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| Welcome Winter is no longer available as a direct link. Click on this to go to Elma Mayer's website and click on the song directly. |
| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog May 15, 2012 ASSOCIATED PRESS Baby With The Bathwater File One of the reasons societies have found marriage useful is to put a sort of seal of approval on the flood of new citizens produced by young straight couples, ensuring their involvement beyond just putting another wild young body on the street. One of the ways marriage aids in this is by enlisting the willing cooperation of these couples because they can witness the process as they themselves come up from newborn, a process which is easy to explain because demonstrated and 'lived' by the society. When puberty comes, they have a firmer grip on the facts of life as it affects not only them but their civilization. A segment of a society that wishes to alter this simple agreement because it feels it has good arguments in some other social arena such as egalitarianism, civil rights or 'the sweep of history', has to try to frame the debate so as to ignore this core truth of marriage and in so doing, lend especial poignancy to the phrase 'throwing out the baby with the bathwater.' Societies might have found it convenient to write laws to directly enforce two parents raising a child for 20 years but they didn't, they found them unpopular and unproductive, coming to rely instead on a majority of young couples' developing a proprietary interest in the enterprise simply because it's in keeping with the widely shared agreement. Progressives seem to want to dwell on the impossibilities of getting this unquestionably important societal goal practiced uniformly, favoring theories and practices, e.g. universally available abortion, that solve things by treating people as particles which are more likely to behave according to widely applied low grade incentives like cash and subsidies. This approach abjures any necessity for enlisting the cooperation of masses of actual human beings by such techniques as presenting a long run view of the culture and their and their children's involvement, ownership and deep interest in its success, even as the selfish individuals the current political thinking seems to be fixated on catering to. later: the goal is power and the casualty is the development of the uprightness of the future citizenry, who will receive no better wisdom than that they are stimulus-response mechanisms whose only hope is to wrest a little power back from the powerful rich and transfer it over to the powerful, own-ass-covering intellectual/political elite. (after Hiltzik grousing about Wall Street's bought- and-paid mouthpieces in Washington.) |
| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog May 20, 2012 ASSOCIATED PRESS Gummint Dispensing Equity File Since the currency of the country is all about agreement (on value), there are government actions concerning money (and money supply) which purport to serve laudable ends-- social justice, evening out the variegated corners of an egalitarian nation, even stimulation of growth for the increased prosperity of all boats-- which do no such thing. Why? Because they slide the ground, as it were, in an opposite direction from the push for the intended good. Taxing the rich, for instance, presumably to offset the fact that the financially acute know how to gradually end up with more money than anybody else, never ends up redistributing wealth as it seemed it might. The rich become less wealthy, ok, fine, that's the first step, isn't it. But then that money disappears into an infinite variety of black holes of inefficiency, cover-your-own-ass-first, makework, etcetera, betwixt the hand of the a-hole wealthy and the hands of the deserving underprivileged. Not to mention plain old corruption. Not to mention that some of the a-hole wealthy were actually providing value and they'll pull in their horns like a snail under a salt shaker, impoverishing everybody just from the slowdown. What went wrong? Gummint forgot that money is a representation of value, it's not the value itself. Since gummint couldn't astrogate its posterior into a successful docking with a porcelain convenience, that attempt to hamfistedly transfer value by shuttling and/or printing dollars was always more likely to result in the disappearance of the wealth in question than its redistribution. Because why? Because the gummint thought it was doing one thing pristinely (creating social justice, righting wrong?), but it didn't factor in the effect of MESSING WITH THE UNDERLYING AGREEMENT OF THE POPULATION THAT IS THE ONLY SOURCE OF A DOLLAR BEING ABLE TO BUY SO MUCH BLUEBERRY MUFFINS ET AL. Even if ends do justify means, you get nowhere if means mutilate ends. The Nazis wanted to define who was human. Statists of all stripes would like to define the dollar and adulterate it at the same time. I believe this is best conveyed by tho old saying "You can't both eat your cake and have it, too." Ultimately, manipulation of wealth by government disappears wealth. If you want to both have and eat a cake, and you have no money and no printing press, the thing to do is bake another cake. Those who have a printing press can't even eat a cake if nobody ever bakes one. To address the printing of money first, I propose that expansions of the money supply be graphically represented by the size of the currency shrinking with each printing (see Milton Friedman for how to calculate) that doesn't result in the destroying of an equal number of old bills. Since this would impose extreme and inequitable hardship on the vending/moneychanging industry, maybe they can just leave the bill size the same and shrink the printed area. I figure if you had started this on the day in 1948 when I was thrust into a world where I could learn that the price of a comic book was not a God- determined 10¢, but could increase to 12¢ (even 15!), that the folding money of today would look roughly like a small stamped postal envelope. Did we want to do this to ourselves? Did we agree to this? Was there a vote I missed hearing about? |