I just read that Farrakhan has accused Bush of blowing up the levee to flood black people and keep white people dry. More amusing stuff.

There are plenty of legitimate and specific matters of policy to use when calling the President to account, and he has some serious mistakes to answer for. Maybe a little less hysteria and a little more calm debate might be good.

Economic law cannot be repealed by state edict.

My bad.

In a disaster like this it is better to let the free-market do its stuff. After there is a city for people to actually work in I wouldn’t have as much of a problem with people voting their wages up and creating a drag in the economy and productivity. That’s what price controls do. Minimum wage laws are basically price-controls in the labor market. Basically price controls reduce the value of money in the economy. In other words, the result is a form of inflation that does produce tangible TEMPORARY benefits. But in the long run, you get more money with less value as all prices of everything in the economy adjust to their true value in the market.

“Economic Law Cannot Be Repealed By Law” – Eugene von Bohm-Bawerk

I know I know, this stuff is just difficult to swallow. Look, I used to be a union member (to get the job you had to) so I saw and would read what some of the nonsense that my dues would fund in ink. I’m anti-left, not anti-worker. I’m all for work. If you want to work, work.

Believe me I don’t want to oppose everything you say, I want to agree with you and vice versa! Let’s be friends, we already share an interest. This blog.

Speaking of cheap labor, did you know the idiot in chief just repealed a law requiring a fair wage in the rebuilding effort? This is what I call corporate looting.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Bush issued an executive order Thursday allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/08/news/economy/katrina_wages.reut/index.htm

I have always felt that if you look for racism, you will probably find it. But if you “hang a sign” on your truck and do what say do efficiently, honestly and with a good attitude, even Archie Bunker will give you a good reference.

What’s that supposed to mean? Even here in NY, some punk skinhead called me the n word when he knew I couldn’t hear him. My friend only told me after the fact. I don’t know anyone who goes out looking for racism. Neither does Colin Powell who I don’t agree with very much politically.

And in the paragraph right before that one you say “Partisanship sucks.” I have to admit, that makes it challenging to want to reply, Ms/Mrs Gines. I don’t like to repeat myself, and much less what other people say. What is silly is you telling me not to be partisan as you launch into a partisan falshood.

I didn’t bait and switch anything, I asked you a serious question in response to the charge of “racism denial”. More than one, actually. And you couldn’t support the charge.

Unless you think your question about which group was more racist is an answer to that very same question – which I asked first, somehow demonstrating that “most neo-cons deny racism in this country”.

Regarding the “race issue” of today, it is more preferable to make progress from the given starting point with focus rather than to deviate and get stuck in the world of negativity. I agree with George Reisman’s view that “The way things should have developed was that the freedoms and liberty enjoyed by white males should have been fully extended to blacks and to women”.

The reason that an investment disclosure can say “past performance doesn’t equal results” is because nature and human action is aleatory. You can’t guarantee what people might do in the future or what may influence them. The American model for governance brilliantly took this into account.

The problem is that the left deviated from America’s free-enterprise system and Judeo-Christian values and pushed the country into a socialistic one. It coupled racism with American values instead of with a failure to live up to those values. Alot of this was due to Soviet propaganda and agit-prop. Although racist violence was rightly protested and opposed, Communist violence against its own citizens dwarfed American violence against its own citizens. Yet the left hails its American supporters. In fact, the left was moving the United States in the direction of the Soviet model.

You cannot say that there weren’t specific criticisms against specific policies that could have helped us avoid some disasterous effects, although you can say that the left muffled or ignored them. Combine moral relativism with economic ignorance and its a recipe for disaster. It is and was difficult to argue with people that play fast and loose with the truth.

Earlier today I used the Great Society as an example of BAD policy. It is completely reasonable to seek a “supply and demand human and economic capital analysis of why”, to paraphrase. Here I can see that you really are tired of partisanship. I don’t think that it is vague to point out that by encouraging broken homes (and what do you think happens when the government starts to provide housing and funding to single teenage girls?) you would have more of them. Yes, I know that the political representatives of the left were not saying “don’t get married, have babies in High School, all the hip girls who are tired of their parents are doing it!” but actions speak louder than words. We essentially started handing out money to girls for having kids early. The government played the daddy role. This transforms, perverts, government. It puts government in the position to treat its citizens like irresponsible children who are unable to govern themselves. In the end that pits those who are able against the government in alliance with those who are not. In the end this has to lead to the end of a free democratic republic. To get to that point takes lots of bad turns and lots of well-intentioned mistaken people.

As the left argued “don’t impose your morality on me” by being judgemental, the right argued “don’t impose your immorality on me” by funding peoples’ “alternative lifestyles” and personal decisions. And if people wonder why there is a disproportionate number of black males in prison relative to any other group in the population, you will see the link being the broken family and the “Welfare Queens”. Maybe it was a matter of proximity and location, but for whatever reason (a cultural anthropologist may have a good explanation) Black America decided to try the “Great Society” and the Democrat Party’s experiments in socialism.

Children in two-parent families of any race and background do much better materially and overall than other children. Crime, health, education, you name it. Today, as the article that I linked to earlier pointed out, almost 70% of black children are born to single mothers. Yes, the left’s antinomian/statist social agenda was a bad influence:

“Conditions for testing that proposition looked good. Between the 1954 Brown decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legal racism had been dismantled. And the economy was humming along; in the first five years of the sixties, the economy generated 7 million jobs.

“About half of all blacks had moved into the middle class by the mid-sixties, but now progress seemed to be stalling. The rise in black income relative to that of whites, steady throughout the fifties, was sputtering to a halt. More blacks were out of work in 1964 than in 1954.

“Most alarming, after rioting in Harlem and Paterson, New Jersey, in 1964, the problems of the northern ghettos suddenly seemed more intractable than those of the George Wallace South.

“Instead of rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment running parallel as they always had, in 1962 they started to diverge in a way that would come to be called “Moynihan’s scissors.”

“Even while more black men—though still “catastrophically” low numbers—were getting jobs, more black women were joining the welfare rolls.

“Convinced that “the Negro revolution . . . , a movement for equality as well as for liberty,” was now at risk, [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan wanted to make several arguments in his report. The first was empirical and would quickly become indisputable: single-parent families were on the rise in the ghetto.

“Though black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier had already introduced the idea in the 1930s, Moynihan’s argument defied conventional social-science wisdom.”

In other words, leftwing academia resisted any evidence that might lend credence to America’s Judeo-Christian values and pose a threat to their “Progressive” misunderstandings and misconceptions about economics and society. The left basically buried Moynihan’s work and labled his analysis racist..

Like I said, combine moral relativism with economic ignorance, and the terrible results speak for themselves. Here’s the link.

This is just my speculation, but I think that post Civil War Jim-Crow types supported the Democratic Party because the concept of “democracy” is basically based on “whatever people want”. And that’s a pretty open-ended suggestion. Sometimes popular things are not good things. The 60s were the left’s heyday, and the Democratic Party was more susceptible to influence by the left than a party more geared toward cautious limited government or the idea that maybe “whatever people want” at any given point in time may not always be a good thing. Now, can there be something better than the GOP? It’s possible, but the DP isn’t it.

I have always felt that if you look for racism, you will probably find it. But if you “hang a sign” on your truck and do what say do efficiently, honestly and with a good attitude, even Archie Bunker will give you a good reference.
Comment by Heliotrope — 09.13.05 @ 5:59 pm

Heliotrope: you are somewhat misguided with that statement. What the heck do you mean:”If you look for racism you will probably find it?” OK, so all those folks who got lynched back in the day were looking for it? What about in 1989 when my parents moved us to Modesto, CA? Was I looking to get called the N— word by my classmates? Once again blaming the victims of racial injustice causes us to have some screwy contradictions. I guess you don’t live in the USA. Because if you did, you would see that outside of certain places, Blacks are still not welcome. When we went camping last year in The Shasta Natl Forest at Gumboot lake (http://www.mtshastachamber.com/recfish.html) there was a guy making noise and partying the whole night. When we saw his RV the next morning, he had a Confederate Flag on it, and some racial epithets on his bumber sticker. Yeah I suppose that by being out in the middle of nowhere trying to enjoy God’s creations made me look for the racism eh? Get real and come back to earth, racism is alive and well. And importantly the politicization of race is alive and well.

I agree conservblack….
I don’t hear many addressing the fact that some of these opportuniteis weren’t exactly knocking on the door in the neighborhoods they resided in prior to the hurricane

I seriously doubt that any “institutionalized racism” will keep anyone with a work ethic from a job in the disaster area. In fact, I don’t know a single contractor anywhere in middle America who isn’t on the constant search for quality labor. (I don’t know how the heavily unionized contractors conduct themselves.)

I hope the New Orleans folks who were trapped in their poverty will spread out to towns that need workers. I also hope they try to get off the welfare treadmill, because it too often causes a poverty of spirit. I hope they have old time religion and will seek out the family of friends that real church provides. I pray that out of this storm, many lost souls find a strong future.

I have always felt that if you look for racism, you will probably find it. But if you “hang a sign” on your truck and do what say do efficiently, honestly and with a good attitude, even Archie Bunker will give you a good reference.

The thievery and war profiteering in Iraq by Halliburton, Bechtel and other contracters are well documented. There is no oversight right now

The National Black Republican Association should be responsive to “real issues relevent (sic) to black folks.” I am curious to know how real issues relevant to black folks differ from real issues relevant to just plain folks.

For the most part, they are the same. However, I’m sure you will admit that the abolition of slavery did not automatically put blacks on an equal footing in this country with their white counterparts. We’ve made progress, but even conservatives like Colin Powell acknowledge that institutionalized racism still exists. For that reason, civil rights still need to be openly discussed and debated.

I would not vote for a party that steals elections, has a secret society of “neo-cons” who are stealing oil for their families and business friends and fools the free press and the voters.

There certainly is a lot of talking points boilerplate in the previous posts. Most of the posters wouldn’t vote for a Republican under any circumstances, so I am amused to think that their protestations would have any effect on the National Black Republican Association. I doubt they would have any effect of the “neo-cons” either.

The National Black Republican Association should be responsive to “real issues relevent (sic) to black folks.” I am curious to know how real issues relevant to black folks differ from real issues relevant to just plain folks.

A major issue I have with the Republican Party is the disenfranchising by the thousands of qualified black voters in Florida as well as Ohio and other states. I don’t want anyone to feed me any crap about Ken Blackwell being black, so it didn’t happen in 2004. Testimony and written accounts from people in different counties in Ohio prove it did.

The integrity of our elections must be addressed and protected by both major parties. We have partisans in charge of counting our votes pledging to deliver states to presidential candidates. We’ve also got Secretaries of State, pulling dual roles as chairpersons for election campaigns of presidential candidates. It’s amazing to me that no one sees a huge conflict of interest.

I currently have no faith in our electoral process.

Sirc – Most Neo-Cons deny racism is a problem in this country, and your bait and switch tactics are silly.

Like the investment disclosure says, past performance doesn’t equal future results…so to does the up and down left and right switches of the democratic & republican part not project their current responses on issues of race today. So what if the southern dixiecrats resisted civil rights legislation to a greater percentage than their other racist Republican counterparts. And?

So lets critically analysis your ‘questions’.

1. White people in general committ revisionism of issue relating to race and the founding fathers, mostly as an act of omission.

2. Republicans vs Dixiecrats and Civil Rights legislation – what is it a contest to see which group was more racist at the time? Immaterial to issue of TODAY and race.

3. Social engineering & the left, which policies are you referring to, please be specific and stop speaking in vague generalities. Secondly, please present RIGHT WING PLANS, during these same period s that were suggested but not put into place, that you think would have had a better effect.

4. I challenge you to prove that POST GREAT SOCIETY poverty has become materially worse because of it. I will settle for basic supply and demand, human capital and economic capital analysis in defining why.

5. 1960’s and black family life. A coincidence or what? What is the alternative to the coincidence. What are you suggesting the variables are?

Finally, what does that have to do with the current polarization of race divided down party lines where both attempt to pimp the issue in their own way?

I support the premise of the NBRA, I hope they just pursue it without getting caught up in the polarized gamesmanship and concentrate on real issues relevent to black folks from a Republican perspective.

Try one of these specials with your lunch: William Teach got buzzed while watching the confirmation hearings. Ogre still isn’t sure about Roberts. Stop the ACLU! reports ACLU whining over Roberts. Public Eye (Bachman version) reports Roberts is a two-…