with mobs of bat wielding Han Chinese citizens specifically imported in to take over the local province. They are threatening executions, too. THEIR RIGHTS TO INDIGENOUS CUSTOMS AND SELF DETERMINATION ARE BEING STOLEN.
And what about protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? I guess since they are now Obama’s wars, not such a big deal anymore.
The odd thing is that our “protest class” has been specifically groomed since childhood to view one thing and one thing only as “evil” and protest worthy – basically white Republicans (it isn’t a male thing – look at Palin). This is what gets their ire and gets them to the street, not the actual level of injustice.
And if you met these protesters in person – their arrogance is breathtaking. Their most immediate attack on Republicans is that they are all “hypocrites”. Since most of you don’t live in a major city that is all-Obama you probably don’t run into them as often as I do. But what type of hypocrisy ignores these obvious types of injustices and focuses only on a certain subset?
This isn’t a “generational” thing – look at who is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan – an all volunteer force that is the best and most professional military that ever walked the planet – and they are young people of roughly the same age as the “protest class”.
Protesting against Republicans is all that they have been taught, and all that they know.
On the one hand, we have the Obama administration’s grand plans for universal health care, investment in our infrastructure, reducing our atmospheric carbon output, and world-wide reduction in sea levels. On the other, we have the requirement to pay for it, assuming the Chinese would like to have some significant portion of their money returned to them. Currently, the administration seems to favor increased taxes (sorry, “contributions”) on those with the highest incomes. The problem is that there are not enough rich people to go around. Even at a tax rate of 100%, there is still not enough money to pay for all the urgently needed good stuff. What to do, what to do…
A possible remedy comes from the Internal Revenue Code, which starts with this:
§ 61. Gross income defined
(a) General definition
Except as otherwise provided in this subtitle, gross income means all income from whatever source derived, including (but not limited to) the following items:
(1) Compensation for services, including fees, commissions, fringe benefits, and similar items;
(2) Gross income derived from business;
(3) Gains derived from dealings in property;
(4) Interest;
(5) Rents;
(6) Royalties;
(7) Dividends;
(8) Alimony and separate maintenance payments;
(9) Annuities;
(10) Income from life insurance and endowment contracts;
(11) Pensions;
(12) Income from discharge of indebtedness;
(13) Distributive share of partnership gross income;
(14) Income in respect of a decedent; and
(15) Income from an interest in an estate or trust.
The definition is broad enough to encompass just about anything that could be construed as income; that is, anything that would result in the improvement in the economic situation of a person or entity. Cash need not be involved. Income can be recognized, and taxes must be paid, on the unrealized gains of certain derivatives (§ 1256, § 988), on bonds that do not pay anything at all until they mature (§ 1272), and even in some situations where you pay too little for something (§ 1274). This is a marvelously flexible idea, and suggests that we can close our budget deficits not by raising the tax rates, but by discovering and taxing previously undiscovered sources of income.
Commenter Mike on this Hit&Run post on California [h/t Instapundit] observes:
First the once-great city of Detroit, then California, and soon the entire country if we don’t come to our senses, and fast.
Saul Alinsky’s new leftism combined with old-style Tammany Hall democratic party corruption is the political version of the Star Trek Doomsday Machine, devouring and destroying everything in its path. [links added]
Heh. Here’s a video if you don’t remember the episode.
Can’t say he’s wrong. Leftists have progressively destroyed the economic vitality of every region they dominated for more than a few decades. They do seem inexorable at times but I think we need to remember that things looked equally bleak back in the ’70s after leftists trashed everything. But the nation as a whole recovered and prospered.
Our diversity and compartmentalization remain our great national strength. If one region destroys itself with foolish policies, others can still prosper. California and the Northeast are failing but Texas and other similar states are prospering.
Perhaps this crisis will prove to be the end of the doomsday machine. Perhaps, like the Star Trek doomsday machine, their greedy, selfish overreach in this time of crisis will cause them to choke to death on the cream of their own runaway spending. This happened in the ’70s and led to the rebirth of the ’80s. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take as long this time.