Hate?  We got that.

NYT suggests ‘deniers’ should be stabbed through the heart – like vampires

Inaccuricies?   We got that.  And this one makes the ol' farm boy in me proud!

Farmers’ Almanac More Reliable Than Warming Climate Models. 

HEY, MAYBE WE SHOULD ADOPT POLICIES TO GET MORE PEOPLE TO WORK: “There are five times as many workers in the top 20 percent than there are in the bottom 20 percent.”

LIVING IN THE HUNGER GAMES: Florida Democrat Alex Sink: Without Immigration Reform, Where Will We Get Our Landscapers and Maids?

from Angelo Codevilla

While our ruling class is too busy to read history, China’s Communist Party — heir to the world’ oldest tyrannical tradition — is assigning its cadres to read Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution — a not-to-be-forgotten account of how France’s monarchy alienated itself from its subjects and drove them first to turn their backs on the system and, then, to hoist it on pitchforks. Although the details of today’s China, America, or the European Union differ from those of France’s Old Regime, attentive readers of Tocqueville discern the main factors that accredit or discredit ruling classes. Let us see.

In short, human collectivities are neither more nor less than networks of mutual obligations. Subjects feel obliged to follow rules and rulers, largely to the extent that the rulers themselves follow rules. Aristotle’ Politics is the primer. Regardless of whether the rulers are many, few, or one, the great divide between regimes is whether obligation runs in one direction only, or in both. Regardless of the rulers’ number, they forfeit voluntary obedience to their regimes insofar as they pursue their interests regardless of the rules by which people live.

Tocqueville’s history of the Old Regime’s decadence details how it overturned centuries of popular customs, imposed countless administrative burdens on the people, changed them constantly, and enforced them erratically. All the while, the Old Regime maintained a class of haughty beneficiaries bereft of real responsibilities. The regime lost respect, and became an object of fear. In this pervasive, intrusive, oppressive, unpredictable government of men, ordinary people found no shelter in custom or common sense, never mind rules. They were reduced to abasing themselves to the administrators, or to bribing them.

Eighteenth century France’s substantial and increasing economic prosperity was not enough to save the regime. The hate and contempt that it had stored up for itself by disrupting the people’s customs and dividing society between arbitrary rulers and powerless subjects extinguished the regime.

Today’s Chinese tyrants know that their country’s unprecedented prosperity will not suffice to keep them in power. Historically literate, they know that Chinese imperial dynasties, tyrannical though their laws were, lasted by administering those laws in ways that had the color of reason and propriety. But they know also that their own dynasty, built as it is on dividing society on the basis of privileged access to power, cannot do that. So, they worry and look for an out.

Historically innocent, our ruling class neither reads nor worries. Rather, it congratulates itself on having erased the distinction between law and administration, and supposes itself to be the measure of right. Indeed, it is eager to further imitate its European counterparts in reducing constitutions, laws, and elections to theoretical status. Europeans long ago noted that their way of life is marred by what they call a “democratic deficit,” but were sure that they could manage this deficit indefinitely. Recent evidence of massive popular disaffection has begun to shake this assurance. None of this however has yet reached America’s rulers.

The sooner it does, the better. While no one can foretell the consequences of the growing deficit of mutual obligations in American public life, we can be certain that Americans, having been raised on the maxim that “all men are created equal,” are far less tolerant of arbitrary rule than Europeans or Chinese.

Steve Hayes and Charles Krauthammer, on Friday’s Special Report with Bret Baier, scoffed at the Washington Post’s front page characterization that President Barack Obama’s expected budget proposal “will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency.”

Hayes marveled: “This is one of the funny things about reading mainstream newspapers and watching mainstream media report on this President, is they somehow are operating under the illusion we’re living in this age of austerity.” Krauthammer proposed, “we have talked about Obama’s assaulting the Constitution. This is an assault on the dictionary. This is a guy who ran $4 trillion of deficit in three years...”

The top of the February 21 front page headline: “Obama budget to rebuff austerity.” Online, the headline over the story by business reporter Zachary Goldfarb: “With 2015 budget request, Obama will call for an end to era of austerity.”

FNC anchor Bret Bair read from the article to lead off the panel segment, “‘With the 2015 budget request, Obama will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency and to his efforts to find common ground with Republicans,’” before cuing up Hayes of The Weekly Standard: “Steve, I think a lot of people might say, ‘really, age of austerity?’”

from some discussions regardig the CBO employment numbers last week.

Mr. Mulligan thinks the CBO deserves particular credit for learning and then revising the old 800,000 number, not least because so many liberals cited it to dispute the claims of ObamaCare’s critics. The new finding might have prompted a debate about the marginal tax rates confronting the poor, but—well, it didn’t.

Instead, liberals have turned to claiming that ObamaCare’s missing workers will be a gift to society. Since employers aren’t cutting jobs per se through layoffs or hourly take-backs, people are merely choosing rationally to supply less labor. Thanks to ObamaCare, we’re told, Americans can finally quit the salt mines and blacking factories and retire early, or spend more time with the children, or become artists.

Mr. Mulligan reserves particular scorn for the economists making this…argument…

A job, Mr. Mulligan explains, “is a transaction between buyers and sellers. When a transaction doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. We know that it doesn’t matter on which side of the market you put the disincentives, the results are the same. . . . In this case you’re putting an implicit tax on work for households, and employers aren’t willing to compensate the households enough so they’ll still work.” Jobs can be destroyed by sellers (workers) as much as buyers (businesses).

He adds: “I can understand something like cigarettes and people believe that there’s too much smoking, so we put a tax on cigarettes, so people smoke less, and we say that’s a good thing. OK. But are we saying we were working too much before? Is that the new argument? I mean make up your mind. We’ve been complaining for six years now that there’s not enough work being done. . . . Even before the recession there was too little work in the economy. Now all of a sudden we wake up and say we’re glad that people are working less? We’re pursuing our dreams?”

The larger betrayal, Mr. Mulligan argues, is that the same economists now praising the great shrinking workforce used to claim that ObamaCare would expand the labor market.

He points to a 2011 letter…signed by dozens of left-leaning economists including Nobel laureates, stating “our strong conclusion” that ObamaCare will strengthen the economy and create 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually….

“Why didn’t they say, no, we didn’t mean the labor market’s going to get bigger. We mean it’s going to get smaller in a good way,” Mr. Mulligan wonders. “I’m unhappy with that, to be honest, as an American, as an economist. Those kind of conclusions are tarnishing the field of economics, which is a great, maybe the greatest, field. They’re sure not making it look good by doing stuff like that.” [Bold added.]

And now here’s Cochrane, following up on the above commentary:

The rhetoric of our national conversation is strangely asymmetric…Imagine if, say, a Republican congressman said how great it was that lower and middle income people were quitting their jobs, so they could become artists. He would be pilloried as completely out of touch with the realities of life in middle America. What, has he been hanging out with former President Bush too much?
…
There are a hundred disincentives to work in America right now. Job lock was a big problem with our employer-based health insurance system, and I’ve written against it too arguing for a system based on portable individual insurance. But as economists, we are supposed to look at overall distortions, understand that employer and employee distortions contribute equally, and that jobs represent two-sided matches. The idea that the full effect of government policy was to induce too many people to work is just silly. [Bold added.]

Beautiful; exactly.

my first touch regarding this was here:  The New Yorker's Embarrassing Attack on Clarence Thomas

There's another good take here: Toobin’s Disgrace

but the BEST take on it: “The white man demands that the black man entertain him?”

These incompetents can't even get their failures on the same page.

Biden Admits Defeat on 7 Million Obamacare Enrollment Goal

Sebelius Denies WH Ever Aimed For 7 Million Obamacare Sign-Ups

RICHARD VEDDER ON HIGHER EDUCATION’S WEALTH INEQUALITY:

The eight Ivy League schools have less than 1 percent of U.S. college students but almost 17 percent of all endowment money. The top 3 percent of schools ranked by endowment size have more than half the funds. Five schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford University and one public institution, the University of Texas) had endowment increases last year of more than $1 billion, exceeding the total endowment of more than 90 percent of the schools (including virtually all the larger ones) publicly disclosing information.

Do rich schools use their wealth to promote upward economic mobility by disproportionately accepting low-income students? No — just the opposite. I took the 10 highest-endowed schools and looked at the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, then compared that with the 10 lowest-endowed schools in a survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

Most Pell Grant students come from below-average-income households. In the highly endowed schools, a median of 16 percent of students received Pells, compared with 59 percent at the lowest-endowed institutions.

A student graduating from Yale or Princeton, with their roughly $2 million endowments per student, has a ticket to a well-paying job, while one graduating from the College of St. Joseph in Vermont, with its $29,000 endowment per student, does not. Only 12 percent of the Yale and Princeton students have Pells, compared with 71 percent at St. Joseph.

1. Total Fed assets increased by 400%.
2. The Fed increased its holdings of U.S. Treasury debt by almost $2 trillion, or over 200%.
3. The Fed now owns over $1.5 trillion of mortgage-backed securities that the private banking system wants nothing to do with.
4. The Fed is perilously close to balance sheet insolvency. When he took over in 2006 the Fed would need to suffer a loss of 3.5% on its assets to force it to throw in the towel (or force it to going crawling to Congress with its tail between its legs and beg for a bailout.) On the day Bernanke left office that loss was reduced to only a hair over 1%.
5. Unemployment is 6.6% today, compared with 4.8% on the day he took office in 2006. Not only that, labor force participation is down, meaning that not only are fewer people working who would like to work, many more have given up on the prospect of ever having job.

Janet Yellen has her work cut out to better these figures. In my recent daily at Mises Canada I explain why she´s in a pretty good position. Bernanke has left the economy so destabilized that it is hard to see how much worse it could get.  Read more here.

Patrick Barron writes in today’s Mises Daily: 

In The Law Frédéric Bastiat presents the irrefutable maxim that man’s rights exist prior to the formation of the state and that, therefore, the collective action of the state cannot conflict with man’s prior rights. According to Bastiat, man can delegate to the state only those powers that he himself already possesses, and man does not have the natural right to force another to give to a charity. Since I cannot coerce you to give to the charity of my choice, neither can government force you to give to the charity of its choice. Yet that is exactly what it does. Let us say that you object that government gives money to a charity that you personally abhor. You would not get very far arguing that you have a right to reduce your tax payment by a pro-rata amount. If you persisted in withholding payment, government will confiscate your assets. If you try to protect your assets, government will kill you.