I'm glad someone else noticed this. The WSJ article was a DISGRACE. The only "gap" in America is between those who work hard, and those who don't. Someone who drops out of high school, gets pregnant at 14, destroys themselves with drugs is "surprisingly" going to reap the consequences of what they have done. WTF is the deal with punishing someone who freakin' works his rear off/ gets an education,etc?
I fail to see how the Left can complain about the gap between rich and poor being wider whilst at the same time supporting the influx of illegals who havent got any marketable skills or a pot to p*ss in.
Yes it's the rich NYT reading elitists and the welfare recipients against the middle class.
In my lifetime, I've watched one publication after another slide into leftism. First it was US News and World Report, which was the right-leaning weekly when I was in college. Then the Economist Magazine began to forsake its libertarian roots and endorsed Clinton for president and became shills for HillaryCare.
The WSJ was the last bastion of thought that was not biased so far left that it was worth something. Now, the news pages of the WSJ have succumbed to the same leftist viewpoint, and I suppose it's only a matter of time before the editorial pages do the same.
Why? My best answer is that the "mainstream" journalism schools now turn out only leftists, so that the larger publications, which recruit only from those sources, inevitably end up with staffs that are majority left.
Thank goodness for online sources, and upstarts such as the Washington Times and New York Post. I look forward to seeing most of the old-line publications continue to slide in readership until they become irrelevant. Let those leftists pukes that think they are so smart deal with having no one listen to them, or being released from their jobs because their organizations no longer have a customer base.
| THE FIXED QUANTITY OF WEALTH FALLACY | The fixed quantity of resources fallacy | | THE FIXED QUANTITY OF RESOURCES FALLACY |
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"Wealth, when you get right down to it, is not the cause of poverty." -- Mitchell B. Pearlstein, paraphrasing George Gilder "If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the poverty and not the difference. Wealth is good. ... wealth is not a world-wide round-robin of purse snatching, and ... the thing that makes you rich doesn't make me poor. ... Without Productivity, there wouldn't be any economics, or any economic thinking, good or bad, or any pizza, or anything else. We would sit around and stare at rocks, and maybe later have some for dinner. ... Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable. In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable."-- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich
"...evidence abounds that the fundamental cause of Third World poverty is not First World greed ... it is the economic, political and social obstacles that developing nations themselves raise to progress by their aspiring poor." --Katherine Kersten in the Minnesota Star Tribune,March 20, 1996 "Look around: It just isn't true that countries get rich at each other's expense.Would America be better off now if Europe and Japan had stayed poor after 1945? Did its jobs migrate, its economy stagnate, leaving rising poverty and chronic unemployment? Not exactly: America thrived. One of the things that helped it after 1945 was expanding opportunities for trade with other rich countries. Americans would be worse off today if Europe and Japan had stayed poor. What's changed? Why isn't this still true? In my view: Nothing; it's still true. The faster India grows, the better off every other country will be... I do not regard the prospect of global capitalism as "harrowing." I regard it as the best opportunity for relieving human misery the world has ever seen." -- Clive Crook, deputy editor of The Economist,in the February 25th, 1997 issue of Slate, in a letter to John Judis "I observed the talks and was shocked not only by the riotous atmosphere, but also by the protesters' misconceptions about trade, the WTO and the developing world. As an Indian national, I know only too well how lack of trade, investment and freedom keeps the world's developing nations in a state of perpetual poverty and environmental degradation. Sadly, the largely middle-class Americans who trashed Seattle last week had little if any comprehension of this fact." -- Barun Mitra, in a column in the Wall Street Journal 12-9-99. Mitra heads the The Liberty Institute, in New Delhi, India "The 'progressive' Left, even while wailing about international poverty, has long decried the Westernization of the 'developing world', the polite term for societies kept poor by socialist governments." -- from The Free Market Means Civilization by Lew Rockwell, President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, originally published in Spintechmag.com,12-22-2000. "Fortunately, political freedom and economic progress are natural partners. Despite capitalism's lingering reputation as the source of all the world's evils, the fact remains that every single democracy is a capitalist country. Half a century of economic experimentation proved beyond doubt that tyranny cannot yield prosperity. ... Socialism collapsed because it is a policy of unrestrained intervention. It tries to fix what is 'wrong' with the spontaneous, self-organizing phenomenon called capitalism. But, of course, a natural process cannot be 'fixed.' ... Socialism is an ideology. Capitalism is a natural phenomenon." -- Michael Rothschild in BIONOMICS: Economy as Ecosystem "Capitalism is not an "ism." It is closer to being the opposite of an "ism," because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell "Not understanding the process of a spontaneously-ordered economy goes hand-in-hand with not understanding the creation of resources and wealth." -- Julian Simon "The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization." -- Mikhail Gorbachev, June 8, 1990 "How a conflict-ridden, grossly over-populated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing." -- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich "In terms of natural resources, Africa is the world's richest continent. It has 50 percent of the world's gold, most of the world's diamonds and chromium, 90 percent of the cobalt, 40 percent of the world's potential hydroelectric power, 65 percent of the manganese, millions of acres of untilled farmland as well as other natural resources. Despite the natural wealth, Africa is home to the world's most impoverished and abused people. Of the 41 black African nations, only three (Senegal, Botswana and Mauritius) allow their people the right to vote and choose their own leaders. Only two (Botswana and Senegal) permit freedom of expression and criticism of government policies. In countries like Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, Sudan, Chad and others, ethnic genocide has taken the lives of untold millions of innocent victims. Slavery is still practiced in the Sudan and Mauritania." -- Dr. Walter E. Williams "Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into 'haves' and the 'have-nots.' Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." -- Ayn Rand "What transformed the world of horse-drawn carriages, sailing ships, and windmills step by step into a world of airplanes and electronics was the laissez-faire principle." -- Ludwig von Mises in The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science "Capitalism is not just a system for producing wealth. It is, above all else, a system based on the noblest moral principle: the protection of the individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Free markets are founded on the individual's right to pursue a career, trade the products of his effort, and enjoy the wealth he has earned without having to seek permission from others or pay ransom for the privilege of living." -- Robert W. Tracinski "For years, statist development experts had sought top-down solutions, operating under the implicit assumption that poor people in the Third World were largely incapable of entrepreneurship. De Soto utterly rejected that patronizing viewpoint, and, beginning in his native Peru, focused on the lack of formal property rights as the source of poverty in poor countries." -- Gene Healy "Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind -- and ... no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun." -- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged "Bad and discredited ideas, it seems, never die. Neither do they fade away. Instead, they keep turning up, like bad pennies or Godzilla in the old Japanese movies." -- Murray N. Rothbard |