Capitalism and the Right to Rise

In freedom lies the risk of failure. But in statism lies the certainty of stagnation.

Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: "The right to rise."

Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn't seem like something we should have to protect.

But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

That is what economic freedom looks like. Freedom to succeed as well as to fail, freedom to do something or nothing. People understand this. Freedom of speech, for example, means that we put up with a lot of verbal and visual garbage in order to make sure that individuals have the right to say what needs to be said, even when it is inconvenient or unpopular. We forgive the sacrifices of free speech because we value its blessings.

But when it comes to economic freedom, we are less forgiving of the cycles of growth and loss, of trial and error, and of failure and success that are part of the realities of the marketplace and life itself.

Increasingly, we have let our elected officials abridge our own economic freedoms through the annual passage of thousands of laws and their associated regulations. We see human tragedy and we demand a regulation to prevent it. We see a criminal fraud and we demand more laws. We see an industry dying and we demand it be saved. Each time, we demand "Do something . . . anything."

As Florida's governor for eight years, I was asked to "do something" almost every day. Many times I resisted through vetoes but many times I succumbed. And I wasn't alone. Mayors, county chairs, governors and presidents never think their laws will harm the free market. But cumulatively, they do, and we have now imperiled the right to rise.

Woe to the elected leader who fails to deliver a multipoint plan for economic success, driven by specific government action. "Trust in the dynamism of the market" is not a phrase in today's political lexicon.

Have we lost faith in the free-market system of entrepreneurial capitalism? Are we no longer willing to place our trust in the creative chaos unleashed by millions of people pursuing their own best economic interests?

The right to rise does not require a libertarian utopia to exist. Rather, it requires fewer, simpler and more outcome-oriented rules. Rules for which an honest cost-benefit analysis is done before their imposition. Rules that sunset so they can be eliminated or adjusted as conditions change. Rules that have disputes resolved faster and less expensively through arbitration than litigation.

In Washington, D.C., rules are going in the opposite direction. They are exploding in reach and complexity. They are created under a cloud of uncertainty, and years after their passage nobody really knows how they will work.

We either can go down the road we are on, a road where the individual is allowed to succeed only so much before being punished with ruinous taxation, where commerce ignores government action at its own peril, and where the state decides how a massive share of the economy's resources should be spent.

Or we can return to the road we once knew and which has served us well: a road where individuals acting freely and with little restraint are able to pursue fortune and prosperity as they see fit, a road where the government's role is not to shape the marketplace but to help prepare its citizens to prosper from it.

In short, we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.

Mr. Bush, a Republican, was governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007.

Tired of being pushed around, a group of CEOs are speaking out.

John Stossel | December 15, 2011

Listen to Audio Version (MP3)

Some politicians claim that politicians create jobs.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says, “My job is to create jobs.”

What hubris! Government has no money of its own. All it does is take from some people and give to others. That may create some jobs, but only by leaving less money in the private sector for job creation.Actually, it’s worse than that. Since government commandeers scarce resources by force and doesn’t have to peddle its so-called services on the market to consenting buyers, there’s no feedback mechanism to indicate if those services are worth more to people than what they were forced to go without.The only people who create real, sustainable jobs are in private businesses—if they’re unsubsidized.Some CEOs are upset that people don’t appreciate what they do. So they formed a group called the Job Creators Alliance.Brad Anderson, former CEO of Best Buy, joined because he wants to counter the image of businesspeople as evil. When he was young, Anderson himself thought they were evil. But then he “stumbled into a business career” by going to work in a stereo store.“I watched what happens in building a business. (My store,) The Sound of Music, which became Best Buy, was 11 years (old) before I made a dollar of profit.”In 36 years, he turned that store into a $50 billion company.Tom Stemberg, founder of Staples, got involved with the Job Creators Alliance because he’s annoyed that the government makes a tough job much tougher.He complains that government mostly creates jobs—that kill jobs.“They’re creating $300 million worth of jobs in the new consumer financial protection bureau,” Stemberg said, “which I don’t think is going to do much for productivity in America. We’re creating all kinds of jobs trying to live up to Dodd-Frank...and those jobs don’t create much productivity.Now, Stemberg runs a venture capital business. “I helped create over 100,000 jobs myself," he said. "Pinkberry and City Sports and J. McLaughlin are growing and adding employment.”To do that, he had to overcome hurdles placed in the way by government.“All that we get is grief and more hoops to jump through and more forms to fill out and more regulations to comply with,” complained Stemberg. “Fastest-growing investment segment in venture capitalism: compliance software.”Compliance is the big word in business today. Every business has to have a compliance department. But resources are scarce, so these departments suck away creativity. It’s one reason that these successful businesspeople don’t think they could do today what they did in the past.Mike Whalen, CEO of Heart of America Group, said he got started with loans from banks that took a chance on an unknown: “It is not an underwriting standard that can be dictated by Dodd-Frank with 55 pages. It’s kind of a gut instinct.”But John Allison, who built BB&T Corp. into the 12th biggest bank in America, says that “gut instinct” is now illegal.“It would be very difficult to do what we did then today. It was semi-venture capital thing. The government regulations (today) are so tight, including setting credit standards, particularly since the so-called financial crisis and since they ... changed the credit standards in the banking industry, making it very hard for the banks to finance small businesses.”These successful businessmen realize that in one way, they profit from the regulatory burden. They can absorb the costs. That gives them an advantage over smaller competitors.“Somebody who wants to compete with us can’t because we can afford to hire the guys that can read this stuff and to keep us in compliance with the law. They can’t,” Anderson said.Politicians rarely understand this. One who learned it too late was Sen. George McGovern. After he left office, he started a small bed-and-breakfast and hit the regulatory wall he helped create. Later, he wrote, “I wish during the years I was in public office I had this firsthand experience about the difficulties businesspeople face....We are choking off business opportunity.”

Wish they learned that before leaving office.

November 21, 2011

Happy Halal Thanksgiving

October 10, 2011

The spoiled brat uprising: Bringing the Communist revolution to our doorstep?

By Wes Vernon

Cancel elections! "Take out" the "sons of bitches!" Send capitalists to "re-education [read concentration] camps!" Chop their heads off! Kill the bankers! Kill the rich! Kill your parents! Kill! Kill! Kill!

"Occupy Wall Street" rioting is not a self-starter with bored white kids on a lark to rush the calendar for Spring Break (though some such "useful idiots" are in the mix).

The whole operation — spreading from Wall Street to other cities — is organized by the Working Family Party, a front for the SEIU/ACORN, allied with Democratic Socialists of America. The attack on America has the backing of groups bankrolled by left-wing moneybags George Soros. All of these "usual suspects" are in-tight with the Obama Administration and the Democratic National Committee. They have been organizing this from Day One. It is anything but "spontaneous." Don't kid yourself.

Street brawlers imbued with class hatred propaganda are egged on by a President of the United States whose parents were followers of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

The attack has been aimed squarely at the heart of the United States for decades. The Communist conspiracy — during and after the Soviet days — has never wavered from its goal of a Soviet-style America under the domination of a worldwide order.

For generations, avenues of public influence have nurtured a nest of potential insurrection, fueled in large part by the writings of the likes of a Communist liar named Howard Zinn (see this column "Howard Zinn, Communist Liar," 8/9/10 & "Is it Safe to Send Your Child to School?," 9/6/10). He and others like him continue to poison the minds of our young. Occupy Wall Street no doubt would bring an evil smile to the late Zinn and his ilk.

Hate America manifesto

With the Hate America Left infecting institutions to which kids are exposed as they grow up, why should we be surprised that a Communist-brainwashed movement would surface damning the "unfairness" of a society that (gasp!) does not hand them their every need and wish?

Occupy Wall Street has forged what amounts to a 21st century Communist Manifesto that includes the following as sacrosanct "rights":

• Minimum wage $20; guaranteed wage income regardless of employment.
  
  
• Universal health care with private insurers outlawed.
  
  
• Free college education. (Given what passes for "education" these days, the price may be right for parents who send their kids to college as good citizens, only to see them return as hateful revolutionaries.)
  
  
• End the fossil fuel economy. (Oh, goody! That will make everyone poor, but then that is basic to any such enforced egalitarianism, so why should this one be any different? So we'll all be poor? Way to go! That'll teach Jimmy Hoffa's "sons of bitches!" — an epithet hurled at the Tea Party as Hoffa introduced Obama at a gathering.)
  
  
• Ban other existing workable energy sources by decommissioning America's nuclear power plants and by re-establishing "the natural flow of river systems" (hydro-electric).
  
  
• Demand the right to freeze in the dark. (Not spelled out, I just threw that one in, reasoning it is a natural consequence of the above energy demands. The absence of a ban on coal mining in this 21st century Communist Manifesto was obviously pure oversight.)
  
  
• Spend a trillion dollars on a freeze-in-the-dark energy policy. (Ah yes! Solyndra-like scandals; the more such criminality, the better to stoke the Communist line that "Duh! The system does not work.")
  
  
• One trillion dollars spent on infrastructure — roads, rail, bridges, sewer, water, electrical grid. (Those who think a case can be made for some federal support for infrastructure are disrespected by this clown price tag pulled out of thin air for the express purpose of bankrupting "the dirty capitalists.")
  
  
• Racial and gender "equal rights" amendment. (Another fraudulent use of the term that has less to do with race or gender — except as convenient covers — and more to do with perpetrating the notion that Ben Franklin, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson intended the Constitution to promote abortion and same-sex marriage.)
  
  
• Open borders migration, everyone can travel anywhere to work and live. (A Terrorists' Rights Bill? Who will sponsor that one? Dick Durbin?)
  
  
• Bring American elections up to international standards. (What is "international?" Iran? Cuba? Or perhaps the UN, which seats some of the world's worst tyrants on its "Human Rights" Commission.)
  
  
• Immediate across-the-board debt forgiveness. (What? Oh, I forgot! Communism supposedly means everything is "free," right?)
  
  
• Outlaw all credit reporting agencies. (Of course, the socialist paradise says if you want it, steal it.)
  
  
• Allow "workers" to sign a ballot at any time whether to join a union — putting the SEIU and ACORN's ballot-stuffing thugs in charge of seeing to it that such elections are "secure" and "fair." (Be certain the term "worker" in this context excludes anyone who succeeds with a good salary or decent retirement. Actress Roseanne Barr would send bankers to "re-education" camps, and if they insist on keeping what she deems excessive amounts, she would then have them beheaded. Be certain that Hollywood mansions and limos would be safe.)
  
  

Obama: comfortable with Marxist buddies

Of course, Obama would support the uprising. It is guided by his own shock troops.

The protesters, he intones, "are giving voice to a more broad based frustration" (translation: keep it up). This Marxist-nurtured "dear leader" talks about the day when his acolytes will "run Republicans out of town" (for their refusal to pass his phony "jobs" bill, a retread of past failures).

Off-the-charts street revolutionaries are echoing Mr. Obama's wailing at "millionaires and billionaires." That's what the self-righteous Marxists (admitted or disguised in respectability) really mean when they lecture the rest of us on "civility" (as practiced by his terrorist friends Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, whose sixties movement included such lovely "civil" sloganeering as "Kill the rich! Kill your parents!).

The SEIU/ACORN thugs and ballot-stuffers use their sharp elbows while agitating for "rights" resembling the "demands" of every violent revolution in history that has led to jackboot governance — including 20th century Nazis and Communists or, for that matter, the Jacobins of the 18th century French Revolution.

On yet another front

Van Jones, meanwhile, concurrent with the Occupy Wall Street rampage this past week, conducted what he called a "Take Back the American Dream" conference.

Under Jones's interpretation, that very title represents a prostitution of the English language. But for self-described Communists such as Jones, Orwellian language is routine. Jones, recall, was ousted from his "Green Jobs" czar position at the White House, after he had been outed in 2009 by Trevor Loudon, Cliff Kincaid, and Glenn Beck. At that point, Jones — also a 9/11 "truther" — had to leave — not because the administration had any problems with his beliefs — but because he had become a PR liability.

Jones's latest venture is another ploy to distract you and me from the Obama administration's march toward the downfall of the United States.

"October is going to be the turning point when it comes to progressives [read Communists] to fight back," Jones crowed on left-wing TV. He envisions "an American fall, an American autumn. Just like we saw an Arab spring." (Great! Every indication thus far points go the "Arab spring" as a springboard for empowerment of the America-hating Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.)

What it's all about

Class hatred is the toxic thread that runs though Occupy Wall Street, the Obama administration's obsession with "the top one percent," and the collaboration of the hard left and radical Islam.

Many of us have seen people rise up from the depths of poverty to make a success of themselves and contribute to the betterment of society.

That experience leads to the conclusion that class hatred in our body politic is just plain evil.

Some of those taken in by it may be "naïve," but that goes back to the Churchillian observation that a person at age 20 who is not a liberal may not "have a heart," but that a person who is not a conservative at age 40 surely does not have a brain.

The motive is very secondary. Class hatred is pure evil. Occupy Wall Street, SEIU/ACORN, Van Jones & "the American fall" — they want America gone as we know it. North Carolina's Democrat Governor Bev Purdue has proposed that we cancel congressional elections. Ominous and chilling. This is a war on the real American Dream. We are honor-bound to resist.

Tea Party Envy

Careful what you wish for, liberals.

By JAMES TARANTO

Let's give credit where it's due: The Washington Post's Richard Cohen seems to have coined the excellent phrase that is our headline today. "I suffer from Tea Party envy," he confessed at the outset of an early-August column. Although he contemns everything the Tea Party stands for, he continues, "I am jealous of its sense of purpose, its determination and its bracing conviction that it is absolutely right."

Now, the left thinks it has found its Tea Party in the combined efforts of the Occupy Wall Street drum circle and something called the American Dream Movement, described in an Associated Press dispatch:

Liberal groups are trying to build a grassroots movement that will help revive the economy and protect Medicare and Social Security, but whether they will be successful--and use it to help re-elect President Barack Obama--is unclear.

Organizers of this week's "Take Back the American Dream" conference in Washington have studied the origins of the tea party as they try to build a countermovement to support liberal causes. The effort is a response to Republicans' takeover of the House in 2010 and disenchantment over Obama's attempts at compromise.

The head of TBAD is none other than Van Jones, who was ousted as the Obama administration's "green jobs" czar when Glenn Beck revealed his Marxist past and his having signed a 9/11 "truther" petition. Jones introduced the idea way back in February, in a Puffington Host essay urging "all who love this country" to "do everything possible to spread the 'spirit of Madison' to all 50 states."

When he refers to the "spirit of Madison," it isn't James he has in mind, but rather the capital of Wisconsin, where members of government employee unions were holding unruly demonstrations in an effort to preserve the legal privileges they enjoyed at taxpayer expense. They failed, but Jones is still trying. An email from MoveOn.org this morning informs us that this afternoon, "thousands of people from the American Dream Movement will march in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Foley Square to Wall Street."

Yesterday we had a few laughs at the expense of Tea Party enviers in the media like E.J. "Baghdad Bob" Dionne and Nicholas Kristof--easy targets, we'll admit. But let's note that there are a few similarities between today's raging lefties and the Tea Party--or at least the Tea Party as the left imagines it.

For one thing, the Occupiers are mostly white, as Malcolm Sacks, "a New York activist who has been participating in the Zuccotti Park occupation," tells al-Jazeera:

In general, the whole freak-out about the economic crisis, in the US at least, is kind of a response to the economic crisis finally hitting white people. . . . It finally feels like a crisis for the majority, including middle class and working class white folks, which is why we're seeing white people at the front, and taking over, these protests. . . .

There's a core of people--the media and press team--who are doing a lot of the organising and shaping the public image. . . . We tried to talk to one of the media folks about the problem of there not being people of colour, and the problem of people of colour not necessarily feeling comfortable participating, and there was resistance on their part to acknowledge that. They deflect criticisms by saying, "if anybody want's [sic] to get involved they can get involved. If they want to be represented, they just come and they can do it too."

Meanwhile, at National Review Online Charles Cooke has video of an Occupier berating a Jewish man with anti-Semitic slurs. Cooke reports that "shortly after my video camera was switched off, [the Occupier] (inexplicably) shouted the N-word at the same man."

NRO's Jonah Goldberg notes that Michael Tomasky is the latest lefty journalist to sign on as a cheerleader for the Occupiers, then notes:

[Tomasky] then goes on to lecture a movement he already supports--regardless of its agenda and its leaders--about how to succeed (short version: Put normal-looking people out front to convince Americans that Occupy Wall Street is something it isn't). I find the whole thing hilarious. Tomasky is the quintessential liberal sucker. His only advice to the left is on tactics and public relations. It's advice they won't take and he'll keep supporting them anyway.

The advice to put normal people out front is a classic bit of Alinskyite common sense, as we noted in February. It is advice the Tea Party might have profited from following more often. In 2010 Republicans lost three winnable Senate races--in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada--because they nominated Tea Party candidates who were too extreme or seemed too weird to capture a majority.

Then again, without the Tea Party it's unlikely that Rand Paul of Kentucky, Marco Rubio of Florida, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Mike Lee of Utah or Ron Johnson of Wisconsin would be in the Senate today. On the whole last year, the Tea Party was a terrific boon for both conservatives and the Republican Party.

Mediaite.com notes that Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, lefty presidential candidate and Democratic National Committee chairman, is warning Republicans that front-runner Mitt Romney has a "big base problem":

Usually that's not a problem. Republicans are very disciplined, they'll pull behind him. Actually, even the Democrats pull in behind after a fight like this. This year you've got the Tea Party. They are not playing with a full deck. I mean, they could go off the rails here. This is going to be really interesting. They might sit home, or vote for somebody else, or find a Libertarian, or Ron Paul might do something. Who knows.

Our guess is that if Romney is the nominee, the vast majority of Tea Partiers will hold their noses and vote for him, the way the nutroots types who loved Dean did for John Kerry in 2004. To be sure, in the 2004 election the "electable" challenger lost to the incumbent. But as Dave Weigel observes, "if unemployment was 9% in 2004, Kerry would have won."

Meanwhile, it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone on the left that OWS and TBAD may be the left's Tea Party in a bad way. Goldberg observes: "Occupy Wall Street is a sinkhole and it's not done growing. All sorts of folks are going to be pulled into it before this is over. At this rate, I expect the White House to go ass over tea kettle around Thanksgiving."

The Tea Party on the one hand and OWS/TBAD on the other have in common that they are both opposition movements. But OWS/TBAD is an opposition movement on behalf of the incumbent. As the AP notes in reporting on Jones's convention, "many [attendees] hope the American Dream movement can generate enthusiasm for Obama next year."

One of them is the hard-left Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, who said at the conference: "We have to set people's hair on fire about what America would look like if Republicans get their way."

Associated Press

Jan Shakowsky is a Jacksonian Democrat.

This captures the spirit not of Madison, Wis., but of Madison Avenue. As Melanie Wells wrote in her 2005 Wall Street Journal review of adman Phil Dusenberry's memoir: "In 1985, Pepsi-Cola execs suggested that the ad agency cast Michael Jackson in a commercial for its signature soda. The singer was signed, but he insisted that the agency show only lightning-quick glimpses of his face in the spot. The request infuriated Mr. Dusenberry at the time. But when the commercial ran he realized that it was a good idea. 'The more you hold back,' Mr. Dusenberry writes, 'the more people will clamor.' Of course the ad got a lot of extra publicity because, on the studio set, Mr. Jackson's hair caught fire from an exploding special-effects fireworks tower."

But the OWS/TBAD people seem even unlikelier to follow Dusenberry's advice to "hold back" than President Obama has been. Left-wing rage may not cost Obama base voters. It may even energize them. But can that happen without turning independents and other normal Americans off even further? If OWS/TBAD is the left's Tea Party, Obama may end 2012 as the left's Christine O'Donnell.

Speaking of the Spirit of Madison . . .
The Washington Post's Greg Sargent has a slightly misleading blog post this morning:

"I'm really encouraged by what I'm seeing. People around the country are finally organizing to stand up to the huge influence of corporations on government and our lives. This kind of citizen reaction to corporate power and corporate greed is long overdue."

That's Russ Feingold, who spoke with me yesterday in order to voice his strong support for Occupy Wall Street, making him one of the most prominent liberal Democrats in the country to endorse the protests. Feingold's strong backing will be seen as significant by the movment's [sic] supporters, because thus far few elected Dems have publicly voiced support for it.

Sargent leads readers who don't know better to think (though in fairness, he doesn't actually state) that the number of elected Dems has gone up from few to few+1. But actually it's still few, since Feingold was de-elected by Wisconsin voters last November.

Meanwhile, you'll get a kick out of this assertion from OWS/TBAD cheerleader Katrina vanden Heuvel, in her Post column:

It makes sense that nurses who are on the frontlines in our communities every day are leading an effort to hold Wall Street accountable for causing these economic troubles while raising hundreds of billions of dollars for vital human needs.

You can only wonder what other completely random things might make "sense" in the weird, wild world of Katrina vanden Heuvel.

Accountability Journalism
Here's the lead paragraph from an Associated Press dispatch yesterday:

The federal government under the Bush administration ran an operation that allowed hundreds of guns to be transferred to suspected arms traffickers--the same tactic that congressional Republicans have criticized President Barack Obama's administration for using, two federal law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

And here's the lead of an AP dispatch today:

The Obama administration has tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and other al-Qaida leaders. Yet, in spite of those successes, Republicans and some Democrats in Congress remain intent on challenging the administration's policies for handling captured terror suspects.

The AP will use every tool in its shed, from the tu quoque to the outright non sequitur, to hold accountable those who would question the Obama administration.

The Sounds of Silence
Here's an education success story: The New York Times reports that the state of Alabama has achieved a 95% statewide attendance rate for Hispanic students. Only that's not how the Times reports that stat:

Statewide, 1,988 Hispanic students were absent on Friday, about 5 percent of the entire Hispanic population of the school system.

This is supposed to be evidence that the state's new immigration-enforcement is too draconian. Maybe it is, but the story is awfully slanted. This passage, which refers to a poultry-processing factory holding a job fair, also stands out:

Not far from the plant, in the Hispanic neighborhoods, it is hard to differentiate the silence of the workday, the silence of abandonment or the silence of paralyzing fear.

Is this a news story or a Simon & Garfunkel song?

We Blame Global Warming
"Fishermen Blame Water for Breakout of Boils"--headline, Sydney Morning Herald, Oct. 5

A Missed Opportunity

• "Carney: W.Va. Special Election Not a Referendum on Obama"--headline, DailyCaller.com, Oct. 4
• "Democrat Wins West Virginia Governor's Race"--headline, Associated Press, Oct. 5

Gary Johnson's Big Break
"Herman, [sic] Cain, Rick Perry, Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney to Boycott Univision Debate Over Rubio Report"--headline, Miami Herald website, Oct. 4

We're Sure She Deserved Every Cent
"[Sen. Scott] Brown paid for law school, in part, by posing nude for Cosmopolitan magazine, the candidates were told. How did [his challengers]? 'I kept my clothes on,' [Elizabeth] Warren said."--Boston Globe website, Oct. 5

What Do Chris Christie and Elizabeth Warren Have in Common?
"Christie's Decision Leaves Republicans With Stark Choice"--headline, New York Times website, Oct. 5

They Blame Israel for Everything
"Settlements Reported in Atlanta Walkway Collapse"--headline, Associated Press, Oct. 5

Let Them Eat Cake
"Outcry as 'Fat' French Pupils Forced to Cut Down on Fries"--headline, France24.com, Oct. 4

So Much for the War on Drugs
"Field Hockey Returns to Grass"--headline, Orion (California State University, Chico), Oct. 4

Koro Syndrome
"A Washington High School student may face assault charges after authorities say his handshake left over 20 football players with pin-like pricks."--WBNS-TV website (Columbus, Ohio), Oct. 4

We Thought They Only Took Tips
"Circumcision Funding Cuts Hurt, Doctors Say"--headline, MyHealthNewsDaily.com, Oct. 5

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don't
"Man Arrested for Hiding Crack in His Buttocks"--headline, Sentinel-News (Shelbyville, Ky.), Oct. 5

Hey, Kids! What Time Is It?
"Opting Out of Race, Christie Says, 'Now Is Not My Time' "--headline, New York Times, Oct. 5

Questions Nobody Is Asking

• "Is Plastic Surgery Spiritual?"--headline, Washington Post website, Oct. 3
• "Is It Racist to Criticize Your Own Race?"--headline, TownHall.com, Oct. 4
• "How many sex partners has the average American woman had--and does anyone still care?"--subheadline, Slate.com, Oct. 3
• "What Kind of Fall Am I?"--headline, New York Times, Oct. 5

Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking
"How a Canadian Culture Magazine Helped Spark Occupy Wall Street"--headline, ArtInfo.com, Oct. 5

Too Much Information

• "Warren Buffett to Rupert Murdoch: I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours"--headline, New York magazine website, Oct. 4
• "Has Obama Found His Inner Populist?"--headline, Politico.com, Oct. 5

Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control
"Spinning Out of Control"--headline, Village Voice, Oct. 5

Breaking News From 1637
"Europe Races to Stem Crisis"--headline, The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 5

Breaking News From 2004
"Cooper Fears Kerry Could Be Left Behind"--headline, Independent (Ireland), Oct. 4

Bottom Stories of the Day

• "No 'Occupy Boston' Walkout at Tufts Wednesday"--headline, Patch.com (Medford, Mass.), Oct. 5
• "Moose Sighted, Sedated West of Ottawa"--headline, CBC.ca, Oct. 4
• "Obama Disapproval Rating Hits New High . . . Again"--headline, National Review Online, Oct. 4
• "Roger Ailes: I Hired Sarah Palin Because She Was 'Hot and Got Ratings' "--headline, Puffington Host, Oct. 5

Mothers Against Unemployed Drivers
Reuters has some good news about the economy, though it isn't exactly economic news:

The economic slowdown could have an upside: a dramatic decline in the number of drinking and driving incidents, a new federal study suggests.

A 2010 national telephone survey of 451,000 people found the lowest level of alcohol-impaired driving since 1993 and a 30 percent plunge since the peak in 2006, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Tuesday.

Along similar lines is this story from the New York Post last month:

Here's another sign of the stalled economy--New Yorkers are ditching their coke habits.

Cocaine-related emergency-room admissions, overdoses and requests for rehab have declined since the economy started its 2008 decline, according to data obtained by The Post.

"It is sort of on a slight but steady downward trend," said Dr. Stephen Ross, director of NYU's Langone Center of Excellence on Addiction. "I treat patients in private practice. Many cocaine addicts tell me stories they don't have enough money to buy it anymore."

His attempts to "stimulate" the economy having failed, perhaps Obama could capitalize on these trends instead for a 2012 campaign slogan: "He kept America safe."

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Joe vs. Jose

You have two families: "Joe Legal" and "Jose Illegal". Both families have two parents, two children, and live in California .

Joe Legal works in construction, has a Social Security Number and makes $25.00 per hour with taxes deducted.

Jose Illegal also works in construction, has NO Social Security Number, and gets paid $15.00 cash "under the table".

Ready? Now pay attention....

Joe Legal: $25.00 per hour x 40 hours = $1000.00 per week, or $52,000.00 per year. Now take 30% away for state and federal tax; Joe Legal now has $31,231.00.

Jose Illegal: $15.00 per hour x 40 hours = $600.00 per week, or $31,200.00 per year. Jose Illegal pays no taxes. Jose Illegal now has $31,200.00.

Joe Legal pays medical and dental insurance with limited coverage for his family at $600.00 per month, or $7,200.00 per year. Joe Legal now has $24,031.00.

Jose Illegal has full medical and dental coverage through the state and local clinics and emergency hospitals at a cost of $0.00 per year. Jose Illegal still has $31,200.00.

Joe Legal makes too much money and is not eligible for food stamps or welfare.  Joe Legal pays $500.00 per month for food, or $6,000.00 per year. Joe Legal now has $18,031.00.

Jose Illegal has no documented income and is eligible for food stamps, WIC and welfare. Jose Illegal still has $31,200.00.

Joe Legal pays rent of $1,200.00 per month, or $14,400.00 per year. Joe Legal now has $9,631.00.

Jose Illegal receives a $500.00 per month Federal Rent Subsidy. Jose Illegal pays out that $500.00 per month, or $6,000.00 per year. Jose Illegal still has $31,200.00.

Joe Legal pays $200.00 per month, or $2,400.00 for car insurance. Some of that is uninsured motorist insurance. Joe Legal now has $7,231.00.

Jose Illegal says, "We don't need no stinkin' insurance!" and still has $31,200.00.

Joe Legal has to make his $7,231.00 stretch to pay utilities, gasoline, etc..

Jose Illegal has to make his $31,200.00 stretch to pay utilities, gasoline, and what he sends out of the country every month.

Joe Legal now works overtime on Saturdays or gets a part time job after work.

Jose Illegal has nights and weekends off to enjoy with his family.

Joe Legal's and Jose Illegal's children both attend the same elementary school.

Joe Legal pays for his children's lunches,

Jose Illegal's children get a government sponsored lunch.

Jose Illegal's children have an after-school ESL program.

Joe Legal's children go home.

Now, when they reach college age, Joe Legal's kids may not get into a State

School and may not qualify for scholarships, grants or other tuition help, even

though Joe has been paying for State Schools through his taxes, while Jose

Illegal's kids "go to the head of the class" because they are a minority.

Joe Legal and Jose Illegal both enjoy the same police and fire services,but Joe paid for them and Jose did not pay.

Do you get it, now?

If you vote for or support any politician that supports illegal aliens... You are part of the problem!

Obama and the Burden of Exceptionalism

Post-'60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline.

By SHELBY STEELE

If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.

Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America's exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America's greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.

Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.

Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his "leading from behind" profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his "hope and change" campaign slogan came to look like the "hope" of overcoming American exceptionalism and "change" away from it.

So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.

Enlarge Image

Chad Crowe

But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America's bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?

American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.

Yet today America is fighting in a number of Muslim countries, and that number is as likely to rise as to fall. Our exceptionalism saddles us with overwhelming burdens. The entire world comes to our door when there is real trouble, and every day we spill blood and treasure in foreign lands—even as anti-Americanism plays around the world like a hit record.

At home the values that made us exceptional have been smeared with derision. Individual initiative and individual responsibility—the very engines of our exceptionalism—now carry a stigma of hypocrisy. For centuries America made sure that no amount of initiative would lift minorities and women. So in liberal quarters today—where historical shames are made to define the present—these values are seen as little more than the cynical remnants of a bygone era. Talk of "merit" or "a competition of excellence" in the admissions office of any Ivy League university today, and then stand by for the howls of incredulous laughter.

Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There's a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.

So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.

But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. (Think of England or France after empire.) To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.

Since the '60s we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded. Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility. We are uninspired in the wars we fight, calculating our withdrawal even before we begin—and then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the wars interminable.

America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding—by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness?

As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.

Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism—the genius for freedom—of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).

Rep. Carson: Tea party wants to see African Americans ‘hanging on a tree’

A leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus is standing by incendiary language he used at a recent town hall when he charged that tea-party aligned members of Congress view African Americans as “second-class citizens” and would like to see them “hanging on a tree.”

Rep. Andre Carson’s (D-Ind.) office confirmed that the lawmaker made the remarks at an Aug. 22 CBC Job Tour event in Miami and said that the comments were “prompted in response to frustration voiced by many in Miami and in his home district in Indianapolis regarding Congress’ inability to bolster the economy.”

“The tea party is protecting its millionaire and oil company friends while gutting critical services that they know protect the livelihood of African-Americans, as well as Latinos and other disadvantaged minorities,” Carson spokesman Jason Tomcsi said. “We are talking about child nutrition, job creation, job training, housing assistance, and Head Start, and that is just the beginning. A child without basic nutrition, secure housing, and quality education has no real chance at a meaningful and productive life.”

“So, yes, the congressman used strong language because the Tea Party agenda jeopardizes our most vulnerable and leaves them without the ability to improve their economic standing,” Tomcsi added.

A video of Carson making the remarks began circulating online Tuesday night. The clip is a compilation of footage from several CBC town halls during the August recess and bears the logo of The Blaze, a Web site launched by conservative commentator Glenn Beck.

“I’m saying right now, under (CBC) Chairman Emanuel Cleaver’s leadership, we have seen change in Congress ... but the tea party is stopping that change,” Carson said at the event, according to the video. “And this is beyond symbolic change. This is the effort that we’re seeing, of Jim Crow.”

“Some of these folks in Congress right now would love to see us as second-class citizens,” Carson continued. “Some of them in Congress right now with this tea party movement would love to see you and me — I’m sorry, Tamron — hanging on a tree.”

“Tamron” appears to be a reference to MSNBC’s Tamron Hall, who was moderating the town hall meeting.

Carson’s remarks are the latest sign of tension between the CBC and the tea party movement. Two weeks ago, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), a member of the CBC, said at a California town hall that the tea party “can go straight to hell.”

In March 2010, Carson alleged that tea party members protesting the health care reform legislation uttered racial epithets at him and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) outside the Capitol.

Both lawmakers told reporters that the protesters used the N-word toward them.

Staff writers Aaron Blake and Paul Kane contributed to this report.

By Bob Unruh
© 2011 WND

Michelle Obama talking about her African trip

Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit over the federal government's refusal to disclose how much taxpayers spent to send Michelle Obama on a "family outing" that included a safari in Africa.

The organization, which investigates and fights government corruption, earlier documented what appears to many to be the extravagant spending by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Records showed Pelosi cost taxpayers $101,000 for in-flight food and alcohol over a period in 2008 and 2009. At one point she instructed the Air Force to provide chocolate-covered strawberries for a snack, since it was her birthday.

"Dark chocolate preferred" was the order.

Do the tone-deaf lawmakers in D.C. make your blood boil? Read all about Washington and its politics of corruption in "Breach of Trust."

Now Judicial Watch wants to know what taxpayers are spending for Michelle Obama's vacations.

"How much did the American people spend to send the First Lady on a family outing in Africa? That's what we want to know," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "On the surface, the trip seems to have been totally unnecessary and was as much an excuse for the Obama family to go on a safari as it was a mission intended to advance the nation's business in Africa."

The organization requested information in June regarding the expenses for the trip. The request included records for the mission taskings for the June 21-27 trip to South Africa and Botswana, the transportation costs and all passenger manifests for the trip.

The government had until Aug. 3 to respond, but did not, so Judicial Watch now has followed up with a lawsuit.

"The professed purpose of Mrs. Obama's trip was to encourage young people living in South Africa and Botswana to get involved in national affairs," the Judicial Watch report said. "The First Lady's remarks focused on education, health and wellness issues.

"However, accompanied by her daughters Malia and Sasha, her mother, Marian Robinson, and her niece and nephew, Leslie and Avery Robinson, the trip also included such tourist events as visits to historical landmarks and museums as well as a visit with Nelson Mandela," the Judicial Watch report said.

"The trip ended with a private family safari at a South African game reserve before the group returned to Washington on June 27," Judicial Watch said.

The organization noted that the White House Dossier, a blog by White House reporter Keith Koffer, said the cost to taxpayers for a C-32 aircraft for the trip alone was $430,000.

This cost, JW reported, was based on an estimated charge of $12,723 an hour, which is what the Department of Defense charges other federal agencies to use that airplane. If a military cargo plane was included – which is typical for Michelle Obama's trips – the transportation alone could have cost another $200,000.

Additionally, there would be costs for Secret Service protection, the care and feeding of a numerous staff members, pre-trip staff work and others categories.

Judicial Watch reported earlier that a "date night" for the Obamas – for a New York dinner and Broadway show – cost taxpayers more than $11,000 in Secret Service expenses alone.

The organization said it is investigating such costs "in the face of a ballooning federal debt and a sinking economy."

The announcement about the court case came just a day after The Daily Mail in the United Kingdom touted the 10 million in public money Michelle Obama has spent on her "vacations."

"Branding her 'disgusting' and 'a vacation junkie,' [reports] say the 47-year-old mother-of-two has been indulging in five-star hotels, where she splashes out on expensive massages and alcohol," the London paper said.

The report said Michelle Obama is believed to have taken 42 days of vacation in the last year, including a respite in Spain that cost $375,000 and a $2,000-a-night ski trip to Vail, Colo.

The family currently is on another vacation, at Blue Heron Farm on Martha's Vineyard, where the rental fees are estimated at $50,000 a week.

The paper reported the situation was aggravated because the Obamas took separate airplanes to the Massachusetts retreat – even though they traveled the same day.

Also, the report cited figures from a Hawaii Reporter investigation into the Obamas' trip to Hawaii last winter, where the costs were $63,000 to bring Michelle Obama to town ahead of the president, $38,000 for a beach property rental, $134,000 for staff members to stay in a nearby hotel and $251,000 in police overtime.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi

The White House Dossier report explained South African U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau confirmed the African trip was partly personal.

"She's coming on this trip to talk about women's development and youth development, and South Africa is a leader in that, not only on the continent but globally," Trudeau said in the report. "A visit to South Africa is important for them as a family. She'll be visiting many struggle-era landmarks, including the Apartheid Museum (and) the Hector Pieterson Memorial."

Pelosi's spending habits first came to light through Judicial Watch efforts, revealing the $101,000 that taxpayers spent for in-flight food and alcohol for her during that time period.

It was last year she requested that strawberries be provided for a special treat on her Air Force transport because it was her birthday. Not just any strawberries: chocolate-covered strawberries. "Dark chocolate preferred."

Then there was a follow-up report from Judicial Watch that more taxpayer money – hundreds of thousands of dollars – were spent in the months before Pelosi handed the gavel over to Rep. John Boehner as Republicans took control of the House following the 2010 election.

Among the receipts: $130 from a Detroit store for popcorn, cheese puffs, Hershey's milk chocolate kisses, peanuts, Snickers minis, Nilla wafers, ginger snaps, mixed nuts, dry roasted peanuts, M&M peanuts, Kraft caramels and crackers.

That order apparently was connected to a congressional delegation trip to Detroit that cost some $24,000 in air travel expenses plus another $10,000 in miscellaneous expenses.

The records, which are linked Judicial Watch's website, include flight manifests, expense summaries, copies of receipts and congressional correspondence for Pelosi's trips in 2010.

There's not a grand total for the expenditures because of the nature of the reporting: Sometimes there were reimbursements listed for members of Pelosi's family traveling with her, and it was unclear whether those reimbursements were paid.

The individual files of 50 to 100 pages of details are posted online in three parts:

• Part One.
  
  
• Part Two.
  
  
• Part Three.

The details include information on a May 6-10, 2010, trip to Afghanistan and Germany "to discuss issues of mutual interest in Qatar and Afghanistan, as well as conduct oversight on women's issues (troops) in Afghanistan and to visit with US troops and meet with government officials in Germany."

Tab for the military travel? $204,135.

And Pelosi "made a personal request that the 'maximum per diem allowance be made available at the enhanced rate of an additional $50.'"

Also uncovered were "numerous" trips by Pelosi between San Francisco and Andrews Air Force Base.

Part of the tab for alcoholic drinks on a congressional trip arranged by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

"Several of these trips included members of Speaker Pelosi's family, including her husband, daughter, granddaughters and son-in-law."

The Detroit trip? Costs were $24,336 for commercial air travel and another $10,046 in "expenses."

The Pentagon also paid for military escorts for the trip, the report noted.

Earlier reports documented that she spent $2,100,744.59 in military travel costs in a single two-year period. That included the $101,429.14 taxpayers paid for "in-flight expenses, including food and alcohol."

"For example, purchases for one Pelosi-led congressional delegation traveling from Washington, D.C., through Tel Aviv, Israel to Baghdad, Iraq, May 15-20, 2008, included: Johnny Walker Red scotch, Grey Goose vodka, E&J brandy, Bailey's Irish Crème, Maker's Mark whiskey, Courvoisier cognac, Bacardi Light rum, Jim Beam whiskey, Beefeater gin, Dewars scotch, Bombay Sapphire gin, Jack Daniels whiskey, Corona beer and several bottles of wine," Judicial Watch reported.

Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters

By Max Hastings

Last updated at 12:49 PM on 10th August 2011

A few weeks after the U.S. city of Detroit was ravaged by 1967 race riots in which 43 people died, I was shown around the wrecked areas by a black  reporter named Joe Strickland.

He said: ‘Don’t you believe all that stuff people here are giving media folk about how sorry they are about what happened. When they talk to each other, they say: “It was a great fire, man!” ’

I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today.

Rich pickings: Hooded looters laden with clothes run from a Manchester shopping centre

It was fun. It made life interesting. It got people to notice them. As a girl looter told a BBC reporter, it showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like’.

If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.

Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped.

They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.

They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.

They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.

Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no one even shot them for it.

A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch — another way of describing the same reality.

The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist.

Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community. They do not watch royal weddings or notice Test matches or take pride in being Londoners or Scousers or Brummies.

Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present.

They have their being only in video games and street-fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious.

The notions of doing a nine-to-five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.

Undercover police officers arrest looters in the Swarovski Crystal shop in Manchester. One rioter lies injured and blood can be seen on the wall

Last week, I met a charity worker who is trying to help a teenage girl in East London to get a life for herself. There is a difficulty, however: ‘Her mother wants her to go on the game.’ My friend explained: ‘It’s the money, you know.’

An underclass has existed throughout history, which once endured appalling privation. Its spasmodic outbreaks of violence, especially in the early 19th century, frightened the ruling classes.

Its frustrations and passions were kept at bay by force and draconian legal sanctions, foremost among them capital punishment and transportation to the colonies.

Today, those at the bottom of society behave no better than their forebears, but the welfare state has relieved them from hunger and real want.

When social surveys speak of ‘deprivation’ and ‘poverty’, this is entirely relative. Meanwhile, sanctions for wrongdoing have largely vanished.

When Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith recently urged employers to take on more British workers and fewer migrants, he was greeted with a hoarse laugh.

Mindless: People wearing masks swig alcohol next to a burning car in Birmingham city centre last night

Every firm in the land knows that an East European — for instance — will, first, bother to turn up; second, work harder; and third, be better-educated than his or her British counterpart.Who do we blame for this state of affairs?

Ken Livingstone, contemptible as ever, declares the riots to be a result of the Government’s spending cuts. This recalls the remarks of the then leader of Lambeth Council, ‘Red Ted’ Knight, who said after the 1981 Brixton riots that the police in his borough ‘amounted to an army of occupation’.

But it will not do for a moment to claim the rioters’ behaviour reflects deprived circumstances or police persecution.

Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.

This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect.

It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion  which modern society finds  unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything  different or better.

Rampage: We are told that youths roaming the streets are doing so because they are angry at unemployment, but a quick look at an apprenticeship website yields 2,228 vacancies in London

A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.

John Stuart Mill wrote in his great 1859 essay On Liberty: ‘The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.’

Yet every day up and down the land, this vital principle of civilised societies is breached with impunity.

Anyone who reproaches a child, far less an adult, for discarding rubbish, making a racket, committing vandalism or driving unsociably will receive in return a torrent of obscenities, if not violence.

So who is to blame? The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass.

The social engineering industry unites to claim that the conventional template of family life is no longer valid.

Protection: Asian shopkeepers stand outside their store in Hackney that was battered by the looters. This time, though, they're ready to take them on

And what of the schools? I  do not think they can be blamed for the creation of a grotesquely self-indulgent, non-judgmental culture.

This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.

The judiciary colludes with social services and infinitely ingenious lawyers to assert the primacy of the rights of the criminal and aggressor over those of law-abiding citizens, especially if a young offender is involved.

The police, in recent years, have developed a reputation for ignoring yobbery and bullying, or even for taking the yobs’ side against complainants.

‘The problem,’ said Bill Pitt, the former head of Manchester’s Nuisance Strategy Unit, ‘is that the law appears to be there to protect the rights of the perpetrator, and does not support the victim.’

Police regularly arrest householders who are deemed to have taken ‘disproportionate’ action to protect themselves and their property from burglars or intruders. The message goes out that criminals have little to fear from ‘the feds’.

Do rioters, pictured looting a shop in Hackney, have lower levels of a brain chemical that helps keep behaviour under control? Scientists think so

Figures published earlier this month show that a majority of ‘lesser’ crimes — which include burglary and car theft, and which cause acute distress to their victims — are never investigated, because forces think it so unlikely they will catch the perpetrators.

How do you inculcate values in a child whose only role model is footballer Wayne Rooney — a man who is bereft of the most meagre human graces?

How do you persuade children to renounce bad language when they hear little else from stars on the BBC?

A teacher, Francis Gilbert, wrote five years ago in his book Yob Nation: ‘The public feels it no longer has the right to interfere.’

Discussing the difficulties of imposing sanctions for misbehaviour or idleness at school, he described the case of a girl pupil he scolded for missing all her homework deadlines.

The youngster’s mother, a social worker, telephoned him and said: ‘Threatening to throw my daughter off the A-level course because she hasn’t done some work is tantamount to psychological abuse, and there is legislation which prevents these sorts of threats.

‘I believe you are trying to harm my child’s mental well-being, and may well take steps . . . if you are not careful.’

That story rings horribly true. It reflects a society in which teachers have been deprived of their traditional right to arbitrate pupils’ behaviour. Denied power, most find it hard to sustain respect, never mind control.

Mob: A crowd of people rush into a fashion store in Peckham

I never enjoyed school, but, like most children until very recent times, did the work because I knew I would be punished if I did not. It would never have occurred to my parents not to uphold my  teachers’ authority. This might have been unfair to some pupils, but it was the way schools functioned for centuries, until the advent of crazy ‘pupil rights’.

I recently received a letter from a teacher who worked in a county’s pupil referral unit, describing appalling difficulties in enforcing discipline. Her only weapon, she said, was the right to mark a disciplinary cross against a child’s name for misbehaviour.

Having repeatedly and vainly asked a 15-year-old to stop using obscene language, she said: ‘Fred, if you use language like that again, I’ll give you a cross.’

He replied: ‘Give me an effing cross, then!’ Eventually, she said: ‘Fred, you have three crosses now. You must miss your next break.’

He answered: ‘I’m not missing my break, I’m going for an effing fag!’ When she appealed to her manager, he said: ‘Well, the boy’s got a lot going on at home at  the moment. Don’t be too hard  on him.’

This is a story repeated daily in schools up and down the land.

Making a run for it: These four looters dash from the Blue Inc store in Peckham with plundered goods

A century ago, no child would have dared to use obscene language in class. Today, some use little else. It symbolises their contempt for manners and decency, and is often a foretaste of delinquency.

If a child lacks sufficient respect to address authority figures politely, and faces no penalty for failing to do so, then other forms of abuse — of property and person — come naturally.

So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.

They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.

They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.

Behind bins: Rioters in Hackney stand in front of a makeshift barricade

They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions. Liberal opinion holds they are victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential.

Most of us would say this is nonsense. Rather, they are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline — tough love — which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.

Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people.

They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

Unless or until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency and impose penalties for bestiality which are today entirely lacking, there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters such as those of the past four nights, for whom their monstrous excesses were ‘a great fire, man’.