No Amount Of Disastrous Failure Can Kill The Fantasy Of A Government-Directed "Great Society"

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  • It was 1964 — I was in the 8th grade — when Lyndon Johnson, newly elevated to the presidency by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, announced the launch of the “War on Poverty” and the imminent coming of the “Great Society.”

  • All that was needed was to put the powers of government to work to apply the available societal resources to the problems at hand; and presto! the problems would be solved. This was obvious to all thinking people. Experts within the government agencies would quickly set to work to devise the programs that would use the gusher of federal tax revenue to end poverty and bring about universal fairness and justice in short order.

  • Programs designed by the experts to eradicate poverty proliferated rapidly, both before and after the 1964 election — Medicaid, the Community Action Program, the Job Corps, the Food Stamp program, Project Head Start, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Housing and Urban Development Act, and on and on.

  • Fifty-five years on, is it possible to name any public policy disaster in the United States greater than the disaster of the War on Poverty and Great Society?

  • It’s not just that all the government spending has not reduced the measured rate of poverty nor the number of people in poverty. . . . We have only fomented anger and resentment in the program beneficiaries.

  • For today I’ll just go into the single example of public housing programs. . . .

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Who Is Winning The Climate Wars?

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  • If you get most of your news passively by just reading what comes up in some kind of Facebook or Google feed or equivalent, you probably have the impression that the Climate Wars are over and the Climate Campaigners have swept the field of battle.

  • In my case, I certainly don’t rely on those kinds of toxic sources of information, but I do regularly monitor many of the media sources in the “mainstream” category — the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Economist, Politico, and several of the television networks like CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN. All of those (and plenty more) have clearly put an absolute ban on any news or information that would cast even the slightest negative light on the proposition that there is an imminent “climate crisis” that must be solved by government transformation of the world economy.

  • I’ll give a couple of examples of the lengths to which this has gone. Back in September, mentally unstable Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose only qualification was her ignorant passion for climate extremism, got the platform of the UN “Climate Action Summit” for a big speech.

  • Actually, out there in the world, reality continues to trump hysteria. Do you remember reports from a couple of years ago that China was ceasing to develop fossil fuel power and was becoming a “climate leader” by going all in for trendy renewables wind and solar? Well, that was to fool the dopes. Just this month, something called Global Energy Monitor is out with a new report on what’s going on on the ground in China. Bottom line: 148 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity under active construction or with construction being resumed after suspension. . . .

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The Evidence That Joe Biden Committed Bribery

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  • Over here at Manhattan Contrarian, I have now had five posts detailing the lay-down case that Joe Biden committed the federal crime of bribery (18 U.S.C Section 201(b)) with respect to the conduct of himself and his son in Ukraine.

  • Meanwhile, over in what we continue to call the mainstream media, there has developed a mantra that there is “no evidence” that Joe Biden acted to help his son collect a bribe in Ukraine. Just yesterday, Eric Felten over at RealClearInvestigations put together a nice roundup of these ridiculous statements.

  • What are we missing here? Actually, it’s what are they missing? What they are missing is a fundamental understanding of how motive or causation are proved in this world.

  • Here is the basic principle: A hypothesis as to motive or causation cannot be proved by evidence consistent with the hypothesis. Instead, motive or causation are proved by evidence inconsistent with the alternative hypothesis.

  • Unfortunately for Joe, there is indeed evidence that is inconsistent with the hypothesis that he acted for pure motives, and not to help his son. I have identified two pieces of such evidence in prior posts. . . .

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Biden v. Trump: Which One Is The "Bribe"?

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  • It was right around the time that I was writing my last post (“The Trump Impeachment: What Is The Crime?”) that House Democrats started using the word “bribery” to describe what they are looking into. OK, that’s a start. Shall we consider it further?

  • Bribery is a real crime, and it’s even mentioned in the Constitution as a basis for impeachment. But there are two major problems with trying to fit the square peg of the Trump/Ukraine fact pattern into the round hole of the impeachable crime of “bribery.” The first is that if providing to a politician some intangible political advantage can be characterized as a “bribe,” then most of what politicians do all day would become “bribery.” The second is that calling President Trump’s conduct as to Ukraine “bribery” invites comparison with the conduct of Joe and Hunter Biden in the same country, and calls for testing the conduct of each against the words of the applicable statute to see which is the better fit.

  • As discussed in the previous post, it’s only a “crime” if you can fit within the exact words of some criminal statute passed by Congress. In the case of the crime of bribery of a federal official, the main statute is 18 U.S.C. Section 201(b).

  • If you have read that, perhaps your reaction was, “then why isn’t every politician already in jail?” The problem is that politics is inherently corrupt. Even if a politician is not “on the take” for personal money, it goes without saying that every incumbent politician regularly uses the powers of his office to obtain intangible political benefits to himself from third parties, for use against rivals.

  • With that background, let’s try applying the words of the bribery statute to the conduct of President Trump and of Joe and Hunter Biden relating to Ukraine. . . .

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The Trump Impeachment: What Is The Crime?

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  • With the big impeachment circus now going on in the House of Representatives, perhaps you have begun to wonder, what is the alleged crime? I know that I have. Should anybody care about that?

  • There is a very good reason to care. The Constitution specifies the potential grounds for impeachment: “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” (Article II, Section 4). All the possible categories of impeachable offenses specified by the Constitution are crimes. To meet the Constitutional test, you have to have a crime.

  • In both the Nixon and Clinton impeachments, they seemed to take seriously this requirement of a crime as the necessary predicate. The large majority of the allegations of wrongdoing closely track the contours of well-known crimes defined in the Code.

  • Here we are in the midst of impeachment mania, and we have completely lost track of the whole idea that there might be a need for an actual crime. I’ve spent some quality time here this afternoon trying to find some intelligent promoter of impeachment who has even ventured a plausible attempt to specify what criminal statute is alleged to have been violated. No success. What I have found instead are various people arguing that no crime is necessary for impeachment.

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Bolivia: That Was Quick!

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  • It was barely more than a month ago — October 3 to be exact — that I made fun of a big spread the previous day in The Nation, declaring the country of Bolivia to be the latest, greatest “Remarkable Socialist Success Story”!

  • And then yesterday, [Bolivian President Evo] Morales may or may not have resigned. That was quick! How could this all have gone so wrong so fast?

  • To start with, there was the small problem of allowing the electoral machinery to be fully controlled by people loyal to the incumbent bent on re-election. Surely then, wouldn’t Morales’s people have no problem turning any remotely close result into a clear victory? Sometimes what seems like an advantage may not turn out that way.

  • From the OAS Report on the election: In some cases, it was confirmed that all the tally sheets in a center had been completed by the same person. Sometimes, that person turned out to be the MAS representative accredited as the party's delegate in the voting center concerned. Likewise, several tally sheets were found in which the government party obtained 100% of the votes. In some of those documents, the fields for opposition parties had not even been filled in with a "0". In some of those voting tables, moreover, attendance was 100%, which is practically impossible. . . .

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