Monthly Archives: April 2015

The Breakfast Club

My favorite eatery in my hometown of Binghamton, NY is the Norman Rockwell example of an immigrant Greek family perfecting the art of the traditional American breakfast.  Every day, the cops and the manual labor crowd hits first, just after 5AM sharing the diner’s copy of the local newspaper.  About 7, the office workers roll in, mulling their own Wall Street Journal’s over coffee.  Last to arrive are the college kids; hung-over in sweats and sandals, cell phone obsessed and getting all of their information from tiny hand-held devices 6 inches from their noses.

I have my breakfast there every day and depending on my schedule, I will plug into any of these shifts of patrons seamlessly, but not so this past Saturday.

As I squeezed into the only 2-person table in the small, crowded dining room, the table of 4 behind me were a group of three young men and a woman I had never seen before.  They were in the middle of what must have been the funniest story ever told because they were laughing and carrying on so loudly that it was impossible not to notice.  Usually moments like that have a short duration, but not in this case.  These kids carried on and drowned out every other potential conversation in the place.  This went on for their entire stay; loud, obnoxious, guttural, profane and markedly racist.  Every other word out of the mouth of the loudest and most obtuse boy was the N word.  In the 20 minutes or so it took me to eat my breakfast, this boy said it loudly and proudly no fewer than 50 times.  In every sentence describing people, he was clear to define it in terms of race in its rawest description.

I was one of 50 or so people who witnessed this behavior.  With the exception of a few very subtle and short in duration looks in their direction, the crowd was otherwise silenced into self-assigned roles as unappreciative and disgusted observers, their breakfast conversations stifled and their day started with unwarranted and unwanted racist rantings.

This group of mouthy, racist malcontents were black.  Had the same racially charged rhetoric been coming from the mouths of whites, someone would have called 911 and a hate crime arrest would have been contemplated.  The only reason this behavior is tolerated is because of the poison of political correctness which has demanded that the unacceptable be embraced.  If a group of white kids had the bad judgment to have breakfast in a predominantly black neighborhood in a predominately black town and carry on the way these kids did, they would not have walked happily out of the diner into the morning sunshine as this group of jerks did, they would have been beaten bloody into silence, perhaps worse.

The 50 or so folks who witnessed this took away with them an impression and to those 4 young people who provided that impression I would like to know, what do you expect?

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Understanding Liberals 101

Government over-reach is always about money and power.  If you follow the money, each and every time you will discover the reasons, the logic, and the motivations behind otherwise sometimes puzzling quandaries.  The stated objectives of politicians are seldom, if ever true.  The ultimate goal of every elected official is the same: stay in office and savor the power.  The reasons given for what they do are usually smoke-screens for an ulterior motive, (i.e. money and power,) done under the guise of helping the children, feeding the poor or saving the planet.

Why, for example, would politicians take such forceful interest in pushing for increasing the minimum wage when the natural market forces of unfettered capitalism do a much better job of determining this?  Two of the most obvious reasons are also the two least talked about, especially amongst those same politicians pushing for the increases.  First, raising the minimum wage buys the votes of those affected and votes are the life-blood of any politician.  If they can’t get elected, they can’t access the power they crave, and with it the potential for great personal wealth.  By championing the increase to the minimum wage, lawmakers garner the favor of every liberal ideologue, rich and poor and with that support, their votes and their contributions.  Liberals in general favor an ever increasing minimum wage because their ideology and schemes depend upon a segment of the population that receives rather than contributes.  Notice that in the talks about increasing the minimum wage there is never a concern for an increase in productivity or other thoughts that justify this increase, quite the contrary; this is simply something for nothing.  Notions of self-sufficiency fly in the face of the dependence liberals count on for underwriting their agenda of social engineering.

Second, for every one cent increase in the minimum wage, hundreds of millions of additional tax dollars roll into the treasuries of every state as well the federal governments coffers.  Again, the life blood of liberal politicians, hell bent on spending other people’s monies. Funding social issue projects and experiments in social engineering by redistributing the wealth of the productive while making it look like a benevolent act of altruism on their part is really the modern liberal’s newest expression of art-form.

Another little secret is that many union contracts put comparable ratios into their pay scales so that union wages increase when the minimum wage increases, again more money for taxes and for union dues supporting candidates supporting the minimum wage increases!

Governments make nothing and create nothing but obstacles.  They produce nothing of value; they simply gather money through taxation, fees, fines, levies and outright confiscation.  Through agency regulation and decree, they build regulatory walls around some, thereby protecting them from competition, while keeping others out of the marketplace altogether, preventing open competition.  And the federal government has the added option of being able to actually print new money when they have exhausted all other sources.

You know you’re listening to a true liberal politician when they say something about the government’s ability to “create jobs.”  Governments don’t create jobs, on the contrary, through the various obstacles governments create, they stifle job creation and with it economic growth.  The only way that any government can affect job creation is to get the hell out of the way and allow the entrepreneur access to markets, capital and labor.

Anyone with a basic understanding of economic principles knows that there should be no artificial, arbitrary minimum wage.  A distrust in market forces, created by ignorance of economics, drives this agenda for the masses, but make no mistake; those elected officials pushing the hardest for these changes fully understand that their efforts make no economic sense.

This is the best kept secret in politics; not the commonly held notion that these politicians need to be educated about these things, not at all, they know the facts and principles of economic theory and in the face of those truths make political decisions that best benefit them at the expense of not only the principled decision, but at the economic costs passed onto the productive.  The politician’s decisions cost them zero, yet they personally benefit the greatest at our expense.  If these actions were indeed based upon an ignorance of economics, their sins would be forgivable, but once you understand that they know better and do so regardless, then you understand the depravity of the situation and the toxic political environment that foments such poisonous outcomes time after time.  These situations are where personal integrity is most accurately measured in a politician’s performance, not in his words.

There is a segment of the working society that falls somewhere between zero and the minimum wage when it comes to their ability to produce value through work.  The modern, enhanced welfare state takes care of these individuals when the market could do so more efficiently and with fairer outcomes.

When people receive something for nothing, their perceived value of those goods or services is zero.  When there is a direct relationship between ones efforts and ones rewards, appreciation for the effort required to produce those rewards builds self-value and encourages self-sufficiency.  Simply getting something for nothing implies that the receiver is incapable, and in some cases this is true and for those few so encumbered, of course a civil society cares for those folks, but a great many more receivers of modern welfare benefits have come to believe in their own worthlessness as it has been defined for them, ironically, by the very people supposedly trying to “help” them.

This is the conscious effort of liberals building a permanent underclass that they can then continue to serve.  This is what keeps liberals in business; they need someone to take care of.  Curing dependency and encouraging self-sufficiency erodes the very base of the liberals operations.  The modern liberal has so little faith in the human spirit that they actually believe that without their wisdom, guidance and grace the world would be in shambles.  Liberals believe that they know best and that large segments of humanity need their help, simply to survive.  The liberal needs clients that are just surviving.  Anyone caught thriving becomes an enemy because the liberal sees the situation as a static environment, not capable of growing.  There is only so much to go around.  The liberal pie never gets bigger; it’s simply a struggle to see who gets the biggest piece.  Liberals see clients where conservatives see people.

Conservatism embraces an ever increasing pie, the ability to “bake your own” and even sell it at a profit!  Liberals measure their success by measuring how many people need their help.  Conservatives see success by creating situations and scenarios where the fewest need help, but can prosper and grow on their own, at their own rate, and by their own design.

The America I know and her forefathers certainly embraced the Conservative model and by doing so, escaped the old world views that have now, sadly crept back into the America of today.  I for one would rather endure the winter in Valley Forge with General Washington than celebrate the beginning of the end when the “Great Society” was ushered in by the biggest racist President of modern times, Lyndon B. Johnson.

Paraphrasing former President Ronald Reagan, ask yourself if we’re better today than we were 50 years ago?

Over one trillion dollars thrown at poverty, unprecedented social engineering, and a virtually zero change in outcomes.  Do we really need another 50 year experiment to convince ourselves that this was not a good idea?  The problem with conservatism is that it is harder than liberalism.  Like going to college is harder than dropping out of school, or working two jobs is harder than collecting unemployment and then welfare.  But like most things in life that are more difficult, the rewards are greater.

We have stark choices today, thanks to bad decisions made time after time during the last 50 years of failed social policy.  We need to begin taking responsibility for our own welfare.  We need to make bad choices have really bad consequences so those so inclined make better decisions that have in the past resulted in their economic survival being paid for by the successful.  When the consequences of dependency become so undesirable as to be painful, miraculously many so affected will find their footing and join the rest of us in becoming less of a burden and more of an asset.

A few years ago, a morbidly obese Ohio man was found fused to a chair in his home.  He had reportedly been in the same chair for more than 2 years.  Rescue workers had to remove a wall to extract him and take him to the hospital where he died the next day.  This is like a segment of our society today, morbidly obese, stuck in the house with no where to turn after 50 years of bad decisions.  The good news is there is hope.  There is time to take the walls down, get to the hospital, have an intervention and get on a healthy diet of self-sufficiency, pride, personal honor, regained self esteem and self reliance.

Another 50 years of liberals help will certainly kill us.

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