WEALTH AND POVERTY

Comment from a Jesuit in Zimbabwe: "Even if there was more fairness in the trade between the southern and northern hemisphere, debts were largely cancelled and aid was flowing in, as long as bad governance and corruption are tolerated poverty will prevail. What is the point of cancelling debts if that merely frees funds to buy fighter planes in China? What good do better terms of trade make if we destroy our economic base for ideological reasons which makes staying in power priority number one to which all other interests are sacrificed? What good is "more and better aid" if it falls into the long fingers of bureaucratic embezzlers who refuse to be accountable as a matter of "national sovereignty"?.... Too many want a slice of the cake without asking where the cake is coming from. If production is not the focus of all our efforts, the existing wealth produced by others will disappear quickly as it is being shared with "cronies". As long as holding on to power is priority number one, overriding all other interests, the economy will continue to be raided for goodies with which to buy the support of this or that particular group of influential people. Those without influence - the sick, the poor, widows and orphans, the homeless and aliens - will continue to go without medication and treatment, starve and die.... "

Greed: "To leftists, greed is when someone else makes more money than they do. The problem with that word is that it's impossible to objectively define. Is a cab driver that chooses to work 60 hours a week instead of 40 greedy? According to whom? Suppose he wants the extra income to send his children to college? Suppose he wants to blow it in Las Vegas? A market economy doesn't ask these questions. They're irrelevant to public policy. Regardless of his motivations, a farmer who produces twice as much as his neighbor has added that much more to the nation's product. He should be suitably rewarded. The tax collector will relieve him of quite enough of the fruits of his labor. What he does with the rest is his business... Leftists have little regard for the creation of wealth. They take that for granted. Their fun comes in redistributing income and wealth. It may be difficult to define greed, but it's easy to define covetousness. That's the greed of leftists for governmental power to confiscate the property of others".

Start frugally to end up rich: "About to graduate from college? If you've been reading much, you could be forgiven for thinking you should cower under your Star Wars comforter at Mom and Dad's house after collecting your diploma. The media buzz: Becoming a financially independent adult is as tough for today's grads as Hercules' labors (which you can now safely forget) were for him.....; But here's a secret you won't hear in the rush to blame young people's woes on everyone except themselves: Society hasn't lost its ladder to financial stability. Young people have just lost interest in starting out poor. Too many 22-year-olds expect to start their adult lives at their parents' level of material satisfaction, without the 30 years of labor it took them to get there. Our world of easy credit and mysteriously glamorous TV apartments says you can have it all now. But live like you're entitled to your parents' finances, and you'll be back living with them soon enough. Live within your means, though, and you'll achieve financial independence before the naysayers say it's possible".

Thoughts on poverty: "One reads much about the poor in America, their piteous lives, their blighted hopes, and the unrelieved downtreading of them by various social ogres such as oppressive corporations who sell them greasy hamburgers. (Why does my wretched spell-checker object to 'downtreading'? You can't be downtrodden unless someone downtreads you. How obvious is that?) This I submit is goober-brained nonsense. America has precious little poverty, if by poverty you mean lack of something to eat, clothing adequate to keep you warm and cover your private parts, and a dry and comfortable place to sleep. In the 'inner cities' or, as we used to call them, slums, there is horrendous cultural emptiness, yes, and the products of the suburban high schools are catching up fast. But poverty? The kind you see in the backs streets of Port au Prince? It barely exists in the United States."

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ELSEWHERE

Why can't Anglo-Saxons run passenger trains? The British invented them after all. No American should need me to tell them about Amtrak and residents of Australia's largest city (Sydney) are almost beyond frustration with their dangerous and unpunctual trains too. Now we hear that in Britain, a lot of trains ran faster in the age of steam!. One could blame government. The American and Australian passenger railways are government run. The railways of the 19th century were of course private and the present British railways have only recently been privatized and run under a burden of regulations. But when one looks at the fast and punctual Japanese railways one wonders.

China is doing more to help low-income Americans than all the bureaucrats put together: "China on Monday threatened to take the United States to a dispute proceeding at the World Trade Organization if the Bush administration persists in restricting imports of Chinese-made textiles. China also rescinded tariffs on its own textile exports, asserting that it will do nothing to limit its shipments as it offered to do last week so long as the United States and Europe impose their own restrictions."

Airbus problems: "Delivery of Qantas's new flagship double-decker super-jumbo will be delayed by at least six months because of problems at European manufacturer Airbus, triggering penalty payments and damaging the national carrier's plans to secure its pre-eminence on the lucrative Pacific route. The shock news comes less than two months after the Europeans trumpeted the successful maiden flight of the plane and two weeks before they go to battle with rival Boeing at the Paris airshow. Airbus representatives delivered the bad news to Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon during the International Air Transport Associations annual general meeting in Tokyo this week. The Australian understands delays apply to all aircraft in the A380 program"

Barriers to publishing conservative books come down: "There was "a tremendous amount of marketplace and institutional resistance" to publishing conservative books, said Adam Bellow, an editor at Doubleday. The New York publishing world was a liberal preserve. How things have changed. Over the last 18 months, three superpower publishers have launched conservative imprints: Random House (Crown Forum), Penguin (Sentinel) and, most recently, Simon & Schuster (Threshold, headed by former Bush aide Mary Matalin). Nor is that all. ReganBooks and the Christian publisher Thomas Nelson are putting out mass market right-of-center books, while mid-list conservative titles pour forth from Peter Collier's 5-year-old Encounter Books and several smaller imprints. There's never been a better time to be a conservative author. What's behind the shift? Crown Forum chief Steve Ross thinks Sept. 11 made the industry less reflexively liberal. There's doubtless some truth to that. But what really turned the big New York publishers was the steady stream of bestsellers that Washington-based Regnery was producing.... Right-of-center authors can now reach millions of potential readers without being reviewed by such traditional gatekeepers as the New York Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books, which rarely deigned to review conservative books". (This story originally appeared in the L.A. Times but now appears to be offline. There is a similar article here).

Strange Justice has just put up another amazing story about Canadian justice -- or the lack thereof.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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