Vox: How Venezuela’s socialist dream collapsed into a nightmare

Venezuela is in the midst of a stunning social, political, and economic collapse. The country of 30 million people is facing dire food and medicine shortages, frequent power outages, serious political unrest, the world’s highest inflation rate, rampant violent crime, and one of the world’s highest murder rates. Earlier this month, Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, declared a state of emergency. --In short, Venezuela has become the world’s most visibly failing state. --It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Not so long ago, Venezuela’s socialist revolution attracted its share of fellow travelers — first-world idealists hungry for the next earthly utopia.

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Berkeley and the Tea Party – Together?

SUSTAINABLE FREEDOM LAB
Can the American left and right unite in 2014? Can they find a common cause without whipping up a cat 5 hurricane? That may be happening. ✧ Berkeley California is a liberal community with a strong and vocal conservative contingent. But California’s Plan Bay Area may be the flash point that welds the two seemingly disparate groups. ✧ In 2008 the California legislature approved SB375, which mandates the states’ 18 metropolitan regions develop Sustainable Community Strategies and reduce greenhouse gases. ✧ In compliance with SB375, Plan Bay Area combines 9 counties in the San Francisco area to form one of the nation’s most aggressive sustainable communities planning regions. Berkeley is in the Plan Bay Area region. ✧ While Plan Bay Area’s goals of increased sustainability and reduced greenhouse gases sound noble, the plan contains serious drawbacks that are catapulting fury across the local political spectrum. Read more at Sustainable Freedom Lab.org... Read More......

NRO: Congress’s Exemption from Obamacare

By John Fund
Make Congress get insurance the same way the little people do? Hill denizens howl in fury. Prostitution. Bribery. Blackmail. Thuggery. Hypocrisy. ✧ Those were just some of the incendiary words thrown around the U.S. Senate last week, and that doesn’t count what people said in private. ✧ The Senate may still have a reputation as a genteel club, but lawmakers seemed to abandon rules of decorum completely last week in arguments about whether Congress should be treated like the rest of the country when it comes to Obamacare. Read more at National Review Online...

Political malpractice! --bc Read More......

WSJ: The New American Divide

WALL STREET JOURNAL, 1/21/2012 - The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.

CHARLES MURRAY: America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality. Read more at WSJ...

—Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010" (Crown Forum) will be published on Jan. 31.

RELATED:
Bradley Lecture by Charles Murray, February 6: Alternative Futures for a Fractured American Culture
AEI: Society and Culture - About the book | Murray on "Coming Apart" | How thick is your bubble? (20 question quiz) | What They're Saying About "Coming Apart" Read More......

Samuelson: Europe’s economic purgatory

WASHINGTON POST, 12/14/2011 by Robert J. Samuelson (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler)

By now, it’s obvious that adopting the euro was a colossal blunder. It may rank as Europe’s worst policy mistake since World War II. The virtues of the common currency — it reduced transaction costs and the uncertainty of fluctuating exchange rates among national monies — were temporary. Its vices seem permanent or, at least, semi-permanent: the mounting economic costs of saving the euro; the growing nationalism from arguing over who’s to blame. ✧ Do not expect some magical “solution.” Europe has entered an economic and political purgatory from which there is no early escape. On paper, the crisis countries (so far: Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain) might benefit from abandoning the euro and resurrecting national currencies. They could then devalue these currencies, spurring exports and tourism. But in practice, this choice is dangerous and maybe impossible. Read more at the Washington Post...

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Bowling with Others

Commentary Magazine.com, October 2007, James Q. Wilson wrote,

In his celebrated book, Bowling Alone (2000), the political scientist Robert D. Putnam argued that America, and perhaps the Western world as a whole, has become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, and neighbors. We once bowled in leagues; now we bowl alone. We once flocked to local chapters of the PTA, the NAACP, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars; now we stay home and watch television. As a result, we have lost our “social capital”—by which Putnam meant both the associations themselves and the trustworthiness and reciprocity they encourage. For if tools (physical capital) and training (human capital) make the modern world possible, social capital is what helps people find jobs and enables neighborhoods and other small groupings of society to solve problems, control crime, and foster a sense of community.

In Bowling Alone, Putnam devised a scale for assessing the condition of organizational life in different American states. He looked to such measures as the density of civic groups, the frequency with which people participate in them, and the degree to which (according to opinion surveys) people trust one another. Controlling for race, income, education, and the like, he demonstrated that the higher a state’s level of social capital, the more educated and affluent are its children, the lower the murder rate, the greater the degree of public health, and the smaller the likelihood of tax evasion. Nor is that all. High levels of social capital, Putnam showed, are associated with such civic virtues as greater tolerance toward women and minorities and stronger support for civil liberties. But all of these good things have been seriously jeopardized by the phenomenon he identified as “bowling alone.” Continued...

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Excerpt: How The Left Was Won

The following is an excerpt from the opening pages of Chapter One of How The Left Was Won: An In-Depth Analysis of the Tools and Methodologies Used by Liberals to Undermine Society and Disrupt the Social Order. [This seemed overly harsh and I was reluctant to put it up until the Oregon Legislature, controlled by liberals, managed to punish 60% of Oregon voters during the week of the 16th with legislation that, if not unconstitutional, appears tyrannical.]

Let’s face it, when you get right down to it, all of liberalism is fueled by a singular strategy—a strategy which has been continually perfected and relentlessly executed over the past forty years. That strategy is to promote and exploit divisiveness.

Everything liberal politicians do is based on this simple principle. Tell the people that are given to hating the most, that they are the ones who are hated. Tell the people who expect the most, that they deserve more. Tell blacks to hate whites. Tell women to hate men. Tell the lazy to hate the motivated. Tell the poor that only conservatives are rich, and then be sure to tell them to hate them for it.

Class warfare, race baiting, name calling and man-hating—all with a singular goal: to get themselves in power by promoting and exploiting divisiveness. Of course, once this divisiveness turns into frenzy, these same people suddenly act as if they actually want to solve a problem that didn’t even exist before they did everything they possibly could to create it.

To liberals, every issue, every situation is an opportunity to divide. History, religion, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the death of a soldier, a political debate, the hurricane which devastated New Orleans. Every tragedy exploited to divide. Every victory belittled to divide. Every incident, every word, every distorted statistic, every holiday—you name it, they will find some way to divide it.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the politicians who promote and exploit divisiveness; it is the people as well. Malcontents, jealous of anyone with any sort of success, come up with any way they can to attack those who are more successful then they are. Someone is rich only because they stole something from them. Certain groups are more successful only because they took advantage of them. Work has nothing to do with it. Intelligence has nothing to do with it. Planning ahead has nothing to do with it. Even luck has nothing to do with it.

And what do these kinds of people view as the solution to this imaginary injustice? Why special rights, privileges and opportunities for themselves, of course. Level the playing field. Get something for nothing. Take from the rich, the white, the male dominated, homophobic society that has already given them everything. Take what they have, what they built, what they earned—whether it be money, property, liberty or opportunity—and find some way, some justification, some cause or some guise to redistribute it to the people who have done nothing to earn it. To people who refuse to compete on merit. To people who insist on taking more out of society than what they put in to it. To people who don’t give a damn that their inclusion comes only at the expense of someone else’s exclusion. The strategy is simple, really—promote divisiveness and then exploit it for your own benefit.

Liberals should thank God every day for differences between people because without them, liberalism would be dead in the water. Without them, the country might have some stability. Without them, it might have a chance to survive. Without them, the problems between those who want and those who have might actually be manageable in some meaningful or productive way. But differences have given liberals the perfect opportunity to stop any rational discussion dead in its tracks. Differences have led to polarization. Differences have led to countries within a country. Differences have led to the dreaded xist-ism-monger-phobia. Differences have allowed liberals to add any of these four sounds to the end of any word they choose, virtually guaranteeing that they can get away with anything they want.

Worse yet, liberals actually have the nerve to turn around and endlessly accuse conservatives of divisiveness. To them, conservatives— who believe everyone should be held to the same standards—are somehow divisive. To them, conservatives—who believe everyone should have the same rights regardless of the guises used to justify different ones for different people—are somehow divisive. To them, conservatives—who sacrifice their time, money, careers and often their lives to defend the true meaning of freedom and liberty—are somehow divisive.

But the reality is that divisiveness does not come from those who are trying to make some contribution to our society. The reality is that divisiveness does not come from those who expect others to at least try to do the same. The reality is that divisiveness comes from those who are always trying to get something out of a society far beyond what they are willing to put back in. The reality is that divisiveness comes from those who are always trying to get something for nothing…

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