This was posted today by a local blogger in Richmond:

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Cable rates are going up again. What a shock.

"Monthly rates for full standard analog service will increase 5.5 percent in the metro area, from $49.71 to $52.45.

"Further proof the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the biggest sham perpetrated on the American public since One Hour Martinizing. (quoting Kramer).

"Most media ownership regulations were thrown out by the Act, and independents were bought up. The Act was claimed to foster competition, but instead it led to historic industry consolidation, reducing the number of major media companies from around 80 in 1986, to 5 in 2005.

" '..both the cable and the telecommunication industries have become significantly more concentrated since 1996 and customer complaints about lousy service have hit all-time highs. Cable industry rates for consumers have also shot up, increasing some 50 percent between 1996 and 2003.'

"Cavalier and Verizon are both finally starting up in the cable provider race, but it is slow in coming, and can't arrive soon enough."
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It always amuses me when people criticize the "elimination" of regulations as the cause of high prices and no competition (how many more phone company choices do we have now because of the relaxation of telecom regulations in the 80's?)

The fact that prices have finally been allowed to rise high enough to sustain competition is why Cavalier and Verizon are able to compete with Comcast (and he doesn't even mention satellite TV, which has always been a cheaper alternative).

Regulations cause artificially lower prices and less innovation. Or was he just complaining that his constitutional rights to cable TV and internet service have been violated all of these years?

This Week on the Web (November 18 – November 24)

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Quote of the Week:

“No free country needs a draft. No country that enslaves its citizens deserves to be defended.”

- Michael Hurd




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Editorial Cartoon of the Week:

Snow Gray
Cox and Forkum



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NEWS

Muslim creationism makes inroads in Turkey
MSNBC.com

Creationism is so widely accepted here that Turkey placed last in a recent survey of public acceptance of evolution in 34 countries — just behind the United States.

“Darwinism is dead,” said Kerim Balci of the Fethullah Gulen network, a moderate Islamic movement with many publications and schools but no link to the creationists who produced the atlas.

Scientists say pious Muslims in the government, which has its roots in political Islam, are trying to push Turkish education away from its traditionally secular approach.
[…]

In the early 1990s, leading U.S. creationists came to speak at several anti-evolution conferences in Turkey.
[…]

“Atlas of Creation” offers more than 500 pages of splendid images comparing fossils with present-day animals to argue that Allah created all life as it is and evolution never took place. Then comes a book-length essay arguing that Darwinism, by stressing the “survival of the fittest,” has inspired racism, Nazism, communism and terrorism.

“The root of the terrorism that plagues our planet is not any of the divine religions, but atheism, and the expression of atheism in our times (is) Darwinism and materialism,” it says.

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COMMENTARY


Don't Say Grace. Say Justice.
Craig Biddle, Principles in Practice

The religious tradition of saying grace before meals becomes especially popular around the holidays, when we all are reminded of how fortunate we are to have an abundance of life-sustaining goods and services at our disposal. But there is a grave injustice involved in this tradition. It is the injustice of thanking an alleged “God” for the productive accomplishments of actual men.

Where do the ideas, principles, constitutions, governments, and laws that protect our rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness come from? What is the source of the meals, medicines, homes, automobiles, and fighter jets that keep us alive and enable us to flourish? Who is responsible for our freedom, prosperity, and well-being?

Is freedom a gift from God? It is not. Freedom, the absence of physical coercion, is a political condition resulting from the rational, principled thought and action of men—men such as Aristotle, John Locke, the Founding Fathers, and American soldiers.

Did God make the ambrosia that melts in your mouth, or the asthma medication that keeps your child alive, or the plush recliner in which you relax, or the big-screen TV on which you watch your favorite show? Did God create the jetliners that bring friends and family from afar, or the stealth bombers that keep the barbarians at bay, or the music that warms your heart and fuels your soul?

Since God is responsible for none of the goods on which human life and happiness depend, why thank him for any of them? More to the point: Why not thank those who actually are responsible for them? What would a just man do?



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Friedman's Sampler: A selection of writings from The Wall Street Journal
Milton Friedman, Opinion Journal

What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.

The essence of political freedom is the absence of coercion of one man by his fellow men. The fundamental danger to political freedom is the concentration of power. The existence of a large measure of power in the hands of a relatively few individuals enables them to use it to coerce their fellow men. Preservation of freedom requires either the elimination of power where that is possible, or its dispersal where it cannot be eliminated.

It essentially requires a system of checks and balances, like that explicitly incorporated in our Constitution. . . .

The person who buys bread doesn't know whether the wheat from which it was made was grown by a pleader of the Fifth Amendment or a McCarthyite, by person whose skin is black or whose skin is white. The market is an impersonal mechanism that separates economic activities of individual from their personal characteristics. It enables people to cooperate in the economic realm regardless of any differences of opinion or views or attitudes they may have in other areas.

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Milton Friedman Was Right: "Corporate social responsibility" is bunk
Henry G. Manne, Opinion Journal

Milton Friedman famously declared that the sole business of the managers of a publicly held corporation was to maximize the value of its outstanding shares. Any effort to use corporate resources for purely altruistic purposes he equated to socialism. He proposed that corporation law should prevent managers from straying off the reservation to join the altruists, a power now almost universally granted them by state legislation.
[…]

The origins of this transformation lie in the minds of people who do not like or appreciate the genius of capitalist success stories, including always politicians, who will generally make any argument in order to control more private wealth. Of course, the social responsibility of corporations is always tied to the proponents' own views of compassion or justice or avoidance of a cataclysm. But the logic of their own arguments requires that essentially private corporations be viewed as somehow "public" in nature. That is, the public, or the preferred part of it, often termed "stakeholders" (another shameful semantic play, this time on the word "shareholders"), has a pseudo-ownership interest in every large corporation. Without that dimension in their argument, free market logic would prevail.

The illusion of great and threatening power, the superficial attractiveness of the notion, and the frequent repetition of the mantra of corporate social responsibility have made this fallacy a part of the modern corporate zeitgeist. Like the citizens who were afraid to tell the emperor that he was naked, no responsible business official would dare contradict the notion publicly for fear of financial ruin, even though the practice continues to cost shareholders and society enormous amounts. This is especially so in large-scale retail businesses like Wal-Mart or Coca-Cola or BP that are highly vulnerable to organized public criticism. Our laws against extortion do not function effectively when it comes to corporations. And so to some extent these private entities have indeed, via the social responsibility notion, been converted into crypto-public enterprises that are the essence of socialism. Milton Friedman was right again.



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Where is the West?
Thomas Sowell, Capitalism Magazine

How can a generation be expected to fight for the survival of a culture or a civilization that has been trashed in its own institutions, taught to tolerate even the intolerance of other cultures brought into its own midst, and conditioned to regard any instinct to fight for its own survival as being a "cowboy"?Western nations that show any signs of standing up for self-preservation are rare exceptions. The United States and Israel are the only western nations which have no choice but to rely on self-defense -- and both are demonized, not only by our enemies but also by many in other western nations.


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Class Warfare: Jim Webb's Populism Merely Skims the Economic Surface
Barton Hinkle, Richmond Times Dispatch

Virginia's Senator-elect, Jim Webb, recently has climbed to the rooftops to trumpet his populist creed. On "Meet the Press" Sunday, he called economic inequality the nation's most pressing problem. And a few days earlier in a column for The Wall Street Journal [reprinted today on this page] Webb lamented "the most important unfortunately the least debated -- issue in politics today": America's "steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century."
[…]

Webb's lament goes beyond CEO pay, so he might want to familiarize himself with Alan Reynolds' Income and Wealth. Reynolds notes that the top quintile of American households predominantly has two income-earners per household. The bottom quintile of households has fewer than one earner per household: 56 percent of those at the bottom of the income distribution pyramid don't hold any job at all. And among those who do work, fully 84 percent work only part-time. The reason? Many in the bottom quintile of income are students, who are busy getting educated so they can earn more in the future, or retirees who are living on Social Security and other pensions. People who don't work much tend not to earn much. How, precisely, is that unfair?

Furthermore, one might be led to think from Webb's complaint that people are assigned to classes at birth and locked into them forevermore. Au contraire. Mobility between income groupings is dynamic. The number of families stuck at the bottom rung of earners is surprisingly small: about 5 percent of households, actually. The rest move upward over time. Likewise, many of those at the top move downward: According to one study, more than half of those in the top 1 percent of income earners in 1979 no longer were in that group a decade later.

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Editor’s Note: Also see An open letter to Senator-elect Jim Webb by Rich Tucker
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U.S. Appeasement Encourages Arab Nations to Go Nuclear
The Ayn Rand Institute

Six Arab nations have told the U.N. atomic energy agency that they plan to pursue and master nuclear technology—meaning that we face the threat of nuclear weapons held not only by Iran, but by several other regimes swarming with and supportive of Islamists. "That nations like Islamist-sponsor Saudi Arabia can make such a declaration is a consequence of America's appeasement-ridden foreign policy—a policy that encourages new threats and aggression," said Elan Journo, junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.

"America's treatment of nuclear-chasing North Korea and Iran has emboldened these Arab states. For decades America and its allies have submitted to the extortion of North Korea, appeasing that hostile regime and showering it with money. North Korea succeeded in going nuclear not despite, but thanks to, Western diplomacy.

"Concessions to North Korea emboldened the Iranians, who are aggressively pursuing nuclear technology. America's groveling diplomatic overtures toward Iran have demonstrated that the United States is willing to provide economic 'incentives'—essentially, protection money—to hostile regimes bent on arming themselves.

"America's shameful policy toward Iran and North Korea has made these regimes stronger and worse threats. That is a necessary result of rewarding evil. And, witnessing the spectacle of the lone superpower prostrating itself at the feet of enemies, what malignant regime would not be encouraged to seek nuclear weapons? And, when it acquires such weapons, deploying them against us through terrorist proxies?

"We need a radically different foreign policy—a policy that upholds American self-interest on moral principle. Such a policy would punish hostile regimes, not reward them."


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Preston Sturges's romantic comedies don't shy away from the subject of finances
Opinion Journal

Among contemporary romantic comedies, "When Harry Met Sally" is hard to top. It's warm without stomping on the heartstrings, and the banter is unusually insightful. But does anyone remember what these characters do for a living? (Harry is a political consultant; Sally, a reporter.) With all their whimsical talk about days-of-the-week underpants and high maintenance mates, their working lives are dismissed in a couple of throwaway lines. And nobody ever worries about money. Do these characters resemble anyone you know? Don't your friends talk about frustrating jobs, wayward investments and the cost of real estate? Don't these things affect the relations between men and women? Money is supposedly the No. 1 thing that couples fight about, but you'd never know it from these movies.

Romantic comedies weren't always so walled off from reality. In the 1940s there was a capitalist comic, a filmmaker fascinated by how dollars could be turned into laughs instead of the reverse. He was Preston Sturges, and a new seven-disc boxed set of his films, four of which are being released on DVD for the first time, provides an excellent tutorial in how money can complicate the romantic comedy formula. What if boy meets girl but loses fortune? What if girl disapproves of the way boy made his dough? What if girl gets tired of paying rent for boy?

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Quotable

“But we can all remind ourselves that the richness of this country was not born in the resources of the earth, though they be plentiful, but in the men that took its measure. For that reminder is everywhere--in the cities, towns, farms, roads, factories, homes, hospitals, schools that spread everywhere over that wilderness.

“We can remind ourselves that for all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men governing themselves without benefit of kings or dictators. Being so, we are the marvel and the mystery of the world, for that enduring liberty is no less a blessing than the
abundance of the earth.”

- The Wall Street Journal




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Other links

The Ayn Rand Institute

The Objective Standard

Capitalism Magazine

4Commonsense.net

OpinionJournal.com

Junk Science

The Intellectual Activist




Web Logs

Principles in Practice– Principled commentary on cultural matters and current events from “The Objective Standard”

Cox and Forkum – Political cartoons and commentary

Noodle Food

The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid – Donald Luskin

Dollars and Crosses – CapitalismMagazine.com

The Intellectual Activist – selections and headlines from TIA Daily-- pro-individualist news and analysis

Rule of Reason – The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism

Contemporary History


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This Week on the Web (November 11 – November 17)

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Quote of the Week:

For Rousseau and his intellectual descendents, compassion—the desire to relieve the pain and suffering of others—is a pre- or sub- rational sentiment that serves man as an automatic, immediate, and infallible moral guide. It is a strictly perceptual-level phenomenon of seeing and feeling the pain and suffering of others, of being overwhelmed by a catastrophic sense of shame and guilt, and of then reacting on one’s range-of-the-moment feelings. According to this sentimental ideology, needs-as-claims are the fundamental human reality; “intuitions” or “feelings” are the way to know, evaluate, and judge such facts; and compassion is the virtue of feeling and acting accordingly.

- C. Bradley Thompson ("The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism")





Editorial Cartoon of the Week:
Flashback
Cox and Forkum




COMMENTARY

White guilt doesn't help blacks
John Stossel, Townhall.com

A white author, Tim Wise, gets applause from students on American campuses for talking about "white privilege." Wise's message is in huge demand -- he does 80 speaking engagements a year. When we taped an appearance at Skidmore College, students of all races praised him as "eloquent," "phenomenal," and "so on point."

But among some black intellectuals a new perspective has emerged, one that puts racism and "white privilege" low on the list of problems plaguing black Americans. Shelby Steele's latest book, "WhiteGuilt", argues that whites do blacks no favors wringing their hands about white privilege.

Whites' preoccupation with guilt and compensation such as affirmative action is actually a subtle form of racism, Steele says. "One of the things that is clear about white privilege, and so many of the arguments for diversity that pretend to be compensatory, is that they advantage whites. They make the argument that whites can solve [black people's] problems. ... The problem with that is ... you reinforce white supremacy all over again. And black dependency."

Steele says that when blacks make racism their central focus, they mire themselves in destructive victimization -- and sabotage their own chances for advancement.

"White privilege is a disingenuous idea," he says. In fact, now "there is "minority privilege."
[…]

"If I'm a black high school student today, there are white American institutions, universities, hovering over me to offer me opportunities. Almost every institution has a diversity committee. Every country club now has a diversity committee. I've been asked to join so many clubs, I can't tell you. There is a hunger in this society to do right racially, to not be racist. ... And I feel rather privileged by it. I don't have to even look for opportunities, in many cases, they come right to me," he adds.

But there is still racism in America. At ABC News I've aired hidden-camera video that showed salesclerks spying on black customers, cab drivers passing blacks to pick up whites, landlords lying to blacks about vacancies, and employers favoring white-sounding names. So don't whites owe blacks compensation for that and for past injustices?

Steele answers, "You owe us a fair society. There's not much you can do beyond that. There isn't anything you can do to lift my life up. I have to do that."


The minimum wage is viewed as an economic free lunch. It isn't
Opinion Journal

Raising the minimum wage has been a hardy perennial of the left for decades now. What is striking is the degree to which is has come to be seen as an economic free lunch. Even some reputedly unbiased economists have started to tout the view that raising the minimum wage has no discernible effect on job creation.

But if this were true, they'd be calling for a $10, $20 or even $50-an-hour minimum wage. They're not, and neither is Nancy Pelosi. That's because the law of demand is one of the most dependable precepts of economics. It says that when the price of something goes up, demand for it goes down. An employee's wages are the price the employer pays for his services, so raising their wages means forcing employers to pay more for workers. The price goes up and there is downward pressure on demand for workers. Other things being equal, jobs are lost.


Promises, Promises
Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek

Although Democrats didn't promise much—they benefited heavily from unhappiness with the war in Iraq—they still succumbed to exaggeration. Their sound bites ran ahead of plausible solutions. Consider three familiar themes. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy; inaction on the minimum wage; and Republican opposition to negotiating Medicare drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies. All are of a piece. The Republicans are lackeys for the wealthy business class; they don't care much about the poor.

But what can the Democrats do? Let's see.


Sometimes Accomplishment is a BAD Thing
Michael Hurd, DrHurd.com

Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, who likely will become the new Senate majority leader next year, said: "We want to be a part of a Congress that accomplishes something."

Watch out!

Let's take a look at what the Democrats in Congress hope to "accomplish":

Raising the minimum wage--translation: outlaw jobs that pay below a certain amount per hour;

Withdrawal of troops from Iraq--translation: end all military action of any kind, both present and future, in Iraq or anywhere else; substitute all military action in the future with the "U.N. process" which means: absolutely nothing, with the aid and help of our enemies.

Helping middle class families with college tuition--translation: subsidize tuition even more than it already is, thereby causing schools to raise their prices even more;

Helping middle class families with health care--translation: regulate and subsidize medical care even more, thereby causing medical services and health insurance to become even more costly than they already are.



Just visiting
Ed Feulner, Townhall.com

At least two detainees at the holding facility here skipped lunch today because they’re on a hunger strike. Which is a pity for them -- the food was delicious.

By contrast, the steady stream of news about “Gitmo” tends to leave one with a bad taste.

On the day I toured the facility, lawyers for 100 detainees were in court insisting their clients have a right to be heard in American civilian courts. And a recent McClatchy newspaper story claimed that “reports of mistreatment and torture have dogged the facility since it opened,” and added, “critics … have described an island gulag of desolation and despair.”

What missing from the criticism is any sense of perspective. For one thing, the most outspoken critics of American policy haven’t bothered to visit Guantanamo. If they did, they’d see that the U.S. military is using the facility to hold roughly 400 enemy combatants. And despite all the criticism, Gitmo’s the most transparent facility ever used to house prisoners of war.


How much does politics count?
Walter Williams, Townhall.com

Blacks and Hispanics, especially blacks, are the most politically loyal people in the nation. It's often preached and taken as gospel that the only way black people can progress is through racial politics and government programs, but how true is that? Let's look at it.

In 1940, poverty among black families was 87 percent and fell to 47 percent by 1960. Would someone tell me what anti-poverty program or civil-rights legislation accounted for this economic advance that exceeded any other 20-year interval? A significant chunk of that progress occurred through migration from rural areas in the South to big Northern cities. Between 1960 and 1980, black poverty fell roughly 17 percent and fell one percent during the '70s. Might this have been a continuation of a trend starting much earlier, or was it a miracle of the civil-rights movement or President Johnson's War on Poverty?




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Other links

The Ayn Rand Institute OpinionJournal.com

The Objective Standard The Intellectual Activist

Capitalism Magazine Junk Science

4Commonsense.net Activism Humor



Web Logs

Principles in Practice– Principled commentary on cultural matters and current events from “The Objective Standard”

Cox and Forkum – Political cartoons and commentary

Noodle Food

The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid – Donald Luskin

Dollars and Crosses – CapitalismMagazine.com

The Intellectual Activist – selections and headlines from TIA Daily-- pro-individualist news and analysis

Rule of Reason – The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism

Contemporary History

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Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone who may be interested (or they can sign up by sending an email with “Week on the Web” in the subject line to rsmurphy@hotmail.com).

Send links to articles that you feel would be a good addition to this newsletter to rsmurphy@hotmail.com.

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