Quotations

Quote of the Day

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Commenter hdgreene at Belmont Club:

The uniting concept in the Leftist economic program is the politically controlled Cartel — whether in health care or energy or finance. Cartels force the consumer to pay higher prices for a lower quality product. They force workers and suppliers to do more for less. They exist, in short, for the benefit of those who control the Cartel. In this case that is bureaucrats, technocrats, politicians and their cronies.
 
Of course they do not promote these Cartels by announcing the real purpose. Instead they tell you it will save lives or money or the entire planet. Salesmanship is important — especially when selling lemons.

“Competing visions of ‘Never Again'”

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Following on David Foster’s Yom Hashoa post, the following extended excerpts from this brilliant column by Caroline Glick frame the issues well in modern political context:

AFTER THE war, world Jewry adopted “Never Again,” as our rallying cry. But “Never Again,” is just a slogan. It fell to the leaders of the Jewish people to conceive the means to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust.
 
These leaders came up with two very different strategies for protecting Jews from genocide, and their followers formed separate camps. Whereas in the early years, the separate positions appeared to complement each other, since the 1970s the gulf between them has grown ever wider. Indeed, many of the divisions in world Jewry today originate in this post-Holocaust policy divide.
 
The first strategy was based on international law and human rights. Its champions argued that the reason the Allies didn’t save the Jews was because the laws enjoining the Allies to rescue us on the one hand, and prohibiting the Nazis from killing us on the other were insufficiently strong. If they could promulgate a new global regime of international humanitarian law, they believed they could force governments to rise above their hatreds and the shackles of their narrow-minded national interests to save innocents from slaughter. Not only would their vision protect the Jews, it would protect everyone.
 
The Jews who subscribed to the human-rights strategy for preventing another Holocaust were the architects of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. They were the founders of the international human rights regime that now dominates so much of Western discourse on war and peace.
 
Unfortunately, the institutions these idealistic Jews designed have been corrupted by political forces they had hoped to defeat.
 
Consequently, the international human-rights regime they created has failed completely to accomplish what they hoped it would accomplish. Instead, the regime they created to protect the Jews is now a key weapon in the political war being waged against them.
 
[. . .]
 
A secondary casualty of the failure of the human rights paradigm has been intra- Jewish relations. Faced with their preferred paradigm’s failure and corruption at the hands of anti-Semites, many Jewish human-rights activists have opted to abandon their fellow Jews and Israel in order to maintain their allegiance to the corrupt, anti-Semitic human-rights model.
 
PARTICULARLY ANNOYING to these human-rights followers is the stunning success of the other post-Holocaust Jewish strategy for giving meaning to the slogan “Never Again.”
 
That policy is Zionism.
 

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“What Bono doesn’t say about Africa”

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Celebrities like to portray it as a basket case, but they ignore very real progress.

William Easterly in the LA Times (Op-Ed from 2007.)

The real Africa needs increased trade from the West more than it needs more aid handouts. A respected Ugandan journalist, Andrew Mwenda, made this point at a recent African conference despite the fact that the world’s most famous celebrity activist — Bono — was attempting to shout him down. Mwenda was suffering from too much reality for Bono’s taste: “What man or nation has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?” asked Mwenda.
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Perhaps Bono was grouchy because his celebrity-laden “Red” campaign to promote Western brands to finance begging bowls for Africa has spent $100 million on marketing and generated sales of only $18 million, according to a recent report. But the fact remains that the West shows a lot more interest in begging bowls than in, say, letting African cotton growers compete fairly in Western markets (see the recent collapse of world trade talks).
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Today, as I sip my Rwandan gourmet coffee and wear my Nigerian shirt here in New York, and as European men eat fresh Ghanaian pineapple for breakfast and bring Kenyan flowers home to their wives, I wonder what it will take for Western consumers to learn even more about the products of self-sufficient, hardworking, dignified Africans. Perhaps they should spend less time consuming Africa disaster stereotypes from television and Vanity Fair.

The excerpt came up (I brought it up) in this comments thread at Small Wars Journal.

Another commenter, Jason Thomas, made the following interesting comment in the same thread:

….A locally driven solution is so important. However, we have created a national government that reflects the deep seated nepotism and corruption endemic at the local level. But the local people dont feel like they are being led by example. How many local Afghas know who their national Member of Parliament is compared to their unelected Governor and District Governor. [sic]
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Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., astutely pointed out in his 1977 biography of Robert Kennedy, the notion that reforms can be carried out in a wartime situation by a beleaguered regime is “the fatal fallacy in the liberal theory of counterinsurgency, with the United States so often obliged to work through repressive local leadership, the reform component dwindled into ineffectual exhortation.”

“An Open Letter from Colleen Lawson, McDonald v Chicago Plaintiff“

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Dear Legislator:
Could you please help me decide which of my kids lives to save? Here’s the problem:

Last night yet another of my kids found himself on the goodbye end of a robber’s gun as the robber slowly counted down
 
“5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . ”
 
I know you politicians told us “if it saves one life, then keeping guns away from law-abiding citizens is the right thing to do!” but I’m having a little trouble figuring out which life is the one to be saved. I’ve had most of these kids for 20 years or more, and I’m rather fond of them all.
 
My kid last night? It was his third time facing armed robbers in Chicago, in Illinois. Can you tell me how many times is just right and how many times is too many?
 
The one last night was in a convenience store at the time. He and his friend had gone into the store to buy soda, and they hid as the robber stuck his gun in the face of the store clerk and began counting down.
 
Do you give classes in hiding? Wait, that can’t be right, cause many kids get found anyway, and it’s not always easy to stay quiet if your heart is thudding and you’re afraid. Maybe you give classes in what kids should do if they find themselves around guns. No, that’s not right. State Sen. Annazette Collins proposed that idea, to keep kids safe and deglamorize firearms, and she was roundly trounced for the idea.
 
[. . .]


Read the whole thing.

(The author’s Facebook page is here.)