Bookworm Room

Tweet “Who’s Thomas Sowell?” my daughter asked. “He’s a genius,” I replied. “Why?” “Because he has the rare gift of simplifying very complex ideas without dumbing them down.” See for yourself: After listening to Sowell, my blog’s motto seems appropriate:  “Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.” [...]

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Tweet Conservatives of all religious stripes have been attacking the ObamaCare mandate regarding birth control and abortifacients on religious grounds.  The Obama administration’s response was to introduce an “accommodation” under which the insurance companies will henceforth offer these medicines and services for “free.” Anybody past the age of five understands that, in this life, nothing [...]

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Tweet We have an odd family friend. Fundamentally, she is a nice person and sports a very unconventional view of the world that occasionally emotes great insights into the human condition. She has a major flaw, however, one that she admits as a character flaw: she is an unabashed hater. Despite her husband, kids and [...]

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Tweet Given this blog’s recent flogging of the China versus U.S. (“us”) question, here is  a primary example of how China may surpass the U.S. by becoming more business friendly as it decentralizes while the U.S. risks having to learn the lessons of socialist history all over again as our over-regulated economy grinds down to [...]

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Tweet Here is a financial report on USA, Inc., presented as a slide show, as developed by financial analysts. Most of us Bookworm Room aficionados know that the economic state of health of our country is not good and getting worse. It is critical, actually. Unfortunately, there are many still wedded to Keynesian mythologies of [...]

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Tweet Today, I told my children, who are 11 and 12, about pyramid schemes.  Since it’s always easiest for me to focus on people, I started my story with the first famous American pyramid schemer:  Charles Ponzi, who gave his name to the whole racket. I explained the Ponzi scheme to the kids in the [...]

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Tweet “Logic! Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” — C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Neither Data nor Mr. Spock, two relentlessly logical creations, could ever be liberals or Democrats or Progressives, or whatever the Hell else they’re calling themselves nowadays.  (For convenience, I’ll just lump them all together under [...]

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Tweet I’ve noted before that San Francisco (consistent with Democratic-run cities and states everywhere) is terribly cash-strapped.  But politics will always trump practicality.  Exactly one month ago, despite the fact that the school district is pretty much broke, the Board of Education voted, not just to cut education programs quite drastically, but also to put [...]

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Tweet If you were wondering what Obama and the maniacal Democrats were doing, James Lewis finally puts a name to it.  It’s the Great Leap Forward: Even the Europeans are resisting hyper-deficits, because Europe always has that memory of the 1920s and 30s: hyperinflation, unemployment, crushing poverty and despair, followed by Hitler and Stalin. They [...]

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Tweet Mary Katharine Ham caught John Kerry finally admitting what Democrats fear most of all:  that people will take control over their own destinies, without the elite in government dictating how their hard earned money should be spent.  Perhaps if Kerry had ever held a real job and earned the money himself, he might have [...]

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Tweet I’m not an economist and I don’t even play one on TV.  I am a one-time history major, though, and someone with the kind of knowledge-base that’s built up over years of being an autodidact, an employee and a small business owner.  While I don’t understand economics at a complex level (I’m a lousy [...]

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Tweet The other day I was speaking with a man who commented that the proliferation of Obama bumperstickers on luxury cars (not to mention the fact that the very rich in blue communities had flocked to the Obama banner) comforted him that Obama would not destroy the US economy by trying to nationalize it.  After [...]

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Tweet I’m no economist, but I can do basic math, and I’ve watched European countries over the last 40 years.  I figured out that taxing 50% of the country so that it supports the other 50% is a mistake.  Adam Lerrick uses intelligent language to explain why.

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Tweet The worst may be yet to come, but before the panic reaches an altitude from which there is no recovery, keep the following in mind (with thanks to Mike Devx, who gave me the idea). Re 1997, from Wikipedia: In financial markets, Black Monday is the name given to Monday, October 19, 1987, when [...]

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Tweet I’ve watched almost all of the debate, but it’s bedtime now, and I’ll have to save the rest for later.  Three comments: 1.  The first, the most obvious, and the most pressing question:  How many botoxes did they kill to create that abnormally smooth, completely motionless forehead Biden was sporting?  That was creepy. 2.  [...]

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Tweet Normally, I’m entirely on board with the theory that “that government is best which governs least.”  Normally, I fear last minute bail-outs, especially those from a Democratically-dominated Congress. But the world economy is a different animal.  When thinking of it, it’s worth thinking also of Roosevelt’s warning that “the only thing we have to [...]

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Tweet I’m no Sondheim fan, but he did get the psychology of blame down well in a song from Into The Woods that has the constant refrain “It’s all your/his/her fault.”  It’s human to assign blame. Sometimes, though, assigning blame is easy, and with the current economic crisis, history shows us that the largest part [...]

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Tweet You’ve got to love an economics video that uses ABBA for its background music.  You’ve also got to love an economics video that uses very simple language to show that Obama has been a very good friend to Fannie and Freddie, and they’ve loved him back, to the profound detriment of the American people: [...]

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Tweet Governments tax people.  They always have.  A good question to ask, though, and one we haven’t seen asked lately is — what’s that money for? The Founders had an idea about what taxes were for.  In the Constitution Art. I, Sec. 8, they spelled out the purpose behind taxes: The Congress shall have Power [...]

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Tweet At Iowa, McCain “gets in your face” mano a mano (that is, he doesn’t delegate his surrogates, but gives a speech to America, Obama included), and he focuses on the facts.  This is a very concrete speech, which appropriately boasts his virtues and clearly exposes Obama’s failings: U.S. Senator John McCain will deliver the [...]

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Tweet Suitably Flip is remarkably brilliant in analyzing Barack Obama’s first response to the economic problems plaguing Wall Street right now.  Go here and get good red ink visuals showing that Obama’s grasp of this problem is about as strong as his grasp of the Russia/Georgia situation was in the first instance.

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Tweet Wow!  Unless I’m very confused, beneath all the O-babble here, Obama is conceding that low taxes benefit the economy: Democrat Barack Obama says he would delay rescinding President Bush’s tax cuts on wealthy Americans if he becomes the next president and the economy is in a recession, suggesting such an increase would further hurt [...]

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Tweet When I was at Berkeley, I had only a few decent professors.  One of them (who was really wonderful) taught a British history class covering the period from 1760 to WWII.  He taught us that the Industrial Revolution, though it started in England, petered out.  It lacked the ferocity and longevity that characterized the [...]

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Tweet Lawrence Lindsey explains in language even a numerophobe can understand precisely why Obama’s Social Security proposal isn’t just mean-spirted, pandering and illogical, but is also disastrous for the American economy: Although the formula connecting benefits to tax payments or “contributions” has evolved slightly over time, it still adheres to this basic message. Today, what [...]

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Tweet In keeping with my prior post, about the callous illogical shown in one of the Times’ most recent articles, I’d like to highlight Obama’s insistence on a “windfall profits tax” — another “bright” idea showing a rather typical Democratic refusal to recognize cause and effect, not to mention a willful refusal to acknowledge historic [...]

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