Too Evil to Live

Everyone should watch "Too Big to Fail" on HBO, the movie version of The Time's writer Andrew Sorkin's book. Then everyone should read "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis. In both, grotesque, self-centered, destructive but good hearted politicians confront grotesque, self-centered, destructive and rapacious money changers. If there are any two books that are more discouraging about the future of western liberalism, they must have been burned by politico-economic censors.

In "Too Big to Fail" a compelling Henry Paulson walks through the carnage created by these politico-economic vandals like a stricken benumbed survivor of some huge natural disaster. But it is not natural. No natural force is as evil and dismissive of its damage as the combined effort of a superficial, posturing politician and a percentage-hungry financial predator. In "The Big Short" petty, stupid well educated people in both government and finance make error after error to aggrandize or enrich themselves at the expense of every possible innocent they can find. These two works are as profound an argument for benign dictatorship as has been made. It is astonishing that the financiers and politicians from New York to Malibu are not hanging from lampposts from sea to shining sea.

Paulson won an extraordinary victory against overwhelming self-interest but the battle is still is an early round. If the politicians and their incestuous financiers have anything to say about it, this battle will have no time limit.

Strangely we, the noncombatants, will be the eventual knockout victim.

What Israel Means 2

Western efforts in the Middle East has been a triumph of hope over experience. The basic concern for the West--indeed for all the developed world--is stability. True, the motive is the predictability of oil production and the maintenance of cheap power throughout the world, but the policy to achieve that is simple stability. To that end the West--and the rest of the developed world tacitly--has aligned itself with thugs, tinhorn dictators, religious posers and the leader-du-jour to suppress/smooth/inspire the Middle East populous to accept the status quo and, above all, maintain production. With the apparent understanding of this area's importance and fragility and despite the cynical need to maintain the oil flow, the world inserted into this region Israel, a newly minted nation made up of foreigners and infidels, displaced the people who had lived there for two millennium and then watched, amazed, as the region deteriorated. The U.N. peacekeeping troops were meaningless, the posturing ineffective but the hope flowed unstaunched.

We now have a new flag in the Middle East: The Arab Spring. We know it's new because we have never heard of it before but if it's new, it must be good. The West will now hang its stability hat on this new hook. Obama apparently in an effort to inspire this new Arab Spring has change American policy to insist Israel roll its borders back to 1967. What will happen is any one's guess.

What is not a guess is the astonishing mishandling of the world's most important resource site. If treason had been on the minds of the people involved it is doubtful we would be facing a worse problem. The arrogance of the U.S., the British and the U.N. in believing they could control this complex land, in inserting unsuspecting Jews into this cauldron with the belief we could and would always help them, the cynicism of their coddling despotic psychopaths and religious maniacs, their pompous periodic rewriting of policy should serve as a caution for anyone optimistic about our bathetic leadership.

What Israel Means

For much of the last several centuries, Jews have wandered back, disorganized but hopeful, to Palestine and the land of the Old Testament. As part of the settlement after the first world war the British, still locked in their fading struggle with France, took control of this area called the British Mandate and, in July of 1922, divided Palestine into two administrative sections, east and west, where Jews were allowed only in the west. (The Balfour Declaration in November 2, 1917 to "establish a national home for the Jewish people" was a hope, not a policy.) November 29, 1947 the General Assembly of The United Nations voted 66% to partition western Palestine into two separate states, one Jewish and one Arab. (The Arabs rejected it.) Israel became a recognized separate state and Egypt, Iraq, Jordan Syria and Lebanon invaded it, fought a war, and lost. About 600,000 Jews left Arab lands for Israel, 720,000 Arabs left Israel for Arab lands. An armistice was signed in 1949.

In 1966-67 Syria began shelling Israel from parts of the Golan Heights, Egypt expelled the UN peacekeepers from the Israel border and attacked in the "Six Day War' and lost again. When the dust cleared Israel held the Gaza Strip, The Sinai Desert, Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights.

In 1970 a civil war broke out between Arafat and King Hussein in Jordan. Arafat ended up with better control of the West Bank but no control over the rest of Jordan.

In October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt again attacked Israel and lost. To get peace, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt and signed an agreement with Jordan.

What are we to conclude from this history? Debate continues over the Arab handling of Arab refugees, of Hamas and Hezbollah, of bombing schools and strapping bombs to children. But as important as these points are individually there are some overwhelming truths here. One, Israel was created out of whole cloth; there were people there whom the British displaced to create the state. Britain can claim the land was gained as a spoil of war but the circumstances are still the same. Two, the Arabs will continue to throw themselves at Israel forever. They are not deterred by defeat--regardless how humiliating. They will come back. And each time they are better armed and better prepared. Two Arab states have nuclear capability. Three, Israel will, with its last breath, destroy all her enemies. There will be no TKO with Israel led bleeding to the side to decline in a new Palestine state; Israel, at its end, will take all of its tormentors to hell with her.

This brings us to the fourth point: This nightmare--which could easily blow the industrialized world back to the steam age--is a direct result of political arrogance and stupidity. The political leaders--from the British to the U.N. to the Americans now--have guided this area through one devastating, homicidal period to another without any apparent second thoughts or guilt about the destruction and death they have unleashed or the clear danger to all the world that lies ahead. This homicidal fine-tuning, this murderous good will, this apocalyptic optimism is repeated and repeated by administration after administration, state after state, until now we are faced with real Arab power staring back at the West and their feckless leaders while we poor souls wait and wonder how much the dead and wounded will be expanded this time and whether we will be included.

What Was Volunteered Is Now Demanded

The notion of the "right to health care" contains a number of implications. First is the "right" of the individual to make demands upon his neighbors; his neighbors must financially underwrite his neighbor's health costs. Second, this demand on his neighbor's income contains--at least for the present--no demands upon the recipient for this largess. He may drink excessively, smoke, take drugs, weigh 600 pounds without any consequence to his health care coverage. Third, this "right" for health care demands the physician to acquiesce. This "right" constricts the rights of the physician who is now legally required to respond to the patient's demand. The physician is bound, indentured without his approval.

People are worn out by taxes. Taxes are unjust, inefficient, misdirected, misspent, skewered by influence--all of these and more--but the small necessary taxes somehow justify the larger unnecessary ones. Taxation in the average citizen's mind is a huge slush fund that sometimes is of benefit to the payer, sometimes not. It is the physician in this relationship that is of interest here. To take a free man, a physician, and bind him in a relationship without his consent--that accepts an infringement on personal freedom and that is new. Some jobs are created as indentured--like policemen or firemen--, some are created as jobs for the common good--like utilities--, but to take independent individuals and absorb them into a system and require thenm to serve without their consent--like eminent domain or a military draft--that is new in this free country.

And the thoughtless attitude towards the physician's liberty should chill everyone, even the most devoted who have entered the subsidized life.

Political Aphorisms

Observations on the two warring tribes on the left and right.

The right sees individuals, the left sees groups. The right seems obsessed with growth, the left with security. The right sees process, the left sees endpoint. The right sees the world as a process with growth a crucial enzyme, the left sees security as the crucial endpoint and sees a government mediated insurance as necessary. The right is willing to allow growth to evolve, to change and adapt as it matures and believes safety is a likely endpoint with many others, the left sees government as the enzyme today but has embraced revolution and science in the past when they seemed promising. The right sees institutions as depositories of the social values, the left sees institutions as ossified obstructions to progress. The right hates centralized power, the left trusts power. The right sees chaos without structure and effort, the left believes man and history have a positive direction and structure is an anchor. The right sees potential and progress in risk, the left sees only heartache.

Neither the left nor the right know they are only part of the current dialectic and neither will emerge intact for the next.

Snookie Summarized

An objection has been made about the Snookie Question, that it is little more than an attempt to justify rich people having less taxes.

The basic point about the Snookie Question is that in addition to raising money, taxes have motives. Alcohol and cigarettes are taxed because they are felt to be harmful, short term gains are taxed more than long term gains because they are felt to be less advantageous to the economy, import taxes are thought to protect domestic industries. There was a recent Senate hearing where general business exemptions for oil companies were specifically targeted for removal because oil prices were rising and politicians wanted to hurt somebody associated with them. There will always be arguments over the accuracy of these policies--for example, many think import tariffs are bad for everyone--but, nonetheless, governments approach taxation as more than a revenue source; they think taxes a tool.

Snookie only takes the next step. In a world where the ability of the government to make a good "investment" is questioned, why not tax and distribute income based on how the money of the taxed and the tax recipients would benefit society. In that light, the debate over Snookie's investment/social value versus Bill Gates' doesn't seem that difficult.

Sometimes They Are More Than Stupid

The real question that the theory of psychological homogeneity raises is this: Is someone clearly pathological in one area of his life capable in other areas? Can a man like Ted Bundy be trusted driving a car or baking bread? Is a serial rapist otherwise a good neighbor?

Is it dangerous to have a sexually depraved man like the IMF chief in control of international money decisions? Is the financial chaos in the world a function of the underlying pathology of the decision makers?

More, do you become a faithless, arrogant, bullying creep when you become rich and powerful or do those traits help you become rich and powerful? If women become rich and powerful, do they act the same?