The Real World

Do you ever wonder if other people live in the real world? You know, the one we inhabit, where tired, sweaty humans work long hours in the sun and rain to wrest from the ground the wonderful things we eat, the fuel for our homes and cars, to bring cattle to market, to make refrigerators and cars and light bulbs?

I've noticed that among the left, there is almost a disbelief in the old fashioned methods of work. It seems incomprehensible to some people that these wonders, Fords, freezers, and fillets don't just magically appear in the retail establishments where we encounter them.  It reminds me of the story told in my family, as my mother's then-three year old sister encountered a squawking, cackling bird running about in Granny's yard. Upon being told what it was, the little girl responded, "That's not a chicken, it has feathers on it!"

I am fairly certain that a lot of liberals, indeed most of the young people who so earnestly espouse the current leftist party lines, have little idea of the processes that bring them the cell phones, IPads, Priuses, and other miracles of technology.  When I was in school, we made innumerable field trips to see various industrial plants - a Coca-Cola bottling plant, Procter and Gamble's soap factory, Cincinnati Milling Machine, a GM plant, the Cincinnati Post-Times-Star newspaper presses, a can making factory, a fastener factory, even a place where they tested deodorants for P&G. I still remember watching in horror as a lab technician sniffed the stinking armpits of a handful of test volunteers. But I don't think that is part of most of most students' curriculum today. It's too bad. Being exposed to these jobs, to these occupations, to seeing how things are made, was important to me, to help me understand what it takes to bring "stuff" to me.  I visited the factory where my dad was a machinist many times.  Dad always wanted me to know what he did for a living, I think so that I might see it and choose differently. It was hot in the factory, loud with machinery, and for many the work in the plant was dull and repetitive. I was determined to go into the military, so it wasn't an issue for me. But I never forgot what I saw. It would do kids today a lot of good to see these things.

I think what is most nettlesome in the liberal world, is the utter disdain many liberals have for honest work that leaves one's hands calloused and dirty.  A liberal friend - a teacher, of course - had to call a plumber.  You would have thought the plumber was an extortionist! She was clearly offended that this tradesman - "who never went to college" should be able to make this much money fixing her leaky shower. I sat astonished that it was any part of the discussion that he had less education than a public school teacher! 

In Michael Burleigh's book, Moral Combat, a look at good and evil in World War II, he notes that in the Italy that brought the Fascists to power, the universities were a place to avoid the draft, and that the colleges produced several times more arts graduates than engineers.  Perhaps this serves as a warning, that when a nation becomes less interested in work and more into navel-gazing, it can only head into a bad place.  We should consider the lesson here in the real world.

Who Is Poor?

What are we to make of the fact that the number of Americans on food stamps has increased from 32 million to 47 million in the past three years? Every sixth American is dining courtesy of the rest of us. That seems incomprehensible in the wealthiest nation on earth, that 16% of us need to be fed by the rest. Meanwhile, obesity remains a major health concern and it would be exceedingly rare to find an actual hungry person on an American street.

And we are generous in feeding our kids, too. Plenty of students get two or three meals a day at school, many at reduced prices or free, subsidized by the taxpayers. Out of our 52 million school age children - those aged 5 to 17 - about 31 million are getting lunch on us. That means that about 60% of America doesn't accept the responsibility for feeding its own children.  So, it's up to us. Yet, I don't think anybody minds feeding the hungry. 

The problem begins when we ask who is truly needy? Is it the girl who is showing her friends her new IPhone5 as she hands the teacher her free lunch paperwork? Is it the boy wearing the $300 stereo headphones as he gives the teacher the documentation of his family's inability to provide food for him? At what point are we no longer generous but merely being played for suckers?

It seems that Americans have completely lost touch with the ugly reality of poverty.  I am old enough that my youth and outlook was shaped by people who lived through the Great Depression.  I remember hearing my grandfather talk about plowing a neighbor's fields for two days, so that he might borrow their mules for one day's plowing. He talked about subsisting on pinto beans and corn bread for weeks at a time. He was pleased to be able to get a nickel's worth of baloney and crackers for lunch when he went to work in the coal mines. 

I feel like most of the current generation, those who enjoy government largess and live on the backs of the rest of America, these people don't know what it is to be hungry, to be cold, to be scared of whether or not there will be baloney or crackers or beans tomorrow.  My grandfather foresaw this.  He told me before he died (in 1983) that if there were another Depression, that people wouldn't docilely stand in line for survival rations - soup, beans, cheese, rice, bread - but they would be violent and take what they wanted.

I listened to my grandpa. But I never thought I would see it.  Now I wonder.

Presidential Leadership

I've been thinking about Presidential leadership.  Over and over in tonight's foreign policy debate we saw our President misstate facts, demonstrate a lack of serious knowledge of the military role in foreign policy, and denigrate a man who questioned him. 

This administration has seized defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq.  We couldn't negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement with a country heavily dependent upon us. That is a failure. We abandoned those who stood beside us against terrorism and evil and we will do it again in Afghanistan. 

But the sad truth is, the Republicans have shown no more acumen in maintaining American power throughout the world, throwing away hard won victories because they simply lack the killer instinct any championship sports team will show in a big game.

President Obama seems to bend over backward to radical Islam. He apologizes for America, as if we are the only nation that has made mistakes.  He seems to pick the Muslim terrorists side reflexively, in Libya, Egypt, Palestine, and Iran.  He doesn't offer the level of support to Israel that we might expect the world's greatest democracy to give the only pro-Western democracy in that region. He failed to support pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran. He refers to a terrible killing spree carried out by a self-proclaimed "soldier of Allah" at Fort Hood as "workplace violence."

But this insistence on finding the good (even when it is imaginary) in the Muslim world was a hallmark of Bush 43, too. He referred to Islam as a "religion of peace" despite the bloody evidence in New York, Washington, London, Madrid, and countless places in the Middle East. There are a lot of brutal thugs in that club.  Our presidents need to say this openly: Islamic extremist terrorists mean to destroy us, to end our way of life, and everything we hold dear. The only way to deal with many of these men is by harsh application of force. 

Bill Clinton did everything he could to avoid confronting these brutal forces, even when Americans were murdered in Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, and as bookends on his watch, at the World Trade Center and on the USS Cole. He tossed a few missiles and bombs at Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Serbia, but ineffectually and in ways calculated to do as little damage to the enemy as possible. He ran from Somalia when it got messy, and demanded the Air Force plan its air war over Serbia at altitudes high enough that no American was endangered, even at the cost of less accurate bombing. He allied us with the Bin Laden-backed Kosovo Liberation Army.

George H.W. Bush put together a coalition to win Desert Storm brilliantly.  But when the enemy was on the run, in those moments where you break their will to fight, he backed down.  On the Highway of Death, we stopped killing the enemy because it looked bad on television. We have simply lost the will to break an enemy in the crushing way that worked for us in 1945.  The result was the longest slow-motion war in our history, 12 years of no-fly zones, intermittent bombing of Iraq, and permitting some degree of state-sponsored terrorism.  If we had killed a few thousand Iraqi soldiers along that desert road in 1991, how many Iraqis, Kurds, Americans, and others would be live today?

Ronald Reagan gets a black mark next to his name for putting American Marines into Lebanon, then doing nothing after Iranian backed Hezbollah bombed their barracks in Beirut in 1983. Why did we not punish Iran then?

Jimmy Carter: 444 days. A figure all of us who lived through the Iranian hostage crisis will remember. What a disaster.

The therapeutic age seems to have purged leadership from our leaders. So often Bill Clinton looked like a talk show host hugging the tearful, bolstering the sad, and listening with trembling lip to the sorrows of life. Once our nation was led by men of steely resolve, heroes who had counted the cost of freedom. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt - these were men who would fight rather than yield on principle, and the foremost principle that an American president upholds is the safety of the American nation and its people. We sacrificed half a million lives to fix the wrong that was slavery.  We saved Europe twice in a generation. We have tried to preserve freedom - or at least a chance for it - for people from Korea to Kosovo, across the breadth of Asia from Indochina to Israel. How many times has America fought brutal enemies, tried to build representative governments, provided every kind of aid and commercial trade, and then treated them as partners, allies, and friends. No other nation has done this.

Now we are engaged in a great global war, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. Will we step up to this responsibility? I hope so. But it begins with a commander-in-chief who faces the world's terrible truths about force, perception, reality, and victory.

Poverty

Minimum wage is a neat idea. Everybody ought to get paid at least a certain amount of money. never mind if their skills only produce half that amount of value for the business enterprise. It's just a nice idea. So, we have had minimum wage laws since the 1930s. Then it was 25 cents an hour. Now it's $7.25 an hour. Isn't that nice? Liberals are so proud of themselves for "helping" working people. They can tell poor voters "we're your friends!"

As with most liberal ideas, they're substituting what feels good for what really works. Some people - especially high school age kids looking for that first job - just don't have $300 a week in marketable skills. Others don't put forth that much ambition or work effort. Consequently, employers are picky about bringing people on at this rate, while  they manage what they can give their current employees more carefully. So it may actually reduce the number of jobs out there. 

But more damaging, is the idea that we've done something for the working poor by creating this "minimum wage," the main effect of which is to drive up prices in the basic food and services sector where the poor spend most of their income - groceries, fast food, small retail. I think the Conservative answer to the liberals' next minimum wage increase ought to be "Heck, let's make it $30 an hour." Make them explain to the poor why they want the poor to remain poor. Let them tell people how easy it is to raise a family on $300 a week.  Let the liberals then explain why a "minimum" wage can't be too high. Let them be the bad guys.

Then, ask why the Republican controlled House hasn't hauled in Big Oil and the Administration to account for the high price of gasoline. It sure made headlines in 2008. Then haul in healthcare leaders and demand free medical treatment and immortality. Heck, Obama says he wants people to be healthy. What could be healthier than living forever? Let the liberals explain how that would upset social security. At some point then, they have to tell people to die.

Alas, none of this will happen.  Conservatives simply won't outdo the liberals in making foolish promises.  The liberals will continue to make conservatives look heartless and mean, while they enact policies that keep people poor and dependent.  It's been said that we could mail a check to every poor family in America sufficient to lift their standard of living for far less money than we're spending on the dozens of overlapping and redundant bureaucracies that aim to help the poor by making them a little less poor but certainly not lifting them out of poverty.  Here's a check for your family of four: let's say $24,000 for the year. And build in a provision for a smaller check for the people who are a little above the line, so that we don't reward sloth at the expense of those who work but just can't get ahead. But pay your own rent, buy your own food, and manage this money well, it's all you get. If they misuse it, then let the justice system work. We would need thousands fewer bureaucrats and managers to run these agencies. (Have you ever thought that if some miracle simply eliminated poverty, this would be so opposed to the interests of the poverty pimp welfare bureaucracies that they would try to stop it? If I woke up tomorrow multi-billionaire wealthy, I'd love to go to a small county or state and just give every welfare recipient a check from me, on the condition that they don't draw any more from the government. It would be fun to see what the "administrator" apparatchiks would do.)

Our two party system is growing into a one mind system, where all the insiders think alike, but differ in degree and little else. A very smart boss of mine once said, "If we're all thinking alike, then some of us aren't thinking." It's time for politicians to think.

Priorities and Liberalism

A friend out of town mentions a news story to me. Seems that the Dayton Daily News is digging into the astronomical salary and perks received by E. Gordon Gee as President of THE Ohio State University. Remember Acton's Law? The old saying that "absolute power corrupts absolutely." I can tell you that three pages of Google Search found papers reporting this story all over the country, and the OSU "Lantern" (the campus paper) covered it but apparently not the Columbus Dispatch. Maybe I just missed it, but it sure wasn't a top item on Google.  A lesson for all those who rely on one source for news.

Turns out that Dr. Gee is paid way more than comparable college presidents. The Daily News reports that E.G.G. is paid more than the presidents of the U of Texas and U of Michigan - combined! Gee even received $64,000 from the University for those ridiculous bow ties. That's shameful. Almost as bad as the $8 million they've paid him since 2007. His comeback to this criticism is, "I make billion dollar decisions every day." So he makes decisions worth $365 Billion a year? The university's budget is about $5 billion a year. Is Gee telling us he earns his pay five days a year?  Aside from the fact that's just BS, what an ego. I know this: just 100 miles away, OSU is more known for football than academics. If E.G.G. just made the same salary as the President of the United States, I'd be ok with it - now there's a guy who makes some big decisions everyday. And cutting his pay to that level would have poured millions back into the coffers.

Let me see if I understand: College is expensive, so we have to make lots of loans available. Kids and their families take the loans, and are saddled with debt for years. With lots more students and lots more money flowing in, we now have a big business enterprise, so we have to hire top dollar executives to run it. To pay for them, we raise tuition. This makes college more expensive, so we have to make more loans available...

 

Meanwhile, college presidents, professors and the liberal politicians who love them tell us that overpaid executives in the private sector are the problem in America today.  They never blink at the king-sized checks that so many public employees get at that level.  E.G.G. has been followed by controversy over his lavish spending every place he's gone. But that hasn't stopped his anointment as the king of THE OSU.

 

Next time a politician tells me big oil and big business executives get too much money, I will have a reply. Hopefully it will leave my questioner a little more thoughtful while the citizens of Ohio try to recover from the E.G.G. left on their faces by THE OSU.