I’m not a professional economist but I do like the subject. I loved it from the first Econ 101 class I took in undergraduate school from Dr. Laura Stern. Even I remember after all those years since Econ 101 some simple economic truths that Mr. Picketty ignores: Any tax on capital will, in the long run, result in lower wages. A confiscatory capital tax (e.g., 80%) makes a invalid assumption that workers and capitalists are two entirely separate groups of people. Some workers own no capital but most certainly do – homes, savings, 401k, IRA, pensions – and even if that capital wealth (and its income) is meager relative to Warren Buffett scale, it would still be impossible to permanently tax “capitalists”, hand the tax revenues to workers, and make the workers permanently better off. It is simply a short term transfer of wealth that will win votes and power until it runs out of gas (all the “excess” capital will have been taxed away). By then, left Progressives hope to have cemented their grip on power.

Progressive love with Mr. Picketty is not grounded in his economics or the welfare of future generations. They are simply a fan because it provides a short term tool to foment envy and unrest and salve it with the promise of someone else’s money to make it all better. When we are all equal – well, most will be equally poor – they will rewrite the rules.

Just as in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm“: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

The CEO (or the President of the United States and his or her cabinet members) must exert clear and accountable leadership in IT for success to possible and sustainable.

Alas, read the article linked here below and you will see that President Obama has done identifiably the opposite of what is called for.

Don’t Blame IT for Obamacare’s Tech Troubles – http://pulse.me/s/sB92M

Pick your favorite and post in the comments.

“Does Austerity Kill? A Look at 17,679 Things the Federal Government Has Done Since Sequestration.” – http://pulse.me/s/qwo9n

One, it gives light to the folly of a government that does too much already and yet is led and populated by people who miss completely the irony of an attitude of “do something” as the first and only response to a disaster. Would seem that this is part of the problem.

Two, the facts noted copiously in the article point out that rather than government being more hard hearted it is more open-check book than ever (note the rapid growth in disaster bureaucracy and aid)

Three, we as tax payers and voters let these people keep doing this to us.

  http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/29/the-7-step-guide-to-our-idiotic-disaster

What is much more clear, and depending upon your take might be a sigh of relief or a shake your head in disgust is: he’s a perfect example of an All-American president. What I mean is he is proving to be the all-too-typical power hungry imperialist type we’ve suffered through often in our nation’s history – the most glaring example in modern times being the Nixon administration .

From the love affair the Obama administration developed with the appointment of “czars” to positions of unelected power in order to circumvent congressional oversight, to the use (and threat to ramp up the use) of “executive orders” to avoid working and negotiating with Congress, to the without-abandon use of drones to dispatch “enemies” that only the President gets to define and identify.

Could the Administration carry out drone strikes inside the United States?” Brennan’s response: “This Administration has not carried out drone strikes inside the United States and has no intention of doing so.”

The absolutely comical linguistic and legal contortions of CIA chief Brennan and the always purposely obtuse Attorney General Holder are all you need to know about the style and substance of our All-American president.

   Obama’s Death Drone Dodge

Jacob Sullum|Mar. 13, 2013 7:00 am    reason.com

1. The recent congressional hearings on gun violence featured former congresswoman Gabby Giffords. She was shot last year at a public event by a crazy gunman. As a result she suffers greatly and will for the rest of her life. Ms. Giffords has shown great courage and resolve to rehabilitate herself though and be able to testify before Congress. Yet, what does she bother to say? Amongst other things – and the most replayed meme and soundbite – that “Too many children are dying; too many children. We must do something.”   This is pure emotion and not even objectively accurate.

1. Violent crime – including violent crime using guns – has dropped massively over the past 20 years

2. Mass shootings have not increased in recent years.

3. Schools are getting safer.

2. While the focus is on the sensational Newtown school murders of 20 school children last month, this focus is, again, done in order to prey upon emotion rather than reason. How about Chicago, the adopted hometown of the President and currently under the administration of the President’s former chief of staff (Mayor Rahm Emanuel)?  Chicago is starting off 2013 on pace to outpace the horrendous murder rate it infamously enjoyed in 2012: 506! In addition, and tragically, a young woman, who recently participated in the President’s inaugural ceremonies, was murdered in Chicago last week. Yes murder made the news but correspondingly, how often do we hear anything about the fact that Chicago has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the U.S.? Just what exactly have restrictive gun laws done to stop what Ms. Giffords is pleading for in her testimony (i.e., “too many children are dying”)? Answer: apparently nothing. Who is holding Mr. Emanuel and the President accountable for enforcing the thousands of gun laws already on the books?

3. In Hartford, CT on January 28, 2013 there was a public hearing on gun violence and one of the most eloquent statements made by citizens was by Henson Ong. Watch it here yourself.

Do we hear this side of the story? Do we hear the arguments and views of Mr. Ong equally aired by the media and given full hearing and analysis so that the “national conversation” can be just that, a conversation that gives and takes and considers all sides …. rather than legislators and the President telling us with an emotion-filled voice that we just need to “do something”.

Certainly it seems risky if not questionable for the NRA to adopt this media strategy that invokes the children of the President and others when the most recent trigger for gun control advocacy was the tragedy of innocent children murdered in their school by a madman.

A little over a year ago though there was polling that showed a long term trend toward and a resulting majority of Americans disfavoring stricter gun control, including any new or tougher restrictions of so-called “assault weapons”. Fast forward to today and every poll you can find shows an increase in support for tougher restrictions, particularly for “assault weapons”. While the Newtown horror provoked understandably visceral emotions in nearly every American it is also logical to assume correspondingly that there is a percentage of the public that supported the NRA positions previously that were thinking emotionally and at least not driven by facts.

Why? I think a glaring fact that is typically glossed over or just not reported is that a super majority of Americans are in favor of gun ownership – the poll in 2011 cited above is prime example. Yet recent polls asking Americans if they favor banning “semiautomatic guns” shows a strong increase and in some polls a slight majority of support. Many handguns are semiautomatic. A majority of new hand gun sales are semiautomatics. It is a feature that many millions of average American gun owners prefer. So how do a majority of Americans – today, 30 days after Newtown – favor both hand gun ownership and the banning of a type of gun that would make 10s of millions of gun owners criminals unless they turn over their weapons to the government?

A good percentage of Americans are easily persuaded by emotion, current events and simplistic arguments (and polls). While I personally think the NRA’s recent ad campaign is silly that is because I think I’m not in that percentage of Americans swayed by current events and simplistic arguments….. those ads are not aimed at me.

The NRA hopes, even if ham handedly, they can focus on the emotions and knee-jerk thinking of the 10 or 15% of their formerly more ardent supporters. How is this different than the President parading out children to be at his side for his announcement of new gun control orders and calls for gun control legislation, clearly wanting to use emotion and images to buttress his views and policies.

There was a recent piece in the WSJ that is largely a re-print from 1993 by Daniel Henninger. It is quite appropriate that Mr. Henninger wrote nearly 20 years ago words that are still perfectly apt for today following the Newtown tragedy – as he wrote those words then following a widely publicized murder and pointed out that the root issues are cultural and that new legislation is merely a weak attempt to paper over (literally!) the real issues.

Have we learned anything since 1993? It seems the answer is a collective “not really”.

I highly reccomend Charles Murray’s recent book “Comimg Apart” for another somewhat similar but deeper view on the starting or tipping point of all this cultural mess in America.

Self control, self restraint, personal responsibility, delaying self gratification … we don’t have enough of thess and we can’t have too much of all of them.

—————————–

Henninger: No Guardrails, Again

For its own protection, American society needs to rediscover self-control and self-restraint.

By DANIEL HENNINGER

With Newtown, the American people seem to sense that it is a moment to stand down and think hard about whether something’s amiss in their society. And it’s not just the guns. We have been here before.

In 1993, the U.S. reacted with national shock at the murder of abortion-clinic doctor David Gunn. President Bill Clinton condemned the Gunn killing, and Sen.  Joe Biden called for legislative remedies. The Journal’s editorial-page editor then, Bob Bartley, asked me to write an editorial, and the result was “No Guardrails.”

What follows is an abbreviated version of that editorial, which was about the linkages between cultural disarray and personal disarray. Not much has changed in the years since.

***

The gunning down of abortion doctor David Gunn in Florida last week by Michael Frederick Griffin shows us how small the barrier has become that separates civilized from uncivilized behavior in American life. In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalized people among us who don’t understand the rules, who don’t think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control.

As the saying goes, there was a time. And indeed there really was a time in the United States when life seemed more settled, when emotions, both private and public, didn’t seem to run so continuously at breakneck speed, splattering one ungodly tragedy after another across the evening news. How did this happen to the United States? How, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, did so many become undone?

We think it is possible to identify the date when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks. A lot of people won’t like this date, because it makes their political culture culpable for what has happened. The date is August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

It clearly show what the options are and how many tough choices need to be made to reduce our annual budget deficits.

Once you get started though I believe you realize that it is not about shutting down the government it is about reducing all the things it attempts to do, some of which are obscenely expensive.

We simply can’t afford to do it all. So, try it yourself. What choices would YOU make?