This atrocity appears to be the act of one man, but the blame can be shared from coast to coast.
I have incredible respect for the U.S. military, especially having been born in a country whose military has staged military coups, and having had to grow up in the aftermath of such a military takeover.
Sgt. Bales has so far been accused of heinous crimes. He has not yet been convicted of them.
However, let's not pretend that there is some acceptable reason that makes something other than the death penalty appropriate if he is indeed convicted.
Horsey complains about the volunteer military. Having very briefly served as a conscript in the Turkish army, let me tell you that the fact that the U.S. military is an all-volunteer force is one reason why its members are much more competent than an average member of the population at large.
Without an all volunteer force, you eventually end up with Stripes.
No, the real problem in Afghanistan is that we have a chicken-in-chief who wasn't content with just trying to undermine the U.S. effort in Iraq (have you looked at how many innocents have been killed there since 2008?). No, he also forcefully advanced the idea that Afghanistan was the right war. The war that had to be won. The nation that had to be built.
Since he has become president, former senator Obama has given up on Afghanistan as well as Iraq. There is no sense of purpose, and the administration is preparing a repeat of the departure from Saigon, possibly while battling Iranian forces.
That is the real problem in Afghanistan.
And, it exists independently of the merciless killing of innocents which Sgt. Bales is accused of committing.
There are thousands upon thousands of members of U.S. military who have served and continue to serve honorably under extremely stressful circumstances.
If Sgt. Bales committed these murders, and his punishment ends up being lighter than fits the crime due to touchy-feely concerns, his case will have cast much greater shame on the U.S. military than anything that happened in Abu Ghraib.
I am taking a wait & see attitude towards this case. However, I am ashamed of the cowardice of people who keep coming up with excuse after excuse for Sgt. Bales without knowing any details about him. Psychopathic killers hide in plain sight among civilians all the time. Why would it be so shocking for one to have hidden in the military environment in this case?
Soon after seeing the video, I went to that spot to look for grandma, but the spot where she would have fallen was too hard to get to. Getting to shore level required a long trek northward, and the trek back south once at that level was significantly hindered by a bunch of boulders the last bunch of which I did not want to risk wearing dress shoes. In any case, I thought to myself, a bunch of liberals would not have littered around the beautiful Palisades with a grandma mannequin. They probably used some invisible cable.
The spot where they filmed the clip is right at the State Line Lookout on the Jersey side of the Hudson River. It is a beautiful spot with fun trails including the Giant Stairs.
The rock where they threw grandma off is usually a favorite perching spot for the vultures that call the park their home:
Those birds look cool from a distance:
It's only when you get up close & personal that you realize what they really look like:
Hi, I am from the government, and I will give you free health care.
But, this post is not about their "neighbors" … It's about the demands themselves.
Here they are, in the order presented on their web site.
Tax Wall Street for gambling with our money. Pass the financial speculation tax.
Taxing current players in Wall Street does nothing to undo the damage of a government fueled speculative bubble in the housing market.
The housing scam worked, within broad outlines, like this …
Financial institutions sold mortgages to people so that they could buy houses at inflated prices. They then turned around and sold those mortgages to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac or packaged them in inscrutable securities, so that the institutions themselves bore none of the risk. Instead, it was mostly passed on to those Government Sponsored Agencies, i.e. the rest of us.
So, the solution is simple: Get rid of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac. Get rid of the notion that housing can be made affordable by giving people free money, and let financial institutions bear the risk they take.
In addition, open the market for credit rating agencies to competition, instead of the current government propped oligopoly.
Support education. Put teachers back in classrooms and ease the crippling burden of student debt.
I delve into this a little in my post What good your edumacation to me?. Basically, a diploma is a private good. It endows the individual who obtains it with credentials that are tied to that person. The diploma enables him to command a higher remuneration for his services in the market place.
If a person chooses to spend $150,000 on attending a program which employers do not find as valuable, that person better have a spare $150,000 lying some place, because it is not our duty to support the personal growth and enchantment of everyone else.
Instead, remove local school districts' ability to obtain taxpayer funds from people with no children or people whose children are attending private school. Establish a generous voucher program for poor people so their children are not condemned to public schools with child care centers for 13 year old moms while Mr. President's daughters attend fancy schools.
Keep working families in their homes. Pass a mortgage relief plan that puts the needs of homeowners above the greed of mortgage bankers.
What is preventing the housing market from coming back is the expectation that prices in a lot of markets have not bottomed out. So, instead, streamline the process by which current occupants who have, say, missed three payments to be kicked out of the properties they are occupying and make it easier for the rightful owners of the properties to offer them for sale.
End too big to fail. Rein in the big banks NOW and hold the people who caused the financial crisis accountable.
If anybody is going to be held to account, it should be people like Geithner, Paulson, and Bernanke who urged politicians to rescue irresponsible financial institutions and so-called home-owners, and the politicians who followed their lead. President Bush is no longer in office, but Senator Obama agreed voted for those rescue packages, and doubled-down after getting elected.
You guys are a little late to the party. The rest of us have been repeating the mantra that there is no room for Too Big to Fail for a long time.
Fair share of taxes from the 1%. End the Bush tax cuts for the 1% and close corporate tax loopholes.
Instead, institute a flat tax. Politicians do not have the right to spend as much as they want now and pass the burden on to future generations. It is their responsibility to do the best they can with the resources the people are willing to provide the government.
Businesses should invest in jobs. Corporations must stop sitting on their profits and start hiring again here in America.
Businesses exist to make money by selling to people what they want at a price no greater than what they are willing to pay for it. They hire people to produce things for them and help sell those things. Whether hiring picks up does not depend on profits that have already been made, but on whether it will be profitable to try to make more stuff and sell more stuff in the future.
Extend unemployment insurance. Millions of Americans are still out of work, and unemployment insurance is a vital lifeline.
If people can sustain a decent existence without having to do stuff they don't necessarily like, there is no incentive for them to seek employment as intensely, or offer as good a deal to employers as they would have otherwise. Unemployment takes money out of the pockets of people who are working and puts it into the hands of the people who are not. What is the incentive to work harder in bad times if your money will used to benefit others. On both counts, extended unemployment insurance is a loser.
Instead, do not extend unemployment insurance. Do not fiddle with silly little tax credits for hiring where Uncle Bob hires cousin Joe for a couple of months so Bob can get the tax credit and Joe can go back on unemployment after a few months.
Get rid of barriers to employment by establishing right-to-work legislation and getting rid of minimum wage provisions.
End corporate control of our democracy. Abolish "corporate personhood" and restore full voting rights to real people.
I guess they are referring to Citizens United, where a group of people got together to engage in political speech. I guess it is OK for people to organize around unions to engage in political speech, but everything else is out of bounds.
But Citizens United is not a good decision because it helped Republicans. It is a good decision because, beyond vindicating First Amendment rights, it helps open the political system to change. In 2009, dozens of incumbents thought they could support the hard-left San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi for speaker, then cast votes for unpopular bills such as ObamaCare and the stimulus, because their bursting campaign treasuries would protect them on election day. Groups empowered by Citizens United helped ruin this incumbent-protection strategy. Citizens United may not benefit Republicans in the future—more likely, it will continue to benefit whichever faction is out of power. For competitive elections, that's a good thing.
Money is speech. The amount of money you can get others to contribute to spread an idea is an indicator of the importance of the idea. If 1% of taxpayers think your idea is worth $5, that's an almost automatic $5,000,000 in support of your idea. So, if you have a very popular idea, you can always get enough resources to prevent a few rich people from dominating the system.
The ninth demand is left for the reader to fill in. So, here is mine:
Stop pretending 19th century socialism or 20th century fascism works. Instead, understand the value of 18th century freedom.
Stop pretending money is free. Stop providing big banks with free money they can use to gamble in the stock market. Let interest rates be determined by what the market will bear. Stop the impending vicious inflation cycle.
Just stop. Please. I do not want to relive the 70s.
Update (10:20 pm on March 16, 2012): Made some minor grammar corrections.
After some publicity on local media leading up to the event, I decided to check out the Tompkins County Rally Demanding An Increase in the Minimum Wage to a Living Wage on Monday, March 12, 2012 at 4:30 pm (before heading up to Cornell to attend Tevi Troy's excellent talk on our presidents and the culture.
Here is some video I shot before leaving at 5:30 pm. The Tompkins County Workers Center claim more than 150 people attended the event. If so, they had not yet arrived by the time I left around 5 pm.
Demands for a higher minimum wage, or just a minimum wage itself, constitute a particularly insidious form of interference with trade. As Adam Smith observed a long time ago:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.
Whether we are talking about restaurant owners or restaurant workers, the reasoning is the same: While no supporter of freedom of speech and freedom of association would suggest that workers should be prevented from organizing, there is no reason to nourish cartel like organizations whose sole purpose is to extract a higher price for the thing they sell, their labor.
A minimum wage is a so called price floor: By law employees are required to pay no less than the mandated minimum wage level. Proponents of a living wage think that the government mandated wage level is too low to lead a decent life, and it should be higher. For example, at Monday's rally, I heard the figure $12.78/hour mentioned. In Ithaca, the Alternatives Federal Credit Union calculates one a couple of times a year.
Their methods are insidious because they do not seek to increase their pay by demonstrating how their contribution to the bottom line of their employers is greater than their compensation. No, they seek to raise their own earnings by pricing out less skilled and less experienced labor.
It was interesting to note that some of the most vocal people at the rally either worked at jobs paying higher than the so called living wage they were demanding or employed people whom they paid higher than the $12.78/hour which they were demanding all other employers be required to pay.
At this point, we must stop and ask: Why just $12.78/hour? I mean, why not ask for $13.00/hr? Y'know, make it an even number? well, the answer to that one is easy: Figures after the decimal point tend to give a superficial sense of accuracy and I guess some people find the number 13 to be undesirable.
But, I mean, honestly, why not demand that every worker is paid $40/hr? Heck, why not demand every worker is paid $100/hr? That's still just about $200,000/year, just shy of what Mr. President considers rich. Why not demand that every employer make sure that everyone who works for her is rich?
Well, to understand why that is silly, ask yourself what would have to happen to the price of a burger if every cashier at a burger joint were paid $100/hr?
And, if you do not see the relationship between the price of a burger and the wages of the people who work at the restaurant, then you have no business participating in any kind of discussion about the world we live in.
OK, let's say you sell 50 burgers an hour at the current price of $2/burger. Now, you have to pay the cashier, cook, and the person who takes care of the drive through $100/hr. Plus, there is the rent, electricity, buns & meat, condiments and a whole lot of other things you have to pay for. But, those are small potatoes compared to the $300/hr you have to shell out.
Let's say you jack the price of a burger up to $20 a piece. Are you going to be able to sell the same amount as before?
Are you going to close up shop? No, more than likely, under those circumstances, others will invent robotic systems which will let you continue to operate a low-price, high-volume burger joint without ever needing a human again.
But, let's get more realistic. Suppose you're currently paying your workers $8/hr and now Tompkins County passes a law that says you have to pay them $13/hr. What's going to happen? Who'll benefit from this, and who'll be harmed?
Let's assume for a moment that you the evil capitalist low wage restaurant owner is always going make out like a bandit — you won't, but, let's forget about that for a second.
Previously, you were paying your workers according to how much their output was worth to your customers.
Could the workers productivity have grown by 62.5% just by the government mandating that you pay them 62.5% more than before? Of course not. If $13/hr were going to make them that much more productive, they would have gone to work at one of those fancy restaurants instead of the burger joint.
Are your customers now going to be willing to pay $3.25/burger and buy the same number of burgers as before? No, because if they are, that would indicate you're a bad businessman. Why would you have been selling burgers at $2 each for all these years if you could have sold the same number of them at $3.25?
So, you're going to ask for a higher price for burgers and sell fewer of them. That will mean you will need less output from your workers, and therefore lay some of them off or decrease their hours.
And, given that the price of the cheaper alternative has increased, one of the sources of competition for the fancier restaurants and diners in town will have been removed.
That is the key point in why some local small business owners join this bandwagon: They also want to make it hard for others to start businesses or stay in businesses that compete with them on price.
In a free market, workers work where the pay makes it worthwhile for them to exert the effort they do, and employers hire people whose output they deem is worth it given the willingness of the customers of the business to pay for whatever that business is selling.
Minimum wage mandates undercut this mechanism of free people agreeing to trade services for money.
Such mandates put lower skilled workers with less experience and businesses with lower margins at a disadvantage compared to already established businesses with workers who are already making more than the proposed minimum wage.
Supporting such laws is tantamount to supporting unemployment, poverty, and misery as the poorest among us never get a chance to gain experience and accumulate human capital.
Updates
11:39 pm on March 16, 2012: Fixed a bunch of grammatical and spelling errors.
Someone called Sandra Fluke apparently testified in some congressional hearing. According to her testimony, she is:
a third year student at Georgetown Law … [and] past president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice
Those are some serious credentials.
Ms. Fluke wants someone else to pay to ensure she does not become pregnant. The idea does have some appeal: It might indeed be social welfare enhancing for conservatives to pay liberals not to reproduce.
The way she goes about making the argument is weird, however:
This research examined the effects of breakfast composition
versus no breakfast on cognitive performance. Results
suggest that performance on most measures is enhanced by
breakfast consumption and that the composition of breakfast
can also influence children's cognitive performance on some
measures, particularly spatial memory, short-term memory,
and auditory attention.
So, shouldn't Ms. Fluke demand that we also pay for her and her fellow students' breakfast as well?
