SOME MORE ECONOMICS

The real job figures: "U.S. job creation continued to move ahead at a steady pace with the announcement Friday that 96,000 non-farm payrolls were added to the economy. Over the past thirteen months 1.9 million new jobs have been created. The unemployment rate stands at a historically low 5.4 percent"

Sowell: "Those who vote on the basis of what the government can do for them are especially short-sighted during a war against worldwide terror networks. What good would it do to get free prescription drugs forever if your forever is likely to be cut short by more attacks like those on September 11, 2001?"

Myths about U.S. workers: "The claim that a large part of the American population can make ends meet only with the help of moonlighting falls on fertile ground among pundits and politicians who promote the view that something is profoundly wrong with U.S.-style capitalism. As John Kerry put it at the Democratic convention in Boston: "People are working weekends; they're working two jobs, three jobs, and they're still not getting ahead.... Also ignored is that only one-in-four multiple jobholders in America says he actually needed more than one job to meet expenses or pay off debt. This point is reinforced by the fact that the higher your formal education, the more likely you are to take a second job. Among Americans with a Master's degree or a Ph.D., multiple jobholding is almost three times as common as it is among high school dropouts."

Minimum wage myths : "Of all the economic myths my students bring to the first day of class, perhaps the most prevalent is that the minimum wage is desirable because, without it, employers would pay substandard wages. My new students -- by and large the products of public education -- have not yet had the benefit of being taught to think economically. If they had any economics education at all in high school, it involved being bombarded with graphs, charts, and curves, the meaning of which they never really were taught, perhaps because their teachers had never been taught either."

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ELSEWHERE

Another marvel of capitalism: "Hot on the heels of dog walkers, personal shoppers and errand runners, Queensland now has its first domestic light-bulb changing service.... For $44 - plus the cost of the bulb - one of four technicians from the Light Globe Doctor will come to your home. "My elderly grandmother couldn't change her lightbulbs and that's what gave me the idea for the business. "When I first started, I thought I'd be going around to little old ladies houses to change their bulbs for them. But since we started 12 months ago, I've only had a couple. "We've been doing about 180 jobs a week and a lot of my customers are just too busy making money at work and doing other things to change them. "Rather than going to the shop, finding the right light-bulb and then changing it, they call me to do it. "I've even been doing jobs after hours. People get home from work, find the light has blown and give us a call. "I did a job for a lady recently who only wanted the one bulb changed."

Leftist hate backfired in Australia: "Above all, what the federal election reaffirmed is that the public, in general, recoils from the rhetoric of hate. Latham, no matter how much he sought to sanitise his image, is an old-fashioned factional headkicker. So is Bob Brown, in his own way, despite being beatified by the media. But the leader of the Greens is the most uncompromising party leader in federal politics, along with the rest of the Permanently Outraged. In short, the progressive movement suffered a meltdown in the election.... All those people who went around Sydney painting signs, "Howard war criminal" and "Howard lies", and all the secular fundamentalism from Brown, and all those loud and proud Howard haters in the media, have yielded a bitter harvest. The public, in its totality, does not reward the rhetoric of hate. And hate is the only word for the undisciplined partisan bile that has spewed from people who should know better."

Privatizing local government works brilliantly: "Crestwood, Illinois [is] being billed as the best run town in America because it operates like a business. This article pointed out that Crestwood, Illinois, with a population of about 12,000, is run so efficiently that the citizens that year were to receive a 26% rebate on their property taxes. Wow! The town is so well off that residents over age 55 get free household repairs, their shrubs cut for free and the goal of this super efficient government was to one day totally eliminate property taxes altogether".

Voter turnout: "Every election year there are great alarms in the media that not enough Americans vote. Supposedly this shows that there is something wrong at the core of our society. In reality, societies where different groups are at each other's throats often have high voter turnout, as each fears the worst if some other group gains political power. Polarization is a high price for high voter turnout. But there are already efforts to scare old people that their Social Security is threatened in order to get out their vote. ... It is young people who are likelier to find their promised pensions are not there when they get old -- unless they get some private pension in the meantime, with or without Social Security privatization. Since 90 percent of the black vote goes to Democrats, it is especially important for Democrats to scare blacks, to get a large turnout."

There is now a book out called The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century . It shows why the English-speaking nations as a whole (including Israel) are likely to continue their cultural and intellectual dominance of the world.

Well-said: "Pardon our populism, but we're a lot more impressed by the views of millions of ordinary voters than by those of all the academics in the world. Democracy and human rights are safer in the hands of people who directly benefit from them, soberly appreciate their value and rightly fear the alternatives than they are in the hands of overpaid, overfed, overpraised intellectual snobs who take their considerable safety and excessive comfort for granted, and spend far too much of their time sneering at those who don't belong to their self-regarding little subculture, but are expected to pay their salaries nonetheless".

Maverick philosopher: "I've said it before, and I'll say it again: It is is a mistake to suppose that the only support for an anti-abortion position must rest on religious premises. Senator John Kerry made this mistake last night during his third and final 'debate' with President Bush" [I agree. I view abortion with horror, even though I am an atheist].

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftism is for most Leftists a desire to sound good rather than a desire to do good

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