Category Archives: View

View 802 Monday, December 16, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

\

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

One observation I can confirm: for many of us, getting old does not result in a lot of time on our hands, because the simpler routine tasks we all have to do become more time consuming and eat all our time and energy. That is certainly happening to me. That’s what has happened to me this weekend; nothing big or difficult, just making some appointments and attempting to deal with the County Court system over Jury Duty, and stuff like that as well as Christmas; but I find that dealing with people on the telephone can be frustrating. I can’t hear them, and they seldom talk into the telephone, and they seem to up the speech rate and shout which is not quite the way to get me to understand.

One of the appointments I made is with the audiologists, after which I will pursue an expensive but said to be effective hearing device. Maybe that will make some of the more routine stuff easier to do and less draining of energy. We can hope so.

I am now about the oldest person I know. I must know some who are older, but I don’t interact with them often, so it is safe to say I am the oldest person I communicate with regularly, which means that I am sailing unpiloted into this dark sea. It sure beats the alternative.

There is more background to the views of the Holy Father on Capitalism than most of his detractors are aware of; and it must always be remembered that he is a spiritual leader, whom many believe to be the Vicar of Christ on Earth, and thus has no choice whatever about what he advocates regarding the plain duty of those possessing this world’s goods toward the poor and downtrodden. He must advocate obedience to the powers that be, but he must act for those not protected by those powers. He must be an advocate for the poor and helpless. How could he be otherwise.?

His Holiness speaks for and to the world’s Catholics. Many, both Catholic and non-Catholic, would say that others would do well to listen to him, and one of his duties is evangelism in the non-Catholic world, but his primary duty is to speak to the Faithful.

He is also but a man. When he says that he is not a Marxist but there are things worth considering in Marxism he speaks as a public man as many of us do, and many would agree with him. Marx predicted that capitalism would result in greater and greater concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. It seems clear enough to me that left to itself, unrestricted capitalism does result in greater concentrations of wealth, which leads to greater temptation to those of power to take that wealth. Sometimes it is done in the name of national unity and the wealth is directed rather than confiscated, as opposed to direct confiscation in the name of the people.

Marxism specifies that class warfare is inevitable and will destroy society; the only remedy is to eliminate class warfare by eliminating classes. Once the victory of the proletariat is achieved through public ownership of the means of production the class war ceases, and all that is left is for government itself to wither away since there is nothing left to fight about. To achieve that result the Communist must be patient enough to allow the situation to develop, to allow the Capitalists to concentrate their power and eliminate the middle class, otherwise class warfare will continue. Others claim to be true Marxists but have other interpretations. Among those were the followers of Trotsky who saw the development of the Regime in the USSR as merely building a new class – what Djilas called The New Class – which would rule and oppress the people. Some of the followers of Trotsky in the United States mutated into what is now called neo-conservatism.

Fascism accepted much of Marx and his economic science, but did not accept the premise that the only solution to class warfare was elimination of the bourgeoisie, and some would argue that Marx himself never accepted that. Do note that Mussolini died shouting the praise of Socialism, and never claimed to be anything but a good Marxist Socialist. He did not write consistent essays on the theory of Fascism, but others including his son in law did, and the main theory of Fascism was that the only way to end class warfare was not to end the existences of classes – that is counterproductive because it is impossible — but to required the classes to work together. The legislature consists of representatives of the institutions – Church, Labor, Shop Keepers, Land Owners, Manufacturers, Educators, the Military, and other indispensible organizations – who try to work out procedures which advance the people, who are the State; and to be sure that they work together, the Leader is empowered to require them to work together for the good of all.

Capitalism insists that Marxism doesn’t work, and leads to economic disaster as well as the creation of a new ruling class; at one time identified as The Party, but later it was recognized that a much smaller group within the Party, the Nomenklatura, are the actual rulers. This group ends most of the factionalism and thus the blood purges; it emerged in strength after Stalin’s purges and basically took control of the USSR following the Hungarian Insurrection.

There have been many attempts to make a moral case for Capitalism, but they all founder on the historical trends: when capitalism is unrestricted, wealth multiplies, but it also concentrates, and the pressure is on to allow anything to be legal and sold in the market place. I have argued elsewhere that an inevitable result of unbridled capitalism is the sale of human flesh in the market place. And I think no one can argue that there is not a strong tendency to concentration of wealth.

Of course there is wealth. More wealth than any other system can produce. What His Holiness did not seem to notice is that in capitalist nations the definition of the poor, in terms of calories consumed, ability to travel, access to good water, health care, often exceeds the definition of wealth in much of the world. It is easy to be blinded by the concentration of wealth, and the great power of Goldman Sacks, Bill Gates, is easily seen, while the negative income taxes and “food” stamps credit cards are not seen. The poor are poor enough in these United States, but they are fairly wealthy compared to the normal condition of many I knew in Memphis in the 1930’s – and I didn’t know any really poor people. But I did know families who were grateful if I brought over a potato from the bushels we kept in our garage.

My point is that Pope Francis is correct when he reminds his people that we are not in this world primarily to acquire more and more wealth. He says no more than “What doth it profit a man though he gain the whole world but suffer the loss of his own soul?” He resents the concentration of wealth, but perhaps pays too little attention to the economic effects: the wealth is concentrated in many overtly Socialist dictatorships as well, but in those places the bourgeoisie such as it is is not appreciably wealthier than the poor in the United States. But it is not the goal of Catholics to be the wealthiest corpse in the churchyard, and His Holiness is right to remind us so in this Advent season.

For more on Capitalism and Catholicism, see http://distributist.blogspot.com/2007/01/distributism-vs-socialism.html

I am not arguing the notion that a distributist society would be as productive as capitalism. I am suggesting that the original notion of a Nation of States would have allowed us a demonstration of the possibility; and in any event, Belloc and Chesterton are worth knowing about. As Burke says, for a man to love his country his country ought to be lovely; it is always worth discussing what this means. The United States have been blessed in this Millennium with remarkably restrained persons of enormous wealth; but it does not change the oddity of the growing discrepancy between wealth and poverty even as the wealth of the very poor rises as well.

Pope Francis is incorrect in saying nothing trickles down to the poor. He is not incorrect in reminding us all that wealth is not the only goal in life.

A session in the American Embassy to the Court of St. James:

Another picture of the far wall:

I do not know if that is standard in other embassies. It is of course quite standard to have a portrait or photograph of the President in those places, and generally one of George Washington.

A few interesting observations from readers. We may return to some of these subjects.

Jerry,

More of Mr. Niven’s legacy:

The US Air Force Band Flash Mob at the Smithsonian http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIoSga7tZPg&feature=youtu.be

Jerry

TED is touting this stretchy spacesuit as “a concept no one has seen before:”

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/12/10/mit-biosuit-system-dava-newman/

except in Analog and other places in the 1970’s.

Ed

And in dozens of my stories and papers…

“This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”

<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/health/the-selling-of-attention-deficit-disorder.html>

Roland Dobbins

 

‘It’s almost as if the non-consumer part of the Chinese economy had reverted to the 1930s, when each province issued its own legal tender.’

<http://thediplomat.com/2013/12/chinas-shadow-currency/?allpages=yes>

Roland Dobbins

Thuktun Flishithy spotted?

<http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/12/saturn-rings-peggy/>

Roland Dobbins

And I call your attention to this one:

Earth Was Warmer in Roman Times

http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/13/study-earth-was-warmer-in-roman-medieval-times/

and

http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/13/multiple-lines-of-evidence-suggest-global-cooling/

We all know this, but apparently it is finally becoming known outside a small circle of readers. There was very little man-made greenhouse gas in Roman times, or in Viking times for that matter, and even less in Holocene times when the temperature was 9 degrees C higher than it is at present. And the Earth hasn’t been getting warmer since 1997.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 802 Thursday, December 12, 2013

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

Begin with this reminder of climate science consensus:

Leonard Nimoy on The Coming Ice Age: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_861us8D9M

Note that at the time as a science fact columnist I was pretty well convinced of this. I even took the picture of Stephen Schneider and Margaret Meade that they used on the back cover of their book. It looked like the future was desertification and cold, cold, cold.

For more on that

1974 : NCAR Called Global Cooling The “New Norm” And Blamed Climate Disasters On It.

<http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/1974-ncar-called-global-cooling-the-new-norm-and-blamed-climate-disasters-on-it/>

Roland Dobbins

Climate Change and its Effect on  World Food

by Walter Orr Roberts  Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado

In February of 1972 earth-orbiting artificial satellites revealed the existence of a greatly increased area of the snow and ice cover of the north polar cap as compared to all previous years of space age observations. Some scientists believe that this may have presaged the onset of the dramatic climate anomalies of 1972 that brought far-reaching adversities to the world’s peoples. Moreover, there is mounting evidence that the bad climate of 1972 may be the forerunner of a long series of less favorable agricultural crop years that lie ahead for most world societies. Thus widespread food shortages threaten just at the same time that world populations are growing to new highs. Indeed, less favorable climate may be the new global norm. The Earth may have entered a new “little ice age”

There are strong signs that these recent climate disasters were not random deviations from the usual weather, but instead signals of the emergence of a new normal for world climates.

www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull165/16505796265.pdf

It’s lunch time. Back later. But perhaps that will amuse you.

And if you need something else to worry about

‘Thus ends roughly 90 years of post-Ottoman secularity.’

<http://takimag.com/article/turkeys_marginal_theocracy_guy_somerset/print>

Roland Dobbins

The Turkish experiment in timocracy seems to be ending in an Islamic State.

As I was about to go downstairs for lunch, I got a call from Bob Neely, a long time neighbor who is also a base in the choir my wife sings in. He used to live down the street from us but has moved up by Gene Autry’s place up the hill.  His daughter Stephanie married Max Gladstone, whose Three Parts Dead is an imaginative new approach to heroic fantasy, and has done well enough that Tor has brought out a second book in the series, Two Serpents Rise. Max is in town for a day or so and wanted to bring over a copy of his new book.  As it happens Peter has just finished making the Great Hall inhabitable again, so these were my first guests in the newly rehabilitated rooms here in Chaos Manor.  Alas I couldn’t offer them tea because my electric water pitcher doesn’t seem to be working, but we have officially had entertainment in the room that has emerged from archeological layers of old computer books, computer parts, newspapers, old computers, tchotchkes from recent and ancient conventions, and useful stuff that was put down only to be lost in the swim.  Which means that when I get a new hot water pitcher I can have tea parties up here again, and I will do so.

Thanks to those who pointed me to this:  http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/12/10/mit-biosuit-system-dava-newman/  Apparently MIT is experimenting with the skintight space suit that appears in many of my early space exploration novels, and apparently some think they have a new invention.  I’m pleased that the concept of the space activity suit is back in the wind and research is being done on it, because I have long been convinced that it’s the right way to go, and I’ll gladly forgive them for thinking they invented it, but I do hope they have not really forgotten the work that Litton industries and Webb Associates of Yellow Springs Ohio have already done.  I can refer them to the 1971 document http://chapters.marssociety.org/winnipeg/sas/DevelopmentOfASpaceActivitySuit.pdf and there are many others, including a couple things I wrote a long time before that.   The Space Activity Suit makes use of the fact that the human skin can be a perfectly good pressure container provided that it is reinforced. I know of experiments in the 1950’s using Spandex, and I was once in a chamber at Litton which was depressurized to 110,000 feet – as near space vacuum as makes no never mind – in one of them. It didn’t fit me perfectly and fit is very important in an SAS. Any void areas between you and the suit need to be filled with partly inflated sealed balloons which can expand to provide the padding.

  Of course the suit needs a neck seal and helmet to deliver breathing air; the lung pressure takes care of pressurizing your system. It’s surprising how much work you can get done in a SAS because you are not fighting pressure changes within the suit when you move.  The concept hadn’t been developed enough in the 50’s to warrant incorporating it into the Dynasoar Boeing was proposing, but it was promising and Webb at Yellow Springs continued the development work. I have always thought that would be the final solution to the space suit program.

Bunny Inspectors

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/12/brace_yourself_for_the_srirachapocalypse/?source=newsletter

Because of the smell? Have you ever been in Salinas during the garlic harvest? Or, downwind of a sugar plant in Louisiana during grinding? Sheesh.

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

We are doomed. Doomed I say.  No Sriracha?

But the Bunny Inspectors are safe, in the new consensus budget which is going to eliminate needless government spending.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 802 Tuesday, December 10, 2013

The news today was largely about President Obama going out of his way to shake hands with Raul Castro at the memorial for Nelson Mandela. The State Department has said that the US position on human rights and tolerance in Cuba has not changed.

At the hearing on Tuesday, Kerry said Obama "didn’t choose who’s" at the Mandela ceremony. Asked by Congress Member Ros-Lehtinen if Castro is upholding basic human rights, Kerry answered: "No. Absolutely not."

The Obama hand shaking incident seems to have taken the lead in coverage of the event.

‘Climate change’ comes to Chicago.

<http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/12/10/temps-reach-18-year-low-more-bitter-cold-and-snow-coming/>

Roland Dobbins

Of course it has been this cold before. It has been warmer before. It takes a lot of computer modeling to determine the temperature of the Earth and a lot more to show a trend, and depending on the model you get different results. Until recently it seemed agreed that the Earth is in a period of remission from the great Ice Ages in which glaciers covered a lot of the Northern Hemisphere, gouging out huge trenches and covering the land with a kilometer of ice, making that part of the Earth uninhabitable.

I was taught in school that we are in an Interglacial period, an interruption of the coming of the ice; in the 1970’s we learned that the current ice age began suddenly, with some areas in Britain and Belgium going from deciduous trees to covered with a meter or more of ice in decades, possibly as few as twenty years. When the ice began to recede northern Europe was repopulated. The effect of the coming and recession of the ice was covered in many books, including a popular work called Ice With Your Evolution by my friend Adrian Berry. The great fear from 1950 to about 1980 was that the Ice might return, and indeed one reason for fear of nuclear waste was to preserve it in places that could survive the return of the ice. This was a standard theme at AAAS meetings of that time, and President Carter’s environment advisor Gus Speth said as much at a Boston meeting; when I asked him if there was not something more to worry about than nuclear waste when your house was under a kilometer of ice, he changed the subject.

In 1997, Edward Teller, Lowell Wood, and Rod Hyde wrote a paper about modulation of climate changes – things we could do to stabilize climate if we have to. As they say in that paper, global warming is not proven; but all the long term evidence indicates a near uncertainty of cooling and the return of the ice. A return of the ice ages is sure to come and will be a lot more catastrophic than the projected global warming. There are ways to modulate climate for cooling or warming. The costs are in the order of billions a year, not precisely cheap but certainly less costly than wars.

Rather than destroying the fountains of wealth that have produced our wealthy age, would it not make more sense to invest a few billion a year to construct and test climate modulation systems? The ice age is sure to come at some time; global warming is also a possibility. Rather than play CO2 games, we need to develop the means for coping with either trend. And note that while global warming is gradual – we can’t really be sure if we’re seeing a return to a warm period like the Viking age or a runaway climate climb, but runaway still means centuries – the evidence show that ice ages can come on suddenly and without warming.

Our present methods of coping with warming cost trillions. We are not investing much in developing climate modulation methods. We should be.

Those interested in tracking climate trends will find http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/1871-climate-superstition/ interesting, but not definitive.

Your TSA heroes at work:

“She took my monkey’s gun.”

<http://www.king5.com/news/local/TSA-agent-confiscates-sock-monkeys-toy-pistol-234986321.html>

Roland Dobbins

I think I might be harmed from laughing too much were I threatened with a 2 inch pistol from a monkey puppet, so I guess it makes sense. Safety first. And a cure for unemp0loyment.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 802 Monday, December 09, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

My apologies for my rather obscure humor with my “quote of the day.”

Chicken chess

Jerry,

Nice quote of the day! Heh. I sincerely hope Putin said that. Hilarious!

""Negotiating with President Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and then struts around like it won the game…""

I think I first heard it years ago, and I really hope Putin’s English coaches just threw it at him as an American or English ‘idiom’ last week and he threw it into the mix. An oldie but a goodie! Heh. I seem to recall it as a chicken (chickens can be trained to play checkers if I recall correctly) here’s a good one from a month or so back:

http://inagist.com/all/386938157671153664/

Anyhow, the sentiment is not lost on me, whether or not Putin said it or not. I Respect Putin, I Laugh at Obama.

I thought it pretty obvious that the Russian chief of state would never have publicly said anything that crass about the President of the Unite States. As my correspondent points out, the story has been told for decades, and attributed to just about everyone in modern times. I believe it was once attributed to Hitler about Neville Chamberlain. It has certainly been said about other American Presidents.

I have received mail informing me that there is no reliable source for Putin ever to have said that, and I am sure it is true. I would be astonished if there were. My apologies for a misplaced sense of humor.

Time Warner has lately had the habit of shutting down my Internet connection about 11 PM PST every night when I sit down to do the mail, so there hasn’t been a mailbag for a while. I’ll get to that. Also there are a number of items to discuss including the current DOJ punishment of Apple with what amounts to a Special Prosecutor whom Apple must pay at $1000/hour and more. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579242320326157900

This is a continuation of the odd DOJ law suit about Apple’s conspiracy to fix book prices by allowing publishers to set their own price for eBooks, as opposed to the Amazon model of having the prices fixed by Amazon. The result of this vile conspiracy is that Amazon has about 85% of the eBook market, and Apple is just beginning to crawl out of the hole it dug itself. One might think that Apple has adequately punished itself. As to anti-trust measures, one wonders. The anti-trust case against Microsoft had nothing to do with real monopolies: Microsoft didn’t believe in having a huge Washington lobby to dispense largesse to government employees and Congressional staffers, and the biggest Washington presence of Microsoft was its sales staff. After the anti-trust action against Microsoft that all changed and now Microsoft throws the big parties and does the other other stuff one expects from the Washington office of a bit corporation.

Now Apple is being shaken down. It’s one way to spread the wealth around.

I have had several smart lawyers try to explain to me how the world was harmed because Apple allowed publishers to set their own prices for the products they sold through the Apple store – the “Agency Model” – as opposed to Amazon’s “:reseller” model in which they paid the wholesale distributor price for a book then sold it at whatever Amazon thought best – usually less than Amazon paid for it for big loss leaders. Of course book stores have long been giving enormous discounts on best sellers in the hopes of getting customers into the stores where they will buy other books at full price and perhaps buy some coffee as well.

I have never understood why I needed the federal government to protect me either as a consumer or as an author. Amazon continued to pay the publisher the full distributor price – generally half the cover price – and author royalties are a percentage of the cover price, so there was never an issue there. And yes, the issue is far more complicated, and involves whether or not Apple conspired to fix book prices which is said to damage the entire market and be bad for everyone; and all this will shortly be before the Court of Appeals. Meanwhile every Apple executive including the design and innovation departments are being summoned before a federally appointed master who has the power to waste their time and collect $1,000/hour as he does it. This is not likely to give us the next big thing. Apple’s competitors are rejoicing: not only have has the government placed a primary hamper on Apple innovation, but Apple is being forced to pay for the inquisition.

That’s nice work if you can get it.

For more on this case, see http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/12/06/wsj-blasts-apple-e-books-antitrust-judge-in-scathing-editorial

I am fortunate enough to have several physician readers of this column, and I would appreciate comment on last week’s Wall Street Journal editorial

Don’t Get Your Operation on a Thursday

Legislation can’t fix hospital overcrowding. Better scheduling of surgeries can.

By Eugene Litvak http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303914304579194530055759414

New York, five other states and the District of Columbia are considering legislation that would mandate minimum hospital-nurse staffing levels. The Massachusetts Nurses Association is planning an initiative for the November 2014 state ballot asking voters to approve a law setting minimum staffing levels for all hospitals, a change they say would alleviate the dangerous strain on overworked nurses and result in improved patient care. The nursing associations in the six states (including Texas, Iowa, Mass., N.J. and Minn.) fervently support such legislation. In turn, hospitals vehemently oppose staffing mandates.

Who is right and who is wrong? Although each side is right in some sense, there is a way to address the legitimate problems faced by nurses without a rigid formula like minimum staffing. It will help nurses and their patients while simultaneously saving hospitals money.

The problem apparently is that there are busy days and slow days in hospitals, and on the busy days the demand for nursing and orderly services in higher than the supply, while on other days there isn’t all that much for them to do. I’ve noticed the same thing in visits to Kaiser: some days the waiting rooms are full, other days the nurses have time to chat with both patients and each other. It really isn’t possible to have a bunch of standby nurses instantly available when demand is high, but not having to be around and on the payroll when things are slow.

Litvak’s solution is better scheduling models, something most OR (Operations Research) guys like me are familiar with. The first thing is to model the input queues. There are good statistics on demands for emergency room services, and a number of good models for staff sizes given predictable fluctuations in demand, and then accounting for an additional random demand input. I’d be astonished if most hospital administrators were not familiar with them. And according to Litvak

the peaks have nothing to do with emergency rooms. The real cause is scheduled, i.e. planned, patient admissions. When many admissions are scheduled for the same day, they create artificial peaks in the demand for beds and thus more work for nurses. Without the peaks in demand that hospitals themselves bring about with their scheduling practices, the hospitals could afford a much better nurse-staffing ratios without controversial legislative measures.

There is a hurdle, though. To better regulate the flow of patients, hospitals will have to change the way they accommodate the surgeons who have operating privileges at their institutions. Surgeons bring revenue into a hospital and in the past have largely operated at their convenience. The challenge is for hospitals to work with surgeons to stagger their scheduled admissions and procedures.

Surgeons are a limited resource and have their own scheduling requirements, and they are not slaves or good candidates for enslavement.

I’d appreciate comments.

I once did a lot of formal study of economic theory, but I gave up: most economic models can be fudged to explain everything, but they don’t seem to be very good at predicting; which is one reason the Five Year Plans that were going to produce wealth in socialist countries didn’t work so well.

I have distilled basic economics into a few axioms about economics and government. One is primary.

I say this is an axiom, which is to say it is self-evidently true:

If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want less of it, tax it or fine people for doing it.

A corollary is that if you can’t tax it, regulation will usually produce the same result.

The consequences of this should be obvious. If you want more unemployment, subsidize it. Pay people to be unemployed for a living and you will get applicants; raise the subsidy for being unemployed and you will get more of them.

But of course this is no more than reopening the discussion of the Deserving and the Undeserving Poor, and it has long seemed evident to me (not an axiom but a postulate) that the best way to deal with that dilemma is to leave a very great deal of the safety net to non-governmental institutions – to Tocqueville’s Associations. In his time these were mostly religious because religions promise high rewards for charity (And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.)

Of course we discourage religious activities and under the corollary we get less religious based activity for supporting the poor, so that government gets involved in deciding who shall receive entitlements and who shall not, and that involves politics and unionization. At one time there was even an attempt to form a union of welfare recipients, but I haven’t hear much about it since one city mayor invited them to go on strike and withhold their services.

Another principle I consider axiomatic is that raising minimum wages either has little effect or causes unemployment, and raising them enough will produce mass unemployment. This has always seemed self=evident to me, but my friend Ron Unz, who is a pretty smart cookie, has a different view.

Raise the Minimum Wage to $12 an Hour

Ron Unz, a software developer and publisher of The Unz Review, is the chairman of the Higher Wages Alliance, which is sponsoring a California ballot initiative next year to raise the state minimum wage to $12 per hour.

Tens of millions of low-wage workers in the United States are trapped in lives of poverty. Many suggestions have been put forth to improve their difficult situation, ranging from new social welfare programs to enhanced adult education to greater unionization. But I think the easiest solution is also the simplest: just raise their wages.
The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and hiking it to $12 would solve many of our economic problems at a single stroke.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/12/04/making-low-wages-liveable/raise-the-minimum-wage-to-12-an-hour

I have tried to follow Ron’s arguments here, but I can’t. I don’t see where the money will come from. The Marxist labor theory of value is that value is added by labor, and the capitalist pays below the value of the labor and keeps the surplus value for himself. Of course he then invests that profit in other enterprises, but that could be accomplished by a better system in which the workers themselves then own the enterprises in which the surplus values are invested.

Ron Unz argues that if Wal-Mart raised prices by less than 2% it could afford the $12 minimum wage without further price adjustments, and this would produce a massive economic stimulus – the higher pay would all be spent, not saved or invested, making more business for Wall-Mart – and the economy would boom. Wall-Mart won’t do that because this would signal competitors to pay less money in wages and use what they save to cut prices below Wall-Mart’s; but a minimum wage law would fix that. Now to compete with Wall-Mart you can’t do it by paying less than it pays, and once again everyone benefits.

I don’t know, but it seems to me that raising minimum wages either has no effect – people are already getting that – or it raises the cost of doing whatever it is that the worker does, and if that isn’t worth the minimum wage the job will disappear.

But I will vigorously dispute one point Ron makes: raising the minimum wage isn’t going to save billions in entitlements.

He says

Ordinary taxpayers would be the other great beneficiaries, saving many tens of billions of dollars each year in payments for Food Stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, housing subsidies, and other social welfare programs. Businesses should pay their own employees rather than quietly shifting the burden to government programs and the American taxpayer. Conservatives and free-market supporters should endorse this simple idea.

This assumes that having raised minimum wages the entitlement programs would be cut. I don’t believe that is politically possible.

I don’t disagree that Scrooge ought to have paid Cratchit a higher wage and ought to have bought a goose for the Cratchit family. I am less sure that Parliament should have required him to do it.

It’s lunch time. More later.

I have not given abandoned the discussion about evolution theories, and the notion of inheritance of acquired characteristics needs discussion, but to me it is self evident that the original Darwinian hypothesis of blind chance and survival of the fittest simply can’t be demonstrated as plausible. My friend Fred has something to say on the subject: http://fredoneverything.net/LastDarwin.shtml And like Fred, I don’t know.  I don’t claim to know.  Just as I don’t know about Global Warming. But I am pretty sure that those who do claim that they KNOW are wrong.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.