Lagniappe

Compassionate Socialized Medicine in Action – This story from the BBC relates the tale of a cancer patient who has been “left to rot” by her country’s socialized health care system. She spent fourteen months working through the British public option, only to have the hospital cancel appointment after appointment. Denied the medication she needed, she finally collapsed. After being rushed to the hospital, she was told that an emergency appointment would take another three months. So she broke down and called a greedy private doctor who, for £140, saw her in three days.

No Eat List – A Seattle restaurant has invoked its right to refuse service to anyone. In this instance that means TSA workers. The owner of the restaurant is a frequent flyer who’s evidently been felt up by TSA goons one too many times, and he’s instructed his staff to ostracize those who’ve taken up violating the Fourth Amendment as a profession.

Parasites on Parade – Public-sector union workers have descended on state capitols in Wisconsin and Ohio to demand their right to continue to feed at the public trough. Unsustainably high public-sector pensions are among the chief causes of budgetary problems in states all across the land, but union workers are determined to get theirs (yours), regardless of the consequences. Whatever the outcome of this particular episode, or of the broader financial crisis, it is becoming clear that the libertarian class analysis is the correct one. It’s not about bourgeois vs. proletariat or left vs. right. It’s about the tax consumers vs. the tax payers. Which one are you?

Inflation Hits Dictators Hardest – As we’ve all heard by now, Egyptian protestors took to the streets to demand the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. US foreign aid kept Mr. Mubarak in power for thirty years, and President Obama, for one, was “shocked! Shocked!” that there had been a corrupt dictatorship in Egypt the whole time. After three weeks, Mubarak stepped down with nothing but $70 billion to show for all those years of “public service.” Egypt now has a military government, something the US media hails as a great victory for freedom. Similar protests have spread to Bahrain, Tunisia, and now Libya, where Nutjob-in-Chief Gaddafi has declared open season on anyone who so much as looks at him cross-eyed.

Far be it from me to dash anyone’s romantic notions about the demonstrations, but the protests did not start off as a spontaneous movement of millions of people yearning to be free. Instead, the whole thing was kicked off by concerns over rising food prices. Egypt is one of the world’s biggest food importers, and most of the population is dirt poor to boot. When prices started to spike up, people took to the streets.

Ben Bernanke has been quick to deny any culpability for rising food prices (or for rising commodity prices). He has reiterated that inflation is “very, very low” – no matter what your lying grocery bill may tell you. Evidently Bernanke believes that rising global food prices are caused by “animal spirits” or “irrational exuberance” in the agricultural sector. They’re absolutely, positively, not related in any way whatsoever to the unprecedented increase in the money supply engineered by central banks all over the world, chief among which is the Federal Reserve.

Revisiting the Land Of Oz

When asked about Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" Truman Capote responded, "That's not writing, that's typing." This came to mind a few weeks ago when my friend over at The Whited Sepulchre, annoyed by my extended hiatus from this site, instructed me to "type something, dammit!" Be careful what you wish for, WS - as requested, I'm typing something. Hope you like it.



When I was in the third or fourth grade I came across an old copy of The Marvelous Land of Oz, the second book in the series written by L. Frank Baum. I enjoyed it so much that as soon as I had finished I went straight to the bookstore and got a paperback copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, read it, then went back for more. Within the span of a few months I had read the entire series - fourteen books in all. As a child, I read the books as mere fantasy, taking nothing more from the stories than the surface-level plot. As a father who reads those same stories to his children, though, I now see the Oz books were much more than just early 20th century fairytales.*

Anyone with basic cable knows that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz tells the story of Dorothy Gale, an undocumented immigrant from Kansas who enters Oz illegally by hiding in her house as it falls out of the sky, inadvertently killing one of Munchkinland's senior citizens in the process. (Naturally, Dorothy is uninsured).

The locals are quick to tell Dorothy that all her problems can be solved by Oz's central government. So she begins her journey to the nation's capital to ask the Great and Powerful Oz to send her home. (Unlike most illegal aliens, Dorothy actually wants to get deported). Along the way she picks up three new friends, each of whom is looking for a government handout of his own.

So they traipse down what must surely be mythology's most expensive public works project to speak to the Chief Executive and to petition the Ozian government for a redress of grievances (grievances about how unfair life - not the government - has been to them). The Wizard, obviously mistaking Dorothy for a large corporate campaign donor or perhaps a labor union leader, grants an audience to her little special interest group. After listening to their requests, he tells them that if they want to take advantage of the government's aid program they must first perform some sort of national service in order to "give back to the community." Specifically, they have to hunt down and kill Oz's Public Enemy Number One, the (allegedly) Wicked Witch of the West.

It should be noted that in the book version the Witch has done absolutely nothing to provoke Dorothy or her friends before they invade the Land of the Winkies to free them from the Witch's reign of terror. Though not specified in the text, I can only assume that at some point Oz explains to Dorothy that in these uncertain times they can't just sit around and wait for the smoking broomstick to take the form of a mushroom cloud over the Emerald City. Perhaps he even tells her that they will be hailed as liberators by the Winkies. And besides, the Emerald City parliament has given him an "authorization for the use of force," which is just as good as a Declaration of War - or at least it's close enough for government work.

Dutifully obeying the Wizard's orders, Dorothy leads her coalition of the willing to launch a preemptive strike in which Dorothy waterboards the Wicked Witch of the West to death. Then Dorothy and her friends (who are indeed hailed as liberators) return to the Emerald City to collect their benefits from the government lock box.

Sadly, though, when Dorothy and her friends attempt to cash the Wizard's I.O.U., they discover that the Great and Powerful Oz is not really a wizard at all. He's just a "great humbug" - an average man who happens to have conned everyone in the country - Munchkins, Winkies, Gillikins, Quadlings, and (most of all) the residents of the Emerald City - into believing he could make all their dreams come true. But as it turns out the only way the government of Oz can "help" the group is by giving them the things they already possessed.

Do you see where I'm going with this, or am I being too subtle again?

All the denizens of the Land of Oz believe their government can do magic - things that are unachievable by mere mortals such as themselves. They never stop to think that "the government" is just a term they've assigned to a particular group of mere mortals such as themselves - just a bunch of ordinary, average people who possess no magic powers whatsoever. What's more, the government has nothing but that which it first takes from the citizens of Oz. Not even the mighty Wizard himself is able to create something out of thin air - he just uses a lot of smoke and mirrors to make the people of Oz believe that he can.

This lesson is obvious enough when presented in a story geared to children, so why is it that so many adults are completely unable to recognize the same frauds when they are presented in the form of news stories or political speeches?

Take the recent piece by David Frum in Esquire magazine, for example. It's a counterfactual State of the Union speech - that is, it's the speech that neocon David Frum would have liked Obama to have given, instead of the one we actually got. He writes,

"Job creation begins with monetary policy. Already, the Federal Reserve is injecting more money into our economy. When the Federal Reserve stopped creating new money in April of last year, our recovery stalled. As it resumed creating money in November, our recovery has revived. The Federal Reserve board is our most important recession-fighting tool."

So David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush (that explains a lot), thinks that jobs are created because "that man behind the curtain" (Bernanke, at the moment) prints little green pieces of paper. These pieces of paper (or to be more precise, these digital zeroes added to accounts held at the Fed) supposedly create capital where none had existed before.

That certainly sounds like magic!

And then there's the actual State of the Union address, in which President Obama claimed that "repealing the health care law would add a quarter of a trillion dollars to our deficit."

So President Obama claims he can improve the government's balance sheet by spending more money, not less, on the mother of all entitlement programs.

Hey - that sounds like magic, too!

These are just a few recent examples of the kinds of ludicrous claims made almost daily by those in government and their sycophants. And clearly there are a lot of people out there who find it reassuring to believe in the Great and Powerful Obama or the Wonderful Wizard of the Fed. Some of us, though, no longer believe that mere mortals have magic powers that they can use to grant us our every wish. And we can recognize a humbug when we see one, no matter how impressive the smoke and mirrors.