The Patriot Post Brief 12-5-2011

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The Patriot Post Brief 12-5-2011
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Foundation

"In reality there is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will now and then peek out and show itself." --Benjamin Franklin

Opinion in Brief

"Joanne Rowling was a welfare mother in Edinburgh, Scotland. All that has changed. As the writer of the 'Harry Potter' novels, having a net worth of $1 billion, she is the world's wealthiest author. ... How did Rowling become so wealthy and unequal to the rest of us? The entire blame for this social injustice lies at the feet of the world's children and their enabling parents. ... The millions of '99-percenters' who individually plunk down $8 or $9 to attend a 'Harry Potter' movie, $15 to buy a 'Harry Potter' novel or $30 to buy a 'Harry Potter' Blu-ray Disc are directly responsible for contributing to income inequality and wealth concentration that economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman says 'is incompatible with real democracy.' ... We just can't blame the children for the unfairness of income inequality. Look at how Wal-Mart Stores generated wealth for the Walton family of Christy ($25 billion), Jim ($21 billion), Alice ($21 billion) and Robson ($21 billion). ... The blame for this unjust concentration of wealth rests with those hundreds of millions of shoppers worldwide who voluntarily enter Wal-Mart premises and leave dollars, pounds and pesos. ... In my opinion, my recently published book 'Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?' is far more important to society than any 'Harry Potter' novel. I'd like to know what it is about me that explains why millions upon millions have not purchased my book and made me a billionaire author. Maybe Krugman and the Wall Street occupiers have the answer." --economist Walter E. Williams1

Re: The Left

"Today's Democratic Party has an ingrained cultural aversion to the Booker T. Washington school. Liberal elites see themselves as a multiracial talented tenth, planning the economy and guiding society. In power, they lavish support on fashionable but unproductive sectors of the economy, such as green-energy boondoggles, and they buy off big constituencies invested in ever larger government such as public-sector unions, the 'helping professions' and even too-big-too-fail businesses. Their arguments sound economic and empirical, but ultimately they're cultural in nature. The upscale white professionals the Democrats are courting disproportionately share a cultural affinity for government and faith that statist interventions are for your own good. They also believe government needs to help people succeed -- or escape -- the rat race of the private sector. (Remember Michelle Obama's advice to working-class women? 'Don't go into corporate America. ... Become teachers. Work for the community.') In his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention, Obama mocked the Booker T. Washington concept of self-reliance: 'In Washington, they call this the ownership society, but what it really means is, you're on your own.'" --columnist Jonah Goldberg2

Government

"Growing local governments are crushing street vendors. The city of Atlanta, for example, has turned all street vending over to a monopoly contractor. In feudalist fashion, all existing vendors were told they must work for the monopoly or not vend at all. ... In Hialeah, Fla., if you operate a flower stand too close to a flower store or if you're not constantly moving, you can be arrested. ... Raul Martinez, the mayor when the law passed, defended the rule. 'You don't want to have everybody in the middle of the streets competing for space on the sidewalk without some sort of regulations. In the city of Hialeah, we're not overregulating anybody.' He says one purpose of the law is simple fairness: Street vendors don't pay property taxes. Brick-and-mortar stores must. ... Mayor Martinez argued that 'you create an unfair advantage when you allow that vendor selling in the front of a flower shop to sell the same flowers that the flower shop sells, and to sell them at a much reduced price. That's unfair competition.' ... If government destroys all the paths out of poverty, the welfare state will look like the only way to help the poor. Maybe, in addition to helping entrenched interests, that's the bureaucrats' goal." --columnist John Stossel3

Insight

"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalize everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalization, and they're now trying to control everything by other means. They're progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people." --former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher

Political Futures

"[Last weekend] on 'Meet the Press' Colin Powell blamed divisive, poisonous Washington politics on the media and the Tea Party. The essence of Powell's argument was: '...What we have to do is sort of take some of the heat out of our political life in terms of the coverage of it, so these folks (Congress) can get to work quietly. ... But the Tea Party point of view of no compromise whatsoever is not a point of view that will eventually produce a presidential candidate who will win.' ... It is not only reductionist, but fundamentally undemocratic to believe, as Powell argues, that if the people would just stop paying attention to what goes on in Washington (helped along by the media refusing to report the political news) politicians could get back to the business of compromising out their differences. ... The heart of the matter, though, is that Americans are deeply divided between resisting or embracing a Europeanized, post-constitutional American economy, government and culture. This decision can no more be compromised on behind closed doors with no one watching than could the question of civil rights and creation of the welfare state in the 1950s-'60s, Franklin D. Roosevelt's labor-oriented statism in the 1930s, slavery in the 1850s-'60s or Andrew Jackson's rights of the common man in the 1830s." --columnist Tony Blankley6

Faith & Family

"The secular virus has been spreading for years in public and private zones. Shopping malls, which would go broke without Christmas, try their best to attract Christmas shoppers without mentioning Christmas. Hence, we get generic 'happy holidays' and color schemes with blue and silver snowflakes cold enough to freeze the socks off Grandfather Frost. He's the former Soviet Union's made-up patron saint who took over giving gifts to children after the commissars bumped off St. Nicholas. It's rumored (just starting it now) that the Christmas-phobic ACLU tacks up portraits of Grandfather Frost in back offices to inspire them during that darned holiday season that Dare Not Tell Its Name. Driving the whole mess is the growing fear Not to Offend. The war on Christmas, part of the ongoing trend to eradicate anything Christian in the public square, is also driven by a profound misreading of the First Amendment, which says 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' To the ACLU and other pro-atheist groups, that means the government must be hostile to any public expressions of belief that offend atheists. That makes atheism the de facto official religion, something the Founders went out of their way to prevent." --columnist Robert Knight7