The Bookworm Beat 5-27-15 — the “oy, such a day!” edition and open thread

Woman-writing-300x265It’s been one of those days: I took two family members to two different doctors’ appointments, went to a work meeting, went grocery shopping, and cooked dinner. It’s 8:30 at night where I am, and this is the first time today that I’m sitting down at the computer.  I still have legal work to do tonight so this will be a very abbreviated post, in no small part because I haven’t had the chance to read a dang thing today. Still, for what it’s worth, here are a few things you might enjoy:

Bernie Sanders is a dodo

Bernie Sanders is a proud socialist (although his net worth is greater than Scott Walker’s, so perhaps he’s a proud socialist hypocrite, but anyway….). Bernie Sanders has announced that he wants to cut back on the number of antiperspirants and sneakers offered to American shoppers so that more children get fed. If you think that’s a non-sequitur, you’re correct. Only an economic illiterate would take — gosh, they’re not even close enough to be apples and oranges…. Let me try again:  Only an economic illiterate would conflate bottled water and tires, and insist that if we use less of one, we’d have more of the other.

One of the first lessons I taught my children is that money’s only value is as a convenient way to measure what the buyer is willing to pay for something and what the seller is willing to accept for something. Honestly, it’s not complicated. Heck, if I had a few minutes alone with Paul Krugman, I might even be able to teach him a thing or two about market value.

Or perhaps Sanders and Krugman should read Kevin Williamson’s masterful, cogent, amusing, and in-your-face analysis of the essence of a free marketplace, not to mention everything that’s wrong with Sanders’s plan:

Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn socialist who represents Vermont in the Senate, generated a great deal of mirth on Tuesday when he wondered aloud how it is that a society with 23 kinds of deodorant and 18 kinds of sneakers has hungry children. Setting aside the fact that we must have hundreds of kinds of deodorant and thousands of choices of sneakers, Senator Sanders here communicates a double falsehood: The first falsehood is that the proliferation of choices in consumer goods is correlated with poverty, among children or anybody else, which is flatly at odds with practically all modern human experience. The reality is precisely the opposite: Poverty is worst where consumers have the fewest choices, e.g., in North Korea, the old Soviet Union, the socialist paradise that is modern Venezuela, etc. The second falsehood is that choice in consumer goods represents the loss of resources that might have gone to some other end — that if we had only one kind of sneaker, then there would be more food available for hungry children.

I can’t urge you enough to read the whole thing — and to share it, as I did.

Also, for more on the terrible failure inevitable if Bernie’s ideas are implemented, check out Michelle Malkin.

Feelings, nothing more than rapey feelings

Wolf Howling and I have been exchanging a series of emails about the deeply wrong way in which feminists are defining “rape” for a new generation of vulnerable young women. My preliminary take on the matter, which looks at the way it engenders in these women a terrible sense of externally-induced victimhood, showed up here. Wolf Howling’s take, which focuses on the deeply un-American idea that a crime is determined by the victim’s feelings, is here. Please note that his post expands to encompass the new racism too.

I feel that, somewhere between my post and Wolf Howling’s, there’s a “universal theory of everything that’s wrong with the Left” article just waiting to be written.

Progressivism is America’s main enemy, with climate change as its primary weapon

Of course, if I ever do manage to write that “universal theory of everything” article, I’ll have to borrow heavily from Mike McDaniel, who has written an impassioned post saying, essentially, that no matter how much Progressives profess to love America, they’re the political equivalent of wife beaters who claim to love their wives even as they pound them into bloody pulps on the floor.

This Leftist inversion of “love” reveals itself in their every utterance and action, and nowhere more strongly than in the climate change canard that is aimed at reducing America to a pre-industrial, primitive nation. If you’re inclined to doubt either me or Mike, go forth and read Michael Grunweld’s article about the Left’s cynical, highly successful war on coal, one that is leaving America increasingly dependent on the fragile reliability of “alternative energy.”

Rand Paul has besmirched himself

A couple of years ago, Rand Paul was trying to go mainstream, and I respected a lot of what he had to say. In this frenzied pre-primary time, though, when the multitude of competing Republican candidates are trying to distinguish themselves from the pack, Paul has fallen back on the loopy fringe thinking that has marked his father’s political career. Someone on my Facebook feed accurately said that Paul is a “liberaltarian,” meaning that his is an amalgam of the worst type of American Progressivism and the loopiest kind of libertarianism.

Roger L. Simon has also had it up to here with Paul. More importantly, so has Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a man Simon describes correctly as “one of the few worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.” Read more here.