Scragged

Hitler's Big Mistake and Islam's Big Advantage

Petrarch — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:52:00 GMT

From the early days of the internet as global discussion and debate between far-flung groups of ordinary people became possible and even routine, attorney Mike Godwin made a trenchant observation:

As a discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

This has become known as Godwin's Law. It means that if you argue over something long enough, sooner or later Hitler is going to put in an appearance in the chain of argument. A further tradition has evolved: whoever first invokes a Hitler comparison loses the argument.

Alas, this law isn't enforced in our politics; if it were, the loony lefties who fulminated about Chimpy McBushitler for the last eight years would have been studiously ignored. Apparently, the corollary to Godwin's Law only applies to comparing Hitler and his National Socialist (Na-Zi, the abbreviation in German) Party to the statist and socialist policies of the left. While comparing leftists to Hitler is out of bounds, comparisons to policies and politicians on the right are ruled fair game.

Then there's Islamofascism, about as politically incorrect a word as can be found anywhere. Are fundamentalist Muslims on the political right, since they are violently aggressive? Are they instead leftists, as their governance tends to be both socialist and totalitarian? Or are they something else?

So, let's compare them to Hitler! And when you do, you discover something shocking: Islamofascism has come up with a psychological weapon against the United States that, had Hitler had the imagination and chutzpah to use, would have made it much, much harder for America to defeat his evil philosophy: Islam is a religion, and under the First Amendment, can't be banned. Nazism is a philosophy but never claimed to be a religion. Not being a religion made it legally possible to ban Nazism for the duration of our war against them.

Totalitarianism On the March

It's easily forgotten today, but during the unprecedented Great Depression of the 1930s, a great many highly respected thinkers thought that the day of democracy was over. The free nations of the world had fallen into a financial hole from which no amount of wriggling seemed able to extricate them. On the other hand, nations which were ruled by authoritarian strongmen seemed able to end the breadlines, put everyone back to work, enforce order, and Get Somewhere. Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Tojo's Japan, and Stalin's Russia seemed, at least on the surface, to have licked their economic problems.

Dictatorships spread far beyond the famous four in those days. There were also Franco in Spain, Peron in Argentina, and no shortage of smaller-scale tinpot rulers throughout South America in the classic banana republics. Africa, India, and Southeast Asia were mostly under the control of European colonial powers and were effectively dictatorships from the point of view of the people. China was torn apart by civil war between two authoritarian sides, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists and Mao's Communists, not to mention foreign invasion by totalitarian Japan.

Look for a liberal democracy, and you pretty much had the U.S., the British Empire, and a few other wobbly countries in Continental Europe. Everyone else, well... today we'd say "they suffered under the heel of dictators," but that wasn't how things looked at the time. The democracies were flat on their faces in the mud, wracked by political wrangling and division. The dictatorships, under the iron grip of one man each, were standing up and marching in lockstep.

Was a strongman just the medicine needed to cure Depression? In England, Sir Oswald Mosley prescribed himself for that role, supported by uniformed paramilitary Blackshirts and stirring oratory just as Hitler had been. In America, international hero Charles Lindbergh argued that we should find common cause with Germany, not conflict. President Roosevelt was advised to seek dictatorial powers to resolve the banking crisis of 1933:

The approving headline FOR DICTATORSHIP IF NECESSARY ran in the New York Herald-Tribune on March 5 [1933], with similar notes stuck in the Inauguration coverage of other major papers.

Documents show that Roosevelt seriously considered doing just that, although to the relief of history and all of us, he decided not to. It was a close-run thing, however: in a crisis, human nature is to look for a Savior and sacrificing essential liberties for the illusion of peace and security is all too tempting.

What we all know as the evil of Nazism began to be apparent, but only very slowly. Even before the war in Europe began, Roosevelt ordered J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to keep tabs on Nazi and Communist sympathizers; FDR saw which way the winds were blowing sooner than most of his peers.

When Germany finally declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor, the FBI pretty much already knew who they needed to arrest for "subversive activities." Hitler's hoped-for Fifth Column in the United States never really got off the ground.

The primary reason it didn't is because there was a far more effective melting pot in America of the early 20th century than we have today. Immigrants were expected to become Americans; for the most part, that's exactly what they did. Only the very most recent German immigrants had much loyalty to Germany, and of course, no few recent German immigrants were fleeing from Hitler and were not the least bit inclined to help him out.

Still, America had a First Amendment in those days just as we have now and Americans had every right to argue in favor of a strongman and being friends with Hitler. America did not, however, have an ACLU arguing that the government cannot keep an eye on things; the FBI carefully implanted snoops within the ranks of German sympathizers and took careful notes.

As soon as war was declared, suddenly what previously was free speech was now an act of treason. Singing the praises of Nazism and shouting "Heil Hitler!" was obviously "giving aid and comfort to the enemy;" off to prison with the lot of them.

The Sanctuary of the Mosque

Things are a bit different today. Modern Neo-Nazis have the freedom to hold rallies and marches; but they're heavily infiltrated by law enforcement, and the moment they step past the boundary of inciting violence, off they're whisked to prison. As a result, unless you are exceptionally unlucky and find yourself in very much the wrong place at the wrong time, you will never be the victim of Nazi violence. Nazi gathering places are few and far between, generally known only to the initiate, and not really growing in number.

And then... you have Islam. According to President Barack Obama,

If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.

Mr. Obama's no better at counting people than he is at fixing economies. Considering that there are only 5 million or so Muslims in America out of a world Islamic population of well over a billion, we're not nearly "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." Still, there are almost certainly a lot more Muslims here than Neo-Nazis. Mosques are visibly growing in number and splendor; the call of the muezzin rings louder than "Seig Heil!" ever did from Deutscher-Bund beer halls.

Yet Islam's attitude towards Jews is almost identical to that of Nazis. In fact, the similarities between the Koran and Mein Kampf are striking; the Koran spends proportionately more time denigrating the Jews even than Hitler did in his book!

So where are the police infiltrations of mosques, to protect American citizens from an evil, anti-American ideology? In England, an independent documentary team infiltrated several prominent London mosques and recorded imams preaching appalling hatred and violence. Dutch politician Geert Wilders has called for the Koran to be banned, just as Mein Kampf is banned in many European countries who directly suffered from Hitler's depravity:

The root of the problem is fascist Islam, the sick ideology of Allah and Mohammed as laid down in the Islamic Mein Kampf: the Koran. In this regard, the texts from the Koran speak for themselves. In various suras Muslims are summoned to oppress, prosecute or kill Jews, Christians, renegades and non-believers, to beat and rape women and to establish a worldwide Islamic state through violence.

We can't very well ban the Koran here in the United States; even during World War 2, possessing a copy of Mein Kampf was not a crime and should not have been. The best response to evil speech is a good thorough debunking, not suppression. When you consider that virtually all the world's terrorists are Muslims, though, simple prudence would dictate an active approach to infiltration, just as J. Edgar Hoover did with Hitler's Nazis and we still do with their successors today.

So, where are we with that? Not nearly where we need to be - because Islam is not just an evil, totalitarian, fascist ideology. It's an evil, totalitarian, fascist religion - and, it would seem, can only be touched with kid gloves no matter what depravity it preaches. Thus we find that Islam, far from receiving a totally justified suspicion, is awarded every accommodation with your tax dollars instead. The Wall Street Journal reported:

At the University of Michigan's local campus, administrators have recently refitted several school bathrooms to include small footbaths in the corner--an accommodation for Muslim students who must perform ritual washing as part of their daily observance.

It would be a frosty day in Hell before an American public university would allow a Protestant minister or Catholic priest to use an empty classroom for religious services - yet here we find a public entity spending taxpayer cash on religious facilities for a belief sworn to destroy our way of life! A belief, indeed, whose leaders have proclaimed war on us. Ah, the joys of that noble name of "religion!"

In Hitler's Germany, the Fuhrer's word was law. He held power of life and death over all. He wields influence beyond the grave over the Neo-Nazis of today. For all practical purposes, Nazis worship Hitler as god, but he forgot to claim to be god, and that was his big mistake. Had he done so, shazzam! Instead of being an ordinary national enemy, Nazism would be a religion and thus unassailable.

Religion, A Total Free Pass?

Of course, that's ridiculous, as the ACLU, CAIR, and other liberal suspects know very well, but that doesn't stop them from pressing ridiculous claims in court using lawyers who're funded by tax-exempt money.

Human sacrifice has a long tradition throughout history and is an essential part of major historical religions - particularly the Mayans, whose removal from the scene is the source of daily slander from the left against half-millennium-dead Spanish conquistadors. You'd think ending human sacrifices would be a noble blow for human rights, but no, halting the Mayan sacrificial system is now defined as cultural imperialism. Nevertheless, trying to sacrifice a human here in the U.S. and even calling yourself a religion will not protect you from a very long prison term ho matter how religious you claim to be.

We also frown on cannibalism, despite that being a well-known feature of the indigenous religions of both Africa and the Pacific Islands, both also oppressed by Western colonialism and thus usually given a free pass to violate modern mores.

Apparently, cannibalism and human sacrifice are a bit too far but only just a bit. What, then, is the Islamic suicide bomber, if not human sacrifice? In what way are the ritual beheadings of David Pearl and countless other Westerners captured by Islamic terrorists different from what the Mayans did atop their pyramids? Why is it OK to stop witch doctors from popping missionaries into the cookpot, but not OK to speak out against a religion that openly calls for stuffing Western women into funereal shrouds and locked-up harems? At least the missionaries were invading the territory of the cannibals; today, the barbarians are coming here, and we kowtow to them in our own land.

No, if Hitler had claimed to be god, J. Edgar Hoover would not have done one single thing differently. The Nazis in America would have been locked up just as quickly, and, one imagines, Mr. Hoover would hardly have quailed from flushing a Mein Kampf down the crapper had it occurred to him.

The difference is that, back then, we know which side was good and which side was evil.

After 9-11, after the London and Madrid bombings, after countless videotapes depicting all manner of debauchery, after the trivial ease of reading the dozens of violent and anti-Semitic passages in the Koran, how can there be any doubt as to which side is good and which evil today?

The only way there can be any doubt at all is if our leaders have completely given up on the idea that some ideas are better than others, that some customs, some societies, nay, even some religions are better than others. Our elites have given up on any kind of faith in God, or even the thought that America has produced wealth through hard work and not by exploiting the downtrodden of other lands.

Their economic ideas are bad enough, but it's this moral relativism, it's their inability to tell good from evil that represents to real danger posed by our leaders' ideas.

Is there any hope? Maybe, just maybe, reality will force its way in. The Wall Street Journal gives us hope:

The African-American leader of a Detroit mosque was fatally shot Wednesday during a Federal Bureau of Investigation raid on what authorities called a criminal gang run by U.S. converts to Islam. Mr. Abdullah was imam of the Masjid Al-Haqq mosque and was connected to a group known as "Ummah," a brotherhood that seeks to establish a separate state within the U.S. that would be ruled by strict Islamic or Sharia law, the U.S. attorney's office said. Authorities do not believe he has ties to such international terrorist groups as al Qaeda. [emphasis added]

Has he not? He has one very great and powerful tie to terrorism: the Koran. Of course, the federal PR people will deny all international ties, but maybe somebody in authority has finally realized what Islam means. Alas, it comes too late for the victims at Ft. Hood gunned down by a Muslim psychologist (!) who was known to his superiors to be trying to convert wounded soldiers, attending a mosque, and publicly made statements condemning our country's presence in the Muslim world.

How many more to go until we are safe again?

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on Islam, Adolf Hitler, antisemitism, Nazism and religion

Of Political Treason and Forgetful Elephants

Petrarch — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:52:00 GMT

It's been a very strange twelve months politically. One year ago, the airwaves resounded with wishful hopes that conservatism was dead and the Republican Party was deader. One year ago, not only did Democrats sweep the polls, but the furthest-left president in all of American history was elected by a clear and convincing majority, to join the furthest left Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader in all of American history. American exceptionalism was at an end; soon we would be no different from any other sclerotic, over-regulated, high-tax European welfare state, and of course never dream of making a move internationally without the august permission of the U.N. and all our enemies therein.

Well. Barack Obama has indeed been delivering change, but not the sort he expected. The Republican Party, as a party, is still flat on its back; but Conservatism is fired up, ready to go, and thirsting for blood. And for the Right, the first order of business is to clean house, ridding the Republican party of RINOs.

Republican party grandees could not be more horrified. Much of the country is not deeply conservative; in order to have a Republican majority ever again, we cannot expect each and every Republican elected official to be a little Rush Limbaugh clone, they say.

That's indisputably true. What's also indisputably true is that, while the Right needs to honor Reagan's "big tent" approach, there are nevertheless certain core beliefs that you have to have in order to be worthy of the name of Republican - to say nothing of deserving conservative support.

Too Many Stabs In The Back

One of those core conservative beliefs is at least a rudimentary sense of loyalty. In 2004, the whole Republican party apparatus from President Bush on down dumped massive resources into helping "moderate" Sen. Arlen Specter win his primary against a more conservative Republican opponent. How'd that work as an investment? Not too well; as soon as Obama swept to power, Sen. Specter jumped across the aisle. He's now a card-carrying Democrat. The Republican party would have done better to support his conservative opponent Pat Toomey, who could not possibly ever be imagined as switching parties, or at the least sat it out and spent its money elsewhere.

This is not an isolated occurrence. Time after time, Republican bigshots spend contributors' money to preserve the seats of people who are barely Republicans at all and who then turn around and stab them in the back. Just as with tax dollars, though, these foolish "leaders" are not spending their own money. It is the money of the donors - Republican voters, the base of the party.

Finally, after seeing the same blunders made habitual, the base of the part has had enough. This off-year election contained the most smashing rebuke to Republican Party leadership seen in many, many years.

The party grandees of rural northern New York congressional district 23 anointed one Dede Scozzafava to run in a special election, replacing Republican John McHugh whom Barack Obama appointed to be Secretary of the Army. There was no primary, no consultation of Republican voters; Ms. Scozzafava emerged from a classic smoke-filled room.

What a Frankenstein's monster the establishment's candidate turned out to be! Nobody is surprised to see a pro-abortion, pro-same-sex-marriage, pro-tax, pro-union-card-check, ACORN- and Daily Kos-endorsed candidate in New York; but not usually rural New York, and certainly not on the Republican slate.

The base revolted. Instead of rallying to the faux-Republican banner, conservatives across the state and the country stood with Doug Hoffman, normally a Republican but running as a "Conservative" since the Republican party leadership didn't want him. Since NY-23 had not elected a Democrat since the Civil War, there was certainly no reason to put forward a squish; Hoffman was much more in line with the general views of the district than Scozzafava, who could be considered further left than the Democratic candidate.

Chaos ensued. Newt Gingrich endorsed Scozzafava; Sarah Palin and Fred Thompson sprung for Hoffman; Mitt Romney sat it out. Accusations of spoiling and disloyalty flew back and forth. Meanwhile, polls showed Scozzafava to be placing a distant third, far behind "Conservative" Hoffman and the Democrat.

Then last week, a scant few days before the election, Scozzafava threw her last two bombs into the arena.

First, she abruptly withdrew from the race and shut down her campaign. With a sigh of relief, every Republican not already in up to their necks raced to endorse Hoffman.

Except, that is, for Scozzafava, who the next day endorsed... Democrat Bill Owens.

Failure Is An Orphan... But Not For Long!

Today we see the result of this disgraceful charade: For the first time since the Civil War, NY-23 has elected a Democrat to Congress. The fight between Scozzafava and Hoffman did, indeed, split the vote, and did, indeed, give Barack Obama yet one more vote for big government statism.

Or did it? Let's look at the numbers:

With 88 percent of the precincts reporting, Owens had 49 percent of the vote to 46 percent for Hoffman. Scozzafava had 6 percent... Owens defeated Conservative Doug Hoffman and Republican Dierdre Scozzafava (skoh-zuh-FAH'-vuh) in the heavily Republican 23rd congressional District in rural northern New York. Scozzafava abruptly withdrew Saturday and supported Owens. [emphasis added]

Combine the votes for Hoffman and Scozzafava, and Owens would not have won. But at 46 vs 6, who is the spoiler? Not the conservative; it was the far-left RINO who fouled the nest. Who was it that set up this disaster? Again, not the base; it was the Republican party leadership, who for reasons known only to themselves chose to back an individual who opposes everything most Republicans stand for, and stands for everything most Republicans oppose.

Clearly there is more house-cleaning yet to be done. To start with, the Right needs to make it absolutely clear that to get conservative support, you'd better be, well, at least a little bit conservative. If you prefer liberalism, there is already a party that would be happy to have you. If you want to lead the Republican party, you'd better know what it's supposed to stand for and act accordingly - or else.

In that oldest of Republican slogans, American wants "A Choice, Not An Echo." Let's provide them one, now and in the future. Let's not forget who would rather be an echo when the time comes to write checks and pull voting levers.

Oh, and one trenchant reminder for those who would seek power: Republicans won governorships in New Jersey and in Virginia in spite of Mr. Obama's support of the Democratic candidates. The Republican party may be on life support, but conservatism isn't, and the more Mr. Obama spends, the livelier conservatism becomes. Who knows? Much more of this, and what once was "conservative" may acquire a capital letter and become "Conservative", like the party identification next to Doug Hoffman's name.

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on conservatism and Republicans

Stunning Innovations from the TSA

Will Offensicht — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:12:00 GMT

Never underestimate bureaucratic creativity in finding new and different ways to waste our money. We wrote some time back how the TSA is sponsoring science fiction conventions ostensibly "to get new ideas." They've been doing this for years, even though they can't point to a single new idea that came from these taxpayer-funded forays into fictional futures.

Now we get a real shocker from the TSA, a perfect example of bureaucratic maximization of benefits for those who populate the organization while minimizing benefit to those of us who pay the bills. In "Want some torture with your peanuts?" the Washington Times describes the TSA's latest brain-wave:

A senior government official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expressed great interest in a so-called safety bracelet that would serve as a stun device, similar to that of a police Taser®. According to this promotional video found at the Lamperd Less Lethal, Inc. website, the bracelet would be worn by all airline passengers.

You'd be given the bracelet instead of a boarding pass. The bracelet would contain a lot of information about you, would reveal your location at all times, and, last but not least, be able to give you an electric shock that would immobilize you for several minutes in case you act up.

The Times was clearly as shocked as we were at the idea and wanted to be sure that the government was really interested in this device:

According to this letter from DHS official, Paul S. Ruwaldt of the Science and Technology Directorate, office of Research and Development, which was written to the inventor whom he had previously met with, Ruwaldt wrote, “To make it clear, we [the federal government] are interested in . . . the immobilizing security bracelet, and look forward to receiving a written proposal.”

In another part of the letter, Mr. Ruwaldt confirmed, “In addition, it is conceivable to envision a use to improve air security, on passenger planes.” [emphasis in the original]

This is a perfect example of the sort of wheel-spinning that bureaucrats love most. The TSA knows that there's no way government officials would let themselves be braceleted on airplanes, and there's no way the public would permit themselves to be braceleted as long as government people were seen to ride bracelet-free.

Thus, there's no possibility that this "research" might result in solving the problem of bad people hijacking airlines and thereby cut into the TSA's lucrative monopoly of shoving airline passengers around. So why do it? These boondoggles let officials like Paul Ruwaldt write fancy letters, look at equipment demonstrations, get courted by vendors, and generally waste time while looking busy.

Bureaucratic nirvana, brought to you by the longsuffering American taxpayers.

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Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name. Read other Scragged.com articles on science, torture and TSA

The Bubble Zone – A Happy Place for Liberals

Benjamin Caliban — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:11:00 GMT

During the early years of American history, Benjamin Franklin remarked that our nation is a republic “if you can keep it.” His statement seems to imply a rueful understanding of the danger that underlies our system: it’s all well and good, until someone like Obama or Clinton or Lyndon Baines Johnson takes office and spends four years – maybe even eight – redefining the very foundations of our two hundred and thirteen year-old republic.

The cornerstone of our republic, the Constitution, is currently being challenged on the grounds of free speech. Mayor Daley of Chicago is preparing to sign into law a restriction against pro-life activity within fifty feet of the entrance to any abortion clinic. In a city where buildings are close to the streets, this bubble zone could easily cover ground that does not belong to the building itself, therefore restricting a person’s right to free speech on public property.

A fifty-foot bubble around a private establishment – this is so emblematic of everything that liberals have ever done. For one, it reminds us of the “drug-free school zone” signs that you see driving down the highway. If only words were that magical; if only drug lords were idiots. That’s a bubble any dealer can pop.

I’ll bet a liberal thought of that one, so high up in the upper echelons of bureaucracy that he’s lost what Mr. Obama calls a “common touch,” something Mr. Obama never had. Maybe bureaucratic liberals should enforce a fifty-foot bubble around school zones as well. That ought to keep the Colombians away!

Speaking of bold-faced people, isn’t it obvious by now that pro-lifers aren’t afraid of going to jail? For God’s sake, these people chain themselves to the front door; impersonate a staff-member to gain access; go limp as the police officers carry them away. They break the law fifty ways sideways, never mind a fifty-foot bubble. They will walk right through it. Could bureaucracy be any less creative? As long as pro-lifers can create a scene, business will not carry on as usual, since the average person avoids a scene of conflict.

This new development in the history of bureaucratic incompetence is somewhat reminiscent of the Law of the Sea Treaty, a proposal by the U.N. to make large portions of the oceans off-limits to entrepreneurs who might like to harvest the minerals on the sea floor, unless they pay an exorbitant fee to the U.N.; a bubble-zone, of sorts. The objective of this treaty was control over large territories of the ocean.

When you consider the chain of cause and effect, however, it’s impossible to maintain that bubble. What people do on the rivers and on land indirectly affects the ocean territories as rivers flow into the ocean and emissions float across the surface. Unless the U.N. also controls activity on land and rivers, the water regions are not completely under their control.

Likewise, unless the advocates of abortion can control what happens outside of their bubbles, there is really no point in having the bubble in the first place. Would a pro-life billboard five hundred feet away from the clinic also violate their privacy, since it can be seen from the bubble zone? Unless pro-aborts can devise a way to regulate all pro-life activity, their bubbles will be burst again and again. And only by bursting these anti-Constitutional bubbles can our Republic maintain its integrity.

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Benjamin Caliban is a staff writer for Scragged.com. Read other Scragged.com articles on Inconvenient Truths and liberalism

John Galt and the China Syndrome

Will Offensicht — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:13:00 GMT

Those who watched the 1979 thriller The China Syndrome were treated to the scientifically-implausible thought that an out-of-control nuclear reactor could burn through the bottom of the containment vessel, sink into the earth's crust, and end up in China. While theoretically possible, such a disaster is profoundly unlikely; Three Mile Island, the worst American nuclear incident in history, released lower radiation levels than the natural radiation in the granite walls of the room in which the US Senate held hearings about the incident. Alas, that mere fact didn't do anything to quiet the hullabaloo, and nuclear power has suffered from an undeservedly bad reputation ever since.

The China Syndrome is fanciful when it comes to nuclear power, but exactly that sort of meltdown is threatening our society.

Government and the China Syndrome

We've explained how high 1970s taxes in Massachusetts drove productive people to leave for California, leading to the founding of Silicon Valley near San Francisco instead of near Boston. Californians didn't learn from the Massachusetts experience; they in turn are driving their high value citizens to other states.

The recent economic slowdown has spread this phenomenon - high-income people are leaving New York, Michigan, New Jersey, and other high-tax states as the states attempt to balance their budgets by raising taxes instead of by cutting spending as we taxpayers have had to do.

The news media are bleating about the threat to the budgets of the states from which people are departing and worrying about all the poor people who'll lack "essential services." The migrations of high-tax citizens is an interesting news item - Mayor Bloomberg pointed out that 1% of the people who file taxes in New York City pay about 50% of all city taxes. That's 40,000 people, and even a handful of them leaving will cause the city noticeable fiscal pain.

It's been said that New York City is a luxury good. That it is, and keeping the city afloat has been a drain on the rest of the state and on the federal government for decades. With the state in a budget crisis of its own, with the state employee unions fighting to the death against any cuts in pay or benefits, with the profitable part of the electorate literally pulling up stakes and moving away, New York's luster may fade.

The Real Problem

The issue runs a lot deeper than short-term revenue shortfalls, however, as the unfolding elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey reveal. Both states have Democratic current governors and vigorous Republican challengers. The Virginia Republican is way ahead in the polls, but the race in high-tax, famously-corrupt New Jersey is too close to call despite the Republican challenger being well-known for putting crooks in jail and the governor being surrounded by crooks who are under investigation.

Here's what the New York Times says about the situation in New Jersey:

SINCE its last gubernatorial election, New Jersey’s unemployment rate has nearly doubled, its home foreclosure rate has soared, and its famously scary property tax rate has bulged and raged, like the Incredible Hulk, into something even scarier. [emphasis added]

The Times goes on to point out that New Jersey's problems go back a long way:

Every election in my students’ memory, and my own, has been billed as the most pivotal in a generation, and every one has focused on the same issues. Candidates swear they’ll tackle corruption, lower property taxes, and do something good about transportation and something even better about education.

What's going on here? Aren't the people of New Jersey aware of the corruption and inefficiencies that decades of one-party Democratic rule have brought to their state? The Times points out that many potential voters are more interested in the World Series than in the upcoming election - after so many broken promises, they've decided that corruption and high costs can't be cured. They've decided that crooks and leeches are so well entrenched that no election can make any difference.

What we're seeing is the early edge of John Galt's China Syndrome: the voters giving up.

The Spreading Rot

Not all states are equally prone to this problem. Although the Massachusetts government has done its best to drive high-value citizens out of the state, MIT, Harvard, and many other universities are located there. High-bracket taxpayers find living near these institutions attractive enough to put up with the excessive costs imposed by the People's Republic of Taxachusetts, at least for now.

There are limits, however. Neither the California climate nor its university system have been able to stem the exodus of wealth-creating California taxpayers.

New Jersey corruption has been driving people away for years and there aren't as many unique attractions to hold the wealthy in the state. People of initiative who cared about being harmed by corruption and high taxes have already left and no longer vote there.

What remains of the Jersey electorate are voters such as state employees and welfare recipients who benefit from corruption and high taxes. It's perfectly logical for them to vote for more of the same; after all, they individually benefit more from waste than they suffer from it. If the Democrats win, New Jersey taxes will really take off and we'll have a meltdown as people abandon their homes - just as took place in Detroit, Michigan. Once one of the highest-income cities in the country, Detroit has driven out so many of its productive people and fallen so far into the third world that the average house sells for $8,000, if you can find someone to buy.

That's John Galt's China Syndrome. Instead of going on strike as in Ayn Rand's novel, wealthy people vote with their feet and move away, leaving behind the unproductive leeches who'll naturally vote for more leeching as long as there is any blood left to leech. When the leeches finally kill the patient as in Detroit, however, it isn't pretty - and Michigan has still not learned the lesson, with Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm having recently moved to "solve" Michigan's problems by piling on even more taxes.

Exit... While You Can

For the moment, wealthy folks are still permitted to move to lower-tax states which keeps their earning power in the United States, but people we know are slowly transferring their assets offshore in anticipation of federal taxes exploding to pay for Mr. Obama's budget-busters. The smart, savvy businessmen who have created wealth in America for centuries won't burn their way through the earth to China, but they and their money may well end up there all the same.

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Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name. Read other Scragged.com articles on Democrats, Detroit, taxes and unemployment

The Power To Regulate Healthcare is the Power to Destroy It

Will Offensicht — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:14:00 GMT

On Aug. 2, 2009, the New York Times reported that the government's "war on cancer" isn't going particularly well:

Forty years after President Richard M. Nixon declared war on cancer, death rates have barely changed.

Cancer researchers will tell you that people are surviving longer after being diagnosed with cancer, but that doesn't mean that cancer can be cured, nor even that treatment is necessarily helping. If medical tests for cancer, far more common these days for the most common cancers, detect illness earlier than they used to, people will live longer after the cancer is detected but they won't die any later than they would have died if the cancer had never been found.

During the 2008 meeting of the President's Cancel Panel, Dr. Scott Ramsey gave his view of the reason why so little progress was being made:

The biggest barrier, in his opinion, was that almost no adult cancer patients - just 3 percent - participate in studies of cancer treatments, mostly new drugs or drug regimens.

There are more than 6,500 cancer clinical trials seeking adult patients, according to clinicaltrials.gov, a trials registry. But many will be abandoned along the way. More than one trial in five sponsored by the National Cancer Institute failed to enroll a single subject, and only half reached the minimum needed for a meaningful result, Dr. Ramsey and his colleague John Scoggins reported in an editorial in the September 2008 issue of The Oncologist.

Part of the reason most oncologists steer clear of drug trials is money. When doctors treat a patient with an approved chemotherapy drug, they get reimbursed more than the drug actually costs and the difference adds to their bottom line. If the patient is in a trial, on the other hand, the patient gets the drug free from the sponsor. There's no markup by the doctor so he makes nothing. There's also a great deal of paperwork associated with a drug trial, and there may be legal liabilities if things don't work out well. For many doctors, the extra costs, the paperwork, and the risks of getting sued are simply not worth it.

This isn't the only article on the subject. On Aug. 7, 2009, the Times reported that even though the "stimulus" added $8.2 billion to the NIH research budget, any research that involves human volunteers faces other obstacles from federal ethics regulations.

No one denies the need to shield human subjects from undue risk. But current regulations have become so stringent and unwieldy that the ethics oversight system often impedes the kind of careful research we should be promoting. As two highly regarded medical ethicists, Dr. Norman Fost of the University of Wisconsin and Dr. Robert J. Levine of Yale, put it in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the system regulating the use of human subjects is "increasingly dysfunctional."

What's going on here? Progress in cancer treatment has ground to a halt for want of people to participate in clinical trials. Other research is being held back:

Some scientists deliberately design their studies more conservatively than they would like in order to placate fastidious review boards. Onerous paperwork regularly delays projects for months and inflates costs. A report last year in the journal Science warned that such paperwork is at "risk of pricing large clinical trials out of reach."

Stanford University researchers have estimated that it cost them about $56,000 in administrative wages, 18 months of delay and 10,000 pages of paper to make a small change to an already-approved research program that simply compared the progress made by patients attending different types of addiction-treatment programs. [emphasis added]

The Times has noticed that government regulations are pushing up the cost of research and, in many cases, wasting the money. Both of the Times articles pointed out that about one-third of cancer trials are abandoned before they're completed. What a lot of our money down the drain!

If the government can't manage the power we've let it assume over medical research, how do we expect bureaucrats to handle the power they want to give themselves over medical practice? Remember, if your doctor sees any Medicare patients, he's not allowed to give a treatment that's not approved by Medicare, even if you're willing to pay. What's going to happen if the medical board tells your doctor that it's too bad that the approved drug didn't work, that's the procedure, and you simply can't have any other treatment?

Medicare reimbursements are already so low they don't cover costs; that's why a lot of doctors won't take Medicare patients. Mr. Obama is talking of taking billions in "waste and fraud" out of Medicare. Since they can't cut rates any further, the only way to cut costs will be to give fewer treatments. How does it help society to give health insurance to people who don't have it if you then deny treatment to people who've already paid for it?

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Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name. Read other Scragged.com articles on health care, bureaucracy and regulation

John Galt Rents a U-Haul

Petrarch — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:11:00 GMT

Throughout history, there have been many occasions where unwise government policies caused the most productive and intelligent citizens to flee a nation, and this loss to talent led directly to national decline. From medieval Spain, where the Inquisition's banishment of Jews caused all the bankers and financiers to spread across Europe and Turkey to their benefit and Spain's decline, to Hitler's thoughtful provision to the United States of all Germany's greatest Jewish scientists who gave us the atom bomb, foolish rulers have repeatedly shot themselves in the foot by irrational hatred of a particular sort of people.

We are seeing the same thing in America today: not hatred against Jews, thankfully, and not a desire to murder anybody - but an irrational hatred and jealousy all the same. The modern target of popular pogroms? The rich.

For decades now, the Democratic Party has loudly proclaimed the virtues of "soaking the rich" - though they usually express the sentiment as "making the rich pay their fair share." George W. Bush's tax cuts for all sent the left into a collective catatonic fit; despite being "for all," the tax cuts heavily benefited the wealthy since they have more income to be taxed. The worm turns, and with Democrats in charge across the board, America's upper class is being measured for the chopper.

However, a necessary aspect of becoming and staying rich is a certain attitude of self-preservation. Just as King Ferdinand and Hitler drove out their most productive citizens to their eventual sorrow, New York City provides us a sterling example of why over-taxing is a bad, bad idea. The New York Post reports:

New Yorkers are fleeing the state and city in alarming numbers -- and costing a fortune in lost tax dollars, a new study shows. More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country.

The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City -- meaning that one out of seven city taxpayers moved out... [emphasis added]

The average Manhattan taxpayer who left the state earned $93,264 a year. The average newcomer to Manhattan earned only $72,726. That's a difference of $20,538, the highest for any county in the state. [emphasis added]

If your rich people move out to escape confiscatory taxes, which in New York City can total well over half of income, they effectively get an instant, massive raise. Billionaire Tom Golisano re-registered as a Florida resident and instantly saved himself $5 million; Rush Limbaugh has famously announced that he's doing the same.

At the same time, New York City's welfare benefits are known the breadth and depth of the continent as being lavish. The city may be losing population, but not as fast as you might think. What it's losing is the wealthy and productive citizens who pay the bills; they're being replaced by people moving in to collect welfare. Mayor Michael Bloomberg explained the problem:

One percent of the households that file in this city pay something like 50% of the taxes. In the city, that's something like 40,000 people. If a handful left, any raise would make it revenue neutral. The question is what's fair. If 1% are paying 50% of the taxes, you want to make it even more?

A city of millions - and a few tends of thousands provide half of the tax revenue! How much more can you squeeze out of them before they run?

Ayn Rand's legendary novel Atlas Shrugged tells of an America where the productive people led by John Galt get fed up, simply refuse to produce anymore, and the nation collapses. As long as federalism prevails and there are other more lightly-taxed states to move to, we won't see that at the national level, but New York City is flirting with a one-state Randian collapse. Will the rest of us learn the lesson and write to our elected representatives before Obama spreads the same devastating policies nationwide?

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on New York, taxes and wealth

There Are No Natural Limits to Regulation

Will Offensicht — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:02:00 GMT

We at Scragged have written over and over about the inability of government regulation to get things right.

Recently, we discussed the current conundrum of the city of Des Moines, Iowa: its sewers, strongly built in days of old by long-departed honest, competent contractors are now "historic structures" that can't be readily repaired.

We've explained how the regulations which surround cancer trials, or any project which involves testing medicine on people, have become so complex that medical people are afraid that testing new medical procedures will become impossible.

Finding examples as silly as the historical Des Moines sewers is like shooting fish in a barrel - no challenge at all. Even the Times article we cited to show that medical trials are becoming impossible gave an example of how ridiculous it gets.

There have been many reports of patients dying from infections they get while they're in the hospital for something else. Hospitals get paid for treating patients, so it's in the hospital's financial interest to make patients sicker - the more treatment they give, the more they get paid.

The University of Michigan developed a 5-step checklist of simple procedures to prevent infections. There was nothing remarkable about the checklist because it covered items like hand washing and cleaning patients' skin before giving an injection that hospitals should be doing anyway.

When the university tried to test the checklist to see if it reduced secondary infections, however, the study fell under the category of "research." That meant they had to get patients' consent whether to let nurses use a checklist when caring for them. Since the study wasn't getting patients to sign consent forms, the feds shut the project down.

The study was reinstated after protest from the scientific community and from the public, but the bureaucracy doesn't often reverse itself, no matter how stupidly it's behaved.

Medical Bureaucrats Aren't Alone

The Wall Street Journal of Oct. 24 had a page 1 story about a storage shed complex in Columbia, SC, where a number of rock bands had been storing equipment and practicing for more than 20 years.

About two years ago, a man who lived a half-mile away decided he didn't like hearing rock music when he wanted to listen to the crickets and managed to shut down the practice sessions after costing the shed's owners more than $20,000 in legal fees.

He wasn't able to get the practice sessions stopped because of noise - the sheds are in an industrial area between two railroad lines which generate plenty of noise. Instead, he bagged them via building codes. The courts ruled that practicing rock music in sheds designed for simple storage constituted a "serious violation" which must cease. The fire marshal ruled that the roll-up doors would have to be replaced with normal doors, the electrical system would have to be upgraded, and bathrooms would have to be provided.

The owners argued that it would be extremely difficult to start a fire in one-story concrete-and-sheet-metal sheds and that bands usually had the doors rolled up and open when practicing - to no avail.

The fact that nothing bad whatsoever had happened during the 20 years the sheds were being used for band practice, other than to the musical arts, meant nothing - rules were rules and band practice had to stop.

We've written about the follies of the "precautionary principle" which says that nothing new should be permitted until it can be proven safe. Unfortunately, the only way to prove something is safe is to try it.

Even proving something safe might not be enough for a true believer in rules. Bands had practiced in the sheds for two decades with no incidents. That ought to be long enough to prove that the electrical system was safe and that the roll-up doors were no hazard, but the courts agreed with the fire marshal and shut the bands down anyway.

Where Does It End?

Why are we taking this tour through the ghosts of Scragged articles past, of bureaucratic stupidities present, and of head-smacking idiocy surely yet to come? There's a point, and a pattern: unlike private businesses, governmental incompetence has no natural limits.

There's a limit to how incompetent a private business can be - bankruptcy is supposed to wipe out businesses which get too far out of touch with their customers, unless of course the government props them up. There are no such limits to bureaucracies. Private businesses, naturally seeing new avenues for profit, have realized this and figured out how to avail themselves of natural bureaucratic empire-building tendencies to their own advantage.

For example, as in the case of our rock bands and storage sheds, electrical and plumbing contractors like to lobby fire marshals to tighten the regulations to require more and more electrical and plumbing equipment in buildings. The more equipment is required, the more money the contractors make. When customers gripe, contractors shrug and say, "Regulations!" omitting the minor detail that contractors influence the regulatory process over time. Building cost isn't a problem as far as the contractors are concerned; increased building costs benefit them. Had the owner of the storage sheds sucked it up and decided to become compliant, some lucky electrical and plumbing contractor would have received a juicy and entirely unnecessary contract to do the required upgrades.

Our courts, which should protect us from government excess, have taken the view that regulatory cost is no concern at all; they upheld even regulations which, given the long history of band practice in the sheds, were manifestly far stricter than necessary. Short of overthrowing the entire government, there's no simple way to cut back the regulatory thicket which costs us all so much money and strikes at the heart of our personal liberties.

Given what we see government do with the authority they've already taken from us, why would anyone want to give them more authority, particularly over medical care?

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Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name. Read other Scragged.com articles on Confucian Cycle, regulation and That's Bureaucracy!

Federalism and National Peace

Petrarch — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:10:00 GMT

Hardly a day goes by without our being dumbstruck by another story of a government authority doing something so mind-bogglingly stupid as to call into question the entire theory of human evolution. Of course, the TSA is a perennial font of such tales; we've also reported on children being snatched from their parents after a beverage serving mistake and historical preservation regulations that prevent old sewers from being fixed.

Today brings us a story that has everything: a young orphan, a struggling family, an intractable zoning bureaucracy. Pathos, hazard, uncertainty - it's all here!

A parenting blog brings us this report, based on local TV news broadcasts:

A retirement community is working hard to evict its youngest resident — a six-year-old girl who lives with her grandparents. If they’re successful, the child could be placed in foster care.

Jimmy and Judy Stottler have been legal guardians of their granddaughter Kimberly for about four years, after her mother lost custody due to a chronic drug problem. But their Home Owners Association bylaws clearly state that all residents of the community must be 55 years or older. Bringing Kimberly home created a stir among their neighbors.

Eventually, the Stottlers decided to move. But despite lowering the price on their home from $250K to $129K, it just won’t sell. Now it’s up to a judge to decide whether Kimberly can stay until her family sells their home, or whether she alone will be evicted. If that happens, she could be placed into state custody until her grandparents can find another place to live. [emphasis added]

This story is a perfect illustration, not of heartlessly cruel tyrants whose cold hearts are warmed by throwing starving orphans into the frigid street, but of exactly why our Founders' national model of Federalism was a work of such genius.

Federalism Makes Everyone Happy

The fact is, the would-be evicters in the HOA have a point. It's simple fact that many elderly people would prefer not to contend with rampaging rugrats during their morning constitutionals. Is there any reason why a given community should not mutually agree to allow only old folks in?

That's just what happened here and the Stottlers voluntarily agreed to the terms of the contract when they moved in. Circumstances have changed and now they have a small child to care for. The appropriate course of action is for them to move elsewhere, which is what they are attempting to do.

Compassion would dictate that the HOA at least put up with little Kimberly until the Stottlers move - they are doing their best to do so. The point is that they can move: there are other communities, apartments, and jurisdictions which welcome kids. Unlucky and slow it may be, but there is a solution that makes everybody happy, and they will get there eventually.

The interesting aspect to HOAs is that, while not being governments exactly, their contractual agreements have the force of law. This allows them to be more intrusive than normal governments. Some people like this and seek out homes with an HOA; others don't, and avoid them.

In a nation that believes in freedom, there is no other way for everyone to be happy and free than by allowing local jurisdictions to do things their way, according to the local will of the majority. Don't like it? Move out!

Obviously, there are limits even to this principle: slavery could never be tolerable precisely because slaves had not the liberty to leave. Jim Crow was wrong, too, because there was no equal justice or due legal process if you were of the wrong color, but affirmative action is no better.

Aside from the most basic fundamental rights enumerated in the Constitution, what possible good is there for an overweening Federal government to set all the rules?

Abortion and Anti-Federalism

Consider abortion. Fundamentally, there is very little ground for compromise. A fetus is either a human being or it is not. If it is, then killing a fetus is murder; if not, then it's no big deal and nobody's business.

There are a certain number of people who believe one way and a certain number of people who believe the other. The precise numbers can and do shift over time, but the consensus will never be unanimous.

We on the pro-life side can hope that, one day, abortion follows the path of slavery: supported by only a handful of recalcitrant reprobates who dare not show their faces in polite society. Until that day, though, we have to live together.

By enforcing one single standard on the entire country, Roe v Wade made peaceful coexistence impossible. In South Dakota as in Manhattan, abortions rights were made the law of the land by fiat.

How much wiser it would have been if the Supreme Court had stated the obvious fact that abortion is not a Constitutional right and that the several states can handle it as they please! New York, Massachusetts, and California would have become anything-goes; South Dakota would have banned it entirely (except for life-of-the-mother); and the rest would have fallen somewhere in between.

Virtually the entire population of the country would be living under laws that they themselves supported - and literally the entire population would be living under laws that they could tolerate. Because if they couldn't, the solution would be ready at hand: move one state over.

Instead, we have a suppurating, pustulent, decades-long civil war that has poisoned our politics and undermined national unity. And you still can't get an abortion in South Dakota.

Federalism At Work

Compare the disaster of abortion jurisprudence with the current status of the homosexual-marriage debate. Several years ago, it became clear that the far left was trying to do with homosexual marriage what it accomplished with abortion: ordain at as a national right by judicial fiat. This succeeded in Massachusetts despite the opposition of the voters and it looked like they'd be doing the same thing in other states.

However, Bill Clinton had wisely placed a brick wall in the way: the Defense of Marriage Act. This law is loudly condemned by the usual leftist suspects as discriminatory and evil, but in fact its only purpose is to permit diversity of opinion. Nowhere does it forbid homosexual marriage; quite the contrary. It simply states that no state can be required to acknowledge a valid homosexual marriage from another state if it doesn't wish to, nor will the federal government without a further act of Congress. In effect, it removed the question from the courts entirely, and placed it in the hands of the people's representatives whre it belongs.

As a result, we now have several states where homosexual marriage has been duly passed into law by the legislature (New Hampshire, Vermont); quite a few where it has been banned by constitutional referendum (California most famously); and even one jurisdiction, Washington DC, where marriage licenses are not issued to same-sex couples but homosexual marriages legally contracted in another state are recognized as valid.

What we don't have is a constant, near-violent protests, except as parts of ordinary political campaigns for and against referenda or candidates advocating one side or another. The issue is being handled by normal political processes, mostly peacefully. The different states and regions are reaching different conclusions and most people are content with the laws that prevail where they live. Problem solved!

Tax, Regulate, Destroy, Repeat

As we wrestle with a vast number of complex problems, the Obama administration would do well to learn this lesson and devolve more decision-making ability to the states. Alas, it's doing just the opposite: the same anti-federalist pattern which the Supreme Court established for abortion is the Obama administration's model for everything else. Allowing different states to handle health care differently so we can see what works? No, we must have one single national monolith imposed on all of us, like it or lump it. Let the states decide how lavish their welfare systems, and thus how high their taxes, ought to be? Nope, not that either.

The vast majority of what the Federal government does today not only has no Constitutional justification, it has no logical justification either. What is there about health care that only the Federal government can do, and the states can't? How about education? Energy? Only regarding international trade and tariffs, national defense, and possibly the environment is there any logical reason why we need one national rule - and it's just those areas (environment excepted) which our Founders assigned to Federal jurisdiction.

There is only one reason to have the Feds decide everything, and that's if you believe that for every question and for everybody, there is One Right Answer. If that's so, then we should all do the same exact thing the One Right Way, and there's really no reason for local governments at all.

If everyone does the One Right Thing the One Right Way, by force of law... we are living in a totalitarian dictatorship, and not in America. And that's even if the One Right Decision actually was the right decision - but when was the last time the Federal government made a right decision about anything at all? As the saying goes, do you really want to give your health care to the guys who brought you the Postal Service, DMV, TSA, Amtrak, and $400 hammers?

A federalist model, where the maximum possible authority is given to state and local jurisdictions, is the only way that most people can be mostly happy wherever they choose to live. It's the only way we as a country can move forward, determining the best way to do things by allowing different places to do them differently and observing what works. There is enough unhappiness with Washington that the governor of Texas can talk about leaving the Union and receive cheers!

The way things are going with all power being centralized in Washington with more and more unworkable ideas being imposed on the entire country, the time may soon come when a return to thoroughgoing federalism might be the only way we can remain as one nation at all.

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on abortion, bureaucracy and federalism

Corruption, Killer of Economies

Will Offensicht — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:09:00 GMT

On a per-capita basis, Singapore is one of the wealthiest nations of the earth excluding those that merely pump oil out of the ground. This is particularly remarkable given that Singapore is a small city with essentially no natural resources; they don't even get enough water to drink and have to buy it from neighboring Malaysia. Its people live by adding value to goods that flow through their country and by providing services.

Many explanations such as hard work, lack of racial diversity, and a good education system have been advanced for their success. We at Scragged agree that these play a part, but having observed the decline in America's economic fortunes which has accompanied our government's toleration of crooked behavior, we've come to believe that the lack of corruption is a major reason for Singapore's success.

The American dream used to be based on the assumption of fair treatment. The idea was that anyone could be born poor and, through a combination of luck and pluck, rise to greatness.

That's possible, of course, only when the system gives equal opportunity. America used to offer that. Over the last half-century, alas, in an effort to right past wrongs, we've had government tilting the scales backwards in favor of various groups. This emphasis on who you are rather than what you're doing has hurt the economy by destroying any semblance of equality of opportunity, but what's really economically painful is the sort of old-fashioned corruption we're seeing more and more often in Washington.

The Singapore Solution

A Singapore native explained why corruption is relatively rare in Singapore. It's interesting to contrast his accounts of Singapore governance with what happens in Washington, DC.

He starts out by telling why he wrote the article:

We should strive to improve our wealth by legitimate means and in an honest way. I have been to places where corruption is out of control and see how the nation suffers as a whole. The living standard is hardly progressing at all, more poor people are on the street and social injustice is rampant. This deplorable stage has driven the good people to leave the country in search of a better life somewhere. Corruption is a major threat to a country stability and well being of its people. [emphasis added]

He observes that corrupt governments impoverish their people. He then points out that the attitude towards corruption is set at the very top of the government hierarchy:

I have great respect for our first prime minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew who is instrumental to change the corrupt infested colony when he took office in 1959 to a well respected country today. He set good example to lead and could not tolerate any of his party members and government officials to corrupt.

A leader must not only state that corruption is unacceptable and set an example of incorruptible behavior, he must take action to find corruption and root it out:

In the early years of Singapore self-rule, the CPIB [which reported directly to the prime minister] sent out undercover to deliberately commit traffic offense and offered bribe to the policeman. Once the policeman took the bribe, he would be handcuffed and sent to CPIB office. This had reduced the number of corrupt practices of the traffic policemen.

There was a time when Americans expected their leaders to follow the law. On Oct. 10, 2009, the New York Times noted in "On This Day:"

On Oct. 10, 1973, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew pleaded no contest to one count of federal income tax evasion and resigned his office.

The Vice-President of the United States resigned his office when it became known that he'd committed one count of tax evasion. In recent days, the Times pointed out that Rep. Charlie Rangel, who heads the committee that writes tax laws, remains in office despite numerous violations of our tax laws, disclosure rules, and New York City rent control regulations.

Some conservatives have argued that this shows the operation of a double standard - Mr. Agnew was a Republican and Mr. Rangel is a Democrat. That's possible, but it seems more likely that we're seeing an overall decline in governmental honesty, after all, the original "Bridge to Nowhere" was Republican corruption in its purest form.

Mr. Obama Understands, but...

President Obama recognized the importance of government keeping the trust of its citizens when he said:

"I've got to own up to my mistake, which is that ultimately it's important for this administration to send a message that there aren't two sets of rules. You know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes." [emphasis added]

- President Barack Hussein Obama

Despite knowing that it's important for citizens to be able to trust their government starting at the very top, Mr. Obama hasn't seen fit to do anything about the corruption swirling around his associates. Mr. Geithner, a Wal Street tax cheat, remains our Treasury secretary. When his ACORN friends were found advising would-be brothel owners how to get federal funding to buy a building to be used as a whorehouse and how to claim their stable of child prostitutes as dependents, Mr. Obama was "too busy" to discuss the matter.

Although the House and Senate voted to stop spending taxpayer money on ACORN, a number of legislators voted against cutting them off. The Justice Department hasn't seen fit to investigate their aiding and abetting violations of federal tax law.

Rather than dragging the miscreants off in handcuffs as in Singapore, our leaders are hoping the storm will blow over so that ACORN can get back to its usual business of registering fraudulent Democrat voters.

Even China, where corruption appears to have originated some 5,000 years ago, has leaders who recognize the importance of honest governance:

There is this anecdote about Mr. Zhu Rongji, ex-premier of China, visiting a customs department in a city. The first thing he did was to get all the officers to place their watches and cigarette lighters on the table. Those who had expensive items were taken away for questioning.

Our government, in contrast, doesn't even say "Boo!" to those who aid and abet breaking our laws, and Mr. Obama's Justice Department undid the conviction of some Black Panthers who'd been videotaped intimidating voters.

Corruption has huge economic costs. The African continent has vast mineral resources and much fertile land, but nobody would speak of the "African Dream." Despite all their resources and in spite of all the billions of dollars in aid and other investment that African countries have received over the years, they can't seem to overcome their longstanding culture of corruption which holds their economies back.

The Liberal Myth

Liberals who want to raise taxes and provide government benefits to "share the wealth" forget that wealth must be produced before it can be shared. No matter who pays, there's no way for anybody to have cars, or clothes, or anything else unless someone is willing to work to produce the goods.

The Weekly Standard points out that Mr. Obama doesn't understand the American Dream:

Obama knows people who make laws, and people who teach law, and people who depend upon help from the government, but few people who make things, or run things, or work in the market economy; in other words, he doesn't know his own country, and has no sense where its center of gravity lies. [emphasis added]

Mr. Obama has never participated in the productive part of our economy. He doesn't understand how our economy works; he has no clue how badly his policies will damage the sources of economic success on which his dreams of helping the poor depend. How can he provide health care, for example, unless health care workers make enough money after taxes to make curing people worth their while?

The American system for producing goods was to set up rules whereby anyone who worked hard and provided something people wanted could become extremely rich. Did government planners decree that we needed PCs? Or iPods? Or did greedy businessmen who wanted to make a buck work hard to put them on the market?

Our system of letting people become as rich as they like so long as they add value to society worked so well that it became known as the "American Dream." The liberal myth is that we can make everybody prosperous by taxing the rich. Liberals forget that when taxes went too high during the depression, wealthy people stopped investing. When capital went on strike, the economy stayed flat until WW II.

Unfortunately, as Confucius wrote long ago, government bureaucrats find it easiest to get the resources to support a life of ease by lobbying for more regulations which businesses must meet. They more rules they can enforce, the bigger their budgets. The more rules businesses have to meet, however, the higher their costs, the less efficient our economy becomes, and the fewer goods are available for consumption. When government costs more than society can afford, society falls. We've described this as "sliding into the abyss of the Confucian cycle."

Any regulations which allow bureaucrats to determine what businesses can and cannot do provide opportunities for corruption, of course. Our bureaucrats are no more and no less honest than Singapore's bureaucrats, the difference is that the Singapore leadership tends to lop heads when they find corruption whereas our leaders promote tax cheats to high office and ignore cheaters who attain high office before their crimes come out.

Most African countries have never had honest governments and we know what corruption costs African economies. We once had a reasonably honest government, a vice president resigned over one charge of failing to pay his taxes, but we're becoming visibly more and more corrupt at the highest levels of government. Must we go the way of Africa?

Read the original article on Scragged.com

Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name. Read other Scragged.com articles on Africa, corruption and Singapore